Pamela Morsi (19 page)

“I’ve always been a bit of a late bloomer myself,” she admitted.

“You’ve come to the right place for that,” he told her. “In Verdant we like to take our time.”

“Yeah,” she replied. “It’s one of the things I like about the place.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said. “Very good. I...I’ve been hoping that you’ll stick around.”

At that moment, D.J. couldn’t imagine anyplace she’d rather be.

They sat together in silence watching the stars gather above them.

He did not move one inch closer in the quiet solitude. There was a safety in his presence that was both welcome and familiar. D.J. knew that feeling, but couldn’t quite place it. It wasn’t sexual. It was something else. Something that she had yearned for, but didn’t quite understand. Secretly she was wishing this respite would never end. But as the world continued spinning, it did.

“We should probably go,” he said, finally.

“Yes, I guess so.”

They stood up and the world was totally different. The wheat was an onyx sea, ever moving in shadow. Above it the heavens were illuminated with the wink of stars and planets, the Milky Way like a giant streak of glimmer slashing across the sky.

She was standing right next to him, awed by the beauty of the night sky and their tiny, tiny place in it. It seemed perfectly natural that he leaned down to gently press his lips to her temple. It wasn’t a kiss really, it was a consolation.

“Take my hand,” he said.

D.J. could see nothing as he unerringly led her through the darkened grain to the edge of the field.

398.5 Folklore

I
t was late when Viv finally left the Porters’. As she walked to her car, Mr. Dewey took the opportunity to relieve himself in the grass.

“You did really well,” she told the dog. “I don’t know how you know what people need. But you were exactly right for Cora today. What in the world was Dutch thinking? Did he tell himself that Cora would believe he’d gotten the pistol out to clean it? Ridiculous.” She sighed heavily. “Or maybe he didn’t care what Cora thought. That’s even worse, of course.”

She opened the door to the Mini Cooper and Mr. Dewey scampered inside. He took his perch on the passenger seat, his front paws on the armrest so that his ears could blow in the wind.

Viv got inside and started up the engine. She backed out into the street and turned toward town, but she didn’t want to go home. There was nothing at home but an empty house and a plethora of canned goods. She began driving aimlessly up one street and down another. At the intersection with the highway she paused to allow a succession of three eighteen-wheelers loaded with grain to pass.

It occurred to her that a tired senior, unaccustomed to night driving and exhausted from a long day at the side of a grieving friend, might reasonably have forgotten to stop at an intersection and been run down by the trucks that were, after all, speeding along.

But, no. While being T-boned by a semi could be very bad, it was not guaranteed to be fatal. And what of the truck driver? She didn’t know who it was or what might happen to them. And certainly Mr. Dewey would not fare well uncrated in a crash. D.J. would prove to be absolutely right about that.

No, her current plan had been arrived at carefully. And it was the best solution.

Once the road was clear, she crossed into the west side of town, where she wound her way without ever turning down the street toward her home. She finally pulled to a stop where her jaunts so often ended, the parking lot of the cemetery. When she turned off her headlights, the darkened landscape revealed nothing. She sat there, gazing out across the fenced area. She wanted to see something. Anything. A wisp of vapor. A translucent specter. An inhuman apparition. There was nothing. A deserted patch of ground where the bodies of people she knew and loved now lay lifeless.

“Food for worms,” she quoted.

Mr. Dewey suddenly jumped in her lap, grabbing attention.

“So what are you up to?” she asked the dog. “Are you getting sick of coming to this place, too?”

She laughed as the animal, who had to be at least as tired as she was, perked into animation. She scratched him lovingly behind the ears. “I wonder if your mama will bring you here to see me? Probably not. I won’t really be here, you see. I’ll be up in heaven with John. My life here, it doesn’t really work for me without him.”

She looked down at the cheery, upbeat little dog face. “But I will miss you when I go.”

She looked out the windshield one more time and sighed heavily. The phrase
move along, nothing to see here,
filtered through her brain, causing her to chuckle wryly.

