Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

Then as now we live without locks; when no one answered she slipped inside, hoping that Leo would be alone and eager to see her and perhaps also, at the same time, hoping that he’d be absent and she’d be able to root among his belongings without distraction. He wasn’t there. She shut the door behind her and sped through the room to the porch, where she examined the blankets piled on Leo’s cure chair, concealing the layers of newspaper; the soapstone pig, presently cold; the two volumes of Mendeleeff’s book balanced on the little table between the chairs; the second chair, oddly bleak, which had been Ephraim’s. Tentatively she stretched out on it and convinced herself she was seeing what Leo saw. Hill, hill, hill, hill, trees and trees and trees. Only the clouds marching from west to east were pleasant to look at. Dark birds rose from the trees, circled around, and settled again; what were they? She imagined Leo, lying a yard away, reaching out a hand to say he loved her.

“Leo?” Abe called.

His chair was a few yards farther down the porch, beyond one of the thin partitions that still, then, marked off territories specific to each room. Silently Naomi retreated inside and inspected Leo’s bed, not just the sheets but the blankets, the pillowcases, the movable tray table that slipped over his legs so that he might eat or write with ease. She investigated the nightstand, the lamp, and the stubby pencils jumbled, inside the nightstand drawer, with white quartz pebbles and pinecones. She inspected the slippers beneath the bed and then, moving toward the front of the room, the little cubicle containing the washbasin, the toilet, and the two metal lockers. His clothes were here and the rest of his belongings. Wool pants hung from a hook; she slid her face along the fabric and then sniffed a sweater she’d seen him wear. More clothes, as well as a laundry bag to investigate. She had a few minutes to herself.

And then Eudora walked by the door to Leo’s room, as she did most afternoons. Seeing it closed — we were required to keep our doors at least halfway open during our free time, so the nurses and orderlies could spy on us — she knocked twice and, worried at getting no answer, opened it. What she found was not Leo slumped over the sink or hemorrhaging in bed but Naomi, perched on a chair with some clothes at her feet, her hands filled with papers, a metal box on her lap.

“What are you doing ?” Eudora said. Swiftly, before anyone else could come by, she closed the door behind her. When she turned back she saw Naomi’s hand emerging from her waistband. “What do you have?”

“Nothing,” Naomi stammered. “I was just — I saw his door was open and I wanted to come in for a minute and see his things. The locker was already open, sort of…”

“You know it wasn’t,” Eudora said, walking over to the chair, as close to slapping her friend as she’d ever been.

“Well, it wasn’t locked, anyway,” Naomi said, for the first time seeming embarrassed. “Then I saw this box under a sweater and I took it out. I know I shouldn’t have, but once I looked inside, I couldn’t put it down.”

What was it, Eudora wondered, that so drew Naomi toward Leo? As she reached over for her friend’s hand, she remembered an October afternoon, not long after Leo had first joined Ephraim in this room. All day rain had been falling and at four o’clock, when the shift changed, the sky had been nearly dark. Along with a few nurses and kitchen helpers and other ward maids she’d stood near the main entrance for half an hour, waiting for a break in the weather and gossiping about the doctors and patients. Leo’s name kept coming up. The way he looked: not that he was so handsome, a dishwasher said — not at all, a nurse’s aide agreed, he was too bony, and his hands were so large they were frightening — but more that even when he was with a group at the dinner table, he seemed alone. As if, another aide said, he needed not so much company as a companion.

Clarice, who had served Leo his dinner the first night he joined us, and who’d been married twice and widowed once, smiled slyly and said that if he was healthier, and she was younger, she’d be tempted to take advantage of him. His eyes were part of it, someone else claimed, while the rain dripped steadily from the breezeway. But not just his eyes. Eudora, listening alertly, had tried to fit this with what she’d noticed as she tidied his room each day. She hadn’t seen that in Leo, herself; both Leo and Ephraim interested her but they were always talking when she came by and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt them. Only after Ephraim left had she seen how solitary Leo seemed, and how Naomi’s whole body tensed in his presence. Just now she was so rigid that her hand, when Eudora touched it, felt like wood.

“Let go of that,” Eudora said, tugging at the open box. Reluctantly, Naomi held it out.

On top of some newspaper articles lay a pencil. Next to it was what looked like its mate, reduced to parts: two slim wooden halves, one with a centered groove running down its entire length, the other with an identical groove that cradled a very slender tube, nipped at the middle like a waist.

Eudora leaned over and pointed at the tube. “Shouldn’t the lead go there?” she asked. She picked up the intact pencil and examined the tip, which didn’t look right and felt glassier than a normal pencil’s tip.

Naomi held out a piece of paper. “This was in there too,” she said. “Something Leo drew, I think. Isn’t that his handwriting?”

A diagram, Eudora saw, in which the wooden halves of the dissected pencil had been drawn side by side, accompanied by Leo’s comments. Pencil soaked in water until the halves came apart. That’s how the lead was removed and the tube inserted. When the two halves are glued back together the pencil appears nearly normal.

He’d labeled the bottom of his drawing of the slim glass tube, Chlorate of potash mixed with sugar; the top, Sulfuric acid . A paragraph connected by an arrow to the pencil’s tip noted: Capillary action forces acid down into the mixture when the tip is broken and air is admitted. A very hot flame appears instantly.

He really was a chemist, Eudora thought. But how had he come by this?

“I wonder if it works,” Naomi said. She reached over and scratched the tip of the intact pencil with her thumbnail. “I can’t believe this would catch fire if I just snapped off a little piece…”

Eudora snatched the box away. “Whatever this is, it’s Leo’s. You shouldn’t even be here.”

As Naomi rolled her eyes, Eudora took the diagram from her, asked if it had been folded, and when Naomi said no, slipped it back in the box. “Was it under the pencils?”

“On top,” Naomi said. “Like that.” Even now, she didn’t apologize.

“What else did you disturb?”

Naomi held her hands up, palm out, in front of her chest. “I just looked at that one thing.”

Eudora frowned and returned the box to the back of the locker. Then she closed the door and stood aside as Naomi moved the chair back next to the sink. “Maybe you should tell him how you feel. Either he’s interested, or he isn’t. Why should you live in this kind of uncertainty?”

“That’s not the point,” Naomi said angrily. “He has to tell me first, for it to count. He can’t just want me because I want him. He has to feel like that by himself. To want me worse than anything.”

Eudora let that pass, suggesting instead, “What if you did something to help him, which would also help him to notice you? You could bring him some books, maybe, from the town library…”

“I’m not interested in what he’s reading, ” Naomi said. “Why would you think—”