The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  “That is fucked up, but it’s not your responsibility.”

  “I might be the only person who knows about it,” I said. I thought about mentioning the fork mark on Ian’s head, but I knew Rocky would just roll his eyes.

  He talked, as he often did, with his mouth full: “You’re not even his teacher.”

  “Sorry. I’ll shut up.” But I wouldn’t stop thinking about it. “I can see your fettuccini when you talk.”

  Rocky wiped his mouth and smiled. “I Can See Your Fettuccini. By Dr. Seuss.” For some reason this was very funny to us, the way he’d twist things I said into the titles of picture books. Too Much Tequila, by Margaret Wise Brown. The Very Obvious Nose Job, by Eric Carle. He announced them in the voice of a father introducing his daughter to a childhood classic.

  “So what are we supposed to talk about?” I said. Usually we discussed the movie, but It’s a Wonderful Life alternately annoyed me and made me cry, and we’d both seen it a hundred times.

  (George Bailey, in despair: “Tell me where my wife is!”

  Clarence the angel, paroxysms of horror and grief: “You’re not going to like it, George. She’s just about to close up the library!”

  And there she runs in thick glasses, clutching books to her useless breasts. This nightmare Mary Bailey has ruined her eyesight from long hours reading alone in the dark.

  How strange, that this one profession should be so associated with loneliness, virginity, female desperation. The librarian with her turtleneck sweater. She’s never left her hometown. She sits at the circulation desk and dreams of love.)

  “Actually, I have a favor to ask.”

  “What?” I took a big bite of pizza so I’d have time to stall if necessary.

  “My cousin’s wedding, in Kansas City. It’s March twenty-fifth, I think. A Saturday.”

  I had to swallow now, to make sure I was answering the right question. “You need a ride, or a date?”

  “I wouldn’t mind the ride, actually, but I was thinking of the date.”

  I took another bite of pizza. Three things I wouldn’t find fun: a wedding where I didn’t know anyone; driving all the way to Kansas City; worrying what Rocky would think this meant.

  “You can say no. I don’t need a date. It would just be fun.”

  “I’m not good at those things. You saw me at the benefit, talking to the piano player and the bartender instead of the donors.” I don’t know why I felt compelled to imply that I hadn’t seen any more of Glenn—we’d had two dates since the concert.

  “These people aren’t intimidating. My cousin’s the host at a pancake house, very down to earth. But don’t sweat it. Whatever.”

  “I’ll check,” I said. “But actually, March twenty-fifth—I think I’m in Chicago that weekend. I’ll check, though.” I could always make that true, if I needed to. Right then a baby at the next table drowned us out with his screaming. Beautiful, merciful screaming.

  I said before that I’d never met anyone like Ian. It was only a half-truth, one of my specialties. So here it comes, the big, repressed memory. And I’m not even paying to lie on your couch.

  Senior year of high school, my friend Darren invited me up to the projection room for a smoke. He wasn’t really my friend, not yet, too cool for me with his baggy green corduroys and his blond hair dyed pink with Kool-Aid, but we had APs and honors classes together, which meant we could act like friends without going through the whole preliminary stage. I’d never been up to the booth before—of all the kinds of geek I was, audiovisual geek was not among them—but it was exactly what I thought: lots of switches and lights, an old paint can half-full of cigarette butts. I knew Darren was gay, or I would have thought it was a low-budget date. He lit our cigarettes and we stared out the little window, down at the seats in the auditorium, like something was about to happen out there.

  He asked how I was doing—I’d been dumped a couple of weeks earlier, three days before Homecoming—and I pretended to be recovering. I said, “I’d pay good money to be gay.”

  Darren looked shocked, confused, horribly wounded. I said, “I’m sorry, I mean I know it’s really hard . . .”

  “You know I’m gay?” Of course I did. The entire school knew. People talked about how brave he was to be out of the closet. Gossip about his love life would win you a rapt audience in the cafeteria. “Because I’ve only told, like, two people. Ever.”

