Waiting for a Star to Fall

by Kerry Clare

  Skipping the papers, however, would be futile. And her task was to keep her head down, perform her duties and not make waves, because she needed this job and her life didn’t need any more upsets. She had to resist the urge to make the library a small island of calm in the raging sea that was today’s breaking news. The waves would overrun the banks eventually. She didn’t have the power to shape how the story would go.

  So the papers got hung, albeit with the front section turned around backwards so there were car ads facing out instead of headlines in all-caps. But it didn’t even matter, because when Brooke returned to the circulation desk, she found her colleague Lindsay involved in an intense discussion of those headlines with Sheila, the chief librarian. The two of them nattering on like this was gossip, something salacious, and Brooke wanted to duck right back out again, but Lindsay spotted her, inviting her to join in: “Have you heard? Murdoch’s finally getting what’s been coming.”

  It was too late to run. Brooke asked her, “How do you know? That he’s had it coming?”

  Lindsay said, “Well, why else would his staff quit?”

  “Who?”

  “Everyone. Chief of staff, the press secretary, all the others.”

  This was news. That everyone would jump ship at such a pivotal moment. What was the point of a team if they didn’t stick by you? How had everything gone so terribly wrong?

  Sheila added, “And he’s still refusing to resign.”

  Brooke couldn’t make sense of it. Last night at the press conference, Derek had vehemently denied everything. “Anyone who knows me—they know that I would never be capable of the things that I’ve been accused of. It’s not the kind of person I am. Those of you who know me—you know. I know you do.” It was the best part of his performance, his voice steady and strong, his eyes staring straight into the camera, into the eyes of the public.

  But then he cried and ran, and if his entire team had quit overnight, this did not bode well. And Brooke knew how all of this would have come about—Derek’s chief of staff was Marijke Holloway, who’d supported Joan Dunn in the leadership race, and years later, resentment from that contest remained. Derek had brought Marijke on board to bring more experience to his team, though he’d been advised that it was a naïve and stupid move. He’d done a poor job smoothing things over, and Brooke knew Marijke would be looking for any excuse to betray him. It was the nature of the game.

  So who had been with him last night? she wondered. If the team had handed in their resignation, who’d been there to sit up for the pizza and the strategy? After that shameful exit, down three flights of stairs. Had he gotten into his car alone?

  Lindsay said, “How the mighty have fallen. He’s going to have to go.” For her, this was something to celebrate. Another predatory male down for the count, and she just assumed that Brooke would feel the same. If it had been anybody else, Brooke probably would have.

  But now she said, “Not necessarily.” It was the fiercest opposition she could manage while retaining her composure.

  Lindsay said, “Huh?” She was emptying the returns bin, and the scanner wouldn’t work. She slapped it three times against the desk.

  Brooke didn’t want to engage. Nothing about this was anything to celebrate, but then Sheila stepped in to save her, an unlikely ally, unafraid of asserting her point of view, because as chief librarian, it was her prerogative.

  “Well, it’s not really fair, is it?” Sheila challenged. “Two anonymous accusations, and it’s all over? Do you really want a system that works like that? What if it was you? That could be my son. Next time, it could be yours.” Employing all the usual clichés, Brooke noted, wondering if it was impossible to have a conversation about any of this that wasn’t idiotic.

  “But it wouldn’t be my son,” Lindsay said, “because I’d never have a son like that. And it’s not just two. You know it’s not just two.” Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. “There’s a pattern here. He’s being accused of inappropriate relationships with young girls who work for him. Anyone disputing that?”

  “But they’re not young girls,” said Brooke. “They’re women.” Lindsay was changing the details of the story to suit her agenda. Brooke picked up the books that were being checked in and filed them on the cart.

  “They were teenagers.” Lindsay was insistent, and disappointed that Brooke was letting her down, onside with the boomer.

  But Brooke was on a roll now. “Ten years ago,” she reminded Lindsay.

  Sheila said, “And it’s not illegal, any of that. Those two accusations aren’t about relationships; they’re saying he raped them. Or that he nearly did—but where do you draw the line? And they’ve got no proof. Why would they wait so long to come forward?”

  Because there was an election coming up in the spring, Brooke knew, but what she said was, “We’re talking about grown-up people making their own choices. Those women knew what they were doing.”

  “Oh, honey,” said Lindsay, and that was the limit. Brooke was fine with disagreement—anyone who’d worked in politics had to be. But being patronized was something she was unwilling to put up with. Lindsay said, “You think a twenty-three-year-old woman knows what she’s doing?”

  “I’m twenty-three,” Brooke said.

  And Lindsay replied, “That’s what I’m saying.”

  * * *

  —

  Brooke went down into the stacks and hung out in Natural History, around a corner so remote that no one ever went there. Here she could finally click on the story, the one Derek’s press conference had tried and failed to pre-empt. She’d managed to avoid the details so far, preferring to glean what she could from the headlines, Twitter threads, gossip and hearsay. From skimming. On the one hand, she’d told herself, she didn’t even have to read the story, because she’d been in the business long enough—the business of politics, if not the business of Derek—that the story would only follow a template she knew well. In a day or two, as they say, the whole thing would blow over. But on the other hand—the hand she’d never show, and even had trouble admitting to herself, because it was the truth of the matter—maybe she didn’t want to know, out of fear the story might turn out to be something different altogether.

