Mira didn’t come to work on Saturday for the first time since she took the job at Westbrook. She was rarely actually scheduled to work on the weekends – one perk of being the director – but being at the library on a day when she wasn’t supposed to be there was a great opportunity to sequester herself in her office and get things done that she didn’t have time for during the week.
On this particular Saturday, though, she didn’t drag herself out of bed until around ten a.m. – she turned off her alarm at seven with every intention of getting up, but then she just laid in the center of her mattress, the sheets thrown off her as the summer heat built outside her window, and stared at the ceiling. Chelle was scheduled for the morning shift, and even though she’d be busy shelving all the books that the other pages were too lazy to put away while they were gone, Mira couldn’t bear the idea of running into her.
Even worse, she wondered if their fight last night would be enough to send Chelle running, and Mira wasn’t sure which was worse – the prospect of seeing her, or the idea that she might never see her again.
So Mira stayed in bed until the aching of her bladder became too great to ignore, and eventually made her way downstairs to scrounge a meal from her mostly bare cupboards. She grabbed a half-stale box of cereal and sat down on her futon, thinking that it would probably be safe to go to the library in the afternoon, when Chelle would be finished with her shift, but by the time she realized that she’d reached the bottom of the cereal box, the sun was beginning to dip in the sky and she’d lost all motivation to leave her apartment.
She turned on the television and turned off her brain, and ignored the urge every time she wanted to go back upstairs to retrieve her phone so that she could talk to Chelle. Mira didn’t even go upstairs to bed that night – she just laid down on the futon and let late-night infomercials lull her to sleep, and on Sunday she ordered takeout and repeated the process all over again. By Monday morning, she was starting to feel like a recluse.
She managed to get up on time by sheer force of habit, then went upstairs and got into the shower for the first time since they got back from the conference. As the hot water pounded over her skin, she rested her forehead on the cool tile wall and determined that the only way she was going to get through the day – or any other day in the near future – was to retreat back into a purely managerial role.
Jack would be waiting for her at the reference desk with all his usual snide remarks, and he’d have a whole new type of ammo to use against her now that he suspected her relationship with Chelle. With the Board of Trustees coming in exactly a week for their quarterly progress report, he would be more ruthless than ever in his efforts to discredit her, and letting go of Chelle was a sacrifice Mira would have to make if she had a chance of standing up against Jack.
It was an ill-advised move to get involved with her in the first place, Mira told herself as she got out of the shower. She knew from the very first moment they met that Chelle would be trouble, and now it was time to grow up and put that to an end, no matter how much it hurt.
***
There was a crowd outside of the library when Mira arrived about half an hour after opening. Among a few patrons and staff, she saw Chelle and Jack standing on the sidewalk and staring at the building.
“What’s going on?” Mira asked as she approached them.
“It was those hooligan teenagers you keep inviting here,” Jack growled, pointing to the book drop on the side of the building.
A garden hose was threaded into it and Mira let out a loud groan as her eyes followed it over to the spigot a little further down the wall, where a puddle of water had collected and begun trickling out to the sidewalk. She put her fingers to the bridge of her nose and asked, not really wanting to hear the answer, “When did this happen?”
“Judging by the size of the mess in the book drop, I’d say sometime earlier this morning,” Jack said. “I bet it was those skateboarding punks that use the parking lot once the cars are gone. I told you we ought to get a gate so we can close it off in the evenings.”
“Then no one would be able to use the book drop,” Mira said, her brain working on autopilot to rebuff Jack’s suggestion. She was already imagining the worst on the other end of that garden hose.
“At least it didn’t happen Saturday night,” Chelle said, her voice much more timid than Mira was used to. She couldn’t stop to feel guilty about the near certainty that she was the reason for this change, though – at the moment, she had more pressing problems.
“How bad is it in there?” She asked. All she needed was a completely flooded circulation area and her presentation to the Board on Monday would be quite literally under water.
“Not too bad,” Chelle said, trying to sound optimistic. “The book drop itself contained the majority of the water.”
“About two dozen books were ruined, though,” Jack said, “And the carpet around the drop is drenched.”
“Okay,” Mira said, taking a deep breath. “We can manage that. Everybody, let’s get back to work.”
Her staff obeyed, starting to trickle back into the building while a few patrons stayed outside to gawk at the scene. Mira waved Juanita over and asked her to put the hose back in the maintenance shed behind the library where it belonged. She made a mental note to find someone from the city landscaping crew she could chew out for leaving the hose accessible to vandals, then headed inside to survey the damage.
