by Dan Noble
The Book Code
Dan Noble
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Epilogue
Thank You For Reading
Reader’s Group
Coming in 2019
About the Author
Also by Dan Noble
“The type of mind that can understand good fiction …is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”
-Flannery O’Connor
____
Polonious: What do you read my lord?
Horatio: Words, words, words.
Polonious: Though this be madness, there is method in it.
-Shakespeare, Hamlet
____
“You’ve gotta be stronger than your story.” –The Killers
Prologue
There’s something in the mind that keeps us trying to make sense of everything, to find the code in the random. The secret center. The reason we’re here. And that’s what’s had me hooked on this mystery. But that can lead to trouble.
Whether or not you’re a Reader with a capital R, it is better to think of a book like a wonderfully engineered car driving through a new land with no itinerary. And no roads. The good news is Reader can wind up with an excellent guide. It is possible to recognize an excellent guide immediately. If this guide can show Reader a character who travels back in time along a telephone connection and Reader buys it, hook, line, and sinker, then he can be confident he has an excellent guide. He knows the rules, this guide, and he can choose which to follow and which to bend because he knows what’s important about these rules and why.
He knows he can make anything happen, because in the story, it is the experience that matters. But to Reader, everything is so dazzling, this is easy to forget. The journey is eye-opening. The brain is careening off in different directions. As Reader is propelled along these roads, he feels himself changing. Wanting to try that Indonesian dish mentioned in The Novel. Interested in taking a tour of Perugia, like the heroine has. Skinny-dipping in a neighbor’s pool at midnight. Or having a life-awakening affair.
There is something not quite right about the way Reader is glued to all he encounters in The Novel, and yet, aches to race through the pages to see where it is he’s going. But Reader realizes, if he does that, gobbles it all up ravenously, it will be over too soon.
And suddenly it is. Abruptly, like a fall with lots of bruising. And that’s when the question haunts most: which is the reality? The dazzling, eye-opening journey that sent Reader’s heart racing, or this lonely bedroom, where Reader faces a pile of unwashed laundry and an alarm clock that will go off with such monotonous regularity in a few hours that Reader doesn’t even need it anymore to signal the start of another soul-destroying day?
Surely, there must be something more to it all than that. That’s all any of us want: for it to mean something. How to harness the magic of the story and keep it when the alarm bell rings?
Terrible as it all was, this is what she taught me.
1
MILLIE
“What can I do for you, ma’am?” I ask Rose, my three year old daughter.
“I told you not to call me ma’am.” Isn’t it amazing that even at three and a half, we don’t like being called that? I don’t understand the pleasure I get in taunting her with it. It might have to do with the ripple that etches above her nose and the way the skin around her eyebrows goes red. Apparently, I do the same.
“All right, ma’am. I’m sorry, no more. I promise.”
She jams her hands on her hips and hooks her thumb through one of the belt loops on her seersucker pants, which I notice, are about half an inch too short already. It is only eight a.m. and already she has lost a sock.
“But, Mum, you just did it again!”
“Did I?” I tease.
“Yes, you said, ‘All right, ma’am. I’m sorry, no more. I promise.’” I stand just in time to see her green eyes—Kennedy’s green eyes—bulge with sheer hatred. The kind kids show us several times a day though they spent months gnashing our nipples to bits and puking in our hair. Our little angels. Sometimes, though as soon as I think it, I force myself to unthink it, she scares me just a little.
I pull her to the sofa, onto my lap. Her tiny bottom, newly swathed in big girl panties, doesn’t span the width of my thigh. “You know what it’s time for?” I ask dramatically.
She’s giggling already—hysterical, throaty peals punctuated by wild shrieks. “No!” she tries, but her smile gives her away.
“A million kickles!” I say and begin the frenzied choreography of kissing and tickling we’ve thus coined after rejecting tissing (me) and dickkiss (Rose after switching the remote to HBO without my noticing).
She’s yelling and laughing and transmitting sounds to shame a screeching train. As I await her endearing crescendo snort (see? Nothing to be scared of),
Writhing in laughter, she slides to the floor. “Ouch, my bum!” Rose says. Kennedy dropped Australian terms all the time when Rose was learning to talk: bum, bloke, snorker. “I want her to be bilingual,” he said, deadpan.
I follow her into the kitchen where things are all clearly explainable, where I’ve lain Rose’s raisin toast on the table, cut into checker squares arranged over Winnie the Pooh and Friends. Next to that is her drawing tablet where she’ll “write” copies of Winnie and Tigger while her raisin toast hardens and the butter congeals.
