Page 26 of Saving Graces
Afterward Shelby sat down with her.
“That was a good speech,” she said. Rosalie raised her chin. Shelby was many amazing things, but a complimenter was not generally one of them. “Are you going to take your own advice?”
“Of course!” scoffed Rosalie. “Security has been walking me everywhere. I know the names of all their kids and their marital concerns at this point.”
“And the burnout counselor?”
She tilted her head. “I’m good,” she said.
Shelby clucked her tongue, her eyebrows making obvious her view on that. Rosalie ignored her. She was resilient. She’d coped with worse and she’d cope with this. She was relieved her staff could speak to someone, but she herself didn’t need help to remain functional.
She worked through lunch, pulling in the volunteer who’d been crying, counselled them, then sent them home early. She glared at her computer screen, distantly noting that she had 107 new emails she had to wade through. Her desk phone rang.
When Shelby walked in, she found Rosalie on the floor in a ball, her back to the wall, sobbing.
“Rosa, what’s wrong?”
And that’s when she had to look her friend in the eye and tell her it had happened again.
“Chloe,” Rosalie said, choking on the name, unable to continue for a full minute. “She didn’t make it.”
Chloe, with her big dark eyes and sweet singing at Kinsey’s songwriting session, her obsession with early 2000s boy bands that she called retro. Chloe who only ever heard her correct pronouns once a week when she came to the center. Chloe, who was so brave for so long, until the darkness became too much.
Rosalie and Shelby sat for as long as they could, cold hands gripped tight, balled-up kleenex surrounding them as they slowed their shaking breaths. Then, they got off the floor and swung into action, following the protocols they’d developed together after one too many phone calls like the one Rosalie had just taken. Rosalie arranged the bereavement counselor while Shelby alerted the staff. The youth worker checked in on the two kids who lived on site and let the night worker know ahead of time. They sent a pair of outreach workers down to check in with the kids they knew within the homeless population, in case any of them were close to Chloe and needed support.
“I’ll head down to the activity room for this afternoon’s cooking session,” Rosalie told Shelby. Chloe had been a regular attendee and there was about to be a collection of further traumatized kids there.
“No,” said Shelby. “You won’t.”
Rosalie’s spine stiffened. “Excuse me?”
“You’re not the right person,” she said. “I’m devastated too, of course I am. Every time we lose someone…” she trailed off, before she raised her chin, eyes narrowed as she made her pronouncement. “You,” she said, “are triggered though. And that’s different altogether.”
“That’s not a fair thing to say,” Rosalie said quietly. “We’ve all lost people we love.”
“Yeah,” said Shelby. “We weren’t all sixteen at the time. And a lot of us have done a whole pile of work processing our shit. You know, like with burnout counselors.”
“I’m a social worker,” Rosalie reminded her. “I’ve got a master’s degree. Do you know how much professional supervision I had to go through to get that? I’ve processed a lot of shit.”
“You know as well as I do that that’s not the same thing as going to see someone.” Their eyes locked, neither woman backing down. “Rosa,” Shelby said. “I’m worried about you.”
“We literally just had a death-”
“Yeah. We work with the most vulnerable youth on the planet. It’s not the first time and it’s not the last time. We both cried when we heard the news, but you still haven’t stopped.”
“What?” Rosalie touched her cheek, fingers coming away wet, and looked down at her shirt. Tear drops soaked the cotton, the fabric sticking to her hot clammy skin. Shelby nodded meaningfully as Rosalie slowly registered the state she was in.
“Okay,” she acknowledged, eventually, wiping her eyes. “I’m always going to struggle when a child dies because the world fucking sucks. But I know Chloe isn’t Rachel.”
“Do you?”
“What does that mean?”
“I can see the guilt in your eyes. We did what we could, Rosalie. We did everything we could. Just like you did back then.”
It wasn’t enough though, was it, came the voice in her head.
Rosalie finally managed to stop crying, but she let Shelby go and speak with the kids in the cooking session. She sat in the office and stared blindly at her stack of admin tasks. She went through Chloe’s file, trying to understand if she’d missed something she shouldn’t have. She made a note of which school Chloe had attended and sent an email to the principal, providing details of support options for queer kids at her school which she knew from past experience would probably be ignored. She took a couple of calls - one from a distressed kid and another from an abusive TERF.
