Rooke

by Callie Hart

  “There are other kinds of love stories, Sasha. Something a little darker every now and then wouldn’t kill any of us.”

  I lay out a stack of small plates along with a couple of small cheese knives, and I notice my hand shaking. It’s been shaking since I left Hathaway’s office six hours ago, and it probably won’t stop shaking for a couple of days. Some of my sessions with him are harder than others, no matter that we always go over the same thing every time we meet.

  Ali sips more of her tea, grimacing when she burns herself further. “I don’t even know why you’re still running this book club.”

  My hand stills on the knife I’m setting down. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because…I don’t know. I don’t mean anything by it. I just...I mean, romance, Sasha? You haven’t looked sideways at a man since Andrew. And I get it, I really do. I don’t expect you to be out bed-hopping and having the time of your life. I’m just surprised that you’re still interested in this stuff is all.”

  “I’m not a nun.”

  “I know you’re not a nun. Nuns get more action than you do.”

  “Ha! You realize how absolutely ridiculous your last statement was, don’t you?” She just raises her eyebrows. “My vagina isn’t a dusty old relic yet. I’d date if I came across the right guy. Maybe.”

  She snorts.

  “What? I would.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You’d flip if a guy even asked for your number right now and you know it.”

  “I work too much to go out on dates. That’s the problem.”

  “The problem is that you’re afraid of your own shadow.”

  “And I suppose you’d have me approaching guys in coffee shops, asking them if they want to hook up later or something?”

  “It would be a step in the right direction. Or maybe setting up an account on a da—”

  “Do not tell me to set up an account on a dating app. I will lose my fucking mind if you tell me to set up an account on a dating app.”

  “Would it really be so horrible? You’re acting like I want you to go trawling the back alleys of the ghetto for a good time. The guys on most of these sites are professionals. They’re short on time, just like you. They’re normal. They earn a paycheck.” She gives me a stern look. “A lot of them even own suits and cover their own bills.”

  “I’m sure they do. I’m sure they’re all great guys. I don’t want to just fall into bed with someone, though. How is a meaningless connection going to be of any benefit to me?” I have to place the wine glass I’m holding down on the table with the utmost care; if I don’t, I’m liable to smash the thing.

  “So you’re looking for something more serious? You want to find a guy to marry and have a brood of kids with? Is that it?”

  I jump, an awful, bottomless agony slamming through me, deep as a ravine, wide as the ocean. The wine glass I just set down so carefully topples over. It rolls, tumbling from the edge of the table before I can catch it, hitting the floor and smashing into a thousand pieces. My heart is stumbling all over the place, stuttering like an engine almost out of fuel. “I’m never going to have another child, Al. How could you even suggest...?”

  Pain flashes across my friend’s face. “But why not? You’re still young. You’re a great mom. There’s no reason you shouldn’t—”

  “There’s every reason—”

  The doorbell cuts us both off, the bright, cheerful sound chiming throughout the lower hallways of the house. I grip hold of the edge of the table, trying to calm myself. Ali and I stare at each other, and can see that she knows exactly how painful her suggestion was just now. I can see the remorse written into the lines of her face, but there’s defiance there, too. It’s a familiar look on her. After Christopher died, she wrapped me in cotton wool just like everyone else did, brought me meals, cleaned my house, my clothes, and my body when I couldn’t even muster the energy to do that for myself. But there came a point, months after the accident, when she decided enough was enough and she challenged me to start doing things for myself again. This feels like one of those times, but she’s pushing too far.

  “Go and get the door,” she says, breaking the tension. “I’ll clear up the glass.”

  There are a thousand things I’d rather do than get the door right now, but it beats standing here, continuing this conversation. I step over the mess on the floor and hurry down the hallway, nervously wiping the palms of my hands on my jeans. I can see the warped shapes of three heads through the frosted pane of glass in the front door even before I open it. Kika, Kayla, and Tiffanie: always on time, and always together, no matter what. The book club has been going for a long time, maybe seven or eight long years. There hasn’t been a single instance these three women haven’t shown up joined at the hip.

