The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

by Gabrielle Zevin

Lambiase nods.

  “Suppose she thought the kid would stand a better chance in a bookstore.”

  “Who can say?”

  “I’m not a religious man, Chief Lambiase. I don’t believe in fate. My wife. She believed in fate.”

  At that moment, Maya wakes and holds out her arms to A.J. He closes the drawer of the cash register and takes her from Lambiase. Lambiase thinks he hears the little girl call A.J. “Daddy.”

  “Ugh, I keep telling her not to call me that,” A.J. says. “But she won’t listen.”

  “Kids get ideas,” Lambiase says.

  “You want a glass of something?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  A.J. locks the front door of the store and heads up the stairs. He sets Maya on the futon and goes out to the main room of the house.

  “I can’t keep a baby,” A.J. says firmly. “I haven’t slept in two nights. She’s a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times. Three forty-five in the morning seems to be when her day begins. I live alone. I’m poor. You can’t raise a baby on books alone.”

  “True,” Lambiase says.

  “I’m barely keeping myself together,” A.J. continues. “She’s worse than a puppy. And a man like me shouldn’t even have a puppy. She’s not potty-trained, and I have no idea how to do that kind of thing or any of the related matters either. Plus, I’ve never really liked babies. I like Maya, but . . . Conversation with her lacks to say the least. We talk about Elmo, and I can’t stand him, by the way, but other than that, it’s mainly about her. She’s totally self-centered.”

  “Babies do tend to be that way,” Lambiase says. “The conversation will probably improve when she knows more words.”

  “And she always wants to read the same book. And it’s, like, the crappiest board book. The Monster at the End of This Book?”

  Lambiase says he hasn’t heard of it.

  “Well, believe you me. She’s got terrible taste in books.” A.J. laughs.

  Lambiase nods and drinks his wine. “Nobody’s saying you have to keep her.”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course. But do you think I could have some sort of say in where she ended up? She’s an awfully smart little thing. Like she already knows the alphabet and I even got her to understand alphabetical order. I’d hate to see her land with some jerks who didn’t appreciate that. As I was saying before, I don’t believe in fate. But I do feel a sense of responsibility toward her. That young woman did leave her in my care.”

  “That young woman was out of her mind,” Lambiase says. “She was an hour away from drowning herself.”

  “Yeah.” A.J. frowns. “You’re right.” A cry from the other room. A.J. excuses himself. “I should just go check on her,” he says.

  BY THE END of the weekend, Maya is in need of a bath. Though he would rather leave such an intimate activity to the state of Massachusetts, A.J. doesn’t want to surrender her to social services looking like a miniature Miss Havisham. It takes A.J. several Google searches to determine bathing protocol: appropriate temperature bath water two-year-old; can a two-year-old use grown-up shampoo?; how does a father go about cleaning a two-year-old girl’s private parts without being a pervert?; how high to fill tub—toddler; how to prevent a two-year-old from accidentally drowning in tub; general rules for bath safety, and so on.

  He washes Maya’s hair with hemp-based shampoo that used to belong to Nic. Long after he had donated or thrown away everything else of his wife’s, he could not quite bring himself to discard her bath products.

  A.J. rinses her hair, and Maya begins to sing.

  “What is that you’re singing?”

  “Song,” she says.

  “What song is that?”

  “La la. Booya. La la.”

  A.J. laughs. “Yeah, that’s gibberish to me, Maya.”

  She splashes him.

  “Mama?” she asks after a while.

  “No, I’m not your mother,” A.J. says.

  “Gone,” Maya says.

  “Yes,” A.J. says. “She probably isn’t coming back.”

  Maya thinks about this and then nods. “You sing.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Sing,” she says.

  The girl has lost her mother. He supposes it’s the least he can do.

  There is no time to Google appropriate songs for babies. Before he met his wife, A.J. had sung second tenor for the Footnotes, Princeton’s all-male a cappella group. When A.J. fell for Nic, it was the Footnotes who had suffered, and after a semester of missed rehearsals he had been axed from the group. He thinks back to the last Footnotes show, which had been a tribute to eighties music. For his bathtub performance, he follows the program pretty closely, beginning with “99 Luftballons” then segueing into “Get out of My Dreams, Get into My Car.” For the finale, “Love in an Elevator.” He only feels mildly foolish.

