Chapter 4 The Empty Chair

Blythe Yarrow came to the December meeting straight from a shift, which was the same as coming straight from a battlefield and pretending it had been a bus ride. She was an ER nurse at the county hospital, forty minutes down the valley, and she worked three twelves a week that turned into four more often than she liked. She had learned to eat standing up and to sleep in the forty minutes before a shift and to keep two versions of herself, one for the hospital and one for outside it, and to change between them in the parking lot like a coat. The December meeting was the last before the holiday, so there were cookies, and a small bottle of something Junie had decided was festive, and Annette had brought a wrapped book to give away in a name-drawing. Blythe sat with a cup and let the room wash over her. She had been coming to the circle for three years, since a patient had died on her shift and she had not been able to explain it to anyone she worked with and had not wanted to explain it to her father, and she had found, in the circle, a place where nobody expected her to have a theory. She listened to them argue about *Slow Water*. She laughed once, at Vernon, who had read the whole book and insisted the dam was the hero. She ate two cookies and did not take the wrapped book, which went to Katia. And then, near the end, she said something she had not planned to say. "I saw Romy's car." The room turned. "Saw it where?" Junie said. "On Court Street." Blythe put her cup down. "Three nights ago, on my way in. Twelve forty in the morning. The sign on the door, R. Fraley, and the windows fogged like a house." Nobody spoke. Annette set her hands in her lap in a way that meant she had a sentence ready and was holding it back, which was, for Annette, a kind of grace. "I didn't get out," Blythe said. "I had a shift. I told myself that. But I want to say it here, because I have spent a week telling myself a shift was a reason, and a shift is not a reason, it's an excuse with a time clock, and if I don't say it out loud I'll keep telling myself it." "You could be wrong," Maeve said, gently. "She could have been reading." "At twelve forty, in the dark, in a fogged car, with the engine off?" Maeve did not answer. She knew cars. She knew the difference between a car that was waiting and a car that was living somewhere. She had a husband at home who could not find the bathroom, and she had learned to read small things because the big things were no longer reliable. So had the others, in their own ways. That was the thing about the circle, and it was the thing Blythe loved and sometimes hated: they were all readers. They had spent years training on sentences, and now and then a sentence was a car. "Someone should go," Sadie said. "Someone should have gone in November," Cassie said, and did not look up. There was a small, honest silence, in which several people recognized themselves. "All right," Glenna said, at last, and she stood, and she put one hand flat on the two-doors table the way she did when the room needed a floor. "Here is what we're not going to do. We're not going to arrive at her door as a group of nine with casseroles. We're not going to decide anything for her. And we're not going to pretend we haven't all seen it." "What are we going to do?" Vernon asked. "One person goes," Glenna said. "One person, with a reason that isn't pity. And the rest of us keep the chair. We keep the chair and we don't make a story out of it, and if she comes back next month we pour her tea and talk about the book." "Which book?" Annette said, because January's book was not yet on the list in anyone's hand but Glenna's. Glenna opened the notebook and read out the title, and the room took the title down on whatever it had — a receipt, a phone, the back of a church bulletin Vernon had been using as a bookmark — and the meeting ended the way it always ended, with cups stacked and coats found and the bell over the door. Outside, snow had started, fine and steady, the first of the year. Blythe stood on the sidewalk with her keys in her hand and watched it come down on Court Street. Court Street was where the library was, and the maple, and the lot. She thought: I go in at eleven. I come out at seven. I could take the long way. She took the long way, and the car was not there, and she stood at the wheel in the empty lot for a while feeling the particular uselessness of having been brave one day too late, and then she drove in to work, and the night was a hard one, and the woman who came in at four with chest pain because she was afraid and alone lived, and Blythe was still not sure whether she had done anyone any good at all. --- The January night was the coldest of the winter, and Romy Fraley was in the library when they came to lock up. She had not meant to be. She had meant to warm up for twenty minutes in the reading room, which had been the plan for this particular evening and every evening for the better part of three weeks — the gym until they turned the showers off, the library until the last bell, the back of the lot until morning. It was a system. It had order. Order was the only thing she had left that no one could take. But the reading room was warm, and the chair by the radiator was deep, and she had the January book open on her knees, and she was a person who had always been able to fall asleep in a chair with a book. She woke to a hand on her shoulder and a voice saying her name, and the library was dark except for one lamp, and Miss Upham was standing over her with her coat already on and her keys in her hand. "Romy," Miss Upham said. "Sweetheart. It's half past nine." The library had closed at eight. Romy sat up. The book slid off her knees and hit the floor with the flat slap of a thing that had been expensive once. She looked at the dark windows and the neat rows of shelves and the small brass lamp Miss Upham had left on for her, which told her, more clearly than anything else that had happened all winter, that she had not been as invisible as she had needed to believe. "I fell asleep," Romy said. It came out small. She hated that it came out small. She was forty-four years old and she had a magnetic sign on her car that said *Cleaning Services*, and she had run that business for nine years, and she had cleaned the houses of half the people in this town, and she sat in a chair in the town library and said, *I fell asleep,* and heard herself become someone who needed to be spoken to carefully. Miss Upham sat down in the next chair. She did not ask. She had run a library for twenty-nine years, and she knew the difference between a question and an invitation, and she waited, and after a while the invitation was accepted. "My car's in the lot," Romy said. "I've been sleeping in it since October. My cousin's couch was September. Before that, the apartment, and before that, the house with Neal, and now it's the car in the lot of the library, which — " She stopped. She had started to laugh and it had caught on something and turned into the other thing, and she put her hands over her face, and Miss Upham put a hand on her back and said nothing at all, which was the correct thing to say. After a moment, Romy said the sentence she had been carrying since October, which she had not said to her cousin or her ex-husband or her mother, and which she had especially not said to the book circle, whose chair she had not filled in four months because she could not bear to sit in a warm room on a Sunday and then go back out into the cold in front of them. "I didn't want them to know," she said. Miss Upham nodded slowly. "They already know, I think," she said. "Not the details. Just the shape. People know the shape of a thing even when they don't know the name of it. That's a small mercy. It means you don't have to do the work of telling them twice." Romy took her hands down from her face. "Glenna called the house," Miss Upham said. "This morning. She asked me whether the reading room was warm. Which is a question no one has ever asked me in twenty-nine years, and which was not about the reading room." Romy looked at the floor, at the book, at the lamp. ---