She pressed the tape for her stop and managed to squeeze her way past everyone, out onto the street, and then it was only a block’s walk to their building. The skateboarder passed her, still chasing his board.
“You’re pushing with the wrong foot!” she called to him.
He held up his middle finger and kept going. That had been what she expected, but at least she’d tried.
A couple of the building’s teenagers were hanging out on the steps, both staring at one phone. She waved, but they were engrossed and didn’t wave back.
Dana had already made it home from work, a chicken box sitting unopened in the middle of their small table. She still wore her scrubs; usually she showered and changed as soon as she got home.
“Oh, thank goodness.” She looked up from her tablet, her face pale. “You didn’t answer.”
“I didn’t answer what?” Mae opened the box and snagged a wing. It was cold.
“Your phone. My text. The networks are all jammed. You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
Dana turned the tablet so Mae could see it. A bomb at a baseball matinee in California. The death toll, a number she didn’t want to contemplate.
“Oh, god,” Mae said.
“There aren’t many details, but they’re saying stay put, if you can, ‘shelter in place,’ there are other threats.”
“In California?”
“The whole country. All tonight’s games are cancelled. Concerts, movies. Malls are closing early. Planes are grounded. A curfew. They’re saying to keep checking the news to see what else is closed.”
“Oh, god,” Mae said again. She closed her eyes, tried to remember whether anyone on the bus had said anything. The murmur she hadn’t quite heard. The people on the street stopping as they looked at their phones, looking around, continuing on their way. The ones who looked like they wanted to say something. Things could be horrible, but you still had to get home, get somewhere.
That number. Her brain caught up with it, tumbled with it. All those people. All those people at the stadium, and then all those people waiting to get on planes, trying to get home, trying to get to loved ones who had been in the stadium, trying to—
“Ssh,” said Dana, standing up and coming around the table, even though Mae hadn’t spoken. “I know.”
Someone had been in to put up the sign.
“The West Branch Library Will Be Closed Today.”
Someone had taken the time to come in and type a sign. Someone had taken the time to not only print the sign, but to look for bright pink paper in the chaotic supply closet and change out the paper in the ancient copier, but not to call the other staff and tell them not to come in.
Mae tried the door, anyway. It didn’t open, of course. She tried the staff door on the side, then knocked, then knocked again. Sure, she thought. Don’t tell the library assistant.
“Mrs. Peters came and left,” said Ms. Sharon, the homeless woman who slept in the back alcove when the shelters were full. “She came in really early, let me use the bathroom while she did some stuff, and then she said the library’s not opening today.”
“Ah.” Mae tried for noncommittal like she had maybe known that and was just testing. She checked her phone again. Nothing.
Mae sighed and typed a message to Ms. Peters. We’re not opening at all? I’m already here.
Message not sent. Network unavailable.
Mae sighed again, then deleted the text. If hers wasn’t getting through, who knew if Ms. Peters had sent a message? She might have texted hours ago, only to have it delayed by the system overload. Mae would look whiny, if that were the case.
She wasn’t whining, though. She had paid for a hack cab to work, shared it with a total stranger, because the buses weren’t running and the rideshare apps were overloaded and she didn’t yet feel valuable enough at work to trust that she wouldn’t be fired for being late, even on a day of special circumstances like this one. The cab had cost as much as half a day’s work, and now she wouldn’t even get paid at all.
“You heard, right?” Ms. Sharon asked, and for a moment Mae wasn’t sure she meant whether Mae had heard her about Mrs. Peters, or the chaos of the day before, the stadium bomb, or the stuff that had happened over night, the undetonated bomb found in a Pennsylvania hotel, the gunman barricaded at the bus station in Mississippi, ongoing, the bomb threats across the country, also ongoing. Whichever.
“I heard.”
The walk home took two hours. Fewer people were out than usual, and those that were smiled thin smiles or nodded as they passed, some weird acknowledgement that the other was not the person who intended you harm, no matter the threats on the news. At least it was a nice day, the kind of sunny spring day that reminded you warmth existed in the world. A weird juxtaposition with everything else.
The girls from upstairs were on the steps watching something on a phone, one pair of earbuds split between them.
“No school?” she asked.
“Closed,” said one.
When she got to their apartment, Mae tried to check what was going on, but couldn’t get any sites to load, news or social media. She turned on the old radio her father had insisted she keep for emergencies and tuned it to the news. Someone recited a long list of “threat closures:” schools, colleges, courts, malls. The central library, but not the branches. Unless they’d messed up and thought the central library meant the whole system.
What wasn’t being said was important, too: how long would everything be closed? How serious were the threats? Was it one person making the threats or a network? It must be credible for all these closings, but there were no details about anything other than the stadium.
A series of texts came from Dana at nine pm—who knew when she’d actually sent them—saying she was probably stuck at the hospital overnight; people were getting drunk and stupid, and there were more suicide attempts than usual, and the ER was a madhouse, and some nurses hadn’t been able to get in because they couldn’t find babysitters for their kids on short notice.
