He opened his arms and Lydia, after a quailing pause, stood into a hug.
“Look at us,” he said, “both alive.”
Lydia took a step back and grabbed the nape of her neck. Her impulse was to sprint down the sidewalk as fast as her awkward feet would carry her—but then somewhere inside she felt a small bright glimmer, and she was greeted with a simple image of the two of them as children, sitting on the carpet in her father’s library, leaning back-to-back, encircled by books.
She almost smiled. “I just can’t believe you’re here, Raj. Because it’s been like—”
“Like twenty years.”
“Wow. Twenty? Sheesh.” She nodded into the cold, then lifted her coffee and moved her books into her lap. “So? Sit with me. Yeah. Sit already.”
Both sat on the slatted bench. A pigeon flapped past in the street.
“I saw your picture in the newspaper,” Raj said.
“You’re not the only one,” she said. “You do realize that was like two weeks ago.”
“It took me that long to gather the nerve to come down here, to be honest.” He nodded in the direction of the bookstore, a few blocks west. “I wasn’t expecting to find you on the way.”
“I sit out here a lot.”
“Lucky for me,” he said. His teeth still gleamed, just as they had when they were kids, and his hair was still a shaggy mess, and his skin still glowed. “I wasn’t even sure you wanted to see me again. Otherwise, you would have—”
“Otherwise I would have looked you up when I moved back to town? It really wasn’t intentional, Raj.”
“You don’t have to explain, Lydia. It doesn’t get more loaded than us.”
“No,” she said, smiling, “it doesn’t.”
“We’re carrying some serious baggage,” he said. “Especially you,” he added, then gently closed his eyes. “Sorry. That was probably the wrong thing to say.”
“Only because it’s true,” she said, and lightly slugged his arm.
“I guess I’ll see you in another twenty years.”
Both of them were smiling now, unable not to. Lydia surprised herself by grabbing Raj’s hand. She didn’t say anything and he didn’t either, but after a minute Raj let go and slid over to his half of the bench.
“So, how long have you been back?”
“In Denver? Gosh, like six years?”
“And here all this time I thought you were hiding in the mountains,” he said. “Address unknown.”
“For a long time I was.”
“One day there was a For Sale sign on your lawn and that was it for my pal Lydia.”
“The plan was to stay in touch,” she said, “but then—you know.”
“I know.”
“I tried.”
“I know.”
And Lydia was being truthful: when she and her father had fled Denver in the middle of her fourth-grade year for the small town of Rio Vista, Colorado, she’d done her best to write letters to Raj, even if it simply meant letting him know she was alive and safe and missing his friendship. She’d spent more time decorating the letters’ margins with flowers and forest creatures than she had on the sullen details of her days. Her father always read and redacted her letters carefully before driving to distant towns—Salida, Gunnison, Leadville—and mailing them without a return address. Since no one could know where they’d ended up settling, Raj never had the option of writing her back.
Eventually, predictably, her letters had stopped.
Lydia looked down at the sidewalk’s gray and pink granite pavers, arranged to resemble the scales of a diamondback slithering through downtown. It was quiet between them. She reached across the bench and gave his wrist a little shake.
“It’s good to see you again,” she said. “I mean it.”
“Sorry about the circumstances,” he said. “But I’m dying to know what’s up with your name. The caption in the paper gave the Lydia part. But Lydia Smith? What happened to Gladwell? You got married? Let me see those hands again. I don’t see a ring.”
“My dad changed our name back when we moved. We were supposed to be anonymous.”
“So you’re not married.”
“Mmph,” she said. “No.”
“I’m kind of surprised by that,” he said, then crossed his legs and tugged a frayed thread from the cuff of his jeans.
“But involved,” she said, though it sounded as if it were a question.
Raj shifted on the bench.
“They never caught him, did they?” he said.
Lydia stared at the argyled mannequins and rainbow kites displayed in the window across the way, and the young woman with a shaved head shouldering her acoustic guitar down the sidewalk.
