Still Lives

“Is this a trial?” Greg flared back, and then added more gently, “Do you really want to have a baby? Because we should talk if you do.”

I denied the desire, but I sulked because I couldn’t express what I did want. Not a baby. Certainly not the diapers and co-sleepers that clogged my brother Mark’s life. But the feeling of our future inside me, mine and Greg’s? I liked that. It anchored me.

I punch the elevator button and the doors open immediately, the interior thankfully unoccupied. After the doors slip shut, I rip open the envelope, addressed to me in plain caps.

Inside: a torn notebook page, and a smaller white paper, folded. I read the notebook page first. The handwriting is Greg’s, hasty and scrawled:

M—I only have a couple of minutes to write this because the police are here, and it seems like they’ve found something incriminating downstairs, but one of my assistants said she’d mail this for me. (1) I am NOT guilty. I know you believe this. (2) Please don’t try to help, like I asked you last night. Let the police do their work. I got this under my studio door this morning and it’s freaking me out. Stay safe. Stay out of this. I love you, my friend.

—GSF

I unfold the second, smaller paper. Six words in black marker:

YOU’D BETTER WATCH OUT FOR MAGGIE.





20

Donor wall,” Hiro says. He is standing outside my office door, wearing a pine-green T-shirt for a bonsai society. He holds up two sheets of paper. “Can you look at these really fast?” he says, recoiling at my grimace. “We’re ninety-nine percent sure they’re correct, but you need to sign off on everything, right? For typos?”

YOU’D BETTER WATCH OUT FOR MAGGIE. The words on the note blaze through my mind. Now I understand Cherie’s suspicions. Greg thought someone was warning him to protect me; Cherie interpreted the opposite. Better watch out for Maggie, as in Maggie’s dangerous.

Who in the world would think I’m dangerous? Maybe Nikki Bolio once thought I was, when I asked her to expose the people she knew. Yet in a ruthless city like Los Angeles, I’m as harmless as a lamb. I make homemade cards for people’s birthdays. I exclusively wear practical shoes. I bring maple-bran muffins to cocktail parties.

Then again, if Greg’s interpretation is right, who is out to hurt me?

Wordlessly, I yank open my office door and throw Greg’s envelope on my desk.

Hiro follows me in, spreading the list of names that will each receive their own shiny chrome plaque on our outside wall. He sets the paper down as if it is delicate, and backs away. “Are you okay?” he asks.

YOU’D BETTER WATCH OUT FOR MAGGIE. There’s something provocative about the message. It’s deliberately unclear. Like a work of art, it invites you to interpret it.

“Maggie?” says Hiro.

“I’m fine.” I try to focus. The black and blue pens of the Development department have slashed through a few names, corrected others. They’re vigilant about this stuff because rich people go ballistic if they are not acknowledged properly.

“I won’t hover,” Hiro says. “But can I come back in an hour?”

I see that Thalia Thalberg’s name has been edited to Thalia Thalberg-Talbert.

“You can’t be serious,” I mutter.

“Two hours?” Hiro says politely.

“Thalia Thalberg married someone named Talbert and they’re hyphenating?”

“She’s getting married,” says Hiro. “In July, I think. Cheapest time to pay the city of Paris to evacuate so she can fill it with her wedding guests.”

I gape at him.

Hiro holds up his palms. “Kidding. She wants to have the wedding in France before her surrogate gets too pregnant to travel.”

“You’re still kidding.”

Hiro gives me a huge, wondering grin. “Actually, no.”

For the first time today, I find myself smiling, too, and not in a snarky way, but an astounded one, at the marvel of Thalia Thalberg-Talbert and her superior ability to hypermanage every life moment. It feels unbelievably good to grin. I pull the list across my desk. “Just come back in fifteen minutes,” I say.

Hiro nods and leaves, pausing at the top of the stairwell to gaze out on my favorite view of the city. Most people just clop on down the steps, focused on their daily tasks. Hiro really soaks it in, his brown eyes blinking. Yegina told me his apartment is full of bonsai trees, that he hopes to make a living from them one day. In his longest conversation with her, he held forth on branches: how the tree always wants to grow, and it grows by trunk and branch, so the bonsai artist’s art is also the line, but his material is a living thing. “Very slow and very unpredictable,” he told Yegina. She repeated this to me with a wry smile.

With a radiant surge of hope, I wish for the two of them to fall in love. Real love. Yegina’s brother is right. She needs someone who is worthy of her, someone who is sincere and kind and who won’t let her down. Maybe it can all begin tonight. Maybe I should just tell Brent and Don so we can quietly slip away.

My eyes fall on the envelope from Greg. Do I tell Yegina about this? She’ll put me under twenty-four-hour surveillance.

Hiro begins to descend the stairs. Juanita crosses my line of vision. She glances from Hiro to me, and I duck my head. Please don’t ask him about the Bas article, I will her, and she doesn’t say a thing, just drifts on, but I think she knows I am a liar.

I stare at the donor lists, gripping my pen, until I am sure Juanita is gone. The Founding Donors—Victor, Hilda, and Janis Rocque—get their own donor category at the top. Then there is a slew of Charter Donors, who’ve given between half a million and a million dollars. Among them are the Beans, Greg’s employers, who gave a public interview this morning in which they defended Greg’s character but said they were “puzzled” by the evidence the police had discovered. Their voices sounded hurt and old.

James and Marie Terrant, Bas’s parents, are also among the Charter Donors. Supposedly they sold their Palm Springs house and gave the proceeds to the Rocque as a welcome gift. They’re joined by collectors and politicos whose names I’ve read so many times I know they’re correct without checking. But when I get to the lower categories of funders, I have to look up and double-check every person and company because last year someone slipped the name Sparkle Jollypants into the list and no one caught it until six months after the plaque had been hung. Among the Gold Donors, a longer name is inked out and replaced with CJ Gallery. I look it up and find nothing, and make a note to double-check it with Hiro.

“Knock, knock,” says a low voice. It’s Jayme, resplendent in a teak-colored tunic and white jeans, her hair bound back in a scarf. Her face betrays no sign of the anguish she displayed last night. In fact, it looks defiant. Whatever she told me, she won’t voice it again. “What are you up to?” she says. It comes out like a challenge.

“Just looking for Sparkle Jollypants,” I say, and show her the donor list.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see the top of my inbox darken with a new message from Yegina, the subject heading: Don. Jayme asks me if I’m ready for the annual report meeting, and I assure her I am, because I’m going to blow my lunch break on developing a few more story ideas from my files. Jayme steps inside my office to say sotto voce that Art of the Race Car is completely off the schedule and, as of this morning, we’re replacing it with a tribute to some board member’s personal collection.

“Well played,” I say, wondering if the new exhibition is Yegina’s idea. “What a relief.”

Jayme doesn’t respond. She is looking at my Cy Twombly drawing, her head tilted back, as if she hasn’t seen it before.

“What if it is just a scribble?” I say. “Don’t you ever wonder that?”

“Did you see that report on Kim Lord’s family?” Jayme says. “Her sister’s been found. She never left Toronto. She contacted the parents, and she’s back in rehab.”

Kim’s sister never left Toronto. That means she can’t be the woman on the flash drive.

“Thank God she’s safe,” I say. “I can’t imagine how their parents are feeling right now.”

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