Overnight Shift

L eah works at the homeless shelter because her feelings aren’t supposed to matter there, and she can always be doing something with her hands, and because you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. 

She arrives a little before 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve. The men have gathered outside for their last smoke break of the day. She sits watching them, the stone stairwell cold and rough against her back. 

The men talk and share cigarettes with quiet, transactional rigor. It’s an economy that she isn’t privy to, one the New York prep school kids in Hillel had emulated with a perverse elegance: elbows crooked, long cigarettes dangled between long fingers. They’ll all get cancer, Ashna said once, then covered her mouth with both hands. 

“You’ll freeze,” an older man says. “Sitting like that.” His tone is neutral, unscolding. He isn’t wearing a coat, just a thick flannel. Leah stands, and then leans against the stairwell, and then straightens again. The men smoke; she mimics them, letting out vapor warmed from within, opaque white skeins in the cold air. Then she closes her mouth, feeling embarrassed and juvenile.  

One of the younger men, Sam, offers her a cigarette. “Should warm you up.” His cheeks are pink with cold. The men titter. She knows she’s the butt of the joke and wonders what part of her appearance reveals the untouched lungs inside. But it’s generous of Sam to include her. And she’s tempted to say yes, to surprise them; it’s been so long since she’s learned a new transgression. 

“Where’s Tim?” the older man asks. Leah knows that name but can’t conjure a face. 

“Probably drunk off his ass,” one of the other men says. 

“Tim has a god-awful sweet tooth,” Sam says to Leah. “If you guys are making dessert tonight, you should save something for him.”

…

The main space of the shelter has five tables, three chairs per table, a nook with a TV, a wall of lockers, and a row of cots. When Leah comes in, the women are huddled around the TV, watching a Christmas baking show special. 

She’s struck by the attention both the women and the camera pay to each baker, each step: the transformation of wet shreds of flour into a smooth, elastic dough. When Leah made challah in Hebrew School she lost focus and added too much water; the sticky dough clung to her palms like flaking skin. On her report cards: Leah is bright but misuses work time daydreaming. Her Hebrew School teacher, always reminding her to pay attention. What is attention taken to its highest degree? Leah doesn’t remember what she ate for dinner, or any of her drive in. The stakes of this memory loss suddenly seem immense and terrifying; she can see the car left unlocked, the stove still burning. It feels like swimming in a pool, only to look down and discover that the pool is bottomless. 

…

“The volunteers are fucking up the pasta,” Alessandro says to Leah. He’s leaning his upper body through the serving window into the kitchen, which he’s not allowed to enter. “Sorry. Effing up the pasta. I shouldn’t be using that language in front of the kiddos.”

It’s high school students doing the cooking, two girls and a boy. All of them are wearing oven mitts, even the girl chopping onions into big, uneven chunks. (Ashna cut onions like her mother had: in translucent parabolic arcs, the blade blazing against her fingernails but never breaking skin.) The boy peers into the pot with the nervousness of someone using a stove for the first time. He’s wearing a T-shirt with the words “Holiday Hero” across the chest, in alternating red and green lettering that makes Leah feel colorblind. The fan isn’t on, which means the shelter has about three minutes before the fire alarm will go off.

“Can you ask the chef wunderkinds how long they’ve been boiling the pasta?” Alessandro asks.

Leah pushes open the swinging door. “Smells great!” she says. Her eyes water from the smoke, and maybe also the onions. She turns the fan on. “How long has that pasta been cooking?”

“Twenty-five minutes,” the boy says. “We want to make sure it’s done.”

Leah leaves the kitchen with bins of silverware and cups balanced on her hip. “Chef says it’s been about twenty-five minutes,” she says to Alessandro.

“That’s not fucking al dente! Can you tell boy genius that prepackaged ravioli needs three minutes tops?”

“Three minutes seems maybe a little short,” Leah offers. 

“You should see what I can do in three minutes. That’s what my wife says!” 

Someone—Sam—claps Alessandro on the back. 

“Jesus, Sandro,” Sam says. “The girl doesn’t need to hear that.” 

