Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

  He held up his hand and she gave him a high five. “I got three wrong on the math portion,” he said, but he was grinning. “Not fractions, though.”

  “Is a high five really all I get? I haven’t seen you since the big news. Are you sure you don’t have something else to tell me?”

  He pressed his fingers to his cheeks and peered up at her. “I got in.”

  “Of course you did.” Ardie felt an aching tenderness that Salomon wouldn’t need tutoring any longer. He was a sweet, quiet kid with a round face and a love for illustrated books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and The Wild Robot that was close to insatiable. She’d asked him to write down a list of his favorites for her so that she could share it with Michael when he was older and Salomon had taken the task so seriously that he’d come back with two pages of recommendations, poured into neat columns. She kept it in her nightstand.

  Rosalita was making impatient noises and Ardie released her hand from the boy’s cap.

  “You see?” Rosalita led Ardie into the kitchen where a builder-grade iron fixture hung over the breakfast table, its ceramic tulips diffusing the light from the bulbs inside. Papers and torn envelopes littered the tabletop. “I don’t understand.” Rosalita flicked the papers. “I don’t understand what they want from me. I can’t pay. What else do they need to know? Salomon has to go to the school. I can’t pay.”

  Frustration wafted off Rosalita as Ardie surveyed the task at hand. She imagined Rosalita’s annoyance was roughly equal to hers when she’d tried to piece together IKEA furniture.

  “Okay.” Ardie scanned the instruction sheet, which described what needed to be included in the numbered boxes. “We can do this. No problem. We can do this.” She turned over the form, biting on her thumbnail for concentration. “We’ll need your federal income tax return, W-2s, some other IRS forms, and your most recent pay stubs. We’ve got those?”

  Rosalita’s hands shook as she cast about over the loose papers strewed across the table.

  Ardie flattened her palms over the table, leaning in. “No worries. I’ll find them.” Salomon had begun tossing up a ball and catching it, tossing it and catching it, and Ardie could tell that this, too, was wearing on Rosalita’s nerves. “Maybe you could make us a cup of tea? Coffee?” Ardie suggested.

  Rosalita smoothed the frizz that had gathered at her temples. “I’ll make both.”

  Free to rifle through the pages, Ardie began searching for the applicable forms. She cleared a square of space for the ones she actually needed.

  She wished she could convey to Rosalita that, no matter how many years of education one had, everyone felt like an idiot when it came to filling out government issued forms. But there was no way to say this without sounding patronizing and so Ardie made herself comfortable in a wood chair that wasn’t comfortable at all and began filling out the required information in the tiny, notched squares provided.

  “What’s Salomon’s father’s name?” Ardie called over her shoulder.

  “No father.”

  Ardie turned in her chair. “It’s important to be accurate,” she said as gently as she could, given the biological impossibility of Rosalita’s claim. Rosalita made eyes at her son, who was throwing the ball with less frequency and making an obvious attempt to overhear.

  “Go watch your movie, Salomon,” Rosalita barked, her hands on her hips. Ardie didn’t scare easily, but if she were a kid, she’d have listened, too. Salomon obeyed his mother with a readiness that Michael, her tiny king of distraction, had yet to emulate and went to sit on the couch. The television blared.

  Rosalita set a teakettle on the electric stove. “Salomon’s father is dead,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  Rosalita rolled her eyes. “Salomon didn’t know him. But I thought … I thought maybe he’d pay for this school. Sometimes he would help if I asked. Here and there. Not much. But.” She shrugged.

  Ardie turned back to study the forms. “There’s a box to check for deceased, but it looks like they still want a name.” Ardie had slipped the heels of her shoes off under the table.

  Rosalita’s eyebrows folded inward and she pulled a dishrag between her hands. “He wasn’t included on the birth certificate. He didn’t leave Salomon a single thing. Why should I have to?”

  Ardie held up her hand, sensing the roadblock up ahead. “Okay, okay. Fair enough. We’ll leave that blank and hope for the best.”

