Previously – Chapter 5: Shadows of Doubt
Patricia drove her, in a bathrobe with a coat over it, at twenty to five in the morning, and did not once suggest that Mia should not be going.
“Do you want me to come in?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll go home and get dressed properly and come back at seven with a thermos,” said her mother.
Mia thought about that sentence, on and off, for the rest of the autumn.
Main Street at a quarter to five was orange and black and completely empty. The light was on in the Lockwood lobby and the door was open, propped with the wedge, and there was water coming out over the threshold in a thin continuous sheet and running down the two steps into the gutter.
Mia stood on the sidewalk for a second and looked at it.
Then she went in.
* * *
The corridor ceiling had come down in one corner. Not the whole thing: a section about four feet square of drywall hanging by its paper skin, with water sheeting off the broken edge in a steady rope, and the fire-drill notice on the floor in an inch of water with the pin still in it.
Adam was on a stepladder with his arms above his head and a hacksaw.
“Don’t come down here.”
“What are you doing?”
“There’s a pipe.” He had to shout. The noise was extraordinary, a hard flat drumming that filled the whole building. “It’s a copper feed, it runs above the ceiling to the toilets, and it’s split about six feet back and I can’t reach the split.”
“Where’s the stopcock?”
“In the basement. I’ve turned it. It’s still coming.”
“Then it isn’t the stopcock for that run.” Mia was already moving. “Old buildings have two. If they put the toilets in later there’ll be a second one and it’ll be near the toilets.”
“How do you.”
“Because I’ve worked in sixteen buildings like this one,” Mia said, “and every single one of them had two.”
They tried the basement first, because Adam had already been down there and because he wanted her to see it, and Mia got nine steps into a set of open treads with no handrail and stopped.
“I can’t do this.”
“No. No, that’s fine, go back up.”
“Adam, I genuinely cannot do this. There’s no rail and the treads are wet and if I go down there I am not coming back up without a fire crew.” She was holding the door frame with both hands and her voice had gone somewhere flat and unfamiliar. “Tell me what you can see.”
He went down with his phone flashlight and described it to her from the bottom, shouting, over the noise, and it was in that four minutes, standing at the top of a set of stairs she could not use, that Mia Chambers understood something she had been avoiding for six weeks: there were now rooms in the world that were closed.
“Big old stopcock on the wall, brass, it’s turned all the way.”
“Is there anything coming off it before the turn?”
“What?”
“Is there a branch. Between the stopcock and the ceiling. Look at the pipe where it goes up.”
A pause.
“There’s a tee,” Adam shouted. “There’s a tee about a foot above the valve and it goes off sideways toward the front of the building.”
“Then that’s your run and the stopcock isn’t on it,” Mia said. “Come up. It’ll be near the toilets. It’ll be in a closet or behind a panel and it’ll look like nothing.”
It was in the closet behind the water heater in the accessible restroom, a brass gate valve on a spur, and it was seized, and it took Mia four minutes to find it and Adam twelve seconds to close it once she had, using the hacksaw as a lever.
The noise stopped.
They stood in the corridor and listened to it not happening. There was still water coming through the ceiling but it was falling now rather than driving, a lot of water finding its way down through a building rather than a supply pushing it.
“How long has that been running?”
“I got the call from Frank Reilly at four,” Adam said. “He was doing his paper route and saw the water in the street. So.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe three hours. Maybe five.”
Mia looked past him, at the studio door.
“Don’t,” Adam said.
She went and looked.
* * *
The floor was under water at the west end. Not deeply. Perhaps three-quarters of an inch, running slowly downhill toward the south wall the way water does in a room built in 1938, and it had reached the third window and it was still spreading.
Maple. Boards on joists. Pale, sixty years old, mopped every night for six years by a man who was standing in a corridor behind her holding a hacksaw.
Mia had seen a floor go once, at a theater in Rotterdam, and knew exactly what she was looking at.
“Adam.”
“I know.”
“Listen to me.” She turned around. “Every minute that water sits on those boards they take it up. They will cup. They’ll swell at the seams and lift and when they dry out in a warm room they’ll split, and the splitting is the part you can’t fix.”
