The Receptionist

by Kate Myles

  Chloe’s anger swerves away from the man in front of her and ricochets along the stream of chrome and neutral faces, searching for an outlet. She can still see part of Doug’s house. She wonders if anyone is home. She pictures his wife padding about, all pregnant and vulnerable.

  Chloe storms back to her car, lifts her phone from the center console, and opens her browser. When is Emily due? There are no search terms to enter. She can’t ask at the office. She opens her Twitter and posts, D is an asshole.

  She thinks of breaking into their house, of rummaging through papers and finding the due date on some doctor form. It won’t be hard to get in, not from the ocean side. Chloe could break the sliding glass door.

  The traffic starts moving. She drives through the downtown and makes a right into the hills at Pepperdine. She concentrates on the winding road, on the sheer face of stone across the canyon. It’s frightening, how powerful a car is. How easily it can turn uncontrollable.

  She could poison Doug’s wife.

  That’s the only way to do something like that. She pictures sneaking into their house and squeezing a medicine dropper of colorless, odorless liquid onto the woman’s food. It makes Chloe laugh then, the image in her head, because she realizes she’s picturing Emily’s plate set out like a pet bowl.

  Too bad Emily isn’t a cat. Chloe comes to a straightaway and tweets as she drives. Meow, says his wife. Meow meow.

  Chloe gets to work early the next morning and finds Jo-Ann in the kitchen, refilling the tray of prepackaged snacks. “How was your day off?” Jo-Ann asks, except it doesn’t sound like a question. It sounds like she’s reading an item off a list.

  “Good,” says Chloe. “I drove to—”

  Jo-Ann turns her back to Chloe and limps stiffly into the hallway. Chloe stares after Jo-Ann, the snub echoing in the empty air. She walks back to her desk and pulls up her Twitter. She counts seven followers from the company before she lowers her face to the keyboard.

  It’s not that she didn’t know they’d see the tweets. It’s that she assumed things couldn’t get worse than they already were.

  And then, as the first few coworkers trickle in, Chloe can’t really get a handle on what’s happening. It’s quite possible that nothing is happening. If a casual observer were perched on Chloe’s shoulder, it wouldn’t see anything unusual in Roderick the statistical-modeling fellow’s hesitating at the sight of her and would think his sullen glance at his watch as he passes was the gesture of someone concerned with the time. And Jeremiah from IT. A casual observer wouldn’t pick up on the difference between his regular cheerful hello and today’s cold eyebrow raise.

  A casual observer wouldn’t notice the sharpness of Elise the vice president’s cheer as she greets everyone in the lobby but Chloe. Or the fact that Teddy, the mail guy, drops his bundle of envelopes in her inbox with more force than usual. It’s not a full slam, and a casual observer might excuse it as an accident, but then the way Teddy glares at Chloe, like she’s personally done him wrong. A casual observer might think, That’s a little weird.

  The casual observer can’t be sure, as the morning wears on, whether there’s an uptick in people turning away as they pass, like there’s some silent agreement to punish Chloe because she finally went too far. By this time, the casual observer has begun focusing its attention inward, to Chloe herself. It notices every breath, every flinch, as her veins and tendons tighten, stretch thin like guitar strings.

  And that’s when the most curious thing happens. This casual observer, this thinking part of Chloe, begins to lift from the turmoil and materialize into its own distinct being: an entity of pure thought.

  The pure thought is detached. It puzzles over certain colleagues and their intermittent circling of Chloe’s desk, the way their stares grow brazen and carry highly specific levels of malice. Chloe hasn’t done anything personally to any of these people, so it’s interesting, why they seem so angry. Perhaps this one guy’s sneer as he eyes Chloe’s torso is an unleashing of hidden misogyny. And maybe this other lady’s wince of disgust at entering Chloe’s space is a jealousy situation. But the source of the animosity doesn’t really matter. It all results in the same predatory energy.

  Time to go, says the casual observer. It nudges Chloe in the direction of her computer and watches as she looks up the balance in her bank account. One hundred twenty-seven dollars. Not enough to leave. Not enough to walk out the door.

