“It’s coming. The ambulance! I hear it!” one of the patrons by the window called.
“Please keep the front clear,” Beverly repeated in a loud, calm voice.
Trina hadn’t blinked. She started to sway on her feet.
Lenny looked up then and spotted Trina. “That girl’s about to faint,” he said to me. “Jamie, go,” he ordered, his voice pained.
“Trina?” I called.
She didn’t move. Her eyes were glued to Wally on the floor, to Lenny leaning over him, feeling for a pulse, listening for his breath.
“Trina!” I tried again.
Nothing.
I left Wally, grabbed her by the shoulders, and pushed her through the other back room doorway and into the children’s room. It was completely empty. I moved a chair over so it was facing the window and forced her to sit. Her skin had passed white and was becoming translucent. Her eyes fluttered. I unlatched the window in front of her and threw it open, even though the air-conditioning was running.
“Stay here, Trina,” I directed her. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
I heard the EMTs bang through the front door with their stretcher.
I turned back to Trina. “The ambulance is here. Just look out the window and take deep breaths.”
She stared out the window, but I don’t know what she saw, if she saw anything at all.
“I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”
She blinked once, then let her eyes close.
I stepped back into the main room, but the spot on the ground where Wally had fallen was empty. He was already on the stretcher, being rolled out of the library.
And then I saw it, pushed up against the bottom of the DVD shelf: his wallet. It must have fallen out of his pocket, or that awful ragged plastic bag, when he fell or when we rolled him or when they moved him onto the stretcher. The wallet was weathered and cracked and busting at the seams, much like Wally himself.
“Wait!” I yelled, to no one and everyone at the same time.
Lenny ran to me, took the wallet from my hand, and rushed it to Beverly, who was following the EMTs out the door, a paper fresh from the printer in her hand.
Then he returned to Sonia and held her while she silently wept into his chest. Several patrons whispered quietly to each other, a few returned to their workstations, most packed up and left.
I went back to the children’s room. Trina was exactly where I’d left her.
“Wally’s going to the hospital now. He’s going to be fine.” I said it because I wanted it to be true.
Trina turned and looked at me for the first time. She moved her head slowly, from side to side, as if she were telling me no, that he wouldn’t be fine at all.
I noticed her cell phone, bedazzled in its pink rhinestone case, sticking out of her pocket, so I helped myself to it. I hit Favorites and tapped her Home setting. “I’m calling your mom. She’ll come get you. Don’t worry.”
The phone rang twice and then someone answered.
A voice I knew, a voice I hadn’t heard in weeks, said, “Trina?”
Trey.
I paused for half a second and then I said, “No, it’s Jamie. At the library.”
It was his turn to pause. “Jamie?”
“Yes.” I barreled ahead, “Something happened here at the library, and Trina’s upset.” I was quick to add, “Nothing happened to Trina. She’s fine. She just needs your mom to come get her. She can’t walk home like this.”
“Like what? What happened?” Trey’s voice was soft and concerned. He was probably a great brother. Better than Trina deserved. No, that wasn’t it. Jane Eyre wouldn’t think that way, and Sonia wouldn’t want me to think that way, either. Maybe Trey was better because that’s what Trina needed, so she could become better herself.
“Someone collapsed, one of our regulars. An ambulance came. Trina saw it happen.” I looked at Trina then. She was staring at me, the color trying to return to her face, the tight grip she had on the chair trying to relax. I turned away from her and told Trey, “She’s pretty upset. Someone should come pick her up.”
“Okay. I’ll tell my mom. We’ll be right there.”
“Thanks.”
“Can I talk to her?” Trey asked just as I was about to hang up.
“Hold on.” I held the phone out to Trina. “Your brother wants to talk to you.”
Trina stared at the phone in my outstretched hand, then looked at me, then back at the phone. Her mind was working, you could practically see it, neurons leaping and connecting behind her frightened eyes, but she still couldn’t manage a word. She closed her eyes again.
I put the phone back to my ear. “Trey, she can’t. Someone needs to get here.”
“Okay, I’m coming right now.” He hung up, but not before I could hear the beginning of his yell, “Mo-om.”
I put Trina’s phone on the seat beside her. “They’re on their way.”
A breeze of cool air pushed through the open window in front of Trina, smoothing back the hairs that had come loose from her braid. A second gust of wind followed the first, and Trina’s chest rose as she took it in.
“Jamie, we were looking for you.” It was Lenny, with Sonia a step behind him. He was holding her hand. They hurried over to me and gave me a joint hug.
“Are you all right?” Sonia asked, her eyes puffy from crying. She held me by the shoulders and backed up so she could get a look at all of me, like she was checking to make sure I was still in one solid piece.
“Yeah. Yes. I’m all right,” I said. My eyes started to well up at the question, but I pushed the tears away. I shivered with the cold of my dried sweat, the adrenaline rush now gone, leaving me clammy.
“It’s okay if you’re not,” Lenny assured me.
“I know.” I hugged my arms against my stomach. “I just want him to be okay.”
“We all do,” Lenny answered. “Beverly went with him.”
