The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  But no, it did happen. The only thing up for debate is whether it happened to me, or whether I made it happen.

  13

  Out of the Hobbit-Hole

  “MEE, MAY, MAH, MO, MOO!” sang Tim’s wall at six o’clock on Monday morning.

  “TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE!

  “To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock, in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock, awaiting the sensation of a short sharp shock, from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!

  “eeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeee!”

  “Oh my God,” I said to Tim’s wall through my pillow at six o’clock on Monday morning. “Oh my God, shut up.”

  “Eaaaaiiiiouwah, eyoe, ae,” said the wall, which was Tim practicing his lines minus all the consonants.

  Outside, a dark midwestern storm was barreling in, the first of the year, and the growing thunder sounded something like Dumpsters scraping on gravel or God chewing rocks. The wind was almost as loud as the thunder, and I wasn’t always confident that my windows wouldn’t crash out of their rotted frames. I thought of turning on music to go back to sleep, but couldn’t bear adding to the noise level.

  I let myself put on old jeans and hiking boots and spent three minutes scratching my back against the corner of my dresser like a psychotic cat. It was only a matter of time before I really broke the skin, before someone approached me on the street and asked why the back of my shirt was soaked in blood. I headed to work early to get the summer reading flyers finished, and to see what damage Sarah-Ann had done yesterday, closing up by herself. It was pouring rain by the time I got there at seven, and branches were down all over the neighborhood. I shook myself off in the lobby and wiped my feet and locked the door again behind me. I’d have two hours alone.

  Maybe because of the quiet, I was more tuned in to details that morning—always a problem for me, since in stories and movies, a focus on little details tends to indicate imminent disaster. Someone in a movie unlocks his door, checks his mail, turns on his light, and you know he’s got about thirty seconds to live. So I was irrationally filled with dread that morning, as I often was when I entered the library early and alone and the only sounds I could hear were my fingers on paper or my purse sliding into the desk drawer.

  I sat in the darkness for a moment, then got up to turn on the downstairs lights, all six light switches, one after the other, different walls and display cases dramatically announcing themselves. I was still soaking wet and cold from the rain. I probably made some noise, as I tend to do in silence—humming or whistling or popping my lips. I went behind my desk and sank again into the soft, spinning chair, when a sound like crumpling paper came from the end of one of the fiction aisles. My stomach turned liquid and I pulled my feet up on the chair. I’d only ever had one mouse in my apartment, but it bothered me so much, the idea of some little thing invading like that, that I’d stayed late at work every night for a week until I was sure it was poisoned and gone. Now I banged my fist hard on the desk to scare this one away. I lowered my foot and kicked the drawers and listened for more scampering.

  “Miss Hull?” said Ian’s voice. I was so used to him saying my name just like that, that I looked for him right in front of the desk and not where the sounds had come from. And then I was reminding myself not to swear as I stumbled down the aisle.

  Ian was squatting on the floor by the big plant stand with books and T-shirts and blankets spread around him.

  He was giggling. He looked terrified. He took his glasses off and wiped his eyes.

  “Don’t tell. Please,” he said. “I mean my parents, or the police. I’m veryveryveryvery sorry.”

  I sat beside him on the carpet, attempting a placid smile and not processing much of anything. “OK.” I waited. He was biting the knee of his jeans and rocking back and forth, but he wasn’t crying, not really.

  “Look!” he said suddenly, and way too loudly, and reached behind himself. “I made a real knapsack!” He held out a long, thick twig with what looked like a balled-up flannel shirt tied to the end. He handed it to me. It was heavy.

  “What’s in here?” I felt the lumps in the shirt, then carefully laid the stick on the ground. Ian untied it.

  He was suddenly breathing normally and smiling, sitting cross-legged and leaning back against the shelf. “Number one: dental floss.” He picked it out of the pile. “Shampoo. PowerBars. Don’t you think that’s good, that I brought PowerBars? They have pretty much every vitamin.”

  He held out a small plastic cup. “For water. And toothbrushing. Here’s my medicine.” He held up an asthma inhaler and a bottle of pills. “Toothbrush, toothpaste, pool pass, socks.”

  Calm, normal voice: “Are you going swimming?”

  “No.” He almost laughed. “It’s my ID. In case I need one for something.”

  “Well, that’s very thorough, Ian.”

  The morning sun reflecting off his glasses gave him yellow moon-eyes.

  “Do you know why I didn’t bring anything to do?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Because I was coming here. There are books, and I can write things, and I’ve been doing origami. I’m sorry I robbed the craft cupboard. Look!” He reached into the plant behind him and pulled out a paper crane. All the pots were filled with folded pieces of notebook and construction paper. In the biggest one he’d set up a village with houses and people and trees. Other pots had families and animals, small and large, and many of my plants had bright paper flowers stuck in their leaves. “Here’s my plane-wreck one.” In one pot was a crumpled paper airplane with its nose in the dirt, surrounded by red and orange triangles. “Those are the flames.” He perched the crane in the leaves of a spider plant.

