I’VE NEVER WORN a man’s clothes before. It feels oddly intimate—all the more so because Eric’s sweatshirt doesn’t smell like a freshly laundered shirt. It smells kind of woodsy—sweet and piney at the same time. Like him, I guess.
I panicked when Dr. Houschka said he wouldn’t let me go unless I had someone to care for me. If I had to stay in that hospital, in that strange room with those strangers coming in and out, a second more, I felt sure I would die. And that serious man from the library—Eric Keegan—was standing there and it just came out of my mouth.
I’m actually surprised he went along with it. Everything about him seems so uptight—not just the way he stands, his spine rigid, his shoulders tense and square, but the intensity in his eyes, the way his lips remain straight and parallel, like an equals sign.
But then they turned up, just a little, when he offered to give me a ride home, and he surprised me again.
Now, sitting beside Eric in the passenger seat of his car, all traces of any joviality are gone and he’s gripping the wheel, still and stony as a statue—Atlas holding the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Granted, his son did almost die. But he didn’t. And even though I told Eric it was nothing, I would think he’d be just a little bit more warm, more grateful to me, instead of acting so indifferent.
Maybe he is kind of an asshole, like Louise suggested.
But then, he’s also kind of polite.
Like how he didn’t pepper me with any questions about why I was in the hospital or what was wrong with my face after Dr. Houschka left my room.
And how he brought me the extra clothes he had in his car—his Wharton sweatshirt and a pair of gym pants—since my clothes were so wet and muddy from the day before they had to be thrown out.
And how he wouldn’t hear of it when I offered to sit in the back so his son, whom he introduced as Aja, could have the front seat.
Whatever. Doesn’t really matter to me who this guy is, except that he’s the way I’m finally getting home. After the unexpected events of the past twenty-four hours—and lying wide awake in a hospital room for the entire night—all I can think about is getting inside the front door of my house. Being alone. Safe.
On the way there, I break the overwhelming silence a few times with one-word or two-word directions: “Right, here.” “Left.” And when Eric pulls into my driveway, it takes everything in me not to jump out of the car before it comes to a complete stop and race inside, throwing the dead bolt behind me with a satisfying click.
But I know that would be rude.
“Thank you for the ride,” I say as I open the car door, each word still an effort to expel from my sore throat.
He pulls up the parking brake between us and turns the key, cutting the engine. “I’ll get your bike,” he says, opening his door, too.
I open my mouth to protest, but when I stand up, I’m so overcome with exhaustion, lifting the bike myself seems an impossible task. Plus, the sweatpants I’m wearing are threatening to fall to my ankles at any second, even though I pulled the string as tightly as I could and knotted it. I sling my bag over my shoulder and grab a fistful of the pants’ elastic band to be safe.
“Where do you want it?” Eric says from behind the open trunk.
“Just inside the gate is fine,” I say, gesturing to the end of the driveway beside the house with my free hand.
Instead of wheeling it like I would, he hefts it up by the frame with one fist and does as directed, while I make my way to the porch. When I get to the front door, I turn to give a quick wave, but am startled when I see that he’s right behind me at the foot of the steps. He shoves a hand in his pocket and scratches the back of his head, his stance as awkward as I feel. I stare at him, my hand on the knob, my body itching to get inside.
He nods as if to seal our agreement. “Well, um . . . are you going to be all right?” he asks, glancing back at Aja once more. “Maybe we should stick around . . . you know, the doctor said . . .”
“I’m fine,” I say, panic rising at the thought of him—of anyone—coming inside my house. “I’ll be fine. Thank you, though. Thank you for, um . . . everything.”
“No, god,” he says. “Thank you.” He fishes in his back pocket with his right hand and produces a wallet. My eyes widen in alarm. Is he going to give me money? Like a reward for saving his kid? Or—and this is more likely, remembering my reflection in the hospital mirror—maybe I just look that destitute.
