The Night Library

by T L Barrett

  “Kids are germ factories,” the oncologist had reminded us at the end of the school year.

  “Still time for what?” Betsy finally asked. She has always been the brave one.

  “Time for the family to get back home,” she answered.

  “Honey, there is no way we can bring these all the way back to Kansas.” She ran one of her long cool fingers down the side of Ronie’s face.

  “No, not Kansas. Kansas is not their home!” Betsy had that look of exasperated emotionality that traditionally would have indicated that she needed to get to bed and rest up so she could put back on her game face. But, she was already in bed. “Why do you think they can’t move?”

  “Sweetie…” I said, sitting with gentle paternalism on the bed. “They can’t move because they are made out of China. That’s just what they are: china figures.”

  “No! You don’t get it because you can’t hear them.” Her voice and her little pointer finger shook in the air. “They can move when they are where they belong.” Her voice was getting higher with uncharacteristic anger.

  “Okay, funny pants, don’t get all worked up,” Betsy said and smoothed the bed sheets over Ronie’s lap.

  “If the china people” (I refused to say family) “are bothering you, I can take them out of here.”

  “Don’t you dare!” she cried.

  “Hey, I just thought if they, you know, were talking all night, I thought you could use your sleep.”

  “I can sleep when I’m dead,” she said and put her arms over her chest. We had heard this in some movie we had watched together, and I snorted, as I have always done when Ronie used a quote like that to over-dramatize her life.

  Betsy was not laughing, and the look she and Ronie gave me cut mine short.

  “Honey, we just want to understand,” Betsy said. “How does the family expect to get back home if they can’t move?”

  “Well, they explained that part to me,” Ronie said. “They need the right kind of storm to get home.”

  “Which is where?” I asked.

  “Oz, silly head,” she responded and rolled her eyes up at me. “You know, like when Dorothy got pulled back? It has something to do with what happens to the air. Anyway, they said they have been keeping track, and now that they are out of the witch’s house,” (We had never said it out loud to each other, but we all knew what she meant) “…they can feel the weather more. They will be able to tell when a storm like that is coming. They think one may be building soon.”

  “And then what will happen?” Betsy asked in her best getting this over so you can rest your silly head and get some sleep voice.

  “We take them to where they need to go. Then they go home and they are free to move again,” she said this with the gracious hand sweeping of a cartoon narrator wrapping up a happy ending.

  “Well, you tell us when, all right?” I said. We each kissed her three times and turned out the light. Truth is, I didn’t remember the conversation till after. There are too many worries, too many things to occupy folks that live on the edge of an emotional cliff.

  ***

  It had rained a lot that summer, but the sky relented by mid-August, and we had enjoyed a clear, warm and sunny month. That weather built up one heck of a storm that finally broke over us on the equinox. Some of the leaves on the trees of our road had started to change, but we hadn’t noticed. Ronie had taken a turn for the worse, and we understood that it would be a matter of days before we made that fateful trip to the oncology respite ward.

  “I was hoping for one more Halloween,” I said to Betsy as she went out for errands. She had taken a leave from work, and I tried to give her as many breaks from the house as I could.

  “I know, Cookinhow, me, too.” She used the nickname that she had pinned me with when we were just dating. She had seen the tears in my eyes. “Get your work done. I’ll be home with Ben and Jerry’s.” I might as well have taken a leave from the office, too. I had all but physically done so. The paperwork had piled up as I surfed the internet or stared out the window. Now, it was time to pay the piper on a Friday night. I sighed, and she ruffled my hair.

  She went out, pulling the hood of her raincoat over her head. It had already started to downpour. I watched her dash to the car and then proceeded to bite down and peck away at the massive pile of paperwork that awaited me.

  I feel guilty about it now, how good it felt to bury myself in work for that hour and a half. I forgot about everything and watched the pile get smaller and smaller. The wind began to howl something wicked outside our house. Thunderheads rumbled hard overhead, but I hardly noticed.

  “Hal?” Betsy’s voice came from the front door. “Didn’t you hear me honking?” I looked up in a daze from my work, and the entire house lit up from a brilliant stroke of lightning. Then the world stumbled down with thunder.

  “Well, no, I was-”

  “How’s Ronie doing?” Betsy asked.

  “Good, I guess. I mean I’ve been pretty busy here.”

  “You haven’t checked on her?” She had that bewildered frustrated look she always gets. I always imagine it should come accompanied by the words: “You used the family cat to wipe your ass after taking a dump?” I shrugged and looked to the side. “Oh, Jesus, the poor girl’s probably scared to death!”

  “Hey, I’m sorry…” I started, but Betsy was already moving toward the stairs. I followed her, my socks getting wet from where she walked before me with her wet shoes. At the top of the stairs she spared one more glance of quizzical contempt at me and opened Ronie’s door.

  Ronie was no longer in her bed. She was not on the floor beside the bed. She was not at the closet, nor was she hiding inside. As Betsy rummaged through the room, my eyes fell on the low shelf near her bed. The china figures were gone.

