by Sarah Jio
“Thank you, Soledad. Yes, my aunt Ruby was a wonderful woman who believed in the power of literature. I grew up right here in the bookstore, where I got to see, firsthand, just how transformative books can be. When Aunt Ruby passed away a few months ago, she left the store to me in hopes that I’d find a way to save it.”
“I understand that the bookstore is in financial distress and that you’re hosting a fund-raiser to keep the doors open,” Soledad says.
I pause before answering. “Yes, that’s right. We’ll need quite an infusion of funds to keep the lights on and to keep Chase and Hanson Bank from proceeding with its foreclosure process.”
“Even the business element of your story is personal,” Soledad continues. “As I understand it, you used to be a vice president at Chase and Hanson. Is that right?”
“Yes,” I say honestly. “I was the very person in charge of shutting down small businesses like Bluebird Books. I used to see things from a black-and-white perspective, but now that I’m on the other side, I realize that sometimes people just need a little more time, or maybe a second chance.” I think about Arthur then. And I wonder if he’s watching, and what he’s thinking.
“Well said from a former financier,” Soledad says. “Now, can you tell us a little about the Goodnight Moon connection? Is it true that the book was somehow inspired by the bookstore?”
“Yes,” I say. “My aunt Ruby and Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon and at least one hundred other children’s books, were very good friends. They corresponded for many years.” I hold up the letters I recently found in the Pippi Longstocking book. “In their letters, each woman encouraged the other in significant ways. And my aunt Ruby was instrumental in encouraging Margaret to continue writing when she was facing her own demons and insecurities. And, in 1946, Margaret came to Seattle and visited Bluebird Books. The experience served as the inspiration for perhaps her greatest work to date, Goodnight Moon.”
“That is truly remarkable,” Soledad says. “So many of us, including myself, have read this book to our children over the years and thought, ‘Wow, this is really special. But where did the idea come from? What compelled this author to write it?’ And yet, until now, there is no explanation. Truly fascinating. And for anyone who’d like to attend the fund-raiser or make a donation to help save Bluebird Books, we’ll put a link up on our website with information on how you can get involved. Thank you, June. We wish you all the best.”
“Thank you so much, Soledad.”
And just like that, the lights shut off, and the cameraman smiles. “You did great,” he says.
“I hope so. Honestly, it was such a blur. I don’t know what I said.”
“Everyone says that,” he reassures me. “I promise, you’ll watch yourself on TV and you’ll think, ‘I did pretty great!’”
“Do you know when the piece will air?”
“Probably in a day or two,” he says. “They usually shoot for the next day, or the day after.”
“Great,” I say, just as the phone begins to ring.
“Feel free to grab that,” the cameraman says. “We’ve got everything we need. We’ll just pack up now.”
“Thanks again,” I say, running to the phone. “Hello, Bluebird Books.”
“Yes, is this June Andersen?”
“Speaking.”
“Ms. Andersen, this is Edward Newton from HarperCollins Publishers in New York City. Our corporate communications office ran across the Seattle Times article, and, well, I wanted to be in touch, since we are the publisher of Goodnight Moon.”
“Oh, yes, hello,” I say.
“Ms. Andersen,” he continues, “we see that your event is in three weeks, and we’d like to create special copies of Goodnight Moon that we’ll rush to the store for your event. Each book’s cover will be affixed with a sticker that reads “In honor of Bluebird Books, the birthplace of Goodnight Moon.”
“Wow. That is . . . wonderful.”
“I have to tell you,” he says, “I was quite shocked to read that a bookstore in Seattle could be the birthplace of this legendary title, and I admit, I didn’t altogether believe it. But our historian did some digging and we found some journal entries from the Brown estate that support what you say you’ve found in the letters between your aunt and Margaret. All this to say, it’s a rare literary discovery, and we’d like to celebrate it with you.”
“I’d be delighted,” I say. “We have at least one hundred coming to the event, and probably more. The invitations just went out.”
“We’ll make sure you have enough,” he says. “How about five hundred, and several more boxes for the shop? I assume they’ll be hot sellers at Bluebird Books.”
“That would be amazing,” I reply. “If we can meet our fund-raising goal, we plan to reopen the store next month.”
“Well,” Edward says, “all of us at HarperCollins wish you the very best of luck.”
“How did the interview go?” Gavin asks, nestling Little Ruby into my arms.
“Great,” I say, indicating the phone. “That was someone from HarperCollins, the publisher of Goodnight Moon. They want to donate several boxes of special edition books for the event.”
“Wow, that’s amazing,” Gavin says. “Things are looking good for Bluebird Books.”
“Let’s hope. I don’t want to get too excited until we have the money we need to pay off the bank.”
He kisses my forehead, then walks to the door. “Come by at lunch. I’m making tortellini.”
“And tortellini solves what problem?”
“Worrying,” he says. “It helps you stop worrying.”
Chapter 24
While Ruby has a morning nap, I decide to get started rearranging the bookshelves. If we’re going to have more than one hundred people in the store, we’re going to need room for them. Carefully, after removing and stacking the books from the waist-high shelves that occupy the center of the store, I line them along the exterior walls. After a half hour, I’m amazed at how much space the shift has made.
