The Janitor

The janitor’s job is to sweep the floor, mop the hardwood, clean the counters, and lock the doors on his way out. He has done this job for four and a half years this August, ever since starting his senior year of highschool. It only takes him an hour to get through the entirety of Halbrook Public Library, three times a week, and it’s a nice change of pace. It pays alright. 

He pushes a heavy sanitary cart past automatic open doors. With noise cancelling headphones on and a somber playlist queued up, he begins. He spritzes surface cleaner on a blue rag, then wipes the mahogany front desk and three desktop stands. He falls into a rhythm. Cleaning clears his mind, as though the physical could manifest into the mental. Wipe away the dust. Scrub the fingerprints away.

The lights are off and he likes them that way. Gives the brutalist architecture reminiscent of the era the library was built in some semblance of serenity, a crude imitation of something striving to be picturesque. Beige steel shelves glisten, hazy moonlight shining through clouded skylights. If they paid him, he’d climb up onto the roof and scrub the skylights from the outside, sweep away the leaves and debris, so he could see the stars from inside. There wouldn’t be a point to it, he knew; the library closed at 6 o’clock sharp every day of the week, besides the Lord’s day. No one would see it but him.

He hooks the spray bottle back onto his cart and picks up his wide broom. Whitney Housten sings a ballad in his ears, and he hums along off-tune, pushing his pile of rubbish towards the back of the library. The skylights turn to white panel ceiling as the shelves begin. First the heavy periodicals, hardly ever touched, then history and religion, and an ocean of fiction novels. He usually avoids the carpeted children’s area. He shoots a quick peek to make sure the books have been re-shelved by the library staff. 

A frown drags his moustache down. “Ma’am?” 

The body, curled into a crescent shape on the 70’s confetti patterned carpet, doesn’t stir. He props his broom up against a wall of children’s fairy tales from A-G and slides his headphones down to settle around his neck. “Ma’am, are you alright?” 

This time, she stirs, curling tighter into the hollow she had created between her head of long white hair and her knees. He treks over carefully, like a cat through tall marshland, towering over her dejected form. Her eyes are scrunched, betraying her age in the fishbone lines around her eyes. Deep creases settled wherever her ghastly face could find room for them, tree branching out to the edges of her face. Not the lines of age; the lines of experience. She opens her eyes, just barely, and squints up at him. “Where am I?” Her voice grates the air, rough with cigarette use.

“You’re in Halbrooke Public Library, ma’am. Do you need me to call someone?” 

The woman pushes herself up on the heels of her hands, and hauls herself up to a seated position. She pauses. The janitor takes a step back and waits. Despite the darkness, he could make out sleep lines etched deep into her neck and cheek from the pressure of her clothes and the pebbled carpet.

“I’m still in the library?” She scans her surroundings, nervous as a hare in her shoulders and the set of her jaw. The janitor crouches down but does not move any closer. She curls two boney hands to her chest and shakes her head, perplexed. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep. They usually come and wake me up.”

“Do you come here every day?” 

The woman meets the janitor’s eyes. Her eyes are black, deep set, and haloed by the deep purple bloom of endless sleepless weeks. “Yes. I come in the afternoon and read to the children.” 

“You’re a volunteer.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t call myself that. I don’t do it for anyone.” 

“I see.” The janitor rolls his wrist over. “It’s nine o’clock, ma’am.” 

She looks up at the black and white clock on the opposite clock and curses under her breath. “I should really get going...” She doesn’t move, though. She remains cross legged on the carpet, draped in her long forest green skirt, still collecting her bearings. 

The janitor feels compelled to join her. She looks so serene, so certain in her affiliation to this rectangle of carpet. He crosses his legs, sitting across from her in his overalls. For many ticks of the clock, they sit in silence, him trying in vain to meet her gaze and her staring down at her lap. It is him who speaks first. 

“I clean this library three times a week. I think they get someone else the other two days.” 

“I’m sorry,” she parroted. “I just need a few moments to wake up.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I won’t get you in trouble for being here.” He sniffles and squints. “You remind me of someone.” 

“Did you grow up here?”

“All my life, ma’am. From before it was a city.”

“Well, then you went to school here. You might have known my daughter, Leah Graham.” The woman peered up at the ceiling and cleared her throat. 

The janitor scrunched his brows together. “Grade five, that one girl on the hockey team.” 

“That’s my Leah. Ah, she out-performed the girls’ hockey teams, so the coach made a special exception for her. Not enough girls interested in a grade five hockey team.” 

“You were at all of our games.”

“You played hockey?” The woman perked up.

“All the way up until highschool.” He almost says the wrong thing then, the janitor, but he holds his tongue just as his lips part. “She was the best defence I’ve ever seen. Never once complained during practice. Always had those two braids down her helmet.”

“She was so good. She would’ve kept playing until college, you know. Out of the city, to one of those big time colleges. Made a name for herself.”

The janitor gets to his feet. She trembles on the ground, sitting in a puddle of herself. “Mrs. Graham, would you like me to call you a cab? On me, I swear.” He extends a hand to her. She takes it and rises to her feet with a crackle of her knees. Beneath her great skirt, tiny ballet flats disappear. 

“Oh, no, you don’t need to do that. I can take the bus.” 

“I insist.” 

“Well, if you insist,” she says, a smile pushing her apple cheeks apart. 

The janitor takes out his cellphone, and makes a call as Mrs. Graham searches through her orange messenger bag and checks that she has everything. He leaves his broom on the side of the shelf, where he can find it when he returns. He walks Mrs. Graham outside, allowing her to hang onto his arm. The April night air has a bite to it. The cab would be five minutes. 

“Do you know about stars very much, Mrs. Graham?” They sit on a bench just by the pavement, just far enough that their clothes don’t touch.

“Well, just a little. Just what I’ve read about constellations, though I’ve never been good at spotting them.” In the moonlight, her long grey hair glows. “Do you?”

“I don’t know anything about the mechanics of it all. I majored in biology. But I could spend hours looking at them. The trick is not looking away. The longer you stare into the black, the more stars come into vision. But the second you look away, they’ll disappear.” 

“You babysit them.”

“Exactly.”

Mrs. Graham tips her head back. The pair find a clear spot of sky, unencumbered by streetlights or high rise buildings, to gaze up at. 

The night is by no means quiet. Cars rush past, whining and honking. People talk on cell phones with no regard for their surroundings as they walk the streets. A pair of teenagers jogs past, playing hip-hop music into the night.

Mrs. Graham sits motionless, like a bird evading capture, and stares up into the black with her ringless hands clutched in her lap. She is a victim of her environment, the janitor knows, but she stands out defiantly from it. It’s her and the stars and that resolute sense of belonging. The janitor steals glances at her until the taxi arrives, until he bids her goodnight and helps her into the backseat. He still remembers where Leah Graham had lived, because the address had floated in all the papers for weeks, and tells the taxi driver. The address had slowly stopped circulating. Leah had never begun grade six, and Mrs. Graham had clearly never slept it off. With all the construction that had happened since, there was hardly any chance of her body ever being recovered now.

The cab disappears into the busy streets, and the janitor walks back inside the dark and quiet library. Scrubbing awaits.