The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

  “What about you?” he said after we stopped and sat on a bench. “Are you going to stay?”

  “Here? I don’t know.”

  “How is it, living at home?”

  “You know what my mom’s like.”

  He held up his hands. “I plead the Fifth.”

  “It’s fine, actually. It’s not so bad. They pretty much leave me alone. I guess I need to figure out what I actually want to do next. You know. Where I want to go.”

  “Why not here? I know one reason for you to stay.”

  The trees made a rushing sound when the night breeze blew through them, a sound like rain falling. The park was empty except for the two of us. I pulled my sweater tighter around me. I slid my feet free of my sandals and felt the cold, spongy grass between my toes. I used to play tennis in this park. The past, my past, was everywhere in this town. When I turned back to Rob, he was looking at me. He’d stated it as a fact, and he was right. He was one reason for me to stay.

  I shrugged. “I’m not in any hurry. Just taking it one day at a time.”

  “Do you want to come back to Cambridge tonight?”

  “Not till the third date, buddy,” I said with a laugh.

  “No, not like that. My roommates are having people over. A party.”

  “It’s kind of late.”

  “It’s, like, ten o’clock, grandma.”

  “Well, I told my parents I’d walk the dog before bed.”

  He offered a hand to help me up. “So living at home does have its downside.”

  “Free food, though. Unlimited laundry.”

  When we got back, his house was dark. I had parked at the bottom of the driveway, borrowing the Volvo for the night, and Rob’s old green Jeep was parked in front of it. It was the same junky car he’d driven in high school. On winter weekends in boarding school, we’d sometimes drive out to the beach on the North Shore. I’d dared him to go swimming once, on a frozen and windy January day, and before I could tell him I was kidding he had stripped to his boxers and run into the steel-gray Atlantic. Rob gave me a thumbs-up, his chest chapping red in the wind, then ducked beneath a crashing wave. We were alone, the only people on the beach. A moment passed. Another moment. Rob didn’t emerge back up. Five seconds, at least. Ten seconds. That was way too long. Just as I started sprinting for the water, he popped back up, grinning like a jack-in-the-box. “You’re insane!” I shouted over the roar of the wind. He’d done it just to get a rise out of me. To be able to say, later, that I’d been so worried about him I’d almost gone in myself. He was covered in goose bumps, lips turning blue, but he laughed the whole way back. Rob was like that.

  I didn’t know what we were doing. Rob took my hands and pulled me toward him. I kept my gaze fixed to his shoulder.

  “How about next week?” he was saying.

  “What about it?”

  “We should hang out again. Lunch?”

  “Okay.” Thinking. Lunch was innocuous enough.

  “Tuesday work for you?”

  “Well, I’ll have to check my calendar. I’m a busy woman.”

  “Good. Tuesday it is.” He tugged me in and kissed me on the cheek before letting go. As I drove away, he waved good-bye from the bottom of the driveway, and I watched him shrinking into the night in the rearview mirror.

  Elizabeth had been calling in her spare moments to tell me about New York, doing her best to distract me. She was always rushing, always late to something.

  “What about this weekend?” she said. It was Monday, the day before I was going to meet Rob for lunch. “My roommate’s going to be gone. I already cleared it with her. You can stay in her room.”

  “I don’t know, Lizzie.”

  “You know I live in Chinatown, right? It’s really far from the Upper East Side. You won’t run into him. You’re going to have to set foot in New York at some point.”

  “Yeah, it’s just that—”

  “Donald is throwing a party this weekend. In his loft. It’s going to be amazing. Jules, come on. You need to get out of that house. Shake it up a little.”

  Rob was waiting for me when I arrived the next day. The Thai restaurant he’d picked was cool and dark inside, a bamboo fan spinning lazily on the ceiling. The restaurant was empty at the lunch hour, most people coming for takeout.

  “It’s not fancy,” Rob said, drinking his beer. “But I like it.”

