“And I need something else, too,” she said, eyes sparkling. Her blue eyes were unfairly pretty. “I’m looking for a book. You probably know it, by Charlotte Brontë. It’s called Jane Eyre.”
Trina didn’t so much as blink; I bet she didn’t want to risk missing even a second of my suffering. I felt my cheeks burn a hot red. I was speechless, frozen in my spot, like a deer in headlights.
And then I felt a hand on my shoulder, a warm touch.
“I can show you where the novels are. Please follow me.” Sonia turned before Trina could respond and walked toward the staircase that led to the loft.
Trina narrowed her eyes at me and then followed Sonia, even though we both knew she didn’t actually need that book.
I made a break for it downstairs, found a chair, and lowered my shaky self into it. I crossed my arms on the tabletop, dropped my heavy head on top of them, and cried.
Beverly
“Is there anything I can do, Jamie?”
Beverly’s voice was quiet and careful.
“I’m sorry,” I said, lifting my head slowly. “I’m okay.”
The genuine look of concern on Beverly’s face made me want to start crying all over again.
“Sonia told me you were down here,” Beverly admitted. “I just wanted to check on you.”
“Thanks,” I managed to say.
“Here.” She took a box of tissues off the shelf and, after looking at my face again, handed the whole box to me. I must have looked frightening.
“Thanks,” I said again. I cleaned up my face, blew my nose, and balled up the tissues in my pitiful, sorry fists.
“So, Jane Eyre,” Beverly said, pulling out the chair beside me and lowering herself into it. “That’s on the eighth-grade curriculum?”
“Yeah,” I answered, instead of saying yes, which I had been trying to say instead. Sonia never answered questions with yeah. “It’s the final exam,” I added.
“Oh dear.” She let out a sigh. “The final.”
I let out a sigh, too, then explained, “You read it with the class, but the final exam is a bunch of essay questions you have to answer in that blue test booklet in school.”
She let out a short huff. “The perfect way to kill a classic.”
My eyes scrunched up. “What?”
“It’s a wonderful book. One of my favorites,” she revealed. “But it never would have been if I had to study it inside and out for a middle school exam. That’s how you kill a book for students. It’s a shame.”
Beverly clasped her locket and slid it back and forth on the chain around her neck for a moment as she thought. “There has to be a way to use the classics in school without destroying the beauty of them.”
She looked truly distraught over this.
“Well, we read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland this year, in seventh grade,” I offered, still dabbing at my nose with a tissue. “And we had a big test on it, but I still liked it by the end of the unit.”
“Well, that’s good to hear.” Beverly nodded, looking somewhat relieved.
“But . . . that might be because I’d read it outside of school, so I already had my own opinion about it.” I sat up a little straighter and felt my stomach begin to settle back in its place. I took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Alice is so charming,” Beverly said, then recited from memory, “‘I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit hole—and yet, and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life.’”
I smiled. “Curiouser and curiouser,” I said.
Beverly smiled back at me, then looked me right in the eyes, her face serious, and asked, “Have you read Jane Eyre yet? On your own?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” she asked, surprised.
“Well, I watched the movie first with my mom, and I loved it, so then she borrowed the book from her friend at work and we read it last summer.”
“How lovely.”
“It’s a hard book, though. Some of the language—we had to read it together so I’d understand it.”
“And?”
“And I loved it. So much. Jane is incredible, what she overcomes, how she faces every day, and then Mr. Rochester, how she is with him. I was blown away by her. But now I . . . It just reminds me—” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“No,” Beverly commanded. Her face was stern and she was pointing at me. “Do not let what happened at school ruin the book for you. That would be like rewriting the ending of a book because it didn’t please you, and you can’t do that. Endings aren’t there to please you. Endings happen the way they do for a reason. Do you understand, Jamie? This is important.” She softened her voice a bit then and folded her hands in her lap.
“Yes,” I said, returning her gaze.
“Don’t rewrite your feelings for that book. Jane Eyre is remarkable. It was, and it still is.”
“Okay,” I promised. “It still is.”
“You cannot rewrite your own past, either. It’s a tremendous waste of energy to cling so tightly to things you cannot undo.”
Beverly’s gaze moved from my face then to some empty space between us, her eyes glazing over slightly. Then, as if reading right from a book, she recited, “‘Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.’”
I watched her, waiting for her to explain.
When she didn’t, I asked, “Is that from the chair upstairs?”
“It’s from Jane Eyre.” Beverly pulled herself out of her trance, clasped her necklace gently, and then let it go. “Helen Burns said it.”
“Oh, Helen!” I remembered right away. “That was the saddest part for me. I hated that, when she died. It was so unfair.”
Beverly’s head moved up and down the tiniest bit in acknowledgment.
“It was like Jane lost the only real friend she’d ever had,” I said. I was so angry at Charlotte Brontë for making Helen die that I started to write her a letter, but my mom told me it was a wasted effort, since the author died in 1855.
I was still mad about it, though. “It felt like Jane lost a sister when Helen died,” I explained to Beverly.
