by Juliet Bell
“Come here?” He smiled. “My dad worked here. For your grandparents. Looking after their horses and the rest of the livestock. Oscar Aguilar.” So Rosie’s grandfather had worked for mine? This was news to me. “That’s how come I knew your dad.”
“You knew my dad as a kid?”
“Of course!” He smiled. “Walt was a little older than me, I was the kid brother in our family, you know, but—sure I knew your dad. He taught me how to bait a hook. He’s the first guy I ever fished with.”
Here was something Miguel and I had in common: “Walt” was the first guy I ever fished with, too.
“That was before the accident, of course. After that, everything changed. They got rid of all the animals, and—our family moved away.” A cloud darkened Miguel’s usually clear-skied face. “I didn’t see much of your dad after that, or Mrs. Von Stern either. For a long time. It was a surprise when she got in touch after all these years and asked me to work for her.” He sighed. “Rosie’s mom wasn’t too happy when I said yes.”
I wondered if it was something they had argued about. “Why not?”
“Oh—she thinks there are bad bad spirits around the place. Because of the unhappy history.”
Great. Now I was going to find it even easier to sleep at night.
I still didn’t even know what had happened to my grandfather, exactly. No one ever seemed to think they needed to tell me that, or other important things. I figured Miguel might actually spill the beans at last, but before I could find out, my cell phone suddenly came alive in my back jeans pocket. “Nowhere Man,” that old Beatles song.
“It’s my dad,” I told Miguel, like I’d forgotten I even had a dad.
“He knew we were talking about him,” he said, smiling. Then he waved me to answer it and wandered off to get some real work done.
“Belle, old girl!”
Yeah, that was my dad all right. He sounded mighty cheerful for a guy who had abandoned his daughter in her hour of need. “Sorry I didn’t call earlier. We were on a three-day float and there wasn’t great cell coverage—”
“Uh-huh.” There was always some version of this story. The exact details didn’t much matter.
“—a group of businessmen from Southern California. They couldn’t tie a fly to save their lives. We’d have starved if it hadn’t been for the powdered eggs.”
There were things I wanted to ask my dad once he quit the fisher-talk, but before I had the chance, he dropped the hearty act for a second. “So, Ella, how are you holding up? Are you and the Old Dragon getting along OK?”
“Yeah.” Though OK seemed an exaggeration. “I mean—it depends.”
“But she hasn’t thrown you in the slawer yet?” I couldn’t believe he had thought of that, too.
“Not yet.” Then again, I’d been there less than a week. There was plenty of time.
“Well, that’s a good sign.” He chuckled. He always found his own jokes pretty funny.
“Dad—” I blurted. I couldn’t hold back anymore. “There’s nothing to do around here. The only game she has is Boggle. I mean, there’s no Internet, there’s no TV—”
“Internet?” He chuckled again. “No. Violet Von Stern is not wired. (Expletive deleted), Ella, you’re lucky you’ve got a signal on your cell phone.” Him and his expletives. I wondered what the GM had to say about those. “Listen, Belle, I understand what you’re saying. Absolute. That house—I mean, I haven’t been there for a long while, but it’s not set up for kids. I know that much. It’s an unweeded garden and all that.” He paused. “Has she shown you the Librerery yet?” He pronounced the word with a silly snobbish accent that did sound a bit like Grandmother.
“Nope.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. It’s kind of amazing. My mother has a thing about books.”
“I noticed.”
“Yeah, well, the Librerery has some pretty remarkable specimens, and though that may not sound very exciting—”
“It doesn’t.”
“OK, but I’m just saying there are some things in there worth paying attention to. You won’t see them anywhere else, that’s for sure. Tell her to show you Kepler’s Dream—she has the Morris edition, Belle, and there are only a dozen copies in the whole world.” That didn’t make any sense. What sort of book only has twelve copies? “That book—well, I’ve had mixed feelings about it over the years, to put it mildly, but you should still see it.”
“Sounds great. I can hardly wait.” I hoped the sarcasm made it through the phone line. “So … when are you coming to visit, Dad? You said you would.”