  So I lied. I said, “I have exceptional gaydar. It’s a talent. Seriously, if college doesn’t work out, it could be my career.”

  “Oh.” He tapped his ashes onto some kind of control panel.

  “I mean, I guess maybe it’s obvious. Like my dad has always been worried about it, from the time I was, like, three. He took away all my coloring books.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I was a little too into them. And then he wouldn’t let me play with girls, but then my mom was like, it’s worse for him to always play with boys, so then I wasn’t allowed to play with anyone but my cousins. They’re Catholic. My parents. Well, so are my cousins, but you know what I mean.”

  We talked through enough cigarettes to make my throat sore, and I suppose he was impressed that I hadn’t flipped out on him, that I was talking with him about this like it didn’t shock me. I’d guess 80 percent of the kids at school would have had the same reaction, would have been thrilled just to get a private audience with Darren Alquist, but Darren didn’t seem to know that, and I couldn’t tell him without letting on how far out of the closet he inadvertently was. Besides, if I pretended I was one of the only ones who could understand him, it might lead to his friendship, and he was far more interesting, more popular, than my other friends. I had some vague vision of our sitting together in the cafeteria and checking out boys.

  Deep into the conversation he said, “It’s like from the time I was born, they’ve been taking away pieces of me and plugging in these fake parts. Like my dad took away my coloring books and gave me Legos, and then all the guys in middle school made fun of the way I walked until I got this fake walk I have to think about every second. And then this school, God, it’s like they took away my heart and gave me a chunk of lead.”

  I said, “It’s like the Tin Woodman.” He raised one eyebrow—effortlessly, as if he raised one eyebrow all the time. “In the book, not the movie. How he started off real, then he chopped his arm off and got a tin arm, and finally everything was tin.”

  He nodded and laughed and I knew it would happen, our friendship. And it did—we smoked and watched track practice from the roof of the arts building, we partnered up for a film project for English, he drew a picture of a giraffe inside my locker. In my yearbook, he signed in green Sharpie: “Dearest Lucy, if ever I’m bound and tortured as a hostage of the Bolivian National Guard, the memory of our time together will get me through the pain.”

  I wrote him a few times from college but didn’t hear back. Someone told me he’d dropped out of Pomona.

  And here’s what’s sick: you already know what happened next, because it’s a cliché. And it’s a cliché for a reason, because these stories always end this way, with the kid’s poor mom trying to clean the shit out of his pants before the paramedics arrive, and that’s the part that gets repeated between your former classmates on breaks home from college—not the part about how he got the gun or even why he did it or how many times he’d tried it before, but the part about the shit in his pants and how his mother was scrubbing at him with a towel like it would make a difference, like she didn’t want her family embarrassed in front of the coroner.

  Back at college after the funeral, I made a big deal about it to my friends, about how I could have stopped it if I’d said the right thing, how I’d had so many opportunities but never taken them. But I was caught up in the cliché of it, the scripts you choose from when someone dies, and I didn’t really mean it at all. I might as well have said, “He was so young, he had his whole life ahead of him!” or “It should have been me!” or “How could a kind G
od let such a terrible thing happen?” I wouldn’t have felt any of them, just somehow enjoyed the recitation.

  Only about five years later did it hit me, heavy and hard as Darren’s chunk-of-lead heart: it had been my fault, as much as anybody’s, and there were things I could have said, and when Brian Willis made a joke in Calculus about how Darren was late because somebody dropped their soap in the locker room shower, I could have stood up and punched him in his swollen, freckled face.

  So there it is, my deep-seated motivation, what I was projecting onto Ian, my heart-tugging excuse. I’d have a hard time convincing a jury that this alone could justify what I did. But I do think it made me an angrier person. You have to accept that, at least: beneath everything, despite a privileged life and a sense of humor, I was an angry person. I enjoyed blaming people. When I heard about idiots like Pastor Bob, I seethed with rage. I actually seethed. For weeks afterward, driving in my car, I’d rant at the Pastor Bobs of the world in a monologue that must have looked, in the rear-view mirrors of those driving ahead of me, like an impassioned tirade at a former lover.

