Chapter Two

All in one place

I felt my knees begin to give out and the blood drain from my face. My mind refused to process Cynthia’s words; I shook my head, as though it would dislodge the foreign concept and shove it back into unreality. “Magdalena” and “passed away” were not words meant to be spoken with the same breath.

Before I could manage to speak, Cynthia was out of her chair, her arm slid around my waist, walking me back into the unlit, currently unoccupied dean’s office, an office with actual walls and door. She shoved me gently into a chair, stepped back out for a moment, and then returned, closing the door firmly behind her, and handed me a can of soda.

“Sip this,” she instructed. “You’re in shock.” I didn’t disobey. The lukewarm Dr. Pepper slid obediently down my throat, the sugary metallic taste coated my tongue, the carbonation tickled the insides of my cheeks and shocked me back into myself, into reality, this new reality where Maggie was dead. I shook my head slightly to myself. No.

“Katie, I’m so, so sorry. No one was supposed to find out like this, especially not you. A departmental email went out, and I know that Harvey tried to reach a few people by phone, but I guess he didn’t get through. I know how close you were. I’m really sorry.”

She wrapped her hand around mine, sandwiching them up against the can. Her eyes pulled at the corners. She was close to tears herself. I knew she hadn’t known Maggie well—Cynthia had only transferred over to our department as the head admin last year from the Math Department—but she was perceptive, and she ran the place as tightly as it could be run, and no one asked for this kind of thing to happen. She must have been dealing with basically all of it herself, over break, and she was still managing to be sincere.

“How did it happen?” I asked quietly, though I didn’t really want to know. I felt like I owed it to her to say something.

“It was quick,” she said. “It was the evening of the Thursday of finals week, or so they think. It had rained a lot that day, first time this season. Remember?”

“Right, right,” I murmured. I didn’t actually remember. Finals week tended to become a blur of grading and desperate emails from both students and administrators—and now, just to add a new fun layer, occasional bouts with the online grading system.

“She was in the parking garage. The pavement was slick. She slipped and fell. Hit her head. Campus police found her the next morning when they did their rounds. She’d probably been there since seven-thirty or so, but the doctor said it was almost certainly instantaneous, no pain. She probably had no idea what happened until it was all over. Take another sip, Katie.”

I sipped. And then I nearly started laughing at the idea that Maggie ever found out what happened when it was all over, given the circumstances, but fortunately I saw the small cross around Cynthia’s neck before I did. I sipped again. I tried to remember what I’d been doing that day, that evening, that very minute when Maggie’s feet had slid out from underneath her as though it were a puzzle that, if solved just right, would allow me the chance to reach back through the fabric of space and time and catch my friend.

(I’d finished my grades the next morning; borrowed Sam’s laptop shortly after. Just for the record. No wonder I’d missed the email. And the phone call. For some reason, this made me feel slightly less guilty, as though I needed an alibi for a freak accident.)

The door cracked open. “Hello?” a male voice said. “Is someone in here?”

Cynthia patted my knee and moved to the door, but I stood quickly. “We’re just leaving,” I said firmly. Despite my teary eyes and the dim light, it was clearly the dean, and I didn’t need to be marked in his mind as the adjunct who cried in his office right before interviews began. I made my way past them both, head down, picked up my things from the hallway where I’d inadvertently abandoned them, and, jaw clenched against any further tears, walked blindly out of the departmental office.

I made it as far as the fountain in front of the library before I stopped, nearly collapsed onto the bench edge of the concrete pond, and allowed my knees to finally begin shaking.

Gone. Maggie was gone.

