by Amy Meyerson
Behind the café counter, Malcolm stopped to talk to the Latina girl I’d met at Billy’s funeral. Her hair was woven into a bun, coffee grinds were smeared across the white apron tied around her waist. When the girl spotted me watching them, she waved enthusiastically. Malcolm looked over, too, his expression more cautious than the girl’s. He filled two cups of coffee and carried them over to my table.
I reached for the mug he held out to me and took a sip. The coffee was black and strong, but I drank it, anyway. Adding milk or sugar seemed like admitting weakness.
“Don’t you worry?” I pointed to a key dangling unsupervised from the cashbox as the girl wiped down the espresso machine. The key was modern, nickel or some metal composite. It didn’t resemble the antique key Billy had left me.
“Our infantry of regulars. They may only buy a cup of coffee, but they’re our eyes and ears.”
“Do you keep a safe somewhere?” I didn’t see any other locks that might match the key.
“There’s no money in it. I went to the bank this morning.”
“I wasn’t asking for money,” I said.
“It’s upstairs, in the storage closet.” Malcolm pointed to a door at the back of the café. His finger traveled to the girl behind the counter. “That’s Lucia. She covers the afternoons. Charlie’s here in the morning. Don’t be startled if you hear him downstairs at dawn. He gets here early to open the store.” I was about to ask him why he thought I’d be here before the store opened, then I remembered Billy’s apartment.
“I’m not staying here—upstairs, I mean. My parents live on the Westside.”
“It’s up to you,” he said.
“When did Billy move upstairs? Last I knew, he lived in Pasadena.” Billy’s house was large and had columns that reminded me of the White House, only it wasn’t populated with a first family or aides, just Billy and too many bedrooms.
“He’s lived upstairs as long as I’ve known him.”
“And how long is that?”
Malcolm squinted at me. “Why do I feel like this is a job interview?”
“How do you think you’re doing so far?”
“Hard to say.” And there was that hint of levity across his face before it vanished again. I’d won over arrogant fourteen-year-old girls who wore push-up bras and more makeup than I did. I’d inspired the class clown to write a six-page paper on how the cotton gin increased the South’s dependency on slavery. For fifty-minute intervals, I’d even gotten entire classrooms of eighth graders to put away their phones and be present. I could certainly charm a cagey thirty-something-year-old bookstore manager.
“Malcolm!” The man next to us looked up, suddenly realizing who was seated beside him.
Malcolm introduced me to Ray the screenwriter. “Ray promises not to forget us when he’s won an Oscar.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.” Ray beamed as if he could picture it happening. His expression grew severe. “You look like him,” he said to me.
I instinctively flattened my hair, its reddish brown the same shade as Mom’s, the same shade as Billy’s. In my periphery, Malcolm stiffened.
Lucia wiped down a nearby table, then joined us for coffee. Her tight tank top revealed several tattoos along her shoulders and chest. When she caught me reading a line of Spanish on her forearm she said it was from One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“She doesn’t read fiction,” Malcolm said to Lucia.
“Come on, Malcolm. Everyone knows One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Lucia smiled apologetically at me.
“My boyfriend’s mom gave it to me actually.” Boyfriend. It still sounded funny off my tongue, and Malcolm must have noticed my discomfort with the term because he glanced over, seemingly curious. “I love Márquez,” I overcompensated. Jay’s mother had left One Hundred Years of Solitude in our living room when she came over unannounced, hoping to kill an hour before she met a friend at a gallery nearby. The novel sat on the coffee table for a week until I filed it on the bookshelf beside the other novels Jay had never read.
A girl with an armful of books lingered by the register, and Malcolm rushed to the front desk to help her. Lucia and I watched Malcolm ring up the girl. He said something that made her laugh, and when he laughed, too, I saw the kind eyes from his portrait in the noir section.
“Don’t let him intimidate you,” Lucia said. “He’s really attached to the store. We all are.” Her tone was kinder than Malcolm’s, but her words carried the same vague threat, should I aim to do anything that might ruin Prospero Books.
* * *
I couldn’t help but think of Jane Eyre as I ascended the narrow staircase toward the eerily silent top floor. While I could remember every dusty corner and piquant scent of the bookshop below, I had no recollection of an upstairs. I’d certainly never been up there. There were two doors, one on each side of the hall. I tried the right one first. A storage room, filled with shelves of books, more in boxes, and cleaning supplies. Behind the stacks of books, I located the safe. It had a combination lock. There weren’t any vaults hidden under panels in the floor, any keyholes that might match the antique key Billy had given me. That left only Billy’s apartment.
I creaked open the door waiting for someone to tell me I was trespassing, invading my uncle’s private life. When no one did, I braved a step inside and shut the door behind me.
Sun dust glittered throughout the spacious living room. It looked like a spread from a design magazine: a brown leather couch with an old chest positioned as a coffee table; an antique vanity beside the door with three mismatching vases spaced across its tabletop. I spotted a keyhole on the chest and tried the antique key. It didn’t fit. Besides, it was unlocked. Inside, piles of clothing were folded neatly. Collared linen shirts and waterproof khaki pants, the style of clothes Billy had worn when I knew him. I unfolded an olive green button-down and inhaled it deeply. It smelled of baby powder, pleasant and fresh, but it didn’t remind me of Billy.
