The Night Shift, page 11
“What?” Lu asked sharply, rolling out a thin sheet of dough across the worktable.
“Tylenol?”
“First aid kit. On the shelf where they keep the cups and lids and shit.” Jean stared at Lu’s hands, pressing and pulling the dough. It made her blood run cold; it looked so much like skin.
“Yes?” Lu prompted, acknowledging herself watched.
“Nothing, sorry.” Jean poured herself another coffee. Her body was angry. She closed her eyes, making promises to do better later. Jean fumbled with the plastic first aid kit, and it fell to the floor, shattering medical supplies across the ground. She heard Lu shout just before her vision blurred into one giant dark spot. Jean knew what it was to faint—she knew it was happening now. She gripped the counter and broke her fall to the Italian ceramic floor before her mind went truly dark.
The sound of a slap, skin on skin, brought her back to the café floor. Lu’s furious face loomed over her. “Are you serious? You’re fainting on me right now? Today?” Jean realized Lu was slapping her face indiscriminately, just covering her cheeks and forehead and the bridge of her nose with tiny smacks. Jean forced her eyes open.
“Oh, thank God. What happened? Are you okay? I didn’t know if I should call an ambulance or what, but I figured you didn’t have insurance, so I just waited.”
“Yeah, I don’t have insurance” were the first words out of Jean’s mouth. “I’m fine, though.”
“What happened?” Lu regarded her closely.
“I have no idea.”
“Are you sick? Dehydrated? Did you eat tonight?”
Jean shook her head where it rested on Lu’s folded legs. It felt like a massive, elaborate design of dominoes was thunderously collapsing inside of her body.
“You’re a real dummy, you know that?” Lu sounded more relieved than angry, and that made Jean feel a little better. “I know you don’t have a lot of time between your shifts, but you’ve got to take care of yourself. Here.” She gently shifted Jean up and rested her back against the base of the counter. Jean’s sight line revealed a flurry of straw wrappers underneath that the porter had missed. Lu disappeared but Jean could hear her behind the bank of shelves, moving amid a clatter of plastic bins opening and closing. The kiss and smack of a refrigerator door punctuated her work. She rounded the corner, and all Jean could see were her pants and dusty kitchen clogs.
“Here.” Lu handed down a sandwich on a plate—one of the good plates, not from the café but from the restaurant.
Jean took a bite and felt a little better. The bracing salt of olive paste and creamy cheese on the warm bread they had just made would make anyone feel better. She still felt a little nauseated and off, but ate the sandwich, hoping it would recalibrate her system—or at least get her through the last hour of her shift. She handed up the empty plate to Lu, who had stayed there, standing over her.
“You still don’t look so good.”
“My eyes hurt,” Jean confessed. She tipped her head up so that she could see Lu’s face.
It was drawn with concern. “Do you need to go home?”
Jean shook her head. “Of course not—I’ll be fine. Let me just drink some more water and wash my hands.”
Lu helped her up and held her at the elbow like she was somebody’s old grandmother shuffling down the church aisle to take Communion. “I’m really okay,” Jean said, as she dried her hands.
Back at the workbench, Jean took over rolling out the dough while Lu mixed the precise spice measurements.
“Should I put nuts in this?” Lu stirred the bronze powder together, frowning.
“I would say yes, but people have allergies. You have to think about that.” Jean was relieved that the conversation was settling into familiar, easy territory.
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Sure.” Jean smiled, or at least thought she smiled, over the landscape of flattened dough.
“What’s really going on with you?”
Jean froze, panicked.
“Is it drugs?”
“Oh my God!” Jean exclaimed, an involuntary indignation rising up behind her ribs.
“Well? Is it?” Lu looked only into the bowl, not at her.
“No, it isn’t drugs.” The rolling pin in Jean’s hands clattered to the floor.
“You sure you don’t want to come clean? Now would be the time.”
“It’s nothing! I’m completely fine,” Jean said, trying to control her response.