Love you, good luck, Mae responded, hoping Dana would see it eventually. She put the phone down, then picked it up again and texted Mrs. Peters. It was a little late to message the boss, but not TOO too late, and better to know now.
Will we be open tomorrow? I didn’t see our branch listed in the closings.
An hour later, a response. Closed.
Shit. She thought of her paycheck short two days’ work. What if it stretched into three days? Four?
She checked the clock again. It wasn’t ten yet. The first and second calls got weird tones, but her third try got through.
“Mrs. Peters?” she asked when the other woman answered. She’d never called her boss on the phone before; they’d only ever spoken in the library and via text, when they were snow delayed.
“What is it, Mae?” She sounded tired, but not like she’d been asleep.
Mae wished she hadn’t called. “Um, I was wondering if you know anything you can tell me. I saw the main branch on the news, not ours. Why are we closed?”
“They don’t want any public computers available.”
“Can’t we open but leave the computers off?” Mae pictured all the people who used the computers: the grocery-orderers, the homework-doers, the job seekers. She’d be one of the job seekers, if they didn’t open soon. She loved working at the library, but she couldn’t afford to not-work at the library. “We’re a library. Don’t we have a responsibility to be open?”
“We have a responsibility to keep our patrons safe. Sometimes that means opening, sometimes that means closing. I promise, we’ll open as soon as they say the threat is past.”
Mae knew a dismissal when she heard one. She thanked her supervisor and hung up. So, that was that. Closed until they opened again. Never mind that she was three quarters time, that she only got paid for the hours she worked. Never mind the kids who used them as a safe haven during the hours between the school day’s end and their parents returning fr
om work—school was out, anyway. Never mind the job hunters, or Ms. Sharon needing a bathroom, or the cancelled computer classes, or the volunteer tax prep, or any of the million other reasons people used the library.
Those were the reasons she was working there. She wanted to go to library school, to be the kind of librarian who made sure a branch did everything for its neighborhood that the community didn’t have. It would be one thing to take out giant loans to become a corporate lawyer or a plastic surgeon, but it seemed like a bad idea to go into debt for a public librarian’s salary, no matter how much she wanted it. She’d been putting money aside for it for ages; she’d be dipping into that soon, if she didn’t get more hours.
The worry outweighed the fear for her; maybe it was the other way around for Ms. Peters and the other people making decisions. Maybe they knew something that made the threat less nebulous, less distant. As it was, the lack of information and stalled websites scared her far more than the bomb threats.
Dana crawled into bed at 7:00 a.m., damp from the shower. “Do you need to get up for work?” she whispered.
Mae grunted no, though she was actually awake behind closed eyelids. Her body was used to getting up at this time, even with nothing to get up for. She lay in bed for a few minutes more, listening to Dana’s breathing change, then rolled over to check her phone. Remembered the sites were down and tried the radio instead, where nothing new was being reported, but the list of shuttered facilities had grown.
When she went to make coffee, she realized she’d forgotten to pick some up the day before. She’d been too busy cultivating annoyance over traveling all the way to work for nothing. She always used snow days as an excuse to stay in pajamas; now she had an urge and an excuse to get out. She dressed and left a note for Dana.
This was her usual hour for catching the bus, but the streets were emptier than usual. A few people sleepily walked dogs—they gave their usual familiar-stranger waves, though more strained looking than usual. More suspicious. No speeding cars using her street as an alternate route to downtown, no crowd at the bus stop.
Why did this feel different from a weather closure? She’d lived through blizzards that had stopped the city in its tracks, introduced snow-baffled silences to the normally-busy roads. Life-interrupting hurricanes had become more common, too. Dana always worked through them since hospital life went on.
The closure list went far beyond any snow day. Movie theaters usually managed to open in everything but the worst blizzards. Malls, too. Then there was the clear blue sky, the first warmth, the do-somethingness of spring. She wished she knew what to do.
The grocery store was closed. A sign on the door said, “you can still order online, and we will deliver,” with their online service’s logo printed large. That was all well and good for the people doing full grocery runs—it was free over $25—but Mae wasn’t about to pay $10 extra for a pound of coffee, assuming the grocery sites were faring better than news and social media. And what about the seniors who came into her library for her to help them order groceries to be delivered? They didn’t have smartphones; the delivery fee was waived if you used the library program.
The convenience store on the corner didn’t have any bulk coffee beans. She bought a quart of iced coffee to carry them through the next few days because it worked out cheaper than getting individual cups. Still, more than the supermarket charged for a pound on a week where every penny was going to count. The man behind her in line clutched two small packages of diapers, and the woman ahead of her, a tiny bag of sugar and a tiny box of tampons, all at the price of convenience.
Dana was still asleep, so Mae poured herself some coffee and sat down to math out the month’s bills. She ran the numbers for three days off work, then a week. They wouldn’t close things for more than a week, would they? Dana made a good salary, but a week without Mae’s pay was the most their budget allowed without dipping into savings, and she knew she was luckier than most to have managed to save at all.
