12. Solenn
— ? —
Solenn
The clinic has a new janitor.
I notice him on Monday morning, pushing a mop across the waiting room with the confidence of a man who has never in his life mopped anything and has decided that confidence will cover it.
Water goes everywhere. On the chairs. Under the chairs.
Into a corner that has no business being wet.
The mop head itself appears to be having some sort of episode.
“Is that-” Maria stops beside me with her coffee halfway to her mouth.
“Yep.”
“Is he wearing-”
“Yep.”
Liam Sharpe, heir to Sharpe Industries, is in khakis and a polo shirt with a laminated badge clipped to the pocket that says CONTRACTOR, and somebody at the supply company has spelled his last name wrong on it.
“He’s making it worse,” Maria whispers.
“Considerably worse.”
The mop catches on a chair leg. He pulls. The chair goes over. A magazine rack rocks on its base and thinks about it. Three patients look up from their phones with expressions running from confused to openly delighted.
“Should we help him?”
“Absolutely not. This is the most entertainment this building has had in years.”
An elderly man in the second row lowers his newspaper, watches the mop go past for a while, and says, to no one, “That boy’s never done a day’s work.”
“No,” I agree.
“He’s cheerful about it, though.”
He is. That’s the maddening part. He is having, by every visible sign, an excellent morning.
He clocks me watching. Has the nerve to wink. I turn around and go back to my desk at a completely normal speed.
***
By Wednesday it has escalated.
The supply closet has been reorganized in a way that makes no sense to any person who has ever cleaned anything.
The toilet paper is where the paper towels go.
The paper towels are on a shelf only he can reach, which I am confident is deliberate.
The bleach has been filed alphabetically, next to the bandages, which is both wrong and faintly hazardous.
There’s also a label maker involved. Nobody gave him a label maker. Nobody knows where the label maker came from. Every shelf now has a small white strip on the front of it announcing what is supposed to be there, in a font he clearly chose, and none of it corresponds to what is actually there.
“He’s made a system,” Maria says, staring into the closet like it’s a crime scene.
“He’s made a system that’s wrong.”
“The floor in exam three is sticky,” Dr. Ravel says at the Wednesday meeting. “It was not sticky before.”
“I’m still learning the equipment.” Liam, from the back, entirely straight-faced. “Mopping is more complex than it appears from the outside.”
“You made it stickier.”
“Growth involves setbacks.”
I bite the inside of my cheek until it hurts.
He catches my eye across the room. His mouth moves about a millimeter. I look at the ceiling until the meeting ends.
***
Thursday brings the trash bag.
I’m at the desk when I hear it. Raised voices, a bark of laughter, and the unmistakable noise of something very wet meeting something very hard.
He’s in the break room, standing in coffee grounds and banana peel and what used to be somebody’s lasagna. The bag has opened down one whole side.
“The bags are defective,” he says, with enormous dignity.
“The bags are fine. You overfilled it.”
“I was being efficient.”
“You were being an idiot.”
“Those two things have never once been mutually exclusive.”
Maria is filming. So is Miranda. This is going on the internet and there is nothing I can do about it.
“Did you pay them to hire you?” I keep it low, close enough that the phones won’t catch it.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m simply a hardworking custodial professional seeking employment in the medical field.”
“You’re getting garbage on the floor.”
“It needed refreshing.”
I almost smile but I refuse.
“You have lasagna in your hair.”
“I’m aware. I’m choosing to live with it.”
He heads toward the bathroom, and I absolutely do not watch him go. I do not notice the way his shoulders move under that stupid polo shirt. I do not think about what he looks like in the shower, water running down his chest, steam curling around-
I go back to my desk and aggressively file things until my heart rate returns to normal.
***
Maria’s video has forty thousand views.
By Friday morning it has two hundred thousand, and the comments have decided he is a divorced dad doing community service, and somebody has slowed down the part where the bag splits and set it to opera.
“They love him,” Miranda reports, scrolling, delighted. “There’s a woman in Ohio who says she’d let him ruin her floors.”
“Delete it.”
