Impotent fury snaps through me. I could tell this bitch off, but what good would that do? My sister would still be in a coma.
“Use that anger, that frustration,” I tell myself. “Eat them instead of food.”
I stand waiting, chewing on my rage and hoping she can’t tell because I know it would give her satisfaction, until she’s finished packaging the dress in tissue and tucking it into a paper bag. Then I pay a thousand dollars for my motivation dress, walk out without a word to her, and go straight home where I hang the dress from the handle of an upper kitchen cabinet so it drapes down over the fridge door. I take a picture of it covering my access to food and make it my phone’s lock screen and wallpaper, and for good measure I also make that picture the background on my home and work laptops.
Wherever I am, I need to see it.
This is the only thing I can do to help Gloria, and I cannot forget it even for a moment.
I will be a size zero.
Chapter Seven
I go back to work, but even the huge artificial-sweetener-laden iced coffee I suck down upon arrival doesn’t help me stay focused. I keep at it, though, forcing myself back again and again to my tasks and telling my body to draw the energy it needs from the fat on my hips and stomach, and I have a few moments of clarity.
Unfortunately, the first one comes when Jaimi’s outside my office door discussing the CFO position with Pilar.
I sit still, wishing I could work while my brain’s in gear but not wanting my keyboard sounds to alert them that I’m in here, and listen as they chatter away about how excited they are at the prospect of being promoted and the work they’ve already done on their presentations and what they still need to complete. I don’t agree with most of their ideas, but they’re not asking me and I’m obviously not going to voluntarily go out there and help them make their presentations better. In fact, one particularly clueless suggestion of Pilar’s makes me smile knowing how stupid she’d sound saying it to the selection committee. Jaimi might be ready to be CFO someday, after I retire, but Pilar? Never.
My smile fades, though, when they switch to talking about their competition for the job and neither of them so much as mentions my name. There is a brief pause in their conversation, which feels like they may have been pointing toward my closed door, but that’s all the attention I seem to warrant. They’ll regret that lack of concern. I have been modelling myself after Elle since I joined the company and I am absolutely going to get this promotion. Jaimi and Pilar are wasting their time.
They wander back to work, eventually, and I allow myself a moment of disgust at their lack of focus then return my attention to my own tasks. Since I will not do anything presentation-related until the end of May when it’s confirmed that I need to, I want to get ahead on my current work so I’ll have time then.
That’s my plan for the next two hours, but people keep interrupting to ask me about Gloria and even when I’m alone the diet seems to be sapping all power from my mind. I persevere, though, and through sheer force of will I do manage to accomplish a few things by the end of the day.
Pleased in a tired way, I take myself and my laptop to Gloria’s bedside where I settle into my usual chair and keep working after first saying hello to Gloria.
The walk from the subway station to the hospital seems to have woken me up, and I’m just figuring out a tricky part in a report when a nurse comes in and promptly drops Gloria’s new feeding bag on the floor.
“Did it— oh, good, it didn’t break,” she says, scooping up the bag. “I’ll get a new one, but at least it’s not all over the place.” She gives me a weary smile. “Troubles always come in threes, they say, and this would have been my third thing today. Guess I got lucky.”
I smile back, and as she bustles away I think about her words. Back when I was fourteen, Dad got food poisoning and our dog ran away and Anthony died all in the same week, and since then I’ve also believed troubles come in threes.
Gloria’s assault is certainly one trouble. Is losing Andy another? Given how difficult I’m still finding it to get used to travelling to my office from my own home, I have to say yes.
Jaimi’s excitement at work comes back to me, and I know what the third thing could be.
Losing my promotion to my protégée.
“What do you think, Gloria?” I say out loud. “Will I get the promotion?”
Gloria doesn’t respond.
“You’re right,” I say as cheerfully as I can. “Of course I will.”
Food carts clatter down the hall outside her room, and I wince. “That’s annoying, isn’t it? It’s noisy in here.” A thought strikes me. “Maybe you could have music or something. I could hook up your iPod to speakers by your head. Do you have an iPod? Or speakers?”