Beverly blinked several times in a row, as if something had suddenly landed in her eye and she was working to set it free. Then she folded her hands together on the tabletop and said, “Jane lost her, yes, but she also found a way to keep Helen with her always, in her words, in the example of the life she led.”
I thought about that for a minute. Helen was gone, and having the memory of her was not the same as having the actual person. It couldn’t be. But I didn’t say that to Beverly. She seemed to be having her own moment, lost in thoughts pulled from the attic of her mind. I wasn’t at all sure how we got from eighth-grade finals to the subject of death, but I had recovered from the Trina incident upstairs.
“You look like you’re feeling better,” Beverly said then, as if reading my mind.
“Yeah. I mean, yes.” I straightened my posture in my chair. “I am.”
“Okay, then. Well,” Beverly stood and neatly pushed in her chair. She returned the box of tissues to the shelf and nodded at me.
“Thank you, Beverly.” Those two little words didn’t seem like nearly enough for how grateful I felt to her.
“You’re very welcome.” She smiled, then turned to leave.
“Wait, Beverly.” I stopped her. “What’s going to happen to the library? Are we getting shut down?”
Beverly took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It seems that’s what the mayor wants, yes. He intends to close us, to address town budget issues.”
“He can’t do that! We can’t let him.”
“We don’t intend to, but it’s complicated. Our annual cost to the town isn’t that high. The problem is this building. It needs so many repairs—it would cost the town a fortune to cover them. The mayor thinks it’s easier to shut us down completely than fix the building. But we’re working on a plan. Lenny is already drafting a petition
to show that residents value the library.”
“If there’s anything I can do to help, I’d like to.”
Beverly smiled wide and said, “That’s wonderful, Jamie. I’m so happy to hear the library matters to you so much.”
It was true. The library mattered to me.
Then she said, “Take a moment to get yourself together and then come back upstairs. There’s lots to do.”
After Beverly left, I stood up, stretched my arms up to the water-damaged basement ceiling, and checked my reflection in the mirror. I splashed cold water on my face, gave my cheeks a few pinches, and climbed the stairs to the main floor.
Trina was long gone by the time I got back to the circ desk, and the afternoon was slow. I had time to look through the art books in the 700s and picked out one on Georgia O’Keeffe and one on Vincent van Gogh to take home with me. I also had time to make a pencil sketch of Wally’s Tuesday flower and another drawing of the old woodwork details that decorated the fireplace mantel in the reading room. I was about to try a quick sketch of Black Hat Guy, who was sound asleep in his quotes chair, but then he popped awake the second I put my first mark on the paper. He headed to the bathroom and I decided to go home. It was almost five o’clock and I was starving. The sandwich I’d packed for lunch was like a distant memory, and there were no Lenny treats in the staff room to sample.
I rounded the library to cut through the parking lot in back, passing the book drop containers on my left as I went. I looked for the dog between them, but he wasn’t there. What was there, though, was some kind of small bowl. I walked closer to get a better look and saw what looked to be a to-go coffee cup, ripped down so the sides were only a few inches tall all the way around. It made a decent water bowl, and it had been recently filled, clear, clean water waiting like a still pond for the little dog to lap up.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one looking out for Shady.
Wally
Wally had sweated two big rings of damp under each of his arms by the time he made it to me at the circulation desk on Tuesday morning. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket—a real handkerchief, like you see in old-time movies—and blotted his forehead and neck.
“Good morning to you, and a good morning it is.” Wally panted out his greeting.
“It’s a rough one out there today, isn’t it, Wally?” Lenny asked him, pushing a cart of new books over to the display wall.
“Yes, sirree,” Wally replied, lowering his handkerchief and looking at the smears of wet grime on it. “This summer is too hot for me, I tell ya.”
“I’ll second that. I got up at four in the morning today to get started on a paint job, just to beat the heat. The paint was practically boiling in the can the other day when I was working at noon.”
Wally cracked a broad smile and chuckled. “Boiling in the can. Is that right?”
“Practically,” Lenny answered him. “You can feel the AC best in that corner back there.” He motioned to the children’s room behind him. “Why don’t you rest there for a little while, cool yourself off a bit?”
“I just might do that,” Wally answered him. “I just might. Thank you very much.”
Wally folded his handkerchief tidily and then slipped it back into his shirt pocket. He pulled a white carnation out of his plastic grocery bag, which was more torn and mangy-looking than it was last Tuesday, something I hadn’t thought possible. He really seemed to take that Reduce, Reuse, Recycle thing seriously, except he seemed to be permanently stuck on Reuse. I bet he had drawers full of used rubber bands at home and cabinets overflowing with empty glass jars, their lids impossible to find because they were all stuffed into another bursting plastic bag somewhere.
“There you go,” Wally said to his flower as he placed it in the vase and removed the old one. “Pretty as a picture.”
“Hi, Wally,” I greeted him. “Thank you for the new flower.”