  “Ronie!” Betsy let out her first desperate scream.

  “Betsy!” I pointed out the empty shelf. We looked at each other and could see the memory of that strange conversation we had with Ronie come bubbling back to the surface.

  “Oh, Jesus, Hal!” she said. Her fear had surmounted her frustration with me. She ran past me screaming our little girl’s name down the stairs and through the house. Instinctively, I ran to the back door off the kitchen and peered out the window to the rain- lashed world beyond. I opened the door, and the down pouring rush of sound came in. I peered across the back yard toward the river. The neighbor’s trees lashed out and down at our little gazebo and Betsy’s garden fence. Another lightning strobe lit the world all around, and my eyes fell on the back gate of the yard fence where the ground dipped down to some trees before the river. I thought I saw a tiny figure moving there amongst them.

  “Ronie!” I screamed and bolted out into the storm in my stocking feet.

  I paused at the gate, scanning the trees that struggled to survive in the flood plain of the river. The river had been low after the long dry spell, the trees roots showing over the detritus from the river’s wash out. Soon, probably by the time this storm had its course, much of it would be underwater again. I made out a pale figure moving away under the gloom of the trees and I screamed her name again.

  Betsy was at my side.

  “Is she there? Do you see her?” I had, but I didn’t now. Betsy and I nearly knocked each other over as we came through the gate and down the grassy bank. Wet sumac leaves slapped and clung to me as I barreled through where I guessed my little girl had passed by not long before, unhindered. Betsy and I came out of the undergrowth into a clear dank spot of riverbed clay just as the world lit up once again with lightning.

  “Catch her, Hal, before she gets to the river!” Betsy roared. Then I saw her, too. A little skeleton stood alone in the thrashing storm under the last of the river trees. I could not make out the river from here, but I knew it could not be far off.

  And then I was at her side, gripping that little boney shoulder. Betsy clung to her other side.

  “Ronie!” Betsy wept with relief. She hugged the girl. “Come back inside,
young lady,” she said.

  “No, Mom! It’s working. Look!” she said. Betsy pulled away. The empty sodden shoebox that Ronie had kept under her bed had been caved in from the embrace.

  Something white skittered a few feet ahead of us in the gloom. I raised my foot with the instinct to defend me and mine from some river rat.

  “No, Dad!” Ronie yelled. The china cow moved in the sodden leaves on the dark Earth. Sensing danger it turned and loped further toward the river. Somewhere in my mind I noticed that the rain had stopped. Lightning flashed again, and I could see other pale shining china figures struggling through the sodden debris. I took a step forward. From behind a stick a little china boy, the one from her shelf, peeked out and put his hands to his ears and stuck a china tongue out at me. He laughed an eerie chime of a laugh and scurried after the others.

  “They are doing it! They are going to Oz!” Ronie yelled in a high broken voice. I looked up to where she was pointing.

  Instead of the last few trees and then the dark rushing of the river, I saw the land sloping ever slightly upward and a clear trail running through a great forest of old thick trees. Will-o-wisps danced there in the dark deep. Where they lit, I saw large hideous faces rising out of the bark on those trees. The ancient gnarled branches shifted and grasped like huge hands in the wind. And then I thought: No, they are not going to Oz. Oz is coming to us.

  The air shifted around us, crackling with ozone. What colors there were in the dark popped out at us, as if lit by a strange moon. The will-o-wisps floated closer.

  My little girl ran forward to meet them.

  “No!” I screamed, and it was a jealous desperate scream. Betsy, beautiful, strong Betsy pulled her back, wrestling with her. Suddenly the girl screeched and clawed like a wild animal.

  “Ronie! Stop!” Betsy pleaded.

  “No, they want me to come with them. They said I can stay with them! Let me go!” she cried and reached out to where the little china figures were disappearing from view.

  “Please, Betsy!” I shouted. “We need you. We need you to stay with us!” But Ronie was beyond reaching with words. She bucked and screamed, and flailed helplessly in our grasp.

  “Come on!” I yelled and nearly picked up both of the girls in my arms and drove them away from the strange colors, the looming giant faces of the trees.

  And then we were back in the storm under the bank before the gate, the rain pelting down and our little girl flailing like a pale fish pulled from the river. We went through the gate, Betsy sobbed, and Ronie screeched a hoarse hiss and flailed.

  Inside the house, her protestations surrendered to spasms and terrible chattering of teeth.

  “I’ll run a warm bath!” I said.

  “No, the storm. Just help me get her back to the room and dry!” Betsy ordered.

  We did so and rubbed the girl down vigorously with a towel. She came around enough to keen again, her face contorted.

  “Ronie, boney girl, I love. Ronie, boney girl, I love.” Betsy kept chanting trying to sooth the little girl and herself. The things I had seen buffeted my mind, like the storm against the house outside.