I scanned the room for another keyhole. The kitchen didn’t have a door. It reeked of disinfectant. The tiled countertops and stove had been scrubbed clean. The fridge was empty, the ice tray lonely in the freezer. Elijah said he’d had the apartment prepared for me. Logical enough, yet there was so much I could have discovered if the fridge had been stocked with Billy’s food, the trash can cluttered with his waste.
The door to the bedroom didn’t have a lock. It was as quaint and characterless as the rest of the apartment, complete with white wicker furniture and a modest bookshelf beside the door, hardbacks faded from years of sun exposure. On the dresser, a bouquet of dried wildflowers rested beside a photograph of a blonde woman. I lifted the frame from the dresser, blowing off the dust that had collected on the glass. She leaned against a boulder on a narrow strip of beach below the cliffs, her thin, white-blond hair pulled over her right shoulder. She had translucent skin and somber green eyes that matched her earrings, or perhaps I only imagined that they were somber because I knew she was dead.
I removed the picture from the frame, checking for an inscription. The Kodak emblem was stamped on the back, nothing handwritten, no dates, no names. This had to be Evelyn. Mom had offered no details on Evelyn Weston’s appearance, but she looked exactly as I expected. Young, late twenties, early thirties. Blonde. Beautiful, hauntingly so.
I stared at the photograph, searching for some indication where or when it was taken. The rocky bluffs looked like Malibu, but Malibu had countless pockets of beach and this wasn’t one I recognized. Evelyn wore no makeup. Her hair was long and straight. Her emerald earrings were antique. Her white T-shirt could have been manufactured at any point in the second half of the twentieth century.
I put the picture back in its frame and positioned it on the dresser exactly as it had been before. Looking at it, I felt a profound sadness. It was the only photograph Billy had displayed in the apartment. While it must have comforted
Billy to return to Evelyn’s likeness each day, it seemed to magnify how empty his personal life otherwise was. Goose bumps rose on my arms. The muscles of my back tensed. His lonesomeness scared me. I scanned the bedroom one last time for a keyhole, and when I didn’t find one, I hurried out, wanting to get as far away from that picture as I could.
In the living room, there was no old bank on the table by the front door. No jewelry box perched on the drop-front mahogany desk against the wall near the kitchen. The desk looked like the one my parents had in their upstairs hall, an ornamental heirloom that had belonged to my father’s grandmother. I ran my hand along the smooth wood, wondering whether Billy had seen the similarity between our desk and his, if he’d sat at this desk and occasionally thought of us. I tried to pull down the front, but it was locked. My fingers traced the ivy carved into the front, a brass keyhole cover that deftly hid the lock. When I slid the antique key into the lock, it fit snugly. I twisted it to the right and the lock clicked open.
The first thing that hit me was the stench of the old wood, its musk. The desk was cluttered with receipts and tattered pieces of cream-colored stationery. I sorted through the crumpled heating bills and yellowed pages of the Los Angeles Times, inspecting each article for the next clue before deciding it was little more than an abandoned article. Beneath the forsaken artifacts of Billy’s daily life, I found a folder filled with the keepsakes he’d concealed for me.
Billy had photographs, a playbill from my middle-school play, flyers from my debate competitions. I laid the artifacts in chronological order and saw the framework of my childhood unfold before me. The timeline began with a photograph of Billy holding me, swaddled in lavender-colored cotton, his expression somewhere between amazed and terrified. Two years later, a snapshot from a dark restaurant, Billy and me eating the same string of spaghetti like in Lady and the Tramp. An action shot from 1991, me running in a sequined bikini. The next January, 1993. My seventh birthday party. The only party I remembered Billy attending. In the photograph, Billy and I posed with a goat. I’d begged Mom to turn our backyard into a petting zoo. I don’t know, Miranda. It sounds unsanitary, she’d said. I’d enlisted Billy, and together we’d prepared a pitch for Mom, filled with facts about the Nigerian dwarf goat—it bred year-round and had a lifespan of fifteen years. About the zedonk—also known as the zonkey, zebrula, zebrinny, zebronkey, zebonkey or zebadonk—which despite its many names was incredibly rare. We outlined the precautions we’d take to ensure cleanliness—a washing station and lots of hand sanitizer—and scientific studies proving how unlikely it was anyone would catch a disease from the Nigerian dwarf goats of Southern California. In the photograph, Billy held the goat like a trophy.
The next picture was from my sixth-grade play, Billy’s arms around Joanie and me dressed in Puritan costumes. Identical bonnets and blue dresses, yet in our postures you could tell who was Abigail Williams and who was a forgettable woman she’d accused of witchery.
In the final photograph, the pet shop looked exactly as I remembered. Speckled linoleum floor, metal cages confining colorful birds. Billy held me close to him as I lifted the puppy toward the camera. We both wore exhilarated smiles. We both seemed happy. How quickly thereafter everything had changed.
