Page 16 of Beneath the Poet's House

Saoirse walks around the quiet house the next morning giddy with excitement, the lines of the poem she stayed up half the night completing whirling around her head like the words of a lover. That is, until her father’s words eclipse them:I’ve got an idea ... how about focusing less on your stupid writing and more on finding a job?

Saoirse sighs. She feels any prospective employer would be satisfied with the “My husband died in January, so I didn’t have the stomach to continue working” excuse, but she also knows her safety net won’t last forever. She tries to recall the location of her computer. She wrote the new poem out by hand, snapping a photo of it on her phone to reread later. Since the poem is in her notebook, her computer should be wherever she left it after transferring the Wi-Fi into her name.

She’s on her way to the kitchen when something catches her eye. A piece of card stock on the small marble table in the foyer, propped against the wall, angled out like a cherished photograph. She walks to the table, resisting the urge to look behind her. She’s alone in the house—no matter what her spooked mind tells her, no matter the presence of this flyer. She lifts the card stock and reads the words printed there. It’s an invitation to a career fair, today at twelve thirty, at Brown University.

There are several bullets beneath the heading, but Saoirse’s fixated on the event’s location. The career fair is intended for Brown Universitystudents. She was a Brown studenttwelve years ago. How had the flyer ended up in her house?

Saoirse’s eyes travel up from the flyer. Slowly, she turns to look behind her, her gaze sweeping from one side of the room to the other. Last night, in a room thick with the honey-sweet scent of candles, Mia had told Sarah Whitman that the new inhabitant of her house needed help. Had the Divine Poet actually intervened?

“Sarah?” Saoirse says softly. “Did you leave this for me to find?”

She feels foolish the moment the words are out. She will take the mysterious flyer as a sign that her luck is changing and get herself to campus. Not because it’s what her father would want her to do, but because sheshouldexplore her options. Mind made up, she hurries to her bedroom to change, donning clothes she hasn’t worn since ...

Since when? Since before Jonathan had stopped seeing her as a person with an identity that was anything other thanhis wife? Since he’d begun speaking to her only about ovulation cycles, and what position she should lie in after sex for his sperm to have the best chance of fertilizing one of her eggs? Saoirse shakes her head violently, willing the thoughts away. Today will be about her future. Not the past. Jonathan’s memory already permeates the Athenæum, the university buildings, the city. He can’t have her mind. Not anymore. She’d given that to him, too, once, and it still wasn’t enough.

An hour later, Saoirse enters Chafee Garden. The area at the foreground of the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library is abloom with powdery goldenrod and cheery helenium. Far more students than she expected mill about. Members of the Brown Band tap their drums and blow animatedly into their horns. So this career fair is a big deal. Saoirse eyes the booth closest to her, and when a pair of young men in suits move away, she steps up to the table.

“Hi there,” says the woman.

“Hello.” Saoirse glances at the materials spread across the tablecloth. Goldman Sachs.Of courseit’s Goldman Sachs. She makes noncommittalsmall talk for several minutes before thanking the woman and moving along.

The names of the tables blend together quickly. Google. Harvard. Microsoft. Does everyone want to work for a Fortune 500 company these days? Saoirse collects a modest number of pamphlets, but if her earlier optimism is a bird, it’s one who’s flown over a body of water too vast for its little wings to handle. After twenty-five minutes, she is ready to go.

The marching band has struck up a strangely somber tune—the horns all melancholy wails and the drums a low, pressurized thudding. She crosses the gardens, trying not to make eye contact with any of the employers positioned alongside the far-right wall as she passes.How disappointing.The rest of the day now looms before her, each hour threatening to last twice as long as the one preceding it. She could look for a job the old-fashioned way: inquire, in person, whether an establishment is hiring. She could go home and crawl into bed. She could ...

She could write.

It’s not the thought itself that causes her to stop abruptly, but that the thought is accompanied with neither anAre you crazy?nor the sudden onset of dread she’s become accustomed to. She is still standing in the middle of the sidewalk when someone careens into her from behind. The binder she’s holding shoots out from under her arm, and the air whooshes from her lungs. A hand grabs her by the elbow, keeping her from tumbling to the ground after the pamphlets and business cards.

“I am so,sosorry,” a deep voice says. “Are you all right?”

Saoirse takes a breath, wincing as the muscles where she was struck twinge, then hurries to collect the various career fair detritus before it can be carried off by the wind. From the corner of her eye, she sees the man who ran into her drop to his knees to help. She wants to tell him not to bother, but he’s already plucking up a piece of card stock printed with a large QR code. Saoirse grabs the last dirt-smudged business card, climbs to her feet, and shoves everything back into the binder.

She turns, and the man’s hand holds out the QR code. The arm of his thick wool peacoat is black and velvety. Saoirse takes the card stock, resisting the urge to mutter to herself that she hadn’t wanted any of this junk in the first place. Finally, she looks up.

Into the face of the man from the Athenæum.

“Shit,” Saoirse squawks and jumps back, unable to help herself. It’s not just that the images from the séance are too fresh for her not to be startled; it’s that, after two previous occasions of running into this man, there’s no way the third can be a coincidence.

“Are you following me?” Saoirse asks. “Did Aidan send you because I wouldn’t talk to him? First the Athenæum, then the coffee shop, then—” She almost saysmy basement last night, but stops herself in time. She needs to keep the upper hand, not sound like some lunatic. “Then today,” she finishes. “What the hell do you want?”

The man shows none of the unsettling intensity he’d displayed on earlier sightings, but he doesn’t manage to look apologetic either. “I don’t know anyone named Aidan,” he says, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. He looks in the direction of Benefit Street. “But I did see you at Carr Haus,” he admits. “We could go there now? I’ll buy you a coffee and exp—”

“No way,” Saoirse interrupts. “I want an explanation now. Why do I keep seeing you everywhere?”

The man scrunches his wide, smooth forehead and runs a hand through hair that is dark and a bit unkempt. He looks a little like the lead in a romantic comedy who’s been waiting on the stereotypically adorable but klutzy woman to clean up his act, and this puts Saoirse on edge even more than her certainty that his running into her wasnotan accident. But then his dark-brown eyes squint in a way that says he fears he’s about to embarrass her.

“I was running to catch up with you after I saw you at one of the booths. I didn’t expect you to come to a complete stop on the sidewalk.” He squints further. “But I was running after you to ask whyyou’vebeen following me.”

Saoirse stares at him, dumbfounded. “WhyI’vebeen followingyou? Are you kidding?”

“You stared me down at the Athenæum so intently that, for a second, I thought I knew you,” he says. He’s animated now, dark eyebrows bobbing, one side of his mouth popping up between words in a nervous half smile. “Then you show up at my regular coffeehouse.” He gestures at the gardens around them. “Now you’re at one of Brown’s career events.” He pauses, shrugging his leather messenger bag higher onto his shoulder. “Are you even a student here?”

Saoirse is still trying to process the one-eighty the conversation has taken. “I’m—” She hates how shrill she sounds, having been put on the defensive. “Iwasa student here,” she huffs. “Areyou? You look old enough to be a professor.”

He gives her that squinty-eyed look again, the one that says he’s sorry she keeps putting her foot in her mouth. And whyhadshe said that? He doesn’t look any older than she is.

“I am a professor,” he says. “An associate one, anyway. In my third year. I’m a member of the fiction faculty for the Literary Arts MFA program. That’s sort of why I thought you were following me. I’ve been warned by colleagues not to be surprised if prospective students attempt to stage impromptu meetings with me, try to get a one-up on the other applicants by showing me their writing sample, that sort of thing.”

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