Don't You Cry(32)

But as far as I can tell, people like him. The man’s history is squeaky clean.

I rise up out of my chair, the steel legs skating across the ugly maroon carpeting, getting tangled on a loose thread. I drape a coat over my hooded sweatshirt and prepare to leave. I double-check that I’ve closed all search engines, and then do a quick sweep of the search history to make sure there’s nothing there. There isn’t. It’s clean as a whistle.

I’m about to leave when I hear a voice. “Alex?” asks the voice. “Alex Gallo?” and I turn to see her, Mrs. Hackett, my high school science teacher, standing before me with some paperback in her hand, a winter coat draped over an arm. She’s hardly changed a bit in the six months since I’ve been there, and I’m struck by a sudden moment of homesickness. I miss school, my friends, roaming the halls of that aged, light brick building with its rows and rows of cherry-red lockers and vinyl floors. Mrs. Hackett still has the same dark long hair, parted at the center and pulled into a low ponytail on the side; the same dark eyes; the same thick eyebrows; the same soft smile. Where her body used to be narrow and trim, there’s now a bowling ball protruding, right in her midsection, which she has her hands laced around. She wears a long, tunic-type thing that bulges at the center, hanging low to cover up the protuberance. A baby. Mrs. Hackett is going to have a baby, and soon. For some reason this makes me smile, even if she is giving me a look of arrant disappointment, her arms crossed, a pout on her pretty face.

“I told them no, surely not,” she says. “I said I wouldn’t believe it until I saw it with my own two eyes. But here you are,” she adds, wielding her hands in my direction, and I force a smile and say, “In the flesh.”

Her disappointment turns to heartache as she asks, “Why, Alex? Why? Why did you turn that scholarship down?”

I shrug my shoulders. “I’m a homebody, I guess. Couldn’t be away from home.”

It’s true, of course, and it’s not true. And everybody knows the reason why, though no one’s too keen to say the words out loud.

“How is your father?” she asks.

“Just fine,” I say. She sighs.

“You used to come here all the time,” she says then, of the library. I did. I used to come here all the time and hole myself up in the stacks all day, with a tower of astronomy books, and read them until the librarians told me to leave. I’d been fascinated with the sky since I was a little kid, since long before I could read. Pops bought me a telescope once, back when he could actually afford a telescope. I can hardly remember life that long ago. I haven’t looked through it in years, not since that night with Leigh Forney out on the beach. That’s the last thing I need to see, my dreams floating off to space with clouds of interstellar dust and nebulae.

It’s what I always thought I would do when I grew up, work as an astronomer or, if that fell through, an aerospace engineer. Design spaceships and airplanes. Study the universe, find life out there somewhere, confirming what I already knew was true: we are not alone. Not working for Priddy full-time, bussing tables. I never thought I’d be doing that. There’s a letter at home somewhere to prove it, a full ride to the U of M, which I turned down two days after Pops drank so much he had to be hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. I’m pretty sure we’re still paying for that visit, a no-interest payment plan I managed to negotiate with the hospital’s billing staff.

My eyes stare off into the distance, to the spines of books lined in a row, as Mrs. Hackett says, “I haven’t seen you around here in a while.”

“I’ve been busy,” I say.

“You’re working?” she asks.

“I’m working,” I say. And then I point at that big, round belly and ask, “Boy or girl?” Anything so that we can stop talking about me and what an utmost disappointment I am, and she confirms that that bowling ball inside her shirt is in fact a girl. Elodie, she’ll be. Elodie Marie Hackett.

I say that I like it. She asks if I want to touch her belly, but I say no.

And then I go because I can’t stand that look of disappointment in her eyes.

Outside I backtrack from the library through town, fully intent on heading out to the beach and finding my way home, along the same path as I always do. It’s almost five o’clock; it’ll be getting dark soon. Pops is likely hungry, wondering where I am and why I’m not making dinner. Tonight we’re having SpaghettiOs and a can of corn. I’m a regular sous-chef. I might even heat up some kielbasa and throw that in, too.

But this is where the plan goes south.

I’m cutting down Main Street, past Ingrid’s house and the café, for a return to the beach. I’m thinking about Pearl, and whether or not she’ll be there for another evening swim—hoping that she’ll be there, so that this time I might actually manage a return wave and not practically shit my pants when she smiles at me—when I hear a screen door slam shut, and standing there, just outside the blue cottage door, is Dr. Joshua Giles.

Locking up for the night.

He wears a coat and gloves, a leather satchel in the clasp of a hand.

His patients have all come and gone, the day is done, and Dr. Giles is heading home. The rest of the street is quiet. Most of the shops are closed for the night, though cars pass up and down the street, going slowly, stopping to take turns at an intersection that bears no stoplight, but rather a yellow yield sign. A block away, a woman walks her dog, a small terrier-like thing that she scoops into her arms to cross the street as a conversion van drives past. The sky has begun to fill with stars, Sirius first, the brightest star in the nighttime sky. I stop on a street corner and stare. In the distance, the train pulls into town as Dr. Giles begins his trek home.