Page 5 of Rooke
Out in the marble-floored bustling corridors and hallways of the museum, I can hear men and women talking in groups, the high, excited chatter of children, and the never-ending echo of footfall. These sounds have been a comfort to me for so long now. It’s the background noise of a life I’ve always had yet a life that now seems distant and strange, like I’m a visitor here and I don’t really belong anymore.
Back here, amongst the stacks and the high shelves, laden with treasures from previous exhibitions—stuffed coyotes, life-size jellyfish, celestial maps of the heavens—I find that Iamstill me, though. Just about.
My interviews were pointless and a waste of time, but somehow it seems they took forever. I’ve missed lunch, it’s well passed two, so I make do with a coffee instead. In my office, I sip the dark black liquid slowly as I give myself the luxury of a ten-minute break. In my purse, the new book club novel glares at me malevolently, taking up too much room. Lord knows why Kayla picked this one.The Seven Secret Lives of James P. Albrecht.Doesn’t sound like a romance to me. Not in the slightest. The blurb on the back of the book doesn’t give anything away, either. Just that the male protagonist of the story is a kleptomaniac and a thief who descends into madness as his crimes worsen in nature.
I can’t see anything about a woman in the story’s description. No sense that James P. Albrecht is going to be rescued from his life of crime and insanity by some sweet-natured do-gooder. It’s what I’ve come to expect. It’s what I crave when I read these days, because the knight in shining armor never lets his princess down. The caring, redemptive heroine never fails her broken beau. These books are my escape from real life. Because you know what? Real life fucking sucks.
The book starts out slow: a man in his early thirties, trying to figure out where he belongs in the world now that the love of his life has left him. The language is trite and frankly a little weird in places. Bizarre descriptions of a Chicago landscape that clearly doesn’t exist in real life. A couple of brief emotional internal monologues that strike me as odd, since as far as I can tell James is neither an empathetic nor sympathetic man. By the end of the first chapter, I’m convinced James is a sociopath and the reason the love of his life left him is because he’s actually murdered her and buried her body in his newly paved back yard.
Weird, though. I’m sucked in. By the time I glance up at the clock it’s already ten past three. Shit. My meeting with Oscar. I’m late. Ihatebeing late, especially when I’ve agreed to help someone. I hurry out of my office, pulling the door closed behind me, and it’s not until I reach the other side of the building that I realize I’ve brought my book with me instead of putting it back in my bag.
I slip unnoticed through the sea of people inside the museum, people’s eyes skating over me indifferently as I weave between gatherings of grandmothers and foreign exchange students, Hasidic Jewish men, and fathers with their sons. I might as well be invisible; the name badge I’m wearing on my shirt, simple, black and inconspicuous, sets me aside from the other museumgoers. I am an employee, a member of staff, and therefore not even a real human being. I’m a part of the grander diorama of the museum, the bigger exhibition. People don’t bother me, especially when it looks like I’m on my way somewhere as I am now.
Oscar’s domain is an assault course of obstacles, designed to keep the unworthy out. His office is on the third floor, tucked away behind the crocodile exhibit, down a series of drafty hallways that are always cluttered with cardboard boxes so old and rotten that they spill their random contents out onto the chipped terracotta tile.
I duck around a crooked tower of telephone directories, smiling when I see their splintered, cracked spines clearly advertise when they were printed (1981 to 2002 respectively), and promptly collide with another obstruction, this time of the human variety. I drop my book as I crash into the person lurking behind the telephone books, yelping out loud as I reach out to steady myself. Very unladylike and most certainly not graceful in any way, shape or form.
“Whoa. Holy shit. You okay?” A hand reaches out and grabs me, and not a moment too soon. I haven’t fallen down since…I can’t remember the last time I fell down, it was so long ago. I’m saved from the indignity of doing so now, but only by the grace of the strong arm that’s snaked its way around my waist. I find myself looking up into the face of a kid. Dark hair, dark eyes… No, wait. Not a kid. Not really. He’s young, but he’s made the transition through that awkward, gangly teenage stage that makes young men appear so uncomfortable inside their own skin. He’s broad shouldered, and his hands feel huge on me. His hair is shaved at the sides, slicked back on top in that oh-so-fashionable cut nearly all twenty-somethings in New York seem to be wearing these days. His jaw is marked with a smattering of stubble, and his left front tooth is delightfully crooked. The flaw isn’t something I would have noticed normally, but being this close to his face I find I have a prime view past his full lips, and his teeth are right in my line of sight.
“Last I checked, murder’s still a felony,” he growls.
“What?”
“Crushed to death by a stack of Yellow Pages,” he continues. “That’s not how I plan on going out.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
He laughs, boisterous and surprising, scaring the shit out of me. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who laughs like this, like he doesn’t care who hears him. He lets go of me, raising both eyebrows as he clearly checks me out. “I’m just fucking with you,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh. Glad to hear it.” I shake my head, regaining a little poise as I straighten my shirt. “Why are you lurking in the hallway back here? Are you waiting on someone?”
The guy, this James Dean-esque stranger whose dark eyes are glinting wickedly in my direction, makes a gun out of his fingers and fires it at me. He blows the imaginary smoke from the end of his index finger. “My grandfather. My mother said he needed to see me.” The guy watches my mouth as I fight back the urge to smirk. “What? Why’s that funny?”
I look him up and down. “Well. I think you probably went to a great deal of effort to look so…disheveled—”
“Disheveled?” He smiles a reckless smile. A dangerous, predatory smile. A smile that undoubtedly gets him into an awful lot of trouble.
“Yes.”
“Why? Because my jeans are ripped? Because my shirt’s faded?” he says in slow, measured words. Damn, his voice is so deep. I can hear the amusement in it, though he’s trying to hide it. He’s enjoying this far too much.
I stand my ground. “Yes. Because your jeans are ripped and your shirt is faded.”
“Fair enough. What of it?”
“You’re obviously trying to exude some kind of bad boy persona, dressing the way you do, and then you’re out hovering in the hallways of museums, doing as your mother tells you.”
He looks at me in a way that makes my insides twist. “Don’t all good sons do as their mothers tell them?”
A sharp twinge daggers me in the chest. I shouldn’t have brought up mothers and their sons. What was I thinking? I do my best to hide my discomfort by glancing down at the floor. “Not in my experience, no.”
“Then you’ve been spending time with some really shitty guys,” he informs me.
Oh, how little he knows. In the past five years, I haven’t been spending time with any guys at all. It’s not as though I’ve been avoiding contact with men. I’ve just been avoiding contact with everyone, period. That’s not something you tell a stranger, though. “I’m assuming Oscar’s your grandfather?” I ask, sidestepping his comment. Oscar is the only faculty member old enough to have a grandchild this old, despite that being not very old at all.
“Bravo, Sherlock.”
“Well, his office is three doors down. Right now you’re standing outside…” I peer over his shoulder. “You’re standing outside a disabled bathroom.”
