The World’s Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family

by Josh Hanagarne

  I looked at the gray blobs in that alien environment. It looked like the negative of a bowl of Rice Krispies and sea monkeys. “No,” I said, sure that he was about to say, “I’m sorry, but it’s happened again. October is simply not your month.”

  “Right”—he tapped the screen—“here. That’s a heartbeat. It’s as healthy a heartbeat as I’ve ever seen at this stage.”

  Janette made a noise between a laugh and a sob. I leaned closer. A tiny beacon of life blipped and flickered on the screen, a pulsing bit of darkness in the graphic tumult of the womb. And it was everything.

  “It’s going to be okay?” I said. “It’s okay?”

  Janette grabbed my hand. “Oh, wow,” she said. “Oh, wow. Josh.”

  We shook hands with Gene Wilder and went out to lunch. “Maybe it’s just time,” she said. “Maybe…maybe we’re just better this time and it’ll work.”

  I kissed her across the table. “I’ll do anything to help you with this. I’ll do everything.” I meant it. It was true. My job was going well and I was considering a career in special education. We had more money. I had more confidence. It was time. It had to be.

  The next two weeks passed in a tentative euphoria. We were happy but we tried to be cautious and humble; what if we celebrated too hard and wrecked everything?

  Another quiet morning. “Josh, I need you to drive me to the doctor.” Janette sounded like she was choking. The drive was only fifteen minutes away, but it felt like it took years. We didn’t talk. She shook in the passenger seat of my truck. I yawned and realized how tightly my jaw was clenched when the effort of opening my mouth actually hurt.

  We sat in the same waiting room.

  No Gene Wilder this time. We were taken into a dim room where Janette, quietly crying, removed her clothes and slipped into a dressing gown. She lay on the table and stared at the ceiling. A young female sonogram technician entered the room and began applying the cold clear jelly to Janette’s stomach. I couldn’t organize my thoughts, but one surfaced, cutting through the chaos. They’re going to give her another ultrasound and we are going to have to sit here and look at the screen and try to see if there’s still a heartbeat and if there’s no heartbeat then that means it happened again. I wanted to lift Janette in my arms and carry her out to the truck. If I could just get her out of here before they started the procedure, we could escape the result. We could return to the book of baby names and laugh, and the next year wouldn’t have to pass with me blaming myself for my wretched, insubstantial seed and she wouldn’t have to lash herself with the guilt that her body was an inadequate vessel. If we could just—

  “Hmm…,” said the technician. “Maybe I’ll—let me try a few more angles.” I stared at the screen. Where was it? Where was the small dark disturbance in the fluid? The pulse that had made the past two weeks a joyous dream? Where was the life we had made? Janette looked, then turned her head back to the ceiling. She closed her eyes.

  “Janette, it’s going to be okay,” I said. “She just has to try another—”

  “I’m so sorry,” said the technician. “I can’t see a heartbeat.” She left us alone. Alone with this terrible silence and this blank screen. A pin-sized change.

  I watched my stricken wife remove her dressing gown and dress herself. Things can change so quickly. As we left, we passed a young couple and their daughter, a girl who couldn’t have been more than three years old. “See!” said the mother, pointing at their hot-off-the-press sonogram. “That’s your little brother!”

  We walked by and scheduled Janette’s D and C surgery.

  A week later, my brother, Kyle, sat with me. Minutes earlier Janette had been wheeled into surgery. I hadn’t eaten all day so we walked to a Subway across the street. “I know that I haven’t always been able to get things done, and that I break down, but this is something different,” I said. “This isn’t part of that. This actually is this hard, it’s not just me.”

  Kyle nodded. “I know, Josh. We all know. Want me to cheer you up?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  He drew back his arm and held his hoagie like a football. “See that old lady over there? I’m going to throw this right into her mouth.”

  I laughed. I had to. I was cried out.

  Janette recovered slowly. We were heavy and dull and the world was cobwebs and leaden air. Her emotional state, her entire psyche, became its own delicate fontanelle. Every happy word within earshot, every laughing child, every piece of evidence that someone else’s life was going how that person wanted it to…it was unwelcome, destructive pressure. We were walking emptiness, a patchwork of living voids stitched together from fissures and rifts.

  Three weeks later I was on the couch. Our apartment was empty, but the building wasn’t. I heard a baby crying through the floor. Two sisters and their mother lived below us. One of them had a two-year-old and was pregnant. The other talked constantly about getting pregnant and spoke of a child that no longer lived with her. They each said they were battling meth addictions. They often knocked on our door with no particular goal in mind. “Hi,” they’d say. “Hi,” I would say. Then we’d stand there and blink and after a while I’d close the door.

  We couldn’t have what they had—children—and what they had, they dishonored with recklessness and drug use. Maddening.

  I fled outside. The sun made me self-conscious, as did the sound of my footfalls and the fresh air. And of course, the tics. As I walked, the noises ripped out of me as I flailed like a puppet.