“If it’s not drugs, what is it? It’s definitely something. Are you pregnant? People faint when they’re pregnant. My Auntie Fatima passed out all the time when she was pregnant with Omar.”
“No! Jesus.” Jean scrubbed her hands across her face and through her hair.
“Well? It’s something, Jean. And while it may not be my personal business, it’s definitely my professional business if you’re passing out at work.”
Jean closed her eyes tight, willing away the question, willing away Lu entirely.
“As much as I wish I could be delicate here, I absolutely do not have the time. What’s going on?”
“It’s going to sound totally absurd,” Jean began, but swiftly clamped her mouth shut. She was desperate to keep the information contained, buried inside her body, but her body wouldn’t hold it. Her body pushed the information out; it emerged with the inescapable velocity of a bulb buried in the earth. “There are these shortcuts, all over the city.”
“No, no, no.” Lu groaned, throwing down the whisk she had been using to combine the different sugars. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Not you, Jean! Not you, too.” She shook her head, and her posture collapsed.
“What? You know about the shortcuts?” Jean asked, incredulous. “Does Omar know?”
“Do you think I was born yesterday? And no, Omar doesn’t know and he better not find out about them from you.” Lu flung her whisk into the sink. “These fucking cinnamon rolls are not going to happen tonight, are they?” Lu paced the perimeter of the kitchen, dead silent, while Jean told her about Iggy and all that she and Claire had done to recover him.
“That was really fucking stupid, Jean. You know that, right?”
“I felt responsible,” Jean said, looking down at the hand-painted tile beneath her feet. “Since I went through with him right before he disappeared. I don’t want that on my conscience.”
“Listen,” Lu said, finally pausing in front of her. “Your conscience is one thing. I can’t tell you anything about that—but your actual human life—your health—that is something I can tell you about. These shortcuts aren’t free, no matter what anybody tells you. They take it out of you. I mean physically. You can probably tell! You’re not stupid.”
Jean stared down at her hands and couldn’t answer.
“That’s right, you’re passing out at work! And forget what it does to your health—your friend Iggy? Do you really think he’s the first person to disappear like that?”
“What?” Jean looked up sharply.
“You really think this is something new, that he’s the first person this happened to?” Lu shook her head, her mouth set in a disgusted, fed-up line.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying a lot of people disappear thanks to this bullshit. I lost someone to this bullshit.” Lu ran the water in the sink steaming hot over the flour-encrusted dishes.
“Oh, Lu, I’m so sorry.”
“Someone I loved a lot. My friend Steph—she was like a sister to me. She lived in my building and we grew up together, you know? She was smart, too.” Lu squirted an aggressive amount of detergent into the sink. The tang of lemons lifted in the air. “She got, I don’t know, obsessed with these things. Like she couldn’t talk or think about anything else. And then one day she was gone. Those fucking things ate her alive.”
“What happened to her?”
“Jean, if I knew what happened to her, I’d be a lot happier.”
“Look, I’m sorry—I know this is inappropriate and that I’m being incredibly unprofessional, but I need to do the right thing. You don’t have to tell me anything, but maybe you know somebody who’d talk to me about this? I don’t know what to do, and neither does Claire. I can’t just let a person vanish without...”
“Without what?” Lu asked sharply.
“Without doing everything I can.”
Lu turned abruptly to face her. Her eyes burned through Jean. “I am telling you, everything you can is not enough. It won’t ever be enough. Now pull yourself together and help me make these cinnamon rolls.”
* * *
They did finish the cinnamon rolls and Jean left her shift feeling jittery and obscenely awake. The events of the night jabbed at her like a thousand insistent fingers, and no matter how many times she rolled and shifted in her bed, she couldn’t find comfort. Everything was open and unresolved; she couldn’t stop thinking.