She started trying random websites to see what was available and what wasn’t. Grocery sites were up, and online retailers, and streaming services. All the big social media sites were either offline or too slow to be worth anything. It didn’t make any sense. There shouldn’t be any reason for one to work and not the other, unless there was also some weirdly specific cyber-attack happening. What she wanted most was information from other people, not just the calm radio voices.
It was a twilight zone of a week. Perfect, sunny days, quiet streets, no work but nothing open. Mae stayed in, watching the news, while Dana reported back to the hospital a few blocks away. When they’d moved into this apartment two years ago, Mae hadn’t yet had the library job, so they’d picked the location to be close to Dana’s work. With the buses down, that turned out to have been a great decision; a thing they couldn’t have anticipated that worked out in their favor.
Mae wondered how many other people were stuck doing what she was doing: checking the news, worrying, counting pennies, counting again. She’d been too young to understand what was happening the last time the country was rocked like this, but none of the accounts mentioned the deep sense of powerlessness she was fighting. They didn’t want blood donors. They didn’t want anyone doing anything at all. Stay home, good citizens. Never mind that you won’t have a home if the stores and theaters and libraries and schools don’t open again, that rental offices would still expect rent and banks would still expect mortgage payments. How long could they possibly expect people to put up with this? The news kept reporting threats. Where were the stories about ordinary people struggling? Where was the resistance to this becoming the new normal? She sent out a group chat to friends, to see if anybody knew of protests. Nobody responded, and she wasn’t sure if the message had even gone out.
On the third day, she babysat a toddler on the second floor whose parents still had jobs to go to. She brought some old paperbacks down to the lobby and made a sign that said: “Free Library.”
On the fourth day, she wished she had a dog, and put up a sign in the lobby offering her services as a dog walker, with little tabs for people to pull off with her phone number. People with dogs had routines they had to follow no matter what. The dog needed feeding, expected walks at regular intervals. Nothing felt normal. She watched a movie online, expecting the same stutter and lag as the news sites, but finding none; even that was odd. She tried to find info about the extended outages and found nothing there, either. Ads everywhere offered discounted memberships to various streaming and delivery services.
On the fifth day, she went downstairs to see if anyone had pulled her dog walking tabs, but nobody had. She sighed. She didn’t need a dog to take a walk, she supposed. She should get some exercise.
The girls from upstairs were on the steps again, watching a phone.
“Hey,” she said, and they waved.
It was another beautiful spring day, perfect walking weather, disconcertingly quiet. When she got back, the two girls were arguing.
“We’ve already seen that one,” said the older one.
“We’ve seen them all,” said the other.
She tried to remember their names. Lily and Kima? No, Kimi, she was pretty sure.
“Kimi?”
The older girl looked up.
She was going to make sure that they knew about the library’s app, that they could rent shows and movies for free, but as she opened her mouth, she found herself asking something else instead. “Have you ever skateboarded?”
Kimi shook her head.
“Want me to show you how? It’ll kill a few hours, if you’re bored.”
Kimi looked like she was going to say no. Her sister nudged her, and she shrugged.
Mae smiled. “I’ll be right back.”
Mae ran up to the apartment to get the storage locker key, then down to the basement. Mae had wanted to donate the skateboards, so Dana had hidden them in the back of the locker; Mae knew they were there, and could’ve tossed them at any point, but if D
ana hadn’t wanted to part with them yet, it wasn’t Mae’s job to trash them. Now they were coming in handy! Finding the helmets and pads took a little longer. They smelled funky but didn’t look actively gross. There was no bloodstains on her board to hint at the last time she’d been on it. None on the helmet because she’d been stupid that day and hadn’t worn it.
The girls still sat on the steps; she’d half-expected them to be gone. They eyed the gear skeptically.
“You can choose whether you want to wear the pads. Helmets are non-negotiable,” she said. “I don’t want anyone getting brain damage because of me.”
She thought they might refuse, but they reached for the helmets.
“Great!” She waited while they adjusted. Kimi’s hair was bigger than Mae’s, so the fit wasn’t too bad.
Lily reached for Dana’s skateboard.
“Not so fast,” Mae said. “Basics first. I’m going to show you how to stand. Your front foot is for balance, your back foot is for steering.”
“My feet are right next to each other,” Lily said. Her sister giggled.
Mae laughed, too. “Okay, fair enough. Let’s start from there. If you take turns pushing each other from behind—not hard—while your feet are right next to each other, you can see which foot you put forward first, and that’ll tell you which foot should be in front on the skateboard.”
They took a minute shoving each other, maybe a little harder than she’d intended, despite her warning.
“Okay, you both put your left foot forward, so that’s the one that’ll be in front. That’s a regular stance.”
“Now can we get on?”
“Yeah, but just on the grass over there.” She pointed to the narrow grassy strip below the ground floor windows.
“We’re riding on grass?”
“You’re standing on grass. I’ll show you.”
Mae handed Dana’s board to Lily and carried her own over to the grass. She demonstrated where she wanted their feet. “Just stand on it and get used to balancing. Try shifting your weight around; toe, heel, whatever. Get used to standing without it rolling.”
Do Not Go Quietly Page 15