“Yeah—right. Uh—there’s a chance I might be able to stop through Albujerk on a layover, on my way to Colorado. It’s complicated. You know, Ella, as I think I explained to you, Mother and I don’t get along too well. That is—”
I let a thick silence fill up the phone.
“Well, anyway. I’ll—I’ll try to figure that out, Belle. OK?”
OK, Dad, but you better mean it this time. You can’t flake out on me this summer, you know? Not this summer. I wondered if there was anyone around who could explain that to him. Where was the (expletive deleted) dad manual when you really needed it?
That night, maybe even the GM was tired of mushy broccoli, so after a game of Boggle—it really was what passed for entertainment at the GGCF—she took me out to dinner at a French place called Chez Albertine. There was something about going to a French restaurant when I knew there had to be great Mexican food all around that felt kind of like going to Paris and ordering tacos, but whatever. At least we were out.
My grandmother ordered snails from the menu, “One of my favorite dishes!” I had to just pretend not to see them or I would get seriously grossed out. So over my steak and fries, for a distraction, I asked about her Librerery. I copied Dad’s goofy pronunciation, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“The Library?” Her face came into focus. “Would that interest you, Ella?”
“Sure.” I mean, not as much as going online, or watching a movie, or talking to one of my actual friends, but … compared with feeding peacocks all day, yeah. Yesssss.
“I have to open the place up soon in any case, as two boys are coming to help me begin cataloging the collection. High schoolers.” She didn’t sound thrilled about this. “They come—ahem!—recommended, but I find it impossible to tell them apart or remember their names, so I think of them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”
She said this as though it were a perfectly sensible thing to say, so I nodded, to be a good sport. “And Dad said there’s some amazing book you have by, uh—Kepler?”
“Kepler’s Dream?” My grandmother’s voice was sharp as a knife edge. “Your father told you about that?”
“Well, he mentioned it …” I got all mumbly again. “I don’t know …”
She looked out the window. “I thought your father found the purchase of that book extravagant,” she said stiffly, but she wasn’t talking to me so much as addressing the Sandias in the distance. Then she turned back. “The Morris Kepler, Ella, is an extremely rare book, the most valuable in my collection. It is a remarkable artifact. Have you ever heard of the Kelmscott Chaucer?”
“No.” It sounded like the name of a racehorse. Or maybe a famous murderer. Did you hear that creepy story about the dude in Kelmscott? He chauced ten people before they caught him.
“Ah. Well, it is a masterpiece of book art, and the Morris Kepler is a similarly rare volume. Your grandfather always dreamed of owning a copy one day, and some years ago—when you were a very little girl—I had the chance to realize his dream.”
I knew almost nothing about my grandfather, except that he had died when my dad was a kid. I always found it weird to think of him being dead so long before I was even born. It was like thinking about infinity, or black holes—it made my brain curdle.
“Was he a collector too?”
“Edward? Edward was an astronomer.” The GM’s face shone with an unfamiliar light. “He loved looking at the sta
rs. It would be fair to say he liked stars better than he liked people.”
Like you and books, I thought, but kept quiet.
“He knew all their names, as if they were his friends, and he knew when they were planning to be where, in the sky. He had all their paths in his head, memorized.”
“Like a travel agent,” I said.
My grandmother laughed. At something I said! I almost choked on my steak.
“I like that, Ella. Quite right.” She looked at me, seeing something she hadn’t before. “Your grandfather was a travel agent to the stars. Plotting their itineraries. That’s very clever.”
I felt a flutter of pride.
“Edward loved Kepler,” she continued in a low, almost dreamy voice. “Kepler was one of the great early astronomers and mathematicians, Ella—like Galileo. He worked out many important things, such as the paths of planetary orbits, but what Edward revered about Kepler was his wild imagination. Kepler believed the Earth had a soul, and that God shaped the planets in accordance with mathematical laws.” I didn’t really understand what she was talking about, but I nodded anyway. I am pretty good at math—much better at math than at making a board game or recipe about some Roald Dahl book I’ve read—but I had never considered God in the equation. And I had barely heard of Kepler. (Scientist? Inventor? Bookstore owner?)
