CLEANING
Stephanie let herself in with Alex’s key. The office was unnervingly quiet. It had an odd abandoned quality like pictures she’d seen of Hiroshima after the blast, life suddenly interrupted. It had snowed overnight so the light Sunday-morning traffic sounded woolen and distant. The little reception area, cluttered in faded yellow and pink Post-its, was bitter cold, but inside Jordan’s office it was uncomfortably warm and close. The radiator by the window sputtered and spat, blustering through the unnatural quiet. As she struggled with the swollen window, she could smell the rust coughed up from deep in the old building’s respiratory system. Then the window gave with a sudden shriek. Dry cold air swirled in and the room seemed to shake itself awake.
She had bought a stack of moving boxes and a tape gun from the U-Haul in Central Square. She leaned the stack up behind the door and opened and taped three boxes. The sensible plan seemed to be to start just inside the threshold and work her way clockwise around the room. With a black Sharpie she labeled one box Books, one Papers and one Stuff. She took the Sunday Globe and spread out the sections, opening up the automotive and style pages first. As she took each diploma or photograph from the wall, she wrapped it in two sheets of newsprint. She quickly filled her first Stuff box, taped it shut and made a new one.
When she came to the bookcase, she took all the files and loose papers and dumped them indiscriminately in the Papers box. Then she started with the books, quickly filling two boxes and half of a third. She was sweating now and flushed. Progress. Order out of chaos. A postponement of the inevitable victory of entropy.
She felt numb as she filed her dead husband’s life away; it didn’t feel like any of this was really his, even the family pictures seemed somehow at a remove from the man. It was remarkable that he could have spent so much time in this little room without leaving more of himself behind. It was all just paint and paper. The phone rang once in the outer office and the ancient machine picked up but the caller left no message.
* * *
Stephanie surveyed her progress. Not bad for a couple of hours. There were six sealed boxes ready to go and three more in progress. She was two-thirds of the way around the room with nothing major left except the desk. She toyed with the idea of plowing ahead to the end but her lower back was killing her and her stomach was grumbling.
She threw her coat back on and, without really thinking about it, walked around the corner to Oggi for a roast beef sandwich. Oggi had been their go-to in Genometry’s early days when she and Jordan had met for lunch whenever their schedules allowed. She sank into the familiar booth as the lunch rush bustled and simmered around her. Through the window she watched the students and early Christmas shoppers, eyes squinted against the blowing snow, as they struggled upstream with their bags and backpacks. She nursed a second cup of coffee and let the muffled clatter of dishes and murmur of conversation envelop her like a warm bath.
An hour later as she paid the check and pulled her coat tight, she noticed how dark it had become. The sun seemed low and impotent already, though it wasn’t yet two. When she got back to the office it seemed changed. The cold air had overwhelmed the radiator and the room seemed suddenly bare and freezing. Stephanie shut the window, leaving just a crack at the bottom.
She dragged the open boxes over and sat down at Jordan’s desk. Part of her mind romanticized the heaps of notes and intricately folded papers as a snapshot of his last hours or days but a cooler bit reminded her that the police had been through the office multiple times and that the particular disorder in front of her was no doubt more a result of their ministrations than her husband’s. All the loose papers went into a box. She rescued an old snapshot of herself with Haden on vacation in Hawaii. Haden was pointing at a rainbow and laughing. Another lifetime. Jordan had written “S&H, Paia” on the back in his familiar angular scrawl. She slipped it into her purse.
There was a stack of software manuals at the back of the desk. As she tossed them in the current Books carton something fluttered to the floor. Stephanie picked it up. One of Jordan’s origami doodles. A tiny baby rat—no, a possum. She smiled and flipped through the manuals looking for more. He usually made them in bunches. He’d offer them up with the appropriate collective noun: a murder of little paper crows, a paddling of Post-it ducks. If there were more, she couldn’t find them. She tucked it into her purse with the picture.
When the desktop was cleared she moved on to the drawers. Pens and pencils, trash. Old phone logs, trash. She flipped through them first, not that she expected to see “Call back mistress re: early dinner and a quick fuck” written anywhere. All the other bills, receipts, letters and miscellany of life went into a Papers box, probably never to be seen again.
Halfway through the middle drawer on the right side she saw a faded bit of lined paper that looked familiar, like a favorite T-shirt from high school that turns up unexpectedly in a suitcase after a visit home. She pulled it out. It was a faded green and tattered at the top where it had been ripped out of one of the steno pads Jordan and Alex had used for phone messages at their Exeter Street apartment nearly twenty years before. On it, in her own neat and boxy hand, was written “TGG TGG! CTG GTG, ATG.”
She gasped for air as the sob rose from deep in her lungs and ripped through her. Tears filled her eyes and rolled unobstructed down her face as she sat silent and perfectly still at her husband’s desk, clutching a decades-old note from herself. The grief that had never seemed to come, through the search, the recovery, the funeral and the countless earnest whispered condolences, now inexplicably burst inside her, racking her body in shuddering waves.
* * *
It was dark when she finally locked up and left. Everything that had been in Jordan’s office, all that was left of him, was now stacked in nine sealed boxes in the hall except for a single photograph, one sheet of green lined paper and a tiny origami possum.