  She waded through the paper trail of someone else’s life and tried to corral it into order. She pulled the pay stubs and set the last three out in chronological order. She read the amounts listed in the little white box at the right. And then read them again.

  “Rosalita.” She beckoned without turning. “Your most recent paycheck is less than half the amount you were previously being paid. Look.” She pressed her finger below the number.

  “No, it’s okay.”

  Ardie turned the stub backward and forward. “Why would your pay have dropped that much?” She tilted her head, puzzled. “Did they cut your hours? Is this what you’re making going forward or what you were making before?”

  “I make that for future now, I think. It’s okay,” Rosalita said again, briskly, then returned to the teakettle, which was beginning to whistle.

  “No.” Ardie bit the back of her pen and pushed herself out of the chair. “This has to be an error. There’s too much of a discrepancy. I’ll talk to accounting for you, or HR. This is ridiculous.”

  “No. It’s fine.” Rosalita slung the dish towel over her shoulder and removed a white mug from an upper cabinet. “This is just how much it is.”

  “Rosalita, this is serious. You can’t live on—”

  Rosalita pushed the unfilled mug back onto the counter. “You’re a rich person. You don’t know what I can live on. You have no idea. Salomon—stop playing with that ball inside!” she snapped.

  “I didn’t mean—” Ardie extracted her hands from the table in surrender, then turned in her chair to watch Rosalita. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” Ardie sank back into the chair. “We’ll have more in common than you think after tomorrow. Rich? Not so much.” She gave a weak smile.

  Rosalita laughed, a bit unkindly, Ardie thought, but that was fine, she could understand why. Ardie had a law degree, assets.

  Ardie pulled out the cookies, slightly broken in her purse, and set them out to share with Rosalita, who wouldn’t take one at first. “Did you know we sued, um, that we filed a lawsuit,” Ardie searched for the word, “demanda judicial against Truviv, the company.”

  Rosalita’s lips tightened. “I know something of it, yes. I … see things. Why?”

  “Against Ames Garrett, too. That man who died. Off the building. Sexual harassment. He wasn’t treating women in the office well. It wasn’t right and we decided we had to do something about it.” She lowered her voice and crooked her arm in a parody of themselves. Do something about it! They’d done something all right. “As you can probably guess, it wasn’t a great idea.” Did she believe that? In hindsight, it had been a terrible idea. But at the time, with the same information, she did think they’d been trying to do the right thing. Without the BAD Men List, without Ames dying, without either one of those two things, maybe it would have turned out differently.

  Rosalita came to the table, pulled out a chair, and selected one of the cookies. A crumb fell into her lap. “I saw him in his office with that … short hair.” Rosalita mimed. “Katherine.”

  Ardie snuffed out a breath and shook her head. To find this out now, a witness. Did it make her feel more or less crazy? “Katherine has changed her tune.” She lifted her eyebrows and took a bite of the cookie. “Said that nothing ever happened between her and Ames. We’re going to lose. The company’s taking everything. I won’t even work at Truviv after tomorrow.” She smiled, just now fully realizing this. “But you have my cell number. You’ll be able to reach me.”

  “No.” Rosalita’s forehead folded. She shook her hea
d. “No, that’s not right. How … how would they do that to … to you?” She gestured big, spirited. “Salomon!” Rosalita barked. Both women looked at Salomon, who was tossing his ball against the popcorn ceiling. He tossed the ball and it slipped away from him, deflecting off his fingers. He lunged to get it and the too-large cap dropped from his head.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  2-MAY

  All this time. This was the extent of Ardie’s thoughts for those first few minutes, the silence ringing in her ears residual from the sound of her car door slamming closed in the dark.

  Ardie kept the seat in her car heated because it soothed her lower back, but tonight, the warmer left a thin layer of slime, the fabric of a Pink Floyd T-shirt sticking to her as she drove. It was ten-thirty and she considered whether to call Sloane or Grace or both.

  Eight years.

