Just a mild case. Not bad, really, in the bigger picture. I tried to remember that. But just … the idea of it? The knowledge that it was back? That a seizure could happen at any moment? Knowing that I wasn’t cured? That I was still the same person who might get uninvited to a sleepover?
It was enough to shift my whole conception of myself.
But that wasn’t something I talked about—ever, if I could help it. It was just something I carried around like a little ice cube of fear in my chest.
And so Alice attacked the symptoms over the cause. “Maybe you should start dating someone.”
“Dating someone?” I asked.
“You know. Preventatively.”
“Who?” I demanded. “Raymond the security guard?”
“What about that guy in IT with the earlobe rings?”
“Earlobe rings are a deal-breaker for me.”
“What about that guy Bruce who does tutoring?”
“He’s married to the girl who runs the coffee shop on Post Office Street.”
“Didn’t the new fifth-grade science teacher just get divorced?”
“Oh, my God, Alice!” I shrieked. “He’s, like, forty!”
Alice didn’t endorse the hysterics. “You’ll be forty someday.”
“In twelve years.”
“The point is,” Alice went on, “if you could just fall in love with somebody—anybody—real quick, then your heart would be too happy to care about any of this.”
“I’m no expert on love,” I said. “But I don’t think that’s how it works.”
It was preposterous. I hadn’t dated anyone since the seizures came back. Partly, yes, because the pickings on the island were slim. But also, I liked stability. More than that, I needed stability. Especially now. Stasis. Routine. Even if it were possible to “fall in love with somebody real quick,” this particular moment of emotional chaos would be the worst possible time to choose. Plus—and I had never admitted this to anyone, maybe not even to myself—I’d already given up.
Because there was a persistent, unanswered question at the center of my life. One that had come back into my head when the seizures returned. One I didn’t even fully realize I kept asking. One I wasn’t sure I even wanted to answer.
Who could love me now?
I’d never even thought it in words, much less said it out loud.
And I wasn’t going to start today.
four
I did not have a seizure that night—or the next night, or the next.
Sometimes they threaten but never come.
But they sure can sharpen your focus. In the wake of it, I just tried to settle, and adjust, and not have a seizure.
So much easier said than done. Especially when you start stressing about the fact that you aren’t managing to de-stress.
The truth was, I had more to do than it was possible to get done. I hadn’t worked in the library all summer. Not since Max died, for sure—but even before that, when I’d been so happily planning his party, thinking I’d get to my cataloguing later. Then, after the funeral, I’d fussed over Babette: organizing the service, doing her laundry, baking her blueberry muffins that she never ate, watering her garden, and stacking the unread condolence cards in alphabetical order.
Summer was my time to get organized: to catch up and to plan ahead. But this summer, I hadn’t done either. And now summer was almost over.
So: No more messing around. It was time to handle it all—the shock, the grief, the dread, the anticipation, the anxiety—the old-fashioned way: like a workaholic.
Convenient. Because I really did have a ton of work.
It takes long hours and late nights to gear up for the start of a school year, even in a normal year—cataloging all our new books, stamping them (I’m a title-page and edge-of-the-pages stamper), bar-coding them, wrapping the jackets in plastic covers, and getting them all on the shelves. Plus: decorating, organizing, lesson planning, Marie Kondo-ing my cabinets, checking in on teachers’ upcoming lesson plans, and stocking books to tie in with study units and book reports. It’s a lot of planning, but it’s also a lot of physical work, and it can only go so fast.
I’m always astonished at the number of people who think I just “hang out” in the library all day. Not to mention the number who think all I do is read. Plus, of course, the kids—who literally think I live there.
Like, they think it’s my actual home.
I do read—constantly—but not during the workday. During the workday, I’m helping kids find the books they need and then teaching them self-checkout. I’m teaching classes on how to find books, and how to be good library citizens, and why stories are important. I’m reading books to every grade level, even the big kids. I’m training volunteers to help restock the shelves, and poring over catalogs to find new books for the library, and weeding old books from the stacks. Plus: lunch duty, faculty meetings, author visits, planning classes, and let’s not forget, in the spring, countless hours of inventory.
It’s more work than people think it is.
It’s more work than even I think it is.
Plus, this year, I’d bought—with my own money—a multicolored hanging sculpture made up of brightly painted recycled bicycle parts. It had looked so soothing on the website where I’d found it, and I’d gotten mesmerized by a video of it gently spinning … but when the box arrived, and I saw the random bags of at least a hundred pieces to assemble—I’d closed it again right away.
Nope. Never mind.
It was going to take me a million hours to put together, at minimum. As far as my to-do list went, assembling that sculpture would have to be dead last.
Workaholism worked and it didn’t work at the same time.
In the abstract, when I think of “de-stressing,” I think of bubble baths, and page-turning novels, and naps under fuzzy blankets—and the truth was, I didn’t have time for any of that. But chipping away at all my piled-up work did have a stress-reducing effect, and not only because I felt a little less panicked with each to-do item I scratched off: it kept me from looking at the big picture. It kept me from thinking about the past, and it kept me from trying to imagine the future, and it let me stay focused on whatever tiny next step was right in front of me.
There is something comforting about tunneling down your focus like that. It was kind of a can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees effect. And in certain moments of relief, I forgot about the forest entirely.
Which is how, the night before our first scheduled faculty meeting with Duncan, Alice was able to shock me like she did. I knew it was Sunday—but I’d just kind of lost track for a little bit of which Sunday it was.
I was walking over to the grocery store to stock up for the week, when I got this pretty standard text from Alice: “Great news!”
“What???” I texted back.
“I thought of the title for my autobiography.”
“Thank God!”
“I know, right?”
“What is it????”
“Do the math.”
“Please never tell me to do math.”
“No! That’s the title!”
“???”
“Do the Math: The Alice Brouillard Story.”
“Ah.”
“Perfect, right? I’m going to make it my catchphrase, too.”
“You have always needed a catchphrase.”
“Agreed. And thanks in advance.”
“For?”
“Being my ghostwriter.”
All fairly standard texting for Alice and me. We threw in a few GIFs, too, and then just when I thought we were done, I got one last ding, and Alice added, “Can’t wait to meet the Guy tomorrow!”
And that’s when I dropped the phone.
Tomorrow. It was suddenly about to be tomorrow. As in the tomorrow. The one I’d been dreading so hard I’d lost track of time. The one where I would see Duncan Carpenter again, for better or for worse, as I stepped—willingly or not—into the rest of my life.
I couldn’t believe it.
It just didn’t seem possible.
None of it seemed possible, in fact.
De-stress, I reminded myself. De-stress.
But it was good timing. I always found grocery stores pleasantly anesthetizing.
I grabbed a cart and took deep breaths as I curved my way around the magazines and mass-market paperbacks, then up and down the aisles. I considered buying a beach towel with unicorns all over it—on sale for $7.99. Did I need a blender? A coffee grinder? A new muffin tin?
I had only managed to put one thing in my cart—the most essential of all essentials: coffee—when, suddenly, I saw him.
Duncan Carpenter.
He was here. Just like that. In my grocery store.
I caught a glimpse—one glimpse—of him walking past the far end of the aisle, and it was enough to make me drop down into a squat, hiding behind my cart.
Slowly, every sense on high alert, I stood back up, and pushed my cart to the edge of the aisle where I’d just seen him, and peeked around the corner.
There he was, at the far end of the wide center aisle, in a white oxford shirt and gray suit pants, striding along with his cart like it was no big deal. Like it was totally normal. Like people named Duncan Carpenter just … wandered around grocery stores in Galveston all the time.