ghosts of his, that he's leaving behind a joyful thing he only just rediscovered.
The third floor looks pretty well identical to the second floor. The papers on the bulletin boards are slightly different but everything else looks exactly the same. The second and third floors are so identical, in fact, that he begins to wonder if the English department has always been on the third floor and he just misremembered it.
He enters the third floor's corridor of offices and, again, the door where his father's office would be located—if this were the right floor—is the only open door in the hall. And, as he pokes his head inside, there's no one there.
Inside the office, things are situated just about the way he remembers, and he has a very clear picture of his father's office then. If Sy had moved from the second to the third floor, he made sure to keep things looking as close to the old office as possible. His father was always a creature of habit—a trait Simon also recognizes in himself. The chair and the desk are the same. The desk is exactly as he remembers it, covered with stacks of files, loose papers and books. Everything is situated in neat piles, but it has the look of a mess just the same.
On his bookshelf there are books, obviously, but in front of a row of books, on the middle shelf, are three photographs. The photo frame in the center, which used to be filled with a family photo taken in the mid-eighties, is now occupied by a portrait of Susannah. It's not professionally taken. It looks like a picture he might have taken himself. She's looking into the camera like she's looking at someone she loves. It's a very nice picture to have on an office bookshelf—the kind of photo that acts as a reminder that someone out there loves you. On either side of Susannah's portrait are photos of Simon and Maggie. Of course, these photos have changed, too. Simon remembers these photos changing with every school year, but now they are stuck on senior photos from high school. It makes him sad to think he's spent all these years looking at Simon and Maggie in this state of arrested development. To think that he's been greeted every day by a picture of Simon from nearly twenty years ago, is sad somehow. It's a reminder to Simon of how much distance had grown between them, and how strange it must've been for him to look at his son again yesterday after so many years had passed.
Beside the bookshelves are stacks and stacks of bank boxes—filing boxes for old notebooks and papers. They all have dates written on the side in his father's hand. Some have titles Simon recognizes from his father's many books of poems, and others have names that Simon doesn't recognize. There must be twenty boxes stacked five high that go all the way behind the office door. According to the dates, there look to be a couple of stacks of boxes missing.
Simon hears something in the hallway but ignores it. He's scanning some of the books on the bookshelf when he hears a clang at the door. He looks over at a young woman standing in the doorway. She has one hand on her chest and the other holding a truck dolly.
"Hello," Simon says.
"Hi," she says, staring at him in a state of perpetual surprise. It would be strange to be stared at like this if he hadn't gotten pretty much the same stare from Susannah yesterday.
"I'm Simon," he says, taking a step toward her with his hand extended.
She reaches out tentatively and absently allows him to clutch her limp hand.
"Is he…?" she asks as a tired tuft of hair falls over her right eye, causing the slightest disturbance in her cool, blue eyes.
He looks at her, her hand still in his hand, and wonders what she's asking him. "Is he what?"
"Is he alright?" she asks, finally pulling her hand back from his grasp.
"Oh, yeah. I mean, no. He's very sick, but he's resting at home."
"Oh, good. I thought that… You know."
"Right. No. He just asked me to come and take care of a few things."
"Anything specifically?" she asks.
"No, not really. I work at a university library back east and he wanted me to… Actually, I have no idea what he wanted me to do. He just asked me to come see his assistant. Is that you?"
"In a manner of speaking, I guess. I'm Laura," she says, and smiles. She has the kind of smile that is alarmingly beautiful. It's so bright that he almost wonders if it's genuine, but she seems so sincere with it that it's impossible to doubt her warmth. She holds out her hand again, but then immediately pulls it back. Her face reddens. "Sorry. We already did that part."
"So, what am I doing here? Do you need me to look at anything in particular?"
"He really didn't tell you much, did he?" she asks and stares at him again with those big, young eyes. "Has anyone ever told you that you're the spitting image of your father?"
"It doesn't come up a lot, no. But it's been a recurring theme lately."