“All right, I suppose we can go home now,” she told Mr. Dewey. “I don’t guess there is much chance that we’ll catch your mama and my son
in flagrante delicto.
Should I speak plain English? I want them screwing each other’s brains out. That’s what young, healthy people who are obviously made for each other should do. But those two are slow to get the message.”

Her tone changed to a whiney mimic.

“They’ve been hurt. They don’t want to make a mistake.” Viv gave a huff of disgust. “Life is way too short to hesitate when reaching for happiness.”

401.2 Language Theory

P
erspective
. D.J. awakened early the next morning with the word in her head. It hung with her as she groggily sipped her first cup of coffee. She tried to push it back. She was sure it was all about the previous evening. It was about being in the wheat field. It was all about Scott. It was all about speaking unguarded and discovering that the earth didn’t shatter and neither did she. She’d simply gained a new perspective.

Dew was as drowsy and bleary-eyed as she was herself. As his meal from the previous night remained untouched, D.J. highly suspected that Viv was overfeeding him on doggy treats. At least she knew that he wasn’t gorging on table scraps.

In the shower with the hot water splashing down on her face, she allowed herself a little bit of nostalgic memory. Scott had been there for her and sympathized with her in a way that was not at all sexy. It had made her feel safe. It had made her feel whole. It had warmed her, satisfied her in a way that sex never did. Quickly, she was forced to correct herself. Sex
almost
never did. Sex with him. Sex with Scott. That had been different.

“You were different,” she said to herself amidst the hot steam. “The difference wasn’t him. It was you.”

Perspective.
There it was again.

Out of the shower, she dried off, smeared her face with moisturizer and began brushing her teeth. Deliberately she pushed Scott out of her mind. Forcing concentration to her workday ahead and the problems ahead. Still the word continued to reverberate in the back of her thoughts like a chorus to a jingle that gets stuck in your brain.

She was staring at the blue-and-white bristles scrubbing across her lower molars when suddenly the image of the library’s long, skinny windows, spaced at three-foot intervals popped up.

“Oh, my God! We’ve got the wrong perspective!”

D.J. was dressed in fifteen minutes flat. Forsaking her business suit for jeans and a T-shirt, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she headed for the library.

She was out so early, she expected deserted streets. But the small business district was alive with people. There was the bustle of getting breakfast out of the way and vehicles gassed up and a thousand chores done before the fields were ready. Added to that, for many, was the early-morning funeral service and respectful homage to the dead. The traffic crawled on Main Street, causing her to grit her teeth in impatience.

When D.J. finally pulled her car into her parking space, she was grateful to see that the rusty old bicycle was securely chained to the railing.

“Bless you, James,” she muttered.

It was heartening to know that no matter how early she arrived, he would always be here first. She hurried inside, not even stopping to make the coffee.

“James! James!”

She walked around the stacks to the aisle in front of the windows.

“What an idiot!” she said aloud.

“Sorry.”

The word was offered as apology and the timid, defeated voice came from the bookshelves.

“What? No, not you, James. Me. I’m the idiot. Me, and every other librarian who’s ever looked at this place since the day that it opened. The shelving is going the wrong way.”

She saw him peeking out at her from behind the books. Not quite ready to confront her in the open.

“The windows were designed like this so that the shelves should run between them, not perpendicular. It’s
so
obvious. It’s like some Escher Figure-Ground thing. It looks like a fish until you see the face and then you can’t see anything else.”

“I don’t see a fish,” James said quietly.

She laughed as if his words were meant as a joke.

“This is going to be so great,” she said. “It’s going to change...it’s going to change everything about this place.”

D.J. looked again at the windows and then at the long rows of shelving loaded with books. Everything was neat and tidy and in perfect order. But it was all in the wrong place. Every volume would have to be taken down and reshelved later.

“Okay, James,” she said. “This is what we’re going to need to do. We’re going to have to empty the entire stack area and take up all the shelving ranges. They’re undoubtedly bolted to the floors, so there will likely be some holes to patch. And the patina on the floor will be a bit mismatched. But it will be worth it. We’ll turn the ranges 90 degrees, bolt them back to the floor and then put the books back on them.”

