"Yes."
"Why four times? On this one. He only tried most of them once or twice."
She had wondered that for seven years and had an answer she had never said aloud to anyone. "Fourteen's the floor with the cafeteria. It used to be the cafeteria, before the renovation. There were vending machines right through that door, and the night lights stayed on. You could see light through the window from the stairs. I think he could see it. I think he thought someone might be there."
Alvin looked up at the narrow wire-glass window in the door. Through it, now, they could see a strip of corridor carpet and the edge of a potted ficus and, beyond, the white glow of the office floor. It looked like the inside of a lit aquarium seen from a dark room.
"The fourteenth floor," he said. "He used to eat his lunch there, his dinner, whatever you call it at midnight. He'd heat up whatever Florine sent in the microwave and sit by the window and do his practice tests for the license. Refrigerant cycles. He had a book about it this thick." He held up his thumb and finger two inches apart. "He was going to take the test in May."
"Ferd told me he was good."
"He was okay. He was getting good." Alvin turned the printout over in his hands. "He wasn't a kid who was good at things right away. He missed a lot of fourth grade with the asthma and never caught up in math. He was twenty-two before he figured out he liked anything. Then he figured out he liked machines that move air. Of all the things. A boy who couldn't breathe right half his life and he wants to spend it making air go where it's supposed to." His mouth did something that was nearly, not quite, a smile. "Florine said it made perfect sense. I said it didn't make any sense. We were both right."
"The sticker," Agata said. "I always wondered."
"April thirteenth, 1997. The last Whalers game at the Civic Center. They beat Tampa Bay two to one. Kevin Dineen scored the last goal. Quentin was four. He sat on my lap the whole third period with his hands over his ears because it was so loud, and when they went off the ice for the last time the whole building was crying, grown men, guys from Pratt & Whitney, and he looked up at me and said, Daddy, why is everybody sad if we won?" Alvin shook his head. "I bought him a sticker sheet at the souvenir stand on the way out. He put that sticker on everything for twenty years. Notebooks. His lunch box. The dash of his car. When he got the badge here he put one on it the first day, and I told him they'd make him take it off, and he said they'd have to catch him first. Nobody ever made him take it off. Nobody ever looked at the night guys' badges close enough to notice."
"And the number on the back."