“The show’s in eleven hours.”
“The show is not the problem.” Mia heard her own voice go somewhere she had not planned. “Adam, the show is a Saturday. That floor is the business. If those boards go, the whole room goes, and it’s six thousand dollars minimum and about four months, and you do not have either of those things.”
Adam stood in the corridor and did not say anything for about two seconds.
Then he put the hacksaw down and said, “Right. Where do we start.”
* * *
Water is heavier than people expect and there is always more of it than there appears to be.
They started with the wet vac from the hardware store, which Frank Reilly’s brother opened at ten past five in the morning to hand over, in a coat pulled on over his pajamas, because Adam called him.
It took four gallons a minute and there were, at a conservative estimate, three hundred gallons on that floor.
By six they had help.
Nobody had called anybody. That was the thing Mia never afterwards got over.
At ten past six Kyle Brennan was at the door in a fleece over pajama bottoms with a second wet vac and an extension reel. At twenty past, two of the fathers from the seven-to-nines with squeegees on poles, neither of whom Mia could name and both of whom knew hers.
At half past, Mrs. Fletcher, in a raincoat, with an armful of towels, a bucket, and an expression of grim delight.
“How did you hear?”
“Beverly Ann Wicklow called me at ten to six.” Mrs. Fletcher was already wringing. “She’d heard it from her son who does the salting. It’ll be around the whole of St Luke’s by nine and there’ll be forty people here by ten, and most of them will be useless and you’re to give them something to do anyway.”
She was right on all four counts.
Diane Coyle came at twenty to seven with Bethany, who took one look and started carrying chairs without being asked and did not stop for three hours. Two women from the church arrived at seven and were given towels. A man Mia never identified turned up at seven thirty with a generator that nobody needed and that he was extremely pleased about.
Lucy arrived at seven with a van she had borrowed from the pharmacy, four boxes of black trash bags, and a look at Mia that said we will be discussing this later.
Patricia came at seven with a thermos, as promised, and then went away and came back at eight with three more, and at half past nine with a tray of bacon sandwiches for nineteen people that she had made in her own kitchen and driven down in a laundry basket.
“Mom.”
“There’s no point in me pushing water about, is there,” said Patricia. “I’d be in the way and I’d be cold.”
At about twenty to seven Connor Reyes came through the front door in his school coat.
“Connor. It’s twenty to seven on a Saturday.”
“Tori texted.”
“How did Tori.”
“Bethany told her.” He was already taking the coat off. “Where do I go?”
“Vac at the west end, work downhill, and take the corner last.”
“Right.” He got about four feet. “Miss. Is the floor going to be all right?”
“I don’t know yet,” Mia said, and watched a seventeen-year-old decide not to ask a second question.
By half past seven there were nineteen people in the building. By nine there were twenty-six, and Mrs. Fletcher had been proved right about most of them, and Adam had found jobs for every single one, including a man of about eighty who was given the task of holding a fan.
Mia ran it from the doorway.
That was the arrangement she made with herself in the first ten minutes and she stuck to it for approximately eighty. She stood in the studio doorway with a mug of tea she did not drink, and directed.
“Not the corner, the corner’s the last place it drains to. Work the high end first.”
“Those boxes are going to wick. Anything cardboard goes out to the truck, all of it, I don’t care what’s in it.”
“Somebody open the fire door and the front door and both windows at the far end. It’s four degrees out there and that’s exactly what we want.”
Adam worked the other end.
They did not, in three and a half hours, hold a conversation.
He took the wet end and the machines and the physical problem. She took everything with a decision in it. Twice he looked up the length of the studio at her and said nothing and she said “no, the seam first,” and he went and did the seam. Once she said, “Adam, the fire door,” and he had it open before she had finished the sentence, because it was four degrees outside and because he had understood at six in the morning that cold dry air was the entire strategy.
At about half past seven Kyle Brennan came out of the supply closet and said, “Who’s actually in charge here?” and both of them said “he is” and “she is” at exactly the same moment, and about twenty people laughed, and Kyle said, “Right, well, that’s cleared that up,” and went back in.
At ten past eight the water was off the floor.
That was when it went wrong.
