The Snap, page 24
She gave him a look that would have spoiled fruit. “It’s all regular, hon.” I kicked him under the table and tried not to laugh. “Alrighty—today’s special is two eggs, two pieces of sausage or bacon, and two pancakes or French toast for six dollars.”
“It’s kind of nice, isn’t it?” I said once we’d ordered. “Syracuse gets a bad rap, but where else can you get a breakfast like that in a city?”
“Is that why you’re still here?”
“What do you mean?”
Omar crossed his leg, resting one foot on the opposite knee, a position the space between the tables could barely accommodate. “You’ve been director for how long now—six years?”
“Seven.”
He spread one hand. “So, what’s next? You’ve climbed as high as you can here. I assume you’re not holding out to be GM.”
“Over Asbel’s dead body.”
The line hovered in midair, and then we both laughed. It was weird to feel so comfortable with someone I’d spoken to only a handful of times, but Omar and I just got each other. It was like sitting next to a stranger on an airplane and pulling out the same book.
“Seriously, though, what’s your plan?”
“I executed the plan. This is the plan—I did it.”
“And that’s it?”
I raised an eyebrow. “It’s not enough?”
“For you? Nah.”
I hadn’t even thought about a life beyond the Bobcats. Becoming media relations director was the pinnacle, and it claimed every bit of me. Omar was the first person I’d ever spoken to who suggested it might be too small.
I pivoted. “What about you? What comes after agenting?”
“That is a good question. Being an agent is strange because you start out trying to get as many clients as possible, and then if you’re good at it you end up representing as few guys as possible—the top tier. That’s where I am now.”
“Maybe next you could be God’s agent.”
“Maybe I could.”
We ate and chatted, and for just an hour I pretended that my father wasn’t in the hospital, that Red wasn’t dead and hadn’t assaulted me, and that I hadn’t in turn dismissed his assault of Abby. I pretended to have slept, and that I hadn’t shamed a good friend for asking me about something true. I ignored it all and ate pancakes with Omar while we talked about how to keep climbing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
NOW
I didn’t know how long I’d been staring into space when Edward’s voice broke in. “Hey, man. She’s expecting you.”
My mind had been churning since breakfast because the conversation with Omar went back to everything I’d been thinking about what remains when a person is gone. Have you built something, left a mark? Was it the kind of legacy you could be proud of?
I wanted to climb, yes. I wanted to build something big and dominate it and have my name on it in big fucking lights. But that was only half of a legacy, and that second part needed some work. That was why I’d left a message for DeMario to please meet me in my office.
He plant-swung his way in on the crutches. This time, I had the chair already pulled out so that the injured leg would fit, and once he was settled he let his head hang back and sighed. The simple act of sitting had completely wiped him out.
I leaned forward, intertwined hands resting on my desktop. “Thanks for coming. I’m sure it’s not comfortable.”
“No, but I’d meet you up on the roof to hear what your man Kurt dug up. What’s the deal, Pop?”
My stomach turned to lead. My face hurt. A thousand skin-saving excuses rushed toward my tongue. We’re still working on that, but he thinks he’s getting close or Kurt found a lead—it looks like someone from your doctor’s office may have leaked your record or look over there and whatever you do don’t blame me.
I took a deep breath.
Jumped.
“I owe you an apology. I’m the one who told Bernie.”
DeMario blinked slowly. He frowned and tilted his head back. “What?”
“I didn’t mean to, initially, it was a misfire. But I also didn’t correct it when I had the chance. And then obviously, I lied to you about it. I’m so sorry. I’ll talk to Faith too, I…”
I trailed off, pained, because he was struggling to his feet but couldn’t quite get there, the angle of the chair was too low. “Can I…?” I half stood and hovered behind my desk. The chair tipped onto two legs because it couldn’t handle DeMario’s braced weight against one side as he pushed upward. He got himself up, but it toppled to the floor. I flinched.
DeMario never said a word. He just gave me a long, piercing look, and then made his way slowly, painfully out of the office. The annex door closed quietly behind him.
Rodney, Chloe, and Edward all stood open-mouthed in the annex. I raised my chin but felt it wobble and softly closed the door to my own office. Inside, I drank an entire bottle of water. I walked to the window and pressed my cheek against it, leaching off the cold to fight against the flames across my face and neck.
Back at my computer, I searched for Abby again. Her bio had an email address and a phone number, but this wasn’t something that could be done remotely. I needed to see her face-to-face. I doubted her firm was the kind of place where I could just drop by, and I wasn’t about to show up in her posh neighborhood and ring the bell.
Scanning her bio, I noticed something near the bottom and froze. Reread it. Cursed.
I’d skimmed over the fact that in addition to her legal work, Abby was also an adjunct professor. It hadn’t pinged for me the last time because I was so taken aback by the life that she’d built for herself, the totality of all that wealth, power, happiness, and prestige. Now, however, it pinged in a big way.
Because Abby wasn’t just any old adjunct professor.
