Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

by Sue Halpern

  Kit let go of the banister and folded her arms across her chest and seemed to be thinking what to say. My plan seemed to be working.

  “Let me sleep on it,” she said after a long pause. And then, from the top of the stairs, “Don’t stay up too late,” which just seemed like a throwaway line after a night of saying very little. Does she even like me? Hard to tell.

  * * *

  In my beginning is my end.

  —T. S. Eliot

  Kit reached her bedroom, slid one foot and then the other over the threshold as if crossing home base, shut the door, and landed on the bed. She was panting slightly, as much from the exertion of climbing the narrow staircase as from being with, and getting away from, the girl. Kit leaned back and let her sandals dangle at the end of her toes before dropping to the hardwood floor, one after the other, with a thunk, remembering too late that there was someone below her who could hear and who would know precisely what she was doing right then: lying on her bed, looking up at the ceiling (which, despite Ray Wagonner’s best efforts, needed another layer of spackle, she noticed). It had gone pretty well, Kit decided. Not that it was over, since Sunny was still in the house and they would meet again in the morning. But overall, it hadn’t been too bad. The girl was an odd one for sure, mostly untouched by the world around her. Not going to school suited her, Kit decided. But being schooled by her parents? Kit was not sure.

  It was an interesting question Sunny asked, too: Did Kit read the ending first? She thought about this for a while, remembering all those Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie mysteries when, yes, she’d skipped ahead so she knew which clues to look for as the story unfolded. But later on, no. There was no peeking. It seemed wrong. She didn’t know why.

  “If you know how a book is going to end, would you read it in the first place?” Kit asked herself later, as she stood in the bathroom, an electric toothbrush winding its way around her mouth. “Do you stop reading a book because you don’t want to watch the characters you like turn out to be unlikable, or the ones with which you identify denied the happy ending you believe they deserve?”

  “I want you to write down the story of your marriage,” Dr. Bondi told her not long after they began meeting. “The beginning, the romance, the whole thing, as much as you remember.”

  Kit pushed back: the assignment seemed pointless.

  “Why do I have to spend more energy putting this story on paper when I tell it to myself all the time?” she complained.

  “Because that’s not the story I mean. You are telling the story from the point of view of its ending. I want you to tell it from the beginning, when everything was possible.”

  Kit protested. It was early enough in their time together that she didn’t realize this was what he wanted: he wanted to know her soft spots, the places he could press on and get a reaction.

  “How about this,” Dr. Bondi proposed. “Just write the very beginning. Let’s call it the prologue. If you want to keep going after that, do. If not, stop.”

  Kit winced.

  “You know what I mean, Kit. The origin story. How you two met and fell in love.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said flatly.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, like I said, I no longer know that story. The narrator is unreliable.”

  “Go on,” he said, in the neutral, slightly disinterested way she would soon come to think of as his radio voice. Did he talk this way at home? Did he have a home? Of course he had a home—he had to live somewhere—but did he have a wife and kids, a boyfriend, a girlfriend? Did they, too, find his practiced compassion annoying?

  Kit sighed. “The narrator is unreliable because she no longer believes the story she used to tell.”

  “How is it different from the one you tell yourself now?” he asked.

  “One is made up and one is real,” she said. “You know how when your house burns down, the insurance company asks you to list everything you lost? Well, one of the things I lost is the story I would tell about my life. Whatever story I tell now will be told by someone—me—who knows that that story was a lie.”

  “It wasn’t a lie, Kit,” he said, “it was your reality.”

  “And my reality was a lie, plain and simple,” she countered. Is this what therapy would be like—one long, frustrating running argument? She sighed again. What was the point? Wasn’t she already having these arguments with herself? A sudden rage came over her, sparking like a mountain thunderstorm.

  “This is stupid,” she said.

  “What’s stupid?”

  “This,” she said angrily. “This whole thing. This conversation. Of course my reality was a lie. If anyone should know that, it’s me.”