* * *
The supply closet was at the end of the corridor and it was three inches deep, because the corridor sloped that way and because nobody had gotten to it.
There were boxes of costume fabric in it, on the floor, and there was a chest of drawers full of paper: rosters, six years of them, the enrollment forms, the insurance file.
Mia went in because everybody else was in the studio.
She knelt down.
She would think about that afterwards more than any other part of it: that she knelt, on a wet concrete floor, on both knees, at eight in the morning, and that at the moment she did it she had a completely clear thought, and the thought was don’t, and that she did it anyway because the fabric was going to be ruined in four minutes and because there was nobody else there.
She got the boxes up onto the shelf. Six of them. They were not heavy individually and she lifted them from the floor to shoulder height one at a time, which is the single worst movement available to a hip like hers, and she did it six times.
Then she got up. It took a while. Then she pulled the chest of drawers out from the wall.
It was full of six years of paper and it had swollen at the base and it did not want to come, and Mia braced her left foot and put her shoulder into it and turned.
It moved about eight inches.
And her right hip did something she had not felt since March sixteenth. It was not a pain, exactly, but a lag: a sensation of a thing arriving late, of a joint reporting for duty a half-beat after it had been asked, and then a bright hot line straight down the front of the thigh.
Mia sat down on the wet floor.
She sat there for about ninety seconds, alone, in a supply closet, in three inches of water, with her back against a chest of drawers, and told herself in a very calm interior voice that it was a muscle, and that she had been on her feet since half past four, and that this was exactly what Sasha had described as a flare, and that it did not mean anything.
Then she got herself up on the shelving and went back out into the corridor.
Lucy was coming the other way and stopped dead.
“What have you done.”
“Nothing.”
“Mia.”
“I moved a chest of drawers,” Mia said, “and it was stupid, and I know, and if you say anything to him in the next nine hours I will never forgive you.”
Lucy looked at her for a long moment.
“Sit down in the office,” she said, “and I’ll bring you the tea you’ve been carrying around for two hours without drinking.”
* * *
By nine the floor was dry to the touch.
By ten it had eleven fans on it, borrowed from four households and the diner, all pointing down the length of the room, and the temperature in the studio was four degrees and everybody was in coats.
Frank Reilly’s brother came back at nine thirty, having gone home and got dressed, and looked at the boards for a long time.
“They’ve took some up,” he said.
“How bad?”
“Not as bad as it’d have been.” He crouched and put his hand flat on the maple by the second window. “You’ve got it off there quick. There’s some cupping coming at the west end, along the seams. It’ll want watching for a month. If it lifts, it lifts, and then you’ll know.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then you got away with it,” he said, “and somebody up there likes dance.”
The ceiling in the corridor was a total loss. There was an area of wall in the supply closet that would smell of damp until March.
The studio floor was intact, cold, dry and covered in eleven fans.
At eleven o’clock, Adam stood in the middle of it and said, to about fourteen people in coats, “Right. Does anybody want to tell me why we shouldn’t do this thing at four o’clock?”
Nobody did.
“There’s a hole in the ceiling in the corridor,” said one of the church women, reasonably.
“There is.”
“People will see it.”
“They will.”
“Well,” she said, “put a bucket under it and a sign on the bucket,” and that was, in the end, exactly what happened, and the sign said THIS IS NOT PART OF THE SHOW in Mrs. Fletcher’s capitals.
“Then somebody help me get the chairs in,” Adam said, and Kyle Brennan said, “Already in the van,” and that was the whole of the decision.
They went at it until two. The last hour was the strange one: twenty-odd people in a warm building doing small unnecessary jobs and not going home, because nobody wanted to be the first, and because there is a particular reluctance that comes over a room that has just got away with something.
Mrs. Fletcher put the chairs out with the diagram. Bethany Coyle and Connor did the mirror with vinegar and newspaper and had an argument about newspaper. Somebody found the fairy lights.
At half past one Frank Reilly’s brother came back with a moisture meter and went around the west end taking readings and writing them on his hand.
“Fifteen percent at the second seam.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s not bad,” he said, which in Pine Falls was a standing ovation.