  People stared. Even holding the gaze of another person was too heavy. I screamed. I walked. I screamed. I scratched myself. My arms waved about, striking at invisible swarms of bees. Tic tic tic tic tic. I slapped my face and chewed my lips until my eyes watered. I could barely remember where my house was. The cold air hit the heat of my face and seemed to create its own wind. I was crying in frustration. I walked faster and watched my feet, dragging them over another crack in the sidewalk, then another. I found myself alone on the corner of an intersection. Over the sound of my ragged breathing and my convulsing body I reached out and tried to find something still. Something calm.

  Across the street, two golden retrievers ran back and forth behind a chain-link fence, barking at me. They weren’t the only ones. Every single dog for what sounded like a square mile was barking its fool head off. They think I’m some big weird dog. I felt exactly like one of Kafka’s hapless characters, stumbling onto a new path and realizing that I’d lost my way. The dogs were barking at me.

  Dogs always look so happy. So pleased with themselves. “Huh!” I shouted. “Huh huh!”

  They barked and jumped and one of them spun in a tight circle.

  I started to laugh on the street as everyone else hurried by, bent into the wind, grim-faced and lashed. I went to the nearest convenience store and bought the biggest bag of dog treats I could find and walked around the neighborhood, doling out those treats to every dog I saw. By the time I passed the school where I worked, the bag was empty.

  “Janette,” I said when I walked in, “I’m going to go to the gym.

  She stuck her head out of the bedroom. “Is our membership still good?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll find out.”

  The membership had expired. The last thing Janette had wanted to do after the miscarriages was exercise, and I’d stopped going too. I signed us up again and went into the weight room.

  I had a decision to make. My suspicion that I could stay at the school and be totally at ease, hidden among the other noisy kids, had been right. It was easy to be there, but it wasn’t challenging in the way I needed it to be.

  “Janette,” I said that night, “I want to find another job.”

  “Why?”

  I explained that I felt like I was hiding out in the school, and that even though I enjoyed it, I wasn’t ready to commit to decades of work in special education. I needed a job that would keep me honest. A job that would prove that I had toughened up and could handle more stress. And
of course, I wanted a job that I’d love. What sort of test would be ideal for a man with noisy, disruptive Tourette Syndrome?

  “A convent?” said Janette. “A monastery? I don’t know, why don’t you just find a job that you like and not worry about whether it will be hard enough to make you miserable?”

  The next day I walked into the quietest building I knew of. A building that, incidentally, I visited almost every day: the public library. I dropped off my books. The silence was heavy and thick. Someone cleared his throat. It sounded like a shotgun blast in the stillness. My mouth went dry and my heart started its familiar pattern: What if? What if? What if?

  “Woo!” Whoops. Sure enough, everyone looked at me, including the staff members.

  “Can I have a job application?” I said.

  I got hired. I wasn’t doing anything super-important. I checked in the books that people returned. When someone wanted to borrow books, I ran their items under a scanner and got them a bag if they wanted one. If they wanted to chat about books, I’d chat. It was a tough, tic-filled four hours, but I did it. There was one moment of absolute panic when a woman approached the desk carrying an infant in a car seat. The baby’s neck was crooked at such an impossible angle that I thought, It’s dead. She has no idea that the baby she thinks is only asleep is dead! This was followed by an even worse thought: It’s dead and SHE KNOWS and she’s in here smiling and checking out Nora Roberts books!

  The baby opened its eyes and saw the horror on my face.

  That night Janette and I went out for dinner and celebrated. I had to laugh. “Some celebration, huh?” I said. “Another first day at work.”

  “Don’t think like that,” Janette said.

  “I’m trying.”

  “Good. What else was on your mind as you served the needy public today?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think we should start our adoption paperwork.”

  CHAPTER 9

  613.7—Kettlebells

  362.734—Adoption

  306.874—Fathers and Sons

  291.13—Greek Mythology

  The young mother stares at a computer screen. Her infant girl in a car seat screeches while her little boy plays on the floor nearby. Other patrons are staring, frowning, shaking their heads. I kneel by the mother.

  “Could you please keep your children more quiet?” I whisper. “I think they might be bothering other people. Can I help?”

  She begins sobbing. “Do you have kids?” She wipes her nose on her sleeve. “These are my kids. I have no idea where their dad is. I haven’t known for about two years. I have to give them up for adoption. They…” Her shoulders shake and she folds forward, crying into her lap. The boy toddles over and pats her on the back, concern on his little face.

  She sits up and whispers, “They don’t know. I don’t know how to tell them. I don’t know if I can tell them.”

  I hug her and now I’m sniffling and I can’t imagine what anyone must think we’re carrying on about. I think about that woman a lot. I never saw her or the kids again.

  LDS Family Services didn’t look like a place where dreams came true. It just looked like a building. I don’t know what I’d expected; maybe that we’d be meeting in a giant crib, or that the employees would all be wearing baby bonnets. Or that they’d pass out babies as party favors. Janette and I were there because as members of the LDS Church, we could take advantage of what we called afford-a-baby. This meant we’d only shell out four thousand dollars or so for our adoption, versus the ten to twenty thousand that other agencies might charge. And of course, it being a church-led agency, God himself was at the helm. If creating perfect families was the goal, surely He’d know how to handle things.