  She claps when he is finished. “Again,” she commands. “Again.”

  “That show runs one performance.” He lifts her out of the tub and then he towels her off, wiping between each perfect toe.

  “Luftballon,” Maya says. “Luft you.”

  “What?”

  “Love you,” she says.

  “You’re clearly responding to the power of a cappella.”

  She nods. “Love you.”

  “Love me? You don’t even know me,” A.J. says. “Little girl, you shouldn’t go throwing around your love so easily.” He pulls her to him. “We’ve had a good run. This has been a delightful and, for me, at least, memorable seventy-two hours, but some people aren’t meant to be in your life forever.”

  She looks at him with her big blue skeptical eyes. “Love you,” she repeats.

  A.J. towels her hair then gives her head an appraising sniff. “I worry for you. If you love everyone, you’ll end up having hurt feelings most of the time. I suppose, relative to the length of your life, you feel as if you’ve known me a rather long time. Your perspective of time is really very warped, Maya. But I am old and soon, you’ll forget you even knew me.”

  Molly Klock knocks on the door to the apartment. “The woman from the state is downstairs. Is it okay for me to send her up?”

  A.J. nods.

  He pulls Maya into his lap, and they wait, listening as the social worker ascends the creaky stairs. “Now don’t be afraid, Maya. This lady’s going to find a perfectly good home for you. Better than here. You can’t spend the rest of your life sleeping on a futon, you know. The kind of people who spend their lives as permanent guests on a futon are not the kind of people you want to know.”

  The social worker’s name is Jenny. A.J. cannot recall ever having met an adult woman named Jenny. If Jenny were a book, she would be a paperback just out of the box—no dog ears, no waterlogging, no creases in her spine. A.J. would prefer a social worker with some obvious wear. He imagines the synopsis on the back of the Jenny story: when plucky Jenny from Fairfield, Connecticut, took a job as a social worker in the big city, she had no idea what she was getting into.

  “Is it your first day?” A.J. asks.

  “No,” Jenny says, “I’ve been doing this a little while.” Jenny smiles at Maya. “What a beauty you are.”

  Maya buries her face in A.J.’s hoodie.

  “You two seem very bonded.” Jenny makes a note in her pad. “So it’s like this. From here, I’ll take Maya back to Boston. As her caseworker, I’ll fill out some paperwork for her—she obviously can’t do that herself, ha ha. She’ll be assessed by a medical doctor and a psychologist.”

  “She seems pretty healthy and well adjusted to me,” A.J. says.

  “It’s good that you’ve observed that. The doctors will be on the lookout for developmental delays, illnesses, and other things that might not be obvious to the untrained eye. After that, Maya will be placed with one of our many preapproved foster families, and—”

  A.J. interrupts. “How does a foster family get preapproved? Is it as easy as, say, getting a department store credit card?”

  �
�Ha ha. No, of course, there are more steps to it than that. Applications, home visits—”

  A.J. interrupts again. “What I mean to say, Jenny, is how do you make sure you aren’t placing an innocent child with a complete psychopath?”

  “Well, Mr. Fikry, we certainly don’t start from the point of view that everyone who wants to foster a child is a psychopath, but we do extensively vet all our foster families.”

  “I worry because . . . well, Maya’s very bright, but she’s also very trusting,” A.J. says.

  “Bright but trusting. Good insight. I’ll write that down.” Jenny does. “So after I place her in an emergency, nonpsychopathic”—she smiles at A.J.—“foster family, I go to work again. I try to see if anyone in her extended family wants to claim her and if that’s a no, I start trying to find a permanent situation for Maya.”

  “You mean adoption.”

  “Yes, exactly. Very good, Mr. Fikry.” Jenny doesn’t have to explain all this, but she likes to make Good Samaritans like A.J. feel like their time has been valued. “By the way, I really have to thank you,” she says. “We need more people like you who are willing to take an interest.” She holds out her arms to Maya. “Ready, sweetie?”

