Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

by Sue Halpern

  This turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. They’re not like Kit, who has boxes of notebooks sitting on her bookshelf, even if what’s inside the notebooks makes no sense. They’ve always had this philosophy of “leaving no trace.” It’s how we managed to live at a campsite for months and no one could tell we’d been there when we left. And it’s why we have almost no stuff—no TV, no computer, not even a blender. And it’s why we live off the grid. You’d think this would have made my search easier since there wouldn’t be a lot to look through, but it actually made it really hard. Neither of my parents has a lot of clothes, so rifling through their underwear drawer or poking around their sweaters was quick and fruitless. I checked all the cupboards in the kitchen and stood on a chair to scan the tops of the bookshelves. We don’t even have a lot of books, not because we don’t read, but because Willow and Steve believe in recycling: when we buy books, we buy them used and then sell them back to the store or bring them to the Goodwill.

  But standing on that chair, looking over our small living room and kitchen, I had two thoughts that merged into one thought. The first was that the only books we buy and don’t sell are the ones in my room that we use for no-schooling. The second had to do with kids’ court. When it was all over, Willow and I had to sign some papers saying that we agreed to my sentence and that if I failed to complete my community service I’d have to be resentenced by the judge. And it occurred to me that those papers had to be somewhere in the house, and if I could find them, they might lead me to whatever it was that would tell me what was going on. I had no idea what I was looking for: this wasn’t like Rusty looking for a bank that had disappeared. So I got off the chair and went into my room and sat on the bed with my legs crossed Indian style and my hands on my thighs as if I were meditating and then very slowly, starting in the left-hand corner, turned my head 180 degrees, trying to take in everything I was seeing.

  And then I knew: whatever I was looking for had to be in the books I used when I was really little, because why would anyone bother looking at them now? And those books are out of the way, on the top shelf, which made it more likely. I dragged in a chair from the kitchen and stood looking at the phonics textbook Willow used to teach me to read and the math workbooks I’d hated so much. But I was also looking at what must have been years of dust, dust so thick I could poke my finger through it. If this was a hiding spot, no one had been putting anything up here in a very long time. I looked through all the books anyway. Nothing.

  When you’re searching for something but you don’t know what you’re searching for, it helps to know the person or people who have hidden the thing or things you’re searching for. It’s something I learned at the library. When a book goes missing, the first thing you have to consider is who was probably the last person to be reading it. If it’s a picture book, chances are some kid was sitting on the floor looking at it for a while and then slid it back in among the other picture books, not realizing that the books go in a particular order. (I tell them to leave them on the tables or on the cart, but they don’t always remember.) If it’s an older kid, forget it. They leave books all over the place. Adults do, too, but at least they usually leave them in the same section where they found them.

  I was thinking about this when I heard our Subaru chugging up the driveway. It’s a long way from the road to the house, and the Subaru just gets noisier and noisier, so it’s the perfect early-warning system. I quickly dragged the chair back to the kitchen and positioned myself in front of the open refrigerator so it would look like I was doing something when Steve came in. Only he didn’t come in, not right away, so I shut the door and went outside to see what he was doing. And what he was doing was, as usual, trying to fix, as he said, “our damn car.”

  Eventually he came in and I made peanut butter sandwiches while he rubbed the grease off his hands, and we ate lunch and played Risk, a game Steve is really good at and likes, because he says it will teach me all about world domination and evil empire building. I was in a great mood—not because I crushed him, as Steve assumed—but because I knew that whatever I was looking for was in my room, and as soon as my parents went to bed, I was going to find it.

  We all have flashlights hanging above our pillows because the power sometimes runs out and you still want to read or don’t want to go to the bathroom in the dark, so it was going to be easy to search once Willow and Steve went to sleep, as long as I was quiet. Risk was helpful: I had been thinking about my strategy all afternoon, knowing that whatever I was after, it was hiding in plain sight in my room. Willow sometimes talks about chi, which has to do with energy, and Steve says that some animals actually have magnets in their bodies to navigate using the magnetism of the North and South Poles, so I sat on my bed, in the dark, trying to “feel” the pull of what I was looking for. The only problem was that I didn’t know what I was looking for. I switched on the flashlight, which cast a dim yellow light along the wall. It was running out of batteries—not good. I shut it off and thought some more. And then I knew. It just came to me. Whatever I was looking for was in one of the binders on the bottom shelf where Willow keeps our homeschool/no-school notes and materials. It’s actually been a point of conflict between Willow and Steve. He thinks true no-schooling has no curriculum and no materials, but Willow says that no-schooling is about digging deep into subjects, so of course you’re going to want to have shovels and picks and hoes, which is her metaphor for what’s in those binders.

