“Destruction.”
“Whatever, destruction. Either way, it’s got to stop.”
Instead of nodding in agreement, he just stares at me with his large eyes. “But it didn’t work.”
“It doesn’t matter. You can’t talk about it. It’s like at the airport. You can’t say the word ‘bomb.’ ” I put the car in reverse and start to back out of the parking spot.
“Why not?”
“Because bombs are dangerous,” I say, putting my foot on the brake and turning to look at him. “They can hurt people. Lots of people. And when you talk about it, or say the word—especially at the airport—people get scared and think you want to hurt them.”
“I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone,” he says.
I sigh and rub my jawline. “I know. I know, bud. You just can’t say it, that’s all.”
I slide the gearshift into drive and press the gas. We ride in silence for a few minutes and then Aja says, “But what if I’m talking about a video game?”
“No! Aja, no. You can’t talk about blowing things up. That’s the rule. Period. The end. Got it?”
“OK,” he says, staring straight ahead at the glove box.
That settled, I run through my mind the things I need to do when we get home. Call Connie, for starters, and see if she can take a few days off work to hang with Aja, while I’m at work. I know it’s asking a lot of her, but I don’t know what else to do.
When we pull into the driveway, I notice that Aja is still looking at the glove box.
“Aja?” I say.
He doesn’t respond.
“Aja, we’re home.”
He doesn’t move.
“Aja! What are you doing?”
He turns, and in a quiet voice says: “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Oh my god—are you trying to blow up the car?”
“No,” he says. And then: “Just the glove box.”
“No! No more telekinetic explosion! It’s done.”
“Destruction, not explosion,” he says.
“Whatever! You need to go back to just trying to move things with your mind. Got it?”
Nothing.
“Aja?”
He opens his mouth: “Can we still get a dog?”
five
JUBILEE
AS I SUSPECTED, the lack of gas wasn’t the problem with the Pontiac. After I put a few gallons in the tank, it still wouldn’t turn on, which is why I find myself riding my bike to my first day of work at the library. And once I get used to the cars whooshing by me, and the terrible feeling that I’m going to die at any second, I kind of start to like it. The wind. The feeling of freedom.
I pass over the Passaic River Bridge into downtown, mesmerized by the light reflecting off the water, and pedal a few more blocks to the library. A block off Main Street, the Lincoln Library is a small, squat brick building sandwiched in between a bank and an old house that now functions as a day spa. I ease off the bike and roll it into the bike rack, threading the lock I ordered online through the spokes of the bike and the metal bars of the rack. Then I stand up, straighten my skirt, and tug at the edges of my gloves. And that’s when I start to panic.
I complete a round of tapping from my skull to my wrists, take a deep breath, and walk up the sidewalk to the single glass door adorned with black sticker lettering announcing the library’s hours of operation. I open it and step inside.
“You must be Jubilee,” a woman says when I approach the main desk in the middle of the library. She has wispy salt-and-pepper bangs and a lined face, and when she stands up, I see that she’s thin everywhere except her hips—her body looks like a snake that’s just swallowed a rodent.
I nod in response to her question.
“I’m Louise, the circulation manager.” She sighs. “That’s really just a fancy title that means ‘librarian that’s been here forever.’ Welcome to the library.”
“OH DEAR, SOMEONE ripped the last three pages of this book,” Louise says a few hours later, holding a copy of If You Give a Pig a Party. It’s the third time she’s said “dear” since I got here.
To me: You didn’t bring an umbrella today, dear? It’s supposed to rain this afternoon.
On the phone with someone I assumed was her daughter: Oh, it was so dear. Little striped tights and yellow wings, and I can just hear her saying “bzzzzz” in that cute little voice. I can pick it up on my way home from work today.
But she also said “shit” under her breath when she dropped a large-print volume of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and it landed on her toes, and I’m not sure why, but it made me smile.
“Now, when you find a ripped page like this,” she says to me, “don’t use regular tape to fix it. We have special tape.” She opens a drawer and takes out a square orange box that says “Filmoplast” on the side. As she pulls out a length of the adhesive, she continues speaking. “For a tear this size, we wouldn’t charge a fee, but if the damage was extensive—coloring on the pages, water damage, a lot of ripped pages—then you’d want to show it to somebody—me or Maryann—to assess the cost of repair or replacement.”
Maryann is the library director, the woman who called me two days after I ran into Madison H. and had started to convince myself that the encounter didn’t actually happen—that it was a figment of my overactive imagination, or that the library had found someone more qualified, with actual work experience. Turns out, they hadn’t.
I nod, my head swimming with the numerous instructions I’ve already been given regarding the computer system, late fees, reshelving books, the finicky printer that has to be at least half-full of paper or it won’t work properly, and how to assist patrons, which are not high-end library donors, as I first thought, but what they call their regular customers. She also gave me a rundown of Maryann’s Commandments, rules like Never leave the circulation desk unmanned and Always smile when you’re greeting patrons. But that’s all nothing compared to how overwhelming the library is in general. It’s not a large space—just a one-story brick building—but to me it’s cavernous. And sitting behind the circulation desk, I feel like I’m on display. The Hope Diamond in the center of the room, except I’m not encased in glass. I’ve spent most of the morning glancing behind me, even though there are only three or four people milling around the stacks and none of them are anywhere close to the circulation desk.