And that was it, really, then. It was over before it even really began. Without Maggie on my side, there was no possible way I could survive the trial by fire of a hiring committee. And without that job, I was fucked; I couldn’t move back east. I wouldn’t even be able to afford the plane ticket without burning my credit to the ground even more, and I wouldn’t go back to Sam, even if he would have been willing to help, which was far from guaranteed given the way that I’d not only burned, but completely obliterated, that bridge as I left town. This was it. I’d have to drag out eviction for as long as I could, or figure out how to live in my car while staying clean enough and sane enough to keep my job (something that wasn’t even novel enough any longer to snag me a book deal, adjuncts living in cars already having been featured in The New York Times), talk my way onto another campus, and lock myself back into the 80-hour weeks that would allow me to survive but prevent me from doing any of the unpaid work that might make me stand out enough to be hired full time. Maybe I’d be able to break even on gas. Maybe I’d even find someplace else to live, someplace cheaper, the Central Valley maybe, if all the jobs out there hadn’t already been scooped up by other Bay Area financial refugees. I’d gambled everything. I’d lost.

And I’d have to do all that without Maggie.

Grief slammed back into my chest, stealing my breath, and I had to bite the insides of my cheeks this time to keep it from returning as racking sobs. Not here, I told myself, forcing my chin up, swallowing the lump in my throat. Not here, not now.

Monitoring my breath, I leaned back on my palms on the abrasive concrete, shoving my system, as quickly as I could, back towards neutral, and I took in the place that had owned me for the past five years. The campus I had loved to the point of incredible stupidity. The library behind me, and where I sat, the concrete moat of a duck-pond-cum-fountain in front of it, hyper-chlorinated and inclined to smell like bird shit. The couples awkwardly flirting by the steps. The couples less-awkwardly, but twice as urgently, making out up against a fence. The clueless kid with the cricket bat who nearly whacked me with it as he walked by. The stuccoed, cracking buildings out of the 1970s, the struggling trees and shrubs, the tumbleweeds of torn Flaming Cheetos bags.

I could see the attempts at beauty. I could also see where each had failed.

I was so wrapped up in my own emotions that I didn’t even see Lucy Alvarez, one of my true colleagues, another long-term adjunct, until she was nearly halfway across the quad. Didn’t see her, that is, until she’d given me a tiny wave and I, automatically, had smiled and waved back.

I regretted acknowledging her immediately. Lucy was a good teacher and a more than adequate, if sometimes overeager, colleague, and we were friends of a kind, the kind who only really chatted at work and almost always about professional things, despite her best efforts. She had been on campus several years longer than I had, and she had always wanted to be one of Maggie’s mentees, but if she had ever made that happen (which I doubted), she’d been picked up and dropped again before I arrived. I knew she often wondered why I was the one who’d gotten Maggie’s time and attention, and not her, but she was too polite to ask directly. She looked, in that moment as she hurried over to where I sat, as though she was brimming with sympathy, and hers would be harder than most to stomach, but it was too late. She’d arrived.

“Katie! Oh my god, I’m so sorry about Magdalena, I really am!”

I sighed and stood, dutifully accepting her half-hug, only capable of feeling gratitude for the fact that she hadn’t been the one to break the news. Before I could open my mouth, much less come up with any sort of response, she continued, squinting up at me. “Did you get your application in?”

Lucy was a small woman, just over five feet, small and pretty with olive skin and shoulder-length, wavy, black-brown hair, hard to pin down age-wise, though I knew she had to be at least in her mid-forties. Her mother was Greek and her father Mexican, she’d once told me at a department event shortly after we first met, in what felt like a strange bid at sharing confidences. I’d smiled and nodded, neglected to answer the unspoken question and share my own ancestry, and then immediately saw someone else I needed to talk to. It wasn’t that I had much of anything to hide; my own background wasn’t anything more interesting than some sort of Scandinavian-Anglo-Saxon mix with just enough Spanish to kill my chances at blonde ambition and keep me shorter than five foot seven. It was that, even then, I recognized Lucy as a type: she traded in information. It was part of what made her such a good work friend (and why I made sure to keep her as one, if at arm’s length)—she knew everything about everyone. It was also why I rarely gave her any substantive information of my own. We were, I never completely forgot, in direct competition for any tenured slot that might arise.

I’d never known her to forget that fact, either. It made her sudden concern over the state of my application a little strange.