  Chloe has to sit there and take it.

  She decides to return a few dirty looks. That was how she used to do it. When was it, yesterday? This morning? It’s a simple exchange, a touch of rudeness in response to rudeness. It’s how people protect themselves. She furrows her eyebrows at a junior account exec, a guy her age. She’s met with a scoff and “Why are you glaring at me?” Someone else nearby makes a tsk noise.

  They won’t let her fight, thinks the casual observer. It watches Chloe’s face lock into place as her coworkers search her demeanor for weakness. And when Brooke, the marketing manager, comes through with a group Chloe used to eat lunch with and says, “Lo, how the mighty fall,” the casual observer notes how Chloe stares straight ahead, like she can’t hear their cackles.

  You’ve made your point, the casual observer wordlessly warns them. Now it’s time to stop.

  But they keep at it.

  Lunch comes and goes. Chloe doesn’t eat. She doesn’t visit the bathroom. She’s stuck to her chair, and her insides are getting tighter, but then Tom the recruiter approaches. His smile is almost friendly.

  “Hi,” says Chloe under her breath. For the first time that hour, she lets a touch of life back into her face.

  Can you believe how everyone is acting? she wishes she could say.

  Tom jerks his chin up. “How’s show business?” he asks.

  There’s no mistaking it. Everything anyone says now has more than one meaning, and because it all sounds innocent, none of it is legally actionable. And who knew they all had this way of speaking in their arsenal? Teddy throws the afternoon mail even harder on the counter. It’s a threat, an unveiling of hatred, backed by the full force and venom of every single one of her coworkers.

  A desperate sliver of Chloe’s consciousness springs to life then and begins dancing about, waving its arms and begging silently, frantically, through Chloe’s frozen face and out the top of Chloe’s scalp. She begs them all to ease up.

  And then Doug. Oh, Doug. He comes to work near the end of the day and flashes her a low peace sign: a coded gesture, signaling under duress. It’s exquisite, the way he shuts his door. Two soft clicks of the latch—a sweet, percussive melody that only Chloe can hear. And the music part of her flits into the air and winds its way to the frosted glass above his doorway and tries to peek in.

  If only she could talk to him. All she wants is to talk.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  EMILY

  No one at my agency gave any hint they knew about Dr. Maryn’s confrontation with Doug. I’d test them. I’d mention her name and watch for hitches and hiccups in my colleagues’ faces, looking for a sign that I was being plotted against. The most I got was patronizing sympathy and conversations redirected to my impending motherhood. I was asked, sometimes, in astonished tones, “You’re working right up to delivery?”

  They wanted me out of there.

  Three weeks from my due date, I had to fight to be included in a multidepartment strategy session. As soon as I sat down, though, my cell phone vibrated into the oak conference table. My brother was calling. I glared at the intrusion of his contact information on my screen. I turned off the ringer. A few minutes later my assistant, Travis, slunk into the room and whispered loudly enough for the people nearby to hear. My brother was on the office line. My dad was in the hospital.

  The faces around me gaped open in a collective demonstration of concern. More pity. People in my industry loved glomming onto these episodes of humanity. But 80 percent of them would forget me after I walked out the door, and the other 20 wou
ld be angling to exploit me.

  I growled at Travis in the hallway. “Don’t you dare spring personal information on me like that in public.”

  “Your brother said it was the only way to get you out of the meeting.”

  “You work for me, not my brother.”

  I tried to stalk ahead of him, but the increase in stride set off a sharp pain in my pelvis. I was too pregnant. I slowed. By the time I reached my desk, my brother had hung up. My first call back went to voice mail. He picked up on the third ring the second time.

  “Dad has pneumonia,” said Wally.

  “No cancer?”

  “They don’t think so,” he said.

  “We have to get him out of there,” I said. “Get him to Cedars or UCLA.”

  “Why?” There was a challenge in Wally’s voice. I pictured him widening his stance at the door to my dad’s room like a nightclub bouncer.

