The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  He opened a door behind the pulpit and ducked under the low frame. I looked down at Ian, at his face turned up into the streams of colored light from the stained glass. His cheeks were yellow, blue, orange, with lines of shadow in between. I left him there and started down the side aisle.

  I didn’t know where the stations of the cross were supposed to start, so I just looked at each painting as I came to it. Christ Meets His Mother. Christ Falls for the First Time. They were poorly painted, and in several Christ bore an unfortunate resemblance to John Lennon. Ian was watching me now. I worried he was waiting for me to have some kind of religious revelation.

  My purse beeped loudly, twice, echoing through the whole sanctuary. Ian jumped back and took his hand off the altar, apparently thinking he’d set off an alarm. I had a message, and one bar of connectivity. When I moved a foot forward, the bar was gone. I moved back, and it was still gone. I held the phone out in front of me like some modern-day divining rod until the bar appeared again. I finally stood half crouched under the arched wall of a little stone alcove near the back of the sanctuary. Ian was busy pulling down the kneelers in the pews. I entered my voice-mail code and listened.

  “Lucy, hello? It’s Monday morning, and you’re not back. I suppose this is your answering machine. You have no idea what I went through to find this number. Rocky had to dig it out for me, from under I don’t know how many files and papers, and it’s been a tremendous inconvenience. For everyone.”

  I held Loraine a little farther from my ear, or rather I moved my entire head away while holding the phone perfectly still so as not to lose the connection.

  “And I need a firm date on your return, Lucy, because it’s just chaos downstairs. The balloon man showed up yesterday, and no one had any idea he was coming. Now, Rocky said he told you about the whole Drake family situation, and apparently Janet Drake told the investigators they should interview Sarah-Ann, Lord knows why. I told the man that you were the head children’s librarian, not Sarah-Ann, but now you’re not even here, which is terribly embarrassing for us. Sarah-Ann is absolutely refusing to do Chapter Book Hour again this Friday, because the children were just beastly to her last week. So I’ll have to do it myself, if you aren’t back. Of course I love working with our little cherubs, but I’m very busy, as you know.”

  That was the end of the message. No farewell, no ultimatum, unless I was meant to take Loraine reading to the children as the threat. I’d been so busy keeping all my stories straight that I’d forgotten the details of that original, simplest one: I’d return on Monday. I considered calling her back, but what would I say? Not wanting to waste that one bar, that one chance for communication with the rest of the world, I decided to call Tim.

  “Lucy,” he said, “where are you?”

  I told him the same story I’d told Rocky and Glenn: bone marrow, Chicago. I said I’d be home by the weekend.

  “Your phone was ringing off the hook yesterday. I finally went in and unplugged it. It was driving us crazy.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “And there was this guy looking for you yesterday. He came here.”

  “A guy in a wheelchair?”

  “No, and not your boyfriend. He was this old guy, very Charlton Heston. He knew your middle name and everything. Look, are you okay?”

  “Did he say who he was? Did he have black hair?”

  “No, white. Like Charlton Heston. The old version. He gave me a name and number, but I threw it away. I figured he was some kind of stalker.”

  I said, “It’s probably just a friend of my dad’s,” although I knew it wasn’t. “He has strange friends.”

  “But you’re cool?”

  “Yeah. He just came once?”

  “Right. Are you in trouble?”

  Thinking rationally, I knew it was just the same detective who’d come to the library, checking out every possible lead. He probably got my address from Loraine. If Rocky had really figured it all out and told the police, there would have been local news coverage, a public search, something more than just one guy knocking one time. But what this did mean was that I’d showed up on their radar screen, and I didn’t like that at all.

  “I’m not in trouble. It was just kind of unexpected. The trip, I mean.”

  “Cool. If you’re back soon, you should know we’re all gonna be gone for the weekend. We canceled Friday rehearsal so we could all go down for that thing in St. Louis. We felt it was more important. The whole company’s going.”

