Chapter Two
The lower campus of the Foothills School was tucked into an actual forested foothill. Trees grew right up to the edge of the
dark wooden buildings, cresting over their huge windows and green metal roofs, and there were large glacial rocks out front,
near the flagpoles. Whit liked those parts of the school. He liked moving from walkway to covered walkway to reach the front-office
building. The school was an open, modular space, and the thought of Annie spending much of her day outside, navigating the
green gaps between buildings with her teachers, classmates, and friends, made him happy.
Chiefly, it was the school-obsessed parent community that bothered him. People like Noel, who devoted their lives to knowing
the latest updates to the school handbook and memorizing the state of every school-related relationship, performance review,
and curriculum change. Also, there were the receptionists.
Whit knew the two women who worked the front desk by sight, but he could never remember their names. He thought of them as
Wet-Looking Curly Hair Woman and Woman with the Extensive Neck Scarf Collection. But beyond the always lacquered hair and
the scarves (today’s was houndstooth), what had stood out to him for the last year were their sad eyes. These ladies were
longing, deep within their bones, to drop a pity casserole off at his house. They leered at him like he needed to be cared
for in some way that blurred the lines between the maternal and the sensual, and it gave Whit the creeps.
“Hello, Mr. Longacre,” Wet-Looking Curly Hair Woman said, and he nodded in greeting. “It’s been a while since we’ve seen you up here. Not writing today?”
“Well,” Whit said, more easily polite with her than he was with Noel, “I’m hoping to, but you never know when the Muse will
strike.”
Whit dug his left thumb into his thigh while the ladies chuckled. There was no Muse, and he hated perpetuating the myth that
writers were mystics who communed with some great, invisible, story-breathing force. He wrote in a cramped, ground-level office
surrounded by piles of books and notepads and dirty mugs. And yes, sometimes on days like this—when his window fogged over
and the lamps were shining their orange light against it—he imagined that from the outside his space looked like a lantern
glowing in the woods. But an ivory tower it wasn’t. That was Helen’s office, the third-floor room where she wrote her novels,
looking out over the trees on one side and a sliver of the sea on the other. He liked his little room, he did, but the ease
with which he could make something symbolic of this arrangement was not lost on him.
“Well, how can we help you?” Woman with the Extensive Neck Scarf Collection asked.
“I need to drop this off,” he said, holding up the package, “in the library.”
“Would you like us to put it in Mrs. Pryor’s box?”
Whit repressed a sigh. He could see where this was heading.
“No, I’d like to give it to her myself.”
The ladies made similarly perplexed faces.
“Well, I’m afraid Mrs. Pryor is—”
He cut them off.
“Please, I’m under strict orders to hand-deliver it there.”
“Orders from—?”
“Helen,” he said, flatly but truthfully. There had been a sticky note and everything.
The ladies cocked their heads to opposite sides, and he could almost see the ingredients for baked ziti combining behind their eyes.
He knew how they saw him, and he knew he wasn’t doing himself any favors in the sad writerly widower department: the sandy beard, the sage cable-knit cardigan, the dark blue eyes that looked either weepy or just tired. (And on really special days, both!)
“Anyway,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” said Woman with the Extensive Neck Scarf Collection. She shrugged, and immediately a visitor pass materialized.
She slid it over the desk to him and very possibly gave him a wink.
“You have a good day now,” one of them was saying as he turned to leave. Whit waved without looking back, trying not to run
like someone who had just narrowly escaped the clutches of predatory sympathy.
The walls of the building were paneled in a wood that resembled the interior of a stately lake house. He walked down a hall
lined on one side with picture windows and on the other with student art, occasionally broken up by doors to teacher classrooms
and posters about inclusivity and anti-bullying. The school felt pleasantly alive. Distant voices formed a constant hum, which
reminded Whit of walking through a movie theater hallway, and the occasional loud cheers or bangs of who knows what only added
to the sensation. He did have to hand it to Helen: this place, with its scent of cedarwood and lavender and lemon, smelled
a hundred times better than any movie theater or school he’d ever walked through.
The double doors to the Helen Albright Longacre Library were open, and on the other side of the threshold was the room in this school that Whit thought was most worth the price of tuition.
