Security(5)

Tessa’s head snaps up from the fountain. She looks terrified. Her breath stops; it’s Pavlovian. She grabs her clipboard and tries to calm herself—some internal conversation, counterargument to a nightmare. The motorcycle engine gives a final grunt and is silent. Tessa’s chest collapses in. Rises--collapses. The sound of her panicked respiration is enough to make an invested observer panic, too, but she grabs her left hand with her right and digs her thumbnail into her palm. Pain pulls her eyes wide open, and her breathing normalizes. She laughs, not happily, dismissing her fear of a revving motorcycle like a judge would a case with no evidence. She’s brutal about putting her boots back on and yanking the front pieces of her hair into a low knot.

A young man in a motorcycle jacket eases down his kickstand with bizarre physical grace. He levers himself off the bike the same way. His clothing and transportation bespeak an idolization of Steve McQueen, but he’s tall, slight. He looks up at Manderley, and he pales. The hotel can have that effect at twilight. Its flat white fa?ade with several hundred panes of clear glass is intimidating—the tired simile of empty windows as eyes. He touches his motorcycle’s handlebars, as if for comfort. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and begins to pace. Occasionally he puts a rough hand through his short, dark hair.

The young man in the motorcycle jacket becomes the central point for two approaching parties: Tessa, from the hedge maze, her boot heels punching divots in the soil and the electricians, from the foyer, whose cacophony is dying down at Vin’s lack of reaction to their mockery. The electricians’ exit from the foyer doors and Tessa’s exit from the maze are nearly simultaneous. Nearly, but not quite. The electricians are first.

Vin says, “Whoa!” He’s staring at the motorcycle parked by their van.

“Dude!” says another apprentice.

The young man turns to them. Tessa sees him in profile, and she drops her clipboard. It clatters against a low marble plaque recommending that any guests who fear tight spaces should forgo the hedge maze. Attached to the plaque is a cube of Plexiglas; it is designed to hold maps of the maze, which Tessa hopes will obviate guest complaints that the path is too difficult. The young man turns back to Tessa. He’s looking at her like she’s a mirage.

“Domini?” says Pat, who’s looking at the young man like he’s a mirage.

Seconds later, the young man in the motorcycle jacket has vanished, surrounded by the five electricians. Their gruff handshakes and slaps to the young man’s back give Tessa, who remains standing stiff as an ax handle, a chance to pick up her clipboard and compose her features, which briefly slide into an arrangement completely foreign to her face: skin crimped and pinking, mouth pressed thin, eyes wet. She swallows, her throat convulsing several times, like whatever she’s feeling is something she must digest. It appears to work. She walks toward the huddle of men with the hard fa?ade she wears on mornings when she has important meetings on her schedule.

The electricians are behaving like girls at a dance who want to be looked at, listened to: “Damn, that jump at Saratoga—”; “Watched it the night my kid was born. Wife kept telling me to turn off the—”; “Haven’t seen you. Heard you’re mostly promoting—”

“Brian?” Tessa says. She makes a check mark on her clipboard. This action is an excuse to study the hedge maze, and not the young man in the motorcycle jacket, whose name, one supposes, must be Brian.

“Listen,” says Pat to Brian, fumbling in the pockets of his drywall--specked jeans, “I know you must get this all the time, but—” He shoves a pen and perhaps a receipt into Brian’s hand. “For my son. He’s a fan. I mean, I am, too, but he’d flip shit if I came home with—”

“Sure,” Brian says, and more pens and odd scraps of paper appear by his hands. “What’s your son’s name?” He grins at Tessa. It’s not a creepy or smarmy grin. It’s boyish. Kind.

Tessa doesn’t smile back. As Brian scrawls personal messages for each of the electricians and signs in swooping cursive underneath, Tessa is fighting a civil war behind her eyes. They want to weep, but they want to scream—but they want to weep for other reasons. Tessa is a difficult woman to love. She likes sex, but she also likes boxing. She looks at her opponent, at least, when she’s boxing. And when sex does weaken her a little, usually right at the end, she looks exactly like this.

Except, not exactly like this. This is exponential. She’s building her resistance to emotion up so high, it’s crumbling under its own unbelievable weight, as if she’s begging this kid—this Brian—to go away before her powers of resistance expire.

He’s finishing his last autograph, the bastard. “It’s nice you guys remember. Thanks. Really, thanks.” He hands a scrap to Vin, who holds it as though terrified to fold it.

“Man,” Vin says, “when Mitch wiped out—”

“Shut up, shithead!” hisses Pat.

Brian’s smile dims.

“Sorry,” says Vin. “Sorry, Domini, man. I didn’t mean nothing, I just—I remember that.” Vin looks at the autograph. He points at where the paper’s still blank, like something’s missing. “It was like my brother died, too.”

“You even have a brother?” Tessa says, her voice hard as nail heads.

Vin looks at her, surprised. So do the other workmen. They forgot her, if they made note of her at all. “Yeah, I do.”