  “Thing?”

  “You saw the flyers downstairs, right? About the kid who ran away? The rally?”

  “Oh, right.”

  The phone cut out right then, and I couldn’t get the bar back, not that I wanted to. The walls of the little alcove seemed to be pulsing, cold and wet. Here I was at the lip of the country, unreachable, unknown, and yet the world was closing in around me. There were detectives at the library, detectives at my apartment, and the one person I counted on to be there through my living room wall, the man who was the heart and soul and loud, irrepressible voice of the building, was heading to a rally for the boy I’d stolen, presumably encouraging him to run harder and faster. I looked around to find Ian and half expected to see my father sitting there in the pew, next to Rocky and Glenn and Charlton Heston and Mr. Shades and Loraine. This is your life, they’d say. You have the right to remain silent.

  “Miss Hull!” Ian was whispering loudly from down the aisle, waving his Xeroxed sheet. “It says it’s the only officially recognized relic in all of New England! And we just came here by accident!”

  “That’s tremendously lucky.”

  “What’s a relic?”

  Father Diggs stuck his head back through the door and coughed pleasantly, a fake cough. Ian looked up at the ceiling, crossed himself (backward, I thought) and walked solemnly through the little door.

  “What’s she the saint of?” Ian asked as I joined them.

  “Well, not every saint is exactly in charge of something. But you could consider her the patron saint of this parish, and of the village in France where she lived.” We had walked down a hallway crowded with cardboard boxes, and now we entered a small room filled with a rack of choir robes and a heap, in one corner, of what looked like the detritus from a Christmas pageant: angel wings, shepherd staffs, jumbled piles of dirty white cloth. Father Diggs walked backward toward the far brick wall and something resembling an aquarium. There was a little purple curtain covering the front. He rubbed his hands together. “Well, here it is.”

  He pulled back the little curtain and flipped a light switch, and a fluorescent light buzzed on in the aquarium. Ian pressed the nose to the glass, and I had to look around his staticky hair to see what was in there. There was a faded blue cushion in the center of the box, and on top was what looked like a small, white, shriveled breakfast sausage.

  “It still has a nail!” Ian squeaked. Father Diggs leaned over the box, studying it with him. I felt the blood flush from my head and I leaned my cheek against the cool bricks of the wall.

  “No,” said Father Diggs, “I don’t think that’s a nail. I think it’s pointing the other way.”

  “Why?”

  My eyes were closed and I could hear my pulse.

  Father Diggs was quiet a moment. “I think that’s what I remember. I think they had it pointing southeast, toward the Holy Land.”

  “But it could be pointing northwest, and that would point to the Holy Land, too. It would just be a longer way to go.”

  Father Diggs chuckled. “Good point, good point.”

  “Because I really think that’s a fingernail. Miss Hull, look. Don’t you think that’s a nail?” I opened my eyes, mainly to see if Father Diggs had noticed that Ian hadn’t called me Mom. They were both staring through the glass, which was partly fogged up by Ian’s breath. I thought, the finger could be pointing to Canada or Mexico or Russia or Jerusalem, but it didn’t matter. There was no place safe to go, and there was no place safe to stop. Only
what does a pointing finger mean, but go, go, go?

  “Don’t you think?” he said again.

  “I have no idea.”

  Father Diggs looked back at my face. “Uh-oh,” he said, taking my arm. “Young man, I think we need to get your friend outside.”

  Ian flipped off the light switch, crossed himself again, and picked up my purse from where I’d dropped it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Father Diggs, as he propelled me out the door and down the center aisle of the sanctuary.

  “Not at all, not at all. Matter of fact, that’s why we keep it hidden away. Most people like knowing it’s there, but they don’t want to see it on a weekly basis, you know?”

  We stepped out the front door, and the cold air made me feel better.

