Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 20

As he was getting ready for work on Monday morning, Jack was aware that he was being extra careful about shaving and selecting his clothing. Millie should be back from her conference, and he had managed to get himself assigned to lots of stories that required library research. He still could not quite shake the suspicion that perhaps he was crazy and had just made it all up – that he hadn't actually seen Millie for those 12 seconds last Wednesday. That she didn't have her arms around him, whispering "my Johnny" into his ear. But no, he was not that crazy. Not quite anyway. Millie Jenkins – or Millie MacGuire, that is – actually worked in the same building with him, and he would be seeing her that very day.

Although the Roosevelt building was farther away from the Morning Star than the Essex, still it was an easy walk, and in ten minutes he was getting settled at his desk with a cup of coffee and his computer warming up. He opened the interoffice email program, and there was Millie's name next to the subject line "Lunch today?" The body of the message said only "We have SO much to talk about," followed by a semicolon, hyphen, and a closing parenthesis. This pattern repeated itself several times.

For the next ten minutes, Jack crafted and re-crafted a casual-sounding reply in the affirmative. He wanted to just go to the library right away on the excuse of doing his historical research, but forced himself to tend to other necessary tasks. He watched the clock until 11:30, then got up and grabbed his jacket from the hook.

And there she was, coming towards him down the long row of desks from the elevator. She was radiant, her long, untamable red-orange hair glowing in the fluorescent lights as if she were outdoors in the sun. Her smile and shining blue eyes were almost as bright, and as she passed each desk along her path, she waved a little hello or sang out a special greeting to its occupant. It lifted his heart, but it also reminded him that Millie loved everyone in the world . . . just as much as she loved him.

"Hi!" she said when she reached him and bounced on her feet, but held her hands behind her back. "I really want to hug you," she stage-whispered, "but I'm being professional. Aren't you proud of me?"

"I don't know," Jack said in his most casual of Jack voices. "I think I'd rather have the hug."

"I'll give it to you outside," she said over her shoulder as she led the way towards the stairwell.

Outside in the sunshine, he had to squint because so much light and color were reflecting off of her and into his eyes. She gave him the promised hug and even kissed his cheek, and then she led the way to a restaurant with open seating under an awning. Though they were mostly in shade, a gap between the awning blinds swaying in the breeze occasionally splashed the full sun on her face and hair. Jack hoped she would not ask him any questions just yet because he was not sure he could remember his name. Fortunately, she did most of the talking, chattering about her conference as they both looked at their menus.

"And some newspaper libraries are scanning in old clipping files and running optical character recognition to convert the image of text into actual searchable text, which works well with typewritten text like medical or legal records because typewriter fonts are a consistent width but newspaper fonts are all different widths, PLUS they're printed on newsprint which bleeds a little and THEN then we stuck that clipping in a drawer 20 years ago so it's a real challenge. They have great BLTs here. And I gave a presentation on our ATEX Files project. Or 'Star Files' as we're calling them now. I started most of it when the newsroom was still on the ATEX system, which, of course, was text only, but NOW I can embed images and design a page with all the information. Have you used that yet? Phil told me he didn't get all the way through your library orientation, so maybe you and I could finish that up this afternoon? You need to see our people-finder tool also. The chicken salad sandwich is fabulous too. Why are you grinning at me?"

"I had forgotten how . . . spirited you are."

"You mean I'm a chatterbox."

"No," Jack said, laughing. "Or yes, but in a good way." During this exchange, Millie had slipped off her light sweater to reveal that she wore a sleeveless top, and when she lifted both hands to adjust her hair band, her white underarms were briefly on display. He could feel the beginnings of an erection pushing its way for headroom in his pants. Fortunately, the waiter came at that moment and Jack put one hand under the table to make a subtle adjustment as Millie quizzed the waiter about salad dressings.

When it was his turn, Jack ordered chicken salad, plus the raspberry iced tea that Millie said was fabulous. When their conversation resumed, she was full of questions about his career, his college years, and what he had been doing all these years. His career was easy to talk about, but he found himself giving truncated answers about everything else. If anyone else had been doing the asking, Jack would have given the semi-fictionalized stories he had assembled over the years to represent the personal life of a more complete human being, but none of those embellishments would come out of his mouth. To fill the time, he stretched out a story about arguing with Christian students in college. He was glad when the food arrived and tried to shift the focus back to her, and not just to avoid talking about himself. There was something he very much wanted to know.

"How's your family?" he asked.

"Everyone is well," she said, picking at her spinach salad. "Of course, Grandma passed away years ago, but my parents are fine and still living in the same house. My sisters and my brother all got married, moved to other cities, and had babies. Darryl will be really glad to see you next time they visit."

