The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

by Gabrielle Zevin

  A.J. had run cross-country on his high school’s team and then at Princeton. He picked up the sport mainly because he had no skill for any other sport aside from the close reading of texts. He never really considered running cross-country to be much of a talent. His high school coach had romantically referred to him as a reliable middleman, meaning that A.J. could be counted on to finish in the upper middle of any pack. Now that he hasn’t run for a while, he has to concede that it had been a talent. In his current condition, he can’t make it more than two miles without stopping. He rarely runs more than five miles total, and his back, legs, and basically every part of him hurt. The pain turns out to be a good thing. He used to pass his runs by ruminating, and the pain distracts him from such a fruitless activity.

  Toward the end of his run, snow begins to fall. Not wanting to track mud indoors, A.J. stops on the porch to take off his running shoes. He braces himself on the front door, and it swings open. He knows that he didn’t lock it, but he is reasonably sure that he didn’t leave it open. He flips on the light. Nothing seems out of place. The cash register doesn’t look molested. Probably, the wind had blown the door open. He flips off the light and is almost to the stairs when he hears a cry, sharp like a bird’s. The cry repeats, more insistent this time.

  A.J. turns the lights back on. He walks back to the entrance and then makes his way up and down each aisle of the bookstore. He comes to the last row, the poorly stocked Children’s and Young Adult section. On the floor sits a baby with the store’s lone copy of Where the Wild Things Are (one of the few picture books Island even deigns to carry) in its lap and opened to the middle. It is a large baby, A.J. thinks. Not a newborn. A.J. can’t clock the age because, aside from himself, he has never really known any babies personally. He was the youngest child, and obviously, he and Nic never had any of their own. The baby is wearing a pink ski jacket. She has a full head of light brown, very curly hair, cornflower blue eyes, and tan-colored skin a shade or two lighter than A.J.’s own. It’s rather a pretty thing.

  “Who the hell are you?” A.J. asks the baby.

  For no apparent reason, she stops crying and smiles at him. “Maya,” she answers.

  That was easy, A.J. thinks. “How old are you?” he asks.

  Maya holds up two fingers.

  “You’re two?”

  Maya smiles again and holds up her arms to him.

  “Where is your mommy?”

  Maya begins to cry. She continues to hold out her arms to A.J. Because he can’t see his way to any other options, A.J. picks her up. She weighs at least as much as a twenty-four carton of hardcovers, heavy enough to strain his back. The baby puts her arms around his neck, and A.J. notes that she smells rather nice, like powder and baby oil. Clearly, this is not some neglected or abused infant. She is friendly, well dressed, and expects—nay, demands—affection. Surely the owner of this bundle will return at any moment with an explanation that makes perfect sense. A broken-down car, say? Or perhaps the mother was struck with a sudden case of food poisoning. In the future, he will rethink his unlocked-door policy. Though it had occurred to him that something might be stolen, he had never considered the possibility that something might be left.

  She hugs him tighter. Over her shoulder, A.J. notices an Elmo doll sitting on the floor with a note attached to his matted red chest by a safety pin. He sets the baby down and picks up Elmo, a character A.J. has always despised because he seems too needy.

  “Elmo!” Maya says.

  “Yes,” A.J. says. “Elmo.” He unpins the note and hands the baby the doll. The note reads:

  To the Owner of This Bookstore:

  This is Maya. She is twenty-five months old. She is VERY SMART, exceptionally verbal for her age, and a sweet, good girl. I want her to grow up to be a reader. I want her to grow up in a place with books and among people who care about those kinds of things. I love her very much, but I can no longer take care of her. The father cannot be in her life, and I do not have a family that can help. I am desperate.

  Yours,

  Maya’s Mother

  Fuck, A.J. thinks.

  Maya cries again.

  He picks up the baby. Her diaper is soiled. A.J. has never changed a diaper in his life, though he is a modestly skilled gift wrapper. Back when Nic was alive, Island used to offer free gift wrap at Christmas, and he figures that diaper changing and gift-wrapping must be related proficiencies. Next to the baby, sits a bag, which A.J. sincerely hopes turns out to be a diaper bag. Thankfully, it is. He changes the baby on the floor of the store, trying not to dirty the rug or look at her private parts too much. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes. Babies move more than books and aren’t as conveniently shaped. Maya watches him with a cocked head, pursed lips, and a wrinkled nose.

