Never Enough Time, page 19
Co-owner, says Hal, now back inside my head, where he belongs.
“What?” I say that out loud, since I have no idea if Hal can hear my thoughts, although I have a yicky suspicion that he can.
You told me to remind you, says Hal, and I nod, letting him know—if I am letting him know—that I’d like to be reminded of every fucking thing.
“All I said was that you were early,” says Min-Jae, looking kind of resentful himself.
“I am early,” I say. “And I’m distracted. And very very happy to see you, Jae.”
At that, Jae’s face lights up and all is forgiven and he hugs me again and I hug him, even harder than he’s hugging me.
“How’s Marie?” I say.
“She’s going to be late,” Min-Jae says. “She’s bringing candles with her and she didn’t have the ones she wanted. So she’s waiting for the store to open.”
I laugh, but Jae’s not laughing.
“There’s no one here yet but us,” he says. “And today is, well, you know. It’s your sevens day. And Marie said . . . well. You know.”
I shake my head.
“I have the wrong day?” he says. “But I was sure.”
“No, you have the right day,” I say. “Is Bennet coming?”
You’re not supposed to mention him, says Hal.
“Maybe,” Jae says. “He’s hard to pin down.”
“I know,” I say.
“You do?” Jae says. “Marie said that you know more than it seems like. You do own thirty-seven percent of this building and that stuff in Westchester and of course Ludlow. I thought you were going to live there, but Marie said you wouldn’t and she’s right, as usual.”
“I would live there,” I say. “I’m going to move there this afternoon.”
Min-Jae laughs now. “Delaney! You’re so impulsive. I love that about you.”
“Let’s have another séance,” I say. “The last one was so good.”
“It was great,” Jae says. “The best one I’ve ever hosted. Want a donut?”
No, says Hal, who apparently is in charge of making sure I don’t eat any donuts.
“Yes,” I say. There’s a plate of donuts on the sideboard, and a sugary one looks particularly appealing to me, so I put it on a plate and take a bite just as Hal says, Don’t. You’ll regret it.
“This is the best fucking donut I’ve ever eaten,” I say, making the donut sound even better than it is, although it is pretty excellent. I haven’t had a donut in weeks, or what I mean is decades, and I can’t resist.
Stop there, Hal says after I take the second bite and—not that I’m doing as I’m told or anything—I put the plate and the part-eaten donut on the table, because I’m pretty full from the oatmeal, etc., that I had for breakfast. But I make a big show of licking the flecks of sugar off my fingers.
If Hal could sigh in disgust, he might, but instead he’s silent, which might be his version of disgusted sighing.
“Jae, how is it you know about the path of the sevens and no one else seems to?” I say.
“I wouldn’t say no one,” Jae says. He’s got two donuts on his plate and is nearly through the first one, which is covered in chocolate. The guy couldn’t be any thinner, so I guess donuts don’t affect him.
“You mean Marie,” I say.
“Yeah,” Jae says, starting in on donut number two even though he hasn’t finished the first one. The second one is covered in sprinkles. I’m happy to see that here, in the far far distant future—yeah, I’m exaggerating—they still have sprinkles. I mean, they’ve got to have something to make up for the voice in the head and the business attire.
“What’s this meeting about, anyway?” I say.
“You’ll see,” Jae says. “Be patient.”
“It’s hard to be patient under my current circumstances,” I say.
“Must be,” Jae says. “Hey, Marie!” He’s waving to someone behind me, and I turn around and through the glass wall, I see Marie approaching. She’s lugging a big bag—finally! someone with a bag—and smiling like crazy as she waves to me.
I’m smiling too as I wave back.
I feel like the most wonderful amazing exciting tremendously good thing is about to happen.
Don’t touch that donut again, says Hal.
Chapter 66
Marie, like her husband, Min-Jae, looks nearly the same as she did the last time I saw her, back eons ago on Ludlow Street. I wish I could say the same about my silver-haired self. I won’t even go into the other changes my face has undergone—use your imagination, but don’t use that much. Just a small little fucking smidgeny bit. Thank you.