She was an adjunct at Annika’s daughter’s law school.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
NOW
I blew off work on Wednesday—didn’t call, didn’t let anyone know. I’d started the week traveling west in this car, making the trip home to Ohio. Now I raced to the east, to the extent that racing was possible on the busiest travel day of the year. The Thruway was a snarl of SUVs with luggage pods snapped to their roofs and college-era sedans stuffed with suitcases and laundry bags. When the GPS flashed a last-minute alternate route, a windy little road through the mountains, I cut in front of a Peter Pan bus to make the exit. I was determined to reach the Berkshires in time for Abby’s office hours even though I didn’t know what to say. I just needed to be in the same room and to hope that, unlike me, Abby knew exactly what she’d want to say if we ever came back together.
Rodney called me at ten. “Where are you?” he asked urgently. “I was worried this was a fall-in-the-bathtub situation. Asbel is completely losing his shit.”
“I had an emergency appointment with my gynecologist,” I said, relishing the look of abject horror I knew would be crossing Rodney’s face. “Really bad, it couldn’t wait. Asbel should know about it, though—he saw me on a telehealth call with her a few weeks ago.” When Asbel himself called as I passed Albany, I sent him straight to voicemail.
Winston College was a small liberal arts school nestled on the Massachusetts border. With its brick walkways and hundred-year-old buildings, it was so beautiful it was almost boring. Students with leather backpacks gathered in little clusters on benches and beneath trees. The air was laced with a trace of chimney smoke, and in the distance church bells rang. I found Abby’s building at the far end of the quad. It was a Gothic gray-stoned monster smothered in ivy. A young woman in a plaid blazer held the door open for me with a glance at my black slacks and sweater.
Inside, the hallways were dark and cool. Everything was stone, and the heavy latticing on the windows didn’t let in much light. Abby’s office—a shared space for adjuncts to cycle in and out of—was located in the basement, and I shuddered at the parallel to our Super Bowl hotel. Every step I took down the narrow staircase brought me closer back to that memory, to that dimly lit hallway, to Abby’s crooked skirt and Red’s silent silhouette closing the door. By the time I reached the bottom I could barely breathe.
What if I’m wrong?
It was lighter down here, because without windows the hall relied on proper fixtures. The numbering outside each office told me that Abby’s would be the last one on the right. I could see its door propped open. I’d barely made it, her office hours were just ending, and as I reached the end of the hall, a tall, thin boy walked out and called back over his shoulder, “So much for a summary determination of infringement and no validity!” He saw me as he turned and stepped aside. “Sorry.”
When I stepped into the doorway she was standing, papers half stacked as she packed up. She froze with her chin and eyebrows lifted, a soft smile on her face that drained away like an ebbing tide as she took me in.
Abby wore a taupe fisherman’s sweater and white jeans, her honey-blond hair loose around her shoulders. While I’d fought my damnedest against aging, Abby had allowed it to pass over her gently, so she looked like a warmed-clay version of herself.
We squared off, her Hamptons neutrals set against my all-black ensemble. I wondered briefly if she would hit me. Instead, Abby straightened her last stack of papers, turned them neatly over so the blank backs showed, and gestured toward a chair. “Why don’t you sit?”
Once she was settled in at her desk, hands under her chin, a diamond the size of a Golden Graham caught the light and sparkled from her fourth finger. I folded my own hands in my lap, covering the left with the right.
“I take it you don’t have a question about IP.”
What could I say? How could I start? I was here to apologize, but also to accuse. Finally I said, “It’s about Red,” and figured in one way or another that covered everything.
Abby let the words hang in the air for a few beats before saying, “I heard about that.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“I don’t think I’d like to get into that with you.”
She said it simply, without vitriol, but it was the first acknowledgment that there was something between us, something massive. I wanted to get out of her office, race back to Syracuse, and leave Abby in the distant past where she belonged.
But then I thought of Lexi, coming downstairs in the morning after realizing that Red had never come to bed. She’d probably checked the kitchen, the patio, looked to see if his car was in the garage. After that she would have padded around their eight-thousand-square-foot home, maybe calling his name but maybe not, so she wouldn’t wake the kids. Eventually, she would have made her way to the office. She would have opened the door, cautiously, wary of finding Red passed out at his desk drunk or high, and trying to figure out what that meant for the blood panel and the treatment she so desperately wanted him to get.
Instead Lexi would have seen a puddle of red soaking the carpet beside the desk. Rushing over to it, she would have found Red’s body, and here it was hard for me to go on because I didn’t know whether she dropped to her knees and frantically tried to revive him or if the head wound was such that she knew it would be no use.
I crossed my legs. Cracked a knuckle.
“That’s fair enough,” I said, “I can understand that. There are a few other things I wanted to talk to you about. Do you know a Carolyn Jensen?”
“Sure—Carolyn’s a very bright young lady. We’ve had a lot of meaningful discussions about law, and life. I think it’s so important for young girls that age to have female mentors, don’t you?” Abby’s eyebrow quirked up. “I know you’ve done quite a bit of mentorship yourself.”
“That’s important to me, yes. Because otherwise girls can find themselves in situations they don’t know how to handle. If no one ever prepares them, they might not realize what something is when it happens to them. They might not have the words to name it.”