"No, really," she says, and walks over to the bookshelf and pulls down one of Sy's books, Slither and the Sea, and shows him the back cover, where a photo of his dad is staring back at him.
He looks at this picture of his dad from over twenty years ago and is taken aback at the resemblance. It's strange. He knew he looked like his father, but he didn't realize how striking the resemblance was until he sees himself staring back at him from the past.
"It's true. He was about my age when this book was released. I haven't looked at this book in years."
"You should. It's one of his best."
"Can I keep it?"
"Sorry, no. Everything in here has to be catalogued."
"Everything? Even his personal effects?"
"Yes, everything. I thought this was your line of work."
"No, can't say I've ever catalogued someone's office before."
"We'll review it, catalog it, and decide what's necessary to hold."
"Who's we?"
"That's what your dad should've told you," she says, taking the book from him and placing back on the shelf. Then she grabs one of the file boxes from the stack nearest the bookshelf and places it on the truck dolly.
"Let me help you with those," he says, and grabs a file box, places it on top of the one she just sat down. "Why don't you fill me in on the things he should've told me."
"The job to review and catalog all this stuff has been set aside for me and one other person. Your dad wanted both people to be intimately familiar with him and his work. So, he arranged for the university to draw up contracts for me and…"
He looks at her, and she can see the realization come to him as he drops a third box on the dolly. "But I have a job. I can't drop everything and move…," He trails off and kind of just stares off at nothing in particular.
"You should talk to your dad," she says, smiling at him.
He turns his stare toward her now.
"What?" she asks.
"You're smiling."
"Am I?" she asks as if she didn't know, though the smiling doesn't end. She's amused by him for some reason.
"You know I'm not going to be able to do this."
"Sure," she says, grabbing the handle of the dolly. She pulls it through the doorway of the office and down the hall. "But it sure would be nice to have a partner through the process."
"Let me get that," he says, following her down the hall.
"No, it's alright. I'm a big girl. I can handle it. Besides, this isn't your job… Not yet," she says, pulling the file boxes out of the faculty hall and into the main hall, all without once taking her eyes off of him.
Watching her as she maneuvers down the hall, she is a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. Her long dark hair has a way of framing her face that gives her features a stunning clarity. Even when a tuft of her hair swings across her right eye, as it seems to make a habit of doing, the clumsiness of it only adds to the flawless frame her hair makes for her face. She blows a futile breath to get the tuft out of her eye only to watch it swing back down.
The jeans and baggy university sweatshirt she's wearing seem like fashionable choices on her young, thin body. And though they may seem like a strange choice for summer, the university does seem to keep this building on the cold side.
&
nbsp; She is an objectively attractive woman, but she is young—maybe mid- to late-twenties, and, at thirty-four, Simon knows to keep his hope at a distance. But it's hard not to wonder what it would be like to spend the next few months with this beautiful woman. But, as soon as he entertains the idea, Rachael pops into his head. And Rachael is the last thing he wants to have in his mind at the moment. So, he focuses again on Laura's face—her eyes still disarmingly fixed on his eyes.
She pulls the boxes into a classroom, and he follows her inside. There are already a couple stacks of file boxes by a desk in the front of the room, and two large, empty conference tables where students' desks should be. There are no chairs around these tables.
"What is this? Where are we?"
"This is my office, temporarily," she says, sitting the dolly down by the desk at the front of the room.
"And what are you going to do here?"
"This is where I'll start the work of going through all these boxes. Then, when the summer is over, they've promised me some space in the library."
"And you're going to go through these boxes, the ones still in his office, along with all the other stuff in there."
"Right."
"Is that everything?"
"I'm not sure."
"What do you mean?"
She looks at him. Her face changes a bit as if something has just occurred to her. "I don't know what's coming after… Well… I'm not sure," she says as her voice cracks.
"Right."
"Sorry. It's been a difficult few weeks," she says, widening her eyes in that strained way people do when they're