Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“Just something to take with you when you go.”

“No, I mean, why this book? Not that I’m — not that I don’t love it. I love it.”

Jacob wanted to tell her that it was something he’d needed to reclaim; something someone else hadn’t been able to finish; a journey he’d needed to take, vicariously. He wished there was time to sit and explain it all. But she was due to be picked up just after his shift.

“A while ago I saw your mug in the art room. You wrote ‘Odysseus’ around the rim.”

“Uh, yeah. In Greek, ” Ella said. She could hardly keep from laughing. “My boyfriend—” She had to try again. “My ex. I don’t know what he is. Anyway, his middle name is Ulysses.”

Jacob felt himself blush and wondered if this was the guy he’d seen in her prom photos.

“Ulysses? What, is he from Brooklyn or something?”

She danced backward a little. “No, his parents are big Civil War nuts. They do those re-creations and things? He hates it. But I always thought it was kind of sweet. I was going to get it tattooed on my wrist. Anyway, I learned to write it in Greek like that so nobody would figure it out.”

Then, moving up onto the window ledge for a moment, she lowered her voice. “We were still dating the first time I was here, and I was kind of obsessed, talking about him all the time and doing stupid stuff like weaving his initials into these Native American dream catchers that Sissy was having us make. She told me I had to knock it off. Said it wasn’t healthy.”

He was sure his face was red now. “Sorry. I guess I thought it was your favorite book.”

“Well. It is now,” she said.

Jacob, who hadn’t been nervous talking to a girl since around the third grade, found himself at a loss. “You always looked as if you were trying so hard at everything here. You’re a smart kid, and you’re going to do great things with your life, and I guess it sucks that it’s always going to be a little harder for you than for other people, and you’ll have to stay on your medication, and sometimes you’re still going to see a homeless guy on the street or something and it’s going to break your heart, and you’ll want to crawl under a rock somewhere and hide everything good that you’ve got to offer from the world because it’s going to seem like the world doesn’t deserve it, but I promise it does—”

Jacob was talking so fast and gesticulating so wildly that he was running out of breath. Paul was staring at him now like he had three ears. He was glad that he couldn’t see Dr. Dorothy out in the hallway, and he hoped she couldn’t see him. His lungs felt like rocks in his chest, and it was as if a great swarm of bees were building a honeycombed hive inside his skull. He felt the whole room wobble like the door to Oliver’s pickup truck, and then Ella was grabbing something — it looked like a paper bag for him to breathe into. He snatched it and held it up to his mouth, forcing out a deep breath that inflated the bag before either of them realized that it was, in fact, her hand-puppet from art therapy. Its googly eyes rattled as he inhaled, and the green pom-pom that had been its nose fell silently onto the rug.

Ella laughed first — a shocked and delighted giggle that she seemed unable to settle — and as Jacob mimed a little defensive stamping on the offending clown-puppet, that set her off even more. The other patients were all cracking up, and in a moment he felt Dr. Wilkens’s hand on his shoulder, coaxing him to head over to the nurse to get checked out.

Jacob tried to say he was fine, but it didn’t come out. He gave Ella a farewell salute, and she clutched the book to her chest again, mouthing the words thank you as he took shaky steps, backward, out of the room. After getting a little orange juice into his system, the nurse said she thought he’d be all right, but Oliver sent him home early just to be sure. It was only as he rode the bus back that he remembered the other thing he’d meant to write in the front of the book — that he’d signed up for Facebook, using his new phone. But in his haste to leave he’d left it in his locker. He thought, maybe in the morning, then, he’d send her an invitation, so they could be friends.

Sometime later that night, with no book to annotate, cold ginger beef in a takeout container at the foot of the bed, and more hilarity on the television, Jacob decided he’d wait another day or two. Tomorrow he’d get up and go through those gates again to Anchorage House. And she’d be off in her real life, and maybe it was all just better if he left it that way.

OCTOBER

October arrived, and with it the golden leaves around Anchorage House began to fall into the duck pond where Jacob, once again, resumed his daily vigil. Under the willow tree he would stand and think about what he’d said to Irene in the hospital, her smile, their conversation the night before about Hector, and the way Irene had felt in his arms when he carried her down the steps of the Met. He thought about the way she’d bent down before the pyramid walls and how she’d looked standing in front of the painted field of poppies. He remembered her on Shelter Island and how, out of everyone, she’d told him last because she’d known that of all of them, he was the one it would break. He’d always thought that being a cynic would prepare him for something like this, but she’d known that only made it worse, because it made you think you wouldn’t care, and yet of course you would. He thought even further back, to the way she’d looked in the hot tub that night on the roof of the Waldorf Astoria, opaque bra against the snow-blown skyline of Manhattan. He hadn’t gone to her wake, wasn’t planning on going to see the show Sara was organizing, of all the things Irene had been working on that year — not because she’d wasted herself on them but because he didn’t see how any of them could be more powerful than her simple being.

Jacob waited for the old routines at Anchorage House to resume their comfort, but week after week he found no trace of the numbness he’d known before Ella. There were more hellos at Oliver’s office door and the same old snide remarks from Paul, this time about the new behavioral therapist — Dr. Patricia Cain, whose bosom seemed to occupy Paul’s every waking thought. Jacob was ready to find him a pacifier to suck on.

About the only real change was with Sissy Coltrane. She’d gone from being oddly friendly around him to being downright chummy — acting as if they were old buddies, asking if he was thinking about getting some different job soon. At the height of it, she even handed him an assortment of brochures to continuing education programs that she claimed to have stumbled upon one day in a public library somewhere. The programs ranged from nursing to publishing to information technology.

“Oliver told me you were thinking about going back to school. You know, I just feel like you can’t ever underestimate the value of a nice change. I lived out in the Midwest for a while after college. I worked on a ranch. Can you believe it?”

“I can, actually, believe that,” Jacob said.

“You’d love it.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Just think about the poetry you could write in the mountains, the prairies. You know there are still places in this country that no human feet have ever touched? I miss the horses. Fishing in an icy stream on a summer’s day, blackbirds and locusts and all that. I’m telling you, the poems will practically write themselves.”

Jacob gagged. “That’s good, because I sure wouldn’t want to write them.”

Instead of getting annoyed, she slapped his shoulder, as if this were just typical Jacob. It was , but there wasn’t any typical anything between them, so why would she be acting like it?