“Did I say friend? Distant acquaintance might be more accurate. Old is correct, though. I found him. He lives not far from here. I just haven’t been to his house yet.” He couldn’t look at Cate. Her “why” was mixing into his “what” in the same way her defensiveness lapped at his determination to prove Monika wrong. He glanced up at the frames surrounding the ceiling, the lights whiting out the glass, turning every one of them into a mirror. He wrapped his fingers over the dark lump of wood in his pocket as he stopped at the blackest of the frames, a lone chunk hanging on one side. Erika Müller wrote romance; the things in her attic that reminded him of Amabile were there because of her love of it. And the absence of writing had created the vacancy at Oma’s side, not some untrustworthy fictional lover. Those were Dietrich’s facts. Crawley’s were much worse.
Chapter 20
“Why Amabile?” one of the women asked as Non Bookends’ bells clanged the German man’s exit. “Why choose that name to write under? I bet he’s right, whoever he was. She fell in love, lost her lover, and everything she wrote after that was sad and true. Does your grandma have any other books under that name?”
Besides what my grandfather burned? My chest hurt. I couldn’t breathe. Grandpa’s back appeared in my mind, the way he paused in his doorway when I’d said Amabile’s name after our walk. Why was this happening, and why now? Ask your grandmother… I couldn’t, I didn’t want to know any of the whys about Amabile, some silly fictional person just like all of Grandma’s others. Amabile and this German needed to go, out of our lives, but especially out of Emerson’s. “I hope not…”
“You hope not? I would think you’d hope she does.”
I pressed the books tighter to my chest. No wonder I couldn’t breathe.
“Why, Mavis might have one of Amabile’s books right there, in your arms.” Both women eyed what I clasped. I shook my head and nodded toward the back. I was taking Amabile away. God, please don’t let there be any books by that woman here.
I left Grandma’s two customers at her table, chattering away, bringing life to something that needed to be dead. Grandma’s crusade exploded in their zeal—a woman’s plight, a woman’s war, a woman who may or may not have survived her crisis. I didn’t want to know what that German had made me feel, though I already did. He was giving form to something invisible and ephemeral I’d always ignored.
The women’s voices carried like the buzzing of bees, a hive of excitement chasing me to Grandma’s room. A little home that suddenly felt like a refuge. I hurried the packages to her cot and dropped them on her quilt. The stack hit and teetered, and I bent and fanned it to the side, exposing return addresses I really didn’t want to see. Had Amabile’s envelope had a German address? But the book had been in English, so it was a translation. Addresses beyond New York slid to the side, towns and cities all within this country. I straightened. I wanted to open every one, more than those two women had. More than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.
I glanced around Grandma’s home-away-from-home. The miniature of what should have been her real world, minus a husband. Fictional people and authors who’d suffered were shelved in rows outside her walls, her companions instead of him. I stared at her quilt, her floral tablecloth too large on the tiny table, at tea towels and salt and pepper shakers from the fifties. I shook my head. This wasn’t right, but it was her refuge, just like it was Grandpa’s to carve sticks to nothing. Yes, they had a bad marriage; at least Grandpa had tried. That German was planting fictional thoughts I didn’t want. He had no business in my head or in Grandma’s store. I’d tell Grandma he was never to be allowed back. God help his friend he’d come to see…and the friend’s family.
“It will be okay,” I whispered to myself, the envelopes, and her room. “He’s just some foreign man who will go away. He’s stirring up trouble before he does because he’s evil. Eventually he will go, and everything will be all right.” I scraped the sweat from my palms onto my jeans, straightened the envelopes on Grandma’s cot, and marched back out into the store.
The buzzing was still there, but quieter. I passed customers settled comfortably in Grandma’s chairs. I was okay. Everything would be fine. An old acquaintance down the street meant nothing, especially if he was a runner. Fast wasn’t in us, according to Grandpa. Neither was racing. That’s why I didn’t race and only ran. The buzzing stopped as I rounded Ibsen and headed to Grandma’s table. The two queen bees were still there, their heads bent together over a large book.
