One Good Dog (2 page)

But this morning, all Adam had wanted for himself was a bowl of Norwegian granola and a fucking run through the contrived landscape of his most recent gated neighborhood. He wanted his “me time,” thirty minutes to call his own, leaving the Bluetooth behind, keeping his head down and his eyes only on the path so that he didn’t have to wave at neighbors or their help. His best ideas often came to him during that thirty minutes.

There was only one thing stopping Adam from just taking his run and going into work a bit late. He held himself and his staff to a rigorous standard of punctuality. Adam March entered his office at precisely seven-thirty every day. Not one minute before or after. It was a source of incredible satisfaction to him that people could set their watches by him. Adam
believed that timeliness was an art and a science. Despite the ten-mile commute and all the variables of traffic, Adam arrived on time. And woe betide the staffer in his group who wasn’t there to greet him. Adam required simple things of people, the sine qua non of his expectation: Be on time. The groups that wandered into the building here and there, untaxed by punctuality, smacked of a basic sloppiness he would not allow in his.

Adam stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, looking at an attractively craggy face, his morning shadow of dark beard firming up a jaw that had only just begun to soften. He stared into his own cold brown eyes, eyes that had earned him the nickname, “Dead Eye.” A nickname he didn’t find offensive, but grudgingly affectionate. A face with gravitas. A face suited to the take-no-prisoners deal maker he had become.

If there was a shadow of an angry, grizzled man in the mirror, Adam swept it away with a brushful of French milled shaving soap.

Adam runs a hand down his silk tie, tucks the strange note into his jacket pocket. Sophie is still AWOL. He stares at her empty chair and, for the first time in many years, wonders about his sister.

Sophie’s armless secretary’s chair is cocked at an angle, as if its occupant weighs more on one side. Her computer screen with the Microsoft logo drifting around speaks of her having been on the computer opening up the e-mails that she will either forward to him or to his underlings or delete as unworthy. It isn’t enough that she’s in the building. Sophie needs to be at her desk when he arrives.

Adam lays the offending piece of memo paper down and
opens up his old-fashioned top-loading briefcase. He can’t remember what he’s looking for. There she is, slinking back to her desk with a giant paper coffee cup in one hand, a pastry in the other. Even from deep in his office, Adam can see that she has a flake of icing on her chin. Now Sophie really is testing him. Instead of dropping everything and grabbing her notebook, she leans over her computer keyboard and taps the mouse. She is checking her e-mail. On his time. Outrageous. Sophie knows this is an important day. What can be more important to her than getting her marching orders from him? He’s really getting tired of her insubordination.

Your sister called.

Adam sits on the floor of a small kitchen. The floor beneath him is sticky, splotched here and there with stains so old, they are part of the geometric pattern of the linoleum. He plays with a Matchbox car, making car noises as he pushes it along and around the cracks in the tile. He is underneath the kitchen table. Four chairs are pushed in; only one has someone sitting in it. His father. Big feet in work, boots, one lacing looser than the other. One foot tilted just a little on the rubber edge of its lug sole. Adam runs the little car up and over the feet of his father. His father shifts his foot away, removing the mountain. Adam putters his lips and propels his car around the perimeter of the defined space beneath the table. He can hear the clink of glass on glass, and the rustle of the newspaper being folded. They haven’t had supper yet, and there are no sounds of it being prepared. A pair of improbably high-heeled vinyl boots appears. His big sister. From his lair, Adam can see her knees, pale, knobby protuberances peeking out over the top of the white boots, above them a long sweep of skinny leg to the hem of her miniskirt.

“Where do you think you’re going?” His father’s voice is low, tired.

“I’m going out. I told you.”

“You are not. You need to start dinner.”

“You promised.”

Suddenly, his father scrapes back the chair and stands up. “Veronica.” Now all Adam can see is his blue work pants, the too-long pant legs covering the tops of his black steel-toed boots. His sister’s legs are obscured by their father’s. “No, I didn’t. You have responsibilities in this house.”

“Fuck my responsibilities.”

