Page 79 of Soft Erasure

The apartment made ordinary noise around the chair. A tap running and shut off. A drawer. Somewhere past the hall a small sound that was not speech yet and was not crying either. Every time it came my whole body turned toward it before I had any say in the matter, and every time I put myself back. I did that eleven times. I counted those too.

The apartment didn’t match the building. Everywhere else in Crownhill the surfaces were arranged and the flowers went out before they turned. Here a rug had gone thin in one corner from feet crossing the same three feet of floor. Toys sat in a basket instead of out of sight. Something warm had been cooked and nobody had aired the kitchen out for company. It was the first room in that building I’d been inside that somebody actually lived in. It frightened me more than the Garden Room ever had.

Caleb stood at the window with his back to the light.

Eight days ago he had sat at my counter with both palms down on the stone and said out loud a thing a server in Edward’s house had held for ten years. Now he stood four feet from his wife and let me be a name on a schedule, and he did it well. I understood what it was costing him only because I’d watched his hands once before.

“Charles thinks somebody inside this family helped you move money he cannot account for,” he said. “He has not said your name yet. He will.”

“I know.”

“Then you understand why you are hearing this here instead of from him.”

I didn’t answer that. Answering would have told him more than the quiet did, and I’d learned which one costs less.

Marissa set her glass down on the arm of the chair.

“He is in the program four days a week,” she said. “Three hours a day. They call it tracking. In the fall they want the rest of it.”

“Want.”

“Have. Edward decided on Friday. Charles agreed Monday.” She read the dates back like a bill she had already paid.

“You would not sign the enrollment.”

She looked at me properly then, for the first time since the door. “No,” she said. “I would not.”

It cost her to say it in the past tense. I watched it cost her. Her hand went out for the glass she had already set down and stopped halfway and came back to her lap. She let me see all of it, which was either the only honest thing in that apartment or the most expensive thing she had ever done on purpose.

“And now.”

“Now there is a letter with this family’s name on it sitting on a desk a stranger put it on, and nobody in this house knows who writes the next one.” Her voice didn’t rise. That was the worst of it. “A child inside the program is a child the Institute has already accounted for. It closes a door Charles believes is standing open.”

“You would put a baby through what they do to residents.”

“I would put him somewhere this family controls the paperwork on, instead of somewhere your letter can reach him.” She didn’t pick the glass back up. “You do not get an opinion about that in this room.”

“I have one whether or not you want it in the room.”

“I am sure you do.” Something moved at her mouth and didn’t finish becoming a smile. “Keep it. Everyone in this family keeps things. You will fit in here better than you think.”

Then she stood and crossed to the window, past her husband, and stopped at the pot on the sill. Ceramic. Too heavy for what was in it, which was nothing yet. A stake. A wire ring. Soil that had been turned recently.

“His band is under that,” she said.

I didn’t move.

“They put it on him when he started. Institute issue, sized for a wrist that grows. It reads what yours reads and it goes back to the same server.” She didn’t lower her voice, and Caleb didn’t turn around. “I took it off him and I put it in that pot and I planted something over it. Facilities log the fault. Then they send another one, and I sign for it, and I have another pot.”

“How many.”

“Three.” She said the number like a woman who had stopped expecting it to stay small. “There will be a fourth. I am not telling you this so you think I am winning.”

“Then why.”

“Because you are going to walk out of here believing I am the one doing this to him. I would rather you knew exactly how little difference it makes that I am not.”

I understood it exactly as I understood the count and the rate card, every number in that building built to look like care and priced like control. I said none of that.