"At the library." She said it simply. "The main one, on Seventh. He wasn't banned from the library. They were nice to him there. There's a librarian named Ms. Huang who used to work with him at a conference, back when he was a school librarian, and she let him use the staff bathroom and she'd hold books for him. So we met there instead. Saturdays at ten. In the reading room on the second floor, at the table by the window where you can see the river." She paused. "It wasn't as good as the bench. You can't talk in the reading room. You have to whisper. And you can't have donuts. He used to bring me a cinnamon twist from Petro's, the bakery on Mercer, and we'd sit here and eat them and he'd get sugar all in his beard. You can't do that in a library. But it was fine. It was still Saturdays."
"How many Saturdays."
"Fourteen." She did not have to count. "November to the end of January. He missed one in December because he had the flu and was at the clinic on Garland. And one in January because—" She stopped, and he saw her decide something. "Because he was using again that week, and he didn't want me to see him like that. He left a note for me with Ms. Huang. It said I'm sorry, kiddo, I'm not good this week, I'll be there next Saturday, keep reading. He always kept his promises about next Saturday, except the last one."
Lloyd took his hand from his eyes. The light seemed very bright.
"He was doing better in December," Lucia said. "That's the thing. He'd started going to a clinic for the medicine that helps, the one you take every morning. He had a job a few hours a week sorting donations at the used bookstore on Holloway, the one with the cat. He was trying to save up for a deposit on a room. He showed me a notebook where he was writing down the money. Two hundred and eleven dollars. He was going to get a room in one of the houses on Linden Street, the ones that rent by the week, and then he said in October he'd go back to court and ask to have Saturdays at the apartment with my mom there. So the bench wasn't really going to be the only place forever. It was just going to be the place where we started over." She looked at the paper in Lloyd's hands. "That's what the fourteenth was supposed to be. The starting over."
"And the last time you saw him."
"January twenty-ninth. He was coughing a lot. He'd lost his coat. Somebody took it at the mission, or he left it somewhere, he wasn't sure. He had on two sweatshirts and a scarf Ms. Huang gave him from the lost and found. I'd just finished The Phantom Tollbooth and we were whispering about Tock, the watchdog, the one with the clock in his stomach. He liked Tock best. He said Tock was the only character in the book who understood that time is the thing you can't get back. He said, 'Thirty-something Saturdays to go, Lu, and then it's donuts again.' And then he went downstairs, and I watched him go out the front door and across Seventh Street, and that's the last time." She smoothed the cover of the Odyssey with her palm. "The next Saturday he didn't come. I waited until the library closed at five. Ms. Huang drove me home. On Monday a lady from the medical examiner's office came to our apartment with a policeman."
"I kept reading," Lucia said. "I didn't know what else to do. It was February so it was Hatchet. I read it twice. There's a boy whose plane crashes in the woods in Canada and he has to survive by himself with a hatchet his mom gave him, and his parents are divorced, and there's a secret he knows about his mom that he can't tell anybody, and he's so angry, and he figures out how to make fire." She was quiet a second. "My dad picked it in October. Before. He didn't know. But I thought it was like he knew. I thought a lot of them were like that. Like he'd left me a map without knowing where I was going to be. That's probably not true. My mom says it's probably not true. She says it's the kind of thing grief does, it makes you find messages. But I don't care if it's true."
"Bridge to Terabithia," Lloyd said. He did not know why he said it. He had never read it. He knew vaguely what happened in it, the way everyone knew; his son had read it in school and come home very quiet.
"August," she said. "'I'm sorry in advance.'" She almost smiled. "He knew that one. Everyone knows that one. I cried so hard on the bus my mom had to come pick me up from the Y. But it's a good book. Jess builds a bridge at the end, so his little sister can get across. That's the part I think about."
The radio on his shoulder chirped, three short tones. Then Sergeant Kwiatek's voice, flattened and crackling: "Forty-four seventy-one, Central Seven."
Lloyd keyed the mic without thinking. "Seventy-one."