Mark was on hand to deftly block the bulk of the crowd from her path.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Annoyed,” she said, smiling confidently for anyone who might be watching. “It’ll be fine. Someone threw red tape in front of us, I just have to cut through it.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Better not, someone will accuse you of a conflict of interest for just standing here. But thanks.”
The good luck expression he gave still seemed worried, but she waved him off.
Celia gathered her things, personally thanked the mayor for delaying the vote, said a few unassuming words to the rest of the committee, and avoided talking to anyone she didn’t absolutely have to. Danton Majors was the last in the line waiting to ambush her on the way out. She couldn’t dodge.
“An unexpected round two, I take it,” he said. His smile was maybe meant to be sympathetic. Or smug. Or both.
She smugged back. “I’m sorry, I can’t comment until I’ve spoken with West Corp’s lawyers.”
“Ah. Of course. Well then, until round three, Mrs. West.”
Mrs. West was her mother, not her. She saved her ire for a more important argument and left the room.
Reporters were waiting in the lobby. Tipped off by Superior Construction, no doubt. Maybe this was all a stupid publicity stunt. She wouldn’t put that kind of thing past anyone.
She spent a stunned moment standing frozen in the elevator after the door opened, confronted by a crowd of photographers snapping pictures and reporters holding out recorders. Maybe only five or six of them, but the group seemed immense when they were all standing in front of her. Shades of days gone by, when they’d shout questions about her joining the Destructor and expect her to say something coherent.
Then she smiled and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t comment until I’ve spoken with West Corp’s lawyers.” Marched straight through the middle of them to the car waiting outside, where Tom ran interference, blocking the way while she escaped into the back.
* * *
She never understood it, but she’d come to appreciate it over the years. Warren West’s grave had started as a simple granite block at the edge of the family plot, where his own parents were buried. A square gray headstone read:
WARREN WEST
CAPTAIN OLYMPUS
HUSBAND, FATHER, HERO
Green lawn covered the space and sloped down a hill to the rest of the cemetery, rows and rows of headstones dating back a hundred years. But his grave had acquired additions: a couple
of extra blocks announcing “in honor of”; tributes from the city and other organizations; a statue of a heroic, stylized figure standing tall and looking skyward—not exactly Captain Olympus but certainly meant to recall him. After twenty years, the grave site had become a shrine. It was always covered with flowers.
Usually when Celia went to visit, she did so early in the morning to make sure she didn’t have to share the space with any of the hundreds—maybe even thousands—of Captain Olympus’s admirers trooping through to pay their respects. She stopped by a couple of times a year. Sometimes on his birthday, sometimes on the anniversary of his death. Sometimes, like this afternoon, just because. A couple was already there, standing before the headstone, snapping pictures. Celia waited some distance away until they were finished before approaching and settling on the lawn, legs folded to the side.
“Hey, Dad.” She didn’t like to think about how much easier he was to talk to now than he had been when he was alive. He was in a box, six feet under, rotted. She didn’t like to think of that, either. “I’ve got a lot of stuff going on right now. I know I always say that. But this time … I don’t know. I want to walk away from it all. Grab Arthur and the kids and just go. But I can’t. I keep wondering if you ever felt like that. Like throwing out the suit and just being you. I know you’d never say it out loud. Maybe I should ask Arthur if you ever thought it.
“The kids … well, they’re teenagers, they just have to get through it. I can’t make it any easier for them, but God, I wish I could. Anna—you know what I keep thinking? That Anna would talk to you. She won’t talk to any of us, not even Mom. But maybe, if you were still here, she could talk to you. It wouldn’t even bother me, because then at least she’d have someone. Isn’t it crazy? That I just keep thinking how much easier this would all be if you were here? And I know that isn’t right, because you weren’t really like that, you never made anything easier, you would just keep telling me that I was doing everything wrong, and that I don’t know what I’m doing or what I’m talking about—”
She shook her head, wiping her eyes before tears could fall. Gazed at the heroic statue with the smooth features that wasn’t even supposed to look like her father and realized that that was what her memories of him had turned into: a featureless palette upon which she could map any emotion, assumption, supposition she wanted.
“That’s not fair, I know. I’m sorry. I just … you’d love the girls, Dad. I wish you could have met them. And I miss you. I miss what we all might have turned into. And … I have leukemia. Because of the radiation from Paulson’s device. I’m sick and I don’t know what to do.”
Her father didn’t say anything.
She pursed her lips, sighed. Got up from the grass, brushed herself off, and walked away.
Almost her whole life, people came up to her—at business meetings, symphony galas, museum fund-raisers, everywhere—and grabbed her hand, squeezing it with an emotional desperation, the look in their eyes sharp as needles, and thanked her. “Your father saved my life. I can’t thank him, so please, let me thank you. He saved my life.” They’d been on a school bus that caught fire, they’d been held hostage at the baseball stadium when the Destructor sealed it in his electrified force field, they’d fallen from a crashing airplane, and Captain Olympus had been there to catch them, to save them.
She would offer a sincere smile and tell them that she understood.