4. Clark
FOUR
CLARK
Records Management was as exciting as waiting for paint to dry, I’d always been told by a friend who did it for a living.
I would just laugh and tell him to either suck it up and learn to love it or save up enough to move on and seek bliss.
In the end, I found myself staring at packed boxes in a gorgeous new apartment in a new city for the sake of a potentially dull job.
Okay, so maybe relocating from rural Eastern Ontario to the smallish city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, wasn’t that radical of a move, but I had never even seen the Atlantic Ocean as an adult before my in-person interview at Rose Financial, which included a walk-through of my possible new digs, and there it was, out in front of my windows!
I opened my balcony doors, and I could smell the sea, the salty air washing over me and making me wonder why I had waited so long to visit the coast.
I had loved my job up in Ontario, but after seven years as a small-town children’s librarian, I had suffered a pair of slipped discs and could no longer manage activities for thirty-plus kids every day—more on weekends.
Being a children’s librarian was like being a storyteller, ringmaster, and cat herder all rolled into one.
Even though the library system would support me during my time off while undergoing physiotherapy so I could, in theory, return to the work that I loved, I wasn’t willing to risk the long-term future of my body and health for any job.
That meant that I needed to find another job where I could apply my skills.
The problem was there just weren't that many jobs—okay, any jobs—nearby that seemed to click.
When I had widened my search parameters to include the Atlantic provinces, it was just for the heck of it.
I thought, why not spend just a little time down east?
It would certainly help with the problem of Claire, my ex who refused to let the relationship go.
She was that unstable type who had probably watched Basic Instinct and read Misery a dozen times each for inspiration.
At first, Claire seemed nice, sweet, and fun.
It was only when I discovered we weren’t on the same page about our futures that I clued in we weren’t a good match for each other.
Claire never wanted kids, and at thirty, I was looking to put my heart into a relationship that was really going somewhere.
For me, that meant a partner, a home, a dog, and at least one kid—hopefully more.
I’d had a great childhood, all things considered, with parents who loved me to bits and did everything they could to keep me healthy and strong, even during my long childhood hospital stays battling leukemia when I was six.
By the time I was in remission, I was seven and had a new baby sister—Rosie.
I knew that I was probably sterile from the treatments that saved my life, but I had no trouble using a sperm donor to build a family.
Or a surrogate, if I wound up with a dude.
Or maybe I could adopt. The point is that I was open to all options.
I wanted to give a kid the same good things I had before everything went to hell with my family.
That freedom to ride my bike until sunset, to run through the woods with friends pretending to be Lost Boys—or Girls—and build forts, play hockey in the winter on the pond down the street and play hide-and-seek in a grown-up hayfield in the summer.
Claire thought I was ridiculous for wanting to sacrifice my own youth on dirty, smelly, loud kids who would probably just grow up to hate us anyway.
Well, I never hated my parents outright for the things they were responsible for, but I kept thinking about Rosie.
How much we all loved her, and how much danger she unknowingly placed us all in.
We started travelling almost as soon as she was born.
We even took on fake last names or passports sometimes, depending on where we were going and for how long.
My parents knew enough to make our movements as erratic as possible so that “they”—The Organization—didn’t find us.
I was kept in the dark about most of what was going on, but I knew that they wanted to take Rosie, which made them the villains in my book.
I thought that Claire and I had ended things amicably, until the letters stuck under my tiny house’s front door began.
I was certain I could handle it, but after a month, I conceded that Claire needed more help than I could provide.
Just when I was about to reach out and seek guidance from the mental health support network in the county, things escalated quickly.
I had to visit the Mounties when her constant barrage of text messages and under-the-door notes went from pleas to get back together to threats of suicide, and then a particularly chilling message that said she’d like to take my dog, Becky, with her to “the other side.” As an accomplished hunter, she bragged, and she knew exactly how to do it—quickly or slowly—and was just debating which method.
I’d had my sweet and gentle golden Labrador for three years, and her safety was not something I was willing to risk.
The authorities could handle the threats of self-harm, but I knew that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police weren’t up for launching a round-the-clock security detail on my dog.
I packed up my stuff and headed east, finding not too run-down temporary housing just outside of Montréal, where I had gone to university, to be somewhere familiar and to get away from where the spectre of Claire lingered everywhere.
When an opportunity in Halifax popped up on one of the job-seeking mail lists, I decided to apply on the spot.
After several Zoom calls, a series of fun information-based computer tasks like working in a mock-up of their records management system to hacking the company’s systems—which I found pretty impossible, but I was proud of the small progress I’d made—I was ready to sign on as a junior records manager at Rose Financial.
Through the recruitment process, I had been working remotely with Jeff, an enthusiastic guy when talking shop who was the chief information officer, and the one to set the hacking and coding tasks, and the senior records manager who had set the tasks involving record systems, storage, and procedures.
I had to admit, when I first met Olive McLeod, the senior records manager, it was a tad odd.
She smiled at me brightly and...expectantly.
I am not sure what she expected, but I knew I would probably let her down unless she was purely thinking of work.
That, I was certain, I had nailed—it was anything personal she might be thinking of that I hoped to avoid despite how freaking gorgeous she was.
As such thoughts raced through my mind when we looked at each other, she then shook my hand, like she couldn’t wait to do it.
That moment our hands touched seemed electric, and to somehow stretch for eons, and I never wanted to let her go.
It was like tumbling into her brown eyes and dumbly shaking her hand were somehow spelling out my entire future, if I only held on and paid attention.
Of course, I did drop her hand after mere seconds and then was faced with Olive McLeod standing in front of me, hands fidgeting with her black skirt, looking at me with a completely unreadable expression.
The bright, smiling woman from before was gone, replaced by a dour person with gorgeous riot-red hair who looked pale, with dark circles under her eyes and a slight tremor in her hands.
As she led me from the conference room to my place in the office, I noticed that she looked wan and sickly.
In fact, during our meeting she had to barf in the nearest trash bin.
Impressively, it didn’t slow her down—she placed the bin in the hallway, wiped her mouth with a handkerchief, downed half a bottle of water, and continued to grill me on everything, especially on how I planned to apply my experience as a children’s librarian to records management.
I got the feeling she was less than pleased to be hiring her replacement from outside the traditional scope of the job, but I was determined to prove to her that I was no joke.
I loved the vibe of the Information Complex right away, and if I was going to ride a desk anywhere, I was damn happy it was here.
I was also given the option, as part of my compensation package, to live in the corporation’s South End apartments, the catch being a company cell phone and being on the on-call rotation.
I said yes that day and would have been a fool not to.
It was a nightmare trying to find an apartment in this city, and everyone back in Ontario who told me what a sleepy little town this was had been dead wrong.
Halifax was in a development boom, and people were moving here every day.
Rents had skyrocketed, still blaming COVID inflation instead of plain greed, and I was told that even some people working their butts off with jobs were living in tents.
So, me having an apartment just like that, and without having to live out in Siberia with a long commute?
I felt privileged beyond words. My official start date was ten days after my move-in date next week, to give me time to acclimate to the city and to read the thick orientation packet Olive had handed me with a tight smile.