  “Wow,” I said. “So you must’ve been here a long time.”

  He looked at his watch. “Fourteen hours.”

  No swearing. “You slept here overnight?”

  “Here’s what I did. My parents were really busy with hosting this Bible study thing at our house, and so I just walked here. And that other lady didn’t even really look around when she left, even though I was ready to hide behind all the different shelves, wherever she walked. And then I got a cot from the closet in that other room, and blankets, and brought it all here. But I put it back when I woke up. I watered your plants.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So you wouldn’t have to do it later and get the origami wet.”

  He tied the edges of his knapsack back up, using the sleeves to make knots around the stick. I got up off the floor and brought over the rolling stool to sit on.

  “Okay,” I said. “Your mom and dad have been scared for a really long time now. We’re going to call them.”

  Ian pulled a book off the shelf and held it open, right in front of his face. He mumbled into it. “I don’t think that’s so good an idea.”

  I tried to pull the book down, but he was strong. “Do you want to call them, or should I?” He didn’t say anything. “So I should do it?” I was expecting a tantrum like the one before Christmas, expecting him to throw the book down and scream, but nothing happened. I stood and walked to my desk. “What’s your phone number?” His head appeared at the near end of the aisle, but still down by the floor. He must have crawled there. He told me the number, loudly and slowly, and I dialed.

  “You have reached the Human Resources Department of Missouri Electric,” said the phone. “Our operating hours are nine to five thirty, Monday through Friday.”

  “Ian,” I said, hanging up, “do you live at the power company?” His face was gone from the aisle. “Ian, what’s your real number?”

  “I forget,” he said from right behind me. I jumped and hit my knee on the desk.

  I pulled the phone book out from underneath the phone and flipped to the D section. “Okay. Then let’s just look you up.”

  “We’re unlisted,” he said, smiling. It was true. No Drakes in Hannibal. I flopped the phone book closed and watched the u
tter relief settle on his face. He was playing with the bottom button on his shirt, practically ripping it off, but he was taking deep, slow breaths, doing a good job of holding himself together. He must have been planning this for weeks. Did he think he was going to live in the library? Fourteen hours was longer than the normal punish-your-parents runaway scenario.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m happy you came to visit me, Ian, but the library opens pretty soon, and you can’t live in my plants.” He giggled, but it turned into a choke. “We can either call the police, or I can drive you home.”

  He turned and kicked my file cabinet, once, hard, and walked toward his aisle crying silently, his face a violent red. He came back with his coat on, carrying his knapsack and a large blue backpack I hadn’t seen before. It looked stuffed, probably with clothes. He nodded at me and then started up the stairs. I left the lights on but locked everything up, and met him in the parking lot. I was surprised that he was waiting for me, that he hadn’t run off. Maybe, on some level, I really had wanted him to make a run for it. But he was still here, standing in the rain by my little pale-blue car. He wanted to go home.

  I got in my driver’s seat and unlocked the passenger door from inside before I realized he was waiting for the back door. It hit me as it hadn’t yet that he was ten, that he rode in the backseat, that he probably still took baths, that he might have a night-light. He got in and had to dig around between the seats for the seat belt, and I tried to remember if anyone had ever sat back there before. I started the car, and NPR blasted from the radio, something about a shuttle launch. I turned it off and we started driving down Waxwing Avenue. I didn’t ask him for his address, because I didn’t know the residential parts of town well enough. But he gave me directions, announcing each one straight into my ear over the back of my seat.

  “Turn left at the next stop sign!” he shouted. “Keep going for one mile!” “Turn left and then immediately right!”

  “Ian,” I said after a while, “I think you’re sending me in a big circle.” Really I wasn’t sure, but it was taking a long time and I knew he usually walked to the library.

  “No, no!” he shouted. “I’m not, and in fact if you look right up here it’s going to be exactly the last house on your left!”

  I watched along the left side until I saw a tall yellow house with perfectly conical little cedar trees along the fence. We stopped by the curb. The newspaper was still at the end of the driveway in its orange plastic, and a short old man was running from his car to the house with a magazine held between his head and the rain.

  “Ian, that’s not your dad.”

  He looked out the window. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “Is this your house, though?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Well, they painted our house very recently, and it sort of looks different, so it’s not familiar to me.”

  I closed my eyes. “Okay, we’re going to the police station.”

  There was complete silence in the backseat. I looked in the rearview mirror and he wasn’t there. I turned off the car and opened my door to jump out and catch him, wherever he was running, but then I saw him crumpled up on the floor of the backseat, his arms up on his head like in a bomb drill. His whole body heaved with crying or vomiting, I couldn’t see. He’d left his glasses and coat up on the seat.

  I opened the back door and squatted down on the curb and put my hand on his back. His shirt was hot and wet, and it stuck to him. He said something I couldn’t understand.

  “What?”