His eyes were as wide as saucers. He looked as if she’d just suggested slitting him open and spreading his entrails around the room. Her suggestion was clearly encouraging panic.

“Oh, no, we can’t do that,” he said. “We can’t do that. We...we can’t do that.”

“Of course we can,” she assured him. “It’ll take a little time and some elbow grease, but we will do it.”

“Uh-uh, no, no, no,” he replied. “Can’t do that. No, uh-uh, no, no.”

Clearly the threat to his perfectly organized stack area loomed large to him.

“It’s okay, James,” she told him. “It’s not like we’re going to start just piling books up and throwing things around. I’ll come up with a plan. We’ll...we’ll maintain order. I promise. The books will be fine. Moving will all be very orderly.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no, no.”

D.J. was too excited about her plan. Too buoyed by her discovery to allow his negativity to dissuade her.

She went up to her office and found the tape measure. She brought it back downstairs and with a cheery hum on her lips, she heard the slamming of a book. As she walked across the floor, she heard another. She ignored the noise and began taking the dimensions of everything.

“James, would you like to hold one end of this?” she asked as she attempted to measure the length of the shelving range.

He made no response. She could hear him moving about and the explosive sound of book closing continued to go off at intervals, but he chose not to answer.

D.J. shrugged it off. She managed to hook the tape measure on her own and get the accurate length.

Definitely she wanted to institute the change in the stack area first, she decided. It was the space most desperate. What she wished she could do was take every volume, shelf and stick of furniture out of the room and then lay it out all at one time. Begin again. Clean slate. That was not possible or realistic. She would work around the constraints that she had. She would have to rearrange the sections of the building separately and utilize the other areas for staging. The stacks would be the most onerous task. It might be perfect to get that done during harvest, while the library was basically empty. If she could move really quickly, if she could get James to help her, if they worked day and night, it all seemed like a very good, very possible idea.

Once D.J. found some graph paper to model the room and its furnishings, she noticed a growing increase in book slamming within the dark confines of the stack shelving. On a routine day, she would hear James slam a book closed two or three times. They weren’t even open for business yet and he’d done many times that number of loud, rifle-shot closures.

Also, uncharacteristically, James was making his presence felt. Typically, he moved about like a ghost. Not so this morning. D.J. could hear him pacing up and back among the shelves. He was muttering to himself and only stopped for another book slam.

“James, are you all right?” she called out.

There was no answer.

She went to the stacks to confront him directly, but he avoided her. As soon as she was in the same aisle, he rushed around the corner. And when she went to that corner, he was around the next. She would never succeed in chasing him down. So she attempted to reason with him.

“If we turn the book shelves to run east and west, then the light from the windows can illuminate the space between them. It’s how it was meant to be, I’m sure. Somebody simply messed up when they first laid out the interior. It’ll be better. You’ll be able to see without a flashlight. The biographies won’t get all sun-damaged and faded.”

Her explanation was no help. If anything, it seemed to make it worse.

Maybe he needed to get used to the idea, she thought. He needed to think it through himself and come up with the same conclusion that she had.

She went back to her seat at the circulation desk and her graph-paper planning. But it was impossible to get anything done with all the tension emanating from the far side of the room.

“It’s going to be fine, James. It’s all going to be fine.”

Muttering stopped.
POW!
Book slammed.

D.J. tried to ignore it, but she was concerned. He was very agitated and her attempts at reassurance weren’t working. What would he be like when she actually attempted the move?

“James? Talk to me, James.”

Pacing. Muttering. No reply.

Maybe he was now as angry with her as he had been with Stevie. But at least with Stevie, he had been quietly silent. His uncharacteristic behavior was a little bit scary.

D.J. wished Suzy were there. Or Amos. Someone who knew James better. Who knew what to do. Who to call. Surely James had parents or people who were responsible for him. How come she didn’t know those people? Who could she ask?

At that moment the phone rang. She picked it up.

“Verdant Public Library.”

There was a moment of hesitation on the other end of the line.

“Hello,” she said, more sharply. The last thing she needed was a crank call from a heavy breather.