  Tiffanie squeals when I open the door; she rushes forward, clapping her hands. “Oh. My. God. I am so excited. This book was life. I can’t wait to show you the edit I posted on Goodreads. Where’s Ali?”

  “She’s in the back.”

  Tiffanie bustles past me, grinning from ear to ear. Kayla and Kika are hot on her heels. Kayla plants a kiss on my cheek, while Kika gives my arm a squeeze. She hangs back, allowing the other two women to go on ahead of us.

  “You’re pale,” she tells me. “Have you eaten anything today? I’m not going to sugar coat it, babe. You look like shit.” This is Kika all over: very perceptive, but also very blunt. I like this about her, but others have been known to be less appreciative of her honesty.

  “I’m fine. And, yes, I’ve eaten, thank you very much, Mother Theresa.”

  “Hey. I didn’t offer to cook you a meal or anything. I just pointed out that you could probably use one. Don’t go giving me more credit than I deserve.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Good. Come on. Let’s go drink a gallon of wine and stuff our faces with cheese.”

  THREE

  YELLOW PAGES

  SASHA

  Being a curator at the American Museum of Natural History might not seem thrilling to most people, but I love it. The dioramas, the dinosaur exhibits, the crocodiles, and the space exhibition. Every single one of the museum’s levels holds something of interest to me. I’m excited every single time I jog up the steps towards the grand entrance, dodging tourists and people taking pictures, leaning against the columns and posing with the lit-up dinosaur topiaries. Work is all I do get excited about these days. What a sad, sad thing to admit to. There once was a time when family vacations and cross-country trips would have me bouncing off the walls, thrilled by the prospect of adventure, at the prospect of experiencing something new. Christmas was my favorite time of year, and spring in the city would make me delirious with the promise of t-shirt weather, cold glasses of Sauvignon Blanc, and rooftop barbeques. Now the seasons all seem to blur into one another. I haven’t left New York in years.

  As I climb the steps, avoiding a row of people wrapped up warm with coats, hats and scarves, who all appear to be involved in a mannequin challenge, I think about the day ahead of me. Morning meetings are unavoidable, as are answering a litany of emails. Midmorning, I have to conduct three interviews in the vain hopes of finding a replacement for Shun Jin, my intern, who has basically been saving my life for the last six months. God knows how I’m ever going to find someone to fill her shoes. Shun Jin’s the kind of girl to assess a situation and gauge whether or not I need to get involved. If the answer is no and it’s something she can take care of herself, then she does exactly that without so much as mentioning it. She doesn’t sweat the small stuff. I know my calendar is entirely safe in her hands, along with all of my exhibition timelines. I can hardly begrudge the fact that she’s been given a pay raise and a junior position within the museum, I recommended her for the post after all, but now that I’m having to find someone who will be as diligent and professional as she is, I’m starting to feel like I’ve totally sabotaged myself.

  In my office, a stack of envelopes has been left on my desk for me b
y the museum’s internal mail service. I hang my purse on the back of the door along with my jacket, and then I leaf through the mail, discarding advertising material in the trashcan and setting aside any invoices I come across. The second to last piece of mail is a small white envelope. My hands go still as I stare down at my name written in black, blocky ink above the museum’s address. I recognize the handwriting. In my mind, I remember the very first time I ever saw that awkward, no nonsense, yet somehow childish handwriting. It was years ago, back in college, when a boy slipped a note inside my Fine Arts of the 20th Century textbook. The note read:

  You ever need a live model, feel free to hit me up.

  310 962 5177

  Underneath the number, the boy had drawn a crude smiley face, which appeared to be winking and sticking its tongue out.

  I drop the envelope into the top drawer of my desk, swallowing hard. My mouth is strangely dry all of a sudden.

