The Receptionist Page 8

  Another wave hit me.

  “I need to check the houses!” I screamed even though I knew he couldn’t hear.

  The ocean knocked into me again. It tugged at my legs, letting me know it had the power to drag me, crush me. I let go of the pylon. I had to check a few more houses, exhaust all options. Another wave came, and then one right after, throwing me onto my hands and knees. I flattened myself on the rocks as the water washed over me, digging my fingers into the space between the stones.

  My neighborhood had turned treacherous.

  I was able to scramble to the staircase at the next house over, crawling flat and sideways. I climbed to the middle step and imagined Bella trying to do what I’d just done, her paws slipping on the rocks as the water engulfed her. I leaned my head against the railing and looked out to sea for any sign of her, a dark head above water, dog-paddling away from death. She wasn’t there. It was getting dark.

  Doug was still on the balcony, silhouetted by the sunset. He pointed to the house above me, suggesting I go up, drenched and shivering, and introduce myself to complete strangers. I could hear children’s voices and the clinking of plates inside. I swept my fingers under my eyes and looked at them, black with mascara. My knees were bloody. There was no way I’d humiliate myself by knocking on their door.

  I stood. I would have to swim home. I took off my wool pants and balled them up. I held on to them as I waded into the ocean but let go after diving under a breaking wave. The water was opaque black on the other side of the waves, and I panicked a moment, kicking at the surface, imagining some unseen creature waiting to drag me under. I turned north, toward the house, and tried the breaststroke, but the current was against me. I might as well have been treading water. I pushed harder. I thrashed my arms in a series of freestyle sprints. I did sidestroke, backstroke, exhausted when I finally neared the house. The water around me had turned thick, like wet cement. I had no idea how to get to shore. There was danger of losing control, of washing up against the house. Doug climbed down to our bottom step. He’d changed into his bathing suit. The ocean crashed against his waist. I rode a wave halfway in and tried to come to a stand, like a landing skydiver, but I stumbled. The water caught me, tossing me like a towel in a washing machine.

  “Here!” shouted Doug. He was on top of me. He grabbed me under the arms, in a lifeguard hold. A wave broke over us, bringing the water to our chests, but he held steady.

  “I got it,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  I let him guide me in, hating the fact that I needed help. I leaned on him as I climbed the stairs and then slumped against the rail at the top. He brought me a towel. I didn’t have the energy to take it from him. He wrapped it around my sopping shirt and shoulders.

  “Let’s get you cleaned up,” he said after a few minutes. We went to the bedroom. He started the bath. “You want a fizz bomb?” he asked. I shook my head and stood at the door to the bathroom, watching the water run.

  “We’ll find her,” he said.

  My mouth filled with sour liquid, pouring from the base of my tongue. I pushed past Doug and fell to my knees in front of the toilet, barely making it before I threw up.

  “Jesus,” Doug said.

  “Get out.”

  “Did you swallow seawater?”

  “Go!”

  I hurled again, unable to control the sounds of tortured puking. When I finished, Doug was sitting on the bed. There was something unnatural in his posture, too casual.

  “Did you leave the gate open?” I asked.

  His face lost all tension, all tone. His voice came out flat. “You were the one on the beach this morning.” I covered my mouth. He was right. I’d taken Bella for a run. She loved the sand, always digging, always barking at imaginary threats in the water. But I’d closed the gate. I’d locked it. I always did.

  He wasn’t done. “I can’t believe you’d even think of asking me that!” He didn’t need to add that last bit. It was an overreaction, blunt-force defensiveness. I wondered, briefly, if he’d done something to Bella. But I put the thought away.

  I’d married a charming, successful, somewhat messed-up guy. I hadn’t married a monster.

  I threw up the next morning after slicing open an avocado. My retching was more violent this time, producing nothing but yellow bile. I flushed and wiped my face with a washcloth. Doug was standing in the doorway, frowning at me.

  “Are you pregnant?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “When was your last period?”

  I shook my head. It had been a while. I didn’t want to look at my calendar in front of him, though. I didn’t want to be pregnant.

