“Good,” I say. “Aja?”
“Asleep,” she says. “He’s a good kid.”
“I know.” I grin a little. He’s frustrating as all get-out. But there’s no denying that he is good. Genuinely better than most other humans. I lean the wheelchair up against the wall where he’ll see it first thing in the morning.
“We found the coffee mugs,” she says.
“You did?”
“Yep. In the box marked ‘board games, poker chips, and miscellaneous,’ of all places.”
I look at her. “I have poker chips?”
“You do.”
“Huh.” I toss my wallet and keys on the side table next to the couch. “Well, thanks,” I say. “I really mean it. Same time tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” she says, moving to gather her things. “Oh, and we found something else.”
“I hope it’s the cereal bowls,” I say. “I can’t find those either. Aja’s been eating his Rice Chex out of a ceramic tureen.”
“It’s a journal,” she says, and then clears her throat. “Ellie’s journal.”
I look at her. I didn’t even know Ellie kept a journal.
“How did it get into my stuff?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she left it at your house?”
I run my fingers through my hair. “What do I do with it? Should I read it?” I’m overcome with the sudden desire to do just that. To get inside Ellie’s brain, find out everything that she’s been thinking. Unravel the mystery that is my teenage daughter.
“No! You can’t read your daughter’s journal. That’s against every parenting rule. Ever.”
I know she’s right. She’s right. But still.
“Well, I could text her and see if she wants it back, but she’s not exactly speaking to me.”
“Eric,” Con says.
“I know, I know,” I say. “I’m sure she wants it back. I’ll just mail it to her.”
“Eric,” she says again, fixing me with her ever-changing hazel eyes that mirror my own. Right now, they’re more green than brown.
“What? I won’t read it. I swear,” I say, crossing my heart. “Where is it?”
She stares at me a beat longer and then says: “On your dresser.” She walks past me to the dining room to collect her purse from the lone chair, then turns and puts her arms around my shoulders. I stand there awkwardly as she hugs me. We’re not a hugging family.
“Er, Con?”
She lets go and sighs. “I just wish you would find someone,” she says. “You shouldn’t be doing all this alone.”
I scoff, even though I don’t entirely disagree with her. “What, are you going to set me up again? That didn’t work out so well.”
A year after my divorce, I went on a blind date with someone Connie knew in college who lived about thirty minutes away from me. A lawyer. Corporate attorney of some kind. She was lovely—big, doelike eyes and thick lips balanced out by a sliver of a nose and thin, stick-straight locks of hair that grazed her shoulders like blades of grass. She laughed easily at my pathetic jokes and robustly defended her stance—like any good lawyer—on the merits of corn versus flour tortillas.
I behaved jovially, like a gentleman. I laughed at the appropriate times, opened car doors, fetched her a glass of water after an athletic bout of sex later in the evening.
But alone the next morning, I stared at my face in the mirror, searching . . . for what, I didn’t know. I felt numb. Or worse than numb, like I had lost a limb and was still having pain in it. I called her that afternoon and told her voice mail I had had a lovely time but didn’t think I was quite ready to date again.
“You had just gone through a divorce,” Connie says. “You weren’t ready yet. That’s normal.”
I stick my hands in my pockets and shrug. “I don’t know that the word ‘normal’ applies to me.”
She smiles. “I’ve been trying to tell you that for years,” she says, reaching for the door handle. “See you tomorrow.”
When Connie’s gone, I pull my cell out of my back pocket and scroll to Ellie’s name. I have her journal. Surely telling her that would elicit a response. Even a threatening “Don’t you dare read it or else” would be preferable to silence. And I could tell her that I wouldn’t dream of betraying her privacy that way, that I’ll mail it back instantly, which would maybe garner me some kind of cool-dad points in her book. But that all feels slightly manipulative, and as much as I want my daughter to speak to me again, I don’t want it to be because she’s being coerced to do it.
So instead I tap out a quick message:
I love you, Ellie. Dad.
