Bean slipped into her office, tossing her black overcoat on the rack behind the door, before sitting down to check her email and voice mail. Throughout the day Bean worked through a stack of files, returned phone calls and emails, read letters that piled up in her inbox before dictating memos to file and giving instructions to her assistant; but her mind wandered, drifted like the snow that rose on updrafts outside her window. She feared her birthday with a dread that tugged at her throat and pressed against her ribcage like an iron lung. She felt as empty as the recycling bin next to her desk when the cleaning staff dumped out its contents. She skirted the thin edge of a bottomless pit filled with her personal failures: her failure as a wife and mother, her failure as a daughter, her failure as a human being.
She left the office at six o'clock, feeling the weight of her briefcase tugging at her shoulder. At the train station, she shoved a five dollar bill into the hand of a beggar, thinking charity might give her a short fix of self-satisfaction; but it didn't. When he thanked her she feigned a smile, then she hurried to catch the southbound train as it pulled up to the station.
After dinner, Bean wrapped leftover spaghetti before stuffing it into the fridge, next to the corpses of dinners past, some of which expired before her marriage did. Grief didn't consume her evening like they did at the beginning. She resigned herself to the failure of her marriage, like sour milk that sat in the fridge so long even the cat wouldn't drink it. Better to drain the half empty carton down the sink than to cry over it.
Light music drifted through the house, soothing her in waves that kneaded the tight knots from her neck and shoulders. With Cassie asleep Bean sipped red wine and began reading Sartre in the living room, hoping to escape her fate in the fate of others. The tangy sweetness rolled across her palate, reminding her of a wine tasting tour she took with college friends through the Napa Valley before she married. Life was simpler then. Possibilities soared on Santa Anas. She sat with one knee up on the brown leather couch, brushing tangles out of her long chestnut hair with one hand and holding Sartre up in the other. Behind the ghostly trunk of a birch tree, sunset flared out soft reds briefly before darkness filled the yard. A quiet peace settled over Bean as she leaned into the cushions. Let tomorrow come.
In the morning hours of March fifth, a north wind blasted the city streets clear of people. Somewhere between Anderson and Chinook station, as the crowded commuter train rocked its way down the narrow gauge, Bean turned forty. When she stepped off the train platform downtown, a strong gust of wind pelted her face with beads of snow. Bean wretched at the collar of her jacket with thin fingers curled around the collar. Bracing against the wind, she hurried across the street to her building. The office towers cast no shadows under grey skies today.
Bean held the smile on her painted face, brushing snow from the front of her black jacket with her hand. Pushing herself through the revolving doors, she resolved to treat today as any other. She squeezed herself onto the crowded elevator, making herself as small as a little girl, before slipping past the knees of men.
She hid in her office with the door closed all day, and even managed to clear a spot off her desk. The desk was redwood laminate, a colour she'd not seen since she first started over a year ago. When Susan Burgess tossed her office door open at six, and announced with her usual bubbly voice, "That's just about enough of that working, Bean. You have a date with a bottle of red wine tonight," Bean winced.
"Yeah, I know." Bean pulled her coat on and grabbed her purse, while her phone went to voicemail. Client's could wait, her birthday couldn't.
The red wine flowed freely, perhaps too freely, at El Greco's, where Bean sat among close friends and workmates. Bean sucked down wine with an abandon not seen since college. Back in college, weekends blurred into one endless flash of strobe lights and pound of heavy bass, where her veins coursed with youth, and she danced in nightclubs until the early hours of the morning.
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