FOURTEEN
“Mom? Dad? If you’re there, pick up. Please.”
Pause.
“Jenny and I are fine. Neither of us are sick. Just so you know. I… we miss you.”
It could be the dead of winter except there’s no snow. Yet. God knows, the air is cold enough to hold a flake to its unique form. The library is still aglow, but the watch on my wrist tells me it won’t be long. I can’t stay out late. Jenny is holed up in my apartment, eating a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
“Is that all they had?” she asked when I jubilantly waved the carton at her. “I wanted rum raisin or cookie dough.”
The ice cream had cost me twenty bucks. Twenty. That was all they’d had at the drugstore unless I wanted their store brand for twelve. And that’s more air than cream.
One week since Jenny lost Mark and we discovered our parents were lost to us both. I call and call and no one answers. The phone system is dying. Calls ring off into nowhere more frequently now.
I still come here every day—without Jenny. I look for Nick’s name and hope I don’t see it. Usually I come straight after work, but today Jenny called in tears.
“Can you believe this?” she asked when I let myself in the door. She’d had the television on, old episodes of some soap because they weren’t making any new ones. “He died in a plane crash before she could tell him she was pregnant with twins.” Then she started sobbing. “Mark and I were going to try for a baby this year. Then he had to go and die, just like Julian.”
“Who’s Julian?” I’d asked.
“On the show.”
So I’m late to the library because of a soap opera.
The head librarian looks up as I walk in. She’s a cliche right down to the glasses performing a balancing act on the end of her snip nose. She’s the only librarian now, aside from a young grad student who prowls the aisles with his metal cart. It looks like it should rattle, but it doesn’t: the wheels are greased into submissive silence. She nods at the round metal clock hanging on the wall like I should be aware that the doors will be locking at any moment. I nod back, to let her know that, yes, I’m aware of the impending closure. Not quite satisfied, she turns back to her work.
The list is up. The crowd has long petered out except for the lone figure standing, legs akimbo, inches from the wall. My heart accelerates. I know the lines of that body. Many a time I admired them across a coffee table, skimmed them in my fantasies. He seems taller to me now, but I’m not sure if that’s because I haven’t seen him for a while or because he’s become almost mythical in my mind these past months. Larger than my tiny life.
Then he turns….
His face is stone. Granite. Marble. Is there something harder? I don’t know, but the hardest rock is what I’m seeing. He’s Nick, if Nick had been carved from the sheer side of a mountain instead of flesh.
“Dr. Rose.”
The words come out stiff, formal. He told me to use his first name but I can’t.
“Hello, Zoe. Are you looking for someone?”
He nods, glances over his shoulder at the list, then returns to me. “I hope you don’t find them there.”
“Who were you looking for?”
Across the invisible wall. “My brother, Theo.”
“I hope you didn’t find him.”
“Stay well, Zoe.” He walks away and I watch him leave without saying another word, my arms dangling helplessly at my sides. Something about the way he moves is altered. There’s a slight hitch—a limp, I guess you’d call it—on his right side. How did it happen? I want to know. But it’s too late, he’s gone, and I’m stuck to the ground like I’m trapped in one of my own nightmares. I could call him back, make him tell me, but my mouth won’t work, either.
Nick is alive. That’s good. That’s all I need to know. That’s all I wanted to know, right? I repeat the words:
Behind me, the librarian clears her throat disapprovingly. Dusty phlegm breaks the spell and I spring forward, study the list just so the librarian doesn’t berate me further. I scan the list, double-check for Nick’s name, just in case his being here was some kind of delusion. But no, he’s not on the list.
But another name is: Theodore Rose.
I bolt out the door, into the freeze, glancing frantically each way. But night has claimed all but the faintest halo from each streetlight, and Nick is lost to me.
“Hello? Mom? Dad?”
The tape whirs onward.
The Pope Pharmaceuticals lobby is no place for a receptionist. No ringing phones, no vendors buzzing through, no public left in public relations. If we still had one, she’d be filing her nails, flipping through magazines, sipping coffee.
I ride the elevator to my floor. Steel cables whine through pulleys, the brakes bump and grind to a halt. I never knew how loud my world was until there was no one to fill it. The locker rooms are empty. My every move is amplified until I sound like a multiarmed woman running the whole percussion section of a symphony. I clean, just like on every other day. I vacuum, mop, empty the trash into the designated chutes. Some lead to a furnace that belches and bellows in the basement. Others go some place I’m not privy to. And that bothers me when once I didn’t care.
The mice are all gone. Their cage doors sag on bent hinges.
“Did they die?” I ask Schultz. He’s hunched over a microscope, peering at slides.
He sniffs, swipes his dripping nostrils with the back of his hand. “I got hungry.”
I stare at him, wait for him to crack, wait for the punch line. There’s always a punch line. Right?
“You ate the mice?”
“I didn’t have change for the vending machine, okay?”
Every day we work in the same spaces and I can’t read him.
“You ever see
“Sure,” I say, “I saw it.”
His head pumps up and down. “They’re not so bad. Better than what’s in the cafeteria.”
There’s nothing in the cafeteria, now. We’re all brown-bagging it. I have no words. No, that’s a lie. I have two:
I say good-bye, try to leave, but he waves me over. “Lookit this.” Leaning to one side, he makes enough room that I can stand beside him and peer into the lens. Blobs and squiggles swimming on a green sea. Pretty. Alien. Terrifying in its otherness.
“What is it?”
“Opportunistic wanton neoplasm.”
