Chapter 4: Clean Hands

The bathroom key at the Gulf station was chained to a hubcap, and Rachel had never been so grateful to hold a hubcap in her life.

“You gotta buy something,” said the man behind the bulletproof window. Fifties, Yankees cap, reading glasses on top of the cap, a Daily News folded to the crossword. “Sign says.”

“I’ll buy something.”

He looked at her. At the trash bags. At the grit in her hair. She watched him start adding it up and decide not to finish.

“Restroom’s around the side,” he said. “Lock sticks. Lift up on it.”

The station sat on the Deegan service road, all fluorescent light and diesel smell, trucks hissing past on the highway above. The restroom was one toilet, one sink, one mirror with a crack running corner to corner, and a pink soap dispenser that said BUBBLEGUM BLAST on a peeling sticker.

Rachel locked the door, lifted up on it, and looked at herself.

Okay. So that was bad. Mascara from yesterday had migrated to her cheekbones. Her hair had dried in the shape of a pillar.

She stripped to her bra. She stuck her head under the faucet, which only ran cold or scalding with nothing in between, and she pumped that bubblegum soap into her hair eleven times and scrubbed until her scalp burned. The water ran brown, then gray, then clear. She washed her face, her neck, her armpits. She was not proud of how she did her armpits. No paper towels, so she dried her hair under the hand dryer, bent sideways, waving at the sensor like a lunatic every time it quit. Twenty-two minutes, start to finish. She’d timed it.

Her work blouse was in better shape than she was. White, cotton blend, wrinkled to hell, but it had been under her coat and it was mostly dry. She buttoned it up to the collar. She put on the black pants that had been in the second bag, the less wet one. She smelled like a twelve-year-old’s birthday party, which beat a river.

When she brought the hubcap back, she bought a pack of Trident for $2.29.

“Sal,” the man said, sliding her change through the tray. He tapped his chest. “Night shift. Ten to six.”

“Rachel.”

“Lift up on the lock, Rachel.” He glanced at the trash bags again. “Those, you can leave behind the counter. Nobody touches nothing behind my counter.”

She hesitated. Everything she owned, with a stranger.

“Or carry ’em to work,” Sal said, and went back to his crossword. “Your call.”

* * *

She left them. Two trains, the 4 down to Fifty-Ninth and a cross-town shuffle, then twelve blocks of walking with nothing in her hands for the first time since Linden Court. Eight dollars and seventy-one cents left, and some gum.

The building on Central Park West had a green awning and a doorman named Hector who called her Miss Moore and had once told her his daughter wanted to be a dentist. She said “Morning, Hector, how’s the future dentist,” and her voice came out completely normal, and that scared her more than anything.

Forty-two floors in a mahogany elevator that didn’t make a sound.

The penthouse was glass on three sides. This morning gray cloud pressed right up against the windows, so close you could almost open one and touch it.

Mrs. Ruiz was at the stove in the gray stone kitchen, stirring something in a copper pot. She’d run this house for eleven years. Sixty-something, short, silver bob, an apron that said nothing cute on it. She did not miss things.

“Buenos días, mija.”

“Morning, Delia.”

Mrs. Ruiz’s eyes went down to Rachel’s flats. The leather was black and dark with wet, and there was a white salt line across the toes where they’d dried and gotten wet again. Then back up, slowly, to Rachel’s hair.

“You smell like candy,” Mrs. Ruiz said.

“New shampoo.”

“Mm.” The spoon kept going around. “It’s raining a lot, eh? For your shoes.”

“It’s raining a ton.” Rachel was already grabbing the French press, the Ethiopian beans, the white mug. Her hands knew where everything lived. “Is he up?”

“He’s always up.”

She carried the coffee down the hallway at 8:03. Left side of the desk, handle at four o’clock. The study door was open a crack and Julian Cross was on a call, standing at the window with his back to her, one hand in his pocket. Dark hair. Charcoal sweater. Six-foot-three of a man who never fidgeted. He was saying “No. No. Then find out,” in that low flat voice he used on people who were about to have a bad day.

He didn’t turn around. She set the cup down and got out.

That was Julian Cross. Eight months she’d worked here, through an agency under her maiden name, and she could count their real conversations on one hand. He was a closed door, a voice down the hall, and some days a pair of gray eyes that landed on her in a doorway and seemed to read her like a receipt, all the way down to the tax, and then moved on. He paid on time, said please, and never once asked her a personal question.

She loved that about him. Nobody in this apartment knew she had a husband. Nobody here knew Michael Hayes existed. It was the one place on earth that was only hers.

So she worked. She worked like a machine with something to prove. She stripped his bed and remade it with hospital corners she could’ve bounced a quarter off. She did the glass on the terrace doors twice. She vacuumed the rug in the den in perfect stripes and then went back and did it again because one stripe was crooked. She did not think about the boy in her window. She did not think about the red sleeve.

At eleven she slipped into the laundry room and shut the door.

Her blouse had wrinkles on top of wrinkles. She took it off, standing there in her bra between the Miele washer and the folding counter, and hung it on a hanger and ran the steamer over it, the Rowenta hissing and spitting, the room filling with hot white fog. It felt so good on her bare arms she almost moaned. Like a hug from something that didn’t want anything back.

She steamed the collar and the cuffs. She had her own blouse on a hanger and her own skin goose-pimpled and her eyes half closed in the warm.

She put it back on, buttoning fast, and turned around.

Julian Cross was standing in the laundry room doorway.

She had no idea how long. He didn’t look embarrassed. He didn’t look anything. His gray eyes went to the steamer, to the damp spots on her cuffs, to her shoes with the salt line across the toes.

“You were three minutes late this morning,” he said. “In eight months you’ve never been late, Ms. Moore.”

He waited.

“What happened?”