Chapter 16
Vanessa was spilling scrambled eggs onto her sister’s plate—plastic and sectioned off in bright colors so that the foods wouldn’t touch each other—when her phone began to buzz. The eggs heaped over one section into the other on purpose, as it was Vanessa’s secret way to mask the fact that multiple foods at breakfast time was a strange luxury from a bygone era. Setting the plate down in front of Emma, who wouldn’t stop drawing at the table, Vanessa clicked the green button on her phone screen. It was a number she didn’t recognize, however the area code was local, so the chances of this person being a bill collector were slim. Still, a pang of terror ran up Vanessa’s spine as she moved the phone to her ear.
“Hello?” She sounded tentative, unsure.
“Hi, good morning,” a cheery woman perked into the phone. “Am I speaking with Vanessa?”
The unease took a tighter hold. Skeptically, Vanessa replied with a gulp. “Yes. Who is this?”
“Hi Vanessa, this is Rebecca from Human Resources at Kümertech Incorporated. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
Bewildered, yet still with some sort of shaky understanding of the root of her newfound connection with Kümertech, Vanessa eyed Emma over her shoulder. “Emma,” she said as she tilted her head away from the microphone. “Can you be a good girl and eat your eggs? I need to take this call in the living room.”
Emma nodded theatrically, her sandy blonde hair coming loose from the lopsided ponytail that Vanessa had haphazardly thrown together on top of her sister’s head.
Walking in to the living room, Vanessa said into the phone authoritatively, “I’m here. What is this regarding?”
“Well,” Rebecca said in a disarmingly cheerful tone, “I have a direct order from our CEO to reach out to you on whether or not you’re interested in the position that has just opened up.”
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “I’m sorry,” she began, trying to be as polite as possible. “I don’t think I’m sure what you mean,” she stammered.
“Oh, I was… under the impression that you and Mr. Ridley knew each other well. He… didn’t tell you?” Rebecca sounded confused.
Vanessa was silent. What could she say? It felt like she was unexpectedly barging into a lion’s den, and the lion was worried about not having set an extra place at the dinner table.
“Let’s back up,” Rebecca started again. “There’s a position open at our company to be the secretary to the CEO. I have been instructed by Mr. Ridley himself to give you a call and offer you the job. Now, I thought he’d already discussed this with you, so I apologize for my candor. Would you like me to go over the salary and benefits with you now over the phone, or should we meet in the office to discuss and negotiate?”
Vanessa’s voice was long gone, floating along a river of surprise in a far-off yonder that she couldn’t see. She was only 21 years old. An uneducated stripper caring for her disabled little sister in the wake of her parent’s death. A cushy office job seemed like it was galaxies away, in another dimension where the social tiers weren’t so bold, so stringent. And a salary negotiation? Any job that paid a salary instead of a measly hourly wage was a dreamy, distant reality for Vanessa, whose mind still calculated things in terms of minimum wage at a panicked moment’s notice. Insecurity pumped through her veins. Why was she being considered for this? Youth aside, she had no marketable skills. What did she bring to the table?
“L-l-let’s…” Vanessa stuttered, “Let’s arrange to meet.”
“Okay, no problem. How does today at 1 p.m. sound?”
“Oh, can it be earlier?” Vanessa asked, the talons of her daily responsibilities shanking her as they gripped her. “I need to pick up my little sister from school, and the bus route calls for a few transfers. I’m worried that a meeting that late will cause me to be late getting her after her classes are done.”
“Oh, I completely forgot to mention,” Rebecca chuckled. “Pending acceptance of the position, a company car is available for you to drive today. As soon as you sign the onboarding paperwork, you're free to take the keys.”
Was this a joke? It had to be. Vanessa reasoned that if she just stayed silent, listening ever fervently to the other end of the call, the breathing would transform into giggles, and whatever insensitive idiot whose mind hatched this plan would shout, “GOTCHA!” into the receiver before hanging up.