“Raj,” she said, “I’d rather not go there.”
“It’s old news, anyway.”
She thought she should say something more but a sudden lump filled her throat, and up and down her spine she could feel the familiar fronds of discomfort that accompanied most reminders of her childhood. She thought about asking him not to mention her past to anyone, but one look into his eyes—a soft dark brown, like sea glass, and as kind and wary as ever—and she knew her past would always be safe with Raj.
She took a deep breath. “And you, Raj? What are you doing with yourself?”
He shrugged, then pointed loosely in the direction of Union Station. “I live above a bar just over there, where that construction is happening? And I’m a cashier at a copy shop, but I guess I’m trying to be a graphic designer.” He opened his wallet and pulled out a card and handed it to her. “I’m calling it my own company,” he said, “but really it’s just whatever jobs I cull from the copy counter.”
Lydia studied the card.
“And what about your dad?” Raj added. “Is he—?”
“Crazy?” she said. “Oh yes.”
“They only get nuttier with age, don’t they?”
“He has, that’s for sure.”
“Mine too,” Raj said. “Both of them. So tell me.”
“We aren’t speaking,” she said. “My dad and I, I guess we’re— What’s the word? Over.”
“Really? Because your dad was so—”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ve just realized.” She stood spontaneously and gathered her coffee, then lifted the pair of Joey’s books into the air, as if they signified some kind of serious business. “I’m in the middle of something here. Work.”
Raj stood too and stuck his hands in his pockets, and for a moment he looked boyish again, brooding and smart and, in the right light, easily as handsome as David.
“Can we do this another time, though?” she added.
“Of course,” he said. “I see you drink coffee. We could do that together.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s do that. Soon.”
When she was a good fifty feet down the block, she heard him yell, “My number’s on the card!”
She spun around and gave him a high thumbs-up, and a pair of passing women in bright ski parkas and bright lipstick looked at her as if she were drunk.
Lydia hadn’t planned on heading back to the bookstore any more than she’d planned on escaping from Raj, but now that she was walking in that direction she felt an unexpected mix of clarity and unease. She needed to be done with Joey, she decided, and wash her hands of his death. She’d return The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac to its empty slot on the Parenting shelves and give serious thought to donating Joey’s crate of butchered books to a thrift store. As she headed toward Bright Ideas, she could feel a certain stride entering her walk, and she swung her satchel back on her shoulder and slid Joey’s books together, cupping them in her palm.
The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books.
Lydia spent so much time carrying books up and down the stairs of the store that she was pleased at how nicely this pair fit together. They were simply snug, easy to carry, no bumbling or sliding apart, almost like a pair of Lego bricks—
In
the middle of the sidewalk Lydia stopped cold. A ponytailed man jogging with a stroller huffed and veered around her. Lydia mumbled an apology, but her focus was already on the books in her hand.
She looked at the books side by side, spine by spine, back-to-back.
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books. The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac.
She pressed the books atop each other. They weren’t just the same size, they were the exact same size. No lip, no overhang, no difference but the words.
Okay, Joey. Words.
Last words?
Lost words?
Words. Words. Words—
I make the codices speak.
There on the sidewalk she opened A Universal History to its first cut-up page—page 128—then she opened The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac to its own page 128, which was wholly intact. It was an awkward process—folding back the cut-up book without stressing its spine—but when she slid them together and lined them up perfectly, page 128 on page 128, the little cut-out windows were now filled in by the words and letters of the book behind. A perfect fit.
A key finding its lock. A message from the grave:
you
. Fo
und
mea
gain
ly,
di
. A
, j
CHAPTER TEN
Lydia’s skills as a bookseller came mainly, she believed, from her ability to listen. A raging case of bibliophilia certainly helped, as did limited financial needs, but it was her capacity to be politely trapped by others that really sealed her professional fate. From bus stops to parties to the floors of the store, Lydia was the model of a Good Listener—a sounding board for one and all. Strangers and acquaintances and the occasional friend unloaded on her by the hour—add booze and it was every five minutes—and Lydia’s main conversational contributions consisted of Yeah or Hmm or Great or Jeez or Ouch or Yikes or Wow.
