14
She walked in the rain’s aftermath along wet sidewalks and under dripping trees with the clouds coming apart in the sky like rotted fabric. The old brick library was gone and the new one with its soaring glass facade like a church stood in its place. There was a history. During construction, people had called it the Lindsay Suskind Library because it was Lindsay Suskind who’d gone rolling backward down the wheelchair ramp of the old building, and it was Lindsay’s mother, Jeanne, newly certified in the law, who threatened action.
Wide, smooth sidewalks now coming and going, glass doors parting at ground level, book aisles like boulevards. Walking into the building was like walking into a botanical atrium, plant life and the sound of water chuckling somewhere, bright shafts of daylight. But the smell of the new library was like the smell of the old library: paper, bindings, the faint whiff of mold. Like the smell of buses, it was a smell of childhood. Of young girls out on their own on a summer day. Long empty days of sunburn and ice cream and the pursuing eyes of boys. Of men.
Angela stood staring at the new releases. Picking one up. Putting it back. Choosing another.
On a stool behind the counter sat a plump older woman who’d been at the old library and who had a way of smiling that made you believe she remembered you, though it had been years. Angela handed her the book and looked beyond her. A seated young man with a silver hoop earring, gazing into a computer screen. That was all.
“Does Lindsay Suskind still work here?” she asked the woman.
The woman scanned the book and smiled. “Oh, yes. She’s taking her lunch break.”
Angela glanced about.
“She’ll be back in fifteen minutes, if you care to wait.”
Angela took the book and her card. “Thank you, it’s not important.”
She walked into the cafe annex and ordered a small black coffee and sat at one of the smaller tables and opened up the book.
The girl was parked at one of the larger tables, reading. Dipping her fork from time to time into a Tupperware. In a final act of amends or whatever you wanted to call it, the new library had installed Lindsay herself at the checkout desk, where she excelled. After a year, Angela heard, she earned her library science degree through the evening and weekend program at the university where her father taught and slept with graduate students, and the library had promoted her accordingly. Mike and Jeanne, separately, were prone to boasting about her in a way they hadn’t when the girl ran track.
Angela remembered the day—her own daughter walking in, hair still dripping from the Owensby pool, so brown and lean in her bikini, so beautiful it startled her. As if some undressed woman had come striding through her front door. You walked home like that? she was about to say when Caitlin ran damp and sobbing into her arms.
What is it, sweetheart, what happened? Her mind leaping to the worst—rape, pregnancy, HIV. It was like falling into blackness. The end of everything. A daughter was your life; it was as simple as that. Her body was the only body, her heart the only heart. The most absolute, the most terrible love.
The July sun was burning in the kitchen window. The air was roaring. The girl couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak; her body was convulsing (the feel of that body pressed to hers, the wet and sun-hot skin, the softness and the firmness, the smell of the pool, of coconut, of the sun itself in her skin, in her dripping hair!).
It’s all right, just tell me, just tell me, sweetheart . . . She’d heard the sirens, she would remember later.
Lindsay, Caitlin said at last. Oh, Mom, it was awful . . . and Angela holding her the tighter and her heart crying, Thank God thank God thank God, and only later thinking of her own sister, Faith, diving off the dock.
Then the day, the bright December day perhaps a week after returning from Colorado when she answered the door and a dark-haired girl was on the stoop in a wheelchair and for just a moment, just an instant, she’d thought, Caitlin.
Angela closed the book and walked over, and the girl looked up. Smiling in recognition, and then true recognition taking hold and the smile falling.
“Mrs. Courtland,” she said. “Gosh. Hello.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, Lindsay. I know you’re having lunch. I just wanted to say hi.”
The girl closed her book and set down her fork. “No, gosh.” She put a hand on Angela’s wrist. “Would you like to sit down?”
“No, you’re eating—”
“Please, sit down.”
Angela pulled out the chair and sat and the girl studied her, searching her face with large brown eyes. For a moment Angela was lost in them. Why had she come? What did she think she would say to this girl, this young woman whom she’d once picked up and dropped off, fed, watched over like one of her own?
“Mrs. Courtland, is there . . . I mean has something . . . ?”
“Oh,” Angela said. “No. No, I’m sorry, I should have said so right away.”
“It’s just, I haven’t seen you here. I mean I’ve never seen you here before. I thought maybe . . .”
Angela shook her head.
“I’m so sorry,” said the girl.
A man came to the counter and ordered something in a low voice, as though he didn’t want anyone to know, and the barista girl set to making it.
“I saw Ariel this morning,” Angela said.
“You did?”
“Yes. I was substituting.”
“You were?”
The girl didn’t want to look or sound surprised, Angela knew, but she couldn’t help it, she had no guile. Her heart had been through too much.
“I’m sorry,” Lindsay said, “I thought you were . . .”
“I was. But that was months ago.”
Lindsay nodded. “Did she behave herself—Ariel?”
“Yes.”
Angela stared at her hands where they lay upon the book. They looked like someone else’s. Her heart was aching.
“She’s gotten to be a pain at home,” said the girl.
“I’m sorry, Lindsay.”
Lindsay shrugged. “She’s what they call a teenager, I believe.”
“Not for that.” She held the girl’s eyes. “I’m sorry for the way I was that day you came to the house.”
Lindsay shook her head. “Don’t, Mrs. Courtland—I shouldn’t have come like that, out of the blue. It must have been a shock.”
“It was. But everything was. Everything. I didn’t know what to say to you.”
“It’s all right.”