“Oh, you’re always welcome for the flowers. I bring my flicks and I bring my flowers,” Wally said, gesturing to the movies still banded together in his bag. Then he started coughing, barely getting his arm up in time to cover his mouth. His whole body lurched forward on the last deep cough of the set. It was so loud and full it seemed to shake the entire building. He might have even scared himself with that last one—his eyes looked wide with surprise and a trace of fear. He lowered his arm from his mouth with a slight tremor, then shook his head.
“That was a whopper,” he said, to himself or to me, I wasn’t sure. One thing was sure, though, and that was that every single person in the library was staring at him. It was that loud.
Beverly came out of her office and clasped her hands in front of her chest, looking at Wally with worry lines etched across her forehead, deep as rake marks in sand.
Lenny caught Beverly’s eye and nodded to let her know he was on it.
He approached Wally, concern shading his face. He put his hand on Wally’s shoulder, and his voice went soft. “Been to a doctor about that cough yet, young man?”
That was so like Lenny, to call him young man. I didn’t know for sure, but it looked like Wally was at least eighty years old.
“Ehh.” Wally waved him off. “No need for a doctor.”
“You’ve sounded better, Wally,” Lenny told him gently, “at least to these ears.”
“I’ve sounded like this as long as I’ve known me,” Wally joked. “Don’t need to see a doc for a plain old cough.”
“Just a plain old cough, Wally?” Lenny asked in a tender voice.
Wally’s face clouded over for a short, dark moment, then quickly reset itself. I had never seen Wally look anything but content: giddy over his flowers or pleased over his movie selections or happily focused on the wall of brand-new releases. Those were the three phases of Wally I’d seen all summer long.
“A little cough never hurt anyone,” Wally told Lenny. “It’s good for the insides. Gets everything up and moving around.”
Lenny paused a moment, then responded with, “Well, my friend, I have to say that is certainly an interesting way of looking at it.” He looked over Wally’s head to make eye contact with me and raised his eyebrows.
I shrugged in response. At least Lenny was trying.
“Jamie,” Wally addressed me. “I got my DVDs to return.”
“Of course, Wally. I’ll take those for you.” I moved quickly to him so he wouldn’t have to release his hold on the counter, which seemed to be keeping him upright.
“This was a really neat one. About an artist who does all these paintings but then her husband takes all the credit for it. True story. Really a good one.”
“Really?” I asked, turning the case over in my hands to read the back. It was PG-13, so my mom wouldn’t have a problem with me watching it. It was the middle of July and we were way overdue, my mom and Aunt Julie and me, for a movie night together. I missed snuggling up on the couch between them with our traditional movie snacks: root beer and chocolate chip morsels poured right onto hot popcorn so they melted streaks of chocolaty goodness all over the salty kernels. The only thing that would make movie night better would be if Vic were there, too.
The summary on the DVD case explained that the story was about two artists who meet in the park one day, begin to paint together, then fall in love and get married.
Of course, after reading that, my mind jumped right to Art Club.
And Trey.
Art Club met every other Friday after school, from October through June, and was open to all sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. We met in the art room with Mrs. Holm at three o’clock and ate snacks while she lectured us on an artist or a particular style or a new material she wanted us to try. She always had slides to go with her talk, and also books and postcards of prints to pass around. While Trey watched the slides, I snuck glances at him. He was always there early and took the same seat, right up front.
After the slide show, we each worked on our own project while Mrs. Holm circled around and helped whoever wanted help. I l
oved those Friday afternoons.
Toward the end of one meeting back in March, a bunch of kids suddenly gathered around Trey, who was busily working with charcoal pencil.
“Oh my God, man. That is amazing,” Michael, a seventh grader, said loud enough for the whole room to hear.
“That is so unfair,” Olivia, an eighth grader, chimed in, leaning over his shoulder to get a closer look. “Can I take a picture of that?” She snapped a shot with her phone before he could even answer.
More kids left what they were working on to see Trey’s drawing.
“Whoa, Trey. That’s sick,” another eighth grader told him.
Trey smiled and thanked each person who complimented him, but you could tell he was in the zone and didn’t want to stop drawing long enough for a conversation.
A few more kids walked over to see his work and I went with them, swarming with the crowd for a peek. More compliments rang out and one boy even said, “Okay, I’ll have to burn mine now. It cannot live in a world where that drawing lives.” He got a few laughs, but Trey didn’t respond. He just kept moving his hand over his paper, sketching lines here and there, adding depth with crosshatching and shading.
Before I knew it, I was the only one left still looking, standing next to Trey with my mouth slightly open, staring at his work. My eyes kept fighting over drinking in his drawing, which was of an old rowboat washed ashore with a seagull in flight above it, or his hands, which were smooth and graceful and captivating in the way they made the charcoal glide over the paper.
He paused and leaned back in his chair, relaxing for a moment, and then looked up at me. “Hey, Jamie.”
“Hi,” I said back, my heart pounding in my ears.
“How’s yours coming?” he asked, when I continued to just stand and stare at him.
“What? Mine?” I stumbled. “It’s okay.”
“Can I see?” he asked.
“No. I mean, yes. It’s just, it’s not that good, not like yours,” I admitted.
A Kind of Paradise Page 8