The unloading voice this time belonged to a middle-aged BookFrog named Pedro, a tender man with red suspenders and white sneakers who’d cornered Lydia twenty minutes ago next to the potted ficus in Genre Fiction. Pedro was unable to speak without intense fidgeting, so throughout his entire riff he pruned the tree by hand, dropping one leaf at a time to the wood floor, as if to punctuate his points. He was talking about his favorite sci-fi authors, explaining the worlds they’d created with enough detail for Lydia to formulate spaceship blueprints, and she politely listened—Yeah, she said, and Hmm and Great and Jeez and Ouch and Yikes and Wow—appreciating not so much the worlds themselves, but the fact that Pedro had become so lost in their trance that he was unable to stop himself from sharing them. All the while Lydia nodded along, admiring his penchant for details and finding it sweet that he wasn’t hitting on her, and probably more than anything, feeling grateful to be focusing on something besides the message she’d discovered yesterday in Joey’s books—You found me again, Lydia—and the subsequent pair of messages she’d managed to decode before work this morning as well.
Joey’s words had scared the bejesus out of her, so Pedro’s riff was a calming distraction. Just as she was settling in to hear about another sci-fi system, she peered across the bookstore floor and spotted Lyle dropping down the stairs, sipping from a paper cup of tea.
“Hold that thought!” she said to Pedro. “Lyle!”
By the time Lydia caught up with him, Lyle was already paging through the Sunday Times at a tilty table in the coffee shop.
She plunged into the wooden chair across from him. Lyle pressed his glasses to the bridge of his nose.
“Lydia,” he said calmly, with an affected Brahmin accent: Lid-ee-ahh. “Join me, will you?”
The first time Lydia had seen Lyle, six years back, she’d thought he was an artist of one flavor or another, or at least a New York transplant, because he dressed perfectly for the part: straggling gray hair, half-moon glasses, black peacoat, high-water chinos, plaid shirts buttoned to his neck, and tan-and-white saddle shoes. Easily in his sixties, Lyle was older than most BookFrogs, and Lydia imagined that at some point he may even have led a conventional life. She’d heard through the Bright Ideas grapevine—admittedly, not the most robust source—that he was independently wealthy, and that previous to his existence as a BookFrog, he’d spent a decade at a care facility near Aspen that Plath called “part loony bin, part ski lodge.”
Given the amount of time that Lyle and Joey used to spend together, the fact that Lyle wasn’t with his friend on the night of his hanging was thoroughly bizarre, a statistical anomaly. Equally odd was the fact that Lyle, who spent as much time at Bright Ideas as any other BookFrog, had left the store around the day of Joey’s death and hadn’t been back since. For two weeks, Lydia had paid more attention to his absence than to anyone else’s presence. Every alcove, every aisle, every couch was missing Lyle’s form.
“Lyle, where on earth have you been?” she said, her voice infused with urgency. “What happened to you?”
Lyle looked over the top of his glasses and down the bulb of his nose, somewhere between confused and indignant.
“What happened?” he said. “My best friend killed himself upstairs; that’s what happened. I’ve been cremating him. Cremating Joey. Who did you think was going to take care of the arrangements? The Rotary Club? His suburban parents and his family of weeping siblings? He had no one, Lydia. I was it.”
“Of course,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
She was. Of all the thoughts zigging in Lydia’s mind lately, the one that hadn’t caught her notice was the fate of Joey’s remains. Of course there would be the issue of arrangements. Besides which, it hadn’t occurred to her that reentering the store was probably just too painful for Lyle.
“He really didn’t have anyone?”
