A Lot of People Live in This House by Bailey Merlin

Author:Bailey Merlin [Merlin, Bailey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913770693
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

AFTER DINNER, RACHEL TAKES Job back up to her room, pressing him against her ear so as to not miss a single breath. She’s eager to make up for all the words they lost to their roommates. She wants to know how he is, really. The borders closing and global air travel being suspended have exceeded even her greatest “what-if” expectations. If she was still in therapy, her anxiety would have a few choice I-told-you-so’s for her therapist. Not that it would help her feel better. Being right rarely feels as good as she thinks it should.

Yes, she knew something would happen while they were apart, but it doesn’t feel good to open and close the door to their bedroom without him in it. Any room without him in it doesn’t feel quite right, which has been true for going on a decade now. Job just makes rooms better.

She met Job a few months after the accident. She’d spent most of her spring semester in the library, hiding from her roommate, who was a very sweet girl but gave Rachel a hangdog expression that made her want to jump from the clocktower. With each passing day, the thought of being an on-campus urban legend became more and more tempting, so she kept herself tucked in the back corner of the library’s first floor, where crying was not so uncommon a sight to warrant concern.

Job had been tasked with repairing a wood buttress that had been damaged in a post-game celebration or post-game loss riot; Rachel was never sure one way or the other. She’d seen him on campus a few times, repairing chipped woodwork and replacing rotted doorways with a much older, much shorter man who had a gut the size of a beach ball and a handlebar mustache straight out of the ‘70s. When she saw the young man in the library that afternoon, she expected to see the old man, too, but he was alone. Not that it made any difference to Rachel, but noticing small things outside of herself was a good way to remember that she was real. Or at least that was what the school-appointed therapist had said after Rachel had mentioned her out-of-body experiences. “Grief can be unkind to the body,” she was told, though her body was relaying the same message loud and clear. It had been three weeks since she had been able to sleep for more than two hours at a time. She hallucinated, her head hurt from dehydration, she had lost twenty pounds. Her body was a disaster, a testament to grief.

As she stared down into whatever book was in front of her, the grief let her know that it was not sated with her paltry suffering. Her grief let her know that it would wring proper tribute from her in the middle of this library. It would make itself known over the pages of a borrowed book, smudging words that she didn’t recognize. Her throat constricted so tight that it was hard to drink air.

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