A Short Walk to the Bookshop

by Aleksandra Drake

  "Will you come in with me for a minute?" I asked him at the gate, pushing it open for Athena who was turning circles around my legs.

  "I think she was a little antsy in my apartment," he replied, watching the dog. He followed me to the door.

  As usual, I stood on the threshold as Athena went in and pushed up the light switches with her nose, making her rounds in every room until she returned to the front door. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up knowing that this was the first time Diedrich had witnessed Athena really working. He just looked impressed though.

  "Will you be alright?" He placed his hand on my door frame.

  I nodded, and when his arms sort of lifted towards me I hugged him. When I closed my eyes and rested my head on his chest, I couldn't hear his heartbeat through his jacket, but I was grateful all the same that I had someone to hold me now. Even if it took embarrassing myself in a bookshop to get there.

  "I'll see you soon," he said as turned to leave, and now that he was leaving I wished that he would hurry. I could feel bile rising up in my throat and I didn't want him to see me cry. There weren't many lines I wasn't willing to cross that day, but crying in front of him was one of them.

  The nausea hit so bad as soon as he left that I got myself a big glass of water and my phone and went to sit on the bathroom floor. The old tile was cracked and ugly but good and cold. It had taken me spending the day in someone else's apartment to realize the harsh reality that I wasn't healthy enough to live alone. I had slept so easily on his couch. Now, the night stretched on endlessly in front of me.

  I laid down on the floor, stared at the dirty grout around the tub, and called my mother.

  Chapter Eight

  "Are you sure it's okay if I come?" Paula asked. She was wearing her hair in a tight braid to keep it off her neck in the damp heat of the burgeoning summer, but no braid could really contain those curls.

  "It's totally okay," I said, not actually knowing if it would be totally okay or not. I'd kind of mentioned off hand to Diedrich that I might possibly invite Paula to the next book club meeting. He'd been ambivalent and I'd taken it as permission. Now that the time was coming I was beginning to feel less sure about that decision, but it was too late now.

  She stirred the ice tea in the tall glass I'd given her and shifted her weight to lean on my kitchen counter.

  "I've never been in a book club before. I'm not really the bookish type. I probably won't fit in, right?"

  I shrugged and hastily downed the rest of my own drink. "I wouldn't say they're necessarily 'bookish.' If the only book you read all season is the book club book, no one would even know."

  "I didn't even read this one." She said, tilting her chin towards the book under my phone.

  "Do you not want to go?"

  "Oh, I definitely want to go. I want to meet that Richard."

  “You want to meet ‘that Richard’ who shops at the store you work at every week and says hi to you every time he comes in? Who was at my birthday party?”

  “You know what I mean. Meet him for real. Outside of work. In a quieter setting.”

  I laughed, glancing at the clock above the stove. We needed to be leaving in the next couple minutes if we were going to be on time and Paula was still only a couple inches deep into her iced tea. I wondered if putting my shoes on and getting Athena's lead would prompt her to hurry it up.

  Paula was never in a hurry. In the past few months that we'd been friends I had learned that very quickly. That chilled out, chatty personality that she had with the customers at work was really just how she was all the time. I liked it, even though her devil-may-care attitude about punctuality sometimes gave me the shakes.

  Paula's crush on Richard was a fun way to keep conversation on her rather than me, but I really didn't understand the, apparently widespread, romantic appeal of the giant engineer. Even tight-lipped Heather seemed to have a soft spot for him whenever he came in to buy groceries.

  He was certainly the most outspoken of the group around the bookstore. Maybe that's what it was.

  "We better hurry," I finally said.

  "Oh, shit." Paula, seeming to notice the time at last, swallowed her tea in an impressive gulp and we hurried back into town. We'd walked to my place together after both of us had gotten off work that afternoon. The walk was nice and it was properly hot most days now, though I had to refrain myself from calling everyone who mentioned the temperature wimps after living in Texas.

  It was the first time I'd not been the first to arrive for book club. When Paula and I came in, Stephen was already sitting with Diedrich at the table. They stopped speaking when we came in.

  "Hello, Sparrow." Diedrich said with his small smile. "Paula," he added with a nod in her direction.

  "Sparrow said it was alright if I joined too."

  "Of course it is. Of course," Diedrich said, though the look on his face was one of mild panic. He bolted out of his seat and headed to the coffee area to start straightening cups and bottles of powdered creamer for no obvious reason. Stephen seemed to notice Diedrich's agitation as well and he and I glanced at each other knowingly behind his back as Paula and I sat down.

  "We met at Sparrow's party. I'm Stephen," He said, extending his hand to her.

  "Yep! I remember you!" Her voice was so bright and cheerful, it seemed out of place in the quiet shop. But not in a bad way. Having Paula around felt like having a window open.