“Absolutely not, it’s the best thing I’ve ever made.”
“Miranda.”
“Nobody knows who he is, Sol. He’s just Mop Guy.” She turns the phone around. “Look at the top comment.”
he has never held a mop in his life and he is TRYING. this is what men should be doing.
“See? Cultural moment.”
Maria leans over the desk. “For the record, we’ve got a pool going. Five dollars a slot.”
“On what?”
“On what he breaks next.”
“You are all appalling and I want everyone to know that.”
“You want in?”
I do want in.
“The autoclave,” I say. “Five dollars.”
“Bold.”
“He alphabetized bleach, Maria. He’s going to detonate that autoclave inside a week.”
***
Friday, Ten in the Morning, Exactly
A glass of water lands on my desk. Beside it, one prenatal vitamin.
I look up. He’s got no mop, no bag, and an expression of total innocence.
“Tessa,” I say flatly.
“She was very helpful.”
“She’s a traitor.”
“She prefers concerned party with good instincts.”
“I’m going to kill her.”
“She asked nicely. Dr. Mendez says hydration is important.” He taps the glass. “Sixteen ounces. Room temperature, not cold, because cold can bring on cramping. I didn’t know that. I know a number of things now that I didn’t know a month ago.”
“I know what Dr. Mendez says. She’s my doctor.”
“Which is why I memorized her instructions.”
“You did not.”
“Modified activity, no lifting over ten pounds, no standing more than ninety minutes without sitting, fluids through the day rather than all at once, iron with orange juice and never with tea, weekly appointments until she’s satisfied, and if there’s any bleeding at all you go in immediately, day or night, and you do not drive yourself.
” He doesn’t blink. “There are seventeen. Do you want the rest, or shall we do them in order tomorrow?”
And there it is.
A man who cannot operate a mop has committed seventeen bullet points about my body to memory in the correct order, and is offering to say them again tomorrow, and something turns over low in me that I do not have the energy to argue with.
I take the vitamin to shut him up. That’s when I see the label.
The pharmacy name. The prescription number. The date it was filled.
This is the bottle from the penthouse. The one that sat on the second shelf of a medicine cabinet in a bathroom five hundred miles from here. The one I left on purpose, standing in front of an open cabinet, deciding that whatever went into my body from that day forward would be paid for by me.
He kept it. He carried it here.
I swallow the vitamin and I don’t say one word about it.
He gives me the same small nod he’s been giving me all week and goes back to losing an argument with the supply closet.
I sit at my desk with an empty glass and I don’t get anything useful done for about ten minutes.
Then I call Tessa on my break and open with, “Seventeen bullet points.”
“Ah.”
“Ah. That’s what you’ve got? Ah?”
“I was going to lead with hello, but you’ve set a tone.”
“You gave my ex-husband my medical instructions.”
“I gave your ex-husband your doctor’s general advice, which is available on any pregnancy website on earth, and he took it away and turned it into a filing system, which frankly says more about him than it does about me.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It is somewhat the point.” I can hear her doing something with a kettle. “Sol, he asked me one question. One. Do you know what it was?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“He asked me what you actually need, as opposed to what he’d like to give you.” The kettle clicks. “And then he wrote the answer down. Nobody’s ever asked me that about you. Not one person you’ve dated.”
“You’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I am on your side. That’s why I answered him.”
“Traitor.”
“Concerned party with good instincts,” she says, and hangs up on me.
***
The walk home becomes a thing.
End of shift and he’s outside. No car. Hands in his pockets, that terrible patience all over him.
“Can I walk you home?”
“No.”
I start walking. He falls in beside me.
“That’s not a yes.”
“And yet.”
The quiet between us isn’t comfortable and it isn’t hostile. It’s some third thing I don’t have a word for. He shortens his stride without being asked and stays half a step to the outside, between me and the road, and I notice that he does it and I notice that he doesn’t mention doing it.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like a whale that swallowed a basketball.”
“You look well.”
“I look tired.”
“You look well and tired. Both are permitted.”