Jack followed at her heels, babbling about the teenagers again.
“You know, they have these sidewalk spikes all over London that deter homeless people,” he was saying while Mira openly rolled her eyes at him and kept walking. “They would be a really simple solution to a lot of our problems – skateboarders, vagrants, you name it – and I bet it wouldn’t cost too much-”
“Problems?” Mira asked, rounding on him just outside the library doors. “You mean patrons. Go back to the reference desk before I get Nita to turn the hose on you.”
She said it with such ferocity – all the joviality that she normally used to deal with Jack leached from her voice – that he didn’t even bother to come up with a retort. He just scurried through the lobby and sat down at his desk.
With one problem solved, at least for the time being, Mira went to the circulation area. The moment she walked into the library she could smell the mildew stench of damp books. She’d have to get some fans in here to dry the carpet and air out the space. Walking around the desk, she saw that the book drop – a large wooden box about three feet square that sat just below a metal chute in the wall – was filled to the brim with water, and the carpet was drenched in a six foot radius all the way around it. A few soggy paperbacks were floating on the surface of the water, and as Mira’s heels squelched in the wet carpet, she saw quite a few more books had perished at the bottom of the bin.
Chelle came up behind her and peered over her shoulder, saying cautiously, “That’s a lot of books in the drop for a Sunday.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame,” Mira replied. “Can you do me a favor while I find someone who can deal with all this water damage?”
“Anything,” Chelle said, and then blushed and looked away.
Mira’s heart broke in the fallout from that reaction, and she wanted nothing more than to sweep Chelle up in her arms and apologize for everything that happened this weekend. But Jack was only a few dozen feet away, with a clear line of sight to the circulation desk, and nothing had really changed. She had to stick firmly to her managerial role or else she’d never stand a chance of making it through the day.
“Can you fish all of these books out of the drop?” Mira asked. “Write down the titles and barcodes if you can make them out, check them back in, and then bring the list to me so we can get them removed from the system. They’re ruined.”
Chelle nodded, and they both watched as the garden hose jerked in the chute and then slowly retracted as Juanita pulled it out from the other side.
“Thanks,” Mira added, then stepped carefully around the wet carpet. Chelle grabbed a trash can and a scrap of paper and got to work, rolling her sleeves up as Mira headed for her office.
“Oh, hey,” Chelle said, mostly to herself, as she skimmed a ruined book off the surface of the water and dropped it into the trash. “Here’s one of the Nora Roberts books I was looking for last week.”
***
Mira spent the next twenty minutes scanning through Westbrook’s rather modest yellow pages, looking for a carpet cleaning company that could handle the water damage before the mildew smell set in and made the whole clean up task more difficult. She’d just scheduled a crew to come out later in the afternoon when she spied Juanita walking past her office door, looking rather damp from her struggles with the hose.
“Oh, Nita,” Mira said sympathetically, “come in here.”
Juanita stepped into her office, and Mira saw that the bottoms of her pants were smeared with mud.
“I’m so sorry,” Mira said. “I didn’t realize that was going to be such a dirty job. I should have made Jack do it.”
“It’s just a little mud,” Juanita said. “I can scrub it off.”
“I don’t want you sitting around in wet clothes all day,” Mira said. “Why don’t you go home and change? Take however long you need to get cleaned up.”
“Okay. Thanks, Mira,” Juanita replied. She started to leave the office, then peeked her head back in the door to add, “By the way, that hose doesn’t belong to us.”
“Oh?”
“I put it in the shed anyway because I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but ours was already in there and the door was padlocked like it’s supposed to be,” Juanita said.
“Well, that’s good to know because my next call was going to be a stern one to the maintenance department,” Mira said.
Juanita left and Mira realized she had no more calls to make for the moment, so she decided to go back out to the circulation area and see how Chelle was doing with the clean-up effort. The news about the hose was pretty peculiar though – she might have believed Jack’s theory about teenagers if it had been left carelessly out on the lawn. It didn’t take much to tempt bored teens into mischief, especially in a dull town like Westbrook, but what kind of vandal would go to the effort of hauling their own garden hose all the way over to the library just to drench a few books?
Mira headed down the hall to tell Chelle that reinforcements would be coming in a couple of hours. Jack was not at the reference desk when she passed it, but he had managed to track mud through the lobby when he came inside. It was another small thorn in her side – of course she wouldn’t count on him to help clean up the circulation desk because he’d no doubt consider it to be below his station, but he could at least do his own job while everyone else pitched in and not make the clean-up effort larger than it needed to be.