Leah bristles at girl; Sam can’t be much older than she is. 

The shelter doorbell rings. Leah’s facing the wrong way and the bins are balanced too precariously on her hip for her to turn. She can’t tell if anyone is moving to answer the door.

“The girl needs to get me my orange juice instead of standing here wasting my time,” says Alessandro. 

Leah inadvertently begins to apologize, even though she doesn’t remember if Alessandro asked for orange juice. 

“None of that Sunny D shit,” Alessandro continues. “I know you guys have Tropicana.” 

“She’s not your servant,” Sam says. 

“Oh it’s okay,” Leah says. “He can have the Tropicana.”

The doorbell rings again. So no one answered it.

“I have to get that,” Leah says. 

…

Cora stands at the door, hands clasped. 

“Your day was just ruined.”

She always greets Leah this way; it would be funny if it wasn’t true. 

“Hi, Cora, good to see you. What can I do for you?”

“I’d like a Christmas ham,” Cora says. “Can you guys prepare this?” The ham in her arms, plastic-wrapped and glistening, is about the size of Leah’s right leg. 

“We’re making ravioli,” Leah says, avoiding eye contact with the ham. Try to sound apologetic but firm, Ashna had said, when Leah was telling her parents she wouldn’t come to their Seder. 

“We’re making ravioli,” Cora repeats, simpering. “Do people eat ravioli for Christmas?”

Leah doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t know what people eat for Christmas. She’s never touched a ham; she went from kosher with her parents to vegetarian with Ashna. 

“Do they? No, they don’t, no one eats ravioli for Christmas, not Italians, not Chinese people, not Israelis, no one. I just want ham for Christmas, is that too much to goddamn ask for?” 

Leah takes the ham gingerly. We work on Christmas, her parents would say, Ashna would say, so they don’t have to. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll see what we can do.” 

…

Twenty steps from the vestibule back to the kitchen. The high school kids are finally straining the ravioli. She lays the frozen ham on the steel countertop. It clangs like teeth against the metal rim of a water bottle.

“Do you guys think you can bake this?” she asks. The boy looks at the ham like it’s an artifact of great archaeological significance. 

“Be sure to wash your hands,” Leah adds. 

The doorbell rings. Twenty steps back. 

“Those two need beds,” the security guard says, pointing to two women. Leah isn’t sure if the women had been at the door when Cora came in; if they were, they’d been silent. 

“We’re full tonight, but I’ll call the other shelters to see if they have availability.”

“Not the one on Montpelier street,” one of the women says. “They lost all my shit and they have needles everywhere. Can you try the Mothers and Daughters?”

“I’ll call everyone,” Leah says. She had come outside in just a hoodie, which was stupid, and already she’s shivering. Her call to Mothers and Daughters goes straight to the answering machine. CASPR is only taking people recovering from addiction. Montpelier is full. 

“You should go inside while you make the calls,” the other woman says, rubbing Leah’s arm. “No jacket,” she tsks. Her hair is in a heavy gray bun pinned with an ornate silver hairpiece that reminds Leah of her grandmother’s Shabbat candlesticks. Leah considers insisting on waiting outside with the women. Something about solidarity, or tikkun olam. But there’s no point in getting cold with them. 

Leah knows that none of the shelters she calls will take the women, and the most she can do for them is make them feel that someone has tried. She can give them blankets or sleeping bags from the shelter’s dwindling supply, but only if the women know to ask for them. She feels the nauseating onset of tears in her throat and tries to swallow them down.

She thinks, as she often does in the wobbling before she cries, of the Torah portion about her namesake: Leah, wife of Jacob, eldest daughter of Laban. Leah’s eyes were rakkot, the rabbi had said, which can mean tender, but it can also mean weak. Leah had weak eyes. 