“Oh, good,” Louise says under her breath, rolling her eyes. “The pillow golfer is here.” I follow her line of sight and see a man wearing sweatpants and carrying a pillow with a floral case toward the computer carrels.
I look back at Louise. “Real name’s Michael. Thirtysomething,” she whispers. “Unemployed. Been coming in here every day for the last six months with that same pillow. He sits on it while playing some computer golf game. Guess the chair gets uncomfortable after a while. One time I swear he didn’t get up to even go to the bathroom for eight hours straight.” She laughs, and I turn to take him in once again, feeling a bizarre kinship with this stranger. He’s probably just lonely—a feeling I’m intimately familiar with. “I don’t know if Maryann mentioned to you, but we get all sorts in here. The job is really only about sixty percent books. The other forty percent is community service. Mostly mental health.”
My eyes widen at this. Books, I can handle. Checking in, checking out, shelving. But people?
“Don’t worry,” Louise says, patting my gloved hand. I flinch at the contact and jerk my hand back. Louise looks up at me, her eyebrows slightly raised. “I know it’s a lot to take in, but you’ll get the hang of it. Really.”
For the rest of the day, I make sure I stay at arm’s distance from Louise.
Just in case.
RIGHT BEFORE THE end of my shift at four, I’m finishing up some new-employee paperwork when I get to this question in the insurance information section: Do you have any preexisting conditions? I hesitate, and then check the box next to “allergies,” just as Louise appears behind me, pushing a cart of referen
ce books. “Take these to the back,” she says. “Row nine forty-six, and reshelve them according to the numbers on their spines. Think you can do that, dear?”
I nod again, and realize I haven’t spoken out loud once since I arrived that morning. I wonder if she thinks I’m mute.
I step out from behind the circulation desk and my legs tremble. I grab the edge of the metal cart for support. The enclosed space of the circulation desk has become my home for the day, my safe haven. But now I have to step out into the aisles. Where the people are. And who knows what might happen?
Even though I have this fear of leaving the circulation desk and walking through the library, I deeply and completely accept myself.
Though I feel a little ridiculous thinking it, the phrase does give my feet the impetus they need to start moving forward. But I still glance to my left, my right, and sometimes behind me as I make my way to the back of the library, searching for the people I could swear are drilling holes into me with their powerful lines of sight. Louise isn’t. She’s looking down, busying herself with tidying up the circulation desk. Her lips are moving slightly and it looks as though she’s muttering to herself.
The cart has one wobbly wheel that lightly whines in protest. When I arrive at row 946, the sound mercifully stops, but instead of silence, the noise is replaced by something else. Some kind of shuffling, as if a raccoon is trapped in the stacks and trying to make its way out. A very heavy-breathing raccoon. Who giggles.
My heart pounding, I quietly pad to the next aisle and peer around the corner, not quite sure what will greet me.
And then I stop, my feet blocks of cement, unable to move forward or backward. At the end of the aisle are two bodies so entangled with each other, they are literally one. They are a jumble of hands, exposed throats, mouths. It’s a Klimt painting come to life. And though I know I shouldn’t be staring, I can’t look away. It’s so raw. And fumbling. And kind of a mess.
And it makes my throat close up and my body flush with that feeling that wakes me up in the middle of the night. That hot hunger and yearning and burning humiliation.
A small scream pierces my eardrums and I realize the two faces that were once buried in each other are now trained on me. I’m shocked by their youth. The girl has braces and flushed cheeks. The boy a smatter of pimples on his jawline.
“You perv,” the boy says, his eyes burning with the testosterone coursing through his veins.
And though I know I should say something, admonish them in my adult voice, I still can’t move. They uncouple, like train cars disengaging, and the girl quickly rearranges the buttons on her shirt, while the boy continues to glare at me.
I feel a presence come up behind me and then Louise’s voice loudly in my ear. “Brendon! Felicia! I’ve told you twice now—the library is not the backseat of your car. Last warning. Next time I’m calling your parents.”
They both drop their gazes to the ground, and Brendon grabs Felicia’s hand, leading her out of the stacks.
When they squeeze by me, Brendan whispers just loud enough for me to hear: “Like what you saw?”
I flush deeper and stare at the row of reference books in front of me, concentrating on the numbers.
Then the kids are gone. Louise mutters, “Horny teenagers,” and heads back to the circulation desk, and I’m left with a cartful of heavy books, waiting to be put in their rightful place.
Everyone is moving around me, going about their business, but my feet are nailed to the spot of worn carpet I’m standing on.
All I can think about is Donovan.
And the way his mouth felt when it was on mine.
six
ERIC
REFLEXIVELY, I PICK up the blue tie from my meager collection and begin to loop it around my neck. I wear the blue tie on Thursdays.
I don’t have OCD or anything—I don’t freak out if I can’t find my blue tie on Thursdays. It’s just efficient—one less decision I have to make. Kind of like why Mark Zuckerberg wears a gray T-shirt every day. I’m the Mark Zuckerberg of accounting. I sometimes use this line at parties and it always gets a perfunctory laugh that pleases me.