She reached for her phone to check the time. It was nearly 7:30 a.m. Maybe, since she was already awake, she should make that visit to Dr. Goldstein’s office. Replays of the uncomfortable conversations with Donna and Jeffrey punctuated her sleepless thoughts. She hadn’t texted Claire about her conversation with Lu over the shortcuts, but she knew that she should.
Jean dressed quickly, hoping to get out of the apartment before Molly and Christine woke up, but realized her mistake once she was back out on the frigid sidewalk. The office would be closed till 10:00 a.m. She’d have to kill an hour or so before going uptown. Jean walked to the diner, the one that held the first shortcut she had ever taken, for breakfast. She ordered a coffee and a plate of pancakes, her appetite fully restored. The diner was mostly empty—the only customers there were people like her: people on their way to or from work. There was no hint of mischief anywhere among the polished chrome fixtures or weary faces of the few people keeping to themselves over their meals. The only volume aside from the sounds of the kitchen came from a table where a very young mother nursed a baby and spoon-fed cottage cheese to a babbling toddler.
She left a pile of cash for the thin-lipped, exhausted waiter, and stood to use the bathroom. In the hallway she paused to consider the Employees Only door. The knob didn’t turn under her hand. She was compelled, for a minute, to pick the lock and go through again, just one more time, to check for Iggy. She couldn’t help but think this particular shortcut was significant, that he was there, stranded, because of her. It couldn’t be a coincidence that he disappeared right after he revealed this particular shortcut to her. If Jean knew the body didn’t lie, she also knew there was no such thing as a coincidence. A coincidence was just another word for connection. But she resisted the compulsion to check; it was morning, after all. She didn’t want to make any more stupid mistakes.
She took the train to Central Park West, relaxing in the post–rush hour silence of the mostly filled seats. The energy inside the subway car was cotton candy soft, filled with people who had been asleep only minutes ago. Jean loved noticing this softness—a rare, precious thing in such a big, difficult city. Whenever she could find it, it felt like a great secret.
This commute was muscle memory—the transfer, the exit, the turn around the corner of sidewalk, and then the park, gleaming up ahead. She headed toward the two matching towers where Dr. Goldstein lived and worked. The street entrance to Dr. Goldstein’s office was still locked. The office was on the ground floor of the first tower, and her apartment was on the forty-fourth. The towers shone shell pink in the thin early morning sun, and Jean squinted against their brilliance as she entered the first one. She rounded a marble corner toward the service entrance to Dr. Goldstein’s office.
Jean had never returned the office key. Dr. Goldstein never demanded it back, and Jean couldn’t quite part with it—it was a memento of her time there that made the rest of her keys look less lonely on their little silver hoop. She withdrew her keychain from her jacket pocket and unlocked the door. Jean was certain Dr. Goldstein wouldn’t mind her having access to the office. At least, Jean told herself that to settle her qualms over the technicality of breaking and entering a place where people’s medical records were stored. The lock turned beneath her fingers and Jean gasped at what waited for her inside. Her winter coat, encased in a dry cleaner’s plastic wrap, hung on the back of the door.
A pervading odor of mold swelled out at her and turned Jean’s stomach. She held her breath and pulled her scarf up over her nose and mouth. She flicked on the lights and walked into her little office, the offshoot of Dr. Goldstein’s larger plush one.
The office was unrecognizable. Banks of filing cabinets were yanked away from the walls and crowded the middle of the room. Her old desk chair lay on its side on the floor like a stroke victim. Jean’s heart raced. She was frozen by the disarray. Could Jeffrey have done this? Jean cast back in her memory for any other possible culprits—maybe a former patient?
Jean unlocked the bolt that connected her old office to Dr. Goldstein’s. She expected to see the familiar clean carpets, Dr. Goldstein’s tasteful arrangement of furniture designed to accommodate all types of families in all types of distress, the black-and-white prints of photographed canyons and mountain ranges surrounding them on the walls.