“She did?”
“She was great,” Sonia said. “She even thought to print out his patron registration so she’d have all his information.”
“I guess they’ll call his kids,” Lenny said, “at the hospital.”
“They better show up this time,” Sonia said, an edge to her voice.
“It’s good you spotted the wallet, Jamie,” Lenny told me. “You did good. With everything.”
The tears started to form again. I could feel them, tiny prickles of heat collecting in my eyes. I blinked hard to crush them.
“And how about you, miss?” Lenny asked, releasing Sonia and squatting down next to Trina in her chair. “Are you all right?”
Trina gazed into his eyes and nodded yes.
“I’m sure you weren’t expecting that when you came to the library this morning. That was scary.”
“Uh-huh,” she whispered.
Sonia was right. Everyone talked to Lenny.
“You’ve got this, Jamie?” Lenny mouthed at me quietly as he stood back up to his skyscraper height.
“Yes.” I nodded. “Her mom’s on the way, so you can just send her back here when she arrives.”
“Will do,” Lenny said.
Sonia smiled at me, approval all over her face.
I smiled back.
Lenny filled his chest with air and then let it out slowly, like a deep meditative breath. The whole room seemed to relax.
“So, one of us should be at the front desk,” I pointed out. “I’ll stay with her.”
“Of course,” Lenny agreed. “I’ll go.”
“I’ll go, too,” Sonia said.
Lenny reached out and gave my arm a squeeze. Then they walked out together.
Trina sat in her chair, still as a mannequin, while I stood beside her, the two of us waiting together for her mom. Neither of us said a word. I gazed out the window and studied the scene before me so I wouldn’t think about Wally. I saw a bright blue mailbox bolted to the sidewalk halfway up the block. Beside that was a wooden lamppost, leaning slightly, black wires both t
hick and thin hanging from it. Beyond that was a gingko tree full of fan-shaped leaves and small golden fruit growing from a stamp-size green space across the street. If Trey were sitting here, he would draw. He would pull out his sketchbook and pencils and lean over the page, then flick his head to move his long, dark bangs out of his eyes and draw.
Minutes passed and then there were fast footsteps, the click-snap of heeled flip-flops on the move, and Mrs. Evans appeared.
“Trina?”
Trina turned in her seat to meet her mom’s eyes. In half a second or less, tears waterfalled down Trina’s face and Mrs. Evans had her wrapped so tight in her arms you couldn’t tell where one of them stopped and the other started.
“Oh, honey,” her mom crooned. “Shh, it’s okay.”
Mrs. Evans rocked her daughter and stroked her hair and whispered in her ear while Trina cried.
I averted my eyes, turned, and zipped quickly out of the children’s room.
Right into Trey.
I was only one step from knocking into him when I realized and slammed on the brakes.
We both took a step back.
“Hey,” he said. His long brown bangs hung messily over his forehead, blocking one eye. He needed a haircut, but he looked great needing a haircut.
“Hey.”
“She’s in there?” he asked about the room behind me.
I nodded. “Your mom has her.”
“Okay.” He tossed his head a smidge to the left to move his hair back.
“Okay,” I repeated, because I didn’t know what else to say.
Because of his eyes.
I got stuck in his eyes. Still! Stuck in the warm, deep-brown shine of them.
“She’s really upset about what she saw,” I said, to stop myself from gawking at him.
“It’s because of our grandpop. She was there when he died. It was really sudden, like this,” Trey explained.
“Wally didn’t die,” I said quickly. “They’re helping him right now, at the hospital.”
“That’s good. For Wally—I’m glad. But they couldn’t save our grandpop.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice quiet.
“Trina was nine and we were at his house. She always liked to play in his study while he read his magazines—he had a huge rolltop desk with all these tiny compartments she loved. He got up to get a magazine off the shelf and that was it—he just had a stroke and collapsed, and Trina was the only one in the room with him when it happened. She started screaming like crazy and my parents ran in and found him on the ground and her on top of the desk, wailing. It was awful. They kept me out of the room, so I never saw anything except the ambulance arriving and leaving, but she saw it all.”
I watched Trey look into the children’s room then. Mrs. Evans was tucking hair behind Trina’s ear while they stood by the window, talking quietly. Trina looked a hundred times better already.
Trey looked back at me and said, “She had nightmares for a while after that. She even started sleeping in my parents’ bed for a while.” He paused then and gave a half smile. “She’d kill me if she knew I told you that.”
“I won’t say anything,” I hurried to tell him.
“I know you won’t,” he said. He stuck a hand in his back pocket, looked at the floor for a second, then lifted his eyes back to my face and said, “I trust you.”
My breath caught in my throat, and then I had to look away, at the floor, at the lights, at the window in the next room, to collect myself.
“I also wanted to tell you—” He paused.
I looked back up at him and took a slow, deep breath.
“That I’m sorry.” He shrugged one shoulder, just one, and kind of stuttered, “You know, about—”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” I told him, my voice surprisingly steady and even and sure.
“Well, I wanted you to know that I’m not mad or anything. I get that you were just trying to . . .” His voice trailed off, and then he said, “I really liked your letter.”