"What about, um, your own family?" Jack asked awkwardly. "Last time I saw you, you and Todd were getting married and starting a fam—"

He stopped abruptly because Millie looked like she'd been slapped. "That was a long time ago," she whispered.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

"It's okay," she said. "I'd forgotten I told you I was pregnant that day, but I remember it now. I only meant to tell you Todd and I were getting married, but it slipped out. We were keeping the pregnancy a secret until after the wedding, which is the way proper Christian families handle that sort of thing. I miscarried two days before the wedding."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Jack managed to say before she waved him off again, now seeming to want to get it all said. "I almost called the wedding off, but everything was all set up and my mom told me it was part of God's plan for me. So we got married and a few months later I got pregnant again and that time it seemed really right, that maybe God had just adjusted the timing a little, and I named him Atticus like I had planned to do with the first baby and I remember wondering if it was the same Atticus, not just the same name but if God had just held onto that first baby's soul to put back into me when the time was right. But it didn't matter because that Atticus died too, and this time everyone knew. For the next few years, I went to fertility doctors and had all kinds of tests, and I got pregnant two more times, but those times I didn't tell anyone except Todd, and I didn't give them names. Then we gave up, and not long after that Todd and I got divorced."

Millie wiped her eyes with her napkin as Jack again fumbled to say something appropriate while scolding himself for secretly being glad she was divorced. Again, Millie waved it away. "Like I said, that was a long time ago," she said in almost her normal voice. "I got emotional just then because it sort of caught me by surprise and because — as you well know — I am an emotional person. Unlike you," she added teasingly.

"I have emotions," Jack said with mock offense, trying to match her lighter tone.

"You have Vulcan emotions," she said, reaching out to poke a finger in his chest. "They're in there somewhere, but you don't let them out much."

"That's because whenever I let them out, I beat up Captain Kirk. He's been a good sport about it so far though."

The check came, and Millie grabbed it, singing out, "My treat!"

"You could at least let me pay half," he protested.

"You can pay next time," she said, "when hopefully there will be wine involved."

They walked back to the Morning Star and Jack kept his Vulcan face intact, but inside he was doing cartwheels that she was unexpectedly single, while also chastising himself for celebrating her misfortune. But that was 15 or more years ago, and she seemed in a good place in her life now. He was just glad to be around her again, and she was already talking about an evening date! Just a "friendship date," of course, and not a romantic thing, he told himself, but getting to spend time with Millie at all was more than he had imagined in a long time. He also reminded himself that just because she was no longer married to Todd did not mean she was single. She was probably not re-married, he reasoned, because she was still using her first husband's last name. Still, she could be in a relationship -- and probably was because men would be lined up around the block for a chance to ask her out.

When they got back to the building, Jack made a quick stop at his desk to check his phone messages and then went to the library, where Millie motioned him over to a particular computer that Phil had told him was used for searching Nexis, Dialog and other online sources that charged for usage. Only certain librarians were sufficiently trained to use them because there were individual charges for everything they did -- making a search, displaying results, printing out a story, etc.

"Okay, on to the people-finding tool," she said, clicking to another screen. "The state Department of Administration sells access to this," she explained as they settled in two office chairs in front of the same computer screen — so close that he could smell her perfume (or her soap or shampoo or something sweet and clean and fresh). "And it uses Social Security numbers as the key to pulling together data from various sources into one report. And it's not just government data but also the header fields from the three credit reporting companies. Not a person's credit score or specific debts or anything really personal but their history of phone numbers, addresses and so on. So, for example, if I was looking for you, I would start with 'Jack Goddard,' but since that is usually a nickname, I would also include 'John Goddard' and maybe even 'Jackson Goddard' to cover my bases."

Within seconds, the record started printing out in the dot matrix printer next to the PC. "They don't let you download these, so we just print them out," she explained as she gathered up the long stack of folded papers and tore off the perforated edges.

She started going over the report with him, and again their heads were so close together. He wanted to just stare at the folds of her ear and the splash of freckles on her neck, but he forced himself to look at the pages as she flipped through them. "This next section is labeled 'Possible Relatives' but that's just based on people with the same last name who have once lived at the same address, not necessarily at the same time. So if the name was 'Smith,' you might get false hits because of that. This section lists all the neighbors of that address, so when there's a crime or something at a residence, we can run the address, and the reporters would have names and phone numbers for everyone on the street. And in this section, they list your mother even though she died 20 years ago because the date of death is being drawn from the Social Security Master Death Index."

It was an impressive report, if a bit creepy. As a citizen concerned about privacy, he might be appalled, but as a reporter trying to track down people to interview, it was golden. He paused at one section. "These are addresses that I've never lived at," he pointed out. "And the date of birth is way off."

"Hmmm, let me take a look," she said, scanning the section. "Usually it's pretty good at weeding out people who just have the same name, but—"

"But what?"

"Well . . . this John Goddard is definitely a different person, but it looks like he was included because he has some past connection with . . . um, your mother."

Jack looked at the date of birth again and did the math in his head. "So this could be . . . my father?"

"I don't know for sure, Johnny — I mean Jack — but it looks that way. He's listed in this section because he shares some past connection . . . not with you but with . . . your mother."

Jack's shields went up instantly, and he closed the report and put it in his briefcase. "That's a pretty cool resource," he said. "Thanks for showing it to me, and thanks for lunch. I'd better get back to my desk."

"I'm sorry, Johnny," she whispered as they stood up together. "I didn't mean to—"

"Don't worry about it," he said with his most unconcerned Jack expression. "It was a surprise, but trust me, it really doesn't matter to me if it's him or not. I've never had the urge to look for him. He's a non-person to me."