the window. It kept ringing, shrill and jarring. It pierced Audrey’s ears and chest and mind. It woke her up, and the slopping thing writhed.
Tears returned. Maybe they’d never left. Her mother in the hospital with iron wings. Saraub gone. He’d abandoned her. This place she lived, The Breviary: it frightened her. She frightened herself.
She kicked the scissors into the nearest corner and tried not to look at them. Then patted her knees, squeezed her hands into fists, bit her lips, imagined the room in its many possible configurations: desk, chair, bookcase, leather couch, two standing lamps, Wallace Neff photos of old Hollywood glamour houses, fancy as Joan Crawford’s palace. In the end, she returned everything to where it now rested and decided how Jill had arranged it was best, and that reassured her. At least someone around here was good at their job.
The phone stopped ringing. Audrey cleared her throat and considered turning tail. Running out of the office, and the building, all the way home to The Breviary.
Jill turned, then jumped. “Audrey,” she said. “How long have you been standing there?”
Instead of her usual brown pantsuit, Jill was wearing jeans and a The Who concert T-shirt. The band’s logo, the Union Jack, was emblazoned across her chest, and above it in messy red pen, someone had written, The Kids are Alright. Beneath the flag, four names were etched in different-colored marker and handwriting, as if added over years: Clemson, Markus, Xavier, Julian.
“I just got here,” Audrey said. “I need to talk to you.”
Jill gripped the side of her desk and slouched so deeply that she folded upon herself. Audrey surfaced from her own grief long enough to feel sorry for her. She looked exhausted. Then again, you reap what you sow: Who the hell has four kids these days, except an egomaniac?
“I need to talk to you, too. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about your mother,” Jill said. The shirt looked worn, like she’d bought it back in the nineties, when everyone else had been listening to grunge.
Audrey looked out the window. Those scissors. Holy mackerel. What had she been about to do? Kill her boss for sending flowers? “I had to sign the papers to turn off her life support. But I couldn’t do it. She’s still out there, in Nebraska. Trapped in that bed. My fiancé left me, too. I think I was going to tell him I wanted to get back together, but he left me in a deadbeat motel in Lincoln, Nebraska, before I had the chance.”
Jill blinked. Her face was pale. Audrey noticed for the first time that the items on her desk were organized in ninety-degree angles. Not a single pen askew. “He left you in a motel?” she asked.
“Yeah. The night after I had my first orgasm, too. I didn’t know they were real, did you?” she blurted this, heard herself, turned red, and lowered her head. But the talking felt good. Less like she was the member of a different species, viewing humans through glass.
Jill wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her eyes got wide. Then something unexpected happened. She laughed. The sound was a quick hiccup. “You never talked about that with anyone?”
Audrey shook her head. The scissors in the corner shone like an accusation, and before she had the time to think about it, she picked them up, and shoved them under a pile of drafts on Jill’s desk, so she didn’t have to look at them anymore. Jill noted this, but didn’t comment. “I don’t get out much,” Audrey said.
“You’re an island,” Jill answered.
“I don’t want to be. I’m trying.”
“You don’t have to be.”
Audrey sniffled. “Sure. I know.” If she looked at Jill sidelong, she didn’t think the terrible thoughts. The scissors didn’t fly up from under the pile and snip.
“Well, like I said, kiddo. Chin up,” Jill said. “I didn’t know you wore glasses.”
Audrey adjusted the black frames on the bridge of her nose. “My mother’s. She was an opera singer.”
Jill nodded. Then she made a strange sound, like a squeaking animal was trapped in her throat. She looked away fast, but not before Audrey saw her ruined expression. Pruned face, knit brows, tight grin just about to crack. Her pain was so deep that it radiated from her in waves.
“Oh, God,” Jill whispered. She held the lower part of her stomach with both hands. Audrey realized that those four names on the T-shirt had to belong to her sons.