Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

by Matthew Sullivan

  —welcome to your new life, she’d tell herself.

  Each day Lydia managed to survive the ride home on the school bus, and once there she’d open all the curtains and wake up her father. They’d eat pancakes or eggs at the kitchen counter and he’d stare solemnly at the chicken clock clucking on the wall.

  Then he’d begin ironing his state-issued shirt and polishing his black ankle boots. She sometimes watched him getting ready and wondered if he was an imposter. Ever since they’d left Denver, he’d been acting less and less like her dad. At first it was small stuff, like when he kissed her good-bye he’d look away too soon, or when she asked him questions he didn’t seem to hear her, even if it was important. He’d even begun to look different. Just after taking this prison job he’d replaced his horn-rims with big wire aviator glasses and shaved his beard clean off. With his regulation buzz cut and parted mustache, he looked less like her father and more like (face it!) a prison guard.

  Although Lydia didn’t understand her father’s transformation, she knew he would never have acted like this unless things were pretty bad. Which was why she kept it all so quiet, what started happening to her during his nights away.

  —You sure you’re gonna be all right?

  —i’ll be fine.

  —Chain the door behind me.

  His car spat gravel on its way toward the prison and suddenly she was alone in the cabin. Silence surrounding her like an invitation.

  The first time Lydia woke up under the cabin’s kitchen sink, the sun was rising between the cracks and Tomas was pounding on the front door, calling her name.

  —Lydia!

  She kicked herself out from under and sprinted down the hall. Before she slid the chain from its clasp on the door she looked around the cabin and it was empty but for her. Of course it was.

  When she let Tomas in he patted her frazzled hair and glanced down upon her. He must have noticed something because he tilted her face by the chin, as if examining a shiner.

  —i overslept.

  —You’re late for school.

  Then he scooped an ant trap from the kitchen floor and threw it beneath the sink, where it belonged.

  As the months spilled forward, Lydia’s nights beneath the sink became all but inevitable. Once, twice, three times a week, while Tomas patrolled the snoring corridors of the prison, Lydia would meander through her bedtime ritual with all the enthusiasm of someone changing a toilet paper roll. In bed she’d get lost in a book and chomp through a wad of gum until she could hardly keep her eyes open any longer. Then she’d thumb the gum to her nightstand, click off her bed light, and aim straight for sleep. Sometimes it worked. But sometimes as she slipped out of consciousness, she’d hear creaking in the crawl space or jangling in the fridge. Doors opening. Milk spilling. Her muscles would jolt and she’d snap out of bed, scamper down the hallway, and fold herself safely under the kitchen sink, usually for the rest of the night.

  Sometimes when Lydia was hiding in there, she believed that she could hear the Hammerman just on the other side of the cabinet door, his boots squeaking through the snowy blood on the kitchen floor. But mostly what she felt was a pervasive sense of dread and anticipation, as if she were Pippi Longstocking sealed into her dark barrel, just beginning to roll over the lip of the waterfall.

  A year of this passed, then two. And then it was a Saturday morning in October and instead of being awakened by her father’s keys in the dead bolt, she was awakened by a ringing phone. She kicked her way out from beneath and snapped the phone off the wall.

  —I’ve got to stay on for another twelve.

  —dad?

  —We could use the money. You’ll be okay at home alone?

  She looked at the chicken clock clucking: five a.m.

  —Or you can go to a friend’s house. Wasn’t there a girl in your art class?

  —i’ll be okay here.

  Lydia held the phone until its buzz went silent. The dad she’d had in Denver wasn’t perfect, but he never would have left her alone so much. Every time she thought of him as he’d been back then—the soft way he entered a room, the tilt of his head when others spoke—she felt incredibly sad, as if the dad in her memory had died that night with all the rest.

  The sun was barely a dream in the east and she had the whole day and whole cabin to herself. She walked from room to room in her socks, snooping in the silence, feeling the kinks and aches of her night beneath go away. When she got to her father’s room, she sat on the edge of his mattress and opened up the gunmetal lockbox he kept under his dresser. She looked through some envelopes and snapshots, then pulled out a crumpled sheet of brown paper towel, the kind found in school and hospital restrooms. When she unwadded it—expecting a tooth fairy tooth or a lock of her infant hair—she was surprised to see her mother’s ruby ring sitting in the crumple like a flower in cemetery soil. He’d finally thrown out the gauze.

  As she was packing the ring back in the box she stopped cold and turned her head and wondered if she’d really just heard a man’s footsteps in the hallway. No one was there when she peered around the jamb, but her heart was pounding. She checked the front door and it was locked, but even in the daylight the realization that it wouldn’t open until dusk tightened the silence around her. A few seconds passed and she was about to feel calm—and then of course she heard it: somewhere in the back of the cabin, an egg splattering on the wooden floor.

  The cabinet door clicked as she pulled it closed behind her.