“I did,” I said. “Submitted it at the end of last semester.”

“Oh good. I was worried that you might be stalled out by, you know. Emotions.” She waved a hand vaguely towards the fountain when I didn’t respond. “Me too, of course, we all are, but I hear that the hiring committee isn’t slowing down at all.”

“Right. I didn’t expect that they would.” I hadn’t actually stopped to give it any thought in the ten minutes in which I’d known of Maggie’s death, but I didn’t hesitate in my response. They wouldn’t. There would be appropriate expressions of grief, etcetera, but nothing by way of a delay. Usually, academic departments were more than happy to tack days or weeks onto bureaucratic timelines, but with a hiring committee, there was always the very real risk that any delay could mean someone in administration might use that time to rethink the decision to allocate funding for a new tenure-track position in the first place. Besides, Maggie hadn’t even been on this committee.

“Neither did I, but you never know. Stranger things have happened, and Harvey was fairly close to her, at least as far as I could tell.” She raised an eyebrow at me, subtly turning a statement into a question, if I chose to hear it that way.

Harvey was our constantly-put-upon departmental chair, a middle-aged man whom Maggie always found—had always found, I internally corrected myself, and felt my stomach twist—to be just good enough for the work he did. Useful, in a word. But of course I wasn’t going to tell Lucy that. Instead, I just shrugged. “Hard to say.”

She let that hang for a moment. A trio of ducks squabbled in the relative silence.

“Do you have your censuses in? Is it censuses? Or censi? I never know how to pluralize things like that.”

“Oh shit,” I said, “I completely forgot about those.” I’d left the office without ever actually sitting down to a computer.

“Oh, no, sweetie, of course you did! It’s totally understandable, and the system has been impossible lately anyway, so you can always blame it on that. But you really should get those going, with all this on the table.”

“All this? Beyond the usual?” I raised my own eyebrow—or brows, really. I have never figured out how to solo that one, to my chagrin.

“Yes, Katie,” Lucy said, crisply. “Very much beyond the usual. This process is going to move fast, and the last thing you need to do is slip up when someone might actually remember. Even before we lost Magdalena, even after they hired Charles, the fines and penalties were becoming a real issue, and they’re going to have to take care of their faculty ratios now. There are too many of us working part time. They’ll have to move fast to have the candidate confirmed, and,” she licked her lips, just a flick of the tongue, and leaned in, placing a hand on my sleeve to pull me closer in, “you know as well as I do that this job description this time is you, Katie. It really is. Developmental English, the tutoring center, a few other things.” She waved a hand again, but this time, with authority. “You check all the boxes. You need to stay focused.” She placed a hand on my wrist. “I know Magdalena would have wanted you to.”

With that, for perhaps the first time since I’d known her, Lucy left before I could come up with an excuse to end the conversation.

I was still standing there watching her go, like someone in a low-budget TV-movie, when she turned and waved just short of the library entrance. “See you at the meeting this afternoon!” she called back. And then the building swallowed her whole.

For one bright moment, as I stood there in the wavering sun that had managed to slip past the cloud cover, the fountain gurgling, the ducks complaining, that cricket ball cracking against the bat, the giggling couples passing by, my breath caught, the world shifted for the second time that day, and I allowed myself to consider that maybe Lucy was right. Maybe it was my time. I let myself feel, just for a moment, how much I loved this place, these people, this work, let myself imagine how incandescently right it would feel to be a permanent, recognized, adequately-compensated part of it. Maggie had wanted it for me. Maybe she still did, somewhere, even though she was gone from here. Especially since she was gone from here. She told me often that we were good for each other, her and me, this place, that she would leave me as her legacy, and a wave of deep, potent hope spilled over me. It was most likely futile hope, I knew. But I couldn’t stop it.