You still have teenage feelings, Ashna had said a month ago, on their bed, in one of the last real conversations. They were debating whether or not Leah should take the overnight shift. Why do we suffer, why is there evil, all of that, those are such teenage questions. Leah had stopped going to synagogue and told Ashna the only Jewish thing she could hold onto was the guilt, the compulsion for care that felt like suffering. She wanted Ashna—who had started drinking alcohol, who let her mother’s calls stack up in voicemail like unwashed dishes—to say she felt the same, at least a little, that she thought about medicine the way Leah thought about the shelter. Something shared, or at least commensurate. I don’t want to suffer around suffering. I want to take care of people, Ashna said instead.  I know where I end and other people start. Ashna could cleave care from warmth. She was so beautiful it made Leah ache to be apart from her.   

On her way back inside, Leah notices a man lying down at the top of the stairs.

“Oh that’s Tim,” the gray-haired woman says. “He’s sleeping off the alcohol. We told him he can’t come in if he’s drunk.” She waves her hand. “He was wandering all over the place.”

Leah thinks of the Seder she missed, the beginning of the Haggadah. Your ancestors were wandering Arameans. For many years they sojourned.

“I told him to go get checked out, but he says he hates hospitals,” the woman adds. Leah remembers what Sam said about Tim’s sweet tooth. She might have a few hours to get started on dessert.

…

“The guard actually showed tonight,” Leah tells Rashid, who’s processing intake on the shelter computer. 

“Local hero.” He exhales through his nostrils. He doesn’t look away from the computer screen. 

“Tim’s sleeping out there,” Leah tries. “He doesn’t look so good, just so you know?” She wants to strike a balance between sounding serious enough to communicate concern, and casual enough in case this is a regular occurrence. But she just sounds like she’s asking Rashid a question     . 

“Tim? He can’t come in if he’s drunk.”

“Yeah, I know. No, yeah. I thought we could, like, check on him?” The words come out of her mouth like discrete text bubbles, and she hates it, being so stuttering and unsure.

 “But you just said he was outside.”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the shelter motto?” 

“A home for our neighbors?” Leah offers. 

Rashid snorts. “No. Repeat after me: Not my circus, not my monkeys.” 

“Oh, okay,” Leah says. “Gotcha.” She stands up to go.

Rashid turns to her for the first time in the conversation—his head, not the rest of his body, like an owl. The skin of his neck crinkles against his shoulder, which is so massive it seems to erase the upper part of his arm. On Leah’s first co-director shift with him, he yelled at a volunteer for sweeping poorly. The volunteer never came back. 

“No. Say it,” he says. “Not my circus, not my monkeys.’” 

“Sorry,” she says, looking away. “Not my monkeys, not my circus.”

“Good girl,” Rashid says.

….

When Leah gets back to the kitchen, the high schoolers are trying to fit the frozen ham in the oven. The holiday hero boy is poking at the plastic wrapping with a knife.

“Thanks for getting started on the ham!” Leah says. “I can take it from here.”

“No it’s chill, we can finish it,” one of the girls says. 

Leah nods. Why is she nodding? “Awesome. In that case, you guys might wanna defrost it a bit more.” 

Leah checks the fridge. They have a donation of thirty lemons about to go bad. She thinks about Tim, and the women watching that baking show earlier, and decides to bake lemon bars. Attention taken to its highest degree, Leah, is prayer. Are lemon bars an acceptable Christmas dessert? The shelter has new, giant whisks, with purple rubber handles. Lemon bars were one of the first things she baked by herself, that summer she didn’t eat, when she was still young enough to see a purple whisk and think: fairy wand. She missed Hebrew School to go swimming with Marie that summer. Marie had perfect, ballet dancer collarbones, the kind that made you feel you were seeing the inside and outside of her concurrently. Marie was the first of these girls whom Leah couldn’t decide if she wanted to be with or inhabit.

The dough feels oily on Leah’s fingertips, even through plastic gloves, and she lifts it to test its stretch. The first of your dough you shall lift up a cake as an offering. Ashna was wearing plastic gloves when they first met, at the health and safety seminar for service groups. Four years ago, junior year of college. Leah presses the crust into a glass tray, spreading out its scalloped edge in little pulses. At that training they did CPR together, Ashna’s mouth against the dummy’s, Leah’s latched hands cracking ribs in its chest. They practiced stabbing each other’s thighs with insulin shots, and massaging them after, Ashna’s thumb circling the hole in Leah’s leggings, the same pair she’s wearing now. I will serve you seven years for her. 