  A.J. apologizes. “Sorry, Maya, but it wasn’t exactly a pleasure cruise for me either. The quicker you stop shitting yourself, the quicker we don’t have to do this.”

  “Sorry,” she says. A.J. immediately feels awful.

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about any of this. I’m an ass.”

  “Ass!” she repeats, and then she giggles.

  A.J. puts back on his running shoes, and then he hoists up the baby, the bag, and the note, and heads for the police station.

  OF COURSE, CHIEF Lambiase would be on duty that night. It seems to be the man’s lot to be present for the most important moments of A.J.’s life. A.J. presents the baby to the police officer. “Someone left this in the store,” A.J. whispers so as not to wake Maya who has fallen asleep in his arms.

  Lambiase is in the middle of eating a doughnut, an act he tries to hide because the cliché embarrasses him. Lambiase finishes chewing, then says to A.J. in a most unprofessional way, “Aw, it likes you.”

  “It’s not my baby,” A.J. continues to whisper.

  “Whose baby is it?”

  “A customer’s, I guess.” A.J. reaches into his pocket and hands Lambiase the note.

  “Oh, wow,” Lambiase says. “The mother left it for you.” Maya opens her eyes and smiles at Lambiase. “Cute little thing, ain’t she?” Lambiase leans over her, and the baby grabs his mustache. “Who’s got my mustache?” Lambiase says in a ridiculous baby voice. “Who stole my mustache?”

  “Chief Lambiase, I don’t think you’re showing an adequate amount of concern here.”

  Lambiase clears his throat and straightens his back. “Okay. Here’s the thing. It’s nine p.m. on a Friday. I’ll place a call to the Department of Children and Families, but with the snow and the weekend and the ferry schedule, I doubt anyone will make it out here until Monday at the earliest. We’ll try to track down the mother and also the father, just in case someone is looking for the little rascal.”

  “Maya,” Maya says.

  “Is that your name?” Lambiase says in his baby voice. “It’s a very good name.” Lambiase clears his throat again. “Someone’ll have to watch the kid over the weekend. I and some of the other cops could take turns doing it here, or—”

  “No. It’s fine,” A.J. says. “Doesn’t seem right to keep a baby in a police station.”

  “Do you know anything about child care?” Lambiase asks.

  “It’s only for the weekend. How hard can it be? I’ll call my sister-in-law. Anything she doesn’t know, I’ll Google.”

  “Google,” the baby says.

  “Google! That’s a very big word! Ahem,” Lambiase says. “Okay, I’ll check back with you on Monday. Funny world, right? Someone steals a book from you; someone else leaves you a baby.”

  “Ha,” says A.J.

  BY THE TIME they arrive at the apartment, Maya is full-on crying, a sound somewhere between a New Year’s Eve party horn and a fire alarm. A.J. deduces that she is hungry, but he has no clue what to feed a twenty-five-month-old. He pulls up her lip to see if she has teeth. She does and she uses them to try to bite him. He Googles the question: “What do I feed a twenty-five-month-old?” and the answer that comes back is that most of
them should be able to eat what their parents eat. What Google does not know is that most of what A.J. eats is disgusting. His fridge contains a variety of frozen foods, many of them spicy. He calls his sister-in-law Ismay for help.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he says. “But I was wondering what I should feed a twenty-five-month-old child?”

  “Why were you wondering that?” Ismay asks in a tight voice.

  He explains about someone having left the baby in the store, and after a pause Ismay says that she will be right over.

  “Are you sure?” A.J. asks. Ismay is six months pregnant, and he doesn’t want to disturb her.

  “I’m sure. I’m glad you called. The Great American Novelist is out of town, and I’ve had insomnia these last couple of weeks anyway.”

  Less than a half hour later, Ismay arrives with a bag of groceries from her kitchen: the makings of a salad, a tofu lasagna, and half an apple crumble. “The best I could do on short notice,” she says.