  “You could lie down on the snow,” Ian said. He had stuck his head and one arm through the strap of my purse and was bumping it with his hip as he walked.

  “I’m much better now.” I hoped the color was coming back to my face.

  “I don’t know if you ought to drive.” Father Diggs held me by the elbow as I walked.

  “I could drive!” Ian said.

  I found myself leaning against the rail fence that bordered the little graveyard. “No, you could not.”

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them the priest was standing right in front of me, smiling. “Why don’t you just wait and get some fresh air for a bit?” he said. “You breathing okay? Look, I’ll show you something fun. You see all that stuff down there?” He pointed down the hill I hadn’t realized we were on, back toward the main road. About a mile to the north was a hazy complex of large buildings, close to the road and distinctly unfarmhouselike, with cars and logging trucks stopped around it in both directions. “That’s the checkpoint for the Canadian border. America ends right there.”

  Ian stared at it through the green glasses that he must have just fished back out of my purse. “That’s so weird. I always thought there was a wall or something.”

  “You think that’s funny,” Father Diggs said, “you ought to see what happens to this road. You go up a mile or so farther north, and it just stops dead in the middle of a field. Then there’s some dense trees, then there’s the actual border, where they mow through every so often to keep it clear, and then on the other side the road starts up again. Only on that side, it’s called Rue de la Something. All the roads do that here. They just stop. Back in Nebraska the roads went on forever and ever. I’ll never get used to it.”

  “I’m going to be fine now,” I said. “I just got squeamish. But thank you so much for your time.” I knew I’d feel even better if he went back inside, if he left us alone with the cold air and pale sun and dead grass.

  “You take care of this fine young lady now,” Father Diggs said, smiling at Ian. “You’re both welcome back anytime. We don’t parade the finger around during Mass!”

  “We’re Protestant!” Ian called after him. “But thanks!”

  33

  O Canada

  After a few minutes I felt stable enough to move toward the car, but when we got there all I could do was sit down on the hood. It was warming up a little, and it wasn’t too cold to just sit there, soaking up the sun and staring toward the border.

  We were quiet, which was fine with me. I halfheartedly willed my feet to move north, but they didn’t, as I knew they wouldn’t. They stayed planted on the front bumper of the car. I had several simultaneous, ridiculous visions: Ian and me trekking north and into the hills, Sound of Music style, a choir of nuns bidding us to find our dream; me running across the border, leaving Ian to stumble down to the police at the checkpoint; the Mounties forming their swords into some kind of arc that we could pass through. But I did also, much more seriously, consider what would happen if we got back into the car and headed to that checkpoint. Ian would have to hide in the trunk. I’d have to be prepared for them to search the car and find him. I’d have some story about needing to flee an abusive husband, about my son not having a passport, how we were going to go stay with my uncle Ilya, just for a few weeks, just till the restraining order could be processed.

  What was so special about Canada in my mind, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t as if they had no extradition treaty. It wasn’t as if they were any freer, any happier. A little less inclined to religious extremism, maybe. A little more welcoming to the Ians of the world, a little less welcoming to the Pastor Bobs. But not much. Growing up hearing all those stories of expatriation, of running across the borders with nothing but your clothes, my younger self must have set some strange, romantic standards of adulthood: in one’s twenties, one is to leave everything behind and start over. This preferably involves gunfire and land mines. One’s mother stays behind and weeps. Only, as Leo Labaznikov had pointed out, “In America, there is no place left to run to.” I was born too late.

  A single car passed us on the smaller road: powder blue, rusted, Japanese. Black hair, black sunglasses. He was going twenty miles an hour at most, not even looking at us. He disappeared over the hill.

  Ian said, “For a second, I almost thought that guy stole our car. And then I realized we were sitting on it!”

  A minute later, the man came back over the hill and passed us again and vanished onto the main road, going south. If he had wanted to grab Ian or shoot me, it would have been the perfect chance. Whatever he had planned, I actually wished for him to get it over with. Ian said, “I guess he found the end of the road.”