I finish the half-Windsor knot and fold my collar down. Then I grab my watch from the bathroom counter and secure it on my wrist. As I walk down the hall toward the kitchen past Aja’s room, I hear him clacking away at his computer.
When he first came to live with me, I was alarmed at how much time he spent on the computer, considering he was only eight at the time. Ellie, of course, was addicted to hers too, but she was nearly five years older. At eight, she spent a lot of time riding her bike with a neighbor friend and choreographing dances and obsessing over Monster High dolls. I didn’t remember Dinesh mentioning that as one of the myriad things he was worried about when it came to Aja. So it was one of the first real conversations I had to have with him after he moved in and I had no idea what to say, since Stephanie had always handled most of those tough talks with Ellie. “You know there are people out there—on the Internet, I mean—that aren’t always nice. You know, to kids. Well, they start out being nice, but then they’re not.” I replayed what I had just said in my mind. It didn’t make sense even to me. “I mean not like bullies, but like . . .” I searched for words that wouldn’t come. How to explain this to an eight-year-old?
“Are you talking about sexual predators?” he said, enunciating each syllable in that formal way he has. My mouth dropped open. “I know all about that. I’m not stupid.”
I closed my mouth. “OK then,” I said. I went to pat his leg, but then I remembered Dinesh saying he didn’t really liked to be touched, so I awkwardly patted the bedspread beside his leg instead. “Good talk.”
Now I feel the need to continue my due diligence and call out as I walk past his open door: “You’re not talking to any sexual predators in there, are you?”
His small voice responds: “I guess I wouldn’t know, would I?”
Good point.
Thank God Connie has agreed to watch him today. Not without some requisite grumbling from her: “I have a real job too, you know.”
And some placating from me: “I know. And you’re very good at it. Best and most underpaid lawyer this side of Passaic.”
Eventually, she acquiesced. “I’m only doing it because I love Aja,” she said. “And because I don’t want him to blow up your apartment.”
“Thank you.”
The doorbell rings just as I’m pouring my second cup of coffee.
“Aja,” I call. “Connie’s here.”
He doesn’t respond.
I check my watch—twenty minutes until the train I need to catch—and open the door. Connie walks past me and looks at my coffee cup.
“I thought you were cutting back.”
“It’s my first,” I lie, then I turn and call for Aja again.
“Where is the little troublemaker?” she asks, setting her purse on the lone chair in the dining room, which isn’t so much a “room” as it is an extra space adjacent to the living room/foyer/den. Such is apartment living. I’m only here for six months and I thought bringing both my small kitchen table and the dining room set from my house in New Hampshire might be overkill. It’s not like I’m throwing dinner parties every weekend. Or ever.
“In his room. On his computer.”
“Ah.”
“Aja!” I turn around and almost run smack into him. “There you are.”
“Whatcha doin’ in there, champ?” Connie asks.
“Talking to Iggy,” he says, without looking up.
“The rapper?” she says, chuckling at her own joke.
Aja just stares at her.
“You know, that Australian girl?” Connie says. “With the large bottom?”
“Iggy’s a boy,” he says, adjusting his glasses.
“Or a forty-five-year-old sexual predator,” I joke, even though a month ago, much to Aja’s embarrassment, I popped into his room while he was Skyping one evening to make sure Iggy was, in fact, a ten
-year-old kid. “Guess we’ll never know, right, Aja?”
He fixes me with his serious look. “You do know. You saw him. Can I go back to my room now?”
“No,” I say. “I figured out your punishment. Today, you’ll be unpacking all of the boxes we have left until you find the rest of my coffee mugs.”
“OK,” he says. That’s the weird dichotomy about Aja—he’s surprisingly easygoing when he wants to be. Doesn’t throw tantrums or get sullen like most other kids his age.
“OK, then,” I say. I check my watch again. I have to leave. I can’t miss the train into the city and risk being late. “Thanks again, Con.”
“Go,” she says. “We’ll be fine.”
“Aja, be good.”
I grab my keys and wallet and start to head out the door.
“Eric?” Aja calls after me—and I know he’s going to say the same thing he’s said to me every morning for the past six weeks. “Don’t forget to look for a wheelchair!”
That damned wheelchair.
LATER THAT NIGHT—MUCH later, since the train stopped for an interminable fifty minutes between Secaucus and Newark, leaving me to believe, briefly, that I would never, ever make it home—I walk into the quiet apartment, lugging an adult-size wheelchair behind me. I finally found it at a Goodwill store in Harlem for $25, taking the entirety of my lunch break to call every secondhand store in the city before I found one. I felt a little guilty for buying it, possibly taking it away from someone who really needs it. But I promised myself I’d return it when Aja was done—and make a monetary donation to the nonprofit while I was at it.
Connie’s reading on the couch. She stands up when she sees me.
“How was work?” she asks.
The question stops me in my tracks. It’s been so long—at least the two years since the divorce and probably even many years before that—since someone asked me that at the end of the day. Since someone cared. I didn’t realize how much I missed it—not Stephanie, just someone—until this moment.
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