  “Sasha? Ahh, Sasha, there you are. I’m glad I found you.” Oscar Blackheath, the oldest curator on staff at the museum, blusters into my office without knocking, a whirlwind of tufty white hair, brown tweed and Davidoff Cool Water. From observing him on the street, you’d be right in placing him as an octogenarian, and yet upon speaking to him you begin to suspect you’re the victim of some weird reality TV show prank. His attitude, his energy levels, and his general outlook on life are more in line with someone in their late twenties. He’s tech-savvy, but his fashion sense is all over the place. In the summer, his go-to outfit is a crisp button-down shirt coupled with a pair of khaki shorts that expose his ghostly white, incredibly knobbly knees. Beyond polite, he speaks like a Victorian gentleman from Saville Row, London, but I know for a fact he was born and raised in New York.

  “Been looking for me, Mr. B?” I ask.

  “I have indeed. I wondered if you might be around this afternoon? I’d like to ask your opinion on the new Theory of Evolution program we’re hosting next year. A number of school programs have expressed their concern over some of the planned exhibitions.”

  “Concern?”

  “Yes. Well, I believe a number of Catholic and Baptist schools are upset that we’ve missed the word ‘theory’ from our promotional flyers.”

  “Oh god.”

  “Yes. Exactly. I’ve penned a very expressive email in response to their missives, but I’d love for you to cast an eye over them before I hit send. Don’t want to go upsetting anyone unnecessarily now.”

  I laugh. “Of course. I can swing by your office around three if that suits you?”

  “Excellent.” Oscar vanishes, leaving behind a cloud of cologne and a pair of wet footprints on the polished floorboards where he was standing a moment ago.

  ******

  “What made you apply for the job here at the museum, Carl? You say you’re primarily interested in linguistics. You realize you won’t be able to further your ambition in that field here at the museum?” The kid across from me looks at me blankly, like I’m speaking Swahili. Ironic, given that he should be able to understand me even if I am, in actual fact, speaking Swahili. It says he has a working knowledge of the language on his resume.

  “I know. Honestly, I just thought it might be fun. I have a couple of months before school starts again. I figured it might be interesting to do some part-time work here.”

  “Part-time? This is a full-time position, Carl. It’s for six months in the minimum.”

  “Oh, for real? I thought maybe that was flexible or something.”

  “Definitely for real. Definitely not flexible.”

  “Huh. Well, okay then. Thanks for seeing me, I guess.” The twenty-year-old punk gets up, shrugging his arms into his down jacket, picking up his incredibly hipster-looking bag and gives me a thumbs-up. “It was great to meet you anyway, Ms. Connor.”

  I watch him go, trying not to let my jaw hit the floor. What in the actual hell was that? A thumbs up? It was nice to meet me anyway? Damn it all to hell. Of the three interviews I’ve just sat through, none of the applicants were suitable. Not even close. The first girl was rude and kept snapping her gum. The second kid was severely shy, to the point where I couldn’t hear a word he mumbled in response to my questions. And my third interviewee, Carl, well… Carl was obviously something else entirely. I slam my laptop closed, sighing heavily.

  Out in the marble-floored bustling corridors and hallways of the museum, I can hear men and women talking in groups, the high, excited chatter of children, and the never-ending echo of footfall. These sounds have been a comfort to me for so long now. It’s the background noise of a life I’ve always had yet a life that now seems distant and strange, like I’m a visitor here and I don’t really belong anymore.

  Back here, amongst the stacks and the high shelves, laden with treasures from previous exhibitions—stuffed coyotes, life-size jellyfish, celestial maps of the heavens—I find that I am still me, though. Just about.

  My interviews were pointless and a waste of time, but somehow it seems they took forever. I’ve missed lunch, it’s well passed two, so I make do with a coffee instead. In my office, I sip the dark black liquid slowly as I give myself the luxury of a ten-minute break. In my purse, the new book club novel glares at me malevolently, taking up too much room. Lord knows why Kayla picked this one. The Seven Secret Lives of James P. Albrecht. Doesn’t sound like a romance to me. Not in the slightest. The blurb on the back of the book doesn’t give anything away, either. Just that the male protagonist of the story is a kleptomaniac and a thief who descends into madness as his crimes worsen in nature.