  Twelve hours later, above the birdlike sounds that echoed through the sink chamber, Lydia finally heard tires crunching up the driveway. The air around her began to crack and she pushed open the door of her dark box. The lower half of her body was so numb she felt as if she’d been cast in concrete. It was impossible to walk, yet she managed to pull herself up tall enough to peer out the window above the sink.

  Outside, at the peak of the driveway, she watched her father, dressed in an unbuttoned work shirt, lifting a heavy cardboard box from the backseat of the station wagon. He walked straight down the slope to his workshop and didn’t step foot into their cabin until long after Lydia had eaten dinner alone, taken a shower, climbed into bed, and—finally, thankfully—read herself to sleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As Lydia awakened and her eyes adjusted to the light, she realized she’d been roused by the sound of snoring. Her first panicky thought was that David didn’t snore. She looked at the pillow pile and braided sheets next to her but the bed was strangely empty. When she followed the snores she found Raj on the floor next to her bed, sound asleep in David’s sleeping bag.

  On the floor, she told herself. Not in the bed. Whew.

  She remembered now: Last night they’d talked for so long that Lydia had suggested Raj stay over. He’d taken her up on the offer.

  The morning was cold so Lydia decided to lie in bed for a while, but when the phone rang in the kitchen she hopped over Raj without waking him. She was wearing David’s sweats and David’s hoodie and as she stared at the ringing phone she imagined it was him, David, calling to let her know he was coming home early for sex or bagels.

  One room away, Raj still snored. The phone stopped ringing.

  As she contemplated coffee she spotted Joey’s milk crate underneath the table. She pulled out the pair of books she’d been hoping to decipher last night when Raj’s knock had interrupted her. One was a slim volume of poems called The Devil’s Tour and she was surprised, as she fanned through it, to find only a handful of tiny windows cut from its pages. This was, as far as she could tell, the shortest of the messages she’d seen thus far. The label on the back belonged to a different book, of course, a brisk novel called Sula that she’d borrowed from the store yesterday, and she could feel her vision blur a bit as she lifted it from the table, opened to the corresponding pages, and slid its text under the cut-up poems. When the pages lined up exactly, a few meager words appeared:

  my

  1.

  As

&
nbsp; T

  me. S

  age

  , f

  In

  D

  her

  . . .

  My last message—except Lydia still had a small pile of books in the crate that she had yet to decipher. So while this may have been the last message Joey had carved, she realized, it was not the last one Lydia would decode. Even so, its directive was clear: Find her . . .

  There she was again: Her.

  Lydia felt her arms fall loosely to her sides as she realized, with great relief, that the woman in Joey’s messages—the Her that Lydia was directed to find, whatever that meant—was probably not herself. In the first message, Joey had addressed Lydia directly, had even used her name, so it seemed likely that Her was another person altogether. But who?

  It was quiet in the apartment, but she could hear the first hints of traffic up on Colfax, as well as birds chirping between branches in the spruce trees that nuzzled her home. When she looked toward the bedroom, she saw Raj wriggling out of David’s bag and slipping on his sandals. His hair was a living mess.

  Lydia closed the books and dropped them into the milk crate.

  “What’s all that?” Raj said, coming into the kitchen.

  “My inheritance. When someone hangs themselves in the store, they apparently feel the need to leave me a gift.”

  “Ouch.” Raj looked down at the crate. “Can I?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “Did I hear the phone?” he said.

  “David’s coming home today.”

  “Then I should probably go.”

  “Probably.”

  As Raj rolled up the sleeping bag and used the bathroom, Lydia—feeling guilty for denying him access to the crate—opened her sock drawer and pulled out the birthday party photo that Joey had had with him when he hanged himself. Raj was in the photo too, and maybe he’d even know something about it. When he came out of the bathroom, his hair was wet and pressed to the side, and she could smell toothpaste on his breath, and she wondered whether he’d used his finger to clean his teeth or her toothbrush—or, god forbid, David’s. He took the photo from her and his eyes widened as he studied it: Lydia blowing out the candles, Raj staring at her, Carol a blur on the boundary of the print.

  “Recognize it?” she said.

  But Raj didn’t say anything, just continued to stare.

  “It’s us,” she said, hoping to break his trance. “Right around then.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” he said, barely audible. “Right around then.”

  “What is it? The way you’re staring at it.”

  “Just look at me fully crushing on you,” he said.

  Lydia took the occasion to fiddle in the kitchen—lifting the kettle, rinsing out the sponge—rather than respond.

  “Where’d you get this, anyway?” he said.

  “From Joey. The guy who hanged himself.”

  “Really?” Raj said, looking at it again. “What a creep. How’d he get it? Did you have it at the store or something?”

  “No such luck,” she said. “I’d never seen it before the night he died. Not that I remember, anyway.”

  The fact was, she still had no idea how Joey had obtained the photo, or why he would have even wanted it. Nothing about the scenario made sense, though she’d wondered about the possibility that a private detective or conspiracy theorist or investigative journalist had somehow enlisted Joey in the quest to uncover Little Lydia’s new identity. But that was as far as she’d gotten.