And yet, Vanessa hadn’t told anyone about her lurid trysts with Aaron. Not even Jessica. The last time she saw him, Jessica watched Emma while she thought Vanessa was working. Filled to the brim with shame and disgust, Vanessa didn’t tell her that she’d blown off her shift at the strip club. How could she? It would be deplorable enough if there was a good reason for it, but this… this sneaking around with a wealthy man twice her age? No. Vanessa could never confess that to anyone, much less the woman who so graciously watched after Emma night after night without asking for a dime.
“Vanessa? Are you still there?” The voice boomed into the phone, drowning out Vanessa’s billowing thoughts.
“I… yeah, I’m here. I'm sorry. There’s a car? I wasn’t… um… I wasn’t expecting that.”
“It is quite a perk, yes,” Rebecca said in a voice that translated to a smile over the phone. “So, can we expect to see you at one today?”
“Well… sure. Okay,” Vanessa’s voice was still tinted with hesitation, but she couldn’t turn this down. Her callow naïveté was in full bloom in the past few days as she burned bridges and shirked responsibility, all for the sake of physical contact.
“Great! Hey, real quick before I let you go,” Rebecca was speaking to her as if they were already colleagues, old pals who passed each other in the hallway and commiserated in the ladies’ staff bathroom after changing their tampons during the workday. “What’s your last name? The email from Mr. Ridley only says your first name.”
“It’s… McCarthy.”
“Okay, perfect. I've got you in for a meeting with me here in Human Resources at one o’clock p.m. today. Make sure that you bring your social security card with you, as well as any photo ID you have and a copy of your birth certificate if you have that, too. We’ll see you a bit later!”
“Thanks,” Vanessa replied in a daze. “Bye.”
* * *
Once Vanessa had dropped Emma off at kindergarten, she walked upstairs with what felt like blocks of lead for shoes. Each step seemed to melt her feet into the floor, dragging her down, preventing her from making the pilgrimage upstairs for the first time in over a year. Her room and Emma’s room were on the ground floor, and all that sat on the top level were her parents’ rooms: a home office, the master bath, and of course, their bedroom. Gulping, Vanessa turned the handle on the door to reveal a ghostly, ethereal memory. The smell of a life she used to know came whooshing toward her, drowning her in nostalgia. Everything is as it was: all the trinkets her mother collected were in perfect order on the bookshelf, and all her father’s books were stacked on his bedside table. The only thing separating their room from its lively counterpart in the past was dust, blanketed over every surface and populating the air. The dust was a thick smog inside this forgotten room, preserved in time.
Vanessa knelt down beside her father’s side of the bed. With hands that trembled in the ocean of sentiment that poured through her just by walking through his door, she managed to spin the dial on the lock of the safe where he kept all his important documents. Tears blinded Vanessa momentarily as her mind flashed back to the day he died, three days after her mother, to whom she never got to say goodbye. Her father’s injuries in the car accident were just as severe, yet he wasn’t killed on impact. For him, death came slowly and methodically.
The last three days of his life were stretched out by a metaphorical medieval torture device, which maimed him to death in creatively anguished ways. He whispered to Vanessa the code to the safe, instructing her to memorize it, in the final hours she spent with him—before he was put into a morphine coma to pass away peacefully. He was dying—being slowly chipped away by the knife of death—and he hissed at his daughter to memorize a code for a safe. Nothing important was even in the safe, just birth certificates, social security cards, scarcely used passports and bank statements to accounts without a substantial amount of savings. There were no heartfelt confessions of unconditional, parental love, no tear-stained goodbyes. Just three numbers whispered in a hoarse tone for a daughter who didn’t know how to march out of the room unassisted, much less into the next phase of her life.
Here, now, in her parents’ empty room, Vanessa found her documentation: two little pieces of paper over twenty years old that signified who she is. That’s all she had to do to prove her identity, flash these two documents. We’re all just piles of paperwork, she thought to herself. Is this all I am? Is this all anyone cares about? While Vanessa was certainly far from her own biggest fan, she couldn’t help feeling like she meant more to the world than two fraying, decades-old sheets of paper.