  But it was time now, because Lindsay and Sheila had caught her off guard. There wasn’t a template for what was currently unfolding, at least one that wasn’t terrible and torn from the pages of a supermarket tabloid, and everything was changing so fast. This wasn’t blowing over. Pulling out her phone, typing into Google, there it was:

  TWO WOMEN ACCUSE MURDOCH OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT

  Who were these two women? It was possible she’d met them both—politics was as small as Lanark was—but then, ten years ago was an eternity, and most of the people she knew hadn’t been around back then. Not women, certainly, who tended to burn out on the long hours, low pay, and the realization that it would be their male colleagues who were promoted and moved up through the ranks. Each one hoped that she might be the rare exception, not merely one of the others. But of course, they all were the others, and there had been so many of them, women who, like the two in the article, had met Derek back home in a bar downtown and gone on to work for him. Not a lot had changed, and the stories were familiar, even though Derek had worked in municipal politics back then.

  So it could have been anybody—this was the thing. Speaking of templates.

  Derek always said it was “HR expediency,” the way he reached out through his social networks, recruiting staff from a dive bar. People would call him on it, and he’d try to explain, saying, “I don’t know a better place to find young, dynamic people who are looking for their first jobs, for summer jobs.” Derek had a talent for making anything he thought up seem entirely reasonable, mostly because he really tended to mean what he said.

  But reading the details made her feel sick to her stomach, and she sank from her squat aga
inst the bookshelf, dissolving onto the dusty floor.

  “I told him to stop,” one of the women was quoted in the article as saying a decade on from the alleged incident, which had begun at one of his parties. She’d had too much to drink, and he’d taken her keys away from her, offering her a place to stay in his spare room. That sounded like Derek. But then. Later that night the woman awoke from her stupor to find him with her in bed without any pants on, attempting to penetrate her, and he wouldn’t listen to her protests. “I tried to get him to stop, but he ignored me. It was almost like I wasn’t even there, except as a body. That was all I was to him.”

  Was she even capable of presuming the truth of this woman’s story? Brooke asked herself. She knew that Derek had been with other women before her—he was so much older than she was. He came with a history, and she couldn’t hold that against him. But she had never liked to think about that history too much, certainly not in this kind of detail. Could he really have done something like the article said? She could even picture the room where it had been said to happen. Whose side was she on?

  The woman continued to work for Derek for another year, the article reported, in summer and between her terms at college. She accompanied him on business trips. Their relationship became intimate. Which didn’t help the woman’s case, Brooke thought.

  “But it wasn’t like I got over it,” she said in the article. “It wasn’t even that I put it aside or forgot, but instead I pursued our relationship. I wanted it to happen, because if we were together, I thought it would make what happened that night all seem okay. But it was never okay. It just took me a long time to realize how wrong it was.”

  The second story was even harder to fathom, and reading it made Brooke feel even sicker. This woman had been at Slappin’ Nellie’s with Derek, and he’d tried to force her to give him a blowjob out back, behind the patio, where the garbage cans were. “He had me pinned against the wall,” she said, “and I kept trying to get away but I couldn’t. He kept pressing his erection against my leg, and he undid his pants. I honestly thought he wasn’t going to let me go unless I did it.” He eventually relented, but she was still traumatized, the woman said. “Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. It’s just not the kind of thing that normal people do. He was like an animal.” This woman, at least, had not agreed to travel with him to Barcelona after the fact, and she only worked for him for the rest of the summer. But still.

  The original article from the night before had been updated to include details of the mass resignation. “I cannot in good conscience continue to support this man,” Marijke Holloway had written to the press in an email. “It’s a time for all of us to stand with survivors. Our party needs to do better.”

  Which sounded noble, but wasn’t the whole story, because Marijke had never properly stood with Derek anyway, and Brooke knew she didn’t have his interests at heart. It disgusted her, too, the way that these women’s stories were being used and manipulated so that somebody out there—a whole bunch of somebodies, Marijke Holloway among them—could score a few cheap political points. So that people like Sheila could have their opinions on the matter, asking just what exactly had that girl been doing with Derek out by the garbage cans at Slappin’ Nellie’s? Was out by the garbage cans even an actual location? Brooke couldn’t visualize it, but it sounded sordid. Hearing a voice that sounded like Sheila’s in her mind: And what did someone imagine was going to happen in a place like that? And Brooke knew that if everyone listened to voices like Sheila’s, no man would ever have to be responsible for anything.