  Richard showed up at just about the same time, and Diedrich rejoined the table, sitting next to me. As the others chatted, Diedrich was silent. I managed to catch his eye while the others were talking and I mouthed "are you okay?" silently.

  He nodded and, under the table, he patted my knee. After that he perked up somewhat as the group began to discuss the Winston Churchill biography we'd all read.

  "I've never slogged though such a slog as this," was my review, flipping languidly through the pages of the tome on the table. "We have to read a novel next time. I'm literally begging you."

  "Oh yeah, I agree. Let's read a novel," Paula seconded.

  Richard agreed pretty readily, but Stephen was hesitant.

  "I never read novels" he said.

  "Don't be a snob," Richard teased the non-fiction purist, saying what I think the rest of us were thinking.

  "Yeah, this isn't your classroom. Cut loose! Live dangerously and read a romance!" I joined in. "Besides, it's summer."

  "Can we read Jane Austen?" Paula interjected excitedly "I never have but I've seen the movies."

  Diedrich was leaning back in his seat with his arms crossed over his chest and laughing silently to himself as the hostile feminine takeover of the book club unfolded.

  "Let's do it." Richard said, smiling at Paula. "I wanna know about this Darcy guy. What makes him so great?"

  Paula positively bloomed under Richard's smile.

  "It looks like you've been outvoted, Stephen," Diedrich said.

  Stephen shrugged with his palms turned out. "Seems that way."

  Diedrich got up and disappeared into the general fiction section. Richard and Paula were discussing the mythos surrounding the character of Fitzwilliam Darcy, mostly as a conversational scaffold to support increasingly obvious flirting between the two of them. In my desire to play wingman as well as I could, I attempted to engage Stephen.

  "Do you assign summer reading to your students?" I asked him, leaning my elbow on the table and resting my chin in my hand.

  "Teaching teenagers forces you to choose your battles wisely," he responded, "and that's a battle I lost so many times I decided to stop fighting it."

  "I'm not surprised. I always hated summer reading. I mean, I liked to read in the summertime. But not assigned books."

  "And yet here you are," he grinned.

  "This is different. I came of my own free will."

  Diedrich reappeared with a couple copies of Pride and Prejudice in his hands. "I'll have to order a couple more, but fight it out over these for now."

  Paula a
nd Richard both grabbed them first, and Stephen and I were left to fend for ourselves.

  When people began to filter out of the shop, I lingered behind, telling Paula that I'd see her at work the following morning.

  "Did it bother you that I invited Paula along?" I asked Diedrich when we were alone, straightening up the chairs and coffee cups people had left.

  "Not at all, why do you ask?" he lied transparently.

  "You seemed bothered."

  "Not bothered," he persisted. The two of us barely fit in the little back room where we washed the mugs together. He rinsed, I dried. "It's just always a bit of a shock when things are different. That's not a bad thing. I just had to adjust. She's a fun woman."

  "I think so too." I took another mug and balanced it on the counter next to the others. "She's kind of brassy. I like it."

  "It's quite a contrast. The two of you together."

  "You think?" I realized again how much the last few years had changed me.

  "What do you think of her and Richard?" I asked as we walked back out into the bookshop proper. He was straightening up the front counter and getting ready to close, so I helped by turning the open sign to closed.

  Diedrich laughed. "They seem very similar. We will have to wait and see if that's a good thing or not."

  "Now that you mention it..." I chuckled "You're absolutely right. Anyway, It'll be fun watching what happens."

  "Should I...walk the two of you home?" Diedrich asked, glancing down at Athena who was sitting patiently near my feet.

  "Oh. uh..." Now that it was summer, there was still plenty of light at the end of the book club meeting. So there was no real need for an escort. That wasn't so important anymore though, we no longer needed an excuse to spend time together. "Sure. If it's not any trouble for you?"

  "It's never any trouble." He said, putting his hat on his head and offering me his arm. Feeling a bit like an old fashioned lady, I laced my arm through his and we set off down the road.

  The next morning, I woke up on the couch to the sound of someone rapping on my door. I bolted upright, my heart immediately flinging itself into a panic attack. The only person I could think who would be at the door was Diedrich, and there was no way he knocked like that, all full of male urgency.

  "Athena," I hissed. She stood between me and the door protectively, but not sure what was expected of her.

  By the time I got to the door to peer through the peephole, the brown-clad delivery person was halfway down the walk again. I exhaled and laughed to myself. Stupid. My mom must have sent me something I forgot at home. I brought the package in and put it on the table while I made coffee and checked the time. It was one in the afternoon. Not too bad. It was a normal time to be awake, and a normal time to be waking up if you're under twenty five. Which I wasn't. But it was still close to normal.

  I didn't notice right away that it was a shipping box from an on-line store I'd never heard of. It wasn't until I was opening it to find the tissue paper and gift wrap that I knew it wasn't from home.