In the middle of the library, a cartoony, handcrafted tree with construction paper bark and felt leaves the size of dinner plates stretched toward the ceiling, where it bloomed outwards like an umbrella.
Floor pillows and large, comfy-looking beanbag chairs were scattered around it like dropped seedpods; vines and glowing Christmas lights grew out from it and crisscrossed half the shelves.
Paper lanterns hung from the ceiling, interlaced with papel picado and strings of dangling, glittering golden stars.
In one corner was a large claw-foot bathtub filled with blue cushions and
a sign that said, “Water you waiting for? Dive into a good book!” A Narnian lamppost stood tall in the fiction section, and two suits of armor—one Japanese and one ambiguously European—watched over the history books. Whit spotted a
dozen stuffed animals in various alcoves, and there were at least three reading nooks that he, at thirty-seven years old,
would have been happy to curl up in for the rest of the day. It was a magical space, and Mrs. Pryor, the librarian, was a
magical, grandmotherly kind of woman. But she was nowhere to be seen.
Whit approached the checkout desk, eyes darting over the various trinkets, including a set of figurines from The Wind in the Willows having a delicious afternoon tea and a Dog Man made from painted cardboard. There was a bell, too, like at the front desk
of a hotel, but ringing it seemed tacky in a space like this. He wouldn’t treat Mrs. Pryor like a hotel clerk, not for a million
bucks. Anyway, the woman could probably sense that he had entered her enchanted realm; at any moment, she would materialize
in fairy godmother fashion, bursting forth from blue flames or floating over to him in a large pink bubble.
“Can I help you?” a voice asked from somewhere unseen, and Whit almost laughed. Mrs. Pryor was magic.
But the voice was wrong—lower, younger, a bit more direct than the librarian’s had ever been.
When he craned all the way over the desk, he saw her: a woman about his age on all fours, rummaging for something in the bottom cabinet of the desk.
From above, he saw that she wore a deep purple sweater and jeans with duck boots, and she had wavy, sable-colored hair to her shoulders.
When she did not look up, Whit leaned back to stand straight.
“Um,” he said to the vacuum of space above the desk, “I was hoping to leave something with Mrs. Pryor—”
“She’s out sick today. I’m subbing for her.”
“Oh, okay.” Whit felt like he was talking to a ghost. He prayed that the front-desk women weren’t on their way to check on
him. He couldn’t bear to be seen standing here, delusionally holding court with the empty air. And—oh—the realization suddenly hit him that they’d been trying to save him from this awkward interaction, trying to tell him Mrs. Pryor
was out today, and he had ignored them.
“Well,” he said, defeated, “I’ll just come back.”
“No,” the disembodied voice said, “don’t go to the trouble. I can take whatever it is—I’ll see her later today.”
Whit waited, but the rummaging continued.
“I’m actually under strict orders to hand-deliver it to her,” he explained, beginning to hate this moment and this interaction.
He was tempted to turn and leave, hoping the substitute librarian would be too slow standing up to catch him. But then he
thought of the front-office ladies again, and their unbearable, hungry pity—how they seemed to imagine he was too enfeebled
by grief to have a normal human interaction. No, thank you.
“I’m telling you,” the voice said, “whatever it is, I’ll get it to her.”
“I really can’t—”
There was a great bang below the desk, followed by a creak and a noise like whimpering wood.
“Everything okay down there?” Whit asked the disembodied voice, bewildered and embarrassed as he stared instead at the nearest dangling star.
“No,” the voice moaned, and then it broke into a bevy of words like a roller coaster slowly cresting a hill before barreling
forward. “These kids just cram books in here, but it’s not really their fault, because the book drop is narrower than you’d
expect, and kids’ books can be so weirdly shaped. I mean, I’m looking at a picture book about root systems that is the size
of a cafeteria tray, and I’m just wondering, which teacher allowed their student to shove this enormous book through the book
slot?”
Another bang, a crack, and the sound of many books sliding over one another, followed by another, more human thud. Whit stretched
over the desk again, and now the woman was on her back, laughing with her head awkwardly plonked against the back wall. She
held the root systems book high.
“Got it,” she said, more to herself than Whit. Then she saw him and seemed to remember she had been speaking to someone just
ten seconds before.
“Are you all right?” he asked as she straightened up into a sitting position and then stood. She had green-framed glasses