“Edward used to love to tell me about the strangest and least known of Kepler’s works—his Somnium, or Dream. It is Kepler’s fanciful account of what the Earth might look like if we traveled to the moon. Kepler imagined moon travel more than three hundred years before it happened! Edward used to say the Somnium was man’s first work of science fiction. Kepler brought out several crucial works in his lifetime, but the Somnium was only published in 1634. Posthumously.”
I looked blank.
“Which means, after he died.”
“Oh.”
“So when, thanks to an antiquarian book dealer Edward and I had known named Christopher Abercrombie—whom you will meet next week, Ella, as he is coming to visit—the opportunity came up to buy this book, years after Edward had passed away, I leapt at the chance. Building the Library, and our collection, was my way of honoring Edward’s memory. That volume is the centerpiece of a collection that Edward and I started together, while he was still alive.” She looked down at her snail shells for a minute. I did not want to think about what had been inside them. “To your father, I believe, the entire project was frivolous. We have very different opinions on the subject.” She looked back up at me. “In any case, Ella. Would you like to see it?”
It wasn’t so much a question as a command.
“Sure!” I said, trying to muster something like enthusiasm.
So the next morning, when I came into the kitchen for my usual breakfast of playground bark in a bowl (when George finally delivered Irene’s care package a week later, I could sneak handfuls of Froot Loops in my room, which is how I actually survived), there was Grandmother waiting for me at the table, her eyes as beady as Hildy’s.
“Ah, Ella! Shall we set off, when you’re finished?”
I half expected to see a thermos and brown bag lunch beside her. She had that jazzy, expectant look teachers get when you’re going on a field trip—even if it’s to somewhere tedious like the botanical gardens or the local gas and electrical plant.
I’d passed the Librerery a bunch of times when I was walking Lou. As field trips go, this one didn’t involve a lot of travel: the building was only about twenty feet from the house. You just had to go through the front door, elbow a few birds out of the way, then go around the side by some deserted wooden pens half covered in brambles. “That’s where I used to keep my pet skunks,” the GM said casually as we went by. “Dear old Arpege and Chanel Number 5. Remind me to tell you the story one day.”
Skunks? But there was no time to ask any more about that, as we trotted down a few steps and there we were.
My grandmother’s key to her main house was a huge old-fashioned one, like the kind that unlocks the dungeon door in a fairy tale. But for the Librerery she used an ordinary key. As soon as she opened the door, there was a shrill beep, and she typed in a code for the alarm. That was something she didn’t bother with at home either, even with all her things. It was my first hint that there must be something worth guarding in here.
It had been bright outside, and it took my eyes a minute to adjust to the dimness. The place was cool and hushed, and I suddenly felt very far away from everything. In another world.
It was one long, high-ceilinged room, shaped like a chapel. Me and my mom—ahem! my mom and I—weren’t churchy people, but during Mom’s illness, Auntie Irene had taken me along a few times to her church. It was peaceful, and I liked the singing. I didn’t know how to pray, really, but I could see how going to a quiet stone building would get you in the right frame of mind to do it.
The Librerery seemed something like that, only instead of saints and crosses all over, there were books.
Hundreds and thousands of books.
They were everywhere. On all the shelves, from floor to ceiling, stacked or spread open on high tables and side tables and low coffee tables, or packed in cardboard in a cluttered back nook. In the center of the room were a couple of armchairs, each with a lamp beside it, like if you were in the mood, you could just plonk yourself down in one of them, get comfortable and read. For the rest of your life.
“Wow,” I said.
It was not the most imaginative utterance of my life, but I couldn’t think of what else to say.
“Yes, Ella.” She didn’t correct me, for once. “This is the Library.”
The GM had, as Dad had said, a thing about books.
“Your grandfather and I bought many of these together,” she told me. “I couldn’t have done it alone. Edward loved books, too. It was how we met, actually, at an antiquarian bookstore—Christopher’s. We were both interested in a volume of Blake.”