  Every morning on my way to work, my rant was interrupted by the sight of Janet Drake running down Waxwing Avenue, even when the sidewalks were coated with ice. I’d probably seen her every day for two years but never realized it was always the same person, the same pink jogging suit, the same pointy elbows, until I’d talked to her. She was always running north, back toward home from wherever she’d been. They lived somewhere within walking distance of the library, but I’d pass her about ten minutes before I got to work. How many miles was that? How many miles had she already run before I saw her? And she was very often in the rec center fitness room too—there when I arrived after work at 6:15 and still there at 7:00 when I darted out past her elliptical machine, hoping she wouldn’t recognize me. How then did she have all this time to be overbearing?

  “Miss Hull?”

  “Yes, Ian.”

  He leaned forward on my desk so he was supporting himself with his chest. Sonya was upstairs, where she’d been staying more and more frequently on their library visits. I wondered if she really trusted Ian, or if she just didn’t care about Janet Drake’s instructions. She was under the continued impression that he was down here playing Noah’s Mission. Now that it was always cold out, he’d developed a system of stuffing one book in the front of his pants and one in the back, his parka covering them both. “Will you be open on Christmas?”

  “On Christmas? No. We’re closed from the twenty-fourth to the twenty-sixth. So this is the last day to check stuff out.”

  He dropped down to the floor so I couldn’t see him. “You mean you’re closed on both those days too? So you’re closed for three days?”

  “Yep.”

  He stood up again, his face pink and crumpled like a two-year-old’s. Dramatically, deliberately, he buried his head in his arms and turned away from me.

  “Ian, it’s only three days.”

  His breathing was fast and loud, his shoulders pumping up and down.

  “Ian?”

  “THAT’S NOT FAIR!” he shouted, and the mother reading with her toddler on the floor turned to see what had happened.

  “Ian.” I came out from behind the desk and put my hands on his shoulders. He jerked his body away from me. I had seen him be melodramatic with Sonya, and Sophie Bennett told me recently that his teachers were finding him incredibly annoying this year, but he’d never done it to me before. I bent down to peek through his arms and see his face. He wasn’t actually crying, just heaving and sighing loudly.

  “You know, Ian,” I said, “you can check out a lot of stuff right before we close and bring it back after.”

  “That’s not true. Because then we’re out of town. For almost a whole week, until New Year’s, and my mom will check my suitcase. So I’d have to get stupid books, like Hardy Boys, and then I could only get ten books anyway, because I’m only allowed to check out how old I am.” A lot of families had that rule: a five-year-old could borrow five books, and so on. He leaned back against the big potted tree by the wall and almost sent it crashing down.

  “I think ten books should be plenty, don’t you? You don’t want your suitcase to get much heavier than that.”

  “And my mom would never let me bring extra books because she never lets me do anything.”

  “Sounds tough,” I said. I went back behind my desk. He looked between his arms to see if I was still watching him, which I was. He picked at the leaves of the plant for a minute, breathing loudly, then stomped over to the mythology shelf.

  He ended up checking out the first ten Bobbsey Twins books. “Are these as stupid as they look?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “Awesome.”

  At the end of the day, Glenn appeared at my desk with the library copy of 1,000 Great Date Nights. “Pick one,” he said.

  I hadn’t invited him to come see me at work, and the presumption bothered me. We’d seen each other quite a few times since the night of the concert, and he’d been e-mailing me constantly, but lately I’d been keeping my replies short. There was something a little too slick about him, the way he’d ask me questions straight out of GQ’s date guide, like “What’s your favorite childhood memory?” And the way he would just show up like this, flashing his piano-key teeth.

  I was glad there was no one around. I’d had a few desperate and fruitless requests that afternoon for The Polar Express and The Night Before Christmas, but right now the basement was empty.

  “Let’s be spontaneous,” he said. He was saying this a lot lately, like it was some great virtue. For a jazz musician, I suppose it is—four bars to fill, and a horn in your hands—but it doesn’t do a librarian a hell of a lot of good.

