Suddenly, more than anything, I want to be home, safe in my own bed.
“Didn’t you say there was a crew party somewhere?” says Kevin. “Maybe Kim’s there? Has anyone checked?”
I tell him I doubt it, but a ray of hope splits my dread. It would be just like Kim Lord to favor the crew, to be standing high on the roof of her party while the rest of us parade through the dark, bloody cave she’s made.
I need to get away from the paintings, so Kevin and I grab Yegina’s badge and take the elevator up to the top floor of the staff offices, which houses our boardroom and the rooftop patio. We can hear the crew party before the door opens, a low hum of chatter and Brent’s voice above it, declaring drunkenly that this is the best goddamn exhibition the Rocque has ever shown and the crew had nothing to do with it.
“It was all her,” he says in a voice soaked with astonishment and booze. “It was all her.”
At the last elevator stop in our office tower, the doors open on a small crowd in T-shirts and jeans scattered around the low walls of the patio. The shadeless square of cement gets so hot during the day that no one uses it, but the night and the cooling dark transform it to the kind of spot trendy bargoers would line up to visit. It’s raised just enough to give a bird’s-eye view of the avenue, but it’s only knee-high to the looming skyscrapers, so you feel both elevated to the California sky and shielded from its vast emptiness. Scattered offices and hotel rooms glow in the sheer, giant buildings beyond, revealing strangely intimate but anonymous views: a parted curtain, a single lamp shining on an otherwise darkened floor. Even more than in the daytime, you realize how many thousands of people occupy this same square mile.
But few crew members are gazing outward tonight. Most of them are clutching red plastic keg cups and watching Brent with mounting concern. Brent is the god of this crowd; everywhere he goes at the Rocque, a certain coterie of scruffy MFA grads follows, slumping and lurking as if hoping no one will notice their efforts to steep in his brilliance. Brent rewards them by making one or two inscrutable utterances under his breath or by ignoring them completely. Tonight is different, and it could be the booze, but I’ve seen Brent drink at every opening. Alcohol tends to increase his dark taciturnity until it pools around him.
Tonight, he’s taken off his suit jacket, pushed his white sleeves up to his large biceps, and is actually broadcasting his thoughts to our twin designers, Phil and Spike. They lean back on their elbows, their broad foreheads glowing. They are nodding, agreeing with Brent. It was all her. It was all Kim. Although I’ve never seen Phil and Spike roused out of their cool torpor to admire anyone, they stayed up all night to design the print materials for Still Lives. I know, because I had to sit in their unwashed radius the next morning when they presented the materials to the exhibition team.
Kevin follows me out of the elevator. I scan the crowd. No Kim Lord here. Not many people I recognize.
Aside from Brent’s outburst, a morose quiet pervades this scene. Evie, the registrar, is smoking in the corner with a crew member and trying ineptly to slouch in a blue blazer that matches her pumps. With her blow-dried bangs and perpetual business casual, Evie has the air of a lost bank teller who stumbled into a college party. I wave at her, but she’s focused on Brent and fighting a scowl. Evie worships Brent as much as his devoted crew does. She must not like seeing her idol unravel. She stabs her cigarette out on the ground, then lights another.
Spike spots me and grins with his upper teeth, but Kevin is already punching the elevator’s down button.
“I need to get back to the galleries. To those paintings,” he says as the panels slide open again. “You sure you’re all right? You’re pretty pale.”
I tell him I’m fine but I’m going home, if he doesn’t mind. We return to the elevator and it hums earthward.
Kevin pulls out his notebook and jots something down.
“Can I take you to lunch tomorrow?” he says. “This is turning out to be a bigger story than I thought.”
It’s not a story to us, I think. But I am ready to say anything to be alone, so I give Kevin my work number and ride silently beside him as he scribbles his notes.
When I was twenty-two and struggling to get my first clips in dinky Vermont newspapers, a beloved university professor arranged for me a job interview with Jay Eastman. Eastman was a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York journalist, and he’d relocated to Vermont to work on pieces that would become a book on drug smuggling in the rural Northeast. He possessed a thundercloud of gray hair and fierce eyes that could strip through your layers like paint thinner. He wasn’t unkind, but he was always right. He needed a research assistant who understood the local culture but would not insist on taking too much credit for it. When he gave me the assignment to talk to the teenage ex-girlfriend of a major drug dealer’s son, it was because he knew that Nikki would open up to me—another girl, about her age, just someone to talk to. And I, young and inexperienced and eager to please, would report back everything she said.
Two days before Eastman’s first story broke and Nikki officially disappeared, I was walking home in Burlington from my second job as a waitress. The spring sun was out, the lake melted, the lawns sodden, and crocuses were nudging up beside porches and stoops. Little throbs of yellow, the buds promised warmer days. Seeing them, I began fantasizing about my move to New York. In two more months, I’d have saved up enough to rent a room in Brooklyn while I took a bottom-rung job at a newspaper. I’d have the clout of a letter from Eastman, my experience from helping with his research, and my name in the back of his book. I’d find my own stories, one by one.
The fantasy had one glitch: Nikki. In two days, everyone she knew would be changed by Eastman’s article on the backwoods winter drug routes and the ways locals were smuggling opiates into the smaller towns. Eastman had promised to protect her anonymity, despite the fact that local law enforcement might subpoena him. He’d taken Nikki personally into his cluttered office and spoken to her about how he would never betray her to the police or anyone else, but still she should be careful.
Nikki had looked bold in his presence, then self-conscious and blushing. She tugged at her tight blond ponytail, then pushed her hands deep in her jean-jacket pockets until the denim was as taut as a sail, and said, “I’m ready.” But within months we would move on, Eastman and I, and with us would go Nikki’s assurance that what she’d done had purpose and meaning. As I hurried home through the chapped Victorians of downtown Burlington, I imagined Nikki a year from now, five years, living with her betrayal. If the police cracked down, it wouldn’t necessarily help the addicts. It might just mean jail time for the people she knew, while others took their place.
Eastman had made me promise not to contact Nikki, but I wished then that I could offer her a place to stay if she became afraid. The fragile sunshine around me faded and a chill made my cheeks burn. It hurt, that air, but it wasn’t a wind. It was just coldness sinking into everything: the budding trees, the strips of yellowed grass between me and the wet, open street. The cold amplified the slam of a porch door, and the slushy whispers of cars passing. It aged the grand, turreted houses, made their ornate windows seem brittle in their frames. It reached into my coat and enclosed me. By the time I got home, I couldn’t stop shivering.