“Worrying a lot about Legionnaires’ disease, I imagine.”
“Exactly. Who would choose to do that? Who would work on one of those floating prisons all year long? Someone like that shouldn’t be taken seriously, is all I mean.”
Jacob didn’t say anything, though he was thinking that at least if he’d signed up for a year on a cruise ship, he could practice his backstroke once in a while.
Ella was stepping widely to avoid the ground in front of the nun’s headstones. “‘Here Lies Sister Mary Sullivan.’ ‘Here Lies Sister Alice McNally,’” she read as she leaped over the graves.
Jacob decided to try one too. “‘Here Lies Sister, Sister, American TV sitcom.’”
She laughed, and he wondered if she even got the joke. But then she said, “TGIF,” as she crossed herself and went along to the next.
“‘Here Lies Twisted Sister, who really aren’t going to take it anymore.’”
“You’re too young to know about them.”
“My dad still has all his old records.”
“And terrible taste, apparently.”
“Hey, speaking of taste, what’d you really think about my poem?”
Jacob had been wondering if she’d have the nerve to ask him face to face. He felt another small swell of pride that she had. “Just what I wrote.”
“But what do you really think? Like, do you think I’ve got what it takes? To be a poet?”
Jacob examined her closely. “You’re going to need a thing. Like white-person dreadlocks. Or a ponytail that goes down to your shins. Or wear a lot of rings maybe. Like an insane, abnormal number of rings.”
Ella frowned. “I was thinking about getting a tattoo.”
“You don’t have a tattoo yet? Oh, God. I’m not sure I can be seen with you, actually.”
Ella looked around perfunctorily to see if the coast was clear. “Do you have one?”
“I have the Chinese symbol for love tattooed on my left ankle.”
“You do not.”
“I can’t show it to you though, because these socks are really complicated.”
“Be serious.”
Jacob quietly used a headstone to scrape a bit of mud off his shoe. There was a poem engraved on it that he had never seen before, though he had been out in the graveyard a number of times and had, in his boredom, looked at all the sisters’ headstones plenty of times before. Somehow he must have missed this one. Or rather he felt as if he had read it before, ages ago in some anthology, for he half-remembered it even as he scanned the simple lines.
It is a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.
A fearful thing
to love, hope, dream:
to be—
to be,
And oh! to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
and
a holy thing,
a holy thing
to love.
At some point as he looked at the inscription, Ella had come over and begun reading it too. She waited for him to say something. He thought about simply saying that he had no way of knowing if she’d be a great poet or not, and that the odds were heavily stacked in the “or not” column, and that even if she managed to find her way to the other side, it meant doing a lot of work for nearly no compensation or recognition whatsoever. But standing there, reading those words on the headstone, he found himself unable to give his usual answer.
“I’ll tell you if you answer one thing for me first. In all seriousness. Why were you on the railing if you weren’t going to jump?”
Ella took a sudden interest in the twigs around her feet, kicking them this way and that.
“It was like being a little kid again. Like not being afraid, at all, of anything. I don’t know if you’ve ever been way out in the ocean like that. I never had been before. But when you’re out there far enough that you can’t see land from any side? It’s just incredible. Like being on a new planet. There’s nothing man-made, just the sun setting and these clouds that are just on fire. Every color imaginable. The whole crayon box. And when the wind picked up, I couldn’t even hear the engines going, or the kids crying down by the pool, or the birds shrieking down by the snack bar… it was just all gone, and I felt like I was in heaven. I wasn’t afraid of anything. It was like I was weightless. But I swear to God, I didn’t want to jump.”
Jacob wanted to hug her, or at least pat her shoulder or rub her head. He settled for holding a hand out and helping her to her feet.
“Did you try telling Dr. McDisney on the boat about it? Or anyone here?”
Ella shrugged. “I didn’t know how to describe it.”
Jacob motioned for her to follow him back. “It is one of the hardest things there is to describe, in my experience.”
“What is?”
“Happiness. All these poems I’m digging up. That’s the theme — that’s what they are.”
Ella spoke slowly, as if worried about mispronouncing something. “I was happy.”
They walked back, slower this time, not afraid of being seen, right up to the side door. Jacob deposited Ella safely back in the common area without a single raised eyebrow (except from Paul, and who cared?). She went and played a game of backgammon with Maura, and the two of them spoke about daytime TV, and while Paul was distracted by a boy attempting to watercolor the windows, Jacob made his way over to the bookshelf and pulled out Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
He felt Ella’s eyes on him as he wrote on a blank page in the back. “Okay, chowderhead, you’re a poet. Write me a poem. ‘Orange Peels.’ Five stanzas. Free verse. Due Friday.”
JULY
Dr. Dorothy Zelig was in charge of the widely advertised new pet therapy program at Anchorage House, which involved taking exceptionally high-strung patients (like Maura) and helping them to relax by playing with dogs. Children who had suffered various abuses at the hands of grown-ups learned to accept love and to care for living creatures. Even if it sounded like hippie-dippy hogwash to him, Jacob had never had any issue with Dr. Dorothy personally until he was once again summoned to Oliver’s office in the middle of the day — this time for exactly the reasons he’d feared. He didn’t know how he’d missed spotting her, and he suspected she’d been hiding down behind some shrubbery on the far end of the graveyard and not at all walking one of the therapy dogs and minding her own business, as she claimed during the meeting in Oliver’s office.
“Gosford had to take a tinkle,” Dr. Dorothy declared, “and that’s when I saw Mr. Blaumann here and the patient Ella Yorke talking suspiciously out by the old statue.”
She spoke as if she were a witness in an episode of Law & Order: Pedantic Bullshit Unit.
“I wasn’t aware,” Jacob said, “that I was talking in an especially suspicious manner.”
Oliver, sitting behind his desk in full-on, serious Dr. Boujedra mode, eyed Jacob wearily. “So you don’t deny that you were with the patient outside the building?”
Jacob considered that it was essentially Dr. Dorothy’s word against his, and that Ella would probably deny everything if they spoke to her about it. But he didn’t want them talking to her about their chat, and giving her the impression that she had committed some sin just by having a conversation. And for another thing, fuck Dr. Dorothy.
“Yeah, no. I don’t deny it. Ella was clearly upset, and it was a nice day, and I thought some fresh air would put things in perspective. Legend has it that nice weather has a calming effect on human beings, but I’m just an orderly so I couldn’t say for sure. Obviously I’d have to do a longitudinal study with multiple placebo groups and write a seven-hundred-page dissertation to be qualified to say so in an official capacity.”