The Knox
What say you, curious one?
I see you lurking, through my windows. Very well. Come, then, have a look. Behold my stately brick facade, my honey-oak door with its ornate surround, my wrought iron fencing. My distinguished double-height first-floor windows, a rarity among buildings here in Beacon Hill. The boot scraper beside my entryway (a bygone necessity, but still charming nonetheless).
Yes, yes, it is true; I once had a mansard roof, but one of the Thurgoods—the miserly Samuel, I believe—replaced it with a flat one during the Great Depression to bring down property taxes. (I was displeased for a good decade or two.) At least they had the good sense to add a parapet.
Pardon me? You were not inquiring about my roof? What were you—Oh. No, I’m sorry, but you simply cannot stroll in, as if I’m some sort of museum or, God forbid,ordinarybuilding. No, no. Only Knox members and their esteemed guests are allowed to enter my premises.
What is the Knox, you ask? Come now, don’t be coy.
You truly do not know? You’ve never heard of the Knox Society? You must not be from Boston. Ah, a tourist. Of course.
Well, as any Bostonian very well understands, you are permittedonlythe view of my exterior. The rest—the history and secrets, the lives and deaths, the money and misfortune, the vast wealth and precious artifacts housed within my walls—is reserved exclusively for the insiders, the members. And so you must content yourself with shadows, and rumors, and the occasional fleeting glimpse of a world to which you will never, ever belong.
There is a simple, aching sweetness of being kept out, is there not? A pathetic allure in the unknown. Not thatIwould know, of course. But I see how you are now eagerly peering into my tinted windows, hungry for a preview of anything—anything at all.
It is futile, I assure you: All you will see is your own reflection, then your thoughts will shift to a sweaty, self-conscious worry about whether you’ve been observed by someone you cannot see.
You haven’t been. The members within don’t bother looking outside. Not atyou, at least.
So run along now, tourist. Do not concern yourself with what goes on within the walls of the Knox. It is for your own benefit, after all. Truly, it is.
These secrets would do you more harm than good.
Taylor
Taylor’s morning walk to work is typical Boston-dreary andgray: steel skies the color of metal office buildings, late February wind gusts that howl through her thin nursing scrubs, dirt-tinged heaps of snow piled on uneven brick sidewalks. Gray, gray, gray.
She lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Boston’s South End neighborhood, so at the beginning of each twelve-hour shift—which is an ungodly, unmentionable hour—she traverses through a city still shrugging off the dark. If she were to draw a line on a map from her apartment to Mass General Hospital, it is a diagonal, like an arrow piercing the city’s heart, but given the old, winding streets, the actual walking route resembles more of a zigzag. The jagged, switchback-ridden path has stones laid as if to trip one up and crooked brick walls that tilt and loom, as if struggling to carry the history they hold.
There’s an uneventful feel to this particular day, like time is cycling in a tiresome loop. The ER hums and beeps like a machine that is both well-oiled and in need of constant repair: too many patients and not enough beds or nurses or doctors. Theyare particularly short-staffed, as flu season is currently reigning like a smug queen, and Taylor doesn’t get a chance to sit down—let alone use the bathroom—until late afternoon. But this is nothing new; she’s used to shoving aside her own needs while working as a nurse. Part of her relishes the way the minutes disappear in the ER—it doesn’t allow her to indulge in a pity party of her current situation—but she also loathes it; resentful of how she gets pulled in too many directions like a piece of saltwater taffy, fielding endless questions, chasing down doctors and missing medications, dodging the continual barrage of patients’ frustrations unfairly hurled at her. At the end of each shift, she’s usually worn thin, the taffy about to break.
Taylor squeezes in her sad excuse of a lunch break around three o’clock and makes it only halfway through a homemade turkey sandwich before being informed she’s getting the next patient. She rewraps the remnants and puts them back in the communal fridge, where they’ll be neglected until dinnertime, or later, then goes to set up the patient’s room.
“February in Bostonalmostmakes me want to move back down south,” her Aunt Gigi remarks, looking out the small window of the empty patient room Taylor is readying. “It’s colder today than a witch’s teat in a brass bra.” Aunt Gigi is the head nurse of the surgical ICU upstairs, and the one who got Taylor a job here in the ER—something that she often reminds Taylor.
Taylor pauses priming the IV bag to glance out the window herself. Like all the windows on this side of the ER, it depressingly faces a brick wall of an adjacent hospital building and makes Taylor feel suffocated in a way she knows she can’t dwell on. Not here, not now. At some point, she’ll need to address it; the claustrophobia has been lurking lately, like an old acquaintance waiting to be acknowledged. “Acquaintance” isn’t right,though, is it? It’s more like a foe, the way it slides its hands around her neck, grasping much too tightly.
She quickly jerks away from the window and focuses on capping the end of the IV.
“This weather must make you miss home, T.J.,” Aunt Gigi continues. “It must be, what, in the high fifties there today? Only a measly thirty-degree difference.”
“No, I don’t miss home at all,” Taylor is too quick to answer.
“Tell me how you really feel.”
“Well, you left North Carolina when you were my age. And you never really came back,” Taylor points out.
“True, true. But I was following my husband to his medical residency.”
“Well. I followed my job.”
“The jobIgot you.”
There it is.
“Yes, Aunt Gigi, I’m very grateful.” Taylor resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