* * *
Mia sat in the office with her leg out straight and a bag of frozen peas from the diner on her hip and let people come to her. They did, in a stream, for about an hour.
Mrs. Fletcher came first, with tea, and stood in the doorway.
“You want to keep that on for twenty minutes and off for twenty.”
“I know.”
“Everybody knows and nobody does it.” She put the mug down. “I did my knee in 1994 and I had it on for four hours straight and did myself more harm than the fall.”
Then Bethany Coyle, who had been carrying chairs for three hours and who wanted to know, with tremendous casualness, whether the running order had changed.
Then Connor, who did not come in, but who stood in the corridor for about fourteen seconds looking at the door and then went away again.
That was the one that got her.
Then Lucy, twice.
Then Patricia, with a bacon sandwich, who put it on the desk and said, “Don’t,” before Mia had opened her mouth, and went away.
And at about eleven, Tori Dorsey, who came in and shut the door. Nobody else had done that.
“Miss.”
“Mia.”
“Miss.” Tori stood with her back against the door. “Is it the hip or is it the other thing?”
Mia looked up.
“What other thing?”
“You know.” Tori shrugged with her whole body, the way sixteen does. “Bethany’s mom says the studio might shut. Because of the Crestwood place. And people keep saying it in the parking lot and then stopping when I come past, so.”
Mia had about four seconds to decide how much of the truth a sixteen-year-old could carry, and got it, she thought afterwards, roughly right.
“It might,” she said. “Not because of today. Today’s fine, the floor’s fine. But there’s a new studio opening in November with a proper floor and six days a week and a lot of money, and Lockwood has ninety-one students and no money, and some of those ninety-one will go, and that’s arithmetic and not anybody’s fault.”
Tori’s face did something.
“Would I have to go?”
“No.”
“Would you want me to go?”
And there it was, seven weeks early, in a cold office, from a girl in a hoodie with a hair clip in her hand.
“Ask me that again in a year,” Mia said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” Mia agreed. “It’s the only honest one I’ve got today, and you’ll notice I didn’t give you the other one.”
Tori thought about it, and nodded, and went out, and Mia sat with a bag of frozen peas and understood that she had just made a promise she had no business making.
* * *
Adam came in at half past one and shut the door behind him and looked at the peas.
“Right,” he said.
“It’s a flare.”
“Mia.”
“It is a flare. It’s soft tissue, I’ve been on it since half past four and I’ve had a whole night without sleep, and this is precisely the thing Sasha told me would happen and told me not to panic about.” All of which was true and none of which was the truth. “I’ll be sitting down for the whole show.”
“You moved a chest of drawers.”
“Who told you.”
“Nobody told me. There’s a chest of drawers eight inches out from a wall and marks on the floor behind it and you’re the only person in this building who was in that closet.” He sat down on the corner of the desk. “You could have asked.”
“There was nobody there.”
“There were nineteen people here.”
“There was nobody there, Adam, in the closet, at the time,” Mia said, and heard how it sounded, and stopped.
He didn’t say anything.
“I know,” she said.
“I’m not going to give you a lecture. I’ve had about eleven of them delivered to me this year and they don’t work.” Adam rubbed his eyes. He had been awake for thirty hours. “But I want to say one thing and then I’ll drop it.”
“Go on.”
“Everything in that closet is replaceable. All of it. The fabric’s forty dollars and the rosters are on Lucy’s spreadsheet and the insurance file is a photocopy.” He looked up. “You went in there and you knelt on a concrete floor for a box of blue nylon, and you’re the only thing in this building that isn’t replaceable, and I’d like you to have that information.”
Mia sat with the frozen peas on her hip and did not have a single thing to say.
“Right,” Adam said, and got up. “Doors at four. There’s a woman in my lobby with a diagram of a chair arrangement and I’m frightened of her.”
At the door he stopped.
“Thank you,” he said. “For the second stopcock. There isn’t a version of today where we open, if you’d been asleep.”
Then he went out.
Mia sat in a cold office with a bag of peas going soft on her hip and the sound of a hundred and forty chairs being put out on the other side of the wall.
She had a month, she thought, to decide whether to tell anybody.
She took the peas off. Then she put them back.
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