Jacob didn’t need to pack. They kept a drawer full of warm weather clothes for him down there, and his mother always had a new toothbrush waiting in the holder in the guest bathroom. So he carried the book with him out to Oliver’s truck, slid in beside it, and immediately resumed underlining. After several weeks he was still only on Book 15, where the goddess Athena is urging Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, to hurry home before his mother, Penelope, weds one of her many suitors, and there were still nine books, plus a lot of conclusions he meant to draw at the end. If he was going to get it to Ella before she left Anchorage House, he’d have to really dig deep.
“It’s good to see you studying again,” Oliver commented as they drove over the Whitestone Bridge. Out the passenger-side window, Jacob could see Queens rising up across the river, and somewhere beyond it, he knew, was Manhattan. His old apartment and his old notes and his old life, all waiting there for him to return.
“Are you thinking about going back for your doctorate?”
“Is there something like art therapy but with poetry and books? Is that a thing?”
It had been some time since he’d seen Oliver look pleasantly surprised. “Bibliotherapy! Yes, there have been some good articles written about it. I could pull a few together for you if you’d like.”
“Thanks. I’ve been thinking I’d like to try it.”
“You mean start therapy?” He actually shouted this, utterly delighted, as if he’d been waiting ages for Jacob to say it.
Annoyed, Jacob explained, “No, I want to give therapy. I mean, I minored in psychology. I think I’d be good at it. If Sissy Coltrane can do it, I can too.”
They rolled on past the New York Times building, and soon Jacob could just spot the remnants of the old World’s Fair.
“Sissy has a certification in art therapy,” Oliver said after a while.
Jacob snorted. “What Sissy has is an alpaca muumuu and a sense of entitlement.”
Oliver groaned. “This is about Ella Yorke, isn’t it?”
Jacob didn’t answer but went back to annotating the book until soon they were winding along the terminals of Kennedy Airport, heading for Delta.
When they finally got to the curb where all the bag handlers were waiting, Oliver forced a smile. “Well,” he said, handing Jacob a small silver case, “if you want to get certified in bibliotherapy, I think it’d be brilliant. But in the meantime, maybe you can use these.”
Inside the silver case were twenty or thirty business cards that in gilt letters read, JACOB BLAUMANN. MASTER AND COMMANDER OF POETRY. SPECIALIZING IN EPIC WORKS. Jacob turned one over in his hands once or twice and then slid the case into his breast pocket. They were beautiful.
“These are perfect,” he said. “Oliver, really. Thank you.”
He couldn’t think of the last time he’d bought Oliver a present, and certainly not out of the blue, and he considered apologizing until he realized that Oliver was trying to segue into something else.
“Jacob,” he began, “I understand how rough this past year’s been on you, but honestly, we might need to face the fact that this isn’t… I mean perhaps we ought to—”
But Jacob hurriedly kissed him on the lips and pushed the side door open. Once he was out, he tried to close the door, only it got stuck, and he had to stop and open it again.
“It’s jammed on the seat belt there,” Oliver said.
“I can see that.”
“Just push it back inside.”
“I’m—” He bit his tongue and knocked the belt back inside. Then he closed the door again and waved goodbye. Oliver drove the truck off past the police officers, who were directing everyone away. The door was still wobbling. Way down near the very end of the lane, he watched as Oliver stopped, got out, came around, and with a firm hand this time, convinced the door to stay shut.
Jacob kept notating while he was standing in the security line. When the time came, he placed the book into the little gray bucket, set the notepad on top, and sent it off into the X-ray machine. The business card case he placed, with his keys, belt, three pens, shoes, and cell phone, in a separate bucket.
“Excuse me, sir?” the security guard asked him on the other side, as he reassembled himself. The guard looked at the book and thumbed through the notepad at the scribbled foreign lettering and sketched boat diagrams and maps of routes, as if they might contain secret codes or be some kind of blueprint for a bomb. “Is this everything?”
“Yes,” Jacob affirmed. “This is all I have.”
Progress. One whole book finished between boarding and taxiing, and Telemachus and his father were reunited at last, but then about an hour into the plane ride, the pen that Jacob was using to mark up the book began to leak. Cursing, he tried to mop up the spill with the back side of one of Oliver’s business cards.
“Do you need to borrow a pen?” asked the woman next to him. Jacob looked at her for the first time since she’d sat down beside him. With long red nails, she dog-eared her place in Heaven Exists!, a book about a boy who allegedly died, went to heaven, and returned to report about it.
Jacob thanked the lady for the offer. She fished in her purse a moment, until she pulled out a ballpoint BIC.
“Oh,” he said, hesitating, “it’s blue.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s a blue pen. I’ve been writing all my notes in black. Does that sound crazy?”
The woman didn’t say but looked a little nervous as she tucked her pen back away.
“How is that?” Jacob asked, thumbing toward her book.
She made an unmistakable eh face before asking, “What’s that about?”
“This jerk who gets lost at sea for thirty years.”
“Do you have a big test on it coming up?” she pointed to his notebook, which Jacob then covered slightly with his hand.
“No. It’s a gift for someone.”
“Lucky someone,” the woman said.
Jacob went back to his work. By alternating his leaky pens every five minutes, and mopping up the ink spills in between with the backs of the business cards, he made it through the rest of the section just before the wheels touched down in Tampa.
SEPTEMBER
He hardly recognized his parents. It was like Close Encounters down there in Tampa, as if aliens had abducted the weary, grumpy people who had raised him, leaving behind these revitalized, reprogrammed retirees. His father and mother had once sleepwalked through the first half of the day. Now they woke up every morning at five a.m. and ran three miles together. They split a grapefruit for breakfast, and to cool down they swam laps. And they weren’t alone. The predawn world of Tampa was alive with octogenarians in DayGlo tracksuits, power walking down the little fake streets. Their retirement community was twenty acres lost in time, polished Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles parked in every driveway. Men wearing hats. Women stopping to chat on the corner. In the afternoons his father had tennis lessons with a coach who had formerly trained Tennessee teens for the pro circuit. “He’s got trophies in a case in his living room,” Jacob’s mother exclaimed when he joined her for a cucumber peel in the spa. “He thinks he’s Mr. Big Shot.”
His mother had befriended a woman named Lydia in the condo next to theirs, who had been a chef in Chicago for many years and was now showing his mother how to make cheese soufflés and teaching her about wine. “We’re taking a trip out to the Loire Valley next year. Have you ever been to a real vineyard before?” Jacob found himself saying he hadn’t, already mourning a whole childhood of nonexistent soufflés.