I sigh. I know so little about my sister. How had we let things get to this stage? We’d been close, before. When we were teenagers. Sure, I’d annoyed her a bit, following her around and trying to be more like her, but we had known each other, understood each other. After Anthony died, though….
Nobody ever came right out and told me, “If you had done what you were supposed to do, he wouldn’t have died,” but I’d known everyone was thinking it, and the way Gloria withdrew from the family, moved away and didn’t see any of us for over a year, made it clear she couldn’t forgive me for the loss of her little brother.
I couldn’t forgive me either. I’d been easy-going and relaxed, but after my lack of attention killed my brother I promised myself I’d change. And I had. I’d developed the self-control that had got me through NYU’s MBA program with the highest marks in my class, and the routines and structures that made sure I could handle the crazy pace of life in finance and move steadily upward in the company. I’ll never be easy-going again, but that’s a small price to pay for the damage I did.
Gloria makes a strange moaning sound, and I snap my head up to look at her. I know from Doctor Wise that these incomprehensible noises don’t mean anything, but I keep hoping every time that she’ll blink and open her eyes and take her hands out of that weird bent-in posture and reach out to me.
She doesn’t, and she can’t.
So I have to reach out to her. I have to get to know more about her, about what happened to her, so I can make all of this make sense.
The nurse returns with the new feeding bag, along with supplies for giving Gloria her sponge bath, so I retreat to the hall chair and pull out the detective’s business card from my wallet.
“No,” she says once I’ve explained who I am, “I’m afraid we don’t know anything yet.”
“But it’s been nearly a week.”
“Four days,” she corrects, but she sounds sympathetic. “We haven’t even finished analyzing the security cam footage from the terminal yet, although that should be done soon. I wish I had something to tell you, but I— oh, I can tell you that according to her cell phone provider her phone hasn’t been connected to the network since it was taken. Which makes robbery seem like less of a motive. But again, I can’t say for sure yet.”
I thank her, though I don’t want to, and get off the phone. Then I sit in the hall staring at the beige floor feeling as dull as the tiles.
I need to know why, and I don’t. None of this makes sense at all, and I so want it to. More, I need it to. She was attacked, like a mugging, but the only thing that was stolen has not been used. So why take it, and not her wallet? If it was a robbery gone wrong, the criminal should have taken everything. If it was an attack on Gloria herself, a targeted one, why bother taking the phone?
And why the hell was she even at the ferry terminal so late?
The cops don’t seem to know why, and maybe they don’t care. If they can figure out who did it from the security cameras, maybe knowing why Gloria was in that situation doesn’t matter to them.
But it matters to me.
I need this to make sense. It hurts so much that it doesn’t. More, it makes me feel panicked and small. If I had an explanation, Gloria would sti
ll be lying in that bed but at least I would know why. I can’t cope with the randomness of this. Apparent randomness. It might be utterly non-random but I don’t know.
Frustrated, and not knowing what else to do, I log into Facebook and go to Gloria’s page. We were friends there, although neither of us posted much, and so I can see her page and all the posts her friends are leaving on her wall begging her to get better. It’s sweet, I guess, but there’s no way for me to tell whether these are casual friends or people who might be important in figuring things out. That’s frustrating enough, but their posts on her wall clutter things up so I have to scroll forever until I finally see her last post, a repost from her Twitter account.
She turns out to have been far more active there, showing off pictures of clothes and discussing TV shows she’d watched and retweeting requests for donations from various groups, but I’m more interested in her bio which provides a link to her roommate’s Twitter account.
I didn’t even know she had a roommate. Has. She’ll get back there. I’m determined.
When the nurse lets me back into the room, I sit beside the bed and say to Gloria, “You live with Jessica, right? That’s still right, I hope. What’s she like?”
