Security(28)

Unless he dies tonight.

“After that, she started coming into our room every night, and her and me would talk while Mitch snored like a dying buffalo in the next bed. And me and Tess would figure out one thing for her to say in school. One thing at school and one thing at home. Then add another thing, and another, and eventually . . .”

“She was fine,” Jules says.

Brian nods, and picks his saucepan off the stove to finish. “Got cold too easily, though. I must’ve given her every scarf and mitten and hat I ever owned, but they were never enough.”

“And your bed,” says Jules.

Brian says, “Sorry?”

“You gave her your bed. You got on the floor instead of her. Didn’t you?”

“She told you that?” Brian says. He colors and looks at the kitchen door, either wishing Tessa would appear or thanking his stars she doesn’t. Maybe both.

Justin puts his arm around Jules. “My wife’s a good guesser.”

Justin’s hand strokes Jules’s upper arm like a gentle child would pet a frightened animal. If he did that when they were alone—but he sees no reason to, and nor does Jules, since no one would be there to watch. Jules and Justin are at their best when they have an audience—a common problem among millennials, who were raised by television and movies, as well as among natives of Los Angeles, who grow up understanding that behind the curtain, is another curtain. Jules and Justin have fought fiercely to construct lives that put them onstage as often as possible, with as large and varied an audience as possible. They have an incredible array of friends, “friends,” and people they’ve friended. They only know how to act when they’re acting.

Brian stacks their three pans and goes to the sink. Justin and Jules try to argue against his doing their dishes, but Brian’s saying, “Tess didn’t like her room much. It faced the woods, and the coyote calls freaked her out. I slept fine on the floor.” He rinses. “I’d set my alarm for a half hour before Lorraine woke up, take Tess to her own bed. Lorraine would’ve gotten the wrong idea for sure. Or she’d have pretended to, if it gave her something else to rag on Tess about. I swear Lorraine wanted a girl just to call her ugly once a day.” He loads a tray a tad roughly and smacks the dishwasher’s “Start” button. “Anyhow,” he says, hosing the sink, “Lorraine never knew. And Tess quit coming to our room at night when she was about thirteen. It—” Brian shrugs. “You know, it would’ve been kind of strange then, I guess.”

The kitchen door swings open. Tessa stands in it, holding up Delores’s cell and setting the sous--chef’s confiscated phone by the dishwasher. “The drill’s over. Security just texted.”





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Brian dries his hands and tosses the towel beside the sink. He walks to Tessa, takes Delores’s phone, taps the screen alight and reads, “ ‘Attention, employees. Scenario complete. Manager and maid in protocol debrief. Proceed as normal.’ ”

Tessa doesn’t say, “I told you so.” But her face does.

Brian, for once, isn’t looking at Tessa. He’s looking at the cell phone. “Is this how they always notify you that you can move around again?”

Now Tessa’s face says exasperation. “No, usually they call the room where the employees are grouped. If we all followed protocol.”

“And if you didn’t?”

Justin takes the cell phone from Brian so he and Jules can read it. Justin says, “Then they get the lowest--ranking member of the security team to round up the ones who didn’t follow protocol so the head of security can lecture them to follow protocol.” Justin sighs. “Poor Viv. Fuck Franklin, but poor Viv. It’s like detention.”

“The phones are out,” Tessa says, because Brian’s still skeptical. “So they texted.”

“Except,” Jules says, also skeptical, “we’re not supposed to have our cells on us.”

Tessa shakes her head at Jules. “Doesn’t apply to Delores. The head of security overruled Charles on that one.”

“Why?” says Brian.

Tessa lifts flat hands, mutely claiming ignorance. But Tessa knows the answer. The answer is that Tessa’s infinitely visible to Charles whereas Delores is not. Delores is the ideal person to act as a clandestine liaison for security. This is why she has the television monitor in her office, as well as an iPhone in her apron pocket, though she is by no means exempt from a rule that states employees are under no circumstances permitted to use earbuds while on the clock.

In addition, Tessa finds Manderley’s level of surveillance excessive. She thinks Charles Destin is paranoid and megalomaniacal—which is not untrue—and that he hired safety operatives who revel in playing God with those they claim to be protecting—which is false and harsh and an outright bitchy thing to say—but she said this to Jules in confidence, or what she thought was in confidence, because Tessa’s aware of roughly a quarter of Manderley’s surveillance. It’s not that she isn’t attuned to danger; it’s that she is overconfident in her ability to defeat negative circumstances by sheer dint of will. Or, in Tessa--speak: “Look, Charles thinks this is a game. And what you and your team mostly do is cry wolf. But if a wolf comes at me? Last thing I’m doing? Is crying about it.”