A man in paint-spattered pants tapped the glass door with the corner of a clipboard. He held a box under his arm. Merrily buzzed him in.
“All done upstairs,” he said.
“Is that it?”
“As requested.” He set the box down carefully. “What is it, anyway?”
“Conceptual art. I think that’s what they call it.”
“Bullshit, right?” He held out the clipboard, a pen. “Like one of those tests they give you, and whatever you see in it, that tells them if you’re a psycho.”
Merrily’s signature slowed, then recovered. “I guess so. It just means something to the person who loves it. Or the person who loves it sees something in it other people can’t see. I don’t know. It’s not mine.”
The guy shook his head, unconvinced. “Is it worth anything, though?”
“Worth money? Not sure.” She lifted the flaps of the box and pulled out a wrapped lump. “In case it is, now I have to call the insurance company. Again.”
Jimmy came around the corner from the back. “I can do it.”
The guy ripped a layer off the form, handed it to Merrily, and bolted. He waved the clipboard without a backward glance.
“I didn’t break up something beautiful happening, did I?” Jimmy said.
“Shut up,” Merrily said, turning the package over in her hands.
“Is that it?”
“This is it.” Merrily released the wrappings to reveal the graceful flume of feather or fire or airplane propeller—whatever it was—that Alice’s mother had loved. Alice’s other mother, Merrily thought. They hadn’t found the right words. As was said in certain corners of the internet, it was complicated. “Lucky thing that Jennifer was overseeing the forfeiture, or this might have been seized, along with everything else.”
“We’ll get it back.”
“Are you sure about that?” An optimist with a father going to prison.
“I am certain of absolutely nothing,” Jimmy said.
“Liar,” she said, tipping her head toward the closed door of the corner office.
He blushed. “No hope there.”
“She’ll choose you eventually,” Merrily said. Eventually could be a long time, though. “When the dust settles.”
“She already chose,” Jimmy said. “She chose Harris. And you’re new to construction so you don’t know this, but—the dust never settles.”
“Never? This place used to be a patch of empty ground, right? Look at it now.” Merrily cradled the statuette in the crook of her arm like a baby and walked to the corner office.
She knocked but didn’t wait to hear a command.
“Hey, sis.”
Inside, Alice sat with her back to the desk. Sunlight glared through the blinds in hashes across the room.
“Sorry, what?” Alice wiped at her face, didn’t turn around. The contraption on her arm kept her from moving too quickly.
Merrily realized her mistake. She should learn better manners. Professional ones. In case this family thing didn’t work out. “I’m sorry,” Merrily said. “I should have let you . . . Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Alice sucked her teeth at her own phrase.
“They sent something down from the penthouse.”
THE PENTHOUSE. ALICE cleared her throat. “They’re finished? It’s empty?”
“Yeah.”
Compared to the nearly 360-degree vista from the penthouse, the view from the second floor of 1799 wouldn’t take anyone’s breath away. No bird’s-eye view of the city’s grid. But from this vantage point she could watch the way the light moved through the streets, from sunrise through the short shadows of midday and the blaze of afternoon, then the golden glow of early evening making all things beautiful.
Not that her work kept her tied to the desk. Assignments were a little thin until JimBig came to trial and all the lawyers sorted the receipts. Recovery was slow in all ways. In the meantime, they perched upon the ruins of a once-great realm. From this desk Alice had consolidated an empire—part real, part criminal, owed and confiscated—and consigned all the broken branches of her family tree into final rest. Laura, newly recovered, placed with Rick in Indiana. Harrison interred with Beth Ann on a green hill out near Fell Creek. The arrangements were both a lot of work and not enough. She sometimes sat at her desk until she couldn’t bring herself to make the trip home. Merrily’s place was closer.
Now Alice swiveled in her chair to find Merrily, the statuette in her hands. Her breath caught.
“I’m sorry,” Merrily said again. “I thought it would be a nice surprise.”
“It is.”
“Yeah, I can tell by the absolute agony on your face how excited you are.” Merrily gazed at it. “Do you want me to put it away for a while? A hundred years?”
Alice held out her good hand, wincing at the stretch over her desk.
“What is it, anyway?” Merrily said.
Fallout. Captured treasure. Debris. “Does it matter? She loved it. At least when she looked at this thing I could see that she was capable of love.”
“You’re such a hard-ass,” Merrily said. “We’re giving people breaks from now on, remember? We never know what kind of crap someone’s going through, and all that? Like they might be, say, secretly kidnapped?”
“God, between your seeing the bright side and the new and improved Jimmy . . .”
“The worst.”
“This is altogether too much earnestness for me,” Alice said.
“Well, I have good news, then. How about some sarcasm and infighting? Juby and Lillian want to meet up and go over the latest ideas on that Jane Doe in Nevada—”
“Tell them to get their own Jane Doe.” She hadn’t been to the Doe Pages since it had all happened and had taken the app off her phone. But she still wondered about Jane Doe Anaho. She still wanted to see her home.