Once she’s seated and busy, I step into the adjoining laundry room. The washing basket is overflowing, so I wade through, yanking out my prematurely enormous maternity pieces and Kennedy’s button-ups. Grabbing a pair of his jeans, a densely folded paper slithers out and I rescue it from a dark and dusty fate behind the dryer. My diligent husband files every receipt for tax write-offs, but endearingly, sometimes washes them by mistake.
Feeling useful, like Kennedy’s money-saver, head financial minister of domestic affairs, I unfold the sheet and lift it to the tray overhead where I collect these effects for him. Belatedly, I
register the word “oncology.”
I picture an egg under a spotlight. I say it slowly to myself.
“WHAT?” Rose yells, her back to me.
“Nothing, sorry.”
“Sheesh. Mom, can you put more butter next time!”
It’s just melted, I want to say, but the O word’s gruesome counterpart intrudes. Cancer. A shock of energy bolts my chest. I do the most ridiculous thing: I wipe my hands, as if removing something sticky and unpleasant. What in God’s name is this thing of pink ribbons and holiday telethons doing in my laundry? In this family, we do different kinds of unspeakable, invisible illnesses, which may or may not cause costume jewelry to detach itself from necks and lie on chair arms. We’ve put our time in with that, and in return, we don’t have to do cancer. Even thinking the word, the hard C sticks in my craw, echoes in my head.
I reach into the tray, my chest thudding, and retrieve the creased sheet from the top of the pile.
Dr. Leonard Kramer, Oncologist
Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
It’s a computer-generated receipt with a breakdown of services rendered: Bloods and Urine, CT Scan, PET, Lymph Node Tissue Analysis. I’ve never realized how scary capital letters can make words look, especially when they’re stapled to a yellow carbon credit card receipt with my husband’s signature and an appointment card with a follow up in eight days’ time.
This is Kennedy’s full name, the one I usually laugh over when I see it in print: John F. Kennedy (his parents are a couple of those), his insurance carrier, and co-payment breakdown. But they’re only words on paper, I tell myself. Only I am too experienced to think they could never hurt me, Mrs. John F. Kennedy.
I scan for a calm, rational thought thread, something I can grab onto, but nothing comes, so I refold the receipt, taking care to follow the creases, replace it exactly where it belongs in the tray, and look for something, anything else.
“Mum!” Rose yells, on cue. I run toward her in the living room, and away from the words on that page.
My American daughter, who thanks to her father, fancies herself fluent in Aussie, is frantically groping at her neck: a sign she has again misplaced her magic charm necklace from The Magic Charm Book about the girl who—taking a page from Dumbo—can’t ice skate without it. Skipping my mother’s troublesome advice about grounding books in real life, I instead have concentrated on the ways in which stories encourage imagination. Simpler, I thought. Harmless. I’d like to think my father—should I ever see him—couldn’t say anything about this little girl and her books.
Right now, I’m glad for the distraction. I am shaken by the oncologist receipt, but I don’t want to panic. People go to oncologists for all sorts of things, don’t they?
“Don’t worry, Mommy will help you.”
Rose stands back, as if this is something I need to be given space for.
You’d think I’d have wanted nothing to do with books after Mother’s vanishing, and at first, I didn’t. But it didn’t take long to find out that without them, life didn’t make sense. I tried to avoid stories altogether for the first few days after I brought Rose home. Right now, my head under the sofa, looking for this blasted necklace once again, I’m thinking I should have tried harder.
I’d lock onto her searching eyes and sing songs. Songs—in that high-pitched voice we swear up and down we’ll never use with our kids—about anything that got her little fists pumping and feet kicking. There once was a girl named Rose. She had a berry for a nose! The dog came by and gave a sigh and ate it. Down it goes! It only took me a week to realize these songs told stories, that avoiding such a thing was impossible.
Besides, I caught Kennedy reading to her on the sly. He has a penchant for a board book named Incy Wincy Spider: The True Hollywood Story. At least, that’s what he calls it.
“What are we without the stories we’ve grown up on?” he asked me. This didn’t seem to jive with the Kennedy who’d so denounced Mother’s fancies, and it threw me. So I gave in to the stories. And what did I get? Hours spent hunched over her crib, and eventually her big girl bed, painstakingly extricating from her sleeping body tarnished costume jewelry that turned her neck green, to secretly replace it with a spare that was not yet at that stage. Already books were trouble.