“I found seven Our Lady of Guadalupe candles!” Marie says as she bounces into suite 17 here on the seventy-third floor of a building I own part of. I hope I own this part of it, since the view of the harbor is pretty great from here.
“Marie!” I say, unable to contain myself. She and I hug, harder and longer than Min-Jae and I did. I don’t even know this woman, but I feel very close to her and her husband. Like we’ve known one another for years or decades or centuries.
Maybe you have, says Hal, shocking me. He can read my mind? This is too fucked. I think about turning my head and blinking, but I don’t. I might need him again later, and I know only how to turn the voice off, not how to turn it back on again.
“I’m going to resign today,” I say once the three of us are seated, all of us with fabulous views. Lady Liberty has sent me a silent message, which message loosely translates to Set yourself free, and I’ve decided that resigning from whatever the fuck I do is the best choice.
A rash decision? Maybe. But rash is all I’ve got, and I’m going to go with it. Tomorrow I’ll be sixty-five, and in another week I’ll be dead. I don’t want to spend another minute in the outfit of an ex-philosopher.
“That’s why we’re here,” Jae says.
“You knew?”
“Delaney,” Marie says, “you really crack me up sometimes.”
“I’m glad I can amuse you,” I say. I mean it.
You can’t resign, says Hal.
“Why the fuck not?” I say out loud.
“Do you have the voice turned on?” Marie says.
“I thought you had that operation,” Jae says.
“Yes, and I didn’t,” I say. “Or if I did, it didn’t work.”
“It doesn’t always work,” Marie says, sympathizing. She’s putting the candles out on the big table, arranging them to her satisfaction. “I’ve heard some stories.”
The day, which used to be bright and sunny, is now dark and overcast. And maybe a little foggy.
“It’s telling me I can’t resign,” I say.
I’m it now? says the indignant Hal.
“Hal’s telling me I can’t resign,” I say to shut him up.
“You can’t really call your voice Hal, can you?” says Lachesis, who’s just barged in. She’s already helping herself to a donut, one of the cream-filled ones, this one with purple icing.
Lachesis is dressed in another scarfy flowy concoction and, unlike Marie and Min-Jae, she’s aged a bit, although only a bit. Instead of looking like a young girl, now she looks like a young woman. Very young.
“I can call it any bloody thing I want,” I say.
That’s right—you tell ’em, Hal says in a surprising show of solidarity with me. Maybe he likes being called Hal. Gives him a sense of historic, epic, filmic, Kubrickian importance.
“And what the fuck are you doing here, so-called Lachesis?” I say. I’m not happy she’s showed up. Is this the final day, so she thought she’d drop by to be here for my last moment? Take notes? Gloat?
“That so-called is harsh,” Marie says.
“That is her name,” Min-Jae says.
I guess the three of them are allies. Them against me.
Us, says Hal, and I turn my head and blink my eyes. Fuck you, Hal—there is no us.
“It’s not like you’re the real Lachesis,” I say, and before anyone has a chance to counter me, I say, “Not that there’s any real Lachesis. She’s a myth.”
“You would know about myths,” Lachesis says. She’s taken a deck of cards out of her pocket—unsurprisingly, she has no bag with her—and is shuffling them.
“I would,” I say. A vision of the coward Amy blurts into my head and I shake it, but the image won’t dislodge.
“Seen any crows lately?” Lachesis says as she busies herself with the most adroit card shuffling ever seen outside of a nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat.
I pick up the sugary donut and take a huge bite of it. Hal is silent. Gone, I hope.
“I’m resigning today,” I say to Lachesis.
“I heard,” she says.
“That’s why we invited her,” Marie says.
“Is Ivan coming?” I say, then remember that that was only my nickname for him. I don’t know what his real name was or is.