He unfolds the leather flap and pulls something out of it, then pushes it toward me. My shoulders relax when I see it’s just a business card. “Take my number,” he says. “Please. Just in case.”
I take my hand off the doorknob and grab the edge of the card, taking care not to touch his fingertips with mine. My gloves, still damp from the ordeal, are sitting in the bottom of my bag.
“K,” I say, dropping the card in my bag and clumsily fishing my keys out of it with one hand—the other is still holding up my pants. “Well, um . . . bye.” I lift my hand with the keys in a little wave and turn to go in the house without waiting for a response.
“Hey, wait,” he says. I stop, fighting the urge to scream in frustration or desperation—I’m not sure which—and turn my head back in his direction.
“Yeah?”
“This is completely random, I know. But didn’t you say The Virgin Suicides was your favorite book?”
I pause. “One of them,” I say.
“Why?” he asks. “I mean, what’s so great about it?”
I narrow my eyes at him, this out-of-the-blue question reminding me of his bizarre book choices at the library.
“I don’t know,” I say, not wanting to prolong the conversation. But I do know. I remember exactly how I felt when I entered the lives of the Lisbon sisters. Like somebody understood.
“But you do know. You must,” he says. “If it’s a favorite.”
I stare at him, willing him to read my body language, which is screaming, Let me go inside! But he just stares back at me, waiting. I take a deep breath and use the momentary pause to examine his face. Good-looking. That’s the other thing Louise called him—and he is, in that his face is striking. It entreats exploration. Good bone structure. That’s what Mom would have said. I always thought that was funny, because if you’ve ever seen a human skull, the bone placement is pretty universal. What I’m drawn to, what I can’t seem to stop staring at, is his eyes. They’re green, like two olives dropped into the center of his face, polished to a glossy shine. And they’re intense, yes, but there’s also a kindness about them. They’re a contradiction, similar to Eric himself. And I find it difficult to look away.
I realize he’s still waiting for me to answer. That he’s not going to leave until I respond. I clear my throat. “It’s just so real,” I say. “I read it as a teenager—and it captured . . . I don’t know, everything. The loneliness. The way we idolize other people’s lives. The desire to be accepted. To be noticed.”
He stares at me, his mouth slightly ajar, and I start to feel exposed, like he can see through me, somehow. I break his gaze and pretend to study the rocks at his feet. “Um . . . for me, anyway. That’s what I liked.”
He still doesn’t respond and I feel the heat rise in my cheeks again. “Well, I really better get inside,” I say, and shuffle back toward the door.
“OK,” he says from behind me. And then: “Bye, Jubilee.” It’s the first time he’s said my name and I fumble the keys in my hand, dropping them on the porch. I quickly bend down to pick them up, taking care not to let go of the sweatpants’ waistband, conscious of how ridiculous I must look.
I straighten up, fit the key in the lock, and turn it, twisting the handle with relief. I scoot in and close the door behind me, turning the lock with a swift flick of my wrist. I lean back against the door, dropping my bag onto the ground at my feet next to the pile of mail that’s landed there in my absence and sigh, looking around. My house.
I’m in my house. Lying in the hospital bed, I fantasized about all the things I wished I were doing at home—lying in my own bed, for starters, reading a book in my comfy corner chair, making eggs and toast, mopping the floors, watching the next lecture in my Harvard series.
So it surprises even me that the first thing I do isn’t to go upstairs and change. I walk over to the window and gently push the curtain to one side and watch as Eric slides into the front seat of his car. I stare at his face as he turns to say something to Aja, who’s still in the backseat, and watch as he slowly eases the car in reverse out of the driveway. I picture myself in the passenger seat beside him. What I must have looked like there—what we looked like to people driving beside us.
THAT NIGHT, I can’t sleep. Dr. Houschka’s words keep replaying in my mind: Maybe you could get this thing under control. It’s the reason Mom moved us from the only home I’ve ever known in Tennessee to New Jersey in high school, so we could be closer to Dr. Zhang and get this thing under control. (Although to be honest, I also think she’d run out of men to date in our small town of Fountain City.)