  During our intake session Janette and I sank into a plump leather couch as a pleasant, slender, white-haired woman explained the process. She spoke so quietly that we almost invited her to sit on our laps so we could hear her. The breakdown: We’d attend six weeks of adoption classes. We’d prepare a mountain of paperwork that, while she avoided calling it our “sales package,” was exactly that. An employee would visit our house and make sure it wasn’t a meth lab. We’d write a personal statement to whoever would birth our child. We’d participate in interviews, both jointly and alone.

  “Isn’t this exciting?” whispered the woman before embracing us. It was like hugging a sweater full of twigs.

  “This is going to be a lot of work,” said Janette afterward. “I don’t even know how to start.”

  “Let’s talk to Shaun and Maryanne.” They were two friends from the ward who had recently adopted a child from this office. I arranged a dinner date for that weekend. After dinner Janette went upstairs to talk with Maryanne while I stayed with Shaun.

  “So how were the classes?” I asked. “What were they like?”

  He moaned. “Worse than church. You sit around and everyone sniffles while they tell you how lucky you are to be adopting. There were people in our classes who’d been coming for years and still hadn’t filled out their paperwork. That was actually one of the only reasons I got our papers done so quick—I didn’t want to do another round of classes.”

  “What do they ask in the interviews? How should we handle that?” I asked.

  “I’m not kidding: Lie through your teeth. Say whatever you have to to look like the ideal candidate.” Shaun looked at something I couldn’t see and frowned. “When we got John, I hadn’t believed in the church in years. I was unemployed. We didn’t have health insurance. Our marriage wasn’t going that well, either.”

  “So why’d they give you a kid?”

  “Because I said the opposite of everything I just told you. I lied like crazy. I had a job. I had insurance. I had faith. All that. You don’t want to get into an argument with these people that you can’t win. Say whatever you have to.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, that was encouraging,” Janette said when we were alone. “Maryanne felt like it couldn’t have gone better. She loved every step of it, apparently.”

  “Well, here’s what Shaun said.” I couldn’t get through it without laughing.

  “Oh. Well. But Maryanne said…Well.”

  “Let’s just start the classes and see.”

  Classes took place upstairs in the agency. Maybe eight rows of beige chairs, the kind you instantly know will be the inverse of agreeable, lined an aisle that led to a pulpit and microphone. Maybe eight people, the kind you instantly know are not your kindred spirits, rose to meet us. We shook hands. We smiled. They smiled.

  “So what are you guys here for?” said a ruddy man whose white shirt and tie made me feel like a mucky hog in jeans. I thought this was a dumb question—what else would we be there for? But I found that many of the couples were there to learn about the process, or to support loved ones going through the process, and, yes, there was one couple who’d attended the classes for three years without completing their paperwork, and that I couldn’t process at all.

  “We want to adopt,” I said.

  In chorus: “Congratulations!” Everyone wanted to hear our story, which was this: Our bodies won’t do what they’re supposed to so we can’t have our own damned kids.

  “Tell us something about yourselves!”

  As always, I couldn’t manage to introduce myself without talking about books. This time out I mentioned my man-love for Mark Twain. You could feel the room deflate. Twain had famously called the Book of Mormon “chloroform in print” and in Roughing It he referred to Mormon women thusly:

  Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my
head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically “homely” creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, “No—the man that married one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that married sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”

  Twain wasn’t a fan of organized religion and I’d brought him to LDS adoption class. Oh well, he could keep me company while Janette paid attention.

  And so began our night of extreme tongue-biting. Our instructor spent the next ninety minutes talking about how grateful we should be that we were adopting. It’s not that I wasn’t grateful that we could adopt, but by the end I felt like anyone who wanted their own biological kid was a sucker. The others in the class, beaming faces every one, whooped and clapped and teared up here and there. Someone made a Family Circus reference and everyone in the room laughed. When someone makes a Family Circus reference and everyone in the room laughs, I’m in the wrong room.

  “Look around you,” said the instructor. “These are your peers. Spend as much time together as possible. Picnics. Holidays. Go to the temple together. Get to know each other. These are your friends. This can be another family.”

  What did we all have in common? Our bodies didn’t work together with our spouses’ bodies the way we’d assumed when we yoked ourselves together. But that was, of course, part of the Plan of Salvation. We had purpose. Our path involved adopting, along with all the heartbreaking epiphanies that paved the road to this classroom. The whole point of polygamy back in the day was that Mormon families could bring forth more kids than anyone else and play theological strength in numbers. I talked to one guy who literally had tears in his eyes as he said he “just felt so guilty” because his desiccated loins weren’t helping “build the kingdom.” What was I supposed to say to that? He really felt guilty and I didn’t know any Family Circus jokes to perk him up.