“What are you two up to?” I swiped my hands down the front of my pants again.
“Look at this,” one said. She swiveled the book my direction. “We can’t figure it out.” She placed a finger on a word in the first column. “There. Why do you suppose she chose that?”
“Who? And chose what?” I frowned at her, then at the dictionary and where she pointed.
Amabile—Am·a·bile—noun. Lilium amabile. The friendly or loveable lily.
Lily. Grandpa’s garage.
Chapter 21
I watched my grandmother, followed her march, looking for lawyer in every step. She brushed past her table where I sat, her purse locked inside one elbow. “Anything happen while I was out?” she asked without slowing.
“New arrivals are on your cot.” I stared at the back I wanted to run to, the hem of her skirt I wanted to cling to the way I had my mother’s when I was little and things were going wrong.
She disappeared around the shelves and eventually through her door. I made myself breathe, listened above the pages flipping around me, the soft whispers and gentle footsteps throughout the store. She’d lock her purse in a cabinet and probably study the stack of new books that had come in. I stared at the pile of unmarked price tags and strands of ribbon I’d arranged into the shape of a lily, and at the closed dictionary on the table’s corner.
Grandma marched back, the packages in her arms, books she might ask me to look at. I stared at the volumes peering from ends she’d slit open as she dropped her new arrivals on the table’s top. She scooted a chair to one side, sat without a word, and began removing books from their mailers, sorting them into categories that meant something to her, and probably to the two women who’d finally gone.
“Any good books today?” I stared at each one, straining to see each author’s name.
“I chose them, so they’re probably good.” Her smile came and went as she laid packaging aside and arranged her books into four piles.
“I’m sorry three you chose got burned.” I hoped she wouldn’t look up, and she didn’t. She squared each stack, then squared each one again.
“That German man came back this morning.”
The squaring stopped.
“I think we need to tell him he can’t…”
She looked away from the books in her hands and glanced above where we sat toward the ceiling.
“Grandma, I don’t like him.” I sounded twelve. Not surprisingly, she didn’t respond. “I mean…he’s trouble. He might upset your customers.”
“Did he say his name?” Grandma looked at me.
“No.” I shook my head. But neither had I asked. Or even thought to. Or wanted to. “It doesn’t matter. He’s visiting someone, so he’ll be gone soon, anyway.”
“That’s not true, I’m afraid.” Grandma shook her head. “He’s always been here. Even longer than you. And I hate to say it, but he’ll never leave.”
Chapter 22
“I brought you something.” Dietrich held the small book Cate’s way. It was meant to be a brace of sorts, a small sting so the bigger sting that may come later would hurt less. He kept his hand over the title and author between them, a half dozen other books balanced on her hip, old books like this one.
“Grandma approves the books for her store.”
“How much longer, Catharine?” A man with black hair came around a shelf, good looking, a smart clip in his step. This was the fiancé Dietrich had seen pictures of in the newspaper. Emerson Cosnik, intending to smart cl
ip his way to the senate—with Cate… Catharine.
“Just two more stacks to put up first.” Cate glanced at her fiancé, leaning from her load. Emerson peeled back his sleeve and studied his watch.
Cate needed time as much as Dietrich did, for important things that could trip up the smart clip. “Let me help.” Dietrich slid his book into his inner jacket pocket. He laid a hand above and one below Cate’s—Catharine’s—stack, and took it from her.
“What are you doing?” Cate grabbed at the books he lifted out of her reach. “I have to put those on the shelves…” She nodded her fiancé’s way. “Fast. We have to be somewhere.”
“Fast it will be. You lead, I’ll follow.”
“I don’t have time to work with someone in the way.”
“You’ll be much faster if you’re not carrying a load. Anyone’s load. Trust me.” Amabile was a story likely having been lived out in thousands of people’s lives. Not in his and Oma’s, though. A night of pacing and analyzing Erika Müller’s writings had convinced him of that. But there was an Amabile of some sort in the little runner’s life. He could help Cate face hers as he disproved his family’s fictional one. Cate could go on then, marry her senator while Dietrich returned to Germany to tell Monika she was wrong.