  He lifted his head enough to wipe his nose on his sleeve. “Please, you’re supposed to just keep driving for a while.”

  There was a thickening fog around my head like alcohol or a dream, and I knew I would do it, if only because I didn’t want to take him to the police against his will and lose his trust forever, and I didn’t want to take him home, and I didn’t want to drop him in the middle of the road. It was only a few hours later that I realized I could have taken him back to the library and waited for Rocky. It was several days later that I remembered what was even more obvious: his address and phone number would have been in the computer file, right there below his name and above his twelve-dollar fine. But I couldn’t think over the sound of his sobbing. Or maybe I couldn’t think of anything but his sobbing. Or maybe on some level, this was what I’d wanted all along: to get him out of Hannibal, if only for a few minutes. I just hadn’t wished it so literally.

  “Drive where?” I asked.

  “Somewhere,” he said. “My grandmother’s house.”

  I knew he didn’t have a grandmother.

  “Okay,” I said.

  14

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  And so they set off, our comrades the librarian and the bright-cheeked lad, as the sudden winds bent the grass in the fields and raged against the car, seeming almost to lift it from beneath and carry it down the street. When the clouds finally parted and the winds died down, the still-rising sun slid beams of red light through the windows, shining on their hair so it looked for all the world as if they were on fire. There were several roads nearby, but it did not take them long to find the one painted with yellow lines and dotted with weathered billboards. Within a short time they were driving briskly toward the west, the boy navigating with directions that came from no place but the lovely magic of his imagination. The sun shone brightly and the birds sang sweetly and the Library Lady hummed as she drove on the black and sparkling road, and although (truth be told) her face betrayed some anxiety about the journey ahead, she did not feel nearly so bad as you might think.

  Really, we were a little lost. I let him go on with the game of navigating a bit too long, until we were on some kind of rural route, and the sky was still so overcast that I couldn’t tell what direction we were heading in. I didn’t have one of those dashboard compasses, and I’ve never had much of an internal compass, either. Nor, I reflected, did I seem to have much of a moral compass. My cell phone was two feet away, in my purse. I could call the police now, and the car was going fast enough that Ian wouldn’t jump out. Then again, how would I explain that a child who had been missing overnight was now in my car, miles from home, although actually, officer, I didn’t know exactly where in the hell we were?

  About twenty minutes in, Ian stopped trying to navigate and instead launched an incessant babble about robots that could do your homework and how long it would take to eat an entire tree, if you blended it up into milkshakes. If he was trying to make me lose track of time, he did a decent job. I felt hungry, and when I looked at the clock it was 10:22. I hadn’t even eaten breakfast—I had planned to run across the street and grab a bagel before the library opened.

  I turned onto what looked like a busier road, hoping to find a gas station.

  “I didn’t tell you to turn here!”

  I lied. “The other way would have been circling back. I thought you weren’t taking me in a circle.”

  “You’re getting us lost!” He seemed genuinely angry, so panicked that for a second I wondered if he’d actually been directing me to his grandmother. But no, he was worried I was heading back home.

  “We need gas,” I said. When he leaned over my seat, he saw the needle on empty. It had been there for the past two years, actually, so that I had to count the miles between fill-ups, but come to think of it we probably were running low. We stopped at a Texaco, and as I ran the pump I realized that if I pretended I had to go inside to pay, I could take my phone and call someone without Ian hearing. Rocky, maybe, to tell him what was going on. But he was hardly friendly lately, and he thought I was obsessed with Ian. I wasn’t sure he’d believe the details of the story. I didn’t know how to call the Drakes. I could call the police and make something up, tell them Ian had just now shown up at the door of my apartment, and it would take a while to calm him down, but I’d drive him to the station in an hour or two. And then I’d buy a map or ask directions, and speed the entire way
back.

  I opened my door to talk to him. “I’m going inside to get food. Do you want anything?”

  He patted his backpack. “I have peanut butter, and jelly, and saltines, which is enough for about one hundred sandwiches, even though they’re small. Plus my PowerBars.”

  “You want a Snickers?” Now I was even talking like a kidnapper.

  “I don’t think you should go inside there,” he said. His face was turning red again. Didn’t this normally work the other way around? Kidnapper stops at gas station, threatens victim not to leave the car, victim makes mad dash to highway.

  “Ian, I at least have to pay. The machine won’t read my card.”

  He undid his seat belt and hopped out onto the pavement. “Okay, then I’m coming with you, and I want a 3 Musketeers.”

  Inside the Quik Stop, I waited till he was absorbed in the candy rack, then told him I was using the bathroom. He thought for a second. “Give me your phone first.”

  “Do you want to make a call?” I put it in his palm.

  “No.”

  I bought chips and a soda for myself, and on our way out I got two hundred dollars from the ATM. I hated to be this far from home without a safe amount of cash, and I figured two hundred would cover us for roadside emergencies and dinner, if need be. I imagined we might stop somewhere, a nicer chain restaurant maybe, and talk things over before I dropped him at home or the police station.