Just then, the sun slipped away and the rain began again. It was just a few drops on my shoulders at first, but then the sky opened up, and I grabbed my things as quickly as I could and ran, not to the library, where Lucy had gone, and not to my next classroom, which wouldn’t be free for another ten minutes, but to the administration building, a door on the side with a printed sign taped up in the window: NO STUDENTS ALLOWED PAST THIS POINT. A professorial version of a gender-specific tree house; the campus mailroom.

Between classes, this place was a literal madhouse, crammed full of professors standing in front of their slot along the wall of mailboxes, absorbed in their fliers, oblivious to their ten nearest neighbors in the last-name-lineup who needed them to move. Everyone had a box here, from the newest adjunct hire to the tottering tenured guy from philosophy who looked like he’d turn to dust if he stood too close to the venting end of the copy machine.

But that day, I’d timed it right; the room was nearly empty, and as the door closed softly behind me, blocking out the rainy-chaos of the quad, I took what felt like my first deep breath of the day, one of dry, warm, toner-scented air.

“Jessica?” I called out to the room, trying to keep my voice even.

“Yes ma’am?” a voice called back. “Is that who I think it is?”

“It’s Katie. Can I come hide for a few?”

“Katie? Really? I’d nearly lost all hope! Come on back. There’s a mostly-clear chair here, just for you.”

In the back corner, partitioned by one of the final rows of mailboxes and a six-foot-tall cubicle wall, was Jessica Torres’s domain. She ran the mailroom. She was a dyed redhead with dirty blonde roots who favored rockabilly dresses that emphasized her zaftig figure, or oversized video game t-shirts and jeans that, she told me, essentially functioned as a disguise for anyone who didn’t know her well. When she wasn’t keeping the mail system running, managing her student employees, or dealing with the various admin tasks that had migrated to her job description (as they will with anyone in academic bureaucracy who actually manages to Get Things Done), she was crocheting under her desk while watching British sci-fi on her laptop or skimming history tomes on the Interwar Period from the library. It was the tragedy of her life, she liked to tell people, that she was stuck here in Silicon Valley and didn’t know how to code—and worse, had no interest in learning. She loved the concept; she hated the reality, barely passed the one computer science class she’d taken as an undergrad, despite entering with the explicit goal of becoming the best woman hacker of her generation.

So she’d gotten her library science degree instead and finagled her way from a part-time position in the stacks ten years earlier to a salaried, classified position with reasonable hours, decent pay, good vacation, and an actual retirement account. The condo just blocks off of downtown Mountain View, paid in full, that her great-aunt had left her several years ago had been the only thing missing from her life, and she still liked to cackle about how the engineer fuckers couldn’t price her out now, no matter how much they wanted her place, no matter how much it offended their sense of decency to have a woman hanging around whose long-term plan didn’t involve marrying an engineer’s salary.

She was in no way in any kind of competition with me, nor I with her, and we hit it off almost as soon as I stepped foot into the mailroom for the first time. She was probably the closest thing I had on campus to an actual friend.

In that moment, I needed an actual friend.

I made my way around boxes of printer paper, scooped an errant stack of fliers from the extra chair, dumped them onto an already-creaking side table, and sat down. I was hemmed in by a filing cabinet on one side and the cubicle wall on the other, and in the state I was in, this counted as cozy. I felt myself relax, just an inch or two.

Jess tugged out her earbuds, swept her bangs back from her forehead, and raised an eyebrow. Her lipstick was a shade of berry, vivid and pristine, and one corner of her mouth pulled back, wryly, as she took me in. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look so good. And where the fuck have you been?”

“What do you mean, where have I been?” I said. “It was break. I was doing break things.”

“Right. You were doing break things and you were so busy you completely ignored all five of my texts and two actual phone calls. Did Sam’s family kidnap you and force you into a winter wonderland somewhere? Because I was really getting worried.”

“You texted me? I’m really sorry. My phone must have been eating them.”

“At first I started to think that you didn’t like me anymore, and then I started to worry about your general health and safety. I had this picture of your body left in some disgusting creek and my next career move having to be some true-crime podcast investigating the death of my work bff. Depressing shit, even for Christmas.”