“Excuse me.” Emerson shook the sleeve back over his watch. “We appreciate your help, but we’re in a hurry.”
“Maybe you could collect the other pile,” Dietrich said without looking at Emerson. “That would hurry things up. For you.”
Cate eyed Dietrich. “Who are you? I don’t know where you came from or why you keep coming back, but I’m telling you now to get out of my grandmother’s store and stay out. Stay away from her and away from me. And him.” She tossed her head where her fiancé had been, his smart clip taking his hurry away.
Dietrich slid a hand inside his jacket and drew the book out. “This isn’t for your grandmother.” He held it toward her. “This is for you.”
“Let’s go, Catharine.” Black hair and impatience was back. “I asked your grandmother, and she said the books can wait until morning. All of them.” Her fiancé clipped near and Dietrich let him take the stack of books from beneath his arm.
Cate stared at the dark green cover Dietrich held in his hand. He let her see the binding that had faded to a dustiness, a single flower embossed on the front.
“Go on without me.” She stared at the lily and Amabile’s name below it.
“You need to be there, Catharine. You’re expected.”
“This is for his campaign?” Dietrich asked.
“That’s right. My name is Emerson Cosnik, and I’m running for Senate.” Emerson stepped closer to Cate’s side, then slid his shoulder in front of her, between his fiancée and the book that had her attention.
This was Cate’s hurry, not his. Dietrich turned the book and opened its cover, swept several pages to the side, then read:
“This is you. It’s the way you really are. It’s the way I see you.” He turned his mirror her way, the bottom of its frame resting on his knees as she sat across from him. Her tiny apartment seemed so much fuller when he was there, so much more alive and warm. He steadied his hands at the upper rounded corners, careful where he placed his fingers near the carved lilies he’d added. “See yourself? See the water? See who’s across it from you?”
She did see herself. She was much younger. She inched closer to the edge of her seat. How was it she could see herself in the mirror so long ago? It must be a trick. She looked over the mirror’s top at him. Maybe it was the language difference. She wasn’t proficient at his English, and he knew nothing of her German, only the niceties. Only words that told him to find his mark and ready himself to go.
They could hear the roar of the crowd far away, others learning those same words in her language. He didn’t care. He was there. With her. She could see it.
Cate’s face blanched. She saw what she had to in the mirror, something her fiancé didn’t. And shouldn’t. “Go without me, Emerson. They’re waiting for you.”
Chapter 23
Amabile. I think I said her name. I must have, for the German man nodded.
“Who are you?” I asked again, once Emerson had gone. Not happily, but rightly. Away from this man and the insinuations he tried to make. Away from the mess this German would make of Emerson’s campaign. “I mean it this time. What is your name, and why are you here?”
“My name is Dietrich. And I told you, I am here because of an old acquaintance. Well, not exactly an acquaintance, personally. A family acquaintance is more accurate, but it turns out the presumed connection was wrong. A literary liberty misconstrued.”
Grandma said he’d always been here and that he’d never go. One of them was lying. It had better be her.
“Dietrich what?”
“Cate what?” he asked. I studied the lines in his eyes. Handsome eyes, except for the lies they inferred. “Shall I read more?”
No. The word was a store shout neither of us heard. “Outside.” We stepped through Grandma’s store, her bells, and out onto the sidewalk, where I wheeled and faced Dietrich. “What do you do, if I can actually believe anything you tell me? You say you don’t care for fiction, yet here you are, reading some to me while speaking of literary liberties. And romance, too? It might be okay to lie in Germany, but we frown on it here.”
The lines in his eyes sharpened. “A common fallacy regarding my country in light of its history, but foreign liars are equally guilty of carrying out schemes.”
I thought of their history and our army. I thought of McCoy, who was being investigated. I thought of the lily in Grandpa’s workbench drawer…and the one on Amabile’s cover. “Is that why you’re here? To carry out a scheme?”