Then I turn off the lamp and walk down the hall to my bedroom, stopping for a moment at Aja’s door and placing my ear to it. I hear the keys clacking away at his computer, of course. I’ll give him a few more minutes before lights-out.
In my room, I sit on the bed, the mattress groaning beneath me, and take my shoes off one by one, thinking about what Connie asked me: How was your day? Stressful. That’s how my day was. How every day has been since I started this job last month. Naturally our largest client would be acquiring an S & P company now, rather than doing it before Shelly left for maternity leave or waiting until she gets back, leaving me—and the team, but really me, since I’m in charge—solely responsible for all the valuations and analyses. There’s no room for error or senior management will go ballistic.
I loosen my tie and lie back on the bed, surveying my barren room and giving in to a self-pitying What in the hell am I doing in this apartment in New Jersey moment. The notebook on my dresser catches my eye. Ellie’s journal.
Ellie. My daughter who hates me. I knew the divorce wouldn’t be easy on her—is it ever easy on any kid? But I never thought we’d be here. We had a good relationship. I thought we did, anyway. Better than most. I knew exactly how to make her laugh. Corny jokes, silly faces behind Stephanie’s back, a well-timed pun. We watched every episode of every season of The Amazing Race together—and the best moment of my life might have been when she turned to me and said, “We should do it. We could totally win.”
How did we go from that—being a hypothetical team on a world-traveling reality show—to this? I glance at Ellie’s journal again and then look away, as if not seeing it will make it less tempting to open it. It’s not. I get up from the bed, snatch the book from the dresser, and quickly open the top drawer, throwing the book in and shutting the drawer before my hands and eyes have a chance to betray my best intentions.
Then I walk down the hall and knock on Aja’s door. I hear him grunt and take that as an invitation to open it. I’m greeted with his profile, his eyes locked to the computer screen. I stand there for a minute, but he doesn’t move.
“Found your wheelchair today,” I say.
He grunts again.
“Hey, did you hear me? I thought you’d be really excited.”
He turns to me, his eyes large and serious. “I just found out they don’t do dress-up at this school, like they do at home. Mrs. Bennett said it’s too much of a distraction.”
I suppress a sigh. Would have been nice to know before I spent my whole lunch break tracking a wheelchair down.
“But at least you can still wear it Halloween night? Go trick-or-treating?”
“I’m too old for that.”
“You are?” I try to remember when Ellie stopped. I guess it was around this age.
“Well, it’s probably for the best, considering it could be really offensive—”
“I’ll find somewhere to wear it.” Aja cuts me off.
I rub my hand over my face. I wonder if I should continue arguing, try to make him see my point of view, but then decide it’s not worth it. If he can’t wear it to school or trick-or-treating, the chances are slim that he actually will find another place to wear it. It’s not like he has a gaggle of new friends at school that will be inviting him to parties or anything.
“What are you doing on there?” I ask.
“Talking to Iggy,” h
e says.
I stand there for a minute more and then say, “Just a few more minutes, then bed. It’s getting late.”
He doesn’t respond, so I gently close the door, but before it shuts all the way, I hear him mutter something. It sounds a lot like “I hate it here.”
The door latch clicks in place and I take a deep breath and close my eyes, trying to swallow the guilt that I feel and reminding myself, It’s only for six months.
ON SATURDAY, I’M supposed to be getting ready to take Aja to the animal shelter—even though a dog is the last thing we need right now—but I can’t stop thinking about Ellie.
I read the journal. I know I shouldn’t have, but when I couldn’t stop thinking about it, wondering if it had some magical insight into Ellie’s mind that would help me understand why she’s so angry—why she won’t speak to me—I got up and opened the drawer where I stashed it. Before I could convince myself that what I was doing was wrong, I reached in, picked up the spiral notebook, opened the front cover, and started reading. And here’s the thing: it’s not really a journal, which must be why Ellie’s not freaking out about where it is. I mean, it is a journal, in that it’s her thoughts written down on paper. But it must have been some kind of school assignment, because there’s a grade and handwritten comment on the inside front cover: “A, Great job!” (That’s my girl. Or that was my girl, until she started hanging out with Darcy and her grades nose-dived into the C and D territory.) And each page is devoted to a different book—presumably books that she read and then discussed her opinions of in this journal.