Abby was quiet for a moment, thinking. When she looked up, she said, “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”
“I didn’t realize—” I cleared my throat. My heart was hammering away in my chest, and there were stars behind my eyes. “My framing of the situation was wrong. When it came to me. When it came to Red and me. And then when it was you, I thought…because of…James, and some other things, I thought that you…”
I could hear how futile it all sounded, how tepid. But it was the truth. I had nothing to offer her but the truth.
Abby stared at her desk. Her cheeks grew bright red and then faded slowly back to their normal shade as she drew even breaths in and out. When she’d recovered herself, she looked directly at me. “Red Guillory raped me, and you helped cover it up.”
Something essential inside of me, some tension rod that kept me upright, snapped. I think somewhere deep down I’d thought that even if Abby wasn’t having an affair with Red, even if Red had done to Abby what he’d done to me, she should have been able to get over it, like I had. Except, of course, that I never did get over it. I’d just learned to live with it, like a hole in the roof that drips water directly onto your face while you’re sleeping. I was shaking. My teeth chattered.
I looked down at my hands. Supposedly the totality of cells in a body are replaced every seven years, which meant I’d had two full cycles to shed what he touched, but I could still feel it. It was like nothing of me had stayed through that regeneration but the bits of him he forced into places they weren’t allowed remained, so that now I was more him than me. I carried him, I hated him. It was such a relief to realize that, finally, after all this time. I hated him.
Fifteen years clicked by like cards in a shuffled deck. I thought of all the times I’d helped him, covered for him. The times I’d eviscerated a reporter for being too tough on him, or spoken glowingly of him to media outlets, politicians, community groups, my family. Red’s wins and his enormous personality spoke for themselves, they were the clay, but I’d been the one molding it. So much of who he was now was a result of my work. Our legacies were inextricably linked, and so hating Red necessarily meant that I also hated myself.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
Abby, who’d had fifteen years to deal with this truth, was more agile on her feet. She drew her lips into a tight line, sat back in her seat, and crossed her arms. “I’m a Kant, you know that?”
“Excuse me?”
She snorted. “Not that—you’ve got it covered if we’re talking about that. I mean Immanuel Kant, the guy who developed moral philosophy. It’s a theory that it’s never moral to lie for any reason, even if the lie does more good than the truth. A friend asks you if you like her hideous dress, you have to say no. When I teach my students, we use the mnemonic ‘you Kant lie.’ ”
“That wasn’t my understanding of ‘intellectual’ property law.”
“It’s a bit outside the syllabus, yes. But Poppy,” she gave me a pitying look, “who wants their whole life to be about only one thing?”
I deserve this. The least I could do was to sit here and take whatever insults she wanted to throw at me—the very least. But it was amazing how all this time and that trauma and her success later, Abby was still Abby. She was someone who always wanted to be more than she was. Already a lawyer and professor, she also fancied herself a master of philosophy. Ranked as the hottest woman in the office, she also needed to steal the man I liked right out from under my nose. It was never enough for her, just like me coming here and apologizing was never going to be enough, although on that point I happened to agree with her. But there was also the issue of the other reason I’d come.
“I know Carolyn came to you to talk about her mother. Annika is a good friend of mine.”
“That tracks.”
I ignored the dig. “I know what Carolyn did afterward, but I want to talk about you, because I think that conversation brought up a few things you’d buried. And once that happened, I don’t think you knew how to shove them away again.”
“You should leave.” The record scratch of Abby’s chair legs against the stone floor echoed through the tiny office. She stood and began gathering her papers, tapping them vertically against the desktop until their edges were flush.
“Do you still play tennis?”
She tried to hide the hitch in her movements, but it was there—barely. Then she recovered herself and loaded the papers into a leather satchel. “I’m a wealthy middle-aged woman who lives in suburbia—of course I play tennis.”
“I was just wondering, because a former Miss Junior Vermont Tennis Association Champion must have a pretty powerful swing.”
Our eyes met. A jolt passed through my lower abdomen and straight to my spine. I watched her eyes flick once to a bookcase behind me but forced myself not to turn.
“You, Poppy,” she said quietly, “are a utilitarian. You believe the most ethical thing is whatever yields the greatest good for the greatest number of people, no matter what it does to an individual. So if five homeless orphans needed organ transplants and one healthy man walked into the OR, you’d gut him like a fish and divvy his insides up, and call yourself a saint for doing it. You think that by being where you are now, you can help so many women, right? You can hire them, you can drive team policy on acceptable behavior. Poppy Benjamin, champion of women in sports, and who cares what you covered up to get there? You said, ‘Red and me’ earlier. That’s interesting, don’t you think? It almost sounds like you knew even more than I thought about what he was capable of.”
I forced myself to stand, but not to run. I dug my heels into the rubberized floor and set my shoulders.
“Which philosopher says to murder the people who’ve wronged you, Abby? Which one says to bypass the police and kill a man in his own home while his kids are sleeping upstairs, and then leave him there for his wife to find in the morning? He was dying, by the way. He had cancer—prostate cancer, so the same stupid thing he let lead him around ruining lives was in the process of taking his. You split your soul for nothing.”
