Don't You Cry(77)

And one more typed sheet of notebook paper, folded into thirds.

Addressed to My Dearest, and signed, All my love, EV.





Alex

I’m the first one at the library when it opens for the day. I’m waiting outside at the top of a small stairway, beside the white exterior columns, when the librarian unlocks the door. She takes her time inserting the key in the lock, and then checks her watch to be certain it’s nine o’clock. Nine o’clock and not a moment before. And then she opens the door as I breeze past inhaling her potent hair spray, and she says to me, “First one here,” as if that wasn’t already obvious, the fact that I was the first one here, the only one here. I mutter a quick, Yup, and then hurry on, to one of the computer terminals, which I haven’t bothered to reserve in advance. That thought never even crossed my mind. Though I’m the only one here, the librarian tracks me down, anyway, scanning my library card because, as she says, Rules are rules. And I’ve already broken one of the twenty-seven rules about using the library’s computer terminals. I watch as she gives me a disapproving look and then withdraws slowly from view. The only people at the library this morning are the other librarians, two older women who file carts worth of returned books. They disappear into the stacks making the books all alphabetical and orderly so that later people can come and muss it all up. It must drive them insane.

I don’t have a lot of information on which to go, but I do know that the cemetery plot where Genevieve was supposed to be buried...it’s empty. I try hard to exhume from memory the stories of little five-year-old Genevieve before she drowned in that bathtub. I wasn’t born yet; I wasn’t even a blip on the radar. To me she was always a ghost. She was never a child, but rather the purported specter in the window of the home across the street, a wraith in white wafting from room to room, calling for her mother. But to others she was a child once.

I look online and this is what I come to learn. For thirty-four smackers, I can request birth and death certificates from the State of Michigan’s vital records office, but I have to mail in a request, pay twelve bucks more to have it expedited and then wait. I don’t have time to wait. I need the answers now. By the looks of it, the vital records office may or may not even send me the information I need; seems much of it—birth records, in particular—is confidential. I don’t really need Genevieve’s birth certificate, anyway, but her death certificate would come in handy, something to help me understand why that casket is empty.

I try another angle. I research the old house, hoping to find some sort of chain of title so I can track down the family that once lived there. Unfortunate thing is, that house has been abandoned so long it predates the world of Zillow and Trulia. The bankruptcies and foreclosures I pull up online all happened over the past couple of years, a dumpy duplex on the west side of town, a slummy home on the east and a couple dozen more listings in between. A sign of the times, I guess. It’s sad, all those people tossed out of their homes because they can’t pay the bills. Pretty soon, Pops and I will be there, too, standing on some busy four-way intersection, bearing cardboard signs that read Homeless and Please Help, feeling grateful for a buck or two.

I do a quick scan for Genevieve’s obituary online, hoping to find a name there for next of kin. But this is what I find: nada, nothing. I type in her name followed by the word obituary, and then check twice to be sure I’ve spelled the words correctly. I add in the name of our tiny little town to narrow the search field, but it comes up empty. Well, not empty, per se, but it pulls up a whole bunch of trash I don’t want or need: a middle-aged lady from Hamilton, Ohio; a Dominican nun from Nashville, Tennessee, dead at the age of eighty-two. Not my Genevieve. Far as I can tell, there isn’t an obituary for the little girl anywhere. Maybe it’s just that it’s been twenty-some years since she died, or maybe it’s something else.

A librarian passes by and I inquire about microfilm, hoping I might find a two-decade-old obituary from the local paper stored there. She stands before me with a pair of bifocals dangling from a golden chain, her hair a latticework of white. She might just be the oldest person I’ve ever seen, and while I follow her through the library and to the microfilm reader squirreled away on the other side—passing two younger librarians who are no doubt faster and more technologically adept than she and thinking this is all a colossal waste of time—it turns out she’s exactly the person I need.

Before we ever even make it to the microfilm machine, she asks of me, “Doing research?” and I say, “I guess you could call it that.”

“What kind of information are you looking for?” she asks in a helpful sort of way, not nosy, and though I hesitate, I tell her. “I’m trying to get some information on that old abandoned home out on Laurel Avenue.”

She stops. “What kind of information are you looking for?” she asks. I have her attention, and whether or not I want it, I don’t know. But I don’t have the first clue how to use a microfilm machine, and so it seems I’m going to need her help with this.

“Just trying to figure out who used to live there,” I say casually, like this is no big deal at all. But her answer is completely unexpected. Her voice and her demeanor change, and she looks at me like I’m either a complete idiot or I’ve been living under a giant sedimentary rock.

“You don’t need a microfilm machine for that,” she says, leaning in close, the smell of her Aqua Net hair spray making me want to retch. “I can tell you who used to live in that house,” she says, her face just inches away so I can see the eroding teeth, the transparency of her corrugated skin, and though I’m expecting the obvious, for her to say something cryptic and obscure about the ghost of Genevieve, what she says turns my world on end and makes me question everything I once thought I knew was true.