She didn’t have time to worry about where Jack was, though. She went across the lobby to find Chelle bending over the book bin, her arm submerged up to the elbow as she fished another book out of the bottom of it. She was wearing a black and white striped skirt that rose up the backs of her thighs as she leaned further over the bin, an unfortunate outfit for the task at hand which Mira couldn’t help but linger over.
If they were alone, she might be tempted to come up behind Chelle and run her hand up the smooth skin of her thigh, gliding it around over her hip and then between her legs – that is, if their relationship hadn’t imploded so spectacularly over the weekend. Now it just made something in Mira’s chest ache to think of Chelle that way.
“Hey,” she said simply as she walked behind the desk and Chelle dropped another soaking book into the trash. There was nothing to do now but maintain professionalism. “How’s it going?”
“Okay,” Chelle said. “I’m up to twenty-two ruined books.”
“Anything of value?”
“Just extrinsically,” Chelle said with a shrug. “They’re mostly mass-market fiction.”
“That’s a silver lining, I guess,” Mira said. “I called a cleaning company and they’ll be here around one o’clock to deal with the carpet.”
“What about the water in the book drop?” Chelle asked, gesturing to the bin. The water level had only gone down by an inch or two since Chelle started fishing paperbacks out of it. “Any ideas on how best to empty it?”
“I guess we’ll just wheel it outside and dump it once it’s empty,” Mira said. “It’ll probably make a mess, but we’ve already got one anyway.”
“You can say that again,” Chelle said, and suddenly they weren’t talking about water and soggy books anymore.
Mira gave her a helpless look, then said, “Let me know if you need anything. I’m going to try and figure out where Jack got off to.”
***
The cleaning company did a thorough job of steaming and then fan-drying the mildew smell out of the circulation area, and aside from the two dozen books that had to be thrown away, the library recovered from its bout with vandalism quite admirably. Mira asked Nita to order new copies of the majority of the lost books, and by Friday she felt pretty confident that the situation had been handled so completely that it was as if nothing ever happened at all.
That was good news because the Board of Trustees was scheduled to arrive bright and early on Monday morning and if they walked into the library to the smell of mildew and a pile of ruined books, their meeting wouldn’t exactly start off on the right foot.
But the circulation desk – and the book drop – were in impeccable condition, and Mira was feeling pretty confident as she came into her office Friday morning and sat down to check her emails. She’d steered clear of Chelle all week, as much as it hurt her to do so, and she was sure that even as petty as he was, Jack wouldn’t stand up in front of the Board with nothing so much as the fact that he’d seen the two of them touch briefly when Mira almost missed an elevator. It was inconsequential evidence, and Mira had been very careful not to give him anything that could fan the flames.
If anything, she had the anecdotal evidence of how she’d handled WPL’s latest and most sinister act of vandalism to bolster her. If Jack even thought of bringing up her alleged relationship with Chelle, Mira thought, she could fire back about how, while the rest of the library was entrenched in the clean-up process or making sure that patrons didn’t experience an interruption in service, he was nowhere to be found.
For once, things were beginning to turn in Mira’s direction – even if it did come at the expense of her heart feeling like it was breaking apart in her chest in the background of every moment of the day – and she intended to spend the majority of the morning on Friday doing last-minute preparations for the Board’s visit.
But, like every day at Westbrook Public Library, it did not go according to plan.
It was a little while after lunch when Jack stormed into Mira’s office, dragging Chelle behind him by the sleeve of her sweater. He practically threw her into one of the chairs in front of Mira’s desk and bellowed, “Miranda, you have to control her!”
“What now, Jack?” She asked wearily, and watched as his face grew to a startling shade of lobster red – almost the same tone as Chelle’s hair.
“Oh, ‘what now, Jack’ – that’s very professional,” he mocked her words. He was in a state she’d never seen before, spitting mad and no longer playing their little game of insults hurled in congenial tones. “I almost forgot that you’re fucking her-”
“Shhh,” Mira hissed, jumping up from the desk to shut her office door while Jack continued to rant.
“-so of course you’d take her side while she stalks me every minute of the day. You probably told her to do it!”
“Stalks you?” Mira asked, looking to Chelle who was scowling up at Jack from her chair.