  I called in sick and printed posters, using a portrait I’d had taken of Bella, meant to be ironic, with a Sears-portrait-style mottled background. Doug helped me stuff the flyers in our neighbors’ mailboxes and staple them to utility poles. I posted on Facebook and Nextdoor. We never found her.

  I felt the loss in my chest, a persistent, hollow ache, and took to making a fist at the top of my sternum, digging in, trying to soothe myself. Doug offered to get me a new dog. But I didn’t want a new dog.

  I was pregnant.

  I’d picked up a home test at a pharmacy on my way to work and done it in a bathroom stall in my office, holding the stick horizontal on my thigh, watching the moisture wick across the window, before throwing up for the third time that day.

  I told no one. I kept my life exactly the same, forcing my face into a mask of competence while my insides lurched to the rhythm of early pregnancy. A month went by. I dreamed of insects, of being invaded, playing host to a parasite. I learned to puke silently, sneaking to bathrooms on different floors of my office, away from my colleagues. Another month passed. I started to feel it, a tightening, a tug at the top of my pelvis. I ignored it. I dreamed I left a baby alone on the beach and watched from the balcony as it floated away.

  My nausea subsided at three months, replaced with cravings for heavy Italian food. When I was four months pregnant, Doug texted me at work:

  Need favor.

  No.

  Favor was a code word. He’d promised my time to someone.

  She’s a dancer.

  Definite no.

  Please?? Last time I swear.

  There were no immediate, drastic changes to my life after Chloe entered it. That afternoon, after she fumbled her way out of my office, I actually had a moment of pity. Then I more or less forgot about her. It would take months before I learned who she was, how destructive she could be.

  PART THREE

  CHLOE AND DOUG

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHLOE

  Chloe has been waiting, hiding, huddling on a toilet in the Beverly Wilshire bathroom for almost an hour. The air-conditioning is blowing on her shoulders, and her arms are purple. She can’t feel her lips. But she doesn’t move. It’s been fifty-five minutes since she shoved that old lady on the street. If they called the police, there would be squad cars and witness interviews. “There she is!” one of them would scream if she walked outside right now. She can’t afford that, not when things are finally going her way.

  Two women with Valley girl–sounding voices enter the bathroom, complaining about some coworker. One stands at the mirror. The other goes to the next stall over. Pins and needles prick at Chloe’s right foot. She reaches down to massage it. The women fall silent. They can tell, suddenly, they’re not alone. They stop gossiping.

  Chloe stands and stretches. How does she keep ending up like this—on the verge of getting caught? It was the old lady’s fault. She shouldn’t have touched Chloe. And Chloe wouldn’t have reacted that way. She wouldn’t have pushed her if it hadn’t been for Doug’s wife.

  The women in the bathroom trade places. Chloe unzips her bag. Doug’s wife’s card is on the top of the pile. She runs her finger along the embossed lettering: Emily Webb.

  Emily Webb is a mean girl, Chloe thinks and pictures what she must have been like in mid
dle school, making fun of other girls’ purses. That poor old lady. Chloe would never have pushed her if Emily Webb hadn’t been so awful.

  The women leave. Chloe takes a breath. Surely things have calmed by now. She heads to the lobby and peeks out the main entrance to the hotel. The sidewalk is empty, no lingering commotion. It’s like it never happened.

  She crosses the street to her old Toyota Celica with its maroon paint mottled white with sun damage. It’s like a sauna, the inside of her car. Chloe sits for a minute with the windows closed. She breathes in the burning air and feels safe and solid. She’s back in her own surroundings. She rolls down her windows and turns her phone back on. Doug’s cell number is saved in her contacts list even though there’s no reason for her to have it. Chloe is tempted to text him, give her version of what happened in case he’s talked to his wife. She wonders if it would be weird for her to do this. She’d have to start with something breezy like, Your wife is really sweet! or Thanks for setting up the meeting!

  Her phone rings. For a minute, she’s elated, thinking it’s Doug, that she summoned him simply by thinking about him. But then she sees the name of her Common Parlance castmate, Dylan, on the display. She starts the car. She doesn’t have to answer. The group does everything by consensus, so it’s not like Dylan is in charge, but he more or less founded Common Parlance, and he’s been texting all day.

