“But it’s ridiculous,” said Greer, hearing her own voice fade a little, as if going out of frequency.
“Maybe, but it’s true. It really bothered me a lot the way they handled it at the time, but when I left ShraderCapital I stopped thinking about it. Then yesterday I saw the video of you in LA. They let you go out there, Greer, and they trotted that girl out too. They didn’t care that it wasn’t true.”
“Exactly what isn’t true?” Greer managed to say. “The whole thing?”
“The rescue was real. The security group apparently went in and saved those girls.”
“Well, good. That’s a relief.”
“But the mentor part never happened. They just pretended it did.”
“But why would they do that?”
“There was a fuckup,” Kim said. “Their contact in Ecuador.”
“Alejandra Sosa.”
“No, not her. The next one. I thought you knew.”
“Next one? She’s the only one we hired. Faith had her looked into. Scrupulously.”
Kim shook her head. “She was good. I agree that she would have done the job. But there was a change. The COO’s wife knew a woman in the region who she liked; she wanted her to take over the day-to-day operations. So she asked her husband, and he asked Shrader, and Shrader said sure, whatever. So Alejandra Sosa was sidelined, and I’m guessing now that no one told Faith. Anyway, the new person was a disaster. She never found mentors. The building that we’d rented just sat empty. Squatters have been living in it. The COO’s wife was mortified when we found out, and everyone just wanted the whole thing to go away, because it stinks. No one wanted to talk about it.”
“Can’t this person be sued?”
“It’s much too late for that. But that’s really not the issue. I don’t think you understand. As you know, we had all these brochures printed up, soliciting donations to keep the mentor program ongoing. The donations were coming in, and maybe they still are. And once ShraderCapital found out the truth, they didn’t shut the fund down and make a public statement and give everyone back their money. They decided that that would be terrible PR. So they just allowed it to keep going, which is, as you can imagine, illegal. And of course Loci’s name is all over the brochure.”
Greer closed her eyes; it was all she could think to do. She thought of Faith, and Emmett, and a bank account filling with money, and a news story, and all of them on trial for fraud. The mind could go wild on just a moment’s notice. Greer felt pressure in her chest, and a medical term swam up to her: unstable angina. I’m only twenty-six, Greer thought, though right now that age didn’t even sound particularly young.
“But let me ask you something,” said Greer. “Lupe Izurieta, who came to LA with me and appeared onstage. What about her? She agreed to read that statement in Spanish about her mentor, who taught her all those skills. Computers. Knitting.”
“Right, she agreed,” said Kim. “Someone wrote it for her.”
“I wrote it,” said Greer, shocked. “Faith asked me to.”
She thought of how frightened Lupe had been, and she had assumed it was because of having to speak about her trauma publicly. But maybe it was because she’d had to stand up there reading a lie that she’d been told to read. Greer looked at Kim to find some hint of craziness, an image of a disgruntled former employee who wanted to punish the company where she used to work. But Kim was just looking back at her with an unbroken gaze, waiting for her to respond, and then Greer remembered something else. She thought of Lupe on the airplane with the puddle of white wool and the knitting needles sticking out of her bag, untouched. She’d thought, on the plane, that Lupe would want to knit during the flight so she would be less afraid.
Maybe the knitting had remained untouched because she didn’t actually know how to knit. Maybe her mentor wasn’t a knitter at all, because she wasn’t real.
* * *
? ? ?
When Greer went into Faith’s office half an hour later and flatly asked if they could speak in private, Faith’s face took on the particular expression that Greer had seen at different times over the years: empathy and attentiveness. Faith said, “I’m heading out for an appointment at the hair salon. Why don’t you meet me there at twelve.”
“Okay.”
“But don’t spread it around. The thing I hate most about going there, above and beyond the obscene amount of money, is the amount of time I have to give over to it. If I added up all the time I’ve spent in such places, I could probably have traveled the world. Done something much more significant than sitting in a chair being passive and wearing a plastic cape like a superhero of nothing. Anyway, we’ll have time to talk. I’m taping a segment for Screengrab later, so I have to look decent.”
Greer found Faith behind the privacy screen reserved for VIPs in the very back of the Jeremy Ingersoll Salon on Madison Avenue, a long deep room that was filled with flowers; the flowers crowded the place and gave it a strong perfume that fought with the formaldehyde in the Brazilian Blowout formula to create a tropical breeze that somehow, at least for Greer, also invoked death and decomposition. Greer waited nervously while the stylist finished with the foils. They glimmered and dotted Faith’s scalp like gum wrappers. The stylist set the timer and left the two women alone.
“So,” said Faith, smiling but serious. “We apparently have exactly thirty minutes together. Talk to me, Greer.” It was unnerving how different Faith looked in her cape and with her shining head, the scalp hooked up not with electrodes but with a conduit to youth and beauty. Faith seemed to notice the way Greer was taking in her appearance, and she added, “Oh, I know, I look strange. But if you saw how I really look when I go too long between appointments, you’d think it was stranger. Or maybe you’ve already seen it.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Well, I have to come here so often that it’s kind of like a crack addiction, and Jeremy Ingersoll is my dealer. If I didn’t do all this, then I would be very gray, and I’m just not wild about how that looks on me. And I have to feel okay looking in the mirror.”
“Of course.”
“It isn’t cheap, vanity. And it gets more expensive all the time. When I started going gray, I worried that if I let it go, I would look like a sorceress. And that was not what I wanted. I wanted to look like myself, that’s all. You’ll know what I’m talking about someday. Not for a long time, but you’ll know.”
She looked directly at Greer in the mirror, and Greer thought about how she had so often craved moments of personal conversation with Faith over the years. Here was another one, and Greer was about to kill it by telling her what Kim Russo had said. She wished, suddenly, that instead of repeating that information, she could say something new from her own life, her own love life. She wished she could blurt out something vulnerable and real.
“So what’s going on with you?” Faith asked easily.
Greer looked at her hands, then back at Faith in the mirror. “Here it is. Apparently there’s no mentor program in Ecuador,” she said. She paused, letting Faith take this in. “There was never a mentor program,” Greer went on, “but we said there was, and we took people’s money, and we’re still taking it. And I went onstage in LA and gushed about mentors and wrote a thing for Lupe to read, but none of it was true. I’ve been told this by a source, Kim Russo from upstairs, and I believe it.”
Faith gaped at her. “You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
“What about the rescue?” Faith asked, agitated.
“That was real.”
“Thank God for that. But really, no mentor program?”
Greer shook her head. She explained what had happened, and why it appeared to be true. Faith didn’t say anything at first, but just sat there with her mouth grimly tight, and finally she said, “Shit.”