“They’re just trying to get you to come back,” Merrily said. “You’re some kind of folk hero over there, I guess? Come on, who doesn’t want to hang out with corpses and missing people? Twenty minutes of blood and gore, and then we talk about men.”
“I don’t know any.” She’d been rejecting any hint about Jimmy. Matt was finally getting back on his feet and off her conscience. He’d met a cute physical therapist, she’d heard. His lawyers were less attractive. Jimmy had been trying to help Lita clean out King and Fine, but it hadn’t been necessary. Not under current management. Alice would make sure Matt got a fair settlement, and others were making sure Gus went to jail.
“There’s one. How could you miss it? You can’t be a tycoon and play dumb,” Merrily said. “Keep your shit together three minutes while I go fetch your mail.”
On the desk, Alice twirled the figure on its end. Feather. Today she was sure. She would have gone with him, forgiven him anything. She still would, to have him here. The figure, turning, became flame and then a blade. She could suddenly understand Beth Ann’s fascination with it.
She could see every choice every way, both sides, all sides always, every decision splitting off into infinite directions. She was immobilized by choice. No, she was taking the deep breath before a busy new life, a new company rising from the ashes, Jimmy’s acumen, Merrily’s salesmanship, Alice’s credit score, which was prime. A deep, deep breath.
Nothing would break ground until the season turned again anyway. They had the winter to make some plans and line up work for the spring.
She should travel while she had the chance. See the world. Take a class. But it scared her. Everything scared her.
She’d spent her whole life under surveillance, with video cameras trained on her front door in the building she now somehow owned, run by a management company she also somehow owned, housed in a skyscraper she might still own when this was all over. Tracking devices, her mail pre-sorted. All the precautions.
And now no one was watching. She’d always counted on the safety net, knowing her dad would catch her if she fell. That must be what every father’s daughter felt, that he would be there always. The most shocking revelation was that there was so far to fall.
Was it any wonder she couldn’t make a single unaided decision? Was it any wonder she put Jimmy off?
Was it any wonder she’d slept with that little square of baby blanket against her cheek for two weeks after it all happened—until she’d noticed why the name “Blanksy” on the tag seemed crowded, the letters fading at different rates? Banks, it had read, with the L and Y crammed in. A soothing presence three-year-old Allison must have required, turned into a prop for the story Harris Fine needed Alice to believe.
It was no longer a comfort to her. She slept with a Xanax prescription, like an adult.
In any case, she was not fit to lead. Alice wasn’t sure if she ever would be. She sat frozen at her desk overlooking nothing at all but a segment of sidewalk, a cut-rate queenpin.
Merrily was in the doorway. She carried a single envelope. “I didn’t realize . . .” She looked sick.
“What?”
“It’s from Rebekah.” The envelope wavered in her hand.
From the casino. Alice heard the word in Juby’s stretched fake Australian accent. “You mean it’s from Rick.”
“Haven’t you wondered? I mean, I got a letter. Natallie said she found her letter after her mom died, so of course there’s a letter.” Their older half-sister proved to be easy to find but not easy to crack. They had two nieces, six and four, who were far more delighted to meet them. She and Merrily had been to Natallie’s suburban home for dinner a few times, where conversation spun out in fits and starts. The three of them couldn’t agree on Rick. Did he deserve their forgiveness? Could he have changed the outcome for any of them if only this or if only something else?
Alice barely had an opinion. It was Harris Fine she suffered, and not one person left on earth understood.
At Natallie’s house or at a meeting with Jimmy and Merrily, Alice might gaze down the table and see how she had traded everything for nothing. She was not Alice in Wonderland. She was the Mad Hatter, presiding over absurdity.
Alice put the envelope flat on the desk in front of her. A few words from a dead man that would not change anything. They couldn’t. “What will it say?”
“You could just read it.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
Merrily threw herself in the chair opposite with a groan. “You’ve always been the difficult one.”
“What could he possibly say?”
“Only that he loved you, you idiot. Have you heard that too often in your lifetime that you can’t hear it one more time and forever?”
She and Merrily had not said the words to each other. Alice balanced the envelope in her hands, as though the weight might tell her something.
“If you get a ‘Love, Dad’ from him, though . . .” Merrily made a sour face. “OK, what’s he going to say? He’s going to say it’s not your fault. He’s going to say he’s . . . sorry that it all happened, that he wished things could have been different. He’s going to say you were always his favorite, is that what you need to hear?”
As long as he was saying all that, she had no need of the note itself. Not now. She would build up to it. Alice opened the top drawer of her desk and slid the envelope inside.
Merrily shook her head. “You’re really not going to read it? After all this crap? Are you serious? You’re crazy, you know that? You—”
“I love you, Merrily.”
Merrily’s laugh was almost a cough. “Oh, we’re doing this? This is it? You’ve decided to feel something again, finally, and it’s for me?” She was blushing the sweetest shade of pink under her freckles. “OK, you lunatic, fine. I love you, too.”