  “Your reality at the time was your reality,” he said firmly, and with such conviction it made her laugh.

  “I’m sorry, but that is pure, unadulterated crap that sounds like something they tell you to say in psychology school.”

  “That doesn’t make it wrong, Kit,” he said gently.

  “There was an end, and it colors everything, even the beginning,” she said. “Why can’t you see that?” Was he being dense on purpose? Was it some sort of ploy?

  “I know you’re not liking me very much right now,” he said, “which is fine. You don’t have to like me. But try to hear what I’m saying.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying don’t assume that what happens in our future invalidates what happened in our past. Isn’t that a big assumption?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But say you voted for Nixon because you thought he was a man of integrity and then Watergate happens. Don’t you reassess how you feel about Nixon?”

  “Yes, of course. But does what he did affect who you are? Is his lack of integrity your lack of integrity?”

  “His lack of integrity may not be my lack of integrity, but it makes me a chump,” she said flatly. “I should have been a better judge of character.”

  “Characters change,” he said.

  “No, they don’t.”

  “From where I sit, they do,” he said.

  “From where you sit, you need to think they do,” she said, not bothering to hide her contempt. From where he sat, everything was fixable. Or, at least, everything could be made better. It was an attitude she just didn’t share, though when she replayed the conversation in her mind—how many times?—she realized that if she didn’t think so, too, she wouldn’t have kept seeing him, week after week, month after month.

  “I can’t make you,” he said, uncrossing his legs and leaning in her direction, “but I would urge you to write down the story you told yourself. Call it fiction if you like. Whatever it is, it will be true to you.”

  * * *

  Sunny/notebooks

  Kit was right: the light on the desk was bright enough to read by because the room itself was so small. Besides the cot, the only other piece of furniture was a bookshelf crammed with magazines she probably got out of the library recycling bin, and worn paperbacks that looked like they had been read by more than one or two or three people, and, on the bottom shelf, a couple of cardboard boxes. I am not going to lie—I pulled out the box nearest to me and opened it up. Inside were bank statements, pay stubs, tax returns—boring. So I put it back and pulled out another box, folded back the flaps, and knew I was onto something—something big. Well, something big to me. Inside were fourteen small spiral notebooks, the same kind that Kit wrote in every morning. My hands were shaking. I made sure the door was closed and locked, and pushed the cot across to block it from opening. I knew I shouldn’t look through them, but I knew I had to. Kit was a puzzle and here, maybe, were the pieces.

  Were they in some sort of order? I couldn’t tell. If they were, and I messed it up, Kit would know. I could hear her walking around upstairs. I took out the notebook on the top left pile. It had a yellow cover on which Kit wrote:

  3.22.08–10.15.08.

  For a second or two I thought about putting it back, but my curiosit
y got the better of me. I flipped open the cover. On the next page, Kit had written the same thing, only less abbreviated. March 22, 2008, to was in blue ink and October 15, 2008 was in black ink. The house had gotten super quiet. Kit had stopped moving around. I was holding my breath so she couldn’t hear me, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me. I think kids who have siblings are much better at sneaking around than kids who don’t. That has been my experience, anyway. I turned the page carefully. The date was written again at the top—March 22, 2008—this time in block letters. And then, this:

  Not that girl

  Not in Kadhimiya Prison, Iraq (“The criminal investigators raped us.”)

  Not in Lhasa, Tibet (“Tibetans usually are so calm and friendly, but suddenly they were insane,” said Balsiger, 25, a teacher. “They were howling like wolves. . . . It was so brutal, so violent.”)

  Not Edna Phillips (Throttled with her dog’s leash and stabbed 86 times. By two 17-year-old girls.)

  Not Silda Spitzer (Again. Still. Sigh.)