But still, to be fair, I texted her immediately afterward.
Found your book journal assignment. OK if I flip through it? Dad
What’s that saying about how it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission? OK, so maybe this is more like asking for permission after you’ve already done the thing you want permission for, but same principle. Kind of. Regardless, I took her silence as approval.
I’m rereading her entry on The Catcher in the Rye (a book I think I read in high school but don’t remember much about) when Aja appears in the doorway to my room.
I drop the journal, as if it’s a porn magazine I’ve been caught looking at. (So, maybe even with her silent approval, I still feel a little guilty.)
“Are you ready?” he asks. “You said we were leaving for the animal shelter at nine.”
“Yeah, sorry,” I say, glancing back at the journal. Suddenly I have an idea. A way to try to make inroads with Ellie. “We just have to make a quick stop first.”
“Where?”
“The library.”
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, when I reach for the handle on the door of the Lincoln County Library, I spot a sign affixed to the glass.
JOIN US NEXT SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31
HALLOWEEN STORY TIME FOR CHILDREN OF ALL AGES
WEAR A COSTUME (BOOK CHARACTERS ENCOURAGED)
FREE CANDY!
I glance over at Aja and he’s grinning at me, his face a lit-up Christmas tree. “Told you I’d find a place to wear it,” he says.
I sigh, and open the door.
seven
JUBILEE
“DON’T FORGET TO wear a Halloween costume, dear!” is the last thing Louise said to me as I was leaving on my fifth day of work.
“A costume?”
“Tomorrow’s Halloween,” she said. “We always dress up at the library.”
I’ve only worn a Halloween costume once in my life. I was nine and my one and only childhood friend, Gracie Lee, and I dressed as the twins from The Shining. “Why on earth would you want to go as that?” Mom asked, snuffing out a cigarette on a paper plate. “It’s morbid.” Gracie Lee took out her bulky blue hearing aids and wore a pair of gloves to match me, even though the girls in the movie didn’t wear them. But nobody really got it—maybe because we looked nothing alike in the face—and one woman even commented how “cute” we were. Gracie Lee couldn’t hear her, so I told her the woman said we looked creepy and she smiled. And then another memory from that Halloween bursts through. As we were sorting our loot at the end of the night, Gracie bit into a Baby Ruth, not knowing it had caramel in it. She hated caramel, so she handed me the candy bar. Before I could get it to my lips, my mom slapped it out of my hand. “Are you trying to kill yourself?” she screamed. “Do you want to die?” That night I had seen vampires and ghosts and a boy in a terrifying mask that looked like it had real blood dripping down its face, but that was the most scared I’d ever been. I was still shaking when I went to bed.
Now, staring at my mom’s closet, I finger the sleeves of each suit and blouse, hoping inspiration will strike me. But so far, I can only think of Business Executive Barbie in Mom’s bubblegum-pink suit that I have yet to wear, because it’s bubblegum pink.
My fingers reach the end of their journey at the back of the closet and land on something soft to the touch. I pull the garment off the hanger and bring it out into the light. It’s a long, white gown—not like a wedding dress, but more like something to sleep in. I have no idea why my mom owned this unflattering, way-too-much-coverage-for-her-taste getup, but it’s perfect.
I’m going to be Emily Dickinson. In the latter part of her life, when she didn’t leave her house and only wore white and talked to her friends and family through her front door.