I pause and wipe the sweat off my brow as the phone rings at Ruby’s desk. I suppose I might be here another twenty-five years and still call it Ruby’s desk. It will always be hers and no one else’s. “Hello, Bluebird Books,” I say, a little out of breath.
“June, this is J.P., the guy who was almost your cousin—from the library.”
“Oh hi!” I say, happy to hear from him. “Did you get my invitation?”
“Not yet,” he says. “But I heard about it, and I wanted to say that I’m coming, and that the library is totally behind your efforts. We want Bluebird Books to be the official bookseller for all of our children’s events this year.”
“That’s amazing, thank you,” I say.
“Also, I spoke to my friend who’s the director of Friends of the King County Library, and he says each year they give a grant to a bookseller who has shown extraordinary community service. These grants are meant to help booksellers thrive in increasingly challenging times. Anyway, I pitched Bluebird Books to him, and he says it sounds like a shoo-in.”
“We would have made great cousins, you know?”
“I know,” he says.
In the rush to get the store ready for the party, I realize that I miss Ruby more than ever. I long to hear her voice. I need her to know that I’m trying to save Bluebird Books, and I need her to tell me, like she did when I was a child, that everything’s going to be all right.
Mister Dog. The dog who belonged to himself. I remember Margaret writing about the title in the previous letter. Of course. I find the first edition, and inside is a single yellowed envelope. It’s addressed to my aunt, but I don’t recognize the handwriting on the envelope. It’s certainly not Margaret’s. I quickly open the letter. It’s dated December 12, 1952, years after the last pair of letters Ruby left for me. What happened in between? I e
ye the letter and read the typewritten words:
Dear Ruby,
I am Margaret Wise Brown’s sister, Roberta. I regret to inform you that Margaret passed away last month in France, where she was recovering from surgery. I hate to be the bearer of this news, but since you and Margaret were very close she’d want you to know. I hope it is a comfort that Margaret’s death was quick and painless. The physician told me that after surgery, she had a terrible time staying in bed. Wanting to go out to the gardens to examine the birds in the lemon trees outside her window, she tried to convince a nurse that she was well enough to walk by kicking her leg up can-can style. Sadly, the action released a fatal blood clot. She died seconds later.
I found a stack of letters from you to Margaret in her Cobble Court home. She kept them in a box on her desk, and it is obvious that you were a beloved friend of hers. I am returning these letters to you. I thought you might like to have them. Perhaps they will bring you some peace.
In looking through them (I hope you don’t mind), I grew to admire the friendship the two of you shared. I also had no idea of the pain I caused my sister. I hope you understand it was unknowingly. Of course, I wish I could turn back the clock now and make her see that I loved her every ounce as much as she loved me. I wish I could tell her that I accepted her just as she was. I believe in my heart that she knew that when she died. It took time, but our relationship strengthened over the years. It brought a tear to my eye reading about Operation Sisterhood. If only everyone had a sister like Margaret who refused to let go. I pray that you and your sister, Lucille, have found your own common ground, though it is not my business to ask about those details.
Well, I do hope these letters are a comfort to you. I know you know, as I do, that as long as this world spins, there will never be another Margaret.
All my best wishes,
Roberta Brown Rauch
I set the letter down, feeling the grief that Ruby must have felt so many decades before. And then I notice a key on the floor. It must have fallen out of the book when I opened it. I pick it up and examine it closely, with a sense of familiarity. The treasure chest. Yes. Aunt Ruby used to keep a treasure chest in the store. After story time, she’d let one child insert the key into the lock, and then everyone could reach in and pull out a candy or a sticker, or a small toy. I used to love that treasure chest. It was magical.
And now, Ruby’s given me the key.
“June?” Mom’s standing in the doorway when I turn around, with Gavin right behind her. “Look who brought lunch.”
Gavin holds up a paper bag that I can smell all the way from inside the bookstore.
“What are you doing?” Mom asks, walking toward me.
I wipe away a tear and hold up the key. “Ruby left me this. Remember the treasure chest?”
Mom nods. “You girls used to love that.”
“Are you going to open it?” Gavin asks.
I eye the screen of the baby monitor and see that Little Ruby’s still fast asleep, then walk to Ruby’s desk, and pull out the chest beneath. I insert the key into the old lock, remembering watching Ruby do the same a hundred times before.
I lift the lid and peer into the chest, which is lined with red velvet. And there, waiting for me, is a copy of Goodnight Moon. I open the cover and see the copyright. It’s dated 1947. A first edition. In perfect condition.
Mom is crying as I lift open the cover of the book. The dust jacket is brittle and it almost feels as if the edges might disintegrate beneath my fingers. “I wish Amy were here,” I whisper to Mom.
“She’s with us,” she says, smiling.
Inside the book is a single letter, from Ruby. It doesn’t look old like the previous letters I’ve found. It’s addressed to me, and it looks as though Ruby took a paper and pen just a few months ago and wrote it out, perhaps the last thing she did in the bookstore before she departed.
Gavin places his hand on the small of my back.
“Read it,” Mom says tenderly. “It’s time you knew, honey.”