  I turned on the flashlight again and ran the beam down the row. Willow is a very organized person, and the binders have labels on their spines: geol for geology, geom for geometry, geog for geography, lit for literature (there are four of these), hist for history. There are five history binders, and suddenly it was so obvious that whatever I was looking for was in one of them that I almost gave myself away by laughing out loud. Like I said, Willow is super organized. I got down on the floor and starting with the first hist binder, went through them, one by one, feeling less certain as I went down the line and the first, second, third, and fourth had nothing but worksheets about the emperors of Rome and others about the Age of Imperialism, a unit on “Ancient Egypt and Her Neighbors” and another on the civil rights movement. “Last chance,” I said to myself, sliding hist binder #5 off the shelf and opening it. Bingo! Tucked between a booklet called How to Teach Slavery to Your Children, which has to be one of the dumbest titles of anything, and a bibliography of books about the Russian Revolution, there was my birth certificate, the stuff from kids’ court, the title to our car, and that passport. I didn’t know what it meant, only that it had to have something to do with Steve and Willow’s strange behavior.

  Chapter Eight

  7.26.10–8.1.10

  A blind attendance on a brief ambition . . .

  —Edwin Arlington Robinson

  Just when Kit had gotten used to Rusty coming in first thing in the morning, meeting her at the top of the stairs before she could get her key in the lock, he stopped. He still came in, but later, slightly disheveled, wearing a faded Vikings T-shirt, not his usual business casual. Kit didn’t want to pry, but then she didn’t have to.

  “Hello, stranger,” Evelyn said when he walked through the door after noon for the third day in a row. The way she said it—more editorial comment, less greeting—put Rusty on the spot, and he stopped in his tracks and looked a little abashed, like a boy who had been caught stealing cookies.

  “I’ve been helping out at the motel,” he said. He felt embarrassed. She—they—whoever could hear him—were going to think he was a handyman now. What a fall from grace, if you could put “Morris, Maines” and “grace” in the same sentence.

  “You’re not letting those people take advantage of you?” Evelyn said, not bothering to hide her contempt for “those people,” by which she meant foreigners, who she was convinced were taking over the country. “My grandbabies and their babies are going to be minorities. White people are going to be the minority in their own country. Even
here in Riverton,” she was fond of saying, though when she said this to Sunny, the girl pointed out that if her children had babies with people of color they’d prevent this, which shut her right up.

  “No, nothing like that,” Rusty said. “Mr. Patel needs someone who is tall to snake out the gutters and swap out the overhead lights. He’s taking it off my rent.” And then, more to himself than to Evelyn, “I guess it’s rent since I’ve been there more than a month.”

  “Well, I think it’s nice of you,” Sunny said, appearing magically in the room, as she so often did.

  “Me, too,” Kit thought, but said nothing, though when Rusty entered the reading room she made sure to look up and smile at him. It was a small gesture, she knew, but small gestures were all she had.

  Kit was still smiling when Rusty came over to her desk to retrieve the box of newspaper clippings he was working through. He’d photograph them, and Kit and Sunny would suggest captions and he’d type them in with his thumbs.

  “What?” Rusty said.

  “What what?”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “I’m not smiling.”

  “Then grinning. You are grinning.”

  Kit paused and shook her head. “You’re not going to like it,” she said.

  “Try me.”

  “I was thinking that you’re actually a nice guy.” There. She said it. She looked up at him and saw that he looked confused.

  “Why wouldn’t I like that?” he said.

  “Well . . .” Kit hesitated, not sure if she should say more. “Well,” she said again, “because I was thinking that you’re a nicer person than I would have thought, which says more about me than about you,” she added.

  Now it was Rusty’s turn to grin. “If that’s a compliment, I’ll take it,” he said.

  “Take this, too,” Kit said, and handed him the box for 1912. Inside, the newspaper clippings were browned at the edges, as if they’d been left too long in the oven, and they were brittle. If he wasn’t careful, they’d break like glass between his fingers.

  “How’s the money quest going?” Kit asked Rusty after he’d been at it for an hour, and she could see his attention starting to fade.

  “Good question,” he said. “I don’t really know. It seems likely that I’m too late. The last thing I heard from the people in the state treasurer’s office is that they need my mother’s death certificate before they’ll even talk to me. Who knows how to get a death certificate?” He gave her an exasperated look, and she shrugged as if she didn’t know. “I had to look it up,” he went on. “I filled out all the paperwork, and now I wait.”

  Waiting, though, was something to do. True, if he never took another bite of chicken vindaloo or garam masala curry he would not be sorry, but it wasn’t like he had somewhere else to go when this excursion was over; it wasn’t as if a job or a house or a family was drawing him back or propelling him forward. His grand strategy—if he could even call it that—had been to capture the money and move on. But now that he was here, and now that there were people who had come to expect to see him every day, he found himself sometimes forgetting that getting up, stepping into a pair of khakis and pulling on a blue oxford shirt, and going to the library was not his job—though there was that not so inconsequential difference that real jobs, actual jobs, jobs where you woke up before sunrise, put on a suit, grabbed a coffee and a bagel, and fell in with all the other sleep-deprived, suit-wearing, coffee-drinking bagel eaters, came with a paycheck. “You have to spend money to make money,” he told himself most mornings before catapulting out of the sagging double bed at the Tip-Top, but so far it was all spending, no making. He was being frugal, but still.