“Hi.” She recognized Scott’s voice.

“Oh, hi.”

“I don’t want to bother you,” he began. “But I saw how you rushed out of here this morning and I thought...well, I worried that... Is everything okay?”

“Everything is fine,” she answered optimistically as almost force of habit. “Except that it’s not. James is...” She lowered her voice and shaded the phone’s mouthpiece with her hand. “James is acting weird. Who should I call? Who takes care of him? His parents?”

“His parents are dead,” Scott told her. “What’s he doing?”

“He’s pacing in the stacks, muttering to himself and slamming books closed.”

“Let me ask my mom,” he said. “I’ll call you right back.”

D.J. was amazed at how comforting she found that reassurance. She remembered how he’d held her last night. How she’d been able to trust him with her fear. She trusted him now.

He did not call back, however. He showed up. Fewer than five minutes after she’d hung up the phone. Scott and Viv came walking in through the library’s front door. Both were dressed in respectful black.

D.J. felt her heart leap at the sight of Scott in a suit. She was right the first moment she’d seen him. The man was totally gorgeous.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot about the funeral,” D.J. said.

She had definitely caught them on their way to the service.

“It’s okay,” Viv reassured her. “We’ve got time.”

At that instant the muttering momentarily ceased, followed by a book slam. Both Viv and Scott startled. D.J. had grown accustomed to it already.

“What happened to set him off like this?” she asked.

“I realized that I needed to change the library around,” D.J. said, not wanting to delve deep into detail. “He told me not to. And I guess that my ignoring him made him quit talking to me. He started muttered and pacing.”

“He’s stimming,” Viv said.

“Stimming?”

“It’s a slang term for self-stimulation. Lots of people with different kinds of brain challenges do it. They focus on some repetitive behavior when they get anxious. It’s a way to comfort themselves.”

“I don’t want to upset him,” D.J. said. “I just want to make the library better.”

“I know,” Viv told her. “Let me try to talk to him.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” Scott asked.

She shook her head. “He’s not dangerous. He’s stressed.”

D.J. watched Viv enter the stack area without the least trepidation. The muttering became louder and the pacing was hurried enough to be running. There were three loud book closings before things began to level off.

D.J. couldn’t hear what Viv was saying, but the tone of her voice was quiet, unruffled. Finally she heard the rough baritone of James. He was now conversing rather than muttering.

“Don’t worry,” Scott told her. “James will be fine.”

D.J. nodded. “Viv will be, too.”

He smiled at her. “So what brought this on? Did you wake up this morning and say, ‘I think I’ll change the library around.’”

“Pretty much,” she answered. “I realized that if the shelving wasn’t perpendicular to the windows, we’d get a lot more light in here.”

Scott surveyed the building in one visual sweep.

“I think it’s always been this way,” he pointed out.

She nodded. “And it’s always been wrong. The day they installed the stacks, somebody made a mistake. Nobody questioned it. Everybody got used to it. Now, all these years later, it takes somebody from the outside to notice the error.”

“Somebody from the outside?” he asked, facetiously. “No, that can’t be right, D.J. You’re one of our hometown girls. Only a genuine Verdanter would sit out in a wheat field on a summer night.”

She liked the joke. She liked the smile.

Viv stepped out of the stacks and returned to the circulation desk.

“I think he’ll be all right for now,” she said. “It’s a lot for him to take in. You realize he’s lived most of his life in this building.”

D.J. nodded. “That must be why he’s so pale.”

“I promised him that you wouldn’t do anything today.”

“Okay.”

“And I said that you’d keep him informed of the plans. That you wouldn’t be doing anything without warning.”

Viv’s tone was pleasant, but her intent was firm. D.J. was the librarian. But James had a say in the library’s future, as well.

“I can absolutely do that,” D.J. assured her. “I was so excited and eager this morning, it probably was pretty scary to watch. A move like this does require planning. And maybe the harvest is not the best time to make it happen.”

“Harvest is probably the best time,” Scott said. “I mean, you don’t have as many people to help you. But you don’t have to close the place down, either.”