She said that collecting started as something they did just for fun, as a hobby. Then they got interested in older, rarer books, and it became a kind of game, a sport, to find unusual editions to add to their growing library.
“Some of these books are very valuable,” my grandmother explained. “Those volumes you should touch only if you have gloves on.” This seemed crazy to me—wearing gloves to look at a book?—but it didn’t seem smart to say so. “And if I ever see you do this, Ella”—she licked a finger and made a page-turning gesture, that way some people do when they read—“I won’t let you in here again.”
Was that a threat or a promise?
I asked the GM how you knew which were the most valuable books. She said if they were signed by an author who was dead, for instance, or inscribed (“Meaning, written in”) by one famous writer to another. (She had a book by someone named Oscar Wilde that he had signed for his son, who had the wacky name “Vyvyan”.) A very old book, or a book printed on special paper, or with a binding made of some fabulous ingredient, like camel hide. Or gold.
“Which brings us to Kepler’s Dream,” she said. “Would you like to see it?” It sounded like we were going to read Kepler’s mind, somehow. His dream.
My grandmother solemnly led me to the end of the room, where there was a fireplace and a bucket of firewood. Something you don’t often see in the school or local library—a handy place to warm up if you get chilly while you’re studying.
Nearby I also noticed a long glass cabinet filled with photographs, objects, clippings. I knew I was supposed to be psyched about Kepler’s Dream, whatever in the world it was, but the pictures caught my eye.
“Who’s this?” I looked at a black-and-white snapshot of a pretty young woman seated next to a tall, silvery guy with a swanky old-time hat on.
“That”—my grandmother’s face, normally sharp, blurred some as she looked at the photo—“is Edward. And myself. On our honeymoon.” If I squinted, I could see how that smiling girl might one day turn into this older Violet Von Stern.
“Hey!” I saw another picture, one of the same silvery guy smiling and shaking hands with a familiar dark-haired figure. “Isn’t that Michael Collins?”
“Yes, it is.” My grandmother seemed impressed that I recognized him. “Edward knew the Apollo astronauts. He was an important astronomer, Ella. His work was of significant help to NASA when it was developing its space program.”
Well, that was worth the price of admission right there. My own grandfather had known Michael Collins! Had shaken the man’s hand! I wondered if my mom knew. A spidery chill crawled down my spine.
Suddenly I was very curious about this Edward Mackenzie. There were pictures of him with other people I didn’t recognize, and medals and ribbons, and a small plaque with his name. On another shelf, a display of feathered hooks and bright-colored nylon.
“Oh, right,” I said to my grandmother. “He fished, too?”
“Well, yes. He did.” It didn’t seem a happy subject: a frown shadowed her face as if I’d just said What and not Pardon. “But the constellations were his real passion. You know, that is why I returned to my maiden name after Edward died. Von Stern. Do you know what Stern means, Ella?”
I stared at her. This seemed like a setup.
“It means ‘star.’ In German. Edward loved the fact that my name meant ‘from the stars.’” She sighed. “After he died, I couldn’t bear to be a Mackenzie any more.”
“And how did he die again?” I asked.
Wrong question.
“There was an accident,” she said curtly, which seemed all that anyone was ever going to tell me about it. And whatever warmth had been on my grandmother’s face froze right up again. “Now, do you want to see Kepler’s Dream or not, Ella? Otherwise I should start preparing for those wretched boys. They start work soon.”
“Of course!” I hopped to it.
My grandmother put on a pair of white gloves she kept in a drawer and handed me a pair, too. It made us seem like criminals trying not to leave fingerprints as we got ready for the big heist. She gave a long explanation of who Morris was, and why his edition of this Kepler book was so valuable, how many precious whatnots were part of the binding and how the prints were ever so carefully produced and many other details I would mention if I had truly been paying attention at the time, which I wasn’t. My grandfather had been a fisherman, and an astronomer, and he had known Michael Collins! And he had died in some mysterious accident that no one wanted to explain to me. There were a hundred other questions I wanted to ask the GM about him, but first I had to look at her extra-special amazing book.