  Finally, miserably, the girl’s sobs subsided, and she fell against the bed sheets. We covered her shaking body, and the both of us lay on each side of her, rubbing her gently.

  “Should we take her to the hospital?” I whispered to my wife.

  “I don’t know,” she said, her eyes swollen. “And tell them what? We didn’t realize that our little girl was out by the river in the worst storm of the year?” I deserved the anger in her voice.

  “I’m sorry baby, I’m sorry.” I didn’t know to whom I was speaking.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right,” Betsy crooned. “Our little girl is safe with Mommy and Daddy again.”

  Ronie let out a few more wails and subsided back into slumber. She stayed very still, and I resisted the awful impulse to check her for a pulse.

  “Oz,” she said simply, and Betsy and I looked at each other from over the girl’s sleeping form.

  Later, she stirred, and her eyes fluttered open.

  “It’s all right, Mommy,” Ronie said. “At least the family is safe. They can move again because they are home.” And she smiled such a sweet sad smile that tears took away my sight, and a sob escaped me. Then the girl sighed and fell deeper to sleep. Ronie looked up at me, with pleading eyes, streaming tears. I did not know what to do, and we held each other over her as she slept and tried to cry as quietly as we could.

  We stayed like that a long time. Ronie slept soundly.

  “Let’s go have a smoke,” I whispered to Betsy.

  “You go. I need to stay with her,” Betsy said.

  “I’ll stay, too.”

  “No, go. You can watch her when I go out later.” Reluctantly I did so, kissing Ronie on the curve of her forehead. Betsy sucked in her breath. I went to Betsy and kissed her a long time on the side of her mouth, then I went downstairs and out on the front porch.

  I smoked deeply, inhaling the tobacco smoke and breathing it out my nose and mouth. The storm was relenting. By the time I had cast the blazing butt out into the wet dark, I realized the only dripping was the water coming off the roof and the leaves of nearby trees. A strange suffocating calm filled the night.

  Gingerly, I opened the front door and began to shut it behind me.

  “Hal!” Betsy cried from above. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

  I came up the stairs, but did not feel them against my feet.

  Betsy was standing at the doorway, her eyes huge and rimmed with swollen dark in the hall light.

  “Hal,” she managed. I went to her across the hallway, reading too much in those eyes, the terrible shock of her face.

  I went into Ronie’s room.

  Inside her bed our little girl had turned completely into china. Her thin delicate fingers on the coverlet and the curve of her forehead, where I had kissed her, gleamed in the half-light. She would not move again.

  Mr. Klein’s Cancer

  If you had asked Arthur Klein, as a child, if he wanted to be a high school English teacher when he grew up, the answer would have been: no, absolutely not. He would have given you the same answer for balding, divorced, fiercely addicted to cigarettes, and living in a drafty house in the backwater Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, of which he was, of course, all of these things. He also had cancer, but was not yet aware of that fact; although he had suffered lingering suspicions for the last nine years that that, too, would be in the cards.

  The young Arthur Klein had always wanted and expected to become a fabulously lucrative writer, which he wasn’t. He scribbled poems at times, half-heartedly during study halls and had even, during his short marriage a decade before, published a short Erotic story entitled: “The Lustiest Wench”. He regarded it as a bitter tribute to his long-dead sex life.

  Arthur hated his life. He hated the cold that gripped the godforsaken land eight months a year. He hated himself for not managing to lead a more fulfilling existence. Yet every school day morning he chain-smoked his way across Bearfield Township in his Toyota sedan and slipped in front of the classes full of ungrateful, hopeless, culture-starved and hormone-ridden cretins.

  And slowly, ever so slowly, he began to convince himself that it was O.K. to blame them. So the hate, like the cancer lying dormant in his lungs, festered in the hours repeating himself in front of the brainless arrogance, the petty and monotonous delinquency. All of these things and more Arthur had found torturous to his very soul, and all he found embodied in one, Tony Demurs, eighteen year-old and two-time Junior.

  Tony swaggered, Tony swore, Tony sidetracked and swindled. It was on day one of Arthur Klein’s awareness that Tony was managing to do all of these things, mid-aisle, grinning and making furtive grabs at a busty classmate.

  “Come on! Get off it, will ya? I know you took my pen, so don’t Jew on me.” He postured with jocularity and then made a quick dive for the cackling girl’s front hemline. A
rthur had hoped he could ignore it this time, he really had. He had been hoping to just get through the “Techniques of Speech Writing” lecture without taking the time to stifle Tony’s latest antic, thereby conceding victory to a boy who thinks Natural Light and the word “bug“ were romantic.

  “Mr. Demurs!” Arthur shouted, making heads snap up and regard the man who had been standing in front of them and talking about something for the last agonizing twenty minutes. “You know the policy I have in my classroom concerning hate language.” He didn’t even bother with the apparently appreciated sexual harassment; it opened too many doors for them, and interruption of class was laughable.

  “Hey,” Tony smiled, “everything is all right Mr. Klein. I was just getting my pen back.”