Free Whitechurch by Chris Lynch

time you were nine. Oakley, I was absolutely certain you were going to be a poet like your mother.”
    You are not supposed to say that, Ophelia Lennon. Didn’t we understand, you and I, that you were not supposed to say that?
    Absolutely short-circuited. My wires are so frayed at this moment, I am powerless to keep from doing the most insane and inexplicable thing of my life. I lurch forward and try desperately to kiss Ophelia Lennon. And this move is so far from what she, or any other sentient being, would have expected, I almost pull it off.
    For a moment she is confused—though not quite as much as I am. But she gets her hands up between us just in time.
    “What could you be thinking?” She is a little angry, but less than she has a right to be. I’ve got no answer, but I don’t think she really expected one. She shakes her head in wonder. “Listen, Oakley, I loved your mother more than anyone on this earth. Almost as much as you did, and that is a lot because I have still never seen anything in life to compare to the two of you. And it is one of the treasures of my existence, the memory of our days here in this place, the three of us … and I am warmed by the very thought of you….”
    “See,” I say because, apparently, I have not yet completed my descent into madness.
    “No, not ‘see.’ You give me a warm feeling, true enough. But so does Doctor Zhivago, and that has nothing to do with the realities of my life either. It is so clearly time for this to stop. I have watched you, and I have hoped for something else, something better, something bigger, something further, something different. So you will not be a poet. That is a pity, but not necessarily a tragedy. The troubling part is watching you pull inward, and backward. In time. In geography.
    “Turn around, son. Go the other way. Please.”
    The daffodils poem sounds remotely familiar, but it is probably just one of those things like, “I took the road less traveled by,” or “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” You know, stuff everybody picks up by osmosis just because there are teachers and librarians and just general jerks spitting it out at you throughout your life. She is exaggerating me as a kid, Ophelia Lennon is, and the only reason I don’t say she is outright lying is out of respect.
    “I’m sorry,” I say.
    She takes my shoulders firmly and turns me toward the exit. We head out, and the last thing is, she pulls on and buttons up her red cloth coat with the faux fur collar against the wind that has been waiting out there to bite at me and Ophelia Lennon.
    It is possible I remember that coat. I have another haywire urge, this time to bury my face in that collar, and to have the wearer wrap her arms around me. But it is a very very very different urge from the last urge. The opposite, in fact. I think, though, that I will get a grip in time. I will sort. But for now I’m thinking it will be enough to be near, near the coat and the wearer and the library.
    I do reach out and touch the sleeve though. I rub rough cloth between my fingers and I know it. I know I know the feel of that coat. I close my eyes for seconds.
    “Oakley,” Ophelia Lennon says as the bitter wind tears over us. “I don’t want you coming around here and wasting away like you have been. If you come into this library again, I want it to be to make use of the books. To make use of you . Otherwise, don’t come.” She turns up her collar for emphasis, for punctuation.
    I wonder for a moment if I can do that, go back into the books in the Whitechurch Library.
    “I’m sorry,” I say. “For what I tried to do. I won’t try it again, I swear.”
    “Don’t apologize,” she says. “I half think I’d let you, if it meant you’d read John Donne with me again.”
    I reach out and shake her hand.
    “I’ll see you around, Ophelia Lennon.” I can feel my head shaking no. “But I’ll be leaving you and John Donne be.”
    I turn around quickly