Page 32 of Finders Keepers
Mrs. MacDonald hoists the box onto the table in slow motion before dropping it between us with a thud. “I’ll go get the second one,” she says, turning away and shuffling back toward the stacks.
“Are you sure we can’t help?” I ask.
“Did you go to library school?” she barks. As if an MLS degree is required to move boxes from shelf to table.
“Not exactly,” I say. “But I do have a PhD in history, with a minor field in archival studies. If that counts.”
“You do, do you? Huh.” The slightest hint of a smile curves her thin, dry lips. Or maybe that’s a sneer. But she does sound somewhat impressed. “All right. Come with me.”
Quentin and I exchange raised eyebrows as I stand, then follow Mrs. MacDonald into the aisles of shelves holding the library’s special collections. I glance back at Quentin before turning the corner and find him leaning back in his chair, balancing on its rear legs in the exact way that earned him six stitches in the back of his head when we were eleven.
Something that definitely hasn’t changed about Quentin Bell is that he has never once in his life learned a lesson.
In the stacks, I immediately notice something I didn’t when I was younger, simply because I had nothing to compare this collection to: there is absolutely no system of organization here. Some boxes have a word or two scribbled in faded pen on the side of the lid, but others are completely blank. The accordion files interspersed don’t seem to be labeled at all. How on earth does Mrs. MacDonald know what to pull? What’s inside each? The only thing I can think of, which I’m pretty sure is accurate despite how horrifying it is to the part of me that appreciates order and best practices, is that all of the information about the Catoctin Library’s special collections is stored solely in Mrs. MacDonald’s brain.
I’m about to ask her about her organizational system to confirm my suspicions, but she speaks first. “Went to some fancy school to learn how to do this job, did ya? Where are you working now?”
“Um…” I consider lying and telling Mrs. MacDonald I’m still at Malbyrne College, the way I did when I ran into Hanako. Something—fear and awe, probably—keeps me honest, though. “I’m actually between jobs at the moment.”
“Oh, that’s good,” she says, which is a strange response. Was she maybe not listening? Is she hard of hearing? I don’t think so, considering how easily she made out Quentin’s whispering from across the room.
“Um. Is it?”
“Could be,” she responds cryptically, then points to a box on a high shelf. “That one.”
“Okay.” A step stool is already nearby, and I pull it over and climb up. I pull the bankers box from its place while trying not to fall over. I can’t believe Mrs. MacDonald—who must be in her eighties, at least—is still doing this. Sure, I expected her to be here since that’s what I was used to, but I didn’t actuallyexpect her to be here. She’s an institution, I guess. And this place runs on pure institutional memory. Which is impressive but also a big problem.
But notmyproblem. It can’t be. I don’t even live here. I’ll be gone as soon as I can catch a break and get things in order again.
Even if I did have more time, considering how challenging it was to convince Mrs. MacDonald to let me carry a box for her, I don’t think an offer to help her organize the special collections room would be well received.
She trails me to the table, as if, without an escort, I might inadvertently light the box on fire or something. I set it down and she gives me a nod of approval. Then she creakily ducks down and checks beneath the table where Quentin is sitting. It’s clear, of course, but she still shoots him a warning look. Then she shouts, “No pens!,” making us both jump an inch in our chairs, before heading back to her desk in the corner.
I slowly, carefully lift the lid on the first box, and the smell of old documents and dust increases tenfold.
“Hello, old friends,” I whisper to the contents before Iremember I’m not alone. Quentin’s mouth quirks at the corner, but he thankfully doesn’t comment.
It’s what it feels like, though, being back in a library’s special collections room, digging around in a bankers box. Like a reunion with someone I’ve missed maybe more than I ever realized. The same way I felt with Quentin when we met on the porch that first night I was back in Catoctin, if I’m honest with myself (which I prefer not to be).
When I decided to continue in my PhD program instead of accepting the position I was offered at the historical society archives where I interned, I consoled myself with the fact that I would still be spending a ton of time working with primary sources. But once I finished the archival research for my dissertation and it was just a matter of writing the dang thing, my funding dried up and I took the temporary teaching position at Malbyrne to support myself. I finished my dissertation, but just barely. Definitely no time or institutional support for jaunts to the National Archives. My last few years have been so focused on new course proposals and serving on committees and advising while balancing a 4-4 course load that combing through a bankers box feels like a sort of homecoming. One less imbued with the sense of failure than arriving at my parents’ house with all of my belongings, and more with the what-if-things-had-been-different wistful feeling of seeing an old lover after a long time.
I pull out the finding aid—the one that Mrs. MacDonald had me and Quentin put together “if we insisted on digging around in her things.” It was the first work of this sort I’d ever done, and looking at it now…well, it’s far from perfect. It’s also handwritten, on notebook paper. And why is it being kept inside the box? At first I thought Mrs. MacDonald organizedeverything in a way that makes it unintelligible to pretty much anyone who isn’t her because she didn’t know better, but now I wonder if it’s because she wants to make life extremely difficult for anyone who might try to replace her. I highly suspect the latter.
“I assume this kind of thing is old hat for you nowadays?” Quentin asks, gesturing to the finding aid in my hand.
“I haven’t actually done any archival work in a while,” I say. “But I did do a whole lot of it in grad school.” I pause, trying to decipher a spot where my description of the box’s contents smeared under my fist as I wrote. “You know, I almost didn’t finish the PhD. I fell in love with archival management while completing my coursework, and I had a great summer internship that turned into a job offer.”
“What made you decide to turn it down?” he asks.
“Ah…” This is another one of those decisions that, at the time I made it, seemed extremely logical. But now I’m not sure. It may be yet another instance of me making the wrong assumptions, focusing on the wrong things. “My ex. Cole. He said I had too much promise as a scholar, that I wouldn’t have the resources to reach my full potential without the PhD. My faculty adviser agreed that my work was strong enough to be competitive on the academic job market, and I, uh…You may not realize this about me, but I enjoy a challenge.”
“You don’t say?” Quentin grins back at me.
“I knew it would be difficult. There are way, way fewer tenure-track jobs than there are candidates for them. But I thought I could be the exception to the rule if I just worked hard enough. That I would be letting Cole down, lettingmyselfdown, if I didn’t try.”
And I did try. So, so hard, for so, so long. But what I loved about academia was also the worst part of it: There’s no real endpoint. You’re never finished. You published a paper? Great, now get started on the next one. You won an award? Nice, but there are still more out there to work toward. Got a faculty position? Now you get to bust your ass until you have tenure. Got tenure? Bust your ass a bit more and you get a promotion. Or maybe a more prestigious university will come and scoop you up, make you an endowed chair or give you your own institute. There is always more work you can be doing, new benchmarks to set, things to achieve.
It’s easy, I’m realizing, to fall into a trap where it feels like the work can counteract the aspects of it all that actually come down to luck or connections or institutional politics. To believe that, if you don’t succeed, it’s only because you didn’t do enough. Didn’t want it enough.