  At times the Four would probe him about the future, asking him what he was going to do next, meaning what job, what profession, once his “little expedition” to Riverton was over. Of all of them, Paddy, the Wednesday gambler, was the most skeptical of Rusty’s pursuit, knowing firsthand the perils of the promise of free money. “You need a plan,” he’d say, and Rusty would nod and have nothing to say, and in that silence Carl would make a joke, say something like Rusty’s plan should be to go down to the Caribbean and become a shoeless beach bum. Then Rich the driver would argue in favor of Rusty going to Hawaii instead, and the other Rich would suggest Maui, and his cousin would counter with Oahu, places neither of them had been to but nonetheless could recite their many virtues. Their banter spared Rusty the embarrassment of admitting he had no particular ambition now that his chosen profession no longer seemed to be an option, and that if he didn’t figure this all out soon, he’d be living out of his car.

  “Do you know why, when I go to the casino, I don’t play poker?” Patrick asked him one day, and then answered his own question: “I don’t play poker because I don’t have a poker face.”

  Rusty wondered if the old man was starting to lose it, it was such a strange thing to say.

  “In other words,” Carl said, translating. “Don’t do something you can’t countenance.”

  “Whoa, big word, Carl,” business Rich said, high-fiving his friend.

  “It happens,” Carl said.

  But Rusty was thinking, not listening. Was the old doctor talking about the whole bankbook scheme, or was he cautioning against going back to a place like Morris, Maines?

  * * *

  His little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love.

  —William Wordsworth

  The call came just after three. Sunny was off in the basement, surreptitiously making copies for Rusty on the free employee machine, so she didn’t hear the phone ring, and the rest of the staff, gathered in the director’s office for an emergency meeting, did, but chose to let it go to voice mail.

  “It’s that bad, is it?” Evelyn was saying, and Barbara, who had just announced she was taking a leave of absence to spend more time with Larry, hung her head and exhaled loudly.

  “I’m afraid it is,” she said. “He’s stopped speaking. He’s lost his words completely.”

  They sat in silence, taking this in.

  “I’d like Kit to take over when I’m gone,” Barbara said, and before she could say how long that would be there was a knock on the door and it was Rusty, standing there with his phone held out to them like an offering. They stared at him. He stared back.

  Evelyn broke the spell. “We’re in a meeting,” she said, stating the obvious. She sounded annoyed, which probably had less to do with being interrupted, Kit thought, and more to do with the fact that inadvertently, she—Kit—had jumped the queue to a job she didn’t even want. If seniority counted for anything, she—Evelyn—should be put in charge.

  “It’s Carl,” Rusty said, and then immediately corrected himself. “I mean it’s about Carl. He’s had a stroke.”

  Smoker. Drinker. Beer gut. Doughnuts. The couch. French fries. Whisky sours. Carl was a marked man. Still, it didn’t seem fair, not even to Chuck, who knew a thing or two about how the body could go haywire.

  “He’s in the hospital,” Rusty added. “Riverton Mercy.”

  “I’d like to go,” Kit said, standing up. Whatever this plan of Barbara’s was, it could wait. And if Evelyn wanted to run the show, more power to her.

  “I’ll take her,” Rusty volunteered.

  “Go, go,” Barbara said. “We’ll talk when you get back.”

  But Kit didn’t go back. Not that day. She and Rusty joined the long line of Carl’s friends rotating in and out of the ICU, two at a time, three hours out, ten minutes in.

  “You need to stand on the left side of the bed,” they told one another. It was like a game of telephone: “Stand on his left side; his right side is paralyzed.” “Make sure you’re on the left side because he’s paralyzed.” “He’s paralyzed on his left side, so stand on that side of the bed so he can see you.”

  When it was their turn, Kit and Rusty stood side by side on the far side of the bed, holding on to the railing as if they were on the deck of a ship as Carl writhed insensibl
y, his body electric. His skin was gray, his eyes closed, his hands wound into fists that bounced along the mattress and sometimes landed soft, aimless punches to his chest or thighs. Kit had seen sick people before, and she had seen people who had died, but she had never seen anything like this. It was as if every circuit in Carl’s brain had gone berserk and was sending crazy, warring messages to every synapse and axon in it. Carl wasn’t talking, but a string of unintelligible sounds were coming out of his mouth.

  “We’re here, Carl,” Rusty said firmly, though he didn’t say who was there, because really, what did it matter?

  “Where are all the tubes and the IV bags and monitors?” Kit asked the nurse, a lithe, possibly Filipino woman who was shuttling between Carl and the man in the cubicle next to him who, veiled by the thinnest curtain, they couldn’t see, only hear. The man was wheezing and his lungs were crackling like popping corn, and someone standing alongside his bed, the way Kit and Rusty were standing alongside Carl’s, was praying out loud, reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm over and over like a rosary.

  “We don’t do that,” the nurse said, checking Carl’s pulse and adjusting his johnny, which had inched up his legs and was close to revealing all.

  “But it’s a hospital,” Kit said. “Isn’t that what you do do?”

  “Not if the patient has a DNR,” the nurse said, turning to leave. “A do not resuscitate order as Mr.”—she looked at the name on the chart hanging off the side of the bed—“Layton does.”

  “I only just learned his last name myself,” Rusty said, turning to Kit when the nurse was gone. “It’s one of the things I really hate about all this.”