  I can’t see anything about a woman in the story’s description. No sense that James P. Albrecht is going to be rescued from his life of crime and insanity by some sweet-natured do-gooder. It’s what I’ve come to expect. It’s what I crave when I read these days, because the knight in shining armor never lets his princess down. The caring, redemptive heroine never fails her broken beau. These books are my escape from real life. Because you know what? Real life fucking sucks.

  The book starts out slow: a man in his early thirties, trying to figure out where he belongs in the world now that the love of his life has left him. The language is trite and frankly a little weird in places. Bizarre descriptions of a Chicago landscape that clearly doesn’t exist in real life. A couple of brief emotional internal monologues that strike me as odd, since as far as I can tell James is neither an empathetic nor sympathetic man. By the end of the first chapter, I’m convinced James is a sociopath and the reason the love of his life left him is because he’s actually murdered her and buried her body in his newly paved back yard.

  Weird, though. I’m sucked in. By the time I glance up at the clock it’s already ten past three. Shit. My meeting with Oscar. I’m late. I hate being late, especially when I’ve agreed to help someone. I hurry out of my office, pulling the door closed behind me, and it’s not until I reach the other side of the building that I realize I’ve brought my book with me instead of putting it back in my bag.

  I slip unnoticed through the sea of people inside the museum, people’s eyes skating over me indifferently as I weave between gatherings of grandmothers and foreign exchange students, Hasidic Jewish men, and fathers with their sons. I might as well be invisible; the name badge I’m wearing on my shirt, simple, black and inconspicuous, sets me aside from the other museumgoers. I am an employee, a member of staff, and therefore not even a real human being. I’m a part of the grander diorama of the museum, the bigger exhibition. People don’t bother me, especially when it looks like I’m on my way somewhere as I am now.

  Oscar’s domain is an assault course of obstacles, designed to keep the unworthy out. His office is on the third floor, tucked away behind the crocodile exhibit, down a series of drafty hallways that are always cluttered with cardboard boxes so old and rotten that they spill their random contents out onto the chipped terracotta tile.

  I duck around a crooked tower of telephone directories, smiling when I see their splintered, cracked spines clearly
advertise when they were printed (1981 to 2002 respectively), and promptly collide with another obstruction, this time of the human variety. I drop my book as I crash into the person lurking behind the telephone books, yelping out loud as I reach out to steady myself. Very unladylike and most certainly not graceful in any way, shape or form.

  “Whoa. Holy shit. You okay?” A hand reaches out and grabs me, and not a moment too soon. I haven’t fallen down since…I can’t remember the last time I fell down, it was so long ago. I’m saved from the indignity of doing so now, but only by the grace of the strong arm that’s snaked its way around my waist. I find myself looking up into the face of a kid. Dark hair, dark eyes… No, wait. Not a kid. Not really. He’s young, but he’s made the transition through that awkward, gangly teenage stage that makes young men appear so uncomfortable inside their own skin. He’s broad shouldered, and his hands feel huge on me. His hair is shaved at the sides, slicked back on top in that oh-so-fashionable cut nearly all twenty-somethings in New York seem to be wearing these days. His jaw is marked with a smattering of stubble, and his left front tooth is delightfully crooked. The flaw isn’t something I would have noticed normally, but being this close to his face I find I have a prime view past his full lips, and his teeth are right in my line of sight.

  “Last I checked, murder’s still a felony,” he growls.

  “What?”

  “Crushed to death by a stack of Yellow Pages,” he continues. “That’s not how I plan on going out.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  He laughs, boisterous and surprising, scaring the shit out of me. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who laughs like this, like he doesn’t care who hears him. He lets go of me, raising both eyebrows as he clearly checks me out. “I’m just fucking with you,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”