But after the first appointment, I refused to go back. It was clear there wasn’t going to be some magic cure, and besides, I didn’t like the way Dr. Zhang was looking at me, that glint in her eye. She wanted to study me, like I was some kind of alien species. I wasn’t interested in being her guinea pig. Mom encouraged me to give her another chance, but she didn’t—couldn’t—force me to go.
I’m still not interested in being a lab rat, but I know Houschka’s right about one thing—I don’t want to end up in the hospital again any more than he wants to see me there. And I can’t exactly stay holed up in my house. I have a job now. A job that I need. And what if he’s right about the rest of it? What if they do know a lot more about allergies now? Whoever they are. What if there is something that can be done?
I get out of bed and creep downstairs, not wanting to interrupt the silence with the creaking of the hardwoods. In the study, I slide into the desk chair and shake the mouse of the computer. The screen glows to life and nearly blinds me. When my eyes adjust, I type “Dr. Mei Zhang” into Google. Her picture immediately pops up under the heading George Watkins University Allergy & Immunology. I shudder, remembering the way I felt underneath her gaze. As if I were a frog in science class and she was gleefully holding a scalpel. But maybe that was just an irrational childhood fear, like imagining monsters under the bed. I click the link, grab a pen and piece of scrap paper from where they lie on the desk, and jot down the phone number and email correlated with Zhang’s name. I stare at it, by the glow of my monitor, and a feeling washes over me. An emotion so foreign, I can’t immediately identify it.
Possibility.
It feels so naive, the hope I used to carry around like Linus’s blanket, imagining a new life—a life without this debilitating allergy—was waiting just ahead. But there it is, blossoming in my belly, and I can’t dampen it. Not immediately. I mean, I don’t plan on running around giving CPR to strangers all the time, but what if I could work at the library without my gloves, or shake hands with people—or I don’t know, take a business card from someone and let my fingers graze his, like a normal person? Or maybe that isn’t normal—to think about touching a near stranger’s fingers with your own.
In the dark, I peer down at the Wharton sweatshirt I’m still wearing—that I just didn’t really want to take off—and wonder if maybe that’s not normal either.
Anyway, I remind myself, Dr. Houschka said “under control”; he didn’t say “cured.” That’s because there is no cure. There is no cure. I say it aloud so that it sinks in. I will always wear gloves. There is no new life waiting just around the corner.
I stare at the phone number on the piece of paper one last time, before I crumple it up, drop it in the wastebasket beside the desk, and go back upstairs to bed.
IN THE MORNING, I wake with a start, my hair sticking to my face, my pillow damp with sweat. I was having a nightmare. About Eric’s hands. His fingers were swollen, cartoonishly large, and they were touching mine—engulfing them, really—the pads of his bulging thumbs rubbing my knuckles. I was trying to tell him to stop, that I can’t be touched, but I felt as though I were underwater, that my mouth wouldn’t obey my brain, that my words were being stolen right out of the air, unable to fulfill their duty of being heard. The harder it was to move my mouth, the harder I tried, until I was paralyzed in fear and panic consumed every nerve in my body.
I sit up, trying to slow my galloping heart. But as I take deep breaths, replaying the scene in my mind, I can almost feel the rough warmth of his fingers on my skin. Or what I imagine it would feel like—I haven’t been touched in so long. Not since right before Dr. Benefield put me in that plastic isolation room when I was six. Right before he diagnosed me and my entire world shifted. For months and years afterward, I tried so hard to remember that last interaction with my mother. The last time she touched me. Did she clasp my face? Kiss the top of my head? Wrap her arms around my tiny frame and squeeze me tight? I’m sure she said something soothing like, “It’s only a week. I’ll be right out here, baby.” But the words don’t matter. If only I had known it was the last time I would be touched, the last time that I would feel the palm of her hand on my arm, her breath on my face, I would have held on a little longer. Imprinted the feeling of her fingertips on my skin. I would have made sure to remember.