He came close, even nearer in the way he looked at me than in the way he stood. “I’m here because of others’ schemes. But I’m staying to help. Not help them…but to help the victims.”
“You call what you do help? From what I can see, you travel around and create problems.”
“I’m not some bored troublemaker. I’m a researcher. I actually look for truth, and then I write it. I fix the lies everyone else tells.”
“Truth? You write truth? And your research is in fictional stories like Amabile and stores like Non Bookends? I don’t for one second believe you write truth or read fiction to find it. You sound like Grandma, except the two of you have nothing in common.”
“I believe I understand your grandmother, possibly even better than you do. I can guess how she would feel about something like this.” Dietrich opened Amabile again.
As he left, it was his face she saw. His back headed toward her door, but in the mirror—in the gift he’d given her…given the two of them—she saw him coming toward the water while looking her way. Walking across the gleaming expanse to her, a smile on his face, blue beckoning in his eyes, gentle waving in the loose strands of blond hair. Long legs destroying the distance between them. Legs that brought him there. Legs made to win.
She wanted to beg him to never go. To stay. But when she glanced from his retreating form to the mirror, she knew he’d always stay. He was running now, toward her, in the glass. She was his prize. One he would cherish forever. That’s the way this love was supposed to be. She saw it, in his mirror.
“You know nothing about my grandmother. Leave her and her bookstore alone. Most people use the library for research. New York has an amazing one. You should try there instead of storybooks or used bookstores.” I turned, my reflection catching my eye, the me I saw in Non Bookends’ window doing the same. I gazed at myself, large gold letters splayed over my head and across Dietrich’s much taller one as he stared with me. Our reflections looked back at us, the sheen of the pavement beneath our feet like water.
“I’ve been to the library. Several of them, in fact,” he said to my reflection.
I looked up at him, at the profile of his real face as he continued to stare at Grandma’s window.
He looked from th
e window to me, a fragile rigidity I hadn’t seen in his reflection. “I told you. I was looking for a runner. You should be looking too.”
The words exploded. I turned back to the window, to the two of us, the short and the tall, the brunette and the blond, the runner and the writer.
Chapter 24
Dietrich looked like a runner. I didn’t. I worked in a bookstore and should have been a writer. But I wasn’t.
“Leave me, leave all of us alone.” I said to his reflection and then to his face. “I’m going to stand here until you go. I don’t want you bothering my grandmother, so leave. Now.”
“You needed to know. And you can rest assured, you’re not the runner I was looking for.”
“You couldn’t catch me if I was.”
Dietrich stepped around me, not even glancing down as he passed. Street lamps and car lights lit the sidewalk now, turning Non Bookends’ front window into even more of a mirror. One that should have shown Dietrich walking away. Leaving the runner without the writer. His footsteps faded, but his reflection stayed. I could still see it. Right there next to mine.
Chapter 25
He would come. She knew he would. He’d been so near…
The outer wounds screamed until there was nothing to scream about—shards of glass extracted, splinters of wood withdrawn, ashes discoloring cuts and burns, bones fragmented into slivers now bound into place. But on the inside of her…the heart that hurt, and waited, screamed on. There was no balm, no relief, no way to remove the ache that lay there watching her doorway every day.
Dietrich slapped Amabile closed, a copy he’d found here in New York. He was right, he knew he was. Amabile was fiction Oma had admired and intended to use as inspiration so she could write again. Some truths were amongst its passion, truths he sensed in Cate’s family, no matter how much the little runner fought them. He didn’t have enough time for her battles, though. Der Spiegel had contacted him: they had an assignment waiting and wanted him back in Germany. Oma would be anxious, also, not to mention Monika. He looked from the window of his hotel room, from the highest floor of the building, onto New York City’s life below. He’d come here for Oma, for his career. Crawley likely wasn’t Amabile’s “he”—not with his injuries—but he was someone’s. Dietrich could only prove what mattered to Oma, then he had to go home.
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