  “How did it go?” Dylan asks.

  “Horrible. She insulted my purse.”

  “Meow!”

  “There’s no meow. I was nice the whole time.”

  “I should have come with you,” Dylan says. There’s a decisiveness in his voice. She doesn’t bother reminding him he didn’t have the choice. Doug set the meeting up for Chloe alone. “Did you give her a flyer for the Grove?”

  “Of course I did,” Chloe says. “She won’t come. Anyway, LA isn’t the place for us. We should move to New York.”

  “Chloe, forget New York. New York is done. If we go anywhere, it’ll be Detroit or Boise, Idaho. Somewhere we can actually do some good.”

  Dylan assumes this speechifying air at least once per conversation. She pictures him standing on his coffee table, using his free hand to gesticulate to an imaginary group of admirers. She moves into the right lane, following signs for the 10.

  “I’m getting on the freeway,” Chloe says. “Let me call you when it’s less windy.”

  She merges onto the highway, matching the speed of the fifteen-mile-an-hour traffic. She slows to ten miles an hour, then five. Her hot car is no longer a comfort. She presses the AC button and waves her hand in front of the vent, but her air conditioner hasn’t worked in months. The hint of breeze blowing past her window is cruel, a tease.

  The traffic stops just as the first trickles of sweat begin their trek down the front of her chest and soak the seam at the lip of her tank top. “Shit,” she says. She’ll be drenched soon and has nothing to change into. She rips off her top and drives, shirtless, back to her day job.

  Chloe steps off the elevator into Beyond the Brand’s lobby just as the LED panel on the front of her desk morphs from periwinkle to magenta. Jo-Ann, the office manager, is at reception covering for Chloe. Jo-Ann tucks the front wisps of her gray bob behind her ears and smiles.

  “How was your audition?” Jo-Ann asks.

  “It was more of a meeting than an audition,” Chloe says. She glances down the hall to Doug’s office. His door is closed. The light is on, though. Chloe can see the glow in the frosted glass above the doorway. Doug is here.

  Jo-Ann grabs her cane and limps to the orange-lacquered cabinet behind the desk.

  Chloe starts to follow her. “Let me do that.”

  “No, no,” says Jo-Ann. “I need the exercise.” Jo-Ann yanks open the cabinet and leans to her right, shifting her weight onto her good leg. She reaches for a clean headset with her left hand.

  Chloe sits. She counts the colors in the lobby: the slate couch and violet pillows, the splashes of orange leading to a large, open warehouse of an office with communal tables and rounded corners everywhere. It was part of a reality show, the redesign of the office. Doug didn’t have to pay for it. His wife set it up.

  “Do you know Doug’s wife?” Chloe asks.

  “Emily?” Jo-Ann hands Chloe a headset. “Of course.”

  Chloe wrinkles her nose. “I’m not sure I like all these colors together.”

  Jo-Ann takes a salted caramel out of the bowl above Chloe’s desk. “Did you change the booking for the Warner preview?”

  “Yep,” says Chloe. “And I fixed the questionnaire.”

  Jo-Ann tosses the caramel to Chloe. “You get a prize.”

  “Thanks!” Chloe says. She unwraps the candy and pops it in her mouth, settling back into the normal rhythm of her day. Beyond the Brand is a cheerful place. Most of the employees are upbeat and interesting, just like Doug.

  Chloe hears his voice. It’s muffled, on the other side of his door. He’s with at least two other people. The meeting spills out into the hall with exclamations of “Great!” and “We’ll get you more titles tomorrow.”

  Chloe runs her fingers through her hair. Maurice, the innovation strategist with the shaved head, appears from around the corner. He stops. “Hey, you,” says Maurice. “How’d your meeting go?”

  “How did you know about my meeting?” Chloe asks.

  “People talk,” he says.

  Who talks? Is Doug talking about her? “People talk way too much around here,” Chloe says. Jo-Ann and Maurice let out deep laughs.

  Their chatter draws more guys out to reception; Jeremiah, the IT manager with the crazy full beard; Roderick, the statistical-modeling fellow in ironic pinstripes; Tom, the recruiter with the fleshy fingers; even Teddy, the mail room guy with the hair growing out of his ears.