“I have to go check on the guests,” Leah tells the high schoolers, sliding the tray into the oven. “Can you take this out in like half an hour?”

The boy has AirPods in. “Yeah, for sure,” one of the girls says.

…

Alessandro is eating the ravioli mush at a table close to the kitchen. Leah sits down with him.

“How’s the shoulder?” she asks when he finishes chewing. He moves it in a circle, the way a professional baseball pitcher might. 

“Not better, not worse,” he says. “But I have to keep working it.” 

They sit in silence as he cuts a piece of ravioli, chews it delicately, and washes it down with fruit punch. 

“Leah, how old are you?” he asks.

“24,” she says. “And counting.”

“You are such a joyful presence,” he says. “Never get older.” 

For a minute this observation feels essentially, overwhelmingly true, like he has the power not only to speak her joyfulness into existence, but to keep her young.

Sometimes you act like a little kid, Ashna said, two weeks ago. I feel like you just want me to take care of you. 

Rachel belonged to the world of speech and action, the rabbi said. Leah belonged to the world of thought.

“Merry Christmas, Leah,” Alessandro says.

…

Leah jiggles the door of Cora’s permanent locker but it doesn’t budge. For a third time, she twists the rattling lock round and round. It clicks in her hand, and the gears feel like something organic and capricious. 

She gets to the end of the combination, presses in the lock, and holds her breath. It doesn’t open, and she feels the pressure of the tears she held back at the door, anger at herself for being so weak, for not being able to open the fucking lock and crying about not being able to open the lock. Ashna could have opened it. She takes a deep, shuddering breath, and presses the heels of her palms into her eyes, like she can physically dam the tears. Leah’s eyes were weak, the rabbi said, because she cried in prayer.

“What’s the combination?” Sam is next to her. She didn’t hear him approach. He takes the lock out of her hands and starts resetting it.

She’s not supposed to tell him someone else’s combination or let him touch a locker that isn’t his. But she doesn’t want to upset Cora by taking too long to retrieve her backpack, and she doesn’t want to upset the other guests by upsetting Cora, and she doesn’t want to upset Rashid by upsetting the guests.

“It’s 24-35-4.” As she says it aloud, she realizes. “That was my high school locker combination.”

Sam’s hands are quick and precise. The locker dings open.

“Mine too,” he says. 

“Really?”

“No,” Sam says. He’s not looking at her but he’s smiling.

…

“The laundry monster is back,” Rashid says, very seriously. “Can you get a few loads in?”

Leah wants to go make the lemon bar filling. She hates laundry, always has. “Yeah, I actually love doing laundry,” she says. 

Fifteen steps to the laundry room, which is between the bathroom and the staff bedroom. The floor is covered with bedding, shelter clothes, and trash bags with hastily scrawled tape labels. Leah scrapes the lint out of the drier trap and starts folding sheets. Lint lodges under her fingernails. It reminds her of Ashna’s post-MCAT beach day two summers ago, her insistence that she didn’t need sunscreen. I’ll be such a bad doctor. In the shower, Leah peeled off flecks of dead pink skin, once-Ashna under her nails. Ashna let her use aloe after, fleshy gel cut from their windowsill aloe plant. Only Ashna watered that plant. Leah often felt that Ashna loved her like a plant too, wanted her to stay in one place and take what she was given. After that sunburn, Leah can’t remember a time Ashna took her care without argument. 

The first sheet hangs off her arm, unfolded. Leah never feels more than seven thoughts away from Ashna, especially when she’s doing things rote, paying no attention. She finishes folding the sheet. The point of this job is that there is nothing to do but do. 

She hears a quiet rustle, like something soft hitting the floor, wings unfolding, and her vision goes black. She stumbles forward, banging her elbow on the washing machine. Then her eyes start to acclimatize, and she sees some light, like the penetration of flashlight through the flesh of a nail. Something brushes against her calves. She can’t remember ever being this frightened. Just as she realizes it’s fabric, it’s pulled off her head. The laundry room appears bright, slightly blue.

