“I didn’t download anything,” she protested.
He shrugged. “You did.” Like he was omniscient, which was weird for a guy in a Scooby-Doo T-shirt.
“He told me not to do it again,” she emailed Clara later. “And I told him there were no guarantees, seeing as I didn’t even know how I’d done it in the first place.”
Clara wrote back saying, “Don’t do it. I know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m sure he’s not even single.”
“Andy from IT in the Scooby-Doo T-shirt?” Clara responded. “Trust me: he’s single.”
They dated for five and a half months, and for a while Jess was worried because the arrangement had the potentialto putter along forever. What if she ended up going out with Andy for the rest of her life?
“You might as well be dating Clayton,” wrote Clara before she left her job in Korea and her all-night internet connection. She became much less in touch in a yurt in Mongolia learning to herd cattle, honest to god. They didn’t have computers there, so Jess received a letter from Clara every couple of months, but her words kept echoing in Jess’s brain.
Then out of nowhere, Andy broke up with her, and mostly Jess was relieved. When she realized this, she was horrified.Surely it was time she became the pilot of her life?
It was even a possibility now. Her pay was decent and she could put money aside for first and last months’ rent on a one-bedroom apartment, a cozy place that was hers alone in an up-and-coming neighbourhood. She got rid of her futon and bought an actual couch. And she decided to apply for teachers’ college, something sure and stable that would lead to an actual job instead of a vague and distant future. She contacted an old English prof, her thesis advisor, asking if she’d provide a reference, and was surprised to hear back right away.
“So strange to get your message just now, the email read,because I’ve been thinking of you. Can you make some time to meet? I might have a little opportunity…”
“I’ve got a new job,” Jess wrote in a letter to Clara, even though she knew her news might seem humdrum compared to Clara’s adventures in various sites across Africa digging for hearths and unearthing ancient artifacts. “Turns out it’s the end of me and childhood cancers—and Andy. I’m starting as office administrator at the Nordstrom Institute—do you remember it? At the library? It’s the special collection of folk and fairy tales, and it’s magical. It’s a three-month contract, but it’s up for renewal.Their last office administrator died; she was seventy-seven. They haven’t hired anybody new there in twenty-three years.”
The letter was sent in care of some person or another affiliated with the archeology department at the university where Clara’s boyfriend, Tom, was employed as a professor. Through these circuitous means it would make its way into Clara’s hands.
Clara’s responses arrived in creased and battered envelopes bearing postmarks from Nepal, Namibia, Tunisia, Jess fishing them from the mailbox as she left for work in the morning. She received emails from Clara, but not often—it was tricky for her to access a computer. And even when Clara did email, she never had much time to write, or privacy to do so in a meaningful way. Her letters said so much more, clearly conveying Clara’s voice—she was much more pen-and-paper than keyboard. Jess also liked the idea that she was carrying a little bit of Clara with her as she made her way through the streets, through the rhythms and routines of this brand-new life she’d created all by herself.
After six months, Jess’s position at the Nordstrom Institute had been made permanent, with benefits, and she went to the dentist for the first time in years. She got eight cavities filled and vowed to take better care of herself from this point onward. These days she was feeling impressively responsible, having put a down payment on a condo to be built on what was still a parking lot that she walked by every morning. She was proud of how far she’d come in the last two years, even if her progress seemed conventional compared to Clara’s. But this had always been the way between them. That distinction had been part of what attracted Jess to Clara in the first place, that she was going places. Jess reminded herself that they were two people who had madedifferent choices, that none of those choices invalidated the other’s, and most of the time she actually believed this. Though she was still stuck on a comment Clara once made about people who spend their whole lives in the towns they were born in. While Jess might have left her town, she was still in the same time zone. How far did a person need to travel to know they’d arrived?
The library where Jess worked was designed like a castle. The entrance was a Romanesque arch flanked by large bronze sculptures of a griffin and a winged lion, references to the folk and fairy-tale collections on the fourth floor. The Nordstrom Institute was named after Charlotte Nordstrom, a children’s librarian who had inherited her family fortune and had no children. When she died she endowed the institute with her inheritance, put towards a book collection that attracted the attention of scholars from all over the world. Decades later, as an undergraduate, Jess was lucky to have access to the collection, rare books that required gloves for handling. Now, to spend every day in such a sanctified space was like winning the professional lottery, particularly after her year in the temping trenches.