  Not with Bear Stearns

  That was it. It made no sense. I turned at random to another page. June 18, 2008:

  Not in Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin (Not a farmer)

  Not on Heparin (extremely low blood pressure, swelling of the skin and mucus membranes, shortness of breath, and abdominal pain)

  Not that girl

  Not at that bus station in Baghdad (“In the bombing, some victims burned to death or died from smoke inhalation in the apartment building, according to an Interior Ministry official. Bystanders climbed onto rooftops 20 to 30 yards away to gather flesh strewn by the force of the blast. Iraqi policemen stacked bodies several feet high in a pickup truck, but some fell out of the truckbed when they drove away.”)

  Not at that café in Baghdad (“Let the world see what’s happening to us,” said Ali Ahmed, who was wounded in the explosion. “We cannot even sit in a simple cafe,” he said from his hospital bed. “I hate my life!”)

  I had a hunch, so I turned to another page—I don’t remember the date—and there, among the other “nots” was the one about “that girl.” I did it again and again, and it was like flipping a trick coin where both sides are heads. “Not that girl” was on every page. Often she was at the top, like Kit had her on her mind right then, and sometimes at the bottom, like it was necessary to write those words before she turned the page. Just to confirm, I took out a different notebook, a blue one that covered about eight months in 2007, and there she was again, that girl, among the tornados, the car bombings, the car crashes, the rapes, the plane crashes, the food shortages and drought.

  * * *

  You are not the same people who left that station.

  —T. S. Eliot

  “Sorry, I guess I stayed up kind of late reading,” Sunny said when she wandered into the kitchen the next morning.

  She was barefoot, in a faded Hello Kitty nightshirt that would have made her look like a little girl but for the dark smudges under both eyes that instead made her appear ragged, like a shabby doll.

  “Pride and Prejudice. I love that book,” she said. It wasn’t untrue. She did love that book. But it was a lie. It was a big fat lie. “Don’t make eye contact,” she coached herself. “Don’t do that nervous foot-shaking thing. Say something innocuous. Keep talking.”

  “You look . . .” Kit hesitated.

  Sunny took a deep, quick, panicked breath.

  “. . . very tired.” Kit laughed. “I’ve always read that teenagers stay up late and get up late, so I guess it’s true.”

  Sunny looked around for a clock. “What time is it?” she asked.

  “After eleven,” Kit said. “There’s cereal. Raisin Bran. The milk is in the fridge. Or you could have some toast. Or both.” She had been practicing these words silently all morning so they would come out easily, as if she weren’t speaking a mostly forgotten language.

  “Raisin Bran is good,” Sunny said, pushing off from the counter at the same moment Kit stood up from the table so the two of them nearly collided. Kit put out her arms to steady herself, and Sunny did, too, and for a moment they were locked in a strange embrace.

  “Sorry,” they said at the same moment, releasing each other and taking a step back.

  “That was awkward,” Sunny said. Her clammy palms left a faint residue on Kit’s forearms, like a temporary tattoo that said Sunny had been there and was leaving.

  Kit looked down, expecting to see something, but her bare arms were unmarked. “The milk is in the fridge,” she said again. “Take the chair.” There was only one.

  Sunny opened the refrigerator. She had recently read (in an old Woman’s Day, at the library) that you could learn a lot about a person from the contents of her refrigerator, like if she was obsessed about her weight (a trifecta of Diet Coke, pickles, and jars of Better Than Broth), if she had a drinking problem (wine in a box, tonic water, limes, vodka in the freezer compartment, spicy V8), if she was lonely (half-eaten containers of takeout). There was an infographic laying it all out. She wondered what the author would make of Kit’s fridge. The egg tray cradled four eggs, the cheese drawer was empty, the crisper was empty, a pint of milk sat next to two sticks of butter, there was a container of coffee yogurt on the second shelf, a bottle of white wine lying on its side, and the packages of hot dogs and tofu pups from the day before. Not a lot to go on, Sunny thought. If she was going to find out about “that girl,” it wasn’t here.

  “I guess I should go to the supermarket,” Kit said, realizing Sunny was taking stock and probably judging her. That’s what people did. They looked inside your refrigerator and passed judgment. Even hippie vegetarian girls. Maybe especially hippie vegetarian girls.