  “Our father is three hours away from the best hospitals in Southern California,” I said. “He’s not staying at Desert Adventist whatever the hell it is.”

  “Hey. My sons were born here. I had my appendix out here.”

  “For some things the local place is okay, but when Mom was sick? Did we go there? No, she came to UCLA.”

  “It didn’t help.”

  “Mom was at your wedding,” I said. “She got to meet your kids, you prick.”

  He hung up. I covered my mouth with my palm. I called back his cell. My sister-in-law answered.

  “Hi, Jessica.” I kept my voice calm and even. “Is my dad awake?”

  Jessica covered the mic with her hand. I listened to her and Wally’s muffled back-and-forth. “She’s your sister,” I heard her plead. Wally responded in grunts.

  “There’s a mute button,” I said. Neither of them heard. She passed the phone to my dad.

  “Hey, Em.” His voice was filled with fluid.

  “What happened?”

  “Had a little trouble last night.”

  “We’re going to get you out of there, okay? We’re going to have you transferred to Cedars.”

  He spoke in a weak falsetto. “If you think it’ll help.”

  I called my dad’s primary care doctor, then the attending physician at Desert Adventist. I called Cedars and the insurance coordinator at Desert. Medicare wouldn’t pay for a medevac flight. We had no way to transfer him.

  I hung up, keeping my grip on my landline receiver. I ached to call Dr. Maryn. She was connected, friends with the chairs of hospital boards. She’d have sorted this out in an hour. I coughed back a burning spurt of acid reflux as I recalled my last phone call with her. It had been in this same spot, at my desk, the morning after she’d stormed Doug’s office.

  “If you would just meet both of us for a sit-down,” I’d pleaded, hoping we could talk our way out of it. “We can explain everything.”

  She was silent. I pressed the receiver hard against my face and told her there’d been a conspiracy against Doug and me. “Right after I got promoted,” I told her, “some asshole accused us of double-dealing.”

  “That was me,” said Dr. Maryn.

  My muscles went slack. “Maryn, you could have come to me.” My voice came out dry, chapped.

  “I’m sorry, Emily, but I can’t let my agent’s personal problems become my problem.”

  She stopped speaking again, creating a vacuum with her silence. No one in my life, not even my family, had ever dared put it to me that succinctly.

  “I don’t have personal problems,” I said.

  “Emily, please, I’m a psychiatrist.”

  It wasn’t an invitation to confide in her, not in the slightest. And so I didn’t. I didn’t tell her that the worst thing, the idea I never thought about, but at the same time, I always thought about, was that I was convinced he’d killed my dog. Of course, I didn’t really think that, not all the time, but wasn’t it unhealthy? That I could think that about my husband?

  “Look, can we just talk?” I had to keep trying. “Face-to-face?”

  “Emily, you have a lot on your plate.” Her tone was intimate, full of the condescending warmth she reserved for the guests on her show.

  Bitch. I made you.

  “Please, Maryn. I’m begging you. Don’t use that footage of Doug.”

  “I’m not sure what our plans are,” she said, fending off my need for information. It was the most I could get from her.

  She laid out her timetable. Out of respect for “our history together,” she agreed to wait on switching agents until after I started my maternity leave. She’d even let me announce we were parting ways. I had until a week after the birth.

  I’d heard nothing from her since. She was back in Saint Louis, on hiatus. I pretended things were normal as I struggled to think of how I could part ways with her and remain sane looking. Agents don’t fire their stars. Agents don’t have creative differences with their biggest clients.

  I was going to have to quit, totally. The only way it made sense was if I announced I was becoming a stay-at-home mom. I’d been an agent for seventeen years. It took that long to get where I was.

  The baby kicked hard on my bladder, forcing me back to the present. My throat felt coated in lava. I shook two Tums from the bottle in my drawer and lowered my face toward my belly. “You better be worth it,” I whispered. I googled independent air ambulances to transport my dad to LA. We would have to arrange for a private helicopter.

  I called Doug.

  “How much is it?” he asked.

  “Forty thousand.”

