The Archivist's Last Flight

I came back to Harlan on a Tuesday in October, forty-eight years after I left it for flight school and four months after I flew my last commercial flight, and the first thing I did, before the lawyer, before my mother's boxes of dishes, was walk into the Harlan Memorial Library.

The doors were still open, which surprised me, because the notice in the paper said the building was condemned and closing for good on Friday. The marble floors were the same, worn pale in the middle where a hundred thousand feet had walked, and the smell hit me right in the chest, old paper and dust and a little bit of lemon polish, and I stood there in the entry hall like an idiot for a good minute before anybody noticed me.

There was nobody at the front desk. Just a cardboard sign that said BACK IN 10 in handwriting I didn't recognize, and the quiet was so complete I could hear the old radiators ticking. I wandered down toward the stacks, and that's where I found her, up on a step stool with a box of maps on the floor beside her, reshelving them one at a time like each one was made of glass.

She was grayer than I remembered, and heavier, and she wore her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and when she turned around and looked down at me she didn't say anything for a second, just held a rolled map against her chest.

"Well I'll be damned," she said finally. "Naomi Leach."

"Hello, Camille."

"I read about you in the paper, your mother's estate, I'm sorry, I meant to send a card and I never did." She came down off the stool, slow, one hand on the shelf. "What are you doing here?"

"I grew up here. I figured I owed the building a visit before they knock it down." I shrugged, and my hands didn't know what to do so I put them in my coat pockets. "I didn't know you'd still be here."

"Forty-six years, can you believe it. I started shelving books the summer after high school and they never managed to get rid of me." She looked at me a moment longer than was comfortable. "You're retired now, I heard that too. The whole town heard it. Naomi Leach, twenty-two thousand hours, back home to roost."

"That's what the paper said, twenty-two thousand hours."

"They got your haircut wrong though, you look better than the picture." She said it plainly, the way she used to say things, and then she seemed to hear herself and turned away and picked the map back up. "Do you want the tour? It's the last week, might as well see where the body's buried."

I said yes, of course I said yes, and she left the maps where they were and led me through the east wing, talking the whole time about the roof leak over periodicals and the boiler that the county wouldn't pay to fix and the elevator that had been broken since 2019.

"They could have saved it," she said, patting a plaster column as we walked. "The engineers said the bones are good, it's all cosmetic, but cosmetic costs money and Harlan would rather build a strip mall. Three more days and I box up forty-six years of my life."

"Where does it all go?"

"Some to the county archive, some to the university, some into a dumpster, if I'm honest. There's stuff in this building nobody's opened since the fifties." She stopped at a heavy oak door with a brass plate that said RARE BOOKS, and took a ring of keys out of her cardigan pocket. "You remember this room?"

Did I remember it. I remember being eighteen and standing in this room with her, the two of us shelving folios in the back corner where the camera couldn't see, and I remember the way the afternoon light came through the one high window and I remember kissing her, or her kissing me, it was always blurry in my memory who moved first, and I remember that we never spoke about it again because I left for flight school in September and she never wrote and I never wrote.

"I used to dream about this place," I said, and it came out before I could stop it. "For years. I'd be in a hotel in Frankfurt or somewhere and I'd dream about these shelves."

"Is that right," she said, and her voice was very even, and she busied herself with the key. The lock was stubborn and she had to lean her shoulder into the door, and inside the room it was dim and cold and smelled even more like old paper than the rest of the building. "Well. It dreams about you too, probably. The place remembers everybody who ever cared about it."

"Does it remember everybody?"

"The ones who mattered." She walked ahead of me between the tall shelves, trailing her fingers along the wood, and I followed like I was eighteen again and had no idea what I was doing.

* * *

The tour took about an hour, and by the end of it we were at the back of the building, past the microfilm room, down a short corridor I'd never been in before, to a door with no sign at all.

"My workroom," she said, unlocking it. "Nobody comes back here, not even the board. I warned you I'd show you where the body's buried."