I sighed. “So about that creek thing.”

“Don’t tell me you actually got murdered and left in a creek.”

I smiled at that, just a bit. “No, but my phone did. Somewhere off of 280. I think it’s all creeks over there.”

“Your phone got murdered and left in a creek?”

“I left Sam.”

“Oh shit. You didn’t.”

“Yeah,” I said, attempting to lean back in the chair. It didn’t budge, so I settled for scootching myself back a few inches and crossing one leg over the other. “I did.”

“What happened?”

Time is funny. If she’d asked me only a little earlier, when I’d first washed up in the Valley like so much rainwater runoff, I would have talked for thirty minutes straight about straight men and expectations and dating sites and cheating—I’d never been cheated on before, and I was furious, furious! But now, a couple weeks in, and with a newer, fresher wound, I paused to consider.

“You know,” I finally said, “I think he was planning his life without me. I think he’d been doing that for a while, ever since he figured out I wasn’t going to happily fall in line with everything he wanted, and just never bothered to share.”

“Share with you, or share with anyone?”

I grimaced. “He was sharing with someone. I’m doing my best to forget her name.”

(It was Taryn, which I remembered because who is even named Taryn? Is that even a name? And in her photo she was blonde and in spandex and next to a bike, holding up a giant metal on a giant fucking ribbon, which I was also doing my best to forget.)

Her eyes widened. “Did you meet her?”

I shook my head. “Nope. Borrowed his computer and found the dating site. Messages, the whole thing. And then I kind of freaked out and left.”

“Didn’t stick around to talk?”

“Didn’t stick around to talk. It’s not like he was talking to me.”

She gave a crisp nod. “Clearly he wasn’t talking to you.”

We sat without speaking for a moment, the rhythmic whir of the copy machine as it went through its maintenance phase at the other end of the mailroom competing with the ticking clock.

“Are you okay?” she finally asked. “I mean, you just left? Did you have a place to go? Do you need a place to stay? I’m in a one-bedroom, technically, but there’s an open plan office with a couch, and you can always crash there.”

I shook my head. “No, no, I’m fine. Thanks. I found a six-month lease in Sunnyvale. It’s crap, but it was also the holidays, and they were slightly more desperate than I was, so it’s going to have to do for now.”

She nodded slowly, a pencil to her lips. Her lipstick didn’t budge. “Okay, then you must have gotten a new phone by now.”

“Yup,” I held it up. “It’s basically a burner. I feel like I’m in some sort of spy movie.”

“Wow, that’s a blast from the past. Okay, open up your contacts and put in my number. That thing has contacts, right?”

“Ha,” I said, pressing my buttons. “Shoot.”

She recited her number. I tapped it in, then texted her. “There. Now you have mine, too. You might be the only one who does. Actually, I probably need to make sure the committee has it…”

“I’m not sure this all really is the best plan, but hey. I’m honored. And this might be the one thing I actually accomplish this morning, so I appreciate you stopping in.”

“That bad?”

She rolled her eyes. “I say this at the start of every semester, I know, but this one really is the worst yet. I think about two thirds of paperwork has now been technically digitized, only no one ever remembers which third is which, and there’s that woman over in administration who refuses to learn how to do anything more complicated than email, so she prints out every single item of business she has to do, does it, and then hands it over to a student aide to put back online.” She shook her head. “I know that there are people leaning on her about it, but I honestly think the only way they’re going to get her to stop is to cut her printing budget in half. Or get rid of the student aides…” she finished, blinking at the thought. “That might actually be the way to go. I don’t think that whatever she’s having them do is in any way approved for work-study, so it might make a good workaround…” She turned to her computer, held up one finger, and typed for thirty seconds. “There. Thanks. Idea sent to the appropriate place.”

“You literally just emailed someone about getting rid of the student aide?”

