Chapter 8
For the first hour, they kept to the terms.
Caroline stayed on the mezzanine. Connor stayed on the ground floor.
Down in the gold light of the tree, he was pulling white cloths off the tables and folding them into a stack.
She had not asked him to. She had not asked him anything.
She went into her office and shut the door and sat at her desk in her green velvet dress with her old wool coat around her shoulders, and she answered Luz, and she answered Stephanie, who had sent a long row of texts with a lot of capital letters.
I’m fine, she wrote. The heat’s on. There’s food. I’m going to sleep in my office.
IS HE THERE
He’s downstairs. His driver couldn’t get through.
CAROLINE
It’s a very big building, Steph.
I’m calling the police.
The police can’t get here either. Nobody can. Go to sleep.
Stephanie sent a picture of her own face, looking furious, with a blanket over her head. Then, a minute later: Text me every hour. I mean it. Love you.
Caroline put the phone down and put her head on her arms on the desk.
It was very quiet. The building made small sounds around her. The heat ticked in the old iron pipes. Somewhere far below, a door moved in its frame. And under it all, like a big slow breath, the wind went over the dome.
She must have dozed. When she lifted her head, her neck hurt, and the clock on her computer said 1:12, and something downstairs had just made a sound like a gunshot.
* * *
She was out the door and at the rail before she knew she’d moved.
The atrium was dark except for the tree. Connor was already running, crossing the marble toward the front of the store, toward Walnut Street. The sound came again — a sharp crack and then a long high sound like ice on a pond — and then the wind came in.
Caroline went down the mezzanine stairs in her bare feet.
By the time she got to the front of the store, Connor had the door to the back of the window display open. Cold air poured through it. Snow blew past him into the store in a thin, glittering sheet.
“Don’t come in here,” he said. “There’s glass.”
She came in anyway, and stopped.
It was window one. The train station.
Something had come through the big front pane.
It lay on its side in the fake snow, half-buried.
It was a metal sandwich board from the café across the street.
The wind must have picked it up and thrown it like a card.
The glass was not gone, but it was cracked from top to bottom in a long silver star, and one whole corner had broken out, a jagged hole the size of a car door.
The storm was coming straight through it.
Real snow was blowing over the fake snow.
The tiny steam train lay on its side off its tracks.
Two of the little travelers with their little suitcases had been knocked flat.
Wind was tearing at the painted sky on the back wall, and one long piece of it had already ripped loose and was flapping like a flag.
The snow piled up in the tiny station, drifting against the little ticket window.
“The whole thing’s going to go,” she said. “By morning. The snow’s going to melt into all of it. The wiring. The motors. The paint.”
“I know.”
“And the wind’s coming right into the store. The next window’s going to crack from the cold. They’re all on the same wall.”
“I know,” Connor said. “Where’s the plexiglass?”
She looked at him.
“You had a sheet of it,” he said. “Big one. For the windows. You always keep one in case a kid throws something. Where is it?”
“Basement,” she said. “Behind the freight elevator. With the plywood.”
“Tools?”
“Maintenance closet next to it. The code’s the year the store opened.”
“Nineteen twenty-four,” he said, and he was already going.
* * *
It took both of them to carry the plexiglass up.
It was eight feet by six feet, and heavy, and it bent like a sail every time they turned a corner.
They took it up in the freight elevator with Connor at one end and Caroline at the other, and neither of them said anything.
She had put on a pair of rubber boots from the stockroom, the ones the dock crew used, three sizes too big, under her green velvet dress.
He had taken off his tuxedo jacket and rolled up his sleeves. His bow tie was gone somewhere.
In the window, the wind was worse.
“Ladder,” Connor said.
“Behind the door.”
He set up the tall ladder against the inside of the front glass.
He went up it with the drill in his back pocket.
Caroline held the plexiglass against the frame from below with both arms spread wide, pressing it flat against the window while the wind tried to take it out of her hands.
The cold came through the broken corner and went straight through her dress. Her arms shook.
“Hold it,” Connor said from above her.
“I’m holding it.”
“Hold it higher. Two inches. Left.”
“I know where left is, Connor.”
The drill went. It stopped. It went again.