It was a windowless room, small, with a single green banker's lamp on a big oak table and a wall of small wooden drawers, the kind that card catalogs used to be, except these were full of photographs. She turned on the lamp and the whole room went green and gold and I felt something in my stomach I hadn't felt in decades.

"What is all this?"

"The collection nobody wants. Photographs of Harlan, going back to 1902. I've been cataloging them for thirty years. This drawer is 1931 to 1936." She pulled one open and took out a folder and laid four photographs on the table under the lamp. "This one's the library the year it opened. This one's the flood. This one, I don't know who any of these people are."

They were people on the library steps, 1934 by the pencil note on the back, a crowd of squinting faces in hats, and I bent close over the lamp to look, and when I straightened up she was standing nearer than she'd been, and I could smell her hair, soap and something a little like cedar.

"You have good hands," she said abruptly. "I always noticed that. Even at eighteen, you had pilot's hands before you ever flew anything."

"Camille." I reached out and touched her wrist, just laid my fingers on it, over the thin skin and the blue veins, and I felt her pulse going faster than a woman her age ought to let hers go. "I used to dream about this place, I told you. But it wasn't the shelves I was dreaming about."

She didn't pull away. She stood there under the green light and looked at my hand on her wrist and then up at my face, and for a long moment neither of us said anything, and the radiator in the wall ticked like a clock.

"You left," she said finally, very quietly.

"I know."

"Forty-eight years, Naomi. You got on a plane in September and I watched the taillights of your mother's car all the way to the county line and I never got so much as a postcard."

"I know. I'm not going to tell you it was flight school and it was hard, because plenty of people do hard things and still write letters. I just didn't know how to be that girl, so I became a different one, and it took me about thirty years to figure out the second one was worse." My thumb moved a little on her wrist, without my meaning it to. "I'm sixty-six years old, Camille. I retired in June. I have nowhere to be for the first time in my life, and the first place I walked was here."

She turned her hand over under mine, slow, so that our palms were together, and she looked at our joined hands like they were one of her photographs, some old thing that needed dating and cataloging.

"Three days," she said. "The building closes Friday. My last day is Friday. And then they take this room apart and everything in these drawers goes into boxes."

"Then we've got three days."

"That's not very long to make up for forty-eight years."

"It's longer than we had this afternoon in 1978." I said it and then my heart was pounding, because she laughed, a short real laugh, the same laugh I remembered from the back of the rare-book room, and she didn't take her hand back.

"No," she said, "I suppose it isn't," and she reached over and turned the banker's lamp down so low the room was nearly dark, just that one green eye of light on the table, and I heard her keys click as she set them down beside it.

"Camille," I started to say, some sensible thing, some apology maybe, and she said, "Hush, Naomi, for once in your life just hush," and I did.

I didn't say a word and she didn't either, and we stood there in the green dark with our hands together, and I could hear my own breathing and hers and that was all, no jet engines, no announcements, no captain's voice, just two old women breathing in a room the size of a closet. I thought about all the sensible things I could still say, that we were both sixty-six, that we'd probably both had knees replaced, that it was four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and then I threw all of it overboard.

"Can I ask you something blunt," I said.

"You usually do."

"That afternoon before I left for flight school. In the rare-book room. Do you ever think about it?"

She was quiet so long I thought she was going to hand me a polite answer, and then she said, "Naomi, I have thought of nothing else for forty-eight years. I catalog photographs of a town for a living and every single day some picture or other walks me right back to that corner. So yes, I think about it. Constantly. It's embarrassing at my age."

"It's embarrassing at mine too," I said, and then I pulled her to me and kissed her.

It was not a gentle old-lady kiss, believe me, it was hard and hungry and a little clumsy, her mouth open against mine, my hand coming up into her hair and knocking a pencil off the table, and she made a sound into my mouth, a low sound, forty-eight years compressed into one syllable, and she pushed me back until