Part Eight: The Afternoon
Marguerite had arranged, with characteristic competence, for someone to take Lina to the hospital by early afternoon. But before that, there were several hours of Monday morning that had been cleared of their usual content and were now occupied by something else.
Lina, it turned out, had opinions about the office.
“You don’t have any pictures,” she said, having conducted a thorough survey of the room in the manner of someone who had professional cleaning experience and knew how to take stock of a space.
“No,” he said.
“My mum has a picture of me on her cart,” she said. “Taped to the side.” She paused. “She says it helps on hard days.”
He looked at his desk. At the walls. At the glass and steel and the view twenty-eight floors down.
“I don’t have many hard days,” he said.
Lina looked at him with the direct, unfiltered assessment of a five-year-old.
“I think you do,” she said. “They just look different.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“What do my hard days look like?” he asked. He asked it genuinely, which surprised him.
She considered.
“Quiet,” she said. “Like you said. When you’re doing something alone.” She looked around the office. “This is a very alone room.”
He looked at the room.
He had not thought of it this way before, though it was accurate. It was a room designed to keep things out — the glass walls that showed the floor without admitting sound, the door that should not have opened this morning, the forty-five minutes every morning that belonged entirely to him.
He had been proud of it.
“What do you think should be in it?” he said.
She thought about this with the seriousness it deserved.
“A plant,” she said. “Plants make rooms feel like someone is home.” She looked at the window. “And maybe something for your desk. Not work things. Something you like.”
“What do you have on your desk at home?”
She lit up the way children lit up when asked about something they loved.
“A rock,” she said. “It’s from the beach, from when we went last summer. It’s gray and it has a stripe through it and if you hold it up to the light it looks like it has something inside.” She paused. “Mum says it’s quartz. I say it’s a window to another world.”
He looked at her.
“I think you might be right,” he said.
