pring comes. The gray scrim lifts from the sky. Lumps of old snow, bundled in shadows like shivering rabbits, vanish. Where there was silence, solitary birds cheep and impatient boys crack baseballs across sandlots. The swells of dock water lose their sickle edges. Menus change—you can smell it through windows open for the first time in months. But all is not well. Still the rain abstains. The grass is as rumpled as morning hair and yellow as urine. Garden hoses unravel for an unslakable task. Tree limbs hold buds like fists. Drainage grates face their thirsty, stained teeth to the sun.

Elisa feels the same way. A torrent inside her is being held at bay. She hasn’t been inside F-1 for three days—five days if you count the weekend, which she does, every minute of it, keeping a running sum in her head. The lab has been occupied. There are more Empties than before and their patrol is more vigorous; before a single mopped floor can dry, it is blotted by boot prints. When Elisa arrives at work, it isn’t only Fleming lording over the shift change. It’s Strickland. She looks away from him, hoping she didn’t just see him smile at her.

The laundry room still smarts the eyes five years after the washing machines were removed. This happened after Elisa came upon Lucille passed out from bleach fumes. In a valorous feat Zelda likes to recount over Automat lunches, Elisa lifted Lucille into a four-wheeled laundry cart and rolled her into the cleaner air of the cafeteria before calling the hospital. Occam doesn’t like attention; all laundry work was outsourced to Milicent Laundry, and Elisa and Lucille were lucky to keep their jobs.

Only sorting duties remain. Zelda and Elisa separate dirty towels, smocks, and lab coats onto large tables as Zelda runs through a fresh Brewster story.

Zelda had wanted to watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color last night, but Brewster had insisted upon The Jetsons, escalating a row until Zelda had shaken her husband off the Barcalounger like trash from a wastebasket, to which he’d retaliated by belting the theme to The Jetsons at top volume over her program’s entire hour.

Elisa knows that Zelda tells the tale to lift Elisa from the doldrums she is unable to hide and declines to specify. She is grateful, and between pitching items into carts, she signs interjections with as much vigor as she can muster. They finish and push their carts into the hall. Elisa has the squeaky one; it caterwauls enough that an Empty pokes his helmeted head into the far end of the hall to evaluate the threat. Their route takes them right past F-1. Elisa strains to listen for telltale sounds while trying not to look like she’s listening. They turn left and head down a windowless corridor black but for the orange parking-lot lights eking through double doors being held open by a block of wood. Zelda pushes open a door, pulls her cart after her, and holds the door for Elisa to follow. They are met, as they often are, by the other graveyarders, standing like birds on a wire, puffing on cigarettes. Scientists dare flaunt Occam’s smoking ban, but not janitors; several times per night they gather at the loading dock, their quarrels suspended for the duration of a smoke. It’s a risk: Breaks are allowed in the main lobby, but not here, not this close to sterile labs.

“You need to oil those wheels,” Yolanda says. “I heard you squealing a mile away.”

“Don’t listen to her, Elisa,” Antonio says. “It gives me time to comb my hair nice for you.”

“Is that hair?” Yolanda gibes. “I thought that was the clog you plunged from the bowl.”

“Miss Elisa, Miss Zelda,” Duane calls. “How come you two never smoke with us?”

Elisa shrugs and points to her neck scars. One puff of one cigarette in the work shed behind Home was all the experiment she’d needed; she’d coughed until blood had darkened the dirt. She wheels the squeaky cart down the ramp, waves at the Milicent Laundry driver in the van’s side mirror, and begins chucking material through the open rear doors into waiting baskets. Zelda parks her cart alongside Elisa’s but turns back to the others.

“Oh, hell,” Zelda says. “I do kind of miss the taste. Give me that cigarette.”

The others hurrah as Zelda joins them at the top of the ramp. She accepts a Lucky Strike from Lucille, lights up, takes a drag, and nestles the elbow of her smoking arm into the palm of the opposite hand. It’s a pose that has Elisa fancying a younger, lither version of her friend being slung about a brass-blasted dance hall by a zoot-suited suitor, maybe Brewster. Elisa follows Zelda’s exhaled smoke as it rises, catching the sodium light before drifting in front of a security camera.

“Don’t worry, sugar.”

She’s startled into looking down at Antonio. He winks one of his crossed eyes and swipes an innocuous broom from where it rests against the wall. He lifts it, handle upward, until the end taps the bottom of the camera. An accumulated spot of dirt on the camera’s bottom panel reveals how the janitors tilt the camera upward, the same way every night, before tapping it back down into place.

“Make us a little blind spot for a few minutes. Pretty smart, huh?”

It takes a minute for Elisa to realize that she has ceased loading laundry. The Milicent Laundry driver honks; she doesn’t react. Duane tries to joke her awake, asking her how come she brings so many more boiled eggs for lunch than she can eat; she doesn’t react. Zelda finally stubs her cigarette, gestures for the driver to relax, and hustles down the ramp to do her share of the loading.

“You all right, hon?” she asks.

Elisa hears her neck bones crackle in a nod, yet can’t look away from the smokers as they toss their smoldering butts in capitulation to the clock and leave Antonio to nudge the security camera back into prosecutorial position. She barely hears Zelda shut the van doors and bang them to tell the driver he’s free to go. Blind spot: Elisa nuzzles into the phrase, explores it, finds it familiar, almost cozy. Zelda and Giles aside, she lives her whole life in a blind spot, forgotten by the world, and wouldn’t it be something, she thinks, if this invisibility were the thing that allowed her to shock them all?