I roll my eyes. Something in my chest goes warm and stupid anyway.
We do four blocks. He doesn’t mention the marriage, the divorce, the hospital, the house, his mother, the article, or any of the eight or nine things I have braced myself to have to refuse to discuss.
He asks me what the worst thing about the clinic printer is.
I tell him, at length, because the printer is a genuine menace and nobody in my life has ever asked. He listens the whole way through and then asks a follow-up question about the paper tray, and by the time I finish I’ve walked three blocks without noticing my back.
“You did that on purpose.”
“Did what?”
“The printer.”
“You looked like you’d had a week.” He shrugs. “People like complaining about a machine. It’s restful.”
“That is a manipulative thing to know about people.”
“I’m told I have to work with the skills I’ve got.”
There’s a lip in the sidewalk outside the pharmacy where a root has come up under it, and I catch my foot on it.
His hand is at the small of my back before I’ve finished the stumble.
Flat, warm, low, exactly where my spine has been screaming since two o’clock. He takes my whole weight for half a second without any apparent effort and then, the instant I’m level again, he takes it away.
He puts his hand back in his pocket and keeps walking and doesn’t look at me and says, in a completely ordinary voice, “They’ve been meaning to fix that since before I got here, apparently.”
My back is still warm where his hand was.
It stays warm for the whole rest of the block, and I spend that block being furious about the entire architecture of the human nervous system.
“You could have let me fall.”
“I could have.”
“Some men would have made a whole thing of it.”
“Some men are idiots.” He steps around a puddle and doesn’t take my elbow to steer me around it. “I’m trying to be a specific kind of idiot.”
My hand comes up.
I don’t decide to do it. It comes up off my side about four inches, toward the back of his, in the exact motion of a woman about to take hold of somebody, and I catch it happening and put it back where it came from before either of us has to acknowledge it.
He doesn’t see. Or he does, and he has the sense not to say so, which I am beginning to understand is a different thing from not noticing.
We walk the last block with about eight inches between our hands, and I spend all of it thinking about how easy it would be to close them, and about what would happen to my life if I did.
We reach my building. He stops at the door with his hands still in his pockets, which by now I understand is a decision he makes and remakes every evening.
“This is where you leave.”
“Okay.”
He doesn’t move.
Neither do I. It is fully dark and there is a light over the door doing something to his face, and we are standing closer than the conversation requires and have been for about a minute.
“Ask me in,” he says.
My mouth opens.
“That wasn’t me asking,” he says. “That was me telling you what I want, so that when you don’t, we both know exactly what you’re refusing.” He steps back off the step. “Goodnight, Solenn.”
He goes.
I get inside and shut the door and stand in my own lobby with my back against it and my hand over my mouth, and I stay there long enough that the timer light goes out and leaves me in the dark.
Upstairs, my phone is on the counter with one message on it from a number I don’t recognize.
UNKNOWN: Cute video. Is he doing the humble thing now? He does that.
I block it.
It’s the fourth number this month. I’ve stopped counting how many are left.
***
The overhear happens on Monday.
I’m coming down the back corridor toward the bathroom when I hear his voice through the break room door, and then Tessa’s, and I stop dead with my hand flat on the wall like a woman who has done this before.
“-Angelina was fireworks.” Him. “All noise, all drama, always performing. Every room she went into turned into a stage and I was expected to be the audience for it. Standing ovation, every night.”
“Sounds exhausting.” Tessa. My friend and traitor. Drinking coffee in a break room with my ex-husband.
“It was. I didn’t notice until it stopped. I thought that was what the whole thing was supposed to be. Loud, and constant, and requiring proof.”
A pause.
“And Sol?”
The pause goes on longer this time.
“I hate fireworks.”
Something in my throat closes.
“I didn’t know that about myself until her.
I didn’t know quiet was a thing a person was allowed to want.
” His voice has dropped to somewhere I’ve only heard it twice.
“I’ve spent my entire life in rooms where I’m always pretending.
This is the first quiet I’ve ever wanted to live inside. With Sol-”
I push off the wall and go.