He sent me an emoji of a scowling face with a sticking-out tongue. It wasn’t easy to remember that when I met him that day in the chapel and he thought I was praying, I felt he was someone a nurse would call an old soul.
Which he didn’t even believe in. So why did I keep up the thing I had with him, whatever it was—back-and-forths, ex-lover to ex-lover, maybe sometimes not so ex? Why did it seem that whatever was between us could not be broken, like the other thing of my childhood?
I didn’t know. And I didn’t know why I decided, as I was leaving that unit, headed for the room of the librarian, that what the lawyer told me was not a story of an oob. That it didn’t qualify. I thought it over and it came to me that his story was really a story of a man who didn’t grow up to be what he dreamed as a boy he’d become. Like I was a psychotherapist, very intelligently and very correctly putting my finger on the root of a really good story.
It was all psychological. It was all about the brain of the lawyer.
And that was that. I had reached a solid, sensible explanation. The lawyer had figured out pi for himself. Plain and simple.
Anyway, I also decided, I needed to let go of the thing with Plummy. He needed to be more away from me than just living in another country. Of that I was completely, absolutely sure.
Eight
It was easy to imagine the librarian in her younger days glaring: glaring and frowning and staring you down if you talked too loud or committed some other library crime. She was a soft-spoken person whose words came out of her mouth with a backbone, an aliveness, an edge that was not always smooth.
I loved our talks, one-sided as they were. I knew that she’d always counted on making bonds with single ladies. Oh, but don’t we have our secrets, men-wise? Oh, she was especially blessed in her life because her dream came true to have boyfriends and never a husband.
Lonely when you’re with someone is different from lonely alone, she had told me.
It was five to midnight. She was two elevators and quite a few hallways away from the lawyer. I was a little breathless from walking fast.
I didn’t first meet her as an inpatient. In my first week of the night shift, I sat with the parents of a young man brought in from the scene of a crash. Due to the location and the condition of his car, it was suspected he was trying to take his own life. There was a previous attempt, several years before, but he’d been holding down a job and seeing a therapist, and had seemed to be comfortable with himself, and hopeful and confident. The emergency surgery he underwent was not successful. I was with his parents when they were delivered that news.
Later, I walked with them to the taxi that would bring them home, although their own car was in the parking lot.
Back inside, by the ER entrance, I could not push my body forward in the normal motions of taking a step and then another, and I leaned against the wall, my head bowed. It was three in the morning. An ambulance had pulled in. The librarian was on a gurney, passing me. She commanded the two ambulance guys to stop. They did.
“Minister Girl,” she said to me, a stranger. “I never saw anyone more weary. You go find an empty bed and lie down. I might need attention to my soul in here, and I want you rested. You go shut your eyes.”
I followed the gurney, stayed with her.
She lived in assisted living and she had taken a fall some weeks earlier, which she had not sought treatment for, and didn’t complain about, until a new night aide took a look at her and called 911. It wasn’t that negligence had taken place, the librarian insisted. She liked where she lived—it was clean and bright; she had friends; books were always available. And no one was up anyone’s back about who was brown or white or whatever, because by now they were all too damn old.
She could hide pain. She could hold on hard to her basic rule of never letting pessimism take over her soul like a force of corrosion, and then she’d end up in a state of pure rust.
An aide had taken her out for a walk in a wheelchair, on a day in still-winter that was unusually balmy. The librarian had petitioned for control. She could walk, although she needed a cane or a walker, and she was no good anymore at distances. She was still at the positive end of being frail. But she had arm strength. She took hold of the grab wheels, happy she’d thought to put on her gloves with leather palms.
All went well until she had to negotiate a curb cut. She had built up some speed while the aide behind her had a lapse in paying attention. A small front wheel struck the concrete curb, and the force of the impact threw her out of the chair to the pavement. The knee she landed on hardest was badly injured, but she was otherwise all right, or so she had thought. It seemed a problem for ice packs and ibuprofen and staying off her feet.
In the ER she was treated for swelling and bruising. She was X-rayed and given a prescription for a mild painkiller a few levels up from what she was taking. The general feeling was that she hadn’t needed to come in.
Almost a week ago, she was admitted, and hooked to a drip of blood thinner. The clot that had formed in her leg was a large one, with every possibility of traveling to her lungs, to her heart. She was hospitalized for a dissolving, and why with all the tech and all the marvels of modern medicine was it taking so long and trapping her?
I had learned that at the age of twenty-two, she was the third Black person to have a position on her city’s payroll that was not about cleaning, janitorial, trash collecting, kitchen work where you were never out in front serving meals, bus driving on certain routes only, and groundskeeping including the digging of graves. A Black first-grade teacher had been hired for a school of few white kids, a file clerk for a basement office of city hall.
She had not finished high school. She didn’t go into the details of why she had to go to work at sixteen, in the warehouse of a mail-order company, where most of the clerks were Black. She did well there. The wife of her boss was a library trustee; she was often around, an anomaly of blondness and paleness. She made friends with the librarian, and said to her, “I think I can help you get out of here and integrate somewhere, if you’re interested.”
The librarian’s first batch of years were in a back room, where it would have been excellent, in the minds of some other employees, and some other trustees too, if she’d stayed until her retirement. If she’d kept that place made for her. She unpacked new books, she sorted, she did repairs, she glued in envelope slots to hold due-date cards, and she ran a mimeograph machine for the monthly newsletter of new titles.
She plotted. She was acquiring skills. She ate, drank, and slept the library. She was proud of herself for never once going through with the desire to hurl a thick book in her hand at the head of someone looking at her a certain way, saying certain things—but leaving the back room needed not to mean jail. All the while she tended to her soul, as if she’d covered it with the same clear, tough, protective coating as the covers she placed on high-circulation books.
She moved herself out to shelve books one day when a cart of returns was overloaded and no one else was getting around to it. She just took a deep breath and did it. Later, she went on to the front desk, then scored a seat in Reference. At the time of her retirement she had an office. She had long ago put out the word that when you went to the library to apply for a job, a person interviewing you would be her, with some actual clout.
As a hospital patient she received cards and gifts and phone calls from her family, scattered and far off. She had visits from friends in her assisted living place, and a few women she had known in the library. But those were in the daytime. Nights were tough.