But I didn’t. And now, sitting in my bed, trying to recall the touch of Eric in my dream—to really feel it on my skin—it’s the same fruitless effort I expended for years trying to recall my mother’s last touch. And then, as my heartbeat slows, I begin to wonder if it really was a nightmare. I wonder if my heart’s racing because I was terrified—or because it was so wonderful.
“DID YOU HAVE a good weekend, dear?” Louise asks when I walk behind the circulation desk Monday morning. She turns to look at me and gasps.
“Oh, dear,” she says, covering her mouth with her hand. The rash around my mouth had lessened when I looked in the mirror this morning, but some red splotches were lingering and my lips were still a bit bruised and swollen. I found a tube of lipstick in my mom’s dresser, but it only accentuated the problem, so I wiped it off.
“What happened?” Louise asks.
My shoulders tense and I silently chastise myself for not preparing a response. I was hoping no one would notice. “Allergic reaction,” I say. When that doesn’t seem to satisfy her, I add: “New lipstick,” because it’s the first thing that pops in my mind.
“What brand? Remind me never to get that one.”
“I don’t remember,” I say feebly as Roger approaches the circulation desk, holding a coffee mug.
“Morning, ladi— Whoa,” he says, staring at me.
“It’s just an allergic reaction,” Louise says, waving him off. “And it’s no wonder, really. You know what they put in lipstick? Crushed-up bugs. Bugs! And lead, I think, if I’m remembering right. Read some article about it a few weeks ago.”
I eye a pile of returns on the desk and start scanning them back in, as Louise and Roger’s conversation is devolving into a discussion of weird things in food, like yoga mat particles in sandwich bread. I tune them out, so I’m not sure if I’ve heard correctly when about five minutes later, Louise says: “It doesn’t matter, we’re all going to be fired anyway.”
My head snaps toward her. “What?”
She looks at me. “Oh, you didn’t hear? Maryann’s in another big fight with the city, trying to keep them from cutting our funding again. We used to have four circulation assistants—can you believe it? But that idiot Frank Stafford, city council’s finance chair, keeps funneling money to the rec center, because his son plays peewee football and he’s convinced he’s going to be the next Ted Brady—that’s a quarterback, right?”
“I think it’s Tom,” Roger says.
“Ted, Tom,” she says, waving her hand. “Anyway, she’s been trying to prove how needed we are in the community, but the circ numbers are down and the few programs we do have are so poorly attended—”
“Could we really be fired?” I cut her off.
“Oh dear,” she says, and reaches out to pat my gloved hand. I move it away from her. “I didn’t mean to alarm you.” She sighs. “But I don’t really know how we’ll even keep the doors open and lights on if they cut the budget any more. It’s bare-bones as it is.”
I stare at her, my mind reeling. This job essentially fell into my lap and I can’t lose it. I need the money. And against all odds, I’m mostly comfortable here. I can’t imagine looking for something else, going into all those strange buildings, talking to new people. At just the thought of it, a vise threatens to clamp down on my heart and stop it once and for all.
WHEN I COME out of the break room at four, I’m surprised to see Madison H. standing there, baby on her hip. I wonder why she’s at the library so often when she never seems to check out any books. Maybe it has something to do with being on the board.
“Jubilee!” she says when she sees me, her eyes betraying her horror. I lift my gloved hand to my mouth, willing the redness to just disappear already. “What happened?”
“Long story,” I say, sliding into my chair.
She shifts the baby to her other hip and looks at me pointedly. I sigh and glance behind me, making sure Maryann and Louise are still in the back room. Then I give her the abridged version of the weekend, ending with Dr. Houschka’s visit.
She stares at me openmouthed. “Jesus, I leave you alone for two days and you go and almost kill yourself.”
“That’s dramatic,” I say.
“Well have you made an appointment?”
“With who?”
“An allergist. To get that bracelet thing. And EpiPens. You should be carrying EpiPens! My nephew has a peanut butter allergy and doesn’t leave the house without one.”