I peel off my sweatshirt and flannel pants and tug the gown over my head. Like all of Mom’s clothes, it doesn’t fit perfectly, but it will do. I go to the bathroom and release my hair from the rubber band that’s been holding it hostage on top of my head. Even though Emily Dickinson wore her hair tightly smoothed back in a conservative bun in all the portraits I’ve seen of her—and I’ve been wearing mine pulled back every day at the library—I decide to let it be loose and wild today. If she holed up in her house for years and didn’t accept visitors, it stands to reason she wouldn’t fix her hair. I glance in the mirror one last time and then go downstairs to get my gloves and keys.
WHEN I WALK into the library, Louise looks at me. “Oh dear, did you wake up late?”
“No,” I say.
She frowns. “Why are you wearing a nightgown?”
“This is my costume.” I slip my bag behind the circulation desk.
She’s got on a black cap and aviator sunglasses, so I feel rather than see her narrow her eyes at me.
“Are you that weird pop singer? That Lady Gaga or whoever?”
“No,” I say. “I’m Emily Dickinson.”
“The poet?”
“Yeah.”
I can see she’s still trying to figure it out.
“Toward the end of her life, she was kind of a hermit and only wore white.”
“Huh.”
She turns her body to face me, and I notice the silver handcuffs hanging from Louise’s belt loop. She points to the paper she’s taped to her chest. It reads: GRAMMER POLICE.
“You spelled ‘grammar’ wrong.”
“I did?” She looks down. “Well, damn.”
She rips the sign off her blouse and pulls a fresh sheet from the printer on the desk. She picks up a black Sharpie and I start wheeling a pushcart toward the door so I can pick up the returns from outside.
The library doesn’t feel as cavernous as it did on the first day, but I’m still leery of leaving the circulation desk. It’s like I’m testing myself each time I do it. How far can I go today? I know the answer: to the returns box outside. It’s like the library—and, weirdly, the people in it—have become an extension of my own house.
Three other librarians are typically working during my shifts—Maryann, the library director; Roger, the children’s librarian; and Shayna, another circulation assistant—but Louise is my favorite. Maybe it’s because she’s the first person I met and I’m naturally more comfortable with her. Or maybe it’s because she’s the person I have the most contact with—Roger sits behind a desk in the children’s section, Shayna’s shift and mine only overlap for a few hours each day, and Maryann is often w
orking in her office in the back or running out to a meeting. Or maybe it’s because she doesn’t probe. (The first thing Shayna asked me when we met: “What’s with the gloves? Are you, like, perpetually cold?” I just shrugged. “Something like that.”) But Louise has never mentioned my gloves or asked anything else personal about me for that matter—like if I have a boyfriend or where I went to college. She just does her job and I do mine.
AT TWO FORTY-FIVE Louise comes rushing up to me, out of breath.
“Aren’t you on break?” I ask.
“I had to come back,” she says. “Maryann called and Roger isn’t coming in today.” She gasps for air.
“Do you need to sit down?” The police hat is perched a tad lopsided on her silver bouffant and the sign on her chest is heaving.
“No, I’m fine. I’m not used to running.”
I picture her in her cop getup bursting out of TeaCakes, the coffee shop where she was taking her lunch break, rushing down the sidewalk to get back to the library, and can only imagine what passersby must have thought: There’s a grammar emergency! Get out of the way!
“You’ll have to do story time for the kids.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. I need to man the circ desk.”
“But I’ve never done that before,” I say, my head spinning.
“Well, no. But surely you’ve read to children before, yes? Nieces? Nephews?”
I shake my head no.
She frowns. “It’s easy. Roger left the three books on his desk and I think you give out candy and sing a song or something. Over in thirty minutes.”
“Sing a song?” This is getting worse by the second.
“Yes. Run along, dear.” She shoos me with her hands toward the kids’ section. “The children— Oh, look! A few are coming through the door now.”
I grab the books off Roger’s desk and head to the carpet circle where one lone adult chair faces an empty floor. I sit down in the chair and look up to see the children who raced through the door now coming at me with full-fledged enthusiasm. There’s a girl pirate, three princesses wearing what appears to be the exact same blue dress, and a boy in an astronaut costume.
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