  It had been after Sloane, even. The details hardly mattered. Once, twice, three times, more than anyone could count? They were all just spokes on a wheel.

  Ardie rolled down her window and flicked her fob over the keypad so that the metal arm lifted. Her black Lexus tilted on its axis, climbed the Truviv parking garage and slid between two yellow lines on the second floor. She hit the “lock” button and the horn blared twice, echoing against the concrete pillars. Once in the garage elevators, no soundtrack played and she felt the eeriness of being scraped along the edges of a cement shaft inside a coffin box attached to a manufactured pulley. She waved to the security guard on duty, crossed the lobby, and rode the elevator in the next bank up.

  The industrial air-conditioning unit hummed through the vacant halls. Around the corner, a young, white woman with anemically brown hair poked her head around a cleaning cart and relaxed when she saw that the intruder was Ardie.

  Like a kid on a pool deck, Ardie had to will herself not to jog. The spirit of anticipation prodded her faster. The chance for vindication—a strong word maybe, but one that was nearly within reach.

  When she was in law school, Ardie had wanted to investigate white-collar crime and practice forensic tax analysis because it had sounded glamorous in the way few jobs actually were. But a month after her on-campus interviews, she’d been offered a job at a law firm that paid almost two hundred thousand dollars a year. At twenty-five, she reasoned she could go on to practice criminal law after she’d paid off her student loans. And this, she learned, was probably the way most career dreams perished.

  Ardie used her keycard to access the room in which the personnel files were stored. The idea that she could parse through the enormous volume of information contained in this room and find nothing hollowed her as she flipped the light switch and locked the door behind her.

  Beige file drawers lined both sides of the long, narrow room. Beams of fluorescent lights turned the air antiseptic. In here, she might never know the time of day. Her cell phone didn’t even have service.

  The personnel files were arranged by department. Cleaning staff had a place in the back third, on the right. Alphabetized. Neatly arranged for easy reference. It was good housekeeping. They were a public company, after all.

  It was exactly the type of meticulous analysis that made Ardie a damn good attorney. (Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the most boring superpower of them all?) But it was a useful one and, an hour into her search, her fingertips were dry from rifling through pay stubs and W-2s. Her back slid against the aluminum file cabinet as she sank onto the floor, the typed and signed confirmation of what she already knew clutched in hand. Ardie understood now why she hadn’t called Sloane or Grace. It wasn’t her story to tell.

  But Ardie did have a story and hers had gone like this:

  A pianist played movie scores in the corner of the hotel bar. A few minutes ago, she’d put a five-dollar bill in the jar and asked him to play the theme from Jurassic Park.

  “Another round?” Ames had asked, sliding the company credit card over to the bartender. They were drinking expensive champagne. They’d closed an expensive deal. Tomorrow, she would have a headache that cost more than her handbag.

  “I’ll be right back. I need to call Dan,” she said. “Order me the same.”

  She excused herself to the lobby, where a canopy of ivy grew overhead. She called her boyfriend. “You sound drunk,” he said.

  “That’s because I am.” Her head felt pleasantly heavy, the tip of her nose and her cheeks had begun to go numb. “Good news: I have my life back.” The moment the deal had been signed, she felt her body instantly lighten, as though she’d just finished a juice fast instead of two months of eating takeout Thai food from a Styrofoam container in the conference room.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Dan laughed. He was a serious young analyst at Deloitte and Ardie had recently been wondering at what point she would know if he was The One.

  “It’s true,” she insisted in the petulant manner of someone too many drinks in to be convincing. “I’m a new woman.”

  “Congratulations,” he said. “Enjoy yourself. I’ll see you tomorrow, or whoever this new woman is that I’m dating.”

  She returned to the bar and picked up the champagne flute, the bubbles still spinning their way to the surface.

