THE ROOM UNDER HER NAME

Chapter 2 — A Place to Put the Baby

Eli got the jam jar out of the suitcase while the grown-ups were arguing about whose office might offer them privacy. He unscrewed the lid just enough to check that Grandpa was still inside. He had been four when his goldfish died and had since acquired a perfectly reasonable distrust of adults who told him things were gone and then produced them in a different container.

“Please don’t open that here,” Maya said.

“I didn’t spill him.”

Julian offered to hold the jar. Eli zipped it into the front pocket of his sweatshirt instead. This gave him the look of a small kangaroo expecting trouble.

“Marisol,” the woman at the green door said when Maya asked her name. “My husband is Luis. Little one’s Ben. I’d ask you in if I thought you’d fit.”

Presidential suites were large enough to host a campaign reception, but a family being moved at two hours’ notice could fill any space. There were carrier bags of food on the piano. A drying rack in the bathtub held eight tiny socks. Luis had disassembled a crib and taped the screws into a paper cup that said CALDER HOTEL, EST. 1928. A toy bus had rolled beneath a cabinet. A child’s life had happened in this room while executives downstairs had called it inventory.

“You have it until Monday at least,” Maya said. “In writing, if you like.”

“I like.”

Maya took out her phone and sent an email to Marisol, copying Peter, promising that no charge would accrue and nobody would enter the room without permission before noon Monday. She sent a second email confirming that the first included both nights over the weekend and Monday morning. Marisol had asked. People who had been surprised by bills learned to ask precisely how the calendar worked.

“Do me a favor,” Julian said from the hall. “Before you give away the rest of the building, let’s have a word downstairs.”

“I just spent the price of two nights you’d already sold me at a hotel I own. I think we can absorb it.”

“Can it absorb the rest?”

“Which rest?”

He glanced at Marisol. His discretion arrived with such impeccable timing that she almost laughed.

Arthur took Eli to the end of the corridor to look at the laundry chute. Maya could see them from the doorway. Her boy was teaching him how to turn a piece of key envelope into a paper helicopter. She had taught him that trick in a hospital car park the day her father stopped recognizing faces. He could do it better than she could now.

“Eighteen families,” Julian said. “Twenty-six adults, fourteen children. Your father opened the west wing after the Linden pipes burst. He made a handshake deal with a fellow from the management company. Insurance would reimburse us, the apartments would be repaired in three weeks, everybody home for Christmas. That was September of last year. It is now May. Three insurance companies and two management companies later, guess how many bills we’ve collected on.”

“From the families?”

“From anybody.”

“Then why does she have a personal bill with Dad’s signature?”

“It’s a guarantee. The insurer has to see what the guest would pay in the absence of coverage. Their accountants need a number.”

Marisol reached back inside and came out with a second piece of paper. “Their accountants didn’t take four hundred dollars out of my husband’s checking account.”

Julian read the slip. He was an experienced enough businessman to recognize a bank receipt upside down. The time he spent turning it around was time he spent working out his answer.

“I’ll look into that.”

“You looked into the last one too,” Marisol said. “February eighth. You were wearing that tie. Ben threw up on it.”

He examined the silk as if the stain might still be there. Maya had an unexpected memory of this man on his knees at her eighth birthday party, dabbing at her spilled punch with his best handkerchief while her father got the camera. She had loved him once with the uncomplicated love children have for adults who show up with presents and no expectation that they will also enforce bedtime. His wife had died young. He had let Maya pick the music at the funeral and had sat through five minutes of a little girl singing into the wrong side of a microphone.

“Peter, get a room for my nephew and me,” he said, meaning Eli. “For my niece and her son. And send us coffee in the boardroom.”

“I’ll take eight fourteen,” Maya said.

Peter’s eyes slid toward Julian. The look took only a moment. It told her more about the organizational chart than any of the papers her father had left.

“Eight fourteen is quite small,” Peter said.

“I’m only five foot six.”

“It’s beside the ice machine.”

“I like ice.”

Fifteen minutes later Eli lay belly down on the twin bed nearest the window, drawing a face on a paper cup. The room looked onto the brick side of an office block. Its bathroom door had swollen in the frame. When the ice machine emptied itself into its steel bin, the noise was like a man throwing a toolbox down the stairs. Maya checked that the window locked, tested the smoke detector and found a bottle cap under the bed. Her father had taught her to inspect a room by imagining she was arriving there with a toddler and a headache.

Eli patted the mattress twice. That was their signal that he wanted her beside him without the indignity of saying so. She took off her shoes and joined him.

“When you said she couldn’t work here,” he began, then rolled the cup between his palms. “Is she going to be poor?”

“I don’t know what her money looks like.”

“Henry’s dad didn’t have a job for a long time. Henry kept his shoes in a grocery bag so the holes wouldn’t get wet.”