“Every time I turn around she’s watching me,” Jack said. “Get your little spy to back off or trust me, Miranda, you’ll regret it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I doubt Chelle knows, either,” Mira said, feeling the blood rising into her face. Jack had that effect on her, and the fact that he’d spoiled a perfectly peaceful afternoon with this absurd tirade was beginning to make her angry. The Board was coming on Monday and Jack was throwing one last temper tantrum because he knew just as well as she did that every single thing he hoped would derail her had only made her stronger.
“That’s right, stand up for your girlfriend-” he started, but Mira cut him off.
“You have nothing to back up that accusation so I’d appreciate it if you’d stop making it,” she snapped. “I’ve had about enough of your bullshit for one lifetime, so how about we get some of those steel spikes you were going on about and we’ll put them all around your desk so Chelle and the patrons and everyone else can’t get within twenty feet of you. Would that solve all your problems?”
She saw a vein bulging out of Jack’s forehead where there hadn’t been one before and he opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, and took a step toward Mira’s door. She thought that he was going to leave, but then he spun around again.
“Nothing to back it up? Is that what you think?” His voice was positively hysterical as he spat the words at her, an uncomfortably manic grin spreading across his face. The next time he spoke, his tone had taken on an eerie calm and he put his hands down on Mira’s desk to lean in as he pulled out his ace. “I just so happened to be perusing the library surveillance tapes, hoping to catch the perpetrator who soaked our book drop. No luck there, but you’ll never guess who I found going at it in the second floor stacks.”
“There are cameras up there?” Chelle asked, her mouth falling open.
Mira went ashen. It felt like her heart was going to explode out of her chest, and she felt her pulse throbbing in her ears as she asked, “What are you going to do, Jack?”
“Well, I was going to sit on this information for a little while and make sure that the Board was ready to put me in the director’s position first, but now you’ve forced my hand by refusing to do your job, so I think I’ll just bring the tape with me on Monday,” Jack said. He pointed his finger at Chelle and said to Mira, “I told you to get her off my back, and you took her side instead. You brought this on yourself.”
Then he stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind him.
***
Mira was standing beside her desk, one hand clutching the edge as if she might fall over without the added support. Chelle stood up, inching closer to her.
“I’m so sorry-” she started to say, but Mira took a step back as Chelle approached, and watching her retreat sent a stab of pain into Chelle’s chest.
“You shouldn’t be in here with the door closed,” Mira said mechanically, not meeting Chelle’s eyes.
“The damage is done,” Chelle answered quietly, but Mira cut her off, turning around to face the window as she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
“I forgot about the cameras,” she groaned. “I can’t believe I forgot about the fucking security cameras. We never use them.”
Chelle just stood there for a few seconds, feeling particularly helpless and more than a little responsible for the whole situation. She really had been stalking Jack – after she finished the sobering task of fishing all those ruined books out of the drop, she’d found Jack returning to the reference desk from wherever he’d gone off to and she asked him to help her push the bin outside so that she could dump the water onto the lawn. He grudgingly agreed to help, and as they were carefully maneuvering the bin outside, trying not to slosh water all through the lobby as they went, she teased him about the muddy footprints that were tracking back and forth from the reference desk from his loafers.
Jack was not the type to dirty his shoes, and he snapped at her when she pointed them out, telling her to mind her own business and just focus on the clean-up effort. That’s when she remembered that he’d been the one to suggest the vandalism had been the work of teenagers – leaped at the opportunity, really.
And then there was the Nora Roberts she’d found floating in the top of the bin, and it all started to come together in Chelle’s mind. She thought about Elizabeth’s comments on his penchant for ruining books that he didn’t believe were worthy of being in the collection. It made a diabolical kind of sense – Jack flooded the book drop to make Mira look bad just before the Board arrived, and it also happened to be an opportunity to get rid of a few choice books.
Suspicion alone wouldn’t be enough to take this news to Mira, though, so Chelle started surreptitiously following Jack around, hoping to catch him in the act of some sort of sabotage, or pick up more concrete evidence of his actions. Before she succeeded, though, he’d caught her creeping through the stacks upstairs behind him and he dragged her into Mira’s office.
“Jack flooded the book drop,” Chelle told Mira now that they were alone. She had no hard evidence, but they were out of time and all she could do was tell her what she suspected. “I can’t give you anything to take to the Board, but I know he’s been trying to sabotage you.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mira said with a sigh, turning around to face Chelle. “But what am I supposed to do with that? A garden hose in the book drop sure as hell doesn’t trump a video of the director screwing a subordinate in the stacks.”