  “Drink up,” he said. “Then I’ll walk you to your room.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  3-MAY

  We had long seen the problem at the heart of it all: being a woman at work was a handicap that we’d been trying to make up for by erasing our femininity in just the right ways. We pretended to agree that an interest in makeup and romance novels and Real Housewives was any more empty-headed than an obsession with sports and craft beer and video games. We joined Fantasy Football leagues. We policed ourselves into removing verbal upticks from our sentences and erasing the word “like” so that we could sound more “professional,” when what we were really trying to do was sound more male. Since sexual harassment was a thing that happened to women, believe it or not, we didn’t want to admit that we had been harassed. It would be admitting that we were women in a way that mattered. So our insistence on speaking up at last ought to have been a clue of what was to come. We were going to start mattering.

  Likewise, the fact that Sloane wasn’t a puddle should have been a clue, too. It was, at the very least, a goddamn miracle. She was waiting for someone in this room to remark: Sloane, you are so stoical. How do you do it? And, oh, by the way, can I get the number for your hair stylist?

  But instead, everyone besides her and Grace looked like their stomachs were upset. She considered offering them Pepto-Bismol just to be cheeky, but, well, she probably shouldn’t.

  They occupied the twentieth floor conference room, the Important One, as Sloane thought of it because this was where she’d done her legal liability presentations for Desmond and the board. She herself had become a legal liability, she realized. She would have made the presentations. Life was funny that way.

  Puffy leather rolling chairs circled the slick mahogany oval around which Cosette, her two henchmen (whom Sloane had named Peggy and Brad without having ever actually learned their names), a staunchly spectacled member of the independent review committee, Al Runkin, Helen Yeh, and Grace sat. From the corner, an enviable fiddle leaf fig fanned impressively large leaves from its trunk and probably retailed for five hundred dollars, a fact which Sloane had learned the hard way when she killed two of them in her own living room.

  Cosette made a big show of checking the time on her Rolex, as if that were the way anyone really checked the time. Sloane figured the Rolex was probably like purchasing a boat. Once you bought it, you were required to log the number of times you used it to justify the cost. “Have you heard from Ardie?” she asked, like they were waiting for one of their friends to arrive for brunch. A mimosa might be nice.

  “I’m sure she’ll be here soon.” Sloane drummed her fingers on the countertop while a silence that threatened Sloane’s conversational impulses stretched.

  To occupy herself, Sloane wondered at Cosette. Silly t
hings, like whether she was the sort never to have dirty dishes in her sink. (Probably.) Her apartment in New York presumably was feng-shui-ed, a copy of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up half-read on her pristine nightstand, as though the reason her home was in such immaculate, anally retentive order were that she was enlightened and not, say, because she billed twenty-five hundred hours a year.

  Cosette gave a perfunctory double-tap of the diamond-rimmed watch face. “Maybe we should go ahead and get started on the housekeeping parts of today’s meeting.” She pushed three sets of documents over. One for Sloane, one for Grace, one for Ardie. “We’ve gone ahead and put together the settlement papers. I’ve used yellow tabs to mark where you need to sign. We wanted to make this as pain-free as possible.” Her lips pruned as she leaned across the table.

  “How considerate of you,” Grace said, her tone minty-cool.

  Cosette, bless her, crumpled her face in an appreciative nod, apparently taking it as an actual fucking compliment.

  Sloane had read somewhere that it would be impossible to kill someone with a thousand paper cuts, despite the old saying, “Death by a thousand paper cuts,” but that a million might actually do the trick. She probably shouldn’t think about that sort of thing after all that had happened.

  “The thing is, Cosette,” Sloane started, “you could have just offered to let us drop the lawsuit. We might have considered that.”

  “Sloane, I wish.” Cosette clicked open her pen. “Given our history. But the board felt very strongly—and I agreed, to be honest—that we needed to set a precedent. To discourage frivolous lawsuits.”

  “Right. Precedent.” Grace frowned at Sloane, shrugged. “Makes sense.” In another room, Grace and Cosette might have passed as sisters.

  Sloane wondered how cocksure—we hated that word—one had to be not to wonder why the two women who were preparing to fork over a gut-churning sum of cash, along with all their stock options and their jobs, didn’t have an eyelash out of place.