From the corner of my eye, I spot the twinkle of the locket’s faux-ruby rhinestone.
Why is it there’s never a moment of motherhood that doesn’t get filtered through our daughterhood? As I take in the necklace’s delicate placement—the charm over the chair arm, the lengths draped over the side—as if it alighted there on a raft of snowflakes, I see my eager young self crouched over that same arm, when this was Mother’s house, searching eagerly out the window for the elusive tree swing my father had promised the night before.
Mother used books to distract me from disappointments on that occasion, and others when I was young, on that very chair, running her finger under the text until I realized those black marks held the meanings, that they told Mother what to say. Going through the early stages of reading comprehension with Rose has given new meaning to Mother’s odd communiqués and all that ensued, it’s certainly enriched the way I comprehend and express myself too.
I shake off the past and concentrate on the discovery that has surely been staring me in the face for months now: Rose would never remove the necklace herself. No. Don’t think it.
“Stop, Mum,” she breathes, then waits, tensed in like a crab, for me to do get some more tissing in, a wide-eyed smile poking up despite her attempt to restrain it.
“Okay, ma’am,” I say, my hands freezing—one on her belly, one under her knee.
“Mu-uuum!”
“I know you can say mom,” I say, twisting to see her face.
“Hmmph,” she grunts.
How have I gotten myself a daughter who says hmmph? Never in my wildest dreams would I have said such a thing to my own mother—even when Mother and I spoke in actual words. I don’t know where Rose gets her audacity; probably from Kennedy, a little from Amelia Bedila. But a part of me takes pride in it, tells me she’s comfortable, safe enough to hmmph me. And that was no easy feat.
“Hmmph,” I mimic. Maybe she needs a bit of shaking up.
“Mom!” she grumbles. I’ve stepped into her role and she doesn’t like it. We want our mothers to be precisely what we think they should be. Don’t I know it?
I hoist her over my head. She’s getting heavier these days, which I don’t like, but her smell of powder, caramel squares, and baby shampoo is consistent. I lower her to rest against my baby bump, where, despite the five months I have to go, the baby feels restless and about to burst free. Still, that could be the onion bagel I ate earlier.
Rose pats around my belly button in a circle, the way she’s seen her father do. “Beebe,” she says, a mix of French and silliness.
“I see your necklace,” I say, expecting to spend the next hour tweezing together a slippery stretched link.
“Yippee!” she exclaims, which is a line from Trouble in the Ark, a book she wouldn’t unclench her fingers from for several months. We had to wrap it in a Ziploc for bath time, which isn’t as airtight as one might think. Her head jolts. “Where?”
I creep with her over to the armchair, using our exaggerated suspense walk.
Beyond the chair and through the old-fashioned cross-sash window, the winter sun is so bright, the view’s obscured and the surface reflective, casting trees, Rose’s blue tree swing, weeds and grasses, mirror-like upon us. The junky locket’s chain is once again surprisingly intact, catching the sun like a jewelry ad, sending a shiver up the backs of my arms. How did it get here, I wonder again, though I’m trying desperately not to. It is a piece of junk and it merely broke. Don’t read anything into it.
“Yahoo!” I yell to distract her, and myself, expecting her to hop on my knee while I finish the book’s line for Noah. She throws herself on the chair and scoops up the necklace.
“Yippee! Should I ‘do the thing’?
” I ask, referring to the horsey bounce I do when we read the story.
“No, Mom. Do up the necklace.” She’s upset, fumbling with the clasp though she has no chance of latching it.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
I place my hands over her rubbery fingers, which pinch at the ends of the chain, which thankfully is not broken. “Can you do up the necklace?” she repeats, as if she hasn’t heard me. Has she caught onto my odd thoughts? I hope not.
She spills the chain into my outstretched palm and then holds her hair up while I fasten the latch and shove down the strange thoughts, focusing instead on the fine hairs at her nape, wanting suddenly to kiss both her polished and unpolished nail stubs.
“What’s wrong?” I ask once more. Soon enough, Rose will be someone all her own, and she’ll be making her own connections that I won’t be able to save her from. Perhaps she already is.
She exhales like a practiced starlet, then turns to examine my face, our noses centimeters apart, identically scrunched. I feel her congested child breath on my upper lip. Is she considering whether to share her concerns? Her palm wiggles in the crook of my arm. “Is there anything you’d like to say to me?” I whisper. You are nothing but the wonderful girl I see before me. Gestalt. I say these words and inhale deeply and it seems to work. I feel like everything is okay.