The sound of the slap is sharp, brief, startling, like the sound of his cap gun, and involuntary tears spark his eyes. His sister makes no sound. “Don’t you talk like that, young lady. Who do you think you are?”

“I’m sick of this. I’m sick of you. I’m sick of being the unpaid babysitter. He’s your kid; you take care of him.”

Adam watches from beneath the table, watches his sister’s long legs in those ridiculous boots stride to the back door. They live on the second floor; this door leads to the back stairs, to the dank hallway below with its clutter of empty cans and unused garden tools. She opens the door.

“Don’t you walk away from me.” His father’s voice is authority, dominance, power. Adam is too young at five and a half to think in those words, but he recognizes the hollowness in his chest every time his father speaks. The hollow fear that the troll beneath the bridge is talking to him and that he won’t have the answers.

From under his kitchen table cave, Adam watches as his sister’s legs come back, coming closer, until her small feet in the vinyl boots point directly at him. He feels a little relief. She’s back. She’ll stay.

He leans out a little, to see past his father’s legs. Veronica speaks, and what she says become the last words he’ll ever hear from his sister; the last words he remembers. “Fuck you, old man.” The door slams shut. And he is left alone with his father.

“Sophie.” A little more insistent. He needs to stop this before it goes any further. Where is that girl? Why isn’t she here standing in front of him with her little steno pad, her lilac-colored pen at the ready, waiting for his orders, waiting for his needs to be expressed and acted on. Waiting to hear him say that he, Adam March, has no sister and that whoever left that message should not be given any encouragement. He will not speak to her. Even before he can start the day’s critical work, now he has to tell Sophie she’s made a mistake, that despite those three innocuous words, despite what some woman has told her, he doesn’t have a sister. Sophie needs to be smarter about crank calls.

In more than forty years, he’s never had a word from her, not since the day she stormed out of the house, leaving him behind, alone with their widowed father. Veronica has been gone so long that he’s never spoken of an older sister, not even to his wife. Why would he bother bringing up a faint memory, a vague recollection of sitting on the couch and sharing a bowl of popcorn, when Veronica’s existence has nothing to do with him? With who he is. Who he has become.

Adam has not so much denied his history as created a whole new mythology—that of self-made man, his history beginning not with childhood, but with his summa cum laude graduation from the University of Massachusetts with his B.S., followed by his Harvard M.B.A. He has whitewashed the years of working as a Pioneer Valley Transit driver to pay for college.
He has downplayed his childhood as a virtual orphan, refusing to speak of his past with a firmness that implies a slightly romantic, yet painful experience, not the facts of a father who gave him up to the state. Or the series of foster homes. The degradation of a life in the system. Long ago, Adam March encapsulated his actual childhood as the body will encapsulate a splinter, forming a hard mass of cells to separate the foreign body and dissolve it. In its place, he found ambition. Adam is a man who always catches the gold ring.

Adam folds the pink note.
Veronica. “He’s your kid.” The sound of a slamming door.

Adam feels a tiny squeezing of his heart muscles. Not pain, not angina. Something else. Tension. The tension that makes him the tiger he is in the boardroom. Adam closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them and rereads the note.
Your sister called.
That is all that is written on the paper. No number. No address. No name. As if he knew them already.

Certainly this is Sophie’s misunderstanding, but what if it’s not? What if, in some bizarre circumstance, some unimaginable turn of events, his sister has come back? If so, what does she expect? A tearful reunion? What does she want? Money? That makes some sense, and he makes a mental note to call his lawyer as soon as he can break free from the day’s high-pressured activity. He opens the slip once more.

Your sister called.
The shaky ground on which he has built his life trembles.

“Sophie.” The name spoken in a flat tone, devoid of warmth, as if addressing a dog. A dog that is being disobedient. A dog that needs training.

“Be right there, Mr. March.” Adam can see Sophie framed in the open office door as she bends over her computer, tiny dimples forming in the backs of her knees where her slightly too-tight, slightly too-short skirt slides upward in defiance of his dress code. Ties for the men and appropriate office wear for the women. Adam March does not tolerate Ally McBeal wear in his office. Sophie’s ample backside wavers from side to side as she taps the keyboard with a response to whatever it is she’s finding so amusing at his expense. His expensive time.