“I don’t need an EpiPen. Or a bracelet. It’s not like I’m going around giving people CPR left and right,” I say, reiterating my inner thoughts from last night.
“Well what if there was another kind of emergency?”
“Like what?”
She thinks for a minute and glances down at her baby. “What if a kid drooled on you?”
“I’d get a rash,” I say, trying to make it sound like no big deal. But I shudder at the possibility, thinking of the girl who almost died from a drop of milk on her skin. And then my stomach starts to tingle and itch right near my belly button as if I’ve conjured a rash just by saying the word aloud. The mind is a funny and powerful thing. I start to scratch it through the material of my shirt. “And then I’d stay away from that kid.”
“What if he bit you?”
My eyes grow wide. “Why would a kid bite me?”
She shrugs. “Why do kids do anything? Hannah found a jar of honey and smeared it all over Molly’s face and hair last week when I was in the bathroom. Looked like she had a spa mask on. Do you know how hard that was to clean up?”
I stare at her, trying to decide if I should continue her little game. “I don’t think a kid is going to bite me.”
She sighs. “Look, I’m not taking you out until you get an EpiPen, OK?”
I look up at her, confused. “Take me out where?”
“On an adventure,” she says, a self-assured smile on her face. Although, I’m not sure that she has any other kind of smile. I think Madison H. came crawling out of her mother’s womb annoyingly confident. “That’s what I came to tell you. I’m going to be your official guide to all of the things you’ve missed the past nine years.”
I stare at her openly now, my mouth an oval of disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Nope.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not,” she says, shifting the baby again to her other hip. “It’ll be fun.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Oh, c’mon,” she says, pushing out her bottom lip in a pretend pout. “You do. You want to. At least give me one night. If you have a terrible time, we’ll never do it again. Scout’s honor.”
“You were a Girl Scout?” I ask, itching my stomach again. I must have gotten a bug bite or something.
“No,” she says. “Is that what that means?”
I snort and shake my head. Then I change the subject. “Hey, has the library board met this month?”
She squawks: “Ha!” The baby jumps in her arms, startled. “No,” she says, calmer. “We meet like once a year. Why?”
“There’s a problem with funding. The city wants to cut it.”
“What else is new?”
“Oh. Well is there something that you guys can do about it?”
“Not really,” she says. “The board’s kind of a joke. We mostly get together to gossip and eat Enid’s rum cake. We don’t really have any power. Not like the city council.”
“Huh,” I say, while my heart revs underneath my blouse. Somebody must be able to do something. I can’t lose this job. I won’t. I need the money.
She jostles the baby back to the original hip. “So you’ll go?”
I give her one last hard stare and then throw my hands up in a gesture of defeat. “Why not?” I say, pushing down the real question burning deep inside my gut: why? Why does Madison H., the most popular girl from school, suddenly want to be my friend? Doesn’t she have better things to do with her time? Why does she care so much?
But later, as I’m arranging a display on books about Native Americans to correlate with Thanksgiving, I chide myself for such childish thoughts. I’m not in high school anymore. We’re adults. She’s being kind. I should stop questioning her so much and just accept it for what it is. Besides, I have to admit, it’s kind of nice to have a friend.
I stand up the final book, Black Elk Speaks, on the end of the row, and absentmindedly scratch my belly again. It’s burning a little now, and I wonder if all my scratching over my phantom rash has somehow irritated the skin. I yank up my blouse to examine it, an audible gasp escaping my lips when I see my bare skin—angry boils and red bumps are burning a path from my belly button down toward my hip. But I don’t understand—why would a rash spring up on my stomach? No one has touched me there. I take a deep breath. It’s probably just a . . . just a . . . rash. From something else. Laundry detergent—isn’t that what people always say? But I haven’t changed my laundry detergent. And I’ve seen this reaction enough in my life to know exactly what it is.
What terrifies me is I have no idea how it got there.