“Knew?” I search her face. There are tears in her eyes. Tears of guilt, regret. And tears of love. She hasn’t been a perfect mother, and for long stretches of time she wasn’t even a good mother, but I forgave her a long time ago, and I love her in spite of it all.
I turn to the letter, open the envelope, and with a shaky voice, I read aloud:
My dearest girl,
And now you come to the end. You’ve read the letters, and I’m proud of you for finding them all. I knew you would. I wanted you to have them so you could know me, really know me. I never kept a diary, and if I had, I might have been too shy to share it with you. All I have are these letters, and I wanted you to read them.
After Margaret passed away, her sister, Roberta, was kind enough to return the letters to me. I was so heartbroken about my friend’s sudden passing that I couldn’t bear to read them again. I tucked them away in a shoe box and put Margaret out of my mind, for it was too painful. She died much too young, at the prime of her life. But her memory always remained in my heart. You see, she left a part of herself here. And she took a part of Bluebird Books with her too.
June, what I’m trying to tell you is this bookstore is the birthplace of Goodnight Moon. Of course, you’ve pieced that together from the letters, haven’t you? Indeed, this is where it all began. I’ve kept this to myself all these years. It didn’t feel right to broadcast it. And when I wanted to, it always felt like the wrong moment. But I knew someday I’d leave it all here for you to find. A treasure to be discovered. I’m hoping that you can use it to save the store. I’m hoping that people will want to come to the place where Margaret took inspiration for her iconic children’s book, a book that has touched so many children, and adult children.
June, do with it what you will. I should add that the signed copy of Goodnight Moon you are holding now is worth a small fortune. Margaret stood at the printing press hovering over the line the day the book was printed (she was wonderfully bossy like that, and I loved her for it, even if it did drive the printers mad!), and she plucked the first finished copy off the conveyer belt. It had a mistake in the back. Flip to the last page, and you’ll see it. The plate slipped, and instead of one mouse on the windowsill, there are two. She said that it was fate, that the two mice were representative of the two of us. Two friends, looking out into the moonlight together on a peaceful night, looking out into a world of possibilities. That’s the Margaret I loved so. The world was her oyster. She never stopped dreaming.
Well, the book is yours now, to sell, to keep, to do with what you please. There are a great deal more valuable first editions in the shop, and please, sell them if you must to keep a roof over your head. I bought them all for you. June, everything I did was for you. Always.
These sentiments might sound silly to you, perhaps even unexpected. But now comes the moment when I will tell you my deepest, longest held secret. In 1970, I was forty-six years old when I gave birth to my first and only child, a baby girl, with cherub cheeks and blue eyes that were so kind. No, not a boy, even though I wanted onlookers to think she was a boy (I dressed her in blue as a disguise, and left her birth certificate vague: J.P.).
As much as I loved her, with all my heart, I had to say good-bye to my child, for her own protection. Her father was a Magnuson, a wealthy and powerful Seattle family, and though he was a good man, and I loved him dearly, he was already married to someone else. He passed away five months before my little girl was born, and when his wife learned of my baby, she was furious. I feared she’d use her influence, her attorneys, to find a way to make me pay. And she tried. When my baby was seven months old, I set her out on a blanket in the store. I turned my back for a moment, and a man in a suit and dark glasses nearly had her in his arms. I screamed and it scared the man off. He drove away in a black Cadillac, but he was back the next day, peering into the window before the shop opened.
&n
bsp; I couldn’t live like that, knowing that my baby might be abducted at any moment—night or day. She wasn’t safe. I went to the police, but they didn’t seem at all concerned. Besides, a Magnuson was the chief of police at that time.
So I made the heart-wrenching decision to give my baby away, for adoption. It was an open adoption, so I could still see her whenever I’d like. But I didn’t let the Magnuson family know that. In fact, I sent word through their attorney that I’d given the baby (boy) away to a wealthy family in New York, and that I hoped Victoria Magnuson would be happy now. It threw her off. The Cadillac stopped coming by. But I still needed to find my baby girl a new home, and I knew just the place. Somewhere close. With the only family I had in Seattle.
June, what I’m trying to tell you is that my baby is you. My niece, the only mother you know, raised you. She did her best, and so did I.
Of course, I questioned the arrangement a thousand times, especially when things got bad at home for you. Fortunately, I was close and able to intervene when I realized the difficulties of the situation, and while your mother worked to improve things at home. And she did. I knew she would. She loved you like her daughter, June. And for that, I shall always be grateful.
None of us is perfect, and perhaps my decision for you wasn’t the best one. But it was the only one I could make at the time. I had to know you were safe.
Could you tell? Could you see my love for you? It was the love of a mother. My dearest daughter, this isn’t the life I imagined, but life never quite goes as we imagine, does it? I didn’t get the house with the picket fence. I didn’t get the doting husband. I didn’t even get to hear you call me Mommy. But I still got you. And that was the best of all.
Your father never got to meet you, but he would have loved you at first sight, just as I did. You are the culmination of our love, a gift to each of us at the moment we least expected. A gift that came at the end of our love story. As fate would have it, Anthony and I would never have a happily ever after, but you gave me a happy ending.