Page 53 of Soft Erasure

I went down it now, one hand on the rail, counting, four flights, six down to two.

The room was empty.

It had been emptied.

The Danish chairs were pushed to one wall. The screen was folded into it. The podium was gone. The glass was clean.

The cleaner with the citrus had been through that morning, after the Monday meeting, as the cleaner went through every public room on Crownhill’s published schedule.

The clock on the back wall said four-fifty-eight.

I stood at the curved wall of the window and I waited.

Waiting was its own risk. The salon cover didn’t reach the second floor.

If anyone pulled the Garden Room feed and found a resident at sixty-seven standing at the glass in a room struck that morning, no version of my face explained it.

I had no story here, only the minute on the clock and the woman it was supposed to bring. I didn’t know she would come. I knew only that the note said she would, from the woman who put paper in my palm in a room full of lenses and never moved my wrist doing it.

I was betting the little I had left on Irene Callow’s hands.

I didn’t look down at the front circle. I didn’t look up at the ceiling. I didn’t look at the camera in the corner, small and black, hidden in the mahogany trim so it read as ornament. I catalogued it anyway. The exits, the angles, the one seam where the dome could not quite see the near edge of the glass.

He had built that habit into me, and it woke whether I called it or not, reading the room for green, reading it for him.

I looked at the pane instead. I looked at my own face in it.

The lights changed at five-oh-three. The wall became a window from both sides.

I didn’t move.

At five-oh-five the front door opened on the lobby below. I couldn’t see it. I knew because the air-handling shifted, and I had been inside long enough to feel it in my teeth.

The mothers were leaving the lobby. The mothers were going onto the circle.

At five-oh-six, three of them came around the curve of the path.

Margaret was the smallest. She walked between two I didn’t know, the taller one in a gray cardigan, the other her own height, in navy.

They moved at the pace of grief. They didn’t look at my window.

At five-oh-eight, Margaret looked up.

She looked at six first. Six was where they had told her I lived.

She held it half a second.

Then her eyes came down the front of the building. Not fast.

One floor and then the next, six to five, five to four, four to three, in the open.

Whatever it cost her to take her face off the window she had been assigned, she spent it where the whole front of Crownhill could watch her spend it.

They stopped on the glass on two.

She saw me.

Her face didn’t move.