No One Knows Us Here(78)

As I rode the elevator up to the top floor of Leo’s building, my predominant feeling was relief. This was the end. One more dinner. I would give him an opportunity to make good on his promise, give me a severance package and let me go. I didn’t even want the severance package! I just needed him to set me free. Leo would plead with me to stay with him, offer me more money, a bigger apartment. Whatever it was, I wouldn’t take it. I didn’t want anything from him anymore.

I felt almost noble about it. I was someone who couldn’t be bought. Not anymore. I would live on the streets before accepting another dime from Leo Glass. This idea no longer terrified me; it emboldened me. In the length of that elevator trip, visions swept through my mind of Wendy and me carrying our worldly goods in satchels tied to sticks. We’d jump on and off trains, camp in the woods on beds of pine needles. We’d find our tribe—other drifters, philosophers and scientists who could teach Wendy everything they knew. It wouldn’t be the life I had planned, but it would be a good life, an adventurous, dangerous life—and isn’t that what we really wanted after all? Not to be safe, snuggled in our little houses with a mortgage and high-speed internet, but to be in danger, living closer to the edge. We needed to creep closer to that edge to feel anything, to feel alive—

The doors to the elevator opened, and I stepped out into the hallway. The floral arrangement on the console table at the end of the hall had been changed since the last time I saw it. Tree branches with delicate bright-green leaves, barely unfurled. Unopened buds. The twigs arched up high over the clear glass vase in every direction, stark and beautiful in their own naked way.

The loft door was open, but no lights were on. “Leo?” I stood there in the darkness, waiting.

“Hola, Consuela,” Leo said from somewhere inside the loft. My head pivoted around, straining to follow the vibrations of his voice.

After a stream of Spanish, the light fixture above the kitchen island burst on, like a spotlight, illuminating Leo standing behind it, his hands spread open wide, like Jesus presenting the last supper. His hands gestured to platters of food, all slick and glossy under the island lights. Pasta piled on a platter, swirled like a nest of worms, covered in what looked like specks of red pepper and sautéed mushrooms and kalamata olives. A composed salad of tomato and cucumber and basil. A loaf of crusty white bread on a wooden cutting board, butter in a dish. Leo’s mouth stretched open, revealing those white tiles of teeth. “Surprise,” he said.

“You made all this yourself?” I was surprised, just a little.

“The bread’s from the bakery,” Leo said modestly. “Can I pour you a glass of wine?” He reached for a corkscrew and began uncorking the bottle he had set next to the food.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not.”

He poured us each a glass, and we toasted across the island, catching each other’s eye as our glasses clinked together.

“To us,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. I just drank. The last drink I’ll share with Leo Glass. That was how I was going to get through the evening. Each bite, each sip was a celebration. Each bite one bite closer to the end. A couple of hours of eating pasta and buttered bread and sipping what I am sure was very, very good wine, and it would all be over. One way or another.

When I smiled back at Leo, it was genuine. “Everything looks delicious.”

Getting through dinner was easy. I could say whatever I wanted; it didn’t matter if Leo found it amusing or not. I talked about a lot of things. He could listen to me for a change. “You don’t know the first thing about me, do you?” I mused, pouring myself another glass of wine. Our plates were empty by then. We’d eaten up all the pasta, the salad. Very tasty, I’d admitted to Leo after the first few tentative bites. He said I’d taught him well. “Did you know I used to live in a motel?”

“No,” Leo said. “I didn’t know that.”

I told him about the motel we lived in, one of those pay-by-the-week places, a bona fide motor hotel, with fake shutters outside and heavy blackout drapes on all the windows, an ancient electric heater on one wall. When you turned it on you could see the little wires inside glowing, and it smelled the way I imagined a doll held over a flame would smell, like charred hair and rubber.

I told him the whole story, my twenty-one-year-old mother working graveyard shift while I slept in a sleeping bag in the motel office, a little room behind the front desk.

When I finished, I had to suck in a deep breath to keep myself from tearing up. I hadn’t thought about that little scrap of my early childhood in years. Leo would have no idea why the memory made me want to blubber like a little kid. It wasn’t because it was rough, living in a motel, sleeping in the office with the night manager. It was because I missed it; I missed that time before everything changed. Before Jason, before Wendy. When it was just the two of us, my mother and me, before anything bad had happened.

I shook my head briskly, the way you do when you want to wake up from a bad dream. “I think I’m still jet-lagged.” I yawned for effect. “I should probably head out.”

“We haven’t had dessert.” Leo gathered our plates and carried them over to the dishwasher. I followed behind him with our glasses. They were delicate, German crystal, so I took them to the sink to wash them by hand.

Later, in the days to follow, the months to follow, I would wonder about this moment, this decision to wash the crystal. Leo had a state-of-the-art dishwasher, silent and thorough. I could have left the glasses to the dishwasher, or to Leo. What did I care if they were ruined? I could have thrown them both to the ground, let them shatter down onto the cement floors of the loft, little shards tinkling and chiming and skittering across the floor, under the furniture. Then I could have marched out triumphantly, and my life would have veered off from there, on some unknown course.