“Of course, do what you need to do,” said the COO, and in the background one of the assistants piped up, “No worries.” The researchers down on 26 found that Sosa had a record of achieving results. The secretary of the executive board of UNICEF had written her a fulsome, nearly weepy recommendation letter. Then, a couple of weeks later, word came that the modest rescue mission had gone well, and that one hundred traumatized young women had been paired with older women. The young ones were offered transitional housing in an apartment building in Quito, where they would recover from their ordeal and learn a trade, through which they could make a living and start a new life. Before the end of the year, as Faith had proposed, one of the rescued young women would be brought here to be introduced onstage and say a few words after the keynote at the mentorship summit coming up soon in LA.
Faith had already begun working on the keynote, but now, deep into October, lying on this table naked under a towel, having her body indelicately pushed and pulled, she thought: I should turn the keynote over to Greer Kadetsky. Let her not only write it but also deliver it. Greer was forward-looking, smart, and passionate. She had the ability to listen well and draw people out; they connected with her and trusted her. Look at those wonderful lunchtime speeches she had written. Plus, Greer was on the verge of becoming her own person, and this would help push her further. She would get to write two speeches, one for the young woman from Ecuador, and one for herself. In her own speech, she would finally be speaking as Greer Kadetsky.
Faith understood that Greer had hit that plateau that comes several years into a new position. She needed proof that her work mattered, not just a nebulous hope that it did. Otherwise, she would continue to feel discouraged, and also she would be in danger of leaving.
What if they all leave? Faith thought. Of course there would always be someone else who would come; people left now and again. Helen Brand had left last month to be a national reporter for the Washington Post. No one was ever irreplaceable, and yet she always felt a pang, like a kind of brief grief, when someone left, followed by a slight start—almost an increase in respiration rate—when someone new arrived.
Give it to Greer, she told herself. Faith recalled one specific conversation with Greer Kadetsky, way back in the earliest days. Greer had called her up, crying, and had told her that there had been a tragedy in her personal life and she couldn’t make it to the very first summit, which they’d all been working toward around the clock. A child had been killed, Faith remembered; Greer’s boyfriend’s brother? But it was so long ago that she couldn’t recall the details. She just remembered Greer’s voice on the phone, saying, “Faith?” and then the tears, and how she, Faith, had immediately gone into soothing mode. As soon as she got off the phone with Greer, she was on another call, scrambling, yelling a little to find someone to take up the slack. That was what it was like, running a foundation. You soothed and you scrambled and sometimes you yelled.
And then one day, sometime later, Faith had overheard Greer speaking to someone in a pleading voice on her cell phone. Faith had come over to her, concerned, and asked if she was all right. Greer looked up, nodding, but she didn’t look all right. That afternoon Greer had come to Faith’s office door—this was no surprise; all the young women eventually showed up at Faith’s door—and she came in and planted herself on the couch and told Faith everything. She and the high school boyfriend had had a rough breakup. “I don’t know what to do,” Greer had said. “We’ve been together for so long, and it wasn’t supposed to end, ever.” Then she’d begun to cry in the sort of loose, phlegmy way that distantly reminded Faith of when Lincoln had been a little boy with croup.
Faith had listened, and while she hadn’t offered any prescriptions, she’d told Greer that she was welcome to come in and talk whenever she liked. “I mean it,” she’d said, and she did mean it, because Greer was one of the good ones. She had come far; she was sterling, loyal, smart, modest—exactly the right person to have hired and promoted. But now Greer was flagging, and needed to be reminded of why she was here at Loci, four years in. Give her this, Faith thought.
Plus, Lincoln was right: Faith was tired and overworked. She was seventy-one years old, and though some people said that seventy was the new forty, it wasn’t. This massage today was desperately needed. She wished she could stay on this table for six thousand minutes, with this compact woman pounding her back and placing a line of hot, clicking stones up and down her spine and massaging her neck with baby oil until it was just a loose string gently connected to a head that felt as light as a balloon. Faith was sick to death of the pace she’d been keeping, and she couldn’t bear to go speak at another Loci summit so soon, not the kind of summits that these had become.
No more psychics. No more pelican butter.
Let Greer do this one. It would be a symbiotic touch.
All of this was what Faith thought about as her masseuse went to the other end of the table and began to rub her feet.
Sue pressed a particular place under the big toe, and Faith startled, then composed a list with two items on it:
Arrange meeting with Greer to discuss LA. Be sure to find out if Greer speaks Spanish, which would be a help.
Encourage Greer Kadetsky generally. She still needs encouragement. They all do.
Faith vaguely recalled their first meeting, back at Greer’s college campus. Greer had been so bright and filled with feeling, but beyond that she had also been upset with her parents. Of course Faith had been reminded of being upset with her own parents at that age. Both sets of parents had held their daughters back, even as they loved them. Faith had been touched, seeing this in Greer, and who knew why you were impelled to do anything you did, but Faith gave Greer Kadetsky her business card, the way she sometimes still gave it out to young women, smiling at them in a way that she hoped would have significance. And apparently it did, for Greer was still here all these years later.
And Faith, indisputably an old woman now, still thought about her own mother and father with a tenderhearted bunching-up of feeling, despite their unfairness toward her over half a century earlier. They hadn’t known better; they were of their time. She could still almost cry now recalling their gentleness, and all the games of charades they’d played, and how she and Philip had run around the Bensonhurst apartment after a bath, squealing and smelling good, finally being caught up in a towel held out by their mother like a toreador. They had left their wet footprints everywhere, though they dried fast and left no trace.
Her parents had held her back, maddeningly, but just for a while. Her brother hadn’t taken her side, and she’d held it against him at first, and then after she’d stopped holding it against him, life had taken over—her life, which was so different from his; and finally it was as if they’d barely ever been siblings, let alone twins. Lying on the table, she tried to make a note to be the one to call him on their birthday in a few months, and not the other way around. Get a jump on the day and be the one to call him, asking him if he and Sydelle were planning to come east soon. “I’d really like it if you did,” she would say. “And we can even play charades. So start practicing.”
Suddenly the hands working on her body began to chop, moving with vehemence up and down over these old bones that had been everywhere, and maybe were starting to slow down.
“Done!” cried Sue the masseuse, and she slapped Faith’s legs with her two forceful hands, the sound ringing out as if in triumph.
NINE