In many ways, however, the Charlotte Nordstrom Institute for Folk and Fairy Tales was a workplace like any other, just one that featured vintage pop-up books, a cabinet full of book-branded board games, and special exhibits on picture-book portrayals of circuses and the history of paper dolls. There was still filing, of course; the photocopier often jammed; and the fax machine was usually out of paper. There was speculation among staff about who was responsible for neglecting to refill it, and the team had divided into factions. Discord also persisted about other matters, such as failure to remove food containers from the refrigerator, theright not to be overwhelmed by perfume, and the perfidy of computers.
There was certainly technological savvy among the staff, but nobody was sure yet about the internet. Digitizing the collections? Yes, without question, so that all that history could be more accessible. But beyond that, Jess’s librarian colleagues didn’t understand: what exactly was the internet for? The library was insisting the Institute required a homepage, and Jess was put in charge of this, her first major initiative beyond unjamming the photocopier and fetching everybody cups of tea.
She was still a receptionist, but this was different than her previous job. She was more like a gatekeeper charged with operating the drawbridge. Ordinary people never showed up at the Charlotte Nordstrom Institute for Folk and Fairy Tales. When things were slow, Jess would be tasked with dusting the collection of ships in bottles that had once belonged to Charlotte Nordstrom’s father and were now housed in a glass case that ran along the wall in the reading room.
It was the most incredible mix of the mundane and the extraordinary, and she loved the balance, the way every day of her professional life was analogous to a cabinet of curiosities. This meant that when she sat down at her desk that morning and removed Clara’s latest letter from its envelope, she didn’t have to feel her view from here was so inferior to Clara’s adventures in the wider world. It was easy to be happy for her friend when she was happy with herself.
But when Jess opened the letter and read its contents, she felt guilty for entertaining these thoughts. They seemed petty now, and her stomach sank as her eyes moved down the page.
Dear Jess,
I’ve been sicker than I’ve ever been—which is saying something after a year and a half dealing with rashes, gastrointestinal explosions from eating lettuce washed in unfiltered water, and bad reactions to anti-malaria drugs. Then I got pregnant, and everything’s gone wrong. Getting pregnant on anti-malarial drugs is a disaster, never mind that I had no business being pregnant in the first place. But the way things work here—living in our encampment, sleeping under canvas, being hot and sweaty and dirty all the time—the usual rules don’t apply. You can do stupid things, but it’s okay, because it’s temporary, plus we need a diversion from the minute focus we devote to our working days, the details in the grains of a handful of sand. So when the work is done, we do what we like, which for me—since Tom and I broke up—has been a guy from Burkina Faso. Tom claimed not to care, but he did. And then after I was so sick, and at around eight weeks I began to miscarry, which I’d been expecting, but the surprise was that I was devastated. Partly because the experience was so physically brutal, but it was more than that. Maybe I’d wanted this baby? I haven’t even begun to unpack what I mean by that, because in practical terms it makes no sense, but I’m old enough now that I could imagine making it work, being somebody’s mother. This baby wasn’t a baby, but instead a mess of blood and tissue, hope and possibility, gushing out of me as I crouched over a squatting toilet trying not to die.
It was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. We were out in the field and there are no comforts there, no place to go and rest and be alone, and everybody knew. Some people were supportive, but most of them thought I’d got what wascoming to me. There are plenty of guys who think a girl has no business being out in the field in the first place, and there I was proving them right as I miscarried for three days, leaving a literal trail of blood behind me.
That was about six weeks ago, and since then I’ve been getting ready to leave, to go someplace else, but I don’t know where yet. Ever since Nepal, I’ve been following Tom, and I really don’t know how to do this without him. But it’s time for me to go it alone, so I have to figure something out. He says maybe he could finagle something and find me a job back at his university in England, but I don’t want to continue in his debt. There’s also the option of coming home, but I’m not ready yet.
So what next? I don’t know. But I wanted to write down what happened to process it all, and I need you to know because you’ll be the one who understands.
Jess checked the date at the top of the letter—Clara had started it a month ago, which meant that she could be anywhere now. Jess realized she hadn’t actually heard from Clara in weeks. Her computer took far too long to boot up, but as soon as it did, she logged on to her email, opened a new message, and typed in Clara’s address.
“I got your letter,” she wrote. “And I’m here for you—in every way and for whatever you need.”
THE MIDLANDS
2004
