Run!
We ran.
PART
I
ONE YEAR LATER
1
POSTER CHILD
CECILY
I’m late again.
That’s rarer today than it was a year ago, because now, when I feel the tick of time, my body starts to prickle with an anxiety I can’t shake without medication, and I feel each second pass as if I’m one of the gears in a clock. As a result, more often than not, I’m early, my foot tapping with impatience as I wait for others as they used to wait for me.
After what happened, I can’t believe anymore that being late has no consequence. I’m proof to the contrary. Yet, my changing personality isn’t rationally connected to what happened. I’m alive today because I wasn’t in the building. I wasn’t sitting on the fifteenth floor in a conference room with a river view, trying to remain calm. Because I was late, I was safe. Close by. Marked, scarred, even, but alive.
Five hundred and thirteen other people weren’t so lucky.
So I don’t want to tempt fate again or rely on not being where I’m supposed to be to save me from my destiny. Like the man who escaped the Twin Towers, only to die in an airplane crash a few years later. Death had plans for that man; it would not be denied.
But despite my efforts, I am late today, my racing pulse reminds me. I check my watch for the twentieth time. It’s only five minutes past when I’m due, not enough to matter, I tell myself, breathing in and out slowly as I’ve been taught to do in these situations.
My pulse slows. It will be all right. Death will give me a reprieve; even it can’t punish me for my lateness today of all days, the day before the first anniversary of my husband’s death.
• • •
“Cecily Grayson?” the receptionist for the Compensation Initiative asks. I try not to notice as every head in the room snaps toward me with a collective so that’s who she is. It would be wrong to notice. Immodest. Selfish. Ungrateful.
I’m not allowed to be any of these things.
Instead, I raise my hand as if I’ve been called on in class, follow the receptionist to my meeting with Teo Jackson, and try not to think about the fact that this building also has a fifteenth floor and I’m on it.
The Initiative said they chose the floor deliberately when they rented the space and announced their intention via press release. They did it to remember—memorialize—the fifteen-floor building that had come crashing down a year ago. Remembering. That’s their purpose, they repeat loudly and often in ads you can’t skip at the beginning of YouTube videos or those pop-ups that follow you around the Internet like a basset hound.
Remembering’s important, but the Initiative’s real purpose is compensation. Weighing up a life lost and assigning it a value, then paying it out to the victim’s family, changing their lives forever, though they’ve already been changed forever. There’s big money in this, I’ve learned, as the furnishings on this floor attest. I’m surrounded by plush gray carpet, newly painted cream walls, and expensive pieces by up-and-coming Chicago artists hanging under directed lighting. People might leave here millionaires or paupers, but they’ll all be treated to the experience.
As if love or loss has a price. As if being denied access to the funds set aside to ease their way through life after suffering this tragedy can be softened by a glass of ice water with a perfect lemon wedge floating in it.
I push these ungrateful thoughts aside. The Initiative has done a lot of good for a lot of people, myself included. I shouldn’t be so critical.
Teo Jackson’s waiting for me in a boardroom lined with corkboards. They’re covered in multicolored cue cards arranged in columns. Above each one is a white card with one word on it. Street, reads one. Unidentified, reads another.
“Cecily,” Teo says. “Great to see you again.”
“Is it?”
Teo rubs at his close-cut beard. His skin is a dark amber, and he’s wearing his trademark gray-blue T-shirt under a well-cut corduroy jacket. Inky jeans. Converse shoes. He’s worn some variation of this outfit every time I’ve seen him. I imagine his closet divided into four neat sections, his day eased by a lack of decisions.
“Why would you even question that?” he asks, smiling with his eyes. I avoid eye contact. Teo’s far too handsome for my current level of self-esteem.
“My therapist says I need to be more . . . definite.”
“Does he?”
“She. Yes.”
I wasn’t in therapy before, but it’s the only place I can unburden myself. Now I use the fact that I have a therapist as a measure of someone’s merit—if they flinch or look embarrassed when I mention it, then I know they’re not worth bothering over.
Teo doesn’t flinch or look embarrassed. He does, however, say, “Wait.”
He picks up a pink card, writes Poster Child? on it in thick marker, then tacks it into place beneath the Street column.
“What’s all this?”
“It’s my storyboard. My map of the day.”
He smiles again. It’s the first thing I remember about him, how he smiled and told me it was going to be all right when he had no way of knowing if that was true. But there was something about him that made me want to believe him, and so I did.
“It’s what I do for every film,” he says. “It’s a way to set out the narrative.”
“But it’s a documentary.”
“It still has to tell a story. Have a beginning, middle, and end. A protagonist and an antagonist.” His hand shifts from one column to the next, tapping the cards so they pop. “A hero.”
His hand comes to land on the card he just wrote on.
“I’m not the hero, Teo.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
A year ago, Teo had been scouting locations with his assistant for a commercial he’d agreed to shoot to pay his bills. He was photographing some of the homeless who