“You can’t do shit like that to her.” It’s Sam’s voice, loud, agitated. He has a sheet in his fist. Leah blinks and turns around.

“She just looked so serious,” Cora says. “And she was blocking the guest washer.” 

Why are they talking about her like she’s not there? Her heart is still pounding in her stomach. Your abdominal aorta. Ashna’s cool hand on her belly button.

“Don’t sneak up on people,” Sam says, taking a step forward.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Cora says. She turns to Leah. “And why was he touching my locker? Rashid gave me a warning for doing the same thing but I don’t see Sam in trouble.” 

Rashid walks in, looks at the uneroded mountain of laundry.

“Everything okay?” he asks. It sounds like an accusation. Leah’s breathing starts to slow. 

“It’s whatever,” Cora says. “I was just leaving.” Sam follows her out, without looking at Leah. He doesn’t take any clothes or bedding with him. Leah wonders if he came in just to follow her.

“What happened?” Rashid says quietly. He’s making an effort to sound gentle.

“Cora, uh, threw her sheet over my head. I think.”

“Oh that’s harassment, for sure,” Rashid says. “That’s a mandatory night out of the shelter.”

This too is intended to make her feel better. Leah wishes, violently, that she hadn’t said anything. A night on the street for a sheet on her head. She thinks about the old women in their sleeping bags finding grates of hot air above the subway, Tim wandering at the top of the stairs. My father wandered as a fugitive Aramean. In Egypt he sojourned with meager numbers. She should go check on the lemon bar crust.

“You can go to sleep, if you want,” Rashid says, another directive nestled in a suggestion. “I’ll finish the load. Just wake up Sam at 4:30 for me. And make sure he gets out of bed because he has work tomorrow and sometimes he just goes back to sleep.” He runs a hand through his hair and inhales deeply. “I can’t believe they’re working him on Christmas Day.” 

…

Leah’s not sure when the kids went to bed, if they even finished the dishes. On the bottom bunk in the staff room, Leah watches the indent of one of their bodies, anonymous and inert in sleep.  

That’s the weirdest thing about physical relationships, for me, I think, Ashna had said. Not sex. It’s the fact that you actually sleep next to the other person, that you trust them with your completely vulnerable body. Later that night she said I don’t know how much longer I can do this.

The girl starts snoring, light but deafening in the narrow staff room. Leah sits up and checks her phone. There’s a text from Rashid: don’t worry ur doing a great job

How absurd it would be for her to text him “great job.” All the message does is affirm her insecurity, the asymmetry in their competence. 

…

At 4:30 a.m., she enters the men’s space to wake Sam, tiptoeing past dozens of bodies, lumps under thin blankets. She sees Alessandro, who sleeps with his mouth open. A puddle of drool is gathering on his pillow. There’s a shout; a few people stir, then everyone stills again. 

Sam has the top bunk in row C. She whispers his name. She can see his eyes move behind their lids, like she is seeing into his dream. He doesn’t stir. 

She pokes his upper arm gently, then more firmly, pressing the whole of her hand against the meaty part of his shoulder.

He turns his head toward      hers; their eyes are exactly level.

“It’s 4:30,” she says. “Time to get up.”

He climbs out of bed, down the ladder. The phrase “heavy with sleep” floats into her mind. He stretches his arms above his head, revealing a soft belly and a trail of hair above his pajama pants.

“Can you believe I wake up looking this good?” he asks. 

…

He joins her for breakfast at 5.a.m. He grabs two Chewy granola bars and a yellow Gatorade, which he packs in a backpack. She waits for her styrofoam cup of noodles to cool. It smells intensely salty. They don’t talk because the required quiet period doesn’t end for another hour. In their silence she hears the rustling of sheets, and beneath that the hum of the washing machine nearby. The dryer rumbles, then pauses, then rumbles again. Sam eats the first granola bar in two bites, then folds the foil into a precise square.

Leah gets up, goes to the kitchen, grabs two plastic water bottles, and comes back. She can’t bring herself to care about plastic or waste here. She slides one of the bottles across the table to Sam and tries to unscrew the cap on her own. The cap won’t come off and the plastic digs into her palms. 