  “I’ll go with you,” Sunny volunteered.

  * * *

  Sunny/shopping

  She could have said no, but Kit let me tag along with her to the store. Her car, a Volvo, is newer than ours, which isn’t saying much, and the radio works, and she turned it on as soon as we left the curb. The news came on and we both listened as if we cared that the Minnesota state government had been shut down, though it’s possible that Kit really was interested. Not me. Politics is just a bunch of adults talking. I was interested when Barack Obama ran for president, even if Steve kept explaining to me and Willow, who was excited, too, that it didn’t matter anymore who was president, because the American system was so corrupt. “Everyone is a tool of Wall Street,” he’d say, and tell Willow to make sure I read A People’s History of the United States, even though no-schooling is all about “letting young learners forge their own path without outside intervention,” and even though that book is, like, eight hundred pages long. And then Obama won, and every time he did something that favored corporations over people, Steve would say “I told you so,” and Willow would tell him he was going to trample my youthful idealism before it could take root, and I guess she was right. It’s good, I guess, that we have an African American president, but politics seems pointless to me.

  It was a quick trip. Kit bought the usual things—milk, eggs, bread, butter, bananas, deli meat, more coffee yogurt, the newspaper, a cooked chicken—but also some pita and hummus in case I was still going to be around for lunch. The phone was ringing when we got back to Kit’s, and it was Willow, who said she’d been trying to reach us for almost an hour, and I considered using this as an opportunity to point out that she would have had no trouble calling me if I had a cell phone, but she sounded rushed and out of sorts and told me to sit tight, they were running late and would be there eventually.

  “I think the Subaru might have finally died,” I said to Kit, when I explained that my parents would not be picking me up any time soon. She said she’d drive me home, but there was no way to get back in touch with my (cell phone–less) parents to tell them this, and I didn’t really want to leave, so I told her that it was better if I just stayed there until they showed up. She looked annoyed for a second, long enough for me to notice, but then suggested we make lunch and take it and o
ur books onto the front porch, so we did. I brought Pride and Prejudice and Kit brought the newspaper and her little notebook. I tried to come up with a way to ask about “that girl” without letting on that I had peeked inside her notebooks, but all I could think to say was “You’re taking notes again,” like I didn’t see her do this every morning at the library.

  Kit didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t help myself and I asked her why. She still didn’t look up or talk, though she lifted the pen from the paper and was shaking it back and forth like it had run out of ink, even though it was one of those Bic pens where you can see how much ink is left and there was a lot. I couldn’t tell if she was thinking what to say or ignoring me. Finally, and with great effort, it seemed, she said, “To keep track.”

  “To keep track of what?” I said. “All the horrible things that are happening in the world?”

  I wondered if I’d gone too far, if she’d know, now, that I’d been snooping, but she said, “Something like that,” and went back to scanning the front page.

  “But why?” I said after a while. That got her attention. I think she thought she had put this conversation to rest and may have felt cornered. We were only a few feet away from each other.

  “You are a very curious girl, Sunny,” she said, and it was clear that this was not a compliment. I thought it was her way of telling me to back off and shut up, but then she said, quietly, more to herself than to me, “To remind me.”

  Did she really expect me not to ask “Remind you of what?” Well, if she did, she was wrong. “Remind you of what?” I said.

  I should set the scene here. Kit was sitting on a porch rocker, I was on the porch swing, and there was a small table tucked into the corner between us. Lunch was on the table, though by then I was the only one eating it. Kit was rocking back and forth slowly, the newspaper in both hands, her notebook and pen underneath, on her lap. She had a distant look on her face, not dreamy, more like removed. Every so often a car would come down Coolidge and each time I’d expect it to be the Subaru, and so did Kit I think, but none of them slowed. It was a warm day, and parents were out pushing strollers and little kids were riding bikes along the sidewalk, which is a lot different from where I live. Every so often someone would call out a greeting to Kit, and she’d wave and they’d move on.