The Lending Library

by Fogelson, Aliza

“All over South America.” His eyes sparkled. “Buenos Aires, Cuzco, the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, Iguazu Falls . . . little beach towns totally off the beaten path . . . on a traveling houseboat, for some of the time, with a guy who builds boats based on ancient Amazonian techniques. It was amazing.”

  Wow, I thought. It was what Shep had been dreaming of doing for so long.

  “That’s amazing, Shep,” I said. He winced a little. “I’m really happy for you.” In spite of myself, I added, “I can’t wait to hear all about it.”

  “Really?” he said, and his voice was so full of boyish excitement that I swallowed the lump and nodded.

  “Dodie, please . . . ,” he began, and I already knew what he was going to say.

  The words rushed out of my mouth before he could speak. “No, Shep. How can I trust you again?”

  Shep hung his head. “I—”

  I wasn’t done yet.

  “You left me like that,” I accused him, cutting the air with my hand. “Like it was nothing. Like you were gone and never coming back. When you know that is probably the one thing I can’t handle. Because you did exactly what my birth father did. That is exactly what my birth father did.”

  I didn’t care that I was repeating myself. This had been pent up in me for months.

  Shep reached out as if to comfort me. Realizing he didn’t have the right, he raked his hand through his hair instead. “Of course you would see it that way,” he said, anguished.

  “Anyone would,” I shot back.

  “That’s not what I meant—I mean, of course they would—but . . . but Do, I didn’t leave without thinking of you. I thought about it all the time—what it might do to you—”

  “Could have fooled me,” I interrupted. I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “You were willing to risk causing me that kind of pain?”

  Shep looked at me imploringly. “Please,” he said. “Give me a second to tell you, okay? I thought of you constantly, Do.”

  How could I believe him when I’d heard nothing for months?

  He handed me another fat envelope that had been sitting on the side table. “You’re probably wondering how you were supposed to know I was thinking about you when you didn’t hear from me? Well, I was telling you every day . . .”

  The flap of the envelope was torn in a few places. The edges of dozens of postcards peeked out of the top. Like the ones he’d sent me . . . but more. So many more. Dozens and dozens of them . . .

  He held the whole thing out to me and scootched closer. Too close. His scent was distracting, and now there was absolutely no hiding the fact that my hands were gently shaking.

  He was still getting closer, and I suddenly found my head against his chest, his chin tucked over it. Lightly touching some of the postcards I’d turned out onto my lap—postcards that I could see, even as tears of relief filled my eyes, contained more stories from his months of travel, each and every one of them signed “All my love, Shep”—he said softly, “I’ll tell you everything now, but since I couldn’t wait until I saw you again to share it with you, I wrote you these . . .”

  It took a long time before I could speak. Shep waited. Finally, I said, “For now, tell me the best part.”

  “I hardly remember the first few weeks,” he admitted, his voice contorting with pain.

  Our faces were so close. He wasn’t going to finish the thought; he was lifting my chin. I knew what was about to happen, but I was almost too dazzled by the smell of him, by the ache of remembering how his lips felt. Almost.

  I stood up quickly, knocking the pile of postcards onto the floor. “Sorry,” I mumbled, grateful to avoid his eyes as I bent down to pick them up.

  “No, I’m sorry.” He knelt down to help me. I handed the ones I’d collected to him, and he stuffed them back into the envelope.

  “I—I have to go, Shep.”

  He sighed. “I understand. Let me walk you out.”

  “Thank you for the wine. I’m glad you’re back.” The warmth in my own words surprised me, and it was all the encouragement Shep needed.

  “Do—” he began again.

  “No, Shep,” I objected, pressing the elevator button but half hoping it would take forever to come.

  “Please, Do. I don’t know if I’ll see you again after this—if you’ll want to—so I need to say this. Being away made me understand everything. How I must have hurt you.

  “Then I realized two things:

  “First of all, no man will ever deserve you, so if I’m the lucky bastard you love back, that’s a gift I’m too selfish to give someone else. I can’t live without you—it feels wrong.