She looked close to tears, and even with all of the baggage that they now had between them, Chelle couldn’t stop herself from stepping around the desk to pull Mira into a hug. It was the only thing she could think to do that would be even remotely comforting, and Mira rested her head on Chelle’s shoulder. For just a moment – a few seconds at most – the world stopped moving and everything felt like it should again.
Then Mira stepped back, pushing Chelle away.
“We can’t,” she said, a few tears streaking down her cheeks.
“But it’s over,” Chelle said, her brow knitting in confusion. Jack had the tape – what difference did it make now?
“It’s not over,” Mira said firmly. “Not until the Board tells me to pack up my office.”
“What are you going to do?” Chelle asked, surprised that Mira thought there was anything left that could be done.
Mira sighed heavily and considered for a moment before saying honestly, “I have no idea. But if there’s any hope at all of keeping my job, what’s happening between us has to end, once and for all. I can’t give Jack anything to work with.”
“Is Jack and this ridiculous library really more important to you than me?” Chelle asked. It felt worse than the first time Mira had broke up with her this weekend, an icicle plunging into her heart and her lower lip quivering as she stood in front of Mira and tried not to cry. “Do you understand how rare what we have is?”
“I know-” Mira started to say, but Chelle didn’t let her finish.
“I don’t think you do,” she said. “You can’t, if you’re willing to sacrifice it for a job that eats up all your time and energy and gives you nothing in return except back-stabbing coworkers.”
“It’s not my fault that you fell in love,” Mira said, her voice straining with the effort of disguising the emotion running just beneath the words. “I told you from day one how it would have to be and you just kept wanting more even though I told you I couldn’t give it to you.”
She was nearly shouting by the time she finished, her emotions bubbling up to the surface despite her best efforts, and Chelle just stared at her until Mira went silent again. Then after a long pause, Chelle said, “Maybe I did push your boundaries, but you needed it. I hope this nightmare job is worth it to you when you go home to your sad, empty apartment tonight and realize that I’m never going to be there again.”
“Get out,” Mira said, pointing furiously to the door. “Get out, Chelle. We’re done here.”
Chelle marched to the door, blood boiling in her ears, and she paused in the doorway just long enough to look over her shoulder at Mira. She was standing in the middle of her office, shaking with anger, and Chelle’s lip curled up as she said, “Coward.”
Then she went out into the hallway and shut the door behind her, collapsing against the wall and trying to keep herself from hyperventilating long enough to get the hell out of the library.
***
Mira didn’t stay in the library long after Chelle left. She sat down in her office chair just long enough to control the tears that streamed involuntarily down her cheeks, wiping them away and trying unsuccessfully to clear the redness from around her eyes. Then she shut off her computer, grabbed her purse, and left in a hurry, dashing through the lobby before anyone had a chance to see her.
She didn’t slow down when she got out of the library. Instead, she slung her purse across her chest and ran home. Her heels slapped at the pavement and her shins began to burn as she forced herself to run on her toes, knowing that she was just asking for an injury, but she didn’t care. If anything, she deserved to spend the weekend nursing shin splints, and a small part of her mind was hoping that the physical pain would distract from the weight settling over her chest.
When she got home, Mira kicked her heels into the corner near the door and threw her bag down beside them. She walked into the living room and collapsed on the creaky old futon.
The sound of her breathing filled the echo-prone space as it slowly shifted from the panting of exercise to the gasps of body-wracking sobs. When they finally subsided, she curled onto her side and looked around the room, at the half-dozen cardboard boxes lining the walls and the tiny television sitting directly on the floor.
Chelle was right. Her apartment was sad and empty, and even though it had never bothered her before, it was all too apt a reflection of the way she felt right now. It never felt empty until she met Chelle because she’d never shared a meal with someone in the kitchen, never shared her bed, never tried to make the best of the uncomfortable old futon while snuggled up together watching re-runs of old sitcoms, laughing merely because it was nice to have someone to laugh with. Now she knew how it felt, and she couldn’t look anywhere in her apartment without being reminded of Chelle.
Mira turned to face the back of the futon, trying to block it all out, but even the cushions held a faint trace of Chelle’s perfume, and hot tears streaked down her cheeks all over again.
Chelle’s words floated again and again through her head. Do you understand how rare what we have is?
Mira felt her stomach turning sour as she lay there masochistically inhaling what was left of Chelle’s scent, realizing that she’d been right about everything. What did it matter how many ladder rungs Mira climbed if the only thing waiting for her at the top was an empty apartment?
She destroyed something beautiful, and for what? Come Monday morning, she’d almost certainly lose her job, anyway.