  I started flipping through the book. “Don’t take me to feed the ducks.”

  “Hey,” he said. He leaned over the desk. “I’ll take ya to the moon, baby.” Cheesy Sinatra voice and wiggling eyebrows.

  I could hear Loraine’s heels clunking unevenly on the stairs. “Okay,” I whispered. “Pretend to browse, fast.” I stood up and yanked the white bed sheet off my desk chair and tossed it under the desk. I’d been using it all week, hoping it would protect my skin from the chair fabric, but if anything, my rash had gotten worse. I was considering switching to one of the beanbag chairs, propping it up on a wide stack of books like a giant orange beanbag throne.

  Loraine leaned over the desk to hand me a sealed envelope, which I knew from experience probably contained a twenty-dollar gift card to one of the chain restaurants by the highway. “Merry Christmas!” she said. “And Hanukkah too, of course. Make sure you get some sleep. You could really use it.” Glenn stood there pretending to be fascinated by the Junie B. Jones books. When she left I closed up, and Glenn and I walked upstairs together. We passed Rocky at the main desk, and I thought of introducing Glenn as an old friend, but of course Rocky had seen him at the benefit. So instead I just said, “Merry Christmas! I’ll call you for a movie!” and Rocky gave a look like he was trying not to laugh. No: more like he was trying hard to look like he was trying not to laugh, but couldn’t get it quite right.

  Glenn and I went to Trattoria del Norte and drank a lot of wine, and I struggled to make conversation. We didn’t have much in common, I was discovering. And the more I thought about it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to date someone whose magnum opus was inadvertently based on a tile cleaner jingle. Nor did I want to be around when someone pointed this out to him. He didn’t seem even slightly aware of my ambivalence, though, and he just kept grinning at me from across the table, trying to stare into my eyes. I’d watched The Music Man enough times as a child to be wary of smiling musicians. The way they waltz into your library singing, swinging that con man briefcase and telling you to be spontaneous. They tell you this whole damn town could be saved with a little luck and a good marching band.

  To fill the silence I almost started telling Glenn about Ian’s temper tantrum, but thought better of it. If I was
already bothering Rocky, who knew the kid and worked with me, how much would I annoy someone who really didn’t care? And amid the five hundred stupid decisions I made that winter—decisions that pointed straight to jail or worse—this drunken, half-arbitrary choice was probably the one that saved my life.

  10

  Stupid

  I tried to be objective in the way I watched Ian that winter, after read the origami e-mail. I don’t think I was imagining the way his eyes had gone dull or how he tended to shifted his weight heavily back and forth between his feet now, as if he were angrily waiting for a bathroom. He had always been moody, but before there had been good moods, and slightly manic moods, and now there weren’t. I gave him The Search for Delicious in early January, and he returned it the next day.

  “It was too boring,” he said. “I stopped.” I was shocked. The Search for Delicious, which my best readers will finish in a day, skipping dinner if necessary.

  “Well, what do you want now?”

  “Something else stupid.”

  “You want something stupid?”

  “Well, it’s all stupid, so I guess I don’t care. I’ll read a baby book.” He squeezed himself into one of the plastic chairs built for three-year-old rear ends and picked Blueberries for Sal without looking. He flipped the pages so fast I worried he’d rip them. “This book is the smartest book ever. This book is a genius. This book is too hard for me. Yay.” He shoved it back horizontally on top of the other picture books.

  Another day, he came bolting down the stairs, his coat still zipped. “Don’t tell her I’m down here!” he whispered, and ran past my desk and into the aisles. In the brief second I saw his face, it didn’t look scared, but it didn’t look exactly like a child playing a game, either. It looked like he was trying to be bad.

  A minute later, Mrs. Drake came down the stairs as fast as she could in her stacked heels and jeans and gray cashmere. “I’m sorry, Sarah-Ann, have you seen my son, Ian?” My God, she was thin. Her elbows were the widest part of her arms.