The Librarianist

In the years following Ethan’s death she worked as a substitute teacher, and then a full-time elementary school arts teacher, and eventually as a public school administrator. At the age of fifty she quit and took a job at a nursery in the southeast quadrant of town, where she worked for fifteen years, all the way up until her retirement.

Bob learned that her catatonia was not symptomatic of dementia, as he had assumed, but was a result of brain trauma suffered after a slip-and-fall accident on the walk out front of her house. She had been perfectly healthy before the injury, apparently; but the blow to her head had led to clotting, which led to stroke, which led to the diminishment of her capacities. She had been a resident at the Gambell-Reed Center for two years before transferring to a facility on the Washington coast.

Bob learned Connie’s Portland home had been less than five miles from his own. This prompted Bob to think of the years after Ethan’s death, the years of wondering when he would see her again. There were some mornings, as he was shaving or making his bed, when he would intuit Connie’s approach, that that would be the day she would walk through the door of the library to see him, and he recalled how distracted he would be, all through his shift, looking up at each person coming in. After he understood she was not going to visit the library, then came a period of ten or more years where he believed fate would intervene on their behalf. He would see her in the market, in the park, somewhere. He would pick out her set, cold expression in a crowd and she would sense his attentions and turn to meet him, and when she saw him the coldness would come away from her face and she would change back to the way she was before, a sort of lighting up, the way she used to look at him when she came through the doors of the library, and she loved him.

Bob was grateful to have accessed Connie’s transcripts, but he also was wounded by the collective information. No matter that the notion of fairness was a child’s; what had happened to them wasn’t fair, and there was nothing that could make it so. He gave the transcripts back to Maria and thanked her. She could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t wish to speak of what he’d learned. Most of her patients had areas of their lives that were too painful to be discussed, and she never pried, respectful of the boundary. Maria understood that part of aging, at least for many of us, was to see how misshapen and imperfect our stories had to be. The passage of time bends us, it folds us up, and eventually, it tucks us right into the ground.

BOB WOKE UP FROM AN AFTERNOON NAP TO FIND MARIA SITTING ON THE edge of his bed, and she had a look on her face as if something was the matter. “What,” he said. “Chip’s son is downstairs, Bob,” she answered. “Connie’s son. I hope you don’t mind my telling you but I figured you’d want to know.”

Bob sat up. “What’s he doing here?”

“He came by out of the blue asking for his mother’s transcripts. I told him they were in storage off-site and now he’s waiting around for them to be brought over.” She was proud of this subterfuge, but Bob didn’t understand her motivations, and asked her why she would tell him such a thing. “I thought you might want to come down and say hello,” she explained.

“Why would I? He doesn’t even know who I am.”

“You can tell him.”

“What if he doesn’t want to know?”

“Then he can tell you. He’s really a very sweet man, Bob. And I know I’m being a busybody, but there’s always the chance your meeting him will be a helpful thing. Look, if you don’t come down, I’ll know you’re not interested. But I’ll stall him as long as I can, okay?”

She patted Bob’s arm and exited and Bob stood up from his bed and paced and considered the situation. He did not want to go downstairs, but that wasn’t the same as deciding it was the wrong thing to do. When it occurred to him that this was almost certainly the only time in what remained of his life that he would know any direct connection with Connie, then did he find himself reaching for his shoes, and he pulled on a suit coat and combed his hair and brushed his teeth. As an afterthought, he sought out the short sheaf of snapshots from the Connie days, slipping the envelope into his coat pocket before striking out for the elevator.