  A.J. pulls Maya closer to him. He takes a deep breath. Is he really going to do this? Yes, I am. Dear God. “You say that Maya will be placed in a temporary foster home? Couldn’t I just as well be that home?”

  The social worker purses her lips. “All our foster families have gone through an application process, Mr. Fikry.”

  “The thing is . . . I know it’s not orthodox, but the mother left me this note.” He hands the note to Jenny. “She wanted me to have this child, you see. It was her last wish. I think it’s only right that I should keep her. I don’t want her moved into some foster home when she has a perfectly good home right here. I Googled the matter last night.”

  “Google,” says Maya.

  “She’s taken a fancy to that word, I don’t know why.”

  “What ‘matter’?” Jenny asks.

  “I’m not obligated to turn her over when it’s the mother’s wish that I should have her,” A.J. explains.

  “Daddy,” says Maya as if on cue.

  Jenny looks from A.J.’s eyes to Maya’s. Both sets are annoyingly determined. She sighs. She had thought the afternoon would be simple, but now it’s starting to get complex.

  Jenny sighs again. It is not her first day, though she only finished her master’s in social work eighteen months ago. She is either bright-eyed or inexperienced enough to want to help them. Still, he’s a single man, who lives above a store. The paperwork is going to be ridiculous, she thinks. “Help me out here, Mr. Fikry. Tell me you have a background in education or child development or some such.”

  “Um . . . I was on my way to a PhD in American literature before I quit that to open this bookstore. My specialty was Edgar Allan Poe. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a decent primer on what not to do with children.”

  “That’s something,” Jenny says by which she means it’s something entirely unhelpful. “You’re sure you’re up to this? It’s an enormous financial and emotional and time commitment.”

  “No,” A.J. says, “I’m not sure. But I think Maya has as good a chance with me as with anyone else. I can watch her while I work, and we like each other, I think.”

  “Love you,” Maya says.

  “Yes, she keeps saying that,” A.J. says. “I warned her about giving love that hasn’t yet been earned, but honestly, I think it’s the influence of that insidious Elmo. He loves everyone, you know?”

  “I’m familiar with Elmo,” Jenny says. She wants to cry. There is going to be so much paperwork. And that’s just for the foster placement. The adoption proper’s going to be murder, and Jenny will be the one who has to make the two-hour trip to Alice Island every time someone from DCF has to check on Maya and A.J. “Okay, you two, I have to call my boss.” As a girl, Jenny Bernstein, product of two stable and loving parents from Medford, Massachusetts, had adored orphan stories like Anne of Green Gables and A Little Princess. She has recently begun to suspect that the sinister effect of repeated reading of these stories was what led her to choose social work as a profession. In general, the profession had turned out to be less romantic than her readings had led her to believe. Yesterday, one of her former classmates discovered a foster mother who had starved a sixteen-year-old teenage boy down to forty-two pounds. All the neighbors had thought the teen was a six-year-old child. “I still want to believe in happy endings,” the classmate had said, “but it’s getting hard.” Jenny smiles at Maya. What a lucky little girl, she thinks.

  THAT CHRISTMAS AND for weeks after, Alice buzzes with the news that A.J. Fikry the widower / bookstore owner has taken in an abandoned child. It is the most gossip-worthy story Alice has had in some time—probably since Tamerlane was stolen—and what is of particular interest is the character of A. J. Fikry. The town had always considered him to be snobbish and cold, and it seems inconceivable that such a man would adopt a baby just because it was abandoned in his store. The town florist tells a story about leaving a pair of sunglasses in Island Books and coming back less than one day later to find that A.J. had thrown them out. “He said his store had no room for a lost-and-found. And that’s what happens to very nice, vintage Ray-Bans!” the florist says. “Can you imagine what will happen to an actual human being?” Furthermore, for years, A.J. had been asked to participate in town life—to sponsor soccer teams, to patronize bake sales, to buy ads in the high school yearbook. The man had always declined and not always politely either. They can only conclude that A.J. has grown soft since losing Tamerlane.