  “Second, I have to compromise more. What you want is important. If you need me to be ready for something, and I’m not—if it’s really important to you, whatever it is—then I will try to be ready too. I know we won’t always be on the same timeline about things, but if you let me have another chance, I promise I will spend the rest of my life trying to make you happy and to grow with you.”

  It was hard for Shep to say things like this. I could see that he’d probably thought about them everywhere from the Pampas to a puddle jumper.

  Wiping the tears off my cheeks as I turned to go, all I could say was, “How do I know you won’t leave again?”

  His fingers alighted on my wrist, staying me.

  “Do, please. There’s more; there’s a story that these postcards don’t tell. Will you let me explain?”

  “No, Shep,” I murmured. “It’s too much.” Don’t look at him.

  Just as the elevator doors slid shut, he pushed one last postcard through. At the top he had written today’s date. There was a picture of an heirloom tomato on the front. It said only,

  I didn’t expect you to wait for me, but I’ve come back to you anyway. Now I will wait—for as long as it takes—for you to come back to me.

  I lay in bed that night remembering the look of shocked disappointment on his face as he disappeared between the elevator doors. He had really believed it would work. The last postcard, well, that was just . . . romantic and maddening.

  More importantly, how did he know I would come back to him? Was he prepared to wait 62 years if it took me that long to forgive him? Or 117, if Jonah Brownlee’s first attempts at a Divine Life Potion proved fruitful? It made me angry that Shep still assumed he knew the person I was after months of absence and that we could go back to how we were the second he decided that was what he wanted.

  Except, a part of me argued back, he does know you. And he still left. I wasn’t ready to accept any kind of love that seemed conditional. I still wanted it all, and I still believed that wasn’t an impossible thing to ask for.

  At 3:00 a.m., mind fuzzy, I tried to snuggle back into sleep as if it were a warm robe. The smile I wore when I woke again at 4:00 a.m. quickly faded. I lay very still, focusing on the tendrils of the dream that were slipping away.

  Scattered snippets caught and held; the tan oval of Shep’s face above me, laughing; wondering why I was flat on my back on the ground; his arms lifting me up, brushing me off, a kiss on my cheek that was publicly chaste but secretly contained a gentle lick, a promise for what was to come later; my face flaming in the midnight darkness as he shucked off his shorts and ran into the water; the ache of longing as he stroked up and down my arm distractedly while talking to my parents.

  I rocked around in my sheets like a malcontent caterpillar. Shep was in town now. Minutes away. My bed was still so empty that I might as well have been the one mosquito netted into a bed, in a clutch of trees, somewhere on the South American plains.

  It was no use. I couldn’t sleep. Maybe a good book would help.

  Outside the windows of the lending library, the trees were starting to puff green. Some perennials from the previous owners popped up every year, making me look like a chrysanthemum-yellow-and-azalea-amethyst-colored thumb instead of the brown thumb I probably was. I could make out the heads of some of the newly bloomed flowers bowing in the morning air. I settled int
o the squishy chair and picked up Trading Dreams at Midnight. The hours sped up as I disappeared into the story of Neena and Tish and the ways they dealt with the pain of their absent mother. At six, I texted Shep: Come by after you’ve had coffee. Let’s go for a walk.

  Shep was there by seven thirty. His hands were in his pockets as he leaned against his truck, his eyes riveted on my face. He swallowed hard. We drove in silence to Little Duck Park.

  We headed up the side of the hill we’d climbed the day Terabithia had gone home with Coco and Mark. I could say that now: home. I knew it was true. I hadn’t lost Terabithia; he was still in my life.

  Losing Shep had been the most painful thing I’d ever experienced because I wasn’t sure I had sacrificed him to something that would make him happier. I didn’t know what I’d sacrificed him to at all anymore or whether we could ever go back to the way we had been.

  The spring sun was strong, but as we climbed higher, the weight of the air compressed into coldness. From the top of the hill, the roads led out of Chatsworth toward the highway in a haze of bright leaves.