  “No, it’s perfect,” A.J. says. “My kitchen is a fiasco.”

  “Your kitchen is a crime scene,” she says.

  When the baby sees Ismay, she bawls. “She must miss her mother,” Ismay says. “Maybe I remind her of her mother?” A.J. nods, though he thinks the real cause is that his sister-in-law frightens the baby. Ismay has stylishly cut, spiky red hair, pale skin and eyes, long, spindly limbs. All her features are a little too large, her gestures a little too animated. Pregnant, she is like a very pretty Gollum. Even her voice might be off-putting to a baby. It is precise, theater-trained, always pitched to fill the room. In the fifteen or so years he has known her, A.J. thinks Ismay has aged like an actress should: from Juliet to Ophelia to Gertrude to Hecate.

  Ismay warms up the food. “Would you like me to feed her?” Ismay asks.

  Maya eyes Ismay suspiciously. “No, I’ll give it a go,” A.J. says. He turns to Maya. “Do you use utensils?”

  Maya does not reply.

  “You don’t have a baby chair. You’ll need to improvise a structure so she won’t topple over,” Ismay says.

  He sets Maya on the floor. He builds three walls out of a pile of galleys then lines the galley fort with bed pillows.

  His first spoonful of lasagna goes in without any struggle. “Easy,” he says.

  The second spoonful, Maya turns her head at the last moment, sending sauce everywhere—on A.J., on the bed pillows, down the side of the galley fort. Maya turns back to him with a huge smile on her face, as if she has made the most fantastically clever joke.

  “I hope you weren’t planning to read those,” Ismay says.

  After dinner, they put the baby to bed on the futon in the second bedroom.

  “Why didn’t you just leave the baby at the police station?” Ismay asks.

  “Didn’t seem right,” A.J. says.

  “You’re not thinking of keeping it, are you?” Ismay rubs her own belly.

  “Of course not. I’m only watching it until Monday.”

  “I suppose the mother could turn up by then, change her mind,” Ismay says.

  A.J. hands Ismay the note to read.

  “Poor thing,” Ismay says.

  “I agree, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t abandon a child of mine in a bookstore.”

  Ismay shrugs. “The girl probably had her reasons.”

  “How do you know that it’s a girl?” A.J. asks. “It could be a middle-aged woman at the end of her rope.”

  “The voice of the letter sounds young to me, I guess. Maybe the handwriting, too.” Ismay says. She runs her fingers through her short hair. “How are you holding up otherwise?”

  “I’m okay,” A.J. says. He realizes that he hasn’t thought about Tamerlane or Nic for hours.

  Ismay washes the dishes even though A.J. tells her to leave it. “I’m not going to keep her,” A.J. repeats. “I live alone. I don’t have much money saved, and business isn’t exactly booming.”

  “Of course not,” Ismay says. “It wouldn’t make sense with your lifestyle.” She dries the dishes then puts them away. “It wouldn’t hurt you to start eating the occasional fresh vegetable, however.”

  Ismay kisses him on the cheek. A.J. thinks that she is so like Nic but so unlike her. Sometimes the like parts (the face, the figure) seem hardest for him to bear; sometimes the unlike parts (the brain, the heart) do. “Let me know if you need more help,” Ismay says.

  Although Nic had been the younger sister, she had always worried about Ismay. From Nic’s point of view, her older sister had been a primer on how not to live her life. Ismay had chosen a college because she had liked the pictures in the brochure, had married a man because he looked splendid in a tuxedo, and had started teaching because she’d seen a movie about an inspirational teacher. “Poor Ismay,” Nic had said. “She always ends up so disappointed.”

  Nic would want me to be nicer to her sister, he thinks. “How’s the production coming?” A.J. asks.

  Ismay smiles, and she looks like a little girl. “My word, A.J., I wasn’t aware that you even knew that there was one.”

  “The Crucible,” A.J. says. “Kids come into the store to buy copies.”

