Page 59 of Soft Erasure

I climbed the north stair to six, wired to the city, not to Penelope, because I wanted the climb on a server the family could not reach. The band read me at 6B and the door opened.

The orchid stood in the foyer with its green throat. The band held at sixty-seven. It didn’t know what I had done in the lobby, or that Penelope had filed the gesture where it would never think to look.

He would. Not today, not soon. But the man whose name was on Sofia’s order, who let himself into my rooms to set the flower down, read everything in the end. He would price this too, and my skin came up for him anyway.

Tomorrow was Friday.

South alcove, four-fifty-five, two minutes, the matches out of the gutter.

Saturday, Mateo would sit his daughter down and tell her what her father cleaned for.

I didn’t water the orchid. The water was not mine to give.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Wednesday DEEP

The DEEP was set for ten, in the Garden Room, in the open, because I had asked for it there and not in the closed room it was built for.

I hadn’t slept. I had spent the night on the floor with my back against the door he didn’t knock on, the matchbook closed in my hand.

The Friday had moved. A second relay, no reason given, a new date sitting behind my face where nothing got logged. Mateo’s Saturday had moved with it.

The count didn’t settle. It came up and went down and came up. Near three-thirty the body laid a word down in the floorboards, the word my mother used, and I didn’t say it back.

I counted past it until the window went gray.

By then I’d decided.

I’d decided to give Caldren the DEEP he wanted and to make it the DEEP he could not use.

I was at the Garden Room at nine-fifty-six. At sixty-seven the car didn’t answer me, and I didn’t ask it to.

I took the service stair to two and came out onto the floor, the curved glass and the front circle white below, the room already full.

They had built the room for it. The Danish chairs were pulled into rows and the floor was a gallery.

Two chairs faced each other at the center, a small table between them, a glass pitcher and two crystal glasses and a folded white cloth.

Beside the cloth, a shallow ceramic bowl, and in the bowl three white pills.

The pills had not been in the morning notice. The staff had set them out so I would not see them until I was in the chair. I saw them at the door.

The DEEP was not the breathing. The DEEP was what came after the breathing, when the body was open and the count had done its work and a hand set the first pill on the tongue and said rest.

I would not go near the bowl. It would sit through the whole of it and be the reason the film was worth nothing to him.

A session in the open was one the door didn’t screen. Caldren had allowed it for the film. He had not chosen who filled it.

In the second row, Detective Willson. Pembroke beside her.

Behind them Helen, the salmon sweater from the courtyard, three women I had no names for and would not be allowed to meet, and a woman in a black hat, praying.

In the front row, Jess, with Noah held to her chest in the carrier, one hand flat on his back. She didn’t set him down. Penelope had not moved Jess’s chair, had not sent Noah to the daycare on three. Penelope had decided a sleeping child was the smaller concession. The larger would have been my walking out.

Irene Callow stood at the door. White coat, the small key-shaped pin, a clipboard at her waist.

This morning she was an attending physician credentialed to observe, on a form Voss had drawn up overnight. I had asked for her at six, through the WELLNESS portal, copied to Voss.