  “So how much longer are you working at the lab?”

  “The end of July, I think. It’s sort of arbitrary. It’s not like I’m really leaving. I’m staying in the same apartment next year.”

  “You didn’t want to take time off before school?”

  “I did. I took this year.” He reached across the table to try my noodles. “Hey, we’re going out to the Cape this weekend. One of my buddies rented a place for the summer. You should come.”

  “You and your roommates? A bunch of dudes?”

  “The girls are coming, too. It’s going to be awesome. It’s right on the beach.”

  I took a small sip of beer. Elizabeth, urging me to New York. Rob, inviting me to the Cape. I knew this point would come eventually, my hibernation forced to an end. The weekend on the Cape would be fun. I could picture it: the burgers sizzling on the grill, the Frisbee floating back and forth. But I also had the feeling that if I were to do it—to go with Rob for the weekend, to be with him again—the previous four years really would vanish without a trace. Every way in which I thought I’d changed would be wiped out by the easy backslide into his arms. It was tempting, to so cleanly erase the messiness of the past. Adam, Evan, all the mistakes I’d made. The man was going to be a brain surgeon. Our life together could be a good one.

  But I shrugged. “I might go stay with Elizabeth in New York this weekend.”

  “I need to know by tonight, so I can save you a place in the car.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He stared at me, quizzical. “I’m not going to wait around forever, Jules.”

  We emerged from the cool darkness of the restaurant onto the too-bright sidewalk. I was squinting, disoriented, my vision spotty from the sunshine, and when Rob said good-bye he kissed me square on the mouth. His lips were still spicy from the noodles. “Let me know by tonight, okay?”

  Chapter 15

  Evan

  There were thunderstorms over New York that December night, earsplitting booms and low rumbles that would have kept me awake if I hadn’t been already. I lay fully dressed on top of the covers in the midtown hotel room, counting down the hours until it was time to go back in.

  David Kleinman had been stuck in DC because of the storm. The thwack of helicopter blades overhead greeted me as I hurried into the lobby on Tuesday morning. I arrived on the floor just as he did. Kleinman walked through the silent hallways without meeting anyone’s eyes. He went straight to his office, dusty from the previous few months, and slammed the door behind him.

  Roger plopped down across from me with a wolfish smile. “How’d you sleep, my friend?”

  I stared at my steaming coffee, willing it to cool so I could start drinking it.

  “Listen, you lawyered up yet? Huh? Hey, I’m talking to you here.”

  “No, Roger. I haven’t.”

  “You haven’t? Shit, Peck, what are you waiting for? You know they’re gonna be after your ass.”

  “Knock it off.”

  “Whoa, whoa. So hostile. I’m just trying to help.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  He snorted. “You’re kidding, right? You don’t think you and Michael made it my business when you decided to fuck everything up for the rest of us? When you broke the law?” Roger shook his head. “You could have said something, you know. Why didn’t you go to Kleinman?”

  He waited, but I didn’t have an answer.

  I went past Michael’s office that morning, but it was empty and dark. Wanda’s desk was vacant, too. Rumors raced like wildfire: Michael had hired a security detail to protect him and his wi
fe. He’d fled to Europe. He’d lawyered up and was refusing to talk. He’d come in at dawn via the freight elevator and cleared out his things. No one knew what was true and what was false. It wasn’t like the market crash back in September. We weren’t in this thing together. This time, everyone fractured into distinct modes of panic, scrambling for seats on invisible lifeboats. Some claimed they’d seen it coming. Others were already on the phone with headhunters. I came around a corner in the hallway and heard a pair of angry voices, one of them saying he couldn’t believe what Michael had done. But when the pair saw me, they shut up. That’s how it went that day. Conversations halted when I came too close. I was persona non grata.