  “Yes, that makes sense. Awful play, really. But the girls get to do a lot of screaming and yelling, which they enjoy. Me, less so. I always come to rehearsal with a bottle of Tylenol. And maybe in the midst of all that screaming and yelling, they accidentally learn a little about American history. Of course, the real reason I picked it is because there are so many female roles—less tears when I post the list, you know. But now, with the baby coming, it’s starting to seem like, well, a lot of drama.”

  Because he feels obligated to her for coming over with the food, A.J. volunteers to help. “Maybe I could paint flats or print programs or something?”

  She wants to say How unlike you, but she resists. Aside from her husband, she believes her brother-in-law to be one of the most selfish and self-centered men she has ever met. If one afternoon with a baby can have such a refining influence on A.J., imagine what could happen to Daniel when the baby is born. Her brother-in-law’s small gesture gives her hope. She rubs her belly. It’s a boy in there, and they’ve already chosen a name and a backup name if the original name doesn’t suit.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, once the snow has stopped and even begun to melt away into mud, a body washes up against the small strip of land near the lighthouse. The ID in her pocket says that this is Marian Wallace, and it does not take long for Lambiase to deduce that the body and the baby are, in fact, related.

  Marian Wallace has no people on Alice, and no one knows why she was here or who she came to see or why she decided to kill herself by swimming into the icy waters of the Alice Island Sound in December. That is to say, no one knows the specific reason. They know that Marian Wallace is black, that she is twenty-two years old, and that she had a twenty-five-month-old toddler. To these facts, they can add what she wrote in her note to A.J. A flawed but adequate narrative emerges. Law enforcement concludes that Marian Wallace is a suicide, nothing more.

  As the weekend goes on, more information about Marian Wallace emerges. She attended Harvard on scholarship. She was a Massachusetts State Champion swimmer, and an avid creative writer. She was from Roxbury. Her mother is dead—cancer when Marian was thirteen. The maternal grandmother died a year later of the same cause. Her father is a drug addict. She spent her high school years in and out of foster care. One of her foster mothers remembers young Marian always with her head in a book. No one knows who the father of her baby is. No one even remembers her having a boyfriend. She was put on academic leave from college because she failed all her classes the previous semester—the demands of motherhood and a rigorous academic schedule having become too much to bear. She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.

  Sunday night, Lambiase stops by the bookstore to check on Maya and give A.J. the update. He has several younger siblings and he offers to watch Maya whi
le A.J. tends to store business. “Do you mind?” A.J. asks. “Don’t you have somewhere to go?”

  Lambiase is recently divorced. He had married his high school sweetheart, so it took him a long time to realize that she was not, in fact, a sweetheart or a very nice person at all. In arguments, she was fond of calling him stupid and fat. He is not stupid, by the way, though he is neither well read nor well traveled. He is not fat, though he is built like a bulldog—thick-muscled neck, short legs, broad, flat nose. A sturdy American bulldog, not an English one.

  Lambiase does not miss his wife, though he does miss having somewhere to go after work.

  He parks himself on the floor and pulls Maya onto his lap. After Maya falls asleep, Lambiase tells A.J. the things he’s learned about the mother.

  “What’s strange to me,” A.J. says, “is why she was on Alice Island in the first place. It’s kind of a pain to get here, you know. My own mother’s visited me once in all the years I’ve lived here. You really believe she wasn’t coming to see someone specific?”

  Lambiase shifts Maya in his lap. “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe she didn’t have a plan of where she was going. Maybe she just took the first train and then the first bus and then the first boat and this is where she ended up.”

  A.J. nods out of politeness, but he doesn’t believe in random acts. He is a reader, and what he believes in is narrative construction. If a gun appears in act one, that gun had better go off by act three.

  “Maybe she wanted to die somewhere with nice scenery,” Lambiase adds. “So the lady from DCF will be coming to get this little bundle of joy on Monday. Since the mother didn’t have any family and the paternity is unknown, they’ll have to find a foster home for her.”

  A.J. counts the cash in the drawer. “Kind of rough for kids in the system, no?”

  “It can be,” Lambiase says. “But this young, she’ll probably do all right.”

  A.J. recounts the cash in the drawer. “You said the mother had been through the foster system?”