I rummaged through the desk, searching for anything else that pertained to me. Amid the credit card advertisements and gas station receipts, I found a folded sheet of lined paper. My handwriting looked pretty much the same, but the words were unfamiliar.
Hi, Uncle Billy!
I bet you’re surprised to hear from me. I know it’s been forever! I graduated high school yesterday. Can you believe it? At graduation, everyone else had tons of family with them. All I had were my parents. That made me think of you, how at one point you might have been there, too.
Do you ever think about me anymore? Sometimes I think about how much fun we used to have together. Anyway, I just wanted to say hi. If you wanted to write back that would be cool. Don’t worry, I won’t tell Mom. Ha, ha!
Love,
Miranda
I reread the letter, trying to imagine how Billy must have felt receiving it. He never wrote back. I would have remembered that. I would have written to him again, letters back and forth until they amounted to a correspondence, possibly more. He must have wanted to write back. Why else would he have kept the letter? He must have known, for reasons still unclear to me, that he couldn’t.
I slowly refolded the letter. Was this it? Had Billy led me to this desk simply to show me that he’d never forgotten me? What an underwhelming end to our last great hunt together.
As I dropped the letter into the desk, I noticed something written along one of its edges in tiny, precise script: Down. I didn’t make anything of it until I returned the photographs to the desk and saw the word repeated on their backs: down, down, down, down, down. And on the photograph from the pet shop, a phrase: down went Alice. The next clue.
I raced around the room, looking for a bookshelf or a stack of hardbacks, any battered old copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There wasn’t a single book in the living room.
I took a deep breath before returning to the bedroom. I had no choice; I had to go in there again. The spines of the hardbacks on the bookshelf were so muted their titles dissolved into the faded canvas. Little Women, Death on the Nile, The Color Purple, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues—novels I couldn’t imagine Billy reading. Between Sylvia Plath and Colette, a thin crimson spine all but disappeared. In peeling gold leaf, Lewis Carroll.
The cover was understated. Red with a small portrait of Alice in gold at the center. I ran my hands along Alice’s embossed hair, her frilly dress, an approximation of which I wore for three Halloweens until I could no longer zip the polyester costume. Did Billy see me in that blue dress? Did he remember that I wanted a pet rabbit to dress in a waistcoat? I flipped the cover to look inside.
Alice fell down, down, down, upon sticks and leaves, unharmed and curious. She tried several doors. They were all locked. She found a golden key, too big for some locks, too small for others until she peeked behind the curtain. The key fit but the passageway was too small, and Alice couldn’t reach the garden. There, Carroll’s words were highlighted in crisp yellow.
[S]o many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
So Alice got pragmatic or as pragmatic as one could get after she’d followed a talking rabbit down a long and dark tunnel. She looked for a book of rules; instead, she found a bottle. DRINK ME, it said. I flipped through the book and found an envelope tucked into the back. READ ME, it said.
Inside the envelope was a thick stack of papers. On the cover page, beneath Cedars-Sinai’s emblem, a Dr. Nazario had written to Billy: This letter is to inform you of your results. Our office will be in contact to schedule a follow-up visit. Dr. Nazario’s name was circled in red. The following pages detailed the tests Billy had undergone, the clinical indication of shortness of breath and tightness in chest, the impression of aortic stenosis. The tests were dated March, two years ago.
I read the highlighted passage again. Very few things indeed were really impossible. I could picture the illustrated copy of the novel I had as a child. Alice in a blue dress. Hearts and spades and diamonds and clubs floating around her. I’d like to remember Billy giving it to me, that it was from Prospero Books, but Mom had purchased it at a children’s bookstore on the Westside. Billy and I never read the novel on those nights when he tucked me in and made me feel indeed that nothing was impossible. Still, he knew, like Alice, I would follow him down, down, down until there was nowhere left to fall.
CHAPTER SIX
In addition to its main campus, Cedars-Sinai had offices across the city. When I looked up Dr. Nazario, he worked in three different locations and didn’t have an open appointment for another six weeks. I tried to explain to the receptionist who answere
d my call that I wasn’t trying to schedule a consultation—I merely wanted to talk to the doctor about my uncle—and she started in on a long explanation of HIPAA privacy requirements.
“Is there any way I can get in touch with Dr. Nazario?” I asked.
“You can always email him,” she said.
“Does he check his email?”
“I’m not his secretary. You want his email or not?”
I jotted a quick note to Dr. Nazario and sent it into the internet void, hoping somewhat futilely that he might read it, let alone respond.
In morning rush hour, the drive from my parents’ house to Prospero Books took over an hour. The 10 to the 110 to the 101, through downtown where somehow the 5 also got involved and the cars piled up in the congestion that made Los Angeles’s freeways famous. When I arrived at the store, I wanted to see Billy’s San Andreas Fault mug beside the computer, his beaten-up leather satchel on the floor beside the desk chair. I wanted to see Lee racing to answer the phone, reminding all callers that, in Prospero Books, books were prized above all else. Instead, I saw Malcolm behind the front desk, reading. When he heard the back door open, he looked up expectantly until he saw me, sighing when he realized I was back again.