Instead, Jean saw more of the same chaos. Some of the furniture was missing and a few of the carpets were rolled back. The scent of mold was strongest in Dr. Goldstein’s office. Her heavy walnut desk was scarred with strange, small markings. The closer Jean looked at them, the more sinister they grew. Like a grim Magic Eye poster, coalescing into a desperate 3D image she couldn’t quite determine; she only knew it was there. Jean pressed her fingers against her throat to check her pulse. It was another trick she had learned over the years, to ground herself when she began to feel the gallop of panic.
All of Dr. Goldstein’s knickknacks and photographs were gone, with one strange exception. The photograph of Jeffrey, the one Jean had recalled while speaking to him on the phone. It sat on the ruined empty desk, in the place where Dr. Goldstein’s massive computer monitor had once stood. The photograph was old, from Jeffrey’s graduate school graduation ceremony. He stood beside his mother—she was in heels and their faces were at the same height. Dr. Goldstein’s neat gray bob swayed pleasantly around her smiling face, and her glasses were those overlarge wire-framed pairs people wore in the ’80s. Jeffrey looked uncomfortable, like his clothes didn’t fit quite right, but also shy. Jean had always thought it was a sweet picture, but when she picked it up to examine it more closely, she saw a hard set to Jeffrey’s mouth that transformed his face from uncomfortable to enraged. Once she saw it, she couldn’t unsee it. She was careful to put the frame back exactly as it was. She switched off the lights, seized her coat, and locked the door behind her.
The sidewalk outside was crowded by a tour group. They formed a colossal, seductive swirl. It would be so easy, Jean thought, to dissolve among them. Nobody would fault her for minding her own business and turning around. But Jean’s body insisted, like it was holding her in place. Even if she could just go home, she knew she shouldn’t.
She was caught in a temporary scrum of men in nearly identical suits. One of them caught her eyes in a lurid gaze. She grimaced through them and realized she was already walking toward the residential entrance of Dr. Goldstein’s apartment building. Jean didn’t feel right spinning through the revolving front door. The girl reflected back at her in the mirrored lobby looked unfamiliar and sallow.
“Oh no, is that Jean?” Marcus was the weekday doorman in Dr. Goldstein’s residential building. His friendliness was rococo—almost overwhelming in its cheer and bonhomie.
“Hey, Marcus. Just stopping by to check in on Dr. Goldstein.”
Marcus came around the lobby’s reception desk and embraced her in the kind of hug given at holiday parties. “It’s good to see you! How come you didn’t stop by sooner?”
“I’ve been working a lot—at my new job.”
“Right, right, of course.” Marcus nodded gravely. “Do you want a coffee? Come sit with me a second.”
Jean paused, but, after a moment, nodded. It would be good to talk to Marcus, to catch up. He was observant and would know if something strange was going on with Dr. Goldstein.
“Cover for me a second. I’ll be right back.”
Jean sat back in the ergonomic rolling desk chair and was suddenly overtaken by weariness. A white-blond woman in a heavy burgundy wool coat took her dog out. Jean tried to smile as though she was supposed to be there, but it didn’t matter; the woman barely registered her presence.
Marcus held the side door open for her as he reentered the building; the little dog refused to use the revolving door. “You take care, Snips,” he said, with a nod at the dog. Marcus’s hands were full of wares from the coffee cart in front of the building. “You want a bagel? I got an extra one just in case.” He tenderly set down a fat, warm cream cheese bagel in front of her, and she was so touched, she opened it and started to eat, even though she had only just had her breakfast. Or dinner. Or whatever it was.
“Thanks, Marcus—this is really kind of you.”
“Don’t thank me. This is our little reunion! And here’s your coffee.” Marcus punched open the tiny plastic tab for her as though she were his child or his lover. Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh no, Jean, no.” Marcus shook his head. “This reunion is a happy one. How you been?”
“I’ve been working a lot,” Jean began. “I guess I’m just stressed. How are you? How’s everything here?” She took a large bite of the bagel and chewed theatrically to fend off any follow-up questions about her emotional state. Marcus had only ever seen her at her most professional.