Jessica’s Twitter account, how snarky and uptight she seems there, especially the part of her bio where she says “Call me Jess and I’ll punch you in the throat”, makes me wonder at her as a roommate for the ‘live in the now, peace and love’ Gloria, but she’s the best connection I have to Gloria’s life so I make a Twitter account and send her a message then get back to working on my tasks.
I talk them through out loud, trying to pretend that at any moment Gloria will wake up and join in the discussion. She doesn’t, and I don’t get very far on the work either though I’m trying hard to stay focused.
Trouble number three is right around the corner if I can’t get enough work done to give me time to ace my presentation, and if by some miracle I pull something together the third trouble could still take my comatose sister.
Either way, I need a miracle.
Chapter Eight
Jessica narrows her eyes. “After we talked,” she says with an unmistakable tough-girl Brooklyn accent, “I started wondering whether you’re really Gloria’s sister after all.”
“Why would I lie about that?”
She draws her apartment door a little more closed, making sure I can’t get in. “Yeah, exactly. Why would ya?”
“Her name is Gloria Katherine Malloy,” I say. “Katherine after our dad’s mom. Gloria because our mother liked it. Her birthday is January seventeenth, and she’s thirty-six now. She likes watermelon, hates cucumbers, and is allergic to strawberries. Her favorite colors are hot pink and purple. She has a long scar on her cheek from…”
Tears, unexpected and painful, rush up to silence me. The scar is from when she found Anthony choking, rushed away to find Mom, and fell through the glass curio cabinet.
“She’s my sister,” I whisper, blinking hard so I won’t cry. I can’t let that happen. I never cry. “Come on.”
Jessica studies me for another moment, while I fight to calm myself, then says, “Okay, fine. Since you care so much, she must be your sister. Come on in.”
I follow her into the apartment, then look around confused. “You’re moving?”
She nods. “They’re turning this building into condos so Gloria and I found a new place.” For the first time, she looks uncomfortable. “But here’s the thing. She ain’t gonna live there. Not for a long time anyhow. And I can’t afford it by myself. So I…” She shrugs. “I got me another roommate.”
I stare at her. “You’re kicking her out? Now?”
“Hell, Val, I feel bad about it.”
So she won’t be called “Jess” but feels free to call me “Val”? I briefly consider giving her the punch in the throat she’d said she’d give any abbreviators but push that urge aside. “Do you? Doesn’t seem like it.”
“You think I wanted her hurt like that?”
My anger at her throwing Gloria out of her apartment doesn’t stop me recognizing this opportunity. “Do you know why she was? Why she was at the ferry so late?”
She drops onto the ratty couch, and to my surprise I see tears in her eyes. “I don’t,” she says, all the fight gone from her. “I’ve thought about it over and over. She never said nothing about being there. Not like she has to report to me, but you’d think it would have come up if she hung out there. She was never a morning person so she was always out late, but the last couple months it was really late. Like, three in the morning, at least a few times a week. And then the cops showed up and told me what happened to her… I don’t know whether she was on Staten Island all those times or just the once, whether someone was waiting for her or some bastard just decided to grab the next girl who went by… I don’t know, and I can’t stop thinking about it. God, people are awful. Poor Gloria.”
I sit down beside her, making a mental note of the ‘out late a lot recently’ thing. “Yeah. I can’t stop thinking about it either. I wish I knew something, anything.”
We sit silently for a few moments, then her phone buzzes and she glances at it. “Sorry,” she says, pushing to her feet. “The movers are nearly here. I was having them take Gloria’s stuff to a storage locker, but now that you’re here you can take it.”
“On the subway?” I say, getting up too. “I don’t think so. And you’re moving right now? Where’s this storage locker?”
She grabs a sheet of paper off the kitchen counter and hands it to me. “I paid for the first month but then I was gonna wait and see what happened.” She pauses and gives me a significant look.
Her dumping this on me, leaving me no way to change the situation, infuriates me. “So if she died you would just leave her stuff there? You weren’t even going to try to find me or my parents?”