Marie and Jae whisper to each other, then nod. Lachesis finishes shuffling the cards and fans them out on the table, then gestures over the perfect arrangement with a flourish.
“Choose one,” she says just as I hear the door creak open behind me.
Chapter 67
By now the sky’s black and it looks like it’s going to rain or like maybe it is raining but it’s hard to tell from up here on floor 73. It just looks like the room we’re in is encased in a very quite dense dark cloud.
“Bennet,” I say as my spirit guide walks over to the donuts, picks one up, and starts eating it without even bothering to put it on a plate. A sugary donut, like the one I haven’t quite finished yet. He downs his in three huge bites and then picks up another and starts in on it.
“Delaney,” he says as he chews. He’s wearing the same fraying jeans and all-black T-shirt—or maybe he has a closetful of a thousand iterations of these same two items—that he was wearing all those years ago, that is, two days ago, in Grand Central.
And I see, as he devours his second donut, that he still likes sugar. Bennet, by the by, hasn’t changed at all.
“Is everyone here?” he says to everyone.
“I shut Hal off,” I say.
“Good thinking,” Marie says. “He can be very annoying.”
“Tell me,” I say.
“The reason I called you here,” Bennet says as he sits down at the head of the table, but before he has a chance to say anything else, I interrupt him.
“You called us here?”
Lachesis snorts. “You should give her a chance to choose a card,” she says to Bennet.
“I don’t abide by cards,” Bennet says. “Even candles are better than pieces of cardboard.”
Marie realigns one of her candles, then repositions two others, then nods in satisfaction at her handiwork.
“Delaney,” says Bennet, “as you know, I’m your spirit guide and, as such, it’s my obligation to tell you a couple of necessary things.”
“Like why the fuck I’ve been skipping ahead seven years every fucking single fucking day?” I throw my partial donut and the plate it’s on across the room, and the two objects make a very unsatisfying sound as they bounce across the carpet.
“That will stop tomorrow,” Lachesis says, and Bennet throws her a deep glare.
“You have your own charges,” Bennet says to Lachesis.
“Well, she’s part mine,” she says.
“Not,” Jae says. “Not at all.”
Lachesis reaches across the table to where she fanned out the cards, picks one, turns it over, and skips it down onto the top of the array: the seven of clubs.
“You should let me light the candles,” Marie says, and Bennet nods in her direction. She pulls an old-fashioned matchbook out of her jacket pocket and lights all the candles. By now it’s pretty hellish dark in here, and I appreciate the light, as eerie and spooky and creepy and wavery and fucking chilling as it is.
“Is everyone finished?” Bennet says. I had no idea he was such the take-charge guy. I think of him more as a sort of jester or actually a complete bum. A good-looking bum, but a bum.
No one says anything, and the head turning must’ve worked, because Hal’s been silent since I did it.
“As you know, tomorrow’s your last day,” Bennet says to me. He’s smiling as he says this.
“My fucking what?” I say, not smiling even a small tiny eensy wee fucking bit.
“Well, it can’t be a surprise,” says Lachesis.
“Be quiet,” Jae says to her. “Can’t you see Delaney’s upset?”
“I’m not upset,” I say. “I’m fucking furious!”
“Don’t knock over the candles,” says Marie, more concerned for the Our Lady of Guadalupe candles than she is for me. She puts her arms out to protect them. And since they’re the only source of light in this gloomy, black, caught-in-a-rain-cloud room, I feel kind of protective of them as well.
“It’s the seventh day tomorrow,” Bennet says. “I was sure you knew that, Delaney. I’m sorry if you didn’t. I’ve been a poor spirit guide.”
Hunh. He’s been a fucking useless spirit guide.
It’s never occurred to me that the cycle will end on the seventh day. I add up the days in my head: (1) grad school, (2) blackout, (3) London, (4) Coney Island, (5) funeral, (6) today. Tomorrow is in fact the seventh day.