“You’re not holding it level.”
“You’re not drilling it level.”
He stopped drilling and looked down at her from the top of the ladder. She looked up at him, in her rubber boots and her velvet gown, with snow in her hair, holding up a sheet of plastic in a windstorm.
And somewhere in the middle of it, she laughed.
She couldn’t help it. It came up out of her, helpless and stupid, and she had to press her forehead against the cold plexiglass to keep holding it. Above her, she heard Connor make a sound too. He was laughing. He was laughing so hard the ladder shook.
“Stop,” she gasped. “Stop, you’ll fall.”
“You said I know where left is.”
“You said it like I was a forklift.”
“You said hold it higher ten years ago,” he said. “Word for word. Standing right there. You told me I didn’t know where left was.”
Caroline stopped laughing.
She remembered. Of course she remembered.
* * *
Ten years ago, on the second Saturday in December, the truck bringing the Hadley’s window figures from a workshop in New Jersey had gotten lost.
It hadn’t been in an accident. It had just vanished.
It had been sent to the wrong warehouse by a freight company that didn’t answer its phone on a Friday night.
Caroline was twenty-six and had just been made window director.
She had been standing on the loading dock at nine o’clock at night, in paint-splattered overalls, calling every number she could find and crying so hard she couldn’t talk, when a man in a navy peacoat got out of a pickup truck in the alley.
He ran a small freight company out of a warehouse in South Philly. He had six trucks. Someone at the workshop had called someone who called someone who called him.
“You’re the window girl,” he’d said.
“I’m the window director.”
“Okay. Window director. I found your truck.” He’d held up his phone. “It’s in a warehouse in Pennsauken. The driver went home. I’m going to go get it myself. Where do you want it?”
He came back with it at midnight, driving it himself.
And then, instead of leaving, he’d stayed.
He’d unloaded the figures with her. And when she climbed the ladder in the corner window at one in the morning to hang the sky, he held the ladder.
At two, when she dropped a whole box of tiny glass ornaments, he got down on his hands and knees and picked them up.
At three, when she was painting the last of the snow and couldn’t reach, he’d lifted her up by the waist so she could get the top corner, and she had said hold me higher, left, no, the other left, don’t you know where left is, and he had laughed so hard he almost dropped her.
That was the Walnut Street corner window. This window. Window one.
When they finished, at three-thirty in the morning, they had sat on the floor of it in the fake snow and shared a candy bar from the vending machine.
He’d walked her out to the street. And he’d said, very seriously, I’d like to take the window director to dinner, if she ever gets a night off before January.
She hadn’t. He’d come to the store every night until Christmas anyway.
* * *
Connor drilled the last screw at two-fifteen.
The wind stopped. Just like that. The plexiglass held, a clear flat wall over the cracked pane, and the storm went on outside it, silent now, piling snow against the other side. The window went still. The loose piece of painted sky stopped flapping and hung down.
In the sudden quiet, her breathing was the loudest thing in the room.
Connor came down the ladder. He stood on the bottom rung for a second, looking at the little train station full of real snow. Then he looked at her.
“It’s not fixed,” he said. “The display’s still wrecked.”
“I know.”
“You want to leave it until Monday?”
Caroline looked at the little train on its side. At the travelers face-down in the drift. At the ticket window, full of snow.
“No,” she said.
He nodded as though he’d known she would say that.
So they fixed it.
It took until three-thirty. Caroline did the delicate things, the way she always had.
She shook the real snow off each little figure and dried it with a hand towel from the staff bathroom.
She checked the tiny wires. She glued the painted sky back to the wall.
Connor did the heavy things. He shoveled the real snow out with a dustpan into a trash can.
He lifted the train back onto its track, and got down on his back in the fake snow with a flashlight in his teeth to look at the motor under the platform.
“It’s wet,” he said around the flashlight. “It’ll dry. Don’t turn it on till morning.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were going to.”
She was going to.
At three-thirty, they stopped. Everything was back where it belonged. The train was on its track. The travelers stood with their suitcases on the little platform. The painted sky was a little wrinkled in one corner, if you knew where to look.
They sat down on the floor of the window, in the fake snow, with their backs against the wall.