I go back to work, but even the huge artificial-sweetener-laden iced coffee I suck down upon arrival doesn’t help me stay focused. I keep at it, though, forcing myself back again and again to my tasks and telling my body to draw the energy it needs from the fat on my hips and stomach, and I have a few moments of clarity.
Unfortunately, the first one comes when Jaimi’s outside my office door discussing the CFO position with Pilar.
I sit still, wishing I could work while my brain’s in gear but not wanting my keyboard sounds to alert them that I’m in here, and listen as they chatter away about how excited they are at the prospect of being promoted and the work they’ve already done on their presentations and what they still need to complete. I don’t agree with most of their ideas, but they’re not asking me and I’m obviously not going to voluntarily go out there and help them make their presentations better. In fact, one particularly clueless suggestion of Pilar’s makes me smile knowing how stupid she’d sound saying it to the selection committee. Jaimi might be ready to be CFO someday, after I retire, but Pilar? Never.
My smile fades, though, when they switch to talking about their competition for the job and neither of them so much as mentions my name. There is a brief pause in their conversation, which feels like they may have been pointing toward my closed door, but that’s all the attention I seem to warrant. They’ll regret that lack of concern. I have been modelling myself after Elle since I joined the company and I am absolutely going to get this promotion. Jaimi and Pilar are wasting their time.
They wander back to work, eventually, and I allow myself a moment of disgust at their lack of focus then return my attention to my own tasks. Since I will not do anything presentation-related until the end of May when it’s confirmed that I need to, I want to get ahead on my current work so I’ll have time then.
That’s my plan for the next two hours, but people keep interrupting to ask me about Gloria and even when I’m alone the diet seems to be sapping all power from my mind. I persevere, though, and through sheer force of will I do manage to accomplish a few things by the end of the day.
Pleased in a tired way, I take myself and my laptop to Gloria’s bedside where I settle into my usual chair and keep working after first saying hello to Gloria.
The walk from the subway station to the hospital seems to have woken me up, and I’m just figuring out a tricky part in a report when a nurse comes in and promptly drops Gloria’s new feeding bag on the floor.
“Did it— oh, good, it didn’t break,” she says, scooping up the bag. “I’ll get a new one, but at least it’s not all over the place.” She gives me a weary smile. “Troubles always come in threes, they say, and this would have been my third thing today. Guess I got lucky.”
I smile back, and as she bustles away I think about her words. Back when I was fourteen, Dad got food poisoning and our dog ran away and Anthony died all in the same week, and since then I’ve also believed troubles come in threes.
Gloria’s assault is certainly one trouble. Is losing Andy another? Given how difficult I’m still finding it to get used to travelling to my office from my own home, I have to say yes.
Jaimi’s excitement at work comes back to me, and I know what the third thing could be.
Losing my promotion to my protégée.
“What do you think, Gloria?” I say out loud. “Will I get the promotion?”
Gloria doesn’t respond.
“You’re right,” I say as cheerfully as I can. “Of course I will.”
Food carts clatter down the hall outside her room, and I wince. “That’s annoying, isn’t it? It’s noisy in here.” A thought strikes me. “Maybe you could have music or something. I could hook up your iPod to speakers by your head. Do you have an iPod? Or speakers?”
I sigh. I know so little about my sister. How had we let things get to this stage? We’d been close, before. When we were teenagers. Sure, I’d annoyed her a bit, following her around and trying to be more like her, but we had known each other, understood each other. After Anthony died, though….
Nobody ever came right out and told me, “If you had done what you were supposed to do, he wouldn’t have died,” but I’d known everyone was thinking it, and the way Gloria withdrew from the family, moved away and didn’t see any of us for over a year, made it clear she couldn’t forgive me for the loss of her little brother.
I couldn’t forgive me either. I’d been easy-going and relaxed, but after my lack of attention killed my brother I promised myself I’d change. And I had. I’d developed the self-control that had got me through NYU’s MBA program with the highest marks in my class, and the routines and structures that made sure I could handle the crazy pace of life in finance and move steadily upward in the company. I’ll never be easy-going again, but that’s a small price to pay for the damage I did.
Gloria makes a strange moaning sound, and I snap my head up to look at her. I know from Doctor Wise that these incomprehensible noises don’t mean anything, but I keep hoping every time that she’ll blink and open her eyes and take her hands out of that weird bent-in posture and reach out to me.
She doesn’t, and she can’t.
So I have to reach out to her. I have to get to know more about her, about what happened to her, so I can make all of this make sense.
The nurse returns with the new feeding bag, along with supplies for giving Gloria her sponge bath, so I retreat to the hall chair and pull out the detective’s business card from my wallet.
“No,” she says once I’ve explained who I am, “I’m afraid we don’t know anything yet.”
“But it’s been nearly a week.”
“Four days,” she corrects, but she sounds sympathetic. “We haven’t even finished analyzing the security cam footage from the terminal yet, although that should be done soon. I wish I had something to tell you, but I— oh, I can tell you that according to her cell phone provider her phone hasn’t been connected to the network since it was taken. Which makes robbery seem like less of a motive. But again, I can’t say for sure yet.”
I thank her, though I don’t want to, and get off the phone. Then I sit in the hall staring at the beige floor feeling as dull as the tiles.
I need to know why, and I don’t. None of this makes sense at all, and I so want it to. More, I need it to. She was attacked, like a mugging, but the only thing that was stolen has not been used. So why take it, and not her wallet? If it was a robbery gone wrong, the criminal should have taken everything. If it was an attack on Gloria herself, a targeted one, why bother taking the phone?
And why the hell was she even at the ferry terminal so late?
The cops don’t seem to know why, and maybe they don’t care. If they can figure out who did it from the security cameras, maybe knowing why Gloria was in that situation doesn’t matter to them.
But it matters to me.
I need this to make sense. It hurts so much that it doesn’t. More, it makes me feel panicked and small. If I had an explanation, Gloria would still be lying in that bed but at least I would know why. I can’t cope with the randomness of this. Apparent randomness. It might be utterly non-random but I don’t know.
Frustrated, and not knowing what else to do, I log into Facebook and go to Gloria’s page. We were friends there, although neither of us posted much, and so I can see her page and all the posts her friends are leaving on her wall begging her to get better. It’s sweet, I guess, but there’s no way for me to tell whether these are casual friends or people who might be important in figuring things out. That’s frustrating enough, but their posts on her wall clutter things up so I have to scroll forever until I finally see her last post, a repost from her Twitter account.
She turns out to have been far more active there, showing off pictures of clothes and discussing TV shows she’d watched and retweeting requests for donations from various groups, but I’m more interested in her bio which provides a link to her roommate’s Twitter account.
I didn’t even know she had a roommate. Has. She’ll get back there. I’m determined.
When the nurse lets me back into the room, I sit beside the bed and say to Gloria, “You live with Jessica, right? That’s still right, I hope. What’s she like?”
Jessica’s Twitter account, how snarky and uptight she seems there, especially the part of her bio where she says “Call me Jess and I’ll punch you in the throat”, makes me wonder at her as a roommate for the ‘live in the now, peace and love’ Gloria, but she’s the best connection I have to Gloria’s life so I make a Twitter account and send her a message then get back to working on my tasks.
I talk them through out loud, trying to pretend that at any moment Gloria will wake up and join in the discussion. She doesn’t, and I don’t get very far on the work either though I’m trying hard to stay focused.
Trouble number three is right around the corner if I can’t get enough work done to give me time to ace my presentation, and if by some miracle I pull something together the third trouble could still take my comatose sister.
Either way, I need a miracle.