  “Jesus, I’ll fly him myself.”

  “It needs to be an air ambulance.”

  “We can’t be throwing around that kind of money, not right now.”

  Liar. I had logs of his keystrokes. I had video of him logging onto his offshore accounts. He’d made enough money from the data sales and who knew what else, skimming from his company, probably, adding embezzlement and tax evasion to his list of crimes. He was hiding cash in Belize, the Seychelles, and the Cayman Islands. I had his account numbers, his usernames and passwords.

  I’d expected hiding money to be a complex process, full of subterfuge and nesting dolls and crypto keys and locked metal briefcases. But when I tried it myself, I saw that the banks were user friendly, with simple log-in pages. All I had to do was google start a shell company. There were any number of places I could choose to open one: Switzerland, the Dominican Republic, Cyprus. I went with Nauru, a small, lonely atoll between the Marshall and Solomon Islands. It was so remote there was no Google Street View, only satellite images. It took just half an hour for me to become the anonymous owner of Nauru’s newest corporation, EWM LLC.

  My call waiting beeped. It was my brother. I answered.

  “When are you coming, Em?”

  “Tomorrow. Doug will fly me up in the morning.”

  The table next to my dad’s hospital bed was cluttered with Styrofoam cups and empty applesauce containers. An ice cube the size of my pinkie nail was melting into a tear in the laminate. I moved a dirty sheet off the chair next to him and sat.

  “Julia Gibbs had a stroke,” my dad said. His face was gray. He wore a nasal cannula. “She’s in the ICU. They won’t let me visit her.”

  “Dad, you have enough to worry about. Just concentrate on you.”

  He blinked up at the water-stained ceiling. I looked at the floor. The wastepaper basket in the corner was overflowing. Unacceptable. I scanned the bed rail for the call button.

  “It’s awful, Em,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Getting old. People keep dying. Even the ones I barely know. You count on seeing familiar faces around town, but they’re all disappearing.”

  I said nothing. I just sat. I rested my hand on his forearm.

  Doug didn’t spend more than five minutes at a time in my dad’s room. He kept jerking to his feet and pacing before asking if we wanted anything from the cafeteria. Once, my sister-in-law, Jessica, said she’d like a coffee, but forty-five
minutes later, he still hadn’t returned.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Jessica. “I should never have married him.”

  She turned to Wally with raised eyebrows. My father said, “Shit,” from the bed. I found Doug two floors above, sprawled on a pleather couch in some surgical waiting room, reading a celebrity magazine.

  “Penny Marshall died,” he said.

  “That’s an old issue,” I said. He tossed the magazine onto the end table. I glanced over at a small group in the corner, three generations of a family. “They think my dad can go home tomorrow.”

  Doug sat up. “That’s great!”

  “I want to stay tonight.”

  He stood and shook his head. “No,” he said. “That won’t work.”

  “Doug.”

  “Tomorrow is my mom’s birthday.”

  “You go. I’ll rent a car,” I said.

  “What if you go into labor?” His voice was getting louder. The family in the corner was staring at us. I motioned for Doug to come out into the hall and stopped short at the nurses’ station. There was a woman, a patient, shuffling across the floor with an IV pole, her face a map of bloat and exploded capillaries. She stared at me. I stared back. I recognized the stoic hurt in her eyes. I’d never forget that look.

  “Hi, Destiny,” I said.

  “Hi,” she whispered. She glanced at my belly and looked away before shuffling off in the direction she’d come from.

  Doug was behind me. I went on my tiptoes and whispered into his ear. “Do you remember that girl I told you about? Destiny Stimpson? She buried the baby in the dumpster?”

  “Your preschool friend? I thought she had the baby in the bathtub.”

  “Would you lower your voice?”

  “There was a bathtub baby and a dumpster baby?”

  “She put it in the dumpster after the bathtub.”

  His lips twitched. I shoved my finger in his face. “Do not fucking laugh.” I looked back. Destiny Stimpson was gone. “I’m staying tonight. It’s only a three-hour drive.”

  “You want to give birth at a rest stop?”