“Well, it was in the pre-interview. Mitch Michaelson might ask me about it.”
“You could cancel.” Greer looked around, making sure no one was listening. They weren’t.
“That would be unprofessional,” said Faith. “And there are other things I want to talk about and call attention to. It’s a good opportunity. We need press; we always do. You know that.”
“But it’s not just about getting press,” Greer said, even more quietly. “Come on, we do the work we do whether we get attention for it or not. We do it for women. You’ve always made a point of this.” Greer paused, picked at something on her sleeve, looked back up. “I didn’t understand, in the beginning, what we were doing here,” she said. “I just knew I wanted to do it. I gravitated toward working here. Toward working for you,” she added, her voice thickening. “But then it wasn’t just about you. It was about them. It’s still about them.” She was shaky, thinking that this sounded like a speech, and she hadn’t meant to give a speech, especially one that she hadn’t written down. Speeches needed to be crafted, edited, revised; this one wasn’t. “And now this place where we work, it isn’t for me anymore. So I can’t do it.”
“What can’t you do?”
“Stay at Loci. I can’t, Faith. It’s not right.” Faith still didn’t say anything, so Greer said, formally, “Okay, I’m going to go now.”
Faith was looking at her, taking her time. Greer thought, I am not going to wait or get her permission to go. I’m just going to go. But she stopped, briefly, picturing her cubicle with all the photos and cartoons she had tacked up above her desk. Over time they had curled and faded. Having quit, she would have to go and untack them one by one now, leaving behind a Morse code of tiny holes for the next person, signifying nothing. Greer had an unexpected image of Cory giving up everything in his life, just walking away from Armitage & Rist and all that had been carefully planned out for him.
Greer saw that everyone in the room was finally paying attention. They had stopped their conversations and were looking up, aware of the change around Faith’s desk. Even looking at Faith they could see it beneath the surface of her face, like underground fasciculation from some neurological storm. A storm was gathering. Oh shit, a storm was gathering in Faith Frank.
“Well, all right then,” said Faith as everyone watched. “I guess that’s it.”
“I guess it is.”
Greer experienced one of those bile squirts in the back of her throat, and she swallowed it down. It was as if her voice alone had quit her job, her voice had stepped up and made the executive decision and done all the speaking, while the rest of her had simply listened and watched. Was this what it meant to have a voice that wasn’t always an inside voice? It came out of you as if through your own personal loudspeaker. She wondered where the reward was for speaking up, where the catharsis was. Right now she just felt sick.
She had only made it to the door when Faith said, “It’s actually kind of funny, in a way.”
Greer turned around. “What is?”
“You make it sound like you care too much about what you do to stay here. That you care too much about women. About sticking up for them. Yet look at what you did all those years ago. To your best friend. I can’t remember her name.”
“What are you talking about?” Greer asked, though she didn’t really want to know.
“Your friend wanted to work here,” Faith said. “She gave you a letter to give me, and one night over drinks you told me about it, and you said that you didn’t want her to work here, right? So you never gave me the letter, and you lied to her and told her you did, didn’t you? And I suppose you were fine with that.”
Fainting was a real possibility, Greer thought. She looked around helplessly; everyone in the room seemed scandalized but distant. No one could help her. Faith wasn’t wrong about what Greer had done to Zee; hearing it spoken aloud was terrible, and the act she described was inexcusable. But it was just so unfair, she thought, just so unnecessarily mean of Faith to say it, and yet she also thought that maybe there was always going to have been a moment like this one at the end, at least if Greer was ever going to be able to go off and do something on her own instead of being a perennial extra-credit-doer, a handmaiden, a good girl who thought that what she had for herself was enough. Good girls could go far, but they could rarely go the distance. They could rarely be great. Maybe Faith was giving this confrontation to her as a gift. But probably not. Faith’s anger had fastened itself on her at last; it had taken a long, long time, but here it was. Maybe Faith had a right to be angry. Greer was leaving her to deal with ShraderCapital on her own; Greer was saying to her: You deal with it, I can’t. And also, Greer was implicitly criticizing Faith for knowing what she knew and staying.
“What did you do with it, Greer?” Faith asked. “Did you throw that letter out? Did you read it? In any case, you decided not to give it to me, and not to tell the truth. Not a great move, I don’t think.”
Greer wasn’t going to faint. Instead, she ran.
PART FOUR
Outside Voices
TEN
When she first became interested in trauma, Zee Eisenstat had taken a course called Assessing the Nature of Emergency, and as the instructor described various scenarios, Zee filled her notebook with the hard scrawl of disaster. Everything she learned in that course, and much of what she went on to learn later at her job, was about the acute, terrible moments in other people’s lives. She was a crisis response counselor in Chicago, and had been working in the field since leaving Teach and Reach three and a half years earlier. First she’d gotten a degree in counseling, but even while she was in school she’d immediately been put to work. The worse the crisis, the more she could focus, somehow; Zee didn’t buckle or back away, like some people did at first.
Her work took her around the city. She would quietly appear at the door of people’s homes after something shocking had happened: a person had died by suicide; there had been a hostage situation; someone had had a sudden bout of psychosis. She was known to be uncommonly skilled at what she did: light-footed, unobtrusive, deeply useful. Once in a while, weeks or months after a trauma, she would hear from families. “You were like my own personal saint,” one man wrote her. “I didn’t know who you were, only that you suddenly showed up.” Another man wrote to say, “I sell snow tires, and I would like to give you a complimentary set.” Zee had become highly valued in the trauma community, and, as she’d proudly told Greer, she had been cited in the International Journal of Traumatology. “I know that doesn’t sound like a real journal, but it is.” That night, Greer had had a vegan cake delivered to Zee’s door in Chicago.