The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  Is he in the library men’s room, whispering to the FBI on his cell phone?

  No! That’s Rocky the Friendly Librarian!

  Is he circling the hotel in a rusted blue car with Pennsylvania plates?

  No! That’s a strange man with slick hair and ominous sunglasses!

  Is he zigzagging across northern Vermont with a would-be revolutionary, sporadically bursting into impressions of Julie Andrews?

  Hooray! You found Ian!

  31

  North

  My phone wasn’t working here in the mountains or I would have called Rocky the next morning, to tell him I’d gotten the e-mail, to ask if there was any more news of Ian. Instead, we drove farther north on Route 89. Ian was giving the directions.

  “Your grandmother better not live in Canada,” I said. “That’s where we’re headed.” We were whispering in the aisles of a little country store where we’d stopped to get food for breakfast.

  “Why can’t we see Canada?”

  “We don’t have passports. Not going to happen.” Although mine was right there in the zip pocket of my purse. “And you can’t get in with your pool pass.”

  “I just meant I want to see Canada. Like, with my eyes. Can’t we do that?”

  “I think the border gets pretty crowded with traffic. I don’t know how close we can even get.” The last thing I wanted was to drive straight into a police checkpoint.

  Instead of Pop Tarts, Ian chose to buy a cheaper, one-serving box of cornflakes so he could afford Handi Wipes to clean off his sneakers. He knelt down there in the middle of the store, in front of the little wall of post office boxes, and scrubbed the white leather until the shoes, apart from the laces, looked brand new. “That’s much prettier,” he said, standing up and folding the Handi Wipe. The bearded man behind the counter, the postmaster, granola- and gasoline- and Penthouse-seller who was probably also the mayor, raised an eyebrow at me. “Something wrong with that kid,” said the look on his face.

  We kept heading north, listening to one of Anya Labaznikov’s mid-’90s mix tapes: Nirvana and Pearl Jam and The Cure. I spent five futile minutes trying to explain to Ian the concept of grunge. I could hear him wheezing beside me. We were down to about three hundred dollars, including escape money, and this part of the state wouldn’t be very fertile begging territory. Trucks were parked in front of farmhouses that should have been abandoned fifty years ago, places with walls so rotted and curved, they looked like Dalí paintings. I knew that unless we found a pile of cash lying around, we’d only last about one more day.

  “I completely miss the library,” Ian said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Mr. Walters said he’d show me his Purple Heart, but I never got to see it.”

  I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. “Rocky Walters, at the library? His what?”

  “His Purple Heart for getting injured in the war.”

  “Ian,” I said, and took my foot off the accelerator so I could turn and see his face for a second, “what are you talking about? What war? Mr. Walters from the library?”

  “Yeah, he was in like the first war in Iraq or something. I thought you were friends with him.”

  I looked ahead at the empty road, at the dead leaf scuttling across on its points like a cartoon lobster. “So,” I said slowly, “by injury, do you mean his wheelchair?” This must have been what Ian had meant, weeks earlier, by “red cross.” But I couldn’t get any of it to make sense.

  “Yeah. Before that he was completely normal. My mom knew him in school, and he used to mow my grandpa’s lawn when he was little, so he must have been normal.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said. And there, I did it. I swore at a ten-year-old child. Classy. Fabulous. Ian stopped talking and opened his Henry VIII book, burying his face in it and breathing fast. He thought he was in trouble. Or maybe he thought the hand of God was about to reach down and smite me, and he wanted to look like we’d never met.

  I had never asked Rocky about his condition, but that was only out of tact. I thought I was being laid-back and understanding about just taking it for granted, not considering it worth conversation. I tried to remember anything he’d ever told me about his childhood, about high school or Boy Scouts or his brother. He’d talked once about relay races at camp, when we were preparing for Family Fun Day, but I’d pictured twenty little boys in identical wheelchairs, baseball cards stuck in the wheels for the flapping noise. It was almost as if he’d deliberately avoided any stories of sports or learning to swim or bunk beds or broken legs or driving a car that wasn’t a van. Or the entire United States military. I wondered if he did it to punish me for never asking, or if it was too painful to talk about a time when he could move through town with his head above people’s waistlines, a time when he didn’t live with his mother.

