Ed stayed away from Penelope while she was recovering in Great Falls, but he hasn’t been able to stop himself from keeping tabs on her. He tells himself it’s for data collection as he watches her from a distance through reports from one of her therapists, an old buddy of his, Russel Dougherty.
“Still doing great,” Russel says. “Working at the library now.”
Ed made himself stay away during his separation from Laura. He’d known, even through the fog of that time, that if he’d been given a scene like the one by the river, he would have returned Penelope’s advances tenfold.
But Laura is pregnant with her new husband’s baby.
And Penelope is an adult now.
Still, it takes him an hour of drinking at Dorothy’s to work up the nerve to go in the first time. Everything he needs is at the state library, so he never comes to this one. In his imaginings, he walks in and she is right there at the front desk, perfectly whole.
Instead, an ugly, yellow-toothed man says, “Help you?”
“Is Penelope Gatson working, by chance?” Ed’s voice is too high.
“Out in the stacks somewhere. Your guess is as good as mine.”
Ed goes to the fiction first. He walks up and down the aisles, A–Z, running his fingers along the books’ spines. No Pen.
He goes through the nonfiction chronologically, pausing in the psychology section to flip through part two of Skinner’s recent autobiography. Ed has skimmed part one but found it ultimately no more insightful than any other case study.
He is stalling.
He looks at a few pages in an oversize book about elephants in the 500s, a book on classical guitars in the 700s, then he turns down an aisle of 800s, and there she is, in the poetry section. Ed watches her for a few seconds before she lifts her eyes from the book in her hands. Her hair is longer, and if he didn’t know where to look, her scars would go unnoticed. There are the faintest starts of lines at the corners of her eyes. Penelope shouldn’t be capable of aging. He often wanted her to be older, but he never thought she’d show it.
“Dr. Ed?”
“Hi, Pen.”
He is older, too, and he sees her see it. The gray threads above his ears, the salt through his beard, the deeper lines along his nose.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
“Your parents wouldn’t let me visit. They banned me from your care.”
“I’ve been away from my parents for years.”
Ed looks at the books level with him, all these collections of poetry. Penelope’s world. She’s clearly landed well.
“I had to focus on the institution. And my marriage. My son.”
“You have a son?”
“He was born when you were in the hospital in Great Falls.”
“So that’s why you didn’t come?”
He steps toward her, just the book between them. “I was there, Pen. The second I heard. And then Ben was born, and I had to go.”
“Ben.”
“Benjamin Edmund Malinowski.”
She touches her head where Ed knows a puckered scar runs. “So, he’s three and a half now?” She will always know Benjamin’s age, Ed realizes. “And Laura?” she asks. “How’s Laura?”
“Pregnant with her new husband’s baby.”
“Oh,” she says, surprised. “Are you all right?”
“All right enough.” Ed nods to the book in her hand. “What are you reading these days?”
“Thomas. I took a class on Eliot, Auden, and Thomas at Carroll, and I’ve fallen in love with all of them. Thomas is my favorite, though, and this is my favorite of his right now. ‘Before I Knocked.’ It would’ve been too complex for my group in Boulder, but I could’ve used parts of it. Like these lines.” She reads: “ ‘I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither / A ghost nor a man, but mortal ghost.’ ”
“What do they mean?”
“You have to figure it out yourself.”
“But you’re the poetry teacher.”
Ed can feel the same energy that pulled them together in Boulder, he’s sure of it. He will invite her to have a drink with him, and if more comes of it, that will be all right. There are worse starts out there, worse improprieties.
“Pen,” he is starting to say, “come out with me tonight—”
Another voice bellows from the end of the aisle. “There she is!”
And then Ed feels her transfer the book to his hands and move away.
“Billy!” She turns and accepts an embrace from the tall young man who’s suddenly arrived. They kiss quickly, and then Penelope smiles back at Ed, her face radiant. “Dr. Ed, this is my boyfriend, Billy. Billy, you remember me telling you about my amazing doctor out in Boulder? This is him. The one and only Edmund Malinowski.”
Ed doesn’t know whether her words are genuine or feigned, doesn’t know what she’s chosen to tell Billy of their past, but Billy is shaking his hand and rambling. “Oh, sir, what an honor. Man, I can’t thank you enough for all you did for my girl. From what she tells me, she wouldn’t be here if not for you, so I’m indebted. Really.”
All Ed hears is my girl. Again he is too late.
“Great to meet you, Billy.” He holds up the book to Penelope. “May I check this out?”
She smiles at him. “Of course, Dr. Ed. You can study that poem and let me know what you come up with next time you’re in. Bring your son. I’d love to meet him.”
He is her former doctor with a young son she’d love to meet. A man who helped her once. A relic.
He walks to the circulation desk and fills out the paperwork to get a library card so he can take this collection of poems home. This book Penelope held and shared with him. He knows he should be happy for her. This is the life he imagined when he discharged her from the institution. The life he told himself she should have. She is his poster child, after all—his life’s work incarnate. And that is more important than taking her to bed. More important than sharing his own life with her.
But he hates the cruelty of their timing. He hates Laura for leaving him when she did. He hates himself for not allowing one full indiscretion with Penelope. He hates Penelope for falling in love with Billy. He hates Billy for existing.
He misses—for just a moment—the complicated days when he had both Laura and Penelope. Wife at home. Patient at work. Yes, it was that very situation that led him to this place, but there had been a surplus of affection then, at least. Two women to love and adore (if he loved Penelope in some way, so be it; what did it matter?). But now they are both gone, their arms linked with Tim and Billy, while Ed walks back to Dorothy’s with only a collection of poems in his hand.