  Shep reached for my hand. He had been pacing ever since we reached the summit. Now he led me over to a rock to sit.

  “Do you remember soon after we started dating, I was acting sort of oddly, and I never really told you why?” he began. I nodded. “And how a number of other times, I got up from bed when I heard something at your window?”

  A number of times? There had been that once. I half nodded, half shook my head.

  “Well, it was my ex, Quinn. They were all Quinn.”

  Quinn? What was she doing?

  “You know how I told you she and I broke up partly because she wanted a baby?”

  I nodded.

  “Really, really badly. She wanted one so badly that she . . . that she . . . ,” he faltered.

  I started breathing slowly through my nose. “Go on.”

  “She threatened to get pregnant whether I wanted it or not.” He raked his hand through his hair. “By that point, I had already fallen out of love with her. It wasn’t the idea of a baby. It was the way she always tried to make me feel small. She talked all the time about her ex-boyfriend whenever I told her no about a baby, and she said I treated her badly. It was all manipulation to try to get me to do what she wanted.

  “Then I met you. Suddenly, this whole world opened up to me. I didn’t feel small around you. I felt like you were part of my team. Part of everyone’s team. I fell in love with you, and that filled me with guilt for having stayed with Quinn at all after I realized I didn’t love her—even before I met you.”

  “So I broke it off with her—the weekend you and Maddie went away together. She couldn’t believe it. She went nuts. She trashed my apartment. She followed me everywhere for the next few weeks. Followed us. I protected you from it. I knew she wouldn’t do anything serious, and I wanted you so badly I was afraid she would scare you away. I worried that she would contact you. Instead, I kept intercepting her before she could.

  “One night, when she started getting bolder, she came to my apartment. You weren’t there, but you could have been. Instead of telling her to go away, like I had the other times, I decided I needed to try to make her understand, so I told her she could come meet me at the site the next day. Neutral ground.

  “She looked different. Scared, somehow. As if she’d been caught committing some kind of crime, and now she was frightened by the consequences. I thought it was just because she understood it was over and had to figure out what to do now.

  “I told her it had to stop. She said she knew, and that was why she was leaving town. ‘Unless you want me to stay?’ she asked.

  “I said no, it was definitely over between us, and not to stay for me.

  “Quinn started crying. I let her cry on my shoulder for a second, and then I told her goodbye and wished her luck. She cried all the way back to the car. She seemed so broken. I couldn’t believe she loved me that much and had treated me so badly. But I didn’t dig deeper, didn’t ask any questions; I was off the hook with her, and I was crazy about you, and all I cared about was that she was going away.”

  He paused. “You okay?”

  “Yes, go on.” Something worse was coming—I could feel it.

  “For the next few weeks, she called me dozens of times. I never picked up. I put my phone on vibrate so that I didn’t have to hear it ringing. I screened my calls. I wanted a clean break. I wanted you. Being with you made me so happy that I forgot all about her, as awful as that may sound. The phone calls, any shred of guilt I might have felt, became like a gnat I could swat away.

  “I didn’t hear from her for more than nine months after she finally cut it out. One of the guys at the site told me she’d moved to New York. I figured she’d gotten on with her life. Then, the day Mark and Coco took Terabithia home, she called me. Remember when I got the call at Mackie and Jeff’s?”

  Of course I remembered.

  “She said she had to see me and was heading back to Chatsworth to meet up. Turns out she’d been living at home with her parents in Greenwich, not in New York. I tried to dissuade her, but she insisted on coming. The next day, she showed up at the site. With . . . a . . .”

  I steeled myself for what was coming.

  “A two-month-old baby boy. Who looked a little . . .”

  “Little what?” I whispered.

  “Like me. As much as a two-month-old baby can.” He pushed himself off the rock and knelt down. “It’s not what you think,” he rushed to say, taking my icy hands in his.

  “Quinn said, ‘Meet Max. Your little boy.’ I nearly fainted on the spot.