  The mothers of Alice fear that the baby will be neglected. What can a single man know about child rearing? They make it their cause to stop by the store as often as possible to give A.J. advice and sometimes small gifts—old baby furniture, clothes, blankets, toys. The mothers are surprised to find Maya to be a sufficiently clean, happy, and self-possessed little person. Only after they’ve left the store do they cluck about how tragic Maya’s backstory is.

  For his part, A.J. does not mind the visits. The advice he mainly ignores. The gifts, he accepts (though he does liberally curate and disinfect them after the women have left). He knows about the postvisit clucking and decides not to let it annoy him. He leaves a jug of Purell on the counter next to a sign that commands please disinfect before handling the infanta. Besides, the women do actually know a few things that he doesn’t know, things about potty training (bribery works) and teething (fancy ice-cube trays) and vaccinations (you can skip the chicken pox one). It turns out that, as a source of child-rearing advice, Google is wide but not, alas, terribly deep.

  While visiting the baby, many of the women even buy books and magazines. A.J. begins to stock books because he thinks the women will enjoy discussing them. For a while, the circle responds to contemporary stories about overly capable women trapped in troubled marriages; they like if she has an affair—not that they themselves have (or will admit to having had) affairs. The fun is in judging these women. Women who abandon their children are a bridge too far, although husbands who have terrible accidents are usually received warmly (extra points if he dies, and she finds love again). Maeve Binchy is popular for a while, until Margene, who in another life had been an investment banker, raises the complaint that Binchy’s work is too formulaic. “How many times can I read about a woman married too young to a bad, handsome man in a stifling Irish town?” A.J. is encouraged to expand his curatorial efforts. “If we’re going to have this book group,” Margene says, “we may as well have some variety.”

  “Is this a book group?” A.J. says.

  “Isn’t it?” Margene says. “You didn’t think all this child-rearing advice came for free, did you?”

  In April, The Paris Wife. In June, A Reliable Wife. In August, American Wife. In September, The Time Traveler’s Wife. In December, he runs out of decent books with wife in the title. They read Bel C
anto.

  “And it wouldn’t hurt you to expand the picture-book section,” Penelope, who always looks exhausted, suggests. “The kids should have something to read when they’re here, too.” The women bring their own little ones for Maya to play with, so it only makes sense. Not to mention, A.J. is tired of reading The Monster at the End of This Book, and though he has never been particularly interested in picture books before, he decides to make himself an expert. He wants Maya to read literary picture books if such a thing exists. And preferably modern ones. And preferably, preferably feminist ones. Nothing with princesses. It turns out that these works most definitely do exist. One night, he finds himself saying, “As a form, the picture book has a similar elegance to the short story. Do you know what I mean, Maya?”

  She nods seriously and turns the page.

  “The talent of some of these people is astounding,” A.J. says. “I honestly had no idea.”

  Maya taps on the book. They are reading Little Pea, the story of a pea who has to eat all his sweets before he can have vegetables for dessert.

  “It’s called irony, Maya,” A.J. says.

  “Iron,” she says. She makes an ironing gesture.

  “Irony,” he repeats.

  Maya cocks her head, and A.J. decides that he will teach her about irony some other day.

  CHIEF LAMBIASE IS a frequent visitor to the store, and to justify these visits, he buys books. Because Lambiase doesn’t believe in wasting money, he reads the books, too. At first, he had mainly bought mass-market paperbacks—Jeffery Deaver and James Patterson (or whoever writes for James Patterson)—and then A.J. graduates him to trade paperbacks by Jo Nesbø and Elmore Leonard. Both authors are hits with Lambiase, so A.J. promotes him again to Walter Mosley and then Cormac McCarthy. A.J.’s most recent recommendation is Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories.

  Lambiase wants to talk about the book as soon as he gets to the store. “So the thing is, at first I kind of hated the book, but then it grew on me, yeah.” He leans on the counter. “Because, you know, it’s about a detective. But it moves kind of slow and most things go unsolved. But then I thought, That’s how life is. That’s how the job really is.”