Suddenly, his mouth is dry and he is very thirsty. As he reaches for the carafe on his credenza, Adam suddenly feels his blood pressure drop, and with it a swooping dizziness, a sense of being outside of his own head. He touches the edge of his desk for solid contact, but his hands feel disembodied, attached to his wrists by threads. The momentary dizziness stops as his blood pressure begins scaling up, but not the sense of plummeting.

Outside of his office, Sophie laughs. Each note of her musical trill strikes him as increasingly taunting. Adam’s thoughts are circling wildly, his razor-sharp thinking suddenly clouded with anxiety. He’s got to get back on track; he has important phone calls to make. He doesn’t have time for distractions. He doesn’t have time to puzzle out what this means. Time for a sister.

Adam crushes the note and tosses it into the receptacle beneath his desk.

His sister, thinking to just walk back in, to pick up a relationship she abandoned when he was a little kid? Leaving him to be passed from one foster home to another? To jeopardize everything he’s spent his whole adult life building?

Adam retrieves the note and tears the sheet into halves,
quarters, and eighths. Adam March has no sister. He has a business to run.

“Sophie.” Adam says her name again as if it is a dead word, a word that is meaningless, invented. “Sophie.” Harder on the second syllable. SoPHIE. Not imploring. Threatening.

The girl stands with her back to him, bending over her computer keyboard, her whole posture mocking his authority.

“Sophie.” His voice gone from authoritative mezzo forte to forte, and still the girl doesn’t come to him.

Still bent over the keyboard, Sophie raises one hand and waves back at Adam, a casual, dismissive salute, acknowledging his voice but postponing his wishes. Putting him off. Like Sterling puts him off. Time and again, when she stands in front of him in their bedroom, unabashedly naked, slowly lotioning herself, spraying the fine mist of her signature perfume into the air and walking through it, readying herself for whatever social event they are scheduled to attend or host. Untouchable. Her surgically enhanced body nearly unattractive in its rock-hard contours and artificially enhanced breasts, but invoking lust in him anyway. Lust that Sterling allows only afterward.

Waving him away like Ariel does, diminishing his importance in front of her teenage friends.

Sophie’s dismissive hand lowers to the keyboard, the importance of her electronic friend subsuming the importance of him. She shifts, the dimples behind her left knee disappearing and the ones on her right deepening, little mocking eyes.

Too much has been invested in this day. This day’s anticipated outcome. Too much of Adam’s time, effort, reputation, and future is wrapped up in his almost eighteen months of
careful analysis, planning, coercing of colleagues to see that he is right, that this takeover is the right thing to do. Too much of his life has been spent in building up to this moment; maybe his whole life has been lived in preparation for this glorious day. With today’s launch, he will step into his rightful place as CEO designee, no longer lying in wait to take over Louis Wannamaker’s position. The years of building upon the weak foundation of his boyhood, his years of achievement, will come to fruition as heir apparent.

Veronica. He called out her name, then and for years after she slammed through the back door.

And Sophie is seriously challenging his authority. She needs reminding. She needs to remember herself and her place in this corporate pack.

“Don’t you talk back to me, young lady.”

Your sister called.
What idiot believed some raving madwoman?

Adam’s mouth is bone-dry; his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. His pulse is pounding in his right temple, a curiously painful thumping that seems audible, as if he can listen to the rising of his blood pressure. He is out of breath. Behind him, the morning light casts a yellow square onto his massive black desk, his shadow like a keyhole in the center. He presses his knuckles against his leather blotter. A thin line of ragged pain arcs between his eyes for a single audible pulse beat. Adam presses his knuckles down harder, presses himself against the edge of the black desk, rocks a little to gain momentum, and pushes off. Coming around the wide desk, he knocks the regulation vase of fresh flowers askew; the foot of the fluted glass vase is suspended slightly over the edge, its balance held by the weight of the arrangement. A lily petal loosens and falls to the
floor. Adam’s shoe crushes it into the carpet, a pink stain like roadkill against the macadam-colored weave.