Inter-Library Loan

Inter-Library Loan Part 4

Chapter 4

Oliver stopped and stared. Frozen. Sister? The thought that C. Paul was part of a larger group, a family, had never even occurred to Oliver. Yes everyone has parents, and often siblings, but C. Paul, to Oliver, wasn't everyone.

"Sister...?" He quietly and confusedly mumbled.

"My older sister Anna."

"Anna? But C. Paul, your name is Caterina Paulska, C. Paul?!"

"She took a pen name. Named herself after our father, Charlie Paulska. Not me Oliver, Anna."

"Oooooh." He pulled back, taking in all this new information. "You look so much alike."

"We did, when we were younger. But not anymore."

"You live here in Buffalo?"

"I have for a long time, just recently transferred to this Tops. Got a promotion." She stated proudly.

"And C...I mean Anna?"

The friendly openness of Caterina's face clouded over quickly. She pulled back from Oliver and crossed her arms over her wide chest.

"I've seen your letters to Anna, Oliver. What do you know about her?"

"She is a writer, a genius. Loves to read."

"What else?"

He shrugged, holding back what he thought he knew. That C....Anna and he were connected by more than some written words.

She sighed deeply and looked toward the ceiling. She took a moment as if weighing her words, then shrugged and said "I'll tell you Oliver because you've been almost a research assistant for Anna."

Oliver sat up straighter, eyes glowing at her recognition, awaiting her revelation. And what a revelation it was. Caterina told him about growing up in a large Polish family in the south towns, where cousins and aunts, and uncles all lived together with their family. There were so many times that they didn't even realize that the similarly aged kid sleeping next to them in bed wasn't a sister, but a cousin.

Yet Anna and Caterina were sisters with only 13 months between them. "Sometimes I thought we were almost twins..." because of the similar thoughts they shared. But Anna's thoughts started to outpace Caterina's and the similarities began to be mostly just physical.

"She would read anything and everything. Newspapers, books, magazines, shampoo bottles in the bathtub..." Voraciously taking in the written word any way she could. She excelled in the non-math classes in school and was never popular, though she didn't seem to ever care. "She was in her own world. Reading, reading, reading." Caterina trailed off as she remembered.

Then she won a scholarship to Canisius College and off she went, graduating high school a year early and not at all caring that she'd never spent any time from home before. Caterina hesitated just a moment before she began again. At the end of her first semester, she was supposed to take the bus home. They found her, about 6 hours after she was supposed to arrive at her hometown Trailways station, in the bathroom of the Buffalo station. She had no bags. Was dressed in just a simple sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, though the weather outside was in the low teens, and with the wind chill much lower than that. She was slumped in the corner of a bathroom stall, vomit down the front of her, and the sleeping pill packets that she had accumulated in the weeks before piled up on the toilet next to her.

They rushed her to the hospital, pumped her stomach, and then sent her off for a psych evaluation. "There was some failed romance that no one ever talked about, least of all Anna." Caterina shrugged. "She was always an inner person, and after that, she pulled back even more"

She was diagnosed as autistic and spent a few years at a facility, where she read even more if you can believe it. Until one of the many great aunts or great uncles died, leaving an actual inheritance to Anna who took the money and bought a place to live and began to write the Ooliver  tales in earnest.

"A house?" Oliver asked "On her own? Where?"

"That is where this story ends Oliver," Caterina stated firmly. "She doesn't venture out and her privacy is all she has ever asked of me, so I give it to her."

"Autistic?" he asked. "And agoraphobic?"

"Autistic, yes. Low on the spectrum probably, but we haven't delved into that any further. Not agoraphobic. She's not afraid of the outside world. It's more like she has no need for them. So why waste her time." She shrugged and smiled sadly. "She has her life and her writing. That's all she wants or needs."

"Did want or need," Oliver stated glumly.

"What's that?" He handed over the last note from C...Anna to Caterina. "She's going to stop she says."

Caterina read it, eyebrows bunched in concern, then looked up at Oliver in shock. "When did you get this?"

"Today."

Caterina jumped up so quickly that Oliver jumped in his chair. She grabbed her coat and scarf from a peg behind the door and quickly pulled them on as she gestured to Oliver as if to shoo him from the premises.

"I have to go. Something I just remembered." She shooed Oliver along the hallway and out the swinging doors so fast that he barely knew where he was. He turned to protest and ask more questions but his "But what..." trailed off as the doors swung empty behind him. She was gone. This sister to C...Anna was gone.

Oliver tucked his head down again as he headed out of the automatic doors of the store and turned towards home. No changing of the streets today, he just wanted to get home, drink a real Pepsi and think things through.

He looked up as he stepped off the store curb to make his way through the parking lot to the sidewalk to see a small, dirty, yellow champagne-colored car sloshing along through the grey-brown slush, with Caterina Paulska driving. She looked panicked and didn't notice Oliver as she looked for oncoming traffic, then turned right toward Oliver's neighborhood.

He thought nothing of this as he trudged along. Only a few blocks to go and he would be warm and able to think this all out. A few minutes later, about 2 blocks from his own street, as he crossed over another, he looked to the right for cars and saw it....the small, dirty, yellow champagne-colored car parked in front of a very non-descript house. He stopped and stared until a beep from behind had him finishing his crossing, then turned to look back. There was a tree between himself and the car so when Caterina and a young man who Oliver immediately recognized as the most recent of C...Anna's graduate students emerged from the porch of the house, he hid behind it. They were talking animatedly as the young man hunched in the wind arms crossed against the cold.

She turned back to her car, crossed over to the driver's door, and continue to point and talk to the student. Oliver heard nothing of what they said. Then she ducked into the car and drove off as the student went indoors. Oliver tucked himself back behind the tree so as not to be seen. Then stepped out a moment later.

He stood there, staring at the house, taking a mental note of the number, and just in awe of the moment. He was there long enough for his fingers to ache from the grocery bags and his feet to start feeling numb in their thick boots from the cold before he turned and walked quickly home.