  Kleinman gathered everyone that afternoon in the same conference room where he’d addressed us on the day he left for Washington. The mood was more somber this time. He once again emphasized that this crisis—a new crisis, one of our own making—would not be the undoing of Spire. This was an aberration, one rogue actor. A man who didn’t stand for what Spire was. Spire would be cooperating fully with authorities. The rest of the firm was clean. Kleinman wasn’t going to let this destroy us. Us. Us. That’s what I focused on. I was still there, still part of the team.

  A hand touched my elbow as I filed out. David Kleinman’s secretary, giving me a sympathetic look. “Evan? He’d like to see you.”

  Kleinman was waiting inside his office. A grandfather clock ticking in the corner marked the silence. He watched me sit, fiddle with my cuffs, shift in my chair, like he was waiting for a truth to reveal itself. Or did he want me to speak first?

  At last he said, “I hear you were the one working with Michael on this deal.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ll have access to a lawyer, one of ours. From now on you shouldn’t say a single thing about this without your lawyer present. Okay? Complete silence unless the lawyer is there. Not to your mom, your friends. Your girlfriend, whatever.” I swallowed; my mouth went dry. “But right now is the exception. Right now I need you to be totally straight with me. What did you know and when did you know it?”

  After I told him everything—the beginning of the deal, what I’d overheard in Vegas, the briefcase for Chan, the $20,000 in cash from Michael—he nodded and dismissed me. Kleinman didn’t say anything about where Michael was, or what was going to happen to him. Maybe it would have been stating the obvious. On the walk back to my desk, I noticed a team of strange men in dark suits in the conference room. Files and stacks of paper and laptops covered the table. The blinds were lowered on the windows. They looked like they were setting up for war.

  The SEC took over one conference room, and our lawyers took over another. The nameplate outside Michael’s office had been pried off by the end of the first week.

  Kleinman’s speech his first day back didn’t do much good. The death spiral began immediately. Investors pulled their money. No one bought what Kleinman was selling—that this was a contained crisis, the mistake of one greedy egomaniac. Michael had been the acting CEO. His fingerprints were on everything. Any deal conducted during his tenure was tainted. Every last skeleton was going to be dragged out of every last closet. We were getting hammered.

  “Michael fucking Casey. I could murder this fucking guy,” one trader said to another in the kitchen. People had stopped bothering with silence around me. They didn’t care anymore, or maybe they’d already forgotten who I was.

  The other guy laughed bitterly. “You’re gonna have to get in line.”

  I felt my throat tighten as I stirred milk into my coffee.

  “Fine. I’d settle for just pissing on his corpse if I had to.”

  By that point, it was clear to me that Michael was almost certainly going to jail. And the odd thing was, I felt pity for him. If we hadn’t been caught, those same guys would have declared him a hero. They would have admired his brilliance and ballsiness for pulling it off. But in this game, you didn’t score points with hypotheticals. Execution was the only thing that mattered.

  Christmas snuck up on me. It was just another day to get through: reruns, takeout, a quiet apartment. My parents called, and so did Arthur. They had seen the news when it broke a few weeks earlier. They knew the outlines of what had happened, but I let the calls go to voice mail. I didn’t feel like talking about it, not yet. There was too much that I hadn’t made sense of. How was I supposed to feel? Guilty, contrite, apologetic? What was I supposed to say? I understood, intellectually, how bad it looked to other people. To people like Arthur and my parents. Normal people. But there was some of me that still saw the upside in what Michael had done. I felt guilt over the wrong thing—over the role I’d played in making the news public. The deal had been working. It was going to make Spire an enormous amount of money. I wasn’t ready to let go of that yet.

  After the holidays, I was sitting at my desk when I felt a tap on my shoulder. A man with a crew cut and an ill-fitting suit told me to follow him. We went into the conference room, where another man who looked just like him sat at the table. One was named John, the other Kurt, both of them from the SEC. I immediately forgot who was who.

  “Have a seat,” one of them said. “Help yourself to water or coffee or whatever.”

  “Thanks,” I said, although their hospitality seemed pretentious when it was our conference room they were occupying.