Six days ago I started out as a careless, unknowing sixteen-year-old and now I’m a more careless, more unknowing, utterly confused and totally pissed-off fifty-eight-year-old. That’s six days. Tomorrow will be the seventh.
“Delaney’s going to resign today,” Min-Jae says, ever the helpful friend. Am I resigning from life?
“Maybe not,” I say. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“You don’t have to,” Lachesis says. “The seven of clubs has decided for you.”
“Cards don’t decide anything,” Marie says.
“Now, now, children, let’s not argue,” says Bennet, who hardly looks like he could be the parent of anyone in suite 17. But he’s an ancient spirit, so he’s probably a zillion years old despite the blond hair and resilient, relaxed physique.
“As I was saying. Tomorrow’s your last day.”
Chapter 68
“You mean the cycle of sevens stops tomorrow?” I say as I reinterpret Bennet’s words, twirling them around until they seem to be saying something I’d like to hear instead of something I dread hearing.
“Yes. It stops tomorrow,” Bennet says. He leans back behind him and picks another donut off the diminishing supply on the sideboard. This one’s yellow. A lemon donut?
It’s pouring rain now. Even up here on floor 73 the rain’s lashing against the windows and making a lot of fucking noise. I wonder how sturdy this building I own a big piece of is. How many other people are in it. How much they’ll all sue me for when the thing collapses because of a fucking rainstorm. Or if they’ll live to sue me.
“Why did you bring the candles?” I say to Marie. Why the fuck I’m asking that when I have far more important fish to flash-fry I’m not sure. But it’s all I can think about as the flickery light spells out my doom.
“Atmosphere,” she says. “And I thought you’d like them.”
“A kind of a going-away present?” I say.
“Not at all,” Marie says. “Just something to remind you.”
“Of what?”
“We have other things to discuss,” Bennet says. There’re specks of yellow icing on the edge of his mouth and just as I see this, he licks them off—as though he hears my thoughts, my reactions.
“I’d like my share in cash,” Lachesis says.
“What?” I say.
“My share of the building,” she says. “After it’s sold.”
“I told you I haven’t decided.”
“Hah,” Lachesis says as she stares at the seven of clubs, which I guess has decided for me. Or so she thinks.
“Just because you turned over the seven of clubs doesn’t mean that I’m selling my share of the building.”
“You’d be selling the entire building, actually,” Jae says. “Because you have all the deciding shares.”
“Oh,” I say. “Does everyone want cash?”
I cannot believe that I, a former philosophy major, a former high school student who didn’t want to write her final paper, a former young girl replete with two living parents and a lot of fury, is now wearing this gray suit, sitting in a glass conference room, and discussing the sale of a gigantic huge fucking building that I own the controlling shares in.
“I should never’ve gotten that MBA,” I say to myself, but Jae hears me.
“I think it was a good decision,” he says, and Marie says, “You can’t get too much education.”
“Let’s see what the cards think,” Lachesis says, and gathers them up and starts shuffling again.
“Stop it,” Bennet says. “No one gives a fuck what the cards think. Delaney, I’ll have my man arrange for all the cash to be distributed.”
“Your man?”
“I don’t deal in business transactions, Delaney. You know that.” Bennet swipes some of the donut crumbs off the front of his crumb-ridden black tee.
“You don’t or you can’t,” I say. As though this will help me. Or inform me. Or enlighten me.
“Both,” he says. “And wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t either,” I say, “except I seem to have.”
I seem to have wasted my entire life, losing Raj, getting an MBA, losing a baby, having brief and unsatisfying relationships with men—one of them my best friend’s husband—never talking to my mother about anything that means anything, and being a fucked businessperson in a fucking horrible suit.
I take off the gray suit jacket and throw it on the floor and run it over a couple of times with the casters on my chair. Like that’ll make something change. If only it would.
“My cash goes to Chloe,” I say.
“All of it?” Lachesis says. She’s still shuffling the cards, despite Bennet’s objection to them.
“All of it,” I say.