  When I pulled out a lacy nightie I went numb. Something inside me shut down completely, it was like I was watching myself from afar. I dug around in the box for a receipt but there was nothing. Nothing but the black lace sex clothes carefully wrapped in hot pink tissue paper and ribbon.

  He knew my address. He'd found me. I had known it was only a matter of time. Officer Dave had told my mom that the fake account was probably a way he was trying to get information about me. Mom tried to spread the word among family that the account was fake and to block it, but he'd gotten through somehow.

  That was the first day I actually used the old wood burning stove in the living room. It was hard to open the flue and it stunk like burning dust when I lit a fire with magazine paper and sticks from outside, but eventually, with difficulty, I had a fire going that was large enough for the box. I punched it down, with the "gift" inside, and shoved it in the stove.

  The nightie must have been cheap polyester, because it melted and stunk up the whole living room. Watching it burn wasn't as cathartic as I'd hoped it would be.

  Chapter Nine

  As the days grew hotter and wetter, my insomnia grew steadily worse. I spent most of my days off asleep, though Athena did her best to keep me awake. She pawed at my blankets, tirelessly trying to rouse me. Usually I managed to sleep through it. Then, at night, I bit my fingernails to the quick as she laid her warm, heavy body across my legs while I sat on the couch. She couldn't prevent me from getting up though, to pace or check the locks again or, peer out the windows.

  Three times I called my mother and told her I wanted to come home, that I was still too sick to live alone. That I was killing myself here all alone.

  "Sparrow." She had said, in that voice that could be so comforting and so frustrating at the same time, "Try and give it more time, I don't want you to give up yet. I know you don't want to come back here. You were miserable. Have you made any new friends besides that bookshop guy?"

  In the end, hearing her voice was enough that, by the end of our phone call, I was always at least partly glad that she'd talked me out of going back to Texas. She was right. I hadn't been happy there either. And I was making friends here. I would get off the phone with buoyed hope and I would eat something and make plans.

  Then night would fall. Darkness crept across the kitchen counters and I'd look at the plans I had made in the morning and just laugh. Morning Sparrow was an idiot.

  I never did call Diedrich after he had offered. As the days went by, I grew more and more regretful that I had showed him so much of the condition I was in. I had moved here to make a fresh start, that was harder to do when there was someone always looking at me a second too long, searching for signs that I was quietly deteriorating. He had always offered me coffee when I came in. He did for everyone, not just me. But after that day he had begun offering me food as well.

  Lately he had taken to giving me apples. I'd forgotten the simple joy of biting into an apple and having a bite almost too big to chew snap off in your mouth. But the weight of his unspoken worry was heavy.

  In mid-June I was up at three in the morning, in bed but horrifically awake. I was battling, like every night, with the feeling of being watched. The feeling of being Not Alone. The feeling that He was coming. Earlier that day I had visited Diedrich and Stephen had been there too. That sunny morning seemed so far away then, but I knew it had really happened because there was an apple that Diedrich had given me on my dresser across from my bed. It was dark but my eyes were adjusted and I was trying to focus on the shine of reflected light from the kitchen on the apple.

  I couldn't call mom again. I'd called her the night before. She needed to sleep, and I didn't want her to give up on convincing me to stick it out in Washington.

  I wanted to hear her voice though. The battle was so loud between my rational mind that knew I was safe and the part of my mind that could only shriek that I was being hunted, and I was so tired. I settled on staring at her name in the contacts on my phone. As I scrolled down to it though, Diedrich's name flashed on the screen towards the top of my contacts list.

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I hit the call button next to his name. My heart thudded so hard in my chest that I sat up, pressing the phone to my ear, clutching my pillow. I listened to it ring. Three rings. Four. Five.

  "Sparrow?" his voice was gravelly and I could see him in my mind’s eye with perfect clarity, his hair messy and eyes bleary, propped up on one arm to reach his phone.

  "How did you know?"

  "I've expected your call. I thought it might not ever come. Are you okay?"

  The urge to cry washed over me like a too-hot shower. I swallowed thickly and held my breath, trying to get myself under control before I answered so he wouldn't hear the frog in my throat. The effort was for nothing, though, and I only managed to whimper out a quiet "No."

  "Do you need me to come? Bring you something?" His voice was stronger now and I could hear him sitting
up and the distant sound of blankets shuffling.

  "No. No, please don't. I just needed to hear someone’s voice. Will you talk to me?"

  "About what?"

  "I don't know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have woke you," I blurted.

  "I told you it wasn't a problem and it isn't. I'm glad you called. After you left today Richard asked me to go hiking with him."

  "...what?"

  He chuckled softly into the phone and I could hear him moving again. I imagined him laying back against his pillow. I did the same, laying down and pulling my blanket up around my ears.