  “That’s your old kitchen in the photo,” Raj said, “so we can assume that your dad took it.”

  “He must have.”

  “So then Joey would have gotten it from him.”

  “From my dad? Okay, but that doesn’t explain when their paths would have crossed. Or how.”

  As Raj continued to study the photo, caught in some loop of memory, Lydia’s mind bloomed in new directions. What if her father had persuaded Joey to help him reconnect with his estranged daughter? Or what if he’d enlisted Joey to keep an eye on her?

  She felt a chill: Find her, Joey’s message had said. Find Little Lydia? Maybe she’d been too quick to omit herself—

  “You okay?” Raj said, gently tugging a loose thread on her sweatshirt.

  “Yeah,” she said, collecting herself. “Sorry.”

  “Was Joey from Rio Vista or something?”

  “Joey was from nowhere, as far as I can tell.”

  “And you’re still not talking to your dad? Because you could always just ask him.”

  “He’s been calling,” she said. “I just haven’t called him back.”

  Raj waved the photo. “Maybe this is why.”

  Lydia took it from his hands. Raj pulled up his socks and strapped on his sandals.

  “I should probably go,” he said.

  He walked to the door and opened it but stopped with his hand on the knob. “You know,” he said, facing the empty hallway, “the police came to see me after you guys left town. Back in fourth grade.”

  “Makes sense they would.”

  “Two detectives. The one in charge and one other guy. This was a month or two after you’d moved, maybe longer. We met in a booth at the doughnut shop after school. It was kind of a big deal. My dad even closed the shop early so there wouldn’t be any distractions.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Raj?”

  “I thought the cops were there to ask about Carol, so I was all ready with a bunch of Carol stories and Carol gossip, but they didn’t seem interested in her at all. All they cared about was your dad. They wanted to know everything about him. Like, everything.”

  Lydia planted her palm on the textured wall.

  “About my dad?”

  “The questions they were asking me, Lydia— It was like he wasn’t even the guy that I knew. Like they were asking about some other guy altogether.”

  “Sounds just like him,” she said, slowly closing the door, bidding Raj good-bye.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lydia found Plath at the base of the bookshop’s wide staircase, leaning against one of the building’s scratched wooden columns like a gumshoe on a lamppost. At first Lydia thought her friend was smoking but soon realized she was just gnawing on a Tootsie Pop. Otherwise she didn’t appear to be doing anything.

  “Very professional,” Lydia said, pointing at her lollipop.

  Plath smiled and brown drool dripped down her chin. A passing customer covered her mouth with her hand.

  “What are you doing, anyway?” Lydia said.

  “Lollipop. Ing.” Then she dragged her fingers along a stream of spines and sighed. “Remind me never to quit this place.”

  “Because you can eat lollipops at work?”

  “Lydia, you just named the one thing we have in common with strippers. But no, I just love it here. That’s all.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lydia was glad to have found Plath. Plath always made her happy, and today of all days she really needed the boost. After Raj had left her apartment, she decided with uncommon certainty that, for the first time in twenty years, she needed to go see Detective Moberg—to ask about the message on his postcard, if ever you want more, but also to ask why he’d been interrogating ten-year-old Raj about her father, and who else he’d cornered in search of information. This felt too huge to hide in her sock drawer.

  “Can I borrow your car?” she said. “I need to go to the mountains—”

  “Say no more,” Plath said, and, lollipop between her teeth, retrieved a jangle of keys from her back pocket and slid one off. Plath had recently shortened her silver hair to just above a crew cut and was wearing big silver hoops that jangled like an optical illusion. “Need a passenger?”

  “Not today,” she said.

  “You sure? How about a shoulder?”

  “I’m good.”

  “How about a drink?”

  �
�About twelve hours too early.”

  Plath was holding a stack of paper, covertly rolled into a tube. A book cart was parked nearby.

  “Is that a returns list?” Lydia said.

  “Don’t you have mountains to conquer? Go away.”

  “Let me see.”

  “Go. Away.”

  One of the duties shared by Lydia’s comrades was to periodically run a returns report through the inventory system and use it to unshelve books that hadn’t sold in months and return them to the publisher. The idea was to cut out whatever titles might be bogging down business, but Lydia would play no part in such a cruel practice. In fact, after many failed attempts at rehabilitation, she was no longer allowed to participate in the returns process at all because each time she’d done so she’d been caught intentionally losing pages from her lists or misshelving favored books in order to spare them from the gallows. She just couldn’t avoid taking it personally: sending a choice title back to the publisher was like sending a perfectly good pooch to the pound, knowing it would be euthanized.

  “This is a business,” Plath said, pointing at Lydia with her soggy white stick, “not a library. Sometimes we have to get our hands dirty.”

  The floor held bits of rock salt and smudged boot prints, but Lydia still knelt next to the cart and bent her head into her spine-reading pose. Her hair crawled into her mouth as she slid out a collection of Grace Paley’s stories.