PART 1 — THE DOCUMENT
My name is Elio Vantresca.
Before the shooting, men stood up when I came into a room. I do not say that to be admired; I say it because it is the thing that fell over.
Shipping contracts, civil works, two hundred and eleven people on a payroll. My signature moved a man’s year.
Then somebody put a round through my T12 on the Pier Nine site at six in the evening in the February.
Complete injury at that level. I have never walked since and I am not going to.
That morning Solange was at her dressing table doing her mouth.
“Roark needs you on the Pier Nine transfer.”
“Tell him to come up.”
She stopped with the lipstick about an inch from her face.
“The men don’t like seeing you like this.”
I watched her in her own mirror.
“I’m paralysed, Solange. I’m not dead.”
She looked at the table. “I’ve got a fitting.”
The wedding was eleven weeks away.
She went out of that room without touching me, which by then was normal and which I had stopped noticing until I wrote that sentence down.
Twenty minutes later Ida came in.
Brown hair in a knot she had clearly done in a car. Circles under both eyes. A navy tunic that had been through a machine about four hundred times.
“Morning, Mr. Vantresca.”
She pulled the blanket back and looked at my legs before she looked at my face, which almost nobody in that house did any more.
“Your left foot’s up. I’m elevating it after your wash.”
I said, “Why do you actually work here?”
She looked up. “Because I need the money.”
That surprised me more than it should have.
“You’re not frightened of me?”
“Should I be?”
I nearly laughed, which I had not done since the November.
She told me, without my asking, that the agency billed me thirty-five an hour and paid her twenty-five. Her sister has medical bills. Rent does not care how tired you are.
No loyalty and no pity. Just the arithmetic.
She got me sitting forward and washed my back with a warm cloth, and it ought to have been humiliating and it was the first ten minutes in six months in which I was a person in that house rather than a problem being managed.
Then she went quiet.
“What?”
She put the cloth down.
“Your fiancée cancelled your therapy this afternoon.”
My hand closed on the rail.
“Why?”
“She told the day staff it doesn’t matter any more.”
Something went cold in my chest, and it was not about my legs.
Solange had sat in a room in the March and heard a consultant say the word uncertain, and she had decided that uncertain meant finished.
Then Ida leaned in slightly.
“I didn’t cancel it.”
I turned my head.
“I rang Hollis myself. He’s coming at three.”
And then she said the thing that changed the year.
“Mr. Vantresca. I don’t think she wants you to get better.”
She looked at the closed door. Then she took a folded sheet out of the pocket of that tunic and put it on the bed beside my hand.
I knew the signature before I read anything.
And I got as far as the first line of it.
PART 2 — SAY GOODNIGHT
Six weeks after I came out of hospital, there was a thing at the house on Crescent Row.
Not a party. Twenty-five people. Two of the board, four of the site managers, Roark, a man from the port authority, and enough wives to make it look social.
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