I blushed immediately but didn’t care. It was way too late to care about that. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”
“I’m sorry my sister embarrassed you. She shouldn’t have done that. She just doesn’t think things through sometimes, you know?”
“Actually, yeah, I kind of know all about that,” I said, completely deadpan, which made Trey grin with his whole entire beautiful face. Maybe Trina and I had more in common than I thought, both of us acting quickly, stupidly, to get what we wanted. For me, it was to get closer to Trey. For Trina, I wasn’t sure. Attention? Popularity? Approval? Only she knew exactly what she was trying to win.
“Well, still. I’m sorry how it turned out.” And he glanced around him at the room, the shelves, the computers, the whole library.
And then I did something I never in a million years thought I could do when thinking about my colossal mistake back in May.
I smiled.
“I’m not,” I said.
“You’re not . . . what?”
“Not sorry about how it turned out.” And then I did what he did. I looked around me, at the circ desk and the shelves, at the furniture and the people, at this place that had been my home away from home all summer long. This place that had given me myself back, only better. A new and improved version of me.
“I’m sorry if I got you in any kind of trouble, but I’m not sorry how it turned out. At all.”
He tilted his head and looked at me then. I could tell he didn’t know exactly what to make of me, not just yet, but he was trying. And I liked that. A lot.
What he said was, “Thanks for taking care of my sister.”
“You’re welcome,” I said back, and then took the staff stairway down to the kitchen. I pulled out my phone and dialed my mom’s work number. While it rang, I thought about the morning, all that had happened between the time we opened and now. My heart fluttered in my chest. I pulled up a chair and lowered myself into it, rested my elbows on the table, and took a huge breath, hoping to wash everything scared and shaky out of me.
She answered on the fourth ring, right before voice mail picked up.
“Mom, it’s me.”
“Hi, Jamie. What’s up?” A short pause, then, “You sound funny.”
“I do?”
“You sound the way you do when you’re trying to act like everything is fine but everything is really not fine.”
“How do you do that?”
“I’m your mom. I live and breathe you.”
“That’s super creepy, Mom.”
“Too bad,” she said, and I could hear her smile. “Talk to me.”
Her voice was comfort and hugs and movies on the couch together, a security blanket, even over the phone.
So I did. I told her everything.
Because sometimes you just needed to talk.
Beverly
The text buzzed through the next morning when I was still at home making my bed.
It was Beverly, about Wally.
He didn’t make it.
Massive stroke.
Beverly wanted me to know before I came to work so I’d have a chance to process it on my own, in private. She said it was a terrible loss, but we still had a library to run. To save.
I hugged the thin blanket I was folding against my face and tried to push all my sadness into it.
Wally. Our Tuesday regular, our movie fanatic. Gone. We knew he was old, and you could tell from the coughing that he wasn’t 100 percent healthy. But still.
I could already feel how much I would miss him. How much we all would. Tuesday mornings at the library would feel strange now, off-balance, for a very long time.
I finished making my bed, splashed cold water on my face, and touched up the little bit of makeup I had just splotched with my tears. Then I locked the door behind me and headed to the library.
It was on my walk there that I remembered the window in the children’s room, the one I opened for Trina. I’d never close
d it! Everything was so crazy after Wally’s ambulance exit. Beverly didn’t even come back to the library that day, which was completely shocking to me but didn’t seem to faze Sonia or Lenny at all, as if they knew something I didn’t. We fielded a ton of questions all day at the circ desk as the news spread through town and people stopped in to find out who, what, when, but mostly who. We were all way too distracted to notice an open window in the children’s room.
But that open window meant anyone could have climbed into the library overnight and grabbed any book, movie, or magazine they wanted, not to mention the cash we kept in the drawer for fines. Not to mention all the computer equipment. The whole library could have been ransacked.
And it would be all my fault.
Another colossal mistake.
Panic began to expand in my gut, and I felt suddenly queasy. I stopped walking and leaned against a tree growing on the strip of green between the street and the sidewalk. I took a deep breath, and then an even deeper one.
The window was a mistake, but it was an honest mistake. It happened because I was helping someone who really needed help. This should be one of those mistakes that was easily forgiven. This should be one of those mistakes that wasn’t followed by a punishment. Or consequences.
“It’s not so bad,” I told myself out loud. “It’ll be okay.” I picked up my pace and hurried to the library.
Everyone was already there when I arrived: Beverly, Sonia, Lenny, a bunch of regulars, plus a mom with a double stroller browsing the parenting magazines. And everyone was busy, doing their regular library things, like they had the day before and like they would the day after.
Like Wally never would again.
I hustled to the children’s room and found the window the way I had left it, still open. I surveyed the room. Everything looked fine. The shelves were full, the toys were stacked in their buckets, the tablets were resting on the low tables waiting for small hands. Nothing was missing or broken.
I shut the window and locked it, relief flooding my body. I exhaled deeply and scanned the room again. When my eyes reached the doorway, I saw Beverly on the other side, looking at me.
A Kind of Paradise Page 13