  As we drove along I asked Ian stupidly, every five minutes, if he was sure, and he’d tell me he was, that he’d seen Rocky’s picture in his mother’s high school yearbook, and he was on the baseball team. I felt sick. Maybe from hunger, but more likely from the realization that Rocky and I weren’t nearly as close as I had thought. My nightmares had thus far been tempered by the distinct possibility that although Rocky might play detective and solve the whole case of the stolen boy, he would still want to protect me. This whole time I’d thought Rocky was in love with me, and he was barely my friend. I couldn’t even see straight. He’d gone to high school with Janet Drake. What if he knew her well? What if he’d been her boyfriend? Why hadn’t he ever mentioned this?

  There was another matter, beyond the shock of it all, beyond my new fears about Rocky’s loyalty: if I didn’t really know anything about Rocky, if I didn’t really know anything about my own father—if my perceptions, in short, were this inaccurate—what if everything I thought about Ian and his family was wrong? All I’d really seen with my own eyes was the time Janet Drake dragged him upstairs while he shrieked that he’d already repented. But who knew what he’d done wrong that day? He could have strangled the cat. And since Ian said the fork marks on his head were self-inflicted, what exactly did I think I was rescuing him from? He was a ten-year-old boy who didn’t think his parents were always fair to him. Big trauma.

  But Pastor Bob was very real, and I saw for myself the way Ian had fallen apart that winter. I hadn’t been making that up. I didn’t think I’d been making it up.

  One of the only thoughts I could keep in my head was how glad I was to be heading away from Brattleboro, away from where Pastor Bob would be waking up, congratulating himself on last night’s speech, heading off in the BobMobile to the next New England town that needed rescuing from tolerance. Wherever he was going, it couldn’t be this far north, unless he intended to preach to the cows. That was yet another thing: if I’d misjudged everything so far, what if I really had been wrong about Ian’s reasons for coming to Vermont? What if Bob, in his repressed and slightly psychotic state, had started manipulating young boys into coming to meet him on the road, however they could get there? What if he threatened them until they ran away and forced naïve young librarians to give them rides? But that made no sense. Of course, logic didn’t seem to be a prerequisite anymore for events in my world.

  Ian hadn’t spoken much since I’d sworn at him. Partly to make it up to him, and partly to get even farther away from Pastor Bob, I said, “I’ll make a deal with you. We will go look at Canada. We’ll see if we can see all the geese and bacon and hockey. And the socialized medicine.” He looked at me blankly, as well he should have. I really was being obnoxious. I was dehydrated and hungry and operating solely on adrenaline, but that was no excuse to talk over his head. I took the only deep breath I’d taken in several days. I said, “But first we need to get you some medicine. What pharmacy do you normally go to?”

  “Walgreens. The one in Hannibal.”

  “Perfect.” I had checked online the night before, in a rare moment of foresight, and found that the state of Vermont had a grand total
of three Walgreens. One very far south in Rutland, one in Brattleboro, where we might run into Pastor Bob himself, and one in the middle of pretty much nowhere, about forty miles east.

  I knew I was making the decision right then that we wouldn’t stay in Vermont more than one or two more days, even if we had the money to. I doubted the Walgreens computer would be rigged up to the Hannibal Police Department, but even so, a charge on the Drakes’ insurance plan would eventually tip someone off. But if we were leaving Vermont anyway, this would just throw them off the trail.

  Within an hour we were standing at the pharmacist’s counter, and I was giving them Ian’s real name. They had us sit and wait, and while Ian flipped through a copy of Bon Appétit rating each picture (“Yummy!” “Icky!” “Yummy!”) I silently panicked that it was taking so long only because they were holding us here until the police came. How long could it take fill an inhaler prescription, anyway? It wasn’t like they had to wait for the machine to count the pills.