Sam tugs on her sleeve. In the dim, purple lighting of the breakfast nook, his eyes are dark and wet. She lets her grip go lax and he takes the bottle from her hand, removing the cap with just his thumb and index finger. 

She can’t help herself. “I loosened it,” she whispers. 

“It was a team effort,” he agrees. 

“You’re making fun of me,” Leah says.

“I never make fun of people,” he says. “I hate humor.” 

When he leaves, he whispers, “Merry Christmas.” She waits for the door to close behind him before getting up.

…

In the staff room she sleeps for about an hour. It’s hot, restless sleep. She doesn’t dream. My father was a wandering Aramean. An Aramean destroyed my father. For many years he sojourned. The thin plastic fleece tangles around her ankles. Her alarm goes off with the phone pressed to her eardrum, buzzing insistently like a moth fluttering against a closed window. Momentarily the sound seems to come from inside her, an internal blare of something she forgot. 

…

The main space is so bright in the morning. It’s a basement so there’s no sunlight, just fluorescents. Leah stumbles out at 6 a.m., trying and failing to open her eyes.

Only two hours left. When her shift is ending, she’s never sure if she’s returning to real life or leaving it.

…

“The guard disappeared and the high schoolers are gone,” Rashid says. “They didn’t make breakfast and they left a fucking mess in the oven.” He’s running the morning bed lottery, cradling the phone between his shoulder and neck while scrambling eggs.

They never took out the lemon bars. Leah can’t even remember why she wanted to make lemon bars; was it just to use up the lemons? She is suddenly so tired that movement and thought feel equally impossible, like a viscous fluid is both all around her and leaking inside her. 

“Do you maybe wanna help get people out the door, or are you just gonna stand there?” Rashid says, jabbing at her with the eggy spatula. His eyes are bloodshot. He never went to sleep. 

Leah leaves the kitchen, still moving like she’s dragging herself from a body of water. Usually a few guests need help getting ready in the morning, and no one lingers at the door. But the main space is clear and Leah can see through the door that the guests are all on the staircase, huddled. 

Outside the cold is bracing. Again she has forgotten a coat, she thinks absently. The guests part for her, all at once, like a strange one-step dance, like Moses, she thinks, and the Red Sea. She sees Alessandro and Cora and then she sees Tim’s body at the top of the stairs, somehow both limp and stiff. This should be the moment her daze breaks, she’s aware of it, she should be breaking into motion, first off the blocks. Instead she is suspended, caught in that pulse between getting a cut and feeling the rush of pain. My father was a fugitive Aramean. For many years he wandered. An Aramean perished. Laban the Aramean had two daughters, Rachel and Leah. Rachel was beautiful but Leah had weak eyes. 

Leah didn’t let Tim in last night, she started his lemon bars and forgot about him. 

Leah calls 911, even though Tim hates hospitals, because she remembers quizzing Ashna on this, when a patient is unresponsive their silence is the condition for assent. The paramedics are on their way, a woman on the phone says; she sounds like Ashna. Stay on the line, she says, keep talking to me. The last thing Ashna said. Don’t talk to me anymore. You need to learn to take care of yourself. 

Rashid says “Shit shit shit.” He’s on his knees doing CPR. He’s worried about the inside of the shelter, what could happen when they’re all standing here so uselessly. The high schoolers are gone, so no one is watching the eggs. The lemon bar crust is sitting blackened in the oven. The dishes are already growing mold, tiny clusters of bacteria proliferating exponentially. No one is preventing this, the unrelenting build-up of debris. If Tim dies, Rashid will have to coordinate the funeral with the high school public service club. The kids will be Tim’s pallbearers; they’ll say, “Today we are your children,” and their parents will come and cry but not for Tim.

For once Leah has stopped thinking about Ashna. The overnight shift is over; she starts to walk away from the shelter. She hears carol singers in the distance, and imagines they’re singing that old hymn, no room in the inn. The air outside is cold and clean. If she had made the filling, she would have zested the lemon down to the pith.