“He had me and he had you. Otherwise he was alone in the world,” Lyle said, crossing his legs and leaning back in his chair. “If you want to pay respects, by the way, he’s at the zoo.”
“At the zoo. As in the zoo?”
“Joey liked to walk the zoo on free days. I didn’t know where else to put him. I thought about leaving him on a shelf upstairs, with Flannery or Fante or Rimbaud. But I figured there were rules against leaving bodies in here.”
“Probably.”
“So I put his ashes in a duffel bag and snipped a tiny hole in the bottom and walked the length of the zoo. But I didn’t make the hole big enough so there were these tiny pieces left over in the bag. I shook them into the grass. But then all the geese thought he was bread crumbs and started charging me. Horrifying, Lydia, the way they gobbled him up. A frenzy. Joey would’ve abhorred all the attention.”
“I can see that.”
“I scanned the sky for vultures,” Lyle said, dramatically peering at the splintery beams above. “There were children all over the place. Balloon animals and hot cocoa. And here I am dumping Joey. Joey. If the den mothers only knew.”
“Just tell me why you weren’t with Joey that night,” she said, and only as the words left her mouth did she realize how sad and desperate she sounded. “You were always with him, Lyle, so why not then?”
Lyle stared at her in silence. Without shame, he placed a pill on his tongue and washed it down with a sip of green tea. He dripped the tea bag above the cup and rolled the lump into a napkin and buttoned it into his peacoat to be reused later. He dried his fingertips with a hankie, then folded it back into his shirt pocket.
“Do you ever really watch people in here?” he said. “The way most people browse, it’s as if they’ve stepped into a temple or church. This is not riffling through hangers on the clearance rack or tossing canned corn into the cart. No, this is browsing. It even sounds drowsy: to browse. Heart rates slow. Time disappears. Serious people turn into dreamers again. They play frozen statues on the floor, chew their fingers, pull the flaps of pop-up books.”
“Why are you telling me this, Lyle?”
“Joey loved it her
e,” he said. “Loved it. This place gave him something sacred. Gave his mind some quiet. This was his Thanksgiving table. His couch-cushion fort. He could get lost in here like nowhere else on earth. I’m telling you this, Lydia, because in all his life, he’d never really had that feeling before, not consistently anyway. Not to overstate it, but this store was the closest thing to a home that Joey ever had.”
“He really had no one?”
“Like I said, he had me and he had you. It’s difficult to imagine how a kid like that had been so horribly cast into the void, but it happened. Joey was one of those bright, troubled boys who never got beyond being a ward of the state. I’m not sure he even knew the details, but apparently from the time he was a baby he’d lived in a big, run-down house on the north side, somewhere off Federal, and he had six or seven siblings of various ages and backgrounds, and the whole group of them had been adopted by this older couple—Guatemalan, I think, or El Salvadoran—who’d never had kids of their own. Mr. and Mrs. Molina.”
Lydia recalled the certificate hanging on Joey’s bathroom wall, the only time she’d ever seen his surname: Joseph Edward Molina.
“Joey remembered very little about them because he was so young, but he talked about eating a lot of meals outside, and crowding onto a couch with his brothers and sisters and listening to their dad play the trumpet and read Bible stories. And Joey said that he remembered being a happy kid, but that his happiness was very short-lived. When Joey was maybe three or four, his father died suddenly. Joey never got the whole story, just that after his father was gone it became impossible for his mother to keep all those kids around. Financially, I’m guessing. So all of them went back into the system, scattered like chaff, you know, and that was the extent of Joey’s experience with family.
“After that, he was bounced from one foster family or group home or juvie center to another. I don’t know why no one else ever stepped forward to take him in. Maybe he was a difficult child, or maybe he just wasn’t a lily-white newborn, which is apparently the hot commodity in the adoption market, sad to say. For whatever reason, after those first few years he fell straight through the cracks. Imagine if your only threads to family, your only memories of what we call home, only lasted as long as your preschool years. It’s tragic.”
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 9