  Chloe is back in friendly territory now. She’s surrounded by men. Men buoy her. They anchor her. It’s like a promise, their attention, that she’s special or meant for something special, and she floats inside their gaze, riding the currents of the way they look at her, lapping up their compliments and small favors.

  The same scene plays out multiple times over the course of each workday with a revolving cast of male coworkers and sometimes Jo-Ann. The conversations are light and usually centered on the salacious side of current events. Sometimes they ask her what Fefu Fornes, the pop star, was like. “So sweet,” Chloe usually says before changing the subject to the “real art” she’s now doing. They love to tease her about her performances. “So what, you’re a mime?” is a running joke. “I’m not a mime,” Chloe always whines and aims a rubber band at whoever says it.

  Today, the talk has turned to yet another LA Times article about millennials.

  “What’s with the participation trophies?” says Tom, the recruiter. He has a wreath of silver hair above his ears, the only man in the office who’s let himself go naturally bald. “Chloe, did you get a prize just for showing up to soccer practice?”

  Chloe blinks back a quick firecrack of anger. Questions are snares. “I think I’m technically Gen Z,” she says. Tom peers down at her with a thin-lipped smile, like he’s registering some silent advantage. She shrinks. “I mean, I moved around a lot.”

  It’s like a magic trick then, the way Doug suddenly appears at Tom’s side, rescuing her. He always does that, shows up in the middle of things and catches everyone off guard. “Am I interrupting anything?” Doug asks and leans back on his heels in an expansive gesture. Whenever he talks, it’s with a twinkle and nudge of good-natured condescension.

  Chloe’s eyes go to his arms. They’re muscular and tan, and he’s wearing an army-green T-shirt she’s never seen before. His hair is messier than usual. She tries picturing what he’s like at three in the morning, exhausted or wasted, dropping all professional pretense. Tom clears his throat and shuffles aside.

  Doug points to Chloe. “How was the meeting?”

  She searches his face for hidden malice, any sign his wife told him about her f
reak-out looking for the flyer. His expression is open and sincere. “It went great,” Chloe says. “Your wife is so sweet.”

  “Your wife?” Jo-Ann purses her lips and looks from Doug to Chloe. She excuses herself from the conversation.

  Doug leans over the counter. He lowers his voice. “How did it really go? You can tell me.”

  Chloe and Doug share a smirk, a flash of understanding that of course it didn’t go well. It never goes well with wives, because wives are shrews who hate younger women and nag their husbands and never want anyone to have any fun. The rest of the crowd drifts away.

  “Seriously! She’s putting me in touch with her commercial department.”

  He nods. His voice and face are gentle. “You made it out unscathed, then? I’m impressed.” She’s never heard him speak so softly, so without his layers of glib and swagger. Is this what he’s like in his personal life? Does his wife have access to this?

  “I’m impressed,” says Chloe. “You’re in a power couple.”

  She leans onto her elbows. He glances down her shirt. Married men have always been off limits, but Chloe can’t remember why anymore. Nobody here cares. FOD, they call the staff members he has affairs with. Friends of Doug. Things like right and wrong, they lose their meaning the longer Chloe stays in LA.

  Take Doug’s wife. All Chloe did was ask her a simple question about the Calder in the lobby, and she had to be so snotty. What do you think? That’s what Emily said. It’s like the woman doesn’t care if she hurts people’s feelings.

  Chloe stares up at Doug. He seems amused, almost giddy. She can still back down, flub another moment, and embarrass herself for the umpteenth time today. Or she can decide. She can focus the tangled buzz of seduction hovering hot over her skin. That’s what Emily would do. Everyone else, they take. It’s time for Chloe to do the same.

  “To be honest,” she says, “I felt a little guilty going to the meeting.”

  Doug draws his head back and studies her. Crap. She’s flirting too hard. But wasn’t he just hitting on her? Isn’t he always hitting on her? He looks down each empty hallway before fixing his eyes on her like he’s watching her but also letting her in on a secret. She loves it when he looks at her like that, like he sees something in her.