Out of her house, she meant. Not out of the country.
But here I was.
—
Here you are,” the department officer said, consulting her computer screen. “Dorothy Gale, ten o’clock. You’re to see Dr.Norton over in the writing center.”
“I don’t understand. My appointment is with Dr.Eastwick. I have an email.”
“Dr.Eastwick cannot meet with anyone anymore. She’s dead.”
The blood rushed in my ears. Obviously, my hearing wasaffected. Still adjusting to changes in the cabin pressure or jet lag or her Irish accent or something. “I’m sorry?”
“Don’t be. It’s not like you killed her. Very sudden, it was.”
The room whirled. My stomach dropped. It had to be a joke. A hoax. I’d never met Dr.Eastwick. I had emailed her without any real hope that she would actually reply. But she had answered all my questions. She’d encouraged me to apply. She couldn’t be...
“Dead?”
“Monday. Not that she’ll be missed, God rest her soul.”
Another joke?
I tightened my grip on my suitcase. The administrative officer was still talking, something about needing to meet with Dr.Norton to discuss my registration. “She’ll be in her office until one. The Oscar Wilde house. 21 Westland Row,” she said. “You know the way?”
I didn’t, of course. I’d only seen pictures online. I nodded.
“The writing center. Right at the edge of campus. Go in through the Hamilton building. Front concourse, ground floor. There’s a sign.” She looked at me doubtfully, as if questioning my ability to read. “Or the security guard can help you.”
I thanked her.
I paused on the steps outside, squinting. After Kansas and the airport, everything was bewilderingly bright and green. Fat white seagulls dotted the emerald lawn like sheep. Students with backpacks strolled the walks. A tour group stopped to take pictures of the library.
Some of my best memories were of libraries. Sitting on the carpet of the Brooklyn Public Library with Toni snuggled on my lap for toddler time. Hiding in the stacks in a gray-shingled cottage in Connecticut. Begging a ride in my uncle’s truck to the squatbrick drive-through that housed the library in Council Grove, Kansas. By the time I was fifteen, I had seven different library cards. While our mother traveled the world, creating art installations we saw only in photographs, my sister, Toni, and I shuttled from our New York apartment to the pullout couches of friends-of-friends to the tiny back bedroom of Uncle Henry’s farmhouse. Books became my friends. The library was my magic kingdom, my refuge, my escape. As long as I could find the library, I was home.
I started walking.
One step at a time, I told myself. Just because my faculty contact was dead didn’t mean I was doomed. Staff changes happened, right? Professors retired or went on sabbatical. Instructors failed to get tenure and moved on to other institutions or new careers. Graduate students dropped out and found jobs. Or were publicly humiliated in their former lover’s bestselling novel and fled across the Atlantic rather than ever face him again.
Okay, maybe that was just me.
“If you’d come to me before...”My advisor at KU had looked down at his desk, not meeting my eyes.“But after two years...”
Two years when Gray and I had been a couple. Two years of begging for extensions, of blowing off meetings with my advisor to discuss my progress (or lack of progress) on my thesis.
“You don’t need him. You can talk to me,” Gray had said.
I took a deep breath. Blew it out. I could deal with this. It was a bump in the road, not the end of the world.
I’d applied to Trinity in a desperate bid to prove—to Gray, to the world, to myself—that I was not the literary vampire, the creative succubus, he’d portrayed in his novel. I hadn’t expected I’d actually be accepted. I’d never dreamed I would actually come, leaving my sister behind.
But my tuition was paid. I’d had to show a receipt at the airport, along with my passport and a bank statement proving I could support myself for the next year. Which I could, even though Toni was starting college now, too. Whatever else our mother had or hadn’t done for her daughters, she’d taken care of us financially. The licensing fees from photographs of her art—plus a hefty life insurance policy—were her legacy to us.
I couldn’t turn back now.
The campus spread around me, windows and arches and towers of stone. It was like stumbling onto the grounds of Pemberley or into a fairy tale. Beyond the abstract sculpture thingy was a square with green on both sides. Trees. Buildings. No signs. No security guard, either.
I wandered through a gate onto a street looking for... What had the administrative officer said? Westland? Westmoreland? Dubliners brushed by, everyone around me moving at speed and with purpose while I trudged along, not quite sure where I was going.