  But they called us up after twenty minutes, and the co-pay was only thirty dollars, plus seventy-nine cents for the chocolate bar that would probably be my lunch. The woman asked if I had any questions for the pharmacist. No, I did not. Lots of questions for the ethicist, but none for the pharmacist.

  As we walked out the door, Ian squirted the inhaler into the air three times, then put it to his mouth and puffed up his cheeks like a blowfish. Now that the prescription was filled, and so easily, too, I knew we should have done this days ago, and I was furious with myself for waiting. I reflected that my revolutionary temperament might be better served by an equal helping of Russian courage, or at least foolhardiness, than by my maternally genetic Jewish-American carefulness. Imagine Woody Allen leading the Charge of the Light Brigade. That was me.

  My key did not fit in the door of my car. I tried again, and Ian yanked on the passenger side door handle. I tried it again, and, idiotically, again. Then Ian said, “Why is there fifty coffee cups in the backseat?” We ran like hell to my actual car, three spaces down, Ian dove into the backseat, and I sped back onto the main road and north out of town. Ian probably thought we were racing away out of embarrassment, worried the car’s owner had seen us from inside the pharmacy. I was worried he’d seen us too, but for much darker reasons. I was somewhat relieved at his ineptitude, that he’d get out of the car and shop for toiletries when he was supposed to be on our trail—unless he’d followed us in there to apprehend us, or take our picture, or grab Ian away. But no, I willfully pictured Mr. Shades filling his little green basket with cotton balls and hair gel, unaware that we’d left.

  It was good, I reasoned, to have a time line for getting out of Vermont now. On the other hand, on some level it was probably bad that there was no longer any compelling medical urgency to getting Ian home, no unassailable excuse if I needed to get rid of him in a hurry. At some point, I might try asking, casually, if he was ready to head back to Hannibal. But it needed to be the right moment. If I had to ask the question more than once, he’d get stubborn and never say yes. Also, we had to be done. Done with what, I wasn’t sure. Done with fixing him, maybe. Saving him.

  I broke off half the chocolate bar and handed it to him. I bit off a tiny corner, just like Charlie Bucket, and let it dissolve on my tongue. It was awfully good, that confection that had cursed my family. (“In Soviet Russia, chocolate eats you!”)

  Ian ate his half in two bites. “I feel way better now,” he said. “But Miss Hull?”

  “Yes?”

  “One thing that’s bothering my breathing is that I don’t know why, but you kind of smell like smoke.”

  32

  Humbug

  At about eleven o’clock, just as the town names were all turning French, Ian reached forward from the backseat and put a fifty-dollar bill on my shoulder. “I think you dropped this,” he said.

  “Where was it?”

  “Sticking out of this pocket back here.” He meant the one on the back of my seat.

  I took the bill and stared at Ulysses S. Grant as if he’d tell me exactly where he’d come from. “It must have been part of the money from Church Street,” I said.

  “No. The one guy gave me a whole hundred dollar bill, but everybody else just gave me regular stuff.”

  I wondered for a moment if Ian had stolen it from the country store cash register, or if he’d had it all along in his backpack, but it was the crispest, cleanest bill I’d ever seen, the corners still sharp. If a ten-year-old had held it even for five minutes, it wouldn’t have looked like that. Likewise, it didn’t seem right that it would have sat undiscovered in my car for the past two years, a pristine relic of the fast-food-eating fan of Australian soccer. It could only have been Glenn’s. I’d been locking my car in even the smallest Vermont parking lots. I set the bill on the dashboard like a lucky charm.

  The road that led to Canada was just a small country highway with farms right along it, but it was fairly busy, and the traffic was slow. I could tell Ian was getting antsy back there, but he didn’t want to admit that he was bored, that a visual of the Canadian border might not be worth another twenty minutes in the car. He pointed straight east, away from the main road, to a tall white church in the distance. “A big green church!” he shouted. He was wearing the green glasses again. “Let’s go over there!”

  “Sure,” I said, and found a road that cut over that way. It might well have been the last turnoff before the border, and I was relieved that we wouldn’t be going any closer, pulling off the road suspiciously or doing an illegal U-turn in front of the heavily armed and presumably well-informed border security.