“Hey, I didn’t even know she had you or parents.” She crosses herself. “And don’t talk about what would happen if she— don’t draw that down on her.”
I hardly hear her last words because I’m so stunned by the first ones. “You didn’t know about us?”
She shakes her head. “She never mentioned any family at all, so I didn’t ask. Thought it might be a sore spot. She was a good roomie but we’re not really friends, you know? Not like she had to tell me. So yeah, I put her stuff in storage for the month, and if she… I’d have renewed it if she might have picked it up someday and if not…” She shrugged.
“If not,” I say, anger rising again, “you’d have walked away and left her stuff there to rot. Nice.”
“Don’t mention rotting!” She crossed herself again. “Seriously, quit it.”
“You’re the one who ditched her the second she got hurt like… like you were throwing a dead cockroach in the garbage, and you’re telling me not to—”
She snatches open her front door. “Just get out. If you’re not afraid of saying shit like that, I totally am, and I don’t want you here another second. I’ll send the movers to the locker, so you go there. Go. Get out!”
I get out, and she slams the door behind me, and I stand in the hallway wondering how exactly that all went so wrong so fast. Then I walk back down the five flights of stairs to the street, passing the movers who are muttering under their breath about ‘damn walkup apartments’, and take a taxi to the storage facility where I find the ten-foot-square storage locker Jessica rented and unlock the door with the code on the paper. Empty. For now. But soon Gloria’s things will be inside.
After about fifteen minutes of sitting by the locker hoping there’ll be something to help me in Gloria’s boxes, I hear a truck pull up and see the same movers get out. “That’s her,” Jessica calls from the taxi that followed them in, adding something that I can’t quite hear but sounds like, “That’s the bitch.”
I start toward her but she says, “I’m telling the manager you’re taking the locker. You stay there.”
I do, though it burns me not to ignore her command,
while the guys start unloading, and shortly she comes out. “It’s in your name now,” she says from across the parking lot, “so that’s that. Nice knowing you, don’t bug me again, goodbye.”
She’s fast, and before I can react she has the taxi door open and is halfway inside.
“Wait,” I shout as she slams the door.
She opens the door an inch.
“If you think of anything else, anything about Gloria, about why she was out so late, let me know. Okay? I have to figure out what happened to her.”
She doesn’t say anything, but I see the sadness in her eyes again before she closes the door and turns away.
I hope she will manage to think of something. I don’t have any other leads.
The movers finish stashing Gloria’s boxes in the locker in minutes, and I tip them and send them on their way then shut the door and sit on the cool concrete floor amid everything Gloria owned.
Should I go through it?
I have to know why she was at the ferry terminal so late at night, but rifling through her things feels wrong. Gloria might not like it, and the fact that I can’t ask her and get a response weighs on me like the boxes weighed on the movers as they hauled them down the apartment stairs.
But not knowing what happened weighs even more, so I sigh and check the nearest box for an indication of its contents then stare in disbelief at the words scrawled on its side.
Envelopes, air fresheners, and CDs.
What idiot throws that random selection of stuff into a box?
Had Gloria packed herself or had Jessica done it after the assault? I don’t know, and Jessica’d never answer if I bothered to ask. Deciding to assume it wasn’t Gloria because I don’t want to think she’d be that clueless, I rip the tape off the box and look inside. Sure enough, envelopes and air fresheners and CDs. And an MP3 player. No speakers, though.
Most of the other boxes hold clothes, although each with some randomly-selected addition, and I give those boxes only the most cursory inspection because I can’t bring myself to touch the brightly-colored garments while my sister wears a hospital gown of an insipid pale pink she’d never have chosen. Plus, going through her things is bringing up awful memories of packing up Anthony’s room the month after he died because I’d overheard my parents saying they wanted it done but couldn’t handle it, and my remembered feelings of misery and guilt are mingling with the current ones and it’s all swirling through me so my empty stomach feels sick.
Holding Out for a Zero Page 5