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We’re moving closer to it. “In all of Manhattan? You like the Reinhold best?” He sounds incredulous.
“What? It’s great.”
“Hmm.” He seems to view it as an odd choice. Looking at it through an architect CEO’s eyes, I suppose it is. The building isn’t tall, it’s not special in terms of fancy flourishes, it’s not even old—it’s the 1940s kind, all blocky gray stone and deep rectangular windows. But the griffin is cool. Brave protector friend, mouth open in a silent roar.
He slows across the street, in the middle of the block from it. “What about it?” Like he’s trying to see it. He really wants to know.
“It’s the griffin,” I tell him.
“What is it about the griffin? A lot of buildings have them.”
“I don’t know,” I say, but I do know.
“Aesthetically?”
“No.” I feel his gaze on me, and I know I’m going to tell him. I want to. I don’t know why. “Symbolically.”
“What does this one symbolize?”
“A moment in time,” I say. “When my sister and I first got here, we got lost. We took this bus and it was a disaster.” I smile, like it wasn’t any big deal, but it was terrifying. “She was crying, and I pointed this griffin out and made up this stupid story about him being our brave protector friend.”
There’s this silence where I wonder if I’ve said too much.
“Did he help? The griffin?”
“A lot,” I say. “She stopped crying and we took pictures of him. I printed one out and put it in the kitchen. If nothing else, he scared the cockroaches back down into the drain.”
“You came here after your parents died.”
“Somebody has been busy investigating my background,” I say.
“Surely you’re not surprised we investigated. Considering.”
I shrug. According to our fake identities, our parents died in a car crash, then I graduated high school at age seventeen and got custody of her.
All lies. Except the custody-at-seventeen part, though it was more like I took custody. Got my baby sister out of a dangerous situation and myself out of the blinding glare of national hatred.
We keep on walking. I take a last look back, remembering myself then. Traumatized, slouching through the crowds in my new brown hair and innocent court clothes, hand-in-hand with Carly, finally away from Mom’s lechy boyfriend with his creepy stare that got creepier every time she passed out.
Away from Mom’s growing desperation for money for the next fix.
I’m not sorry I took Carly out of there. She was so young and vulnerable. I saved her—I know that to my bones. But she saved me, too. She was a reason for me to keep fighting.
We stop at a Starbucks. I get a java chip Frappuccino and he gets a latte. We take a cab the rest of the way.
The fabrication facility is a giant warehouse on Front Street—the old kind with arched-top windows.
We enter a massive, well-lit, state-of-the-art space full of state-of-the-art machinery in bright, primary colors. The place hums with activity and guys in Locke-blue jumpers making giant things out of metal and wood.
“We make doors and windows, refurbish heating plants, that sort of thing,” he says over the din. “Locke owns so much property, it stopped making sense to sub this stuff out.”
I keep expecting Smuckers to react to the loud sounds, but Henry holds him tight and scratches his snout in a vigorous way, lulling him with an overload of attention.
Is it possible that’s what Henry is doing with me? Is it working?
He knows people’s names here, too. A few come up and pet Smuckers. We head to an elevator bank at the center of it all and take it up to the drafting floor. We cross a tundra of desks and people doing things on huge computer screens to get to a place with lots of long tables.
He hands Smuckers over and pulls out a piece of foamcore the size of a door. “I’ll cut this down a little for the check.” He takes it to a table that has lots of measure markings and slices off two hunks with a large box cutter. “I don’t actually do this, typically, but I don’t want to pull people off jobs that have been waiting in a queue.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket and taps. Soon he’s the proud parent of a giant printout of a check front. He spray glues the back of the check and we roll it onto the foamcore, working together to avoid bubbles and wrinkles.