  What if it was me? Brooke considered. That person whose personal life had just turned into a political weapon? Lindsay didn’t have it right either. None of this was really about justice, or even about protecting women. There’d inevitably be holes in both women’s stories, and soon everybody would be calling them liars, which was why you don’t take meetings with low-lifes offering you money for your story from that time you got too drunk a decade ago. Because once the story isn’t yours anymore, no amount of money could possibly be worth it.

  She read the article right to the end. It was awful. Then she sent Derek a text, the first message she’d sent him in a while, breaking a silent streak of more than a month, which had been so hard-won, but now everything was different. Just thinking of you. I’m here if you need to talk, or more. Derek’s whole world had fallen to pieces, and maybe nobody else had thought to check in and see if he was okay. Really all she was saying was, “You are not alone,” and then she texted that message too, just to be clear about it. Waiting a moment for him to reply, the familiar vibration of her phone. There had been a time when the buzz between them had been constant. Derek would make a speech that would be the top story trending that night, and three minutes before—from where she was waiting, ready to watch him go live—she’d receive his message: You’re my good-luck charm. Sometimes totally out of the blue: You’re amazing.

  But her phone was still and silent now, the way her heart felt, slumped down there on the floor. And she imagined him feeling the same, all alone in his room, those empty walls a void. She sent him one more text, the same thing he used to say to her: You’re amazing. She’d texted him too many times now, but these weren’t ordinary circumstances. If Derek was as desperate as he seemed, a bit of support could make all the difference in the world.

  Which was the trouble, of course, how everyone these days came down so hard on others for all their faults and frailties, forgetting that these people being held to such exacting standards were only human. Humans whose faults and frailties were magnified and compounded under media scrutiny, along with the pain and vulnerability that might have caused the faults and frailties in the first place. Though, Derek’s was a problem that was partially of his own making—he always had to insist on being more than only human, which establishes an impossible expectation for a person to have to live up to. Was it only inevitable that it would all fall apart?

  * * *

  —

  Brooke went back upstairs to Circulation, where Lindsay apologized when she saw her. “I wasn’t being flippant,” she said, “but I know the fire these women are going to come under. I feel for them.”

  “I feel for everyone,” said Brooke, and Lindsay started telling her a story about an old boss who’d once tried to kiss her in an elevator. “I had no recourse,” Lindsay was saying. “It was literally part of my job description, putting up with that shit.”

  “Well, that’s not right,” said Brooke.

  “For me, I guess,” said Lindsay, “the whole thing is a little bit personal. I’m thinking about those girls. I’ve been those girls.”

  But people ought to be able to be responsible for their own choices, was what Brooke was thinking. If Lindsay’s old boss had made her uncomfortable, surely she could have taken the stairs? Even though it made Brooke ashamed to think such things, and she knew she sounded like Sheila, which was opposed to all her politics. But if people weren’t responsible, see, it only meant that you were not in charge of your own life, and who would ever want to believe such a thing about themselves? To accept this, Brooke thought, felt like a surrender, a life sentence. But she said nothing about these complicated and blasphemous thoughts to Lindsay, instead nodding and going about her duties refreshing the stack of date-due slips as her co-worker continued to explain that these poor girls were victims, that all of us girls were victims. And then Lindsay left for the reading room to take her turn at the reference desk, leaving Brooke to climb up into the chair at Circulation, adjusting it accordingly, holding the lever so the seat rose—Lindsay was very tall.

  Brooke was still fiddling with the backrest when she heard a voice she immediately recognized, and she contemplated adjusting the chair so it would sink so low that she might disappear behind the counter. But it was too late now. She’d already been spotted.

  “Jacqui Whynacht!” she exclaimed, like this was good news. Run-ins
with people like Jacqui Whynacht are the reason most people tend to flee their hometowns at the first opportunity.

  Jacqui flashed a ring, informing Brooke, “It’s Jacqui Diamond now.” Evidently she’d married her high school boyfriend Matt, or else his brother, because you never know in Lanark. Her hair was blonder, and she seemed shorter, or maybe just weighted down by the toddler on her back. “When did you get back to town?”

  “Beginning of the summer,” Brooke told her, taking the books that Jacqui unpacked from a cloth bag, Good Night, Good Night, Construction Site the one on top. Brooke pretended to examine the titles carefully, anything to divert attention away from herself. Jacqui had always been intense. She’d run the morning announcements in high school, her shrill voice ringing through the hallways and classrooms with way too much enthusiasm. Brooke had never understood what Jacqui was so excited about, and even now, she felt herself wilting in her presence.

  “Where are you living?” Jacqui asked, fishing for something in her enormous duffle bag. “Are you back home? You got a place yet?”

  “A place?”

  “A house,” she said, still rummaging. “It’s a buyer’s market, you know. It’s not going to get any better than this.” Finally Jacqui had it: her card. She laid it on the counter before Brooke. “Diamond Realty,” she said. “Family company. Lanark’s top-rated—you’ve probably seen the ads on benches.”

  “I’m not really looking,” Brooke told her. “I’m just renting right now, temporarily. I’m sort of in-between—”

  “In this market?” Jacqui was shaking her head. “You’re throwing money down the drain.”