18-APR
When Rosalita arrived on the fifteenth floor, Ardie was on the phone. Ardie saw her and gestured her to stay. Stay, she mouthed. Come, come. Giant waves of her arm, leaving Rosalita no choice.
“When are you coming back?” she was saying into the handheld receiver. A question: Why did nobody in fancy offices use cell phones instead? A badge of honor to be chained to a desk, loopy cord like a leash yanking the employee back to work? Random thoughts occurred to Rosalita as she waited, like tracing cracks in the wall out of boredom. She tried not to listen, but she wasn’t Salomon. She wasn’t half deaf. “I don’t know what to think.” Ardie sighed. She twisted her chair sideways, slacks draped like hanging curtains over her knees. Under different circumstances, Rosalita might have been annoyed at being asked to hold still. She might have read it as an insult, her time less valuable than the lawyer’s just because her time was literally less valuable. “No, I don’t regret suing him, suing … Yes, of course it’s unfortunate. But it’s—I’m not sure … Probably, yes. Ultimately. But, things are still delicate.” She smiled at Rosalita. “Are you okay?” Rosalita thought she was speaking to her and only closed her mouth in time for Ardie to say, “I’m worried about you. You sound—okay. I have to run. Have you been sleeping? Try to get some rest. Bye.” The phone clattered into its cradle.
“Trouble has a way of multiplying, doesn’t it?” she said to Rosalita, who didn’t know whether that was true, only that trouble metastasized if it went untreated. Ardie looked at her expectantly and then Rosalita remembered the reason she was here. The something wonderful.
“I brought something for you,” she said, holding out a simple, brown paper bag.
Ardie narrowed her eyes, skeptical. In a different life, they might have been sisters. Cousins, at least. “I thought we settled.” But she took the bag.
“Tamales. I have a friend that makes them. Good ones.”
Ardie’s eyes went soft. She opened the mouth of the bag and breathed in the scent of cooked corn.
“Salomon got into the program.”
Ardie crunched the bag closed. “He passed?” Her eyes turned to saucers. A flush rose in her cheeks.
Rosalita nodded, her throat clogged and swollen.
Ardie rushed around the desk to meet her, enveloped Rosalita in a hug, pulled her in tight, and kissed her forehead. Rosalita allowed this to happen because it took the edge off a craving inside of her. When Ardie pulled away, she was scooping a tear out from underneath her lower eyelid and Rosalita wore a silly doll-like frown, painted on, eyes sparkler-happy. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all week,” said Ardie. Growing up, the moments in which girls were genuinely happy for one another had been hard to find. Rosalita was grateful. “All month. Maybe even all year.”
It had been several days since Ames Garrett had jumped off the side of the building. Two men from the basement had used a jackhammer to claw the block of sidewalk from the ground and then used a spinning silo to pour fresh cement where the body had fallen.
That was the day before Salomon passed the entrance exam into the private school program. Rosalita didn’t tell Ardie this: how the two events would always be linked in her mind, how they would matter in some way.
After the two women had said all there was to say, which wasn’t very much given the momentous event that had happened between them, Rosalita left to do nothing but wait until dark.
She collected Crystal without any of her usual grumbling. Tonight, she moved through the floors of the office with extra efficiency and even Crystal didn’t need prodding. It was payday. The promise of a full—or, at least fuller—bank account awaited.
The evening passed in pleasant monotony. Thin carpet underfoot. Breathless halls blinking awake. The off-key hum of Crystal singing to herself. Or to a baby. Rosalita lost herself in her mind, wandering down happy passageways, most of which led to Salomon.
She spotted a soggy paper in the men’s urinal on Nineteen, the last restroom on their shift.
“Look.” Crystal had found another, clogged in the drain at the end of the row.
Rosalita felt the outer edges of her nostrils pull up. She stretched plastic gloves onto her hands and plucked the fingertips to break the suction. She pinched the corner of the first piece of paper. On it, a smiling portrait of Sloane Glover, printed from the company directory, bled piss and printer ink. Rosalita extracted two others: the face of the new mother named Grace and, last, of Ardie. She dredged the photographs out of the urinal basins with the solemnity of one turning over a body found lifeless in shallow water, to find the mouth and eyes and skin bloated and waterlogged.
“What is it?” Crystal asked, moving out of the way as drips of urine trailed the floor on the way to the trash can. Rosalita skinned her hands of the latex. The smell of ammonia thickened.
“Target practice. It looks like.” Rosalita wanted to take a shower to rid herself of the ugliness of men—of the things they did when they thought no one was watching and, worse, when they didn’t care whether someone was watching or not.
Rosalita and Crystal didn’t finish cleaning the nineteenth floor bathroom. Instead they rolled their cart back into the elevator and sank to the basement below ground, their backs throbbing, their hands dry from disinfectant, their feet tired.
Rosalita stood in front of the foreman now. “You hear anything about up there—upstairs—recently?” she asked when he handed her the envelope made out in her name.
“Other than a guy making ten times more money than I do offing himself? Nah. Don’t care to.” Rosalita thought about the vomit in the trash can in that man’s office, wondered if she alone had seen the first sign and whether that meant anything.
Distracted, she took the envelope. Something was going on upstairs. She had caught the short-haired woman and the dead man doing … doing something. Seen the puke in the plastic bag. Found that the men on the executive floors had been urinating—literally pissing on—the likenesses of the women who worked for them, women she knew. For all three to happen so close in time, Rosalita thought, they had to be connected. But how?
Rosalita ripped the envelope with her pointer finger, a flap of skin opening up like a gill underneath the paper where it cut. She read the numbers once, twice, three times. She had never been good at math. But any way that Rosalita looked at the check, it was for less than half its usual amount.