  “‘Max is your son.’ She was smiling and told me to do the math.

  “I did the math. It would have been a little less than a year earlier, before I admitted my feelings for you. It was before Quinn and I had stopped . . . well, it was when I was still in denial about how wrong she was for me.

  “I asked her how it could have happened when we always used protection. I had made sure of that; I didn’t trust her. Dodie, are you sure you’re okay? You look green.”

  I waved my hand to signal I’d be fine. Hearing about Shep’s sex with his ex-girlfriend was the least of my worries now. I wanted him to get to the part where it wasn’t what I was thinking it was. Stat.

  “Quinn admitted to poking holes in the condom beforehand. I will not repeat what I said to her in response to that. She told me I shouldn’t speak to her that way since I was the mother of her child.

  “I said I didn’t believe her and asked why she hadn’t told me before, why now?

  “She said she had tried, right when she found out, and reminded me that I wouldn’t take her calls. She said she had to try again now because ‘Maxie’ would soon be aware of what was going on around him, that eventually he would go to school and see the other kids with moms and dads. She wanted to give me a chance to be part of his life and even hinted that maybe we could try again.

  “I told her no way and demanded a paternity test.

  “She tried to talk me out of it, but I wasn’t having it. We did the test. It came back negative when I was in Peru. She admitted to me that she’d cheated on me with her ex when we were having problems and that he wanted nothing to do with her. It made me sick to my stomach to think how she’d lied to me. To think that down the road she would have told that little boy I was his daddy. To put me in that position!”

  Shep was silent, as if waiting for me to sympathize or at least say something.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I finally asked, my voice breaking . . . my heart breaking for that little boy. None of this was his fault, and yet he was the one who was going to suffer the most.

  “I felt like I couldn’t. You had just lost Terabithia. How could I tell you that I might be the father of another child out in the world?

  “Then the night we fought, when you said you wanted to have a baby right away . . . after you’d admitted that you were trying to adopt Terabithia a few months ear
lier without telling me . . . it was clear how determined you were. I know it wasn’t fair to see any similarities in my situation with Quinn and with you, but it was too much of a coincidence. I couldn’t process it all. I panicked, and I ran.”

  “I was your fiancée,” I said softly. “You didn’t even give me a chance. You didn’t even stay to talk about it. You left me . . . you made me think you’d abandoned me, just like . . . just like h-he did . . .”

  “I know.” His eyes filled with tears. “I know, and I’m so, so sorry.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. All my anger at Shep, which had been bubbling up under the hurt, came to the surface, and if I didn’t get out of there, I was going to explode. “I need to be alone,” I said through gritted teeth. He caught up with me where the hill started to slope downward and grabbed my arm.

  “No!” I yelled, pushing him away. “You hypocrite! Don’t follow me! I can’t even look at you!” I choked out.

  “Dodie, wait.”

  I turned around to face him. “No! You . . . you asshole,” I sobbed. “You have the nerve to lecture me about taking away your choice, when all this time . . . when you allowed me to think it was because of something I’d done. That I failed in some way. That you didn’t love me enough. You can go to hell!”

  Shep’s mouth hung open. He was looking at me like I was a different person. That’s exactly what I was. Not the same helpless four-year-old. Not even the person I’d been three months earlier, who was only ever hard on herself when she hadn’t deserved it.

  I picked my way down through the heavy carpet of dead leaves and branches, stumbling occasionally on pockets of uneven ground, blinded by my tears. At the bottom of the hill, I stopped and retched until there was nothing left. And then I went home.

  —TWENTY-FOUR—

  May 2009

  School was almost over for the year. I would miss it, and the relief of losing myself in the smell of glue and the sound of construction paper tearing. And the kids, of course.

  “Who’s that in your picture?” I asked my second-grader Joon. She was drawing a man so tall he looked like his legs had been stretched. He was wearing a top hat. Come to think of it, he looked a little bit like Abraham Lincoln without the beard. A bright burst of bouquet covered his hand, which was extended toward us.