The Withdraw

Such was the way of cubicle life: our vents whirred, our phones rang, and we sat mostly in silence. The stock market hadn’t yet opened when Steph asked if anyone remembered Don Watson.

“Don Watson?” Barry stopped walking back from the coffee pot. He looked at the overhead light for a moment and squinted his eyes. “Yeah, I remember him.”

“Well, you’re not gonna like this,” Steph said, taking the readers off her nose and folding them. “His daughter’s dead.”

Her face had gone soft, red, swollen, and her voice cracked when she said, “They found her this morning.” She appeared to me then like a cherub in an oil painting. The overhead lights made her flyaways illuminate into a halo, white and opaque.

Steph breathed a heavy breath. I loosened my tie.

Barry did not respond. Instead, he dropped his mouth and widened his eyes a little, then shuffled his shoulders and crossed his arms. A big sweat stain shaped like a chicken wing materialized down his back; he had cinched his tie too tight. It was so cold in that office, I remember, and colder, then, outside.

“I just don’t know whatta say,” Steph whimpered. She put her hands together like she was praying and set them on her forehead, elbows on the desk. She closed her eyes, and I heard her whisper barely, “The needle was still in her arm.”

I didn’t know Don Watson or his daughter. Dizzily, I kept typing.

Our office was a dull green-gray but painted well. There were quick stock tickers mounted to the walls like televisions, computers stacked in tri-folds, conference rooms with mahogany tables, marble floors running down the hallway to the elevator, and I wondered if anyone ever thought how nice it was to walk down a hall like that. We were up with the clouds, I thought, among reserved snowflakes.

Jessica’s shoes snapped against the stone coming towards us. “What’s wrong today, Steph?”

Steph and Jessica worked together like the two ends of Newton’s cradle; Jessica swung and hit Steph, and Steph came back and blew through the whole office as consequence. Daily dramas. Often, this had to do with the market’s performance or too-loud phone calls or how Intern Jake burnt the coffee. Silly kid, sober kid. He didn’t know any better, he grew up in the suburbs.

Jessica saw Barry and shrugged her hands.

“Don’s girl died,” he said, staring at the floor.

She widened her eyes. “Mercy.” She paused.

Then Intern Jake wandered in, and they all just stood there and talked about the only things they knew about Don Watson’s daughter and gripped their mugs until the coffee inside grew cold, until their fingers turned blue–that she went to a prep school on the other side of the state–out in Philly, right?–and that Don Watson bought her a used Volvo when she turned sixteen, and how they all told-him-so when she totaled it at sixteen-and-a-half. She had red hair and they knew — or were pretty sure — she majored in Philosophy at some liberal arts school. She must have dropped out around the same time Don Watson dropped out of the trading business for retirement. And that one time Don Watson brought her into the office for Christmas, how she was dressed like an elf — so damn cute, said Steph — and she kept showing everyone her missing teeth. How old was she? Five? Six?

She was twenty-three.

Don Watson sent her to rehab, and they all knew. Don Watson was a good father, they were sure. Don Watson had a good girl.

“I mean–I just can’t–I have no words,” said Steph. Her eyes were red. “She was just a kid.”

They stood staring at the carpet together for a long time. It was new and blue and had raised strike marks on it–something that could be found nowhere other than a skyscraper with a mirrored elevator.

I once met a woman named Mila who worked in the office five floors below. She introduced herself holding open an elevator door with a flat palm and she brought her lunch in a plastic grocery bag. She seemed nice. She must have known Don Watson.

The whole building knew Don Watson. People kept leaving their desks to fill their metal coffee cups in our break room and to mumble remembrances in shades of hush within the claustrophobic square footage surrounding my cubicle.

I accidentally elbowed a woman with thick glasses grabbing my briefcase on my way to lunch. It was not Mila. I looked for her then and again when I came back. She was not there.

But Jessica was, when I came back, and her face was swollen like Steph’s. She told me to take the rest of the day.

“Do you know Don Watson?” she asked me.

“No,” I said honestly, “but the name sounds familiar.”

“Don Watson used to be an analyst here — he was so good with the trusts — and he left a while before you came — matter of fact, he had your desk — but anyway, his daughter’s dead, and we’re just gonna get outta here early today.”

I told her, “Of course.”

“Only twenty-three.” She shook her head side to side. “How old are you again?”

“Twenty-thr–er, I guess twenty-four.”

Jessica made a fist and put it up to her lips, biting at her thumbnail. She looked at me with glassy eyes and put a hand on my shoulder. “Have a safe trip home.” She turned, taking her hand with her.

When I got home, I went straight to the shower and turned the temperature up so high that my breath became steam, vapor, cloud. I got shampoo in my eyes and it didn’t burn, but rather felt tight, like it was sucking out all the moisture I let in.

It was my birthday. I didn’t want to tell anyone at work, though. Partially because they wouldn’t care, partially because I knew at everyone else’s birthday party, we all went around every time and said who’s ticking up next and they asked every time, “When’s your’s again,” and I would tell them “It’s January fourteenth,” and they would say, “Oh, yeah, that’s right, that’s right,” as they looked down at the cake in their hands a moment before popping their heads back up for another bite.

When I got out of the shower, I poured a bowl of cereal and sat on my couch and turned on the television. I sat through grainy commercials for local law firms and dentists who sang shrilly about needing my business. It was nice, I thought, getting my money’s worth for the cable. I waited for the eight o’clock news.

The screen cut to a police officer. Yeah, we got a report this morning, he said. We’ve been monitoring activity ’round in Shadyside for quite a while but, uh, we found her and all the paraphernalia when we got to the apartment. The officer sort of looked around. These things, you know, they happen.

There was stock footage of caution tape.

Concealed between couch cushions, in a mattress, underneath the kitchen sink.

Emergency lights twirled.

Trafficking.

Snow.

Too late.

I buzzed the screen to black.

The living room was cold. I set my bowl of cereal milk on the carpet and pulled the quilt my grandmother made for me off the back of the couch and I slept there. Because Don Watson’s daughter died.

And when I woke up, it was three in the morning. My throat was dry, and my breath tasted terrible. I left the quilt but took my bowl into the kitchen and washed it and dried it and put it away. I had this feeling then, like I was a kid. How I longed for listless innocents.

Sometimes when I think about these sentiments, I still do. I’ve been hurting all over for a stranger I knew so well.

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Behm is a writer from West Virginia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, The Allegheny Review, The Haverford Coterie, and Zeniada.