  “And besides,” he said, “it’s Sunday. We might get to hear the end of church.”

  “It’s Monday. We’ve been gone a whole week.”

  He gasped. “You let me miss church!” Not the way most children would have said it, in joyful astonishment, but in horror. As if I’d fed him poison.

  “Okay, so we’re going today.”

  I took a few false turns before we found it. Up close, it wasn’t nearly as tall or as white as I’d thought. It was dirty, almost gray, and still decorated for Christmas, three months past, with crumbly brown wreaths and garlands tied with bows that remained a violent red against the faded needles. There was a little graveyard off to the side, the kind with wafer-thin stones that nobody bothers tending anymore. “Parish of St. Bernice,” the sign in front said. “All are welcome!” How brilliant of me, to drive this particular child halfway across the country just to introduce him to the Catholic Church. I tried to think of a way to back out of it. But he was so happy, bouncing up and down on the seat as we pulled into the empty gravel parking lot between the church and the graveyard. I turned the car off and put on my coat, but Ian was already out there, still with the green glasses on, cutting across the heap of leftover snow to get to the side door. He rang the bell and said something into the intercom, and by the time I reached the door it was buzzing and Ian was tugging it open with both arms. We stepped inside and Ian stomped his shoes on the mat.

  A pale, skinny man in jeans and a red sweater and a clerical collar came down the hall looking mildly surprised. He squinted at us as he walked, to see whom he’d just let in, and then for the last three yards held his hand out for Ian to shake. “Father Diggs,” he said, as he finally reached Ian and pumped his arm, then grabbed my hand from my side and shook it too. “Or Father Oscar, whatever you prefer. Or just Oscar!” A man named Diggs this close to a graveyard was almost too Dickensian to be true, but here he was, tall and pockmarked and gangly. “Sorry for my informality here. We don’t get many visitors during the week. We’re a small parish.” He straightened the sweater on his knobby shoulders. “But I assume you’re here to see the finger.”

  Ian looked at me and then back at the priest. I reached over and plucked the green glasses off his nose. “Yes,” Ian said. “We would definitely like to see the finger.” I nodded, bewildered, but glad Ian was taking charge. I was busy panicking over the possibi
lity that the priest would offer Ian confession, and he would go into the little booth and tell Father Diggs exactly who we were.

  Father Diggs smiled at me, over Ian’s head. “I figured. I’m always happy to show people. Did you read about it in the guidebook? Someone put it in a guidebook a ways back. Why don’t you come into the sanctuary, and you can have a look around while I get the keys.” We followed him around the corner. He flicked a row of four light switches, and the narthex lit up around us.

  “Are you from these parts?”

  “Yes,” Ian said. “Well, we’re from Concord, which is the capital of New Hampshire. It’s just that we’re not a Catholic family. We’re a Protestant family. But we wanted to see the finger, out of curiosity.”

  Father Diggs went to a long table and moved aside a stack of bulletins and flyers. He handed us two pink sheets. The Legend of St. Bernice, they said at the top. They were hard to read, with the speckly gray letters that come from Xeroxing a Xerox.

  “Personally,” he said, more to me than to Ian, “I don’t know much about this whole relic thing. I came here in ninety-two, and it was old news by then. I came all the way from Omaha, Nebraska, if you can believe it. Still not sure how I ended up in the great state of Vermont. But Concord, right? Concord’s a great town.” He opened the big double doors to the sanctuary: dark wooden pews, a broad isosceles of stained glass at the front, Stations of the Cross along the sides. Father Diggs started down the middle aisle and we followed. “It was a gift in the early nineteen hundreds. Some wealthy parishioner did his grand tour of Europe and got the finger somewhere in France.” I managed not to laugh at his choice of words. “I mean, the fact that they even sold it to him means they can’t have valued it very much. Or perhaps they were starving. It’s a bit of a white elephant now, but the older women in the church, they’ve grown up with it. It’s important to them.” We had reached the front of the room. “If you’ll excuse me a minute,” he said, “I ought to tidy up back there first. You can poke around.”