Page 52 of Soft Erasure

Penelope cleared her throat. “We’ll resume next week. Counsel will distribute the revised footage.”

The women turned from the window and filed out. I filed out with them.

In the hall, Dr. Callow was at the elevator. She pressed the button, stepped in, and the doors closed on her. She had not looked at me once.

The paper was warm in my hand.

I didn’t open it again until I was inside 6B, the door shut, the rooms quiet, the number at sixty-seven. I sat on the floor and turned the paper over. There were two more lines on the back, smaller.

Margaret has been waiting. Tell no one. Tuesday at five-oh-eight. The mothers will know. She will lift her wrist. Lift yours.

I put the paper down. He had known. He had sat a row behind me through all of it. Before that he had set a child face down on my counter and read me for the softness the family wanted closed. And the whole time she had been four floors down, walking a circle, lifting her wrist at a window I was not standing in.

He had said nothing.

Tuesday was tomorrow. I would have to be at that glass at five-oh-eight, at sixty-seven, with a reason for being on two that held. I didn’t have one yet.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Tuesday at Five-Oh-Eight

I went to the Garden Room at four-fifty-seven.

I went early, and I went alone, and I went knowing there was no un-going once I had. The note had said Tuesday. It had said she would lift her wrist, and that I was to lift mine.

It hadn’t said what it would do to me to be seen back.

I had been awake since five that morning, which the band logged as Sleep deficit: moderate. I had eaten the tray at eight without reading the foil. I had done the seven-count past counting.

The count was his. I used it to get my hands still, which made him the reason I could go down there and keep something from him.

The matchbook from The Greenroom didn’t ride in my jeans anymore. The watch pocket was on my body, and my body was what they never stopped reading.

So it lived in the book now, third from the left on the shelf they had stocked for someone like me, pressed into the gutter against the spine, two finger-widths below the lip, where a hand run along the top would miss it.

Dr. Callow’s card was folded inside it, since the first night. Jess’s note was in it. Margaret’s two lines had gone in last night, folded down to the size of the rest.

The matchbook was thick now. It had been filling since the dock, a pencil number at the start, a folded body of evidence by now.

My hand had learned that spine the way another hand learns a rail in the dark.

I’d told the band I was going to the salon.

The salon had eight chairs, each with a mirror carrying a small black panel set at a degree no decorator would choose.

The band could not see my face. The panel could.

It was not a salon. It was a session room that billed the family extra for the blowout and took the reading for free.

I was walking out of one of his rooms to stand in another, and telling the building it was about my hair.

My tone had been steady, the tone of a woman whose number sat where they wanted it, whose hair was due.

The Garden Room was on two. The elevator didn’t run for me. It had not run for me since the number went under eighty-eight, and the number had been under eighty-eight for a long time.

A woman at sixty-seven went down the way the linens went down, on the back stairs the guests never saw.

The fire stair from the night with Willson didn’t reach two. The interior service stair did. Mateo had shown me the door without showing me.