“Oh no. Can’t be that obvious. I just reminded everyone who does have a student worker that the workers need to submit their time sheets with task codes, and that since things are tight at the moment, we will be evaluating the task codes more closely than in semesters prior. She won’t make any changes, but once the students turn in their forms, I’ll have leeway to ask a few questions. Or someone will.”

“You’re good at what you do.”

“I’m good at what I do. And how’s it going for you so far? It’s been what, two hours?”

“It started out okay. But then I found out that you can miss some pretty horrible things when you don’t check email over break.”

It took a second for the shoe to drop, and her face fell along with it. “Oh shit, Katie. You didn’t know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry. That’s part of why I was trying so hard to reach you, but it’s also kind of why I didn’t push harder. You really just found out today?”

“I really just found out today. I managed to get through the entire break in blissful ignorance.” I took a deep breath and gingerly tapped at the corners of my eyes with my fingertips. My mascara was far from waterproof.

“Here,” she said, fumbling for a box of tissues. “Take this. I’m so sorry.” She paused while I dabbed my eyes and examined the slightly stained tissue. “Are you still going to apply for that open position? I doubt anyone would hold it against you if you didn’t.”

“You know I can’t pull out now.”

“You could. These are really, really unusual circumstances.”

“But when’s the next one going to come? I can’t afford to stay here forever without either a full time position or two other schools on the side.”

“Oh fuck. That’s right. You’re single now.”

“I’m single now.”

“So you’re applying, and Maggie’s out of the picture. Okay. Let me think about this. Your application is already in, right?”

“Yeah. It was due on the 18^th. I submitted it that morning.”

“Okay, good. Last I heard they’re still moving forward on schedule.”

“I figured.”

“But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You show up, you put in even 80% of what you might usually be able to do, and you’ll definitely have the pity vote locked down.”

I snorted. “Pity vote? In what world does that exist?”

“I’m serious. Harvey will keep that in mind. I’m not sure I know who else is on there and what their deal is, but I’ll find out.”

I wasn’t sure what there really was to find out, aside from a list of names, but even knowing that she was going to be poking around for me did, in a small way, help. 

“That’d be great. Thanks.”

“I take it you’re not using your personal email right now?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll send it to your district address and keep it all relatively vague. Get a new one set up if you can.”

“I’ll add it to the list.”

“I’m serious. No one around here is technically savvy enough to track email outside of the system, but the internal stuff is an open book.”

“Okay, okay. I will.”

“Good. They should be announcing interviews soon. Anything else I can do?”

Just knowing someone was on my side, actively on my side, made me tear up again. I reached for a new tissue. “Can you grab my mail? I just don’t want to, you know, no idea who’s going to be out there to run into….”

“On it.”

I kept my eyes on my hands and my hands in my lap, listened as her heels clicked authoritatively over to my mailbox, paused, and then clicked back.

“You sure you haven’t been here yet today?”

“Completely sure. Haven’t been here since last semester.”

“There’s nothing there for you,” she said, sliding back into her seat.

“Is that weird? I mean, two-thirds of everything is supposed to be online right now.”

She chuckled. “Not in this world.”

“Really? Nothing?”

“Nothing. Maybe someone grabbed it for you.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Maybe Lucy was trying to be extra helpful, given the circumstances. God, I hoped not. I didn’t need her going through my mailbox on the off chance something actually important had made its way in there. I glanced up at the clock. “I need to run.”

“Thanks for stopping in. I’m really glad you didn’t get murdered and shoved in a creek.”

I laughed a little at that. “Me too. At least I think.”

On my way back out, I walked past my mailbox. Jess was right—it was completely empty, bereft of all the other detritus in various copy paper colors that every other box around it had in spades. That was weird. It had never happened before.

Weird, however, wasn’t something I could afford to waste time or energy on. I had one more class, and then I had the first English Department Meeting of the semester. Maybe whoever it was who had taken my mail had actually done me a favor and saved me one small chore. With the way things were going, I reminded myself, as I pushed the door open and prepared to run for the next overhang, I couldn’t afford to turn down any favors I could find.