  “You have a good holiday?” one of them asked.

  “Um, yeah. It was fine.”

  John looked over at Kurt, or vice versa. “Did I tell you I had to drive all the way to Short Hills on Christmas Eve? For that new Elmo doll. Jesus.” He rolled his eyes, then said to me, “Don’t ever get married, okay?”

  I laughed. At that moment, the door to the conference room opened. A blond woman in a skirt suit came in, brandishing a briefcase in one hand and a large Starbucks in the other. She stopped, froze. “What did you say to them?” she said, her eyes wide.

  “We were just shooting the shit,” John or Kurt said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Never talk to him without me here. Understood? That goes for you, too,” she said to me. “You really should know better, Evan.”

  But I didn’t even know why I needed a lawyer. The questions that John and Kurt asked were easy, straightforward. I nodded, confirmed, clarified, helped them establish the particulars of the deal: the timeline, the players. As the week went on, my fear started to dissipate. They were treating me like I had done nothing wrong. Maybe I’d be okay. Maybe all wasn’t lost just yet.

  “Hold that?”

  I pushed the Door Open button. Roger hurried into the elevator. “Oh,” he said, catching his breath. “Thanks, Evan.” I think it was the only time he’d ever thanked me for anything. It was definitely the only time he’d ever used my first name.

  “Good weekend?” I asked.

  He glanced away, staring instead at the ticking floor numbers as we zoomed up the skyscraper. “Yeah. What about you?”

  “Fine,” I lied. The weekends felt endless without the distraction of work. I went through a case of beer without even trying. I had no idea what to do with the time.

  We were silent for the rest of the ride up. Both of us were in early. Roger was working on some big new deal with Steve. And I’d been coming in early because I knew that appearances mattered. I needed to prove that I was ready to hit the ground running when this mess was over. I’d been removed from every project, every e-mail distro, but things would be back to normal soon enough.

  As Roger and I approached our desks, I saw an unfamiliar woman standing near my chair. A spark of hope: maybe she was there to give me a new assignment.

  “Evan Peck?” she said, and I nodded. “Could you come with me, please?”

  She led me to the other side of the floor and stopped in front of what I’d always assumed was a supply closet, tucked in the building’s core, far away from the windows. She balanced a stack of binders in one arm while she shuffled through a ring of keys with the other hand. “Do you mind?” she said with a smile, handing me
the binders. She was kind of cute.

  “Here we go,” she said, finally finding the key. She opened the door and flipped the light switch. It was a small, windowless office. A bare desk, a computer, a chair. It smelled like paint. Yes, I realized, I had in fact seen the janitor opening and closing this door just the other week. “This is nicer, isn’t it?” Her voice had gone up an octave. “Your very own office.”

  “I’m supposed to work here?”

  “You know, I’ve never heard of an analyst getting his own office before.”

  “But why? Why are you moving me?”

  She turned on the computer, swept her hand across the desk, nodded at the whole array. “It’s nice in here, actually. Nice and clean and quiet. Don’t you think?”

  “So I just…are people going to know where to find me?”

  “Well, it sounds like you’ve been spending most days in deposition with the SEC. While you’re tied up with that, we figured we’d move you in here so we could free up your old desk.”

  “Free it up for who?”

  “I’m really just here to help you get settled. Actually, I have to go. I have a nine o’clock on another floor. Here’s the key. The door locks automatically.”

  There was a forgotten industrial-size bottle of window cleaner in the corner. I used that to prop open the door while I settled in. A minute later, I looked up to see that the door was pushing the heavy bottle across the carpet, gradually trying to close itself against the outside world.

  The following week, when I walked into the conference room for our usual 9:30 start time with the SEC, something had changed. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. Then, as I poured myself a cup of coffee from the setup at the side of the room, I realized that John and Kurt were both silent. My heart started beating faster. They were staring purposefully at the papers in front of them instead of engaging in their usual stupid banter.