  I lay back on the hood, which was still warm, or at least warmer than the air, and watched the traffic. After Bush’s reelection, a lot of people had talked about moving to Canada, although I didn’t know anyone who actually had. It was something Tim and his actor friends would shout when they got drunk. I imagined that all these people in trailer trucks and Subarus were launching out on their new lives—their pockets full of Canadian coins, their radios blasting songs of freedom. They were like settlers, heading off to colonize Canada as the new America, the land of infinite possibility. They would camp on the prairies and coastlines. They’d live on cod and seagulls. I would join them. I would leave Ian, not with the border police, but maybe at the parsonage door. Then I would join my fellow pilgrims.

  But I would be the one with the secret, the one I’d learned from my father: you always take your country with you. You think you can leave Russia? You find yourself stealing someone’s dry cleaning, buying the black market cigars that support Cuban communism. You think you can leave America? Go ahead and try.

  What is three Americans? A revolution. What is two Americans? A divided nation. What is one American? A runaway with no destination.

  I would keep my secret, though, and watch what I already knew would happen. We settlers would proclaim ourselves a city on a hill. We’d slowly push the native Canadians onto reservations in the Yukon. The friendlier ones would teach us how to drill for oil. They’d trade us Montreal for a handful of beads.

  Within a few generations, the sight of a real Canadian would be rare. Our children would dress like them for Halloween. We’d name our country clubs after their fallen chiefs.

  Our brave little nation would grow. Global warming would make our weather tropical. America, scorched and obsolete, would fall into disrepair. Other countries would come to envy New Canada. But could we help it if our children had beautiful teeth? Could we keep from shining our glorious light for all nations to see? Someone has to dominate the world.

  Soon, our president would claim divine right and bomb things. We would develop a deep self-loathing.

  Things would fall to shit. Also, we’d run out of trees.

  Some of us, the dreamers, would pack ourselves in dinghies and set sail for Greenland. Greenland, land of opportunity. The first two hundred years would be fantastic.

  I had somehow, in the last couple of days, fallen under the illusion that I was in charge. I felt I had a decision to make—fight or flight, stay or go—when really Ian had been calling the shots all along. And the natural end of our j
ourney was not the dead end of this winding Vermont road, but whatever Ian decided it was.

  “Listen,” I finally said, “what is the name of the town where your grandmother lives?” I waited for the meltdown.

  “Mankson,” he said, and slid down onto the car’s front bumper and grinned up at me like he’d won a game, although I couldn’t imagine what he’d do when we got there.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  “We’re there!” he said, and started clacking his teeth together like a monkey. “I just can’t wait to see my grandmother!”

  “We’re there?”

  “There was a sign! Didn’t you see it? It said ‘Mankson, Vermont, Home of the Mankson Township Mighty Moose!’ I memorized it.”

  “So what’s her address?”

  “Well, I forgot to tell you something. She’s dead. I only wanted to visit her grave. And guess where her grave is!”

  “Is it right here in this graveyard?”

  “Yes! Probably!”

  The way he hopped down off the bumper, the way he made a huge show of walking back to the rail fence and surveying the graveyard as if trying to remember something, he couldn’t have fooled the world’s dumbest substitute teacher.

  I felt stable enough to walk, although I really did need some food. I followed him to the fence and opened the swinging gate so we could walk in, onto the brown frozen grass and the furrows of half-melted snow. It was a small graveyard, with only thirty or forty graves. Ian was squinting at the writing on each marker, although none of the stones seemed recent, and the once sharp-edged chisel marks had eroded to the soft, shallow traces a finger would leave in sand.

  “So Ian, what’s the name of your poor dead grandmother?”

  “Eleanor Drake,” he said, but then opened his mouth again as if he wanted to change it. “But she had this other maiden name. This is definitely where she was buried, though, because I was here when I was little.”