S
am has not asked Mena if she’d like to go to the book club meeting tonight, and so she assumes that he doesn’t want her there. During the book tour for his second novel,
Benders,
he brought her with him. His publishing company sent him on a fifteen-city tour, all across the country.What she remembers about those months were the red-eye flights, her head resting on Sam’s shoulder, the small dim hotel rooms and their cold sheets, the taxi rides and the awkward new celebrity of Sam’s. Everywhere they went there was someone who adored him. He always looked vaguely startled by their fawning, and then uncomfortable, apologetic. She remembers how his modesty made her feel even more proud of him. She always sat near the back during his readings, not wanting to distract him. But somehow, whenever he read, he always located her and focused on her each time his eyes left the page. This was one of the many things that convinced her that every word he wrote was meant for her.
When he was writing, he would read her each chapter he wrote as he finished it. He wouldn’t proceed unless she was there to hear what he’d written. Sometimes, she fell asleep at night to his soft reading; he was testing the words, tasting the words, trying them out on her. He started
Small Sorrows
when she was pregnant with the twins. He whispered each word against the stretched skin of her belly. His fourth and fifth novels were also like little secrets they shared. As the kids ran and played outside, they sat at the kitchen table over coffee or warm bowls of bread pudding or wine and she listened to his stories unfold. It hurts her that he hasn’t read anything to her for more than a year. It hurts her that he doesn’t want her there, at the library tonight.
“What time do you have rehearsal tonight? Should I drop you off?” Sam asks as he emerges from the bathroom. He’s been in there for a while now; she could hear the medicine cabinet closing and opening. The water running.
“It’s Monday. The theater’s dark, no rehearsals,” she says. “What time is the meeting?”
He glances at his watch, has to turn it to see the watch face. It’s loose on his wrist.
“Seven?”
“Great!” She smiles. “Are you nervous?”
He shakes his head, looks at the book in his hand.
She remembers when he received the artwork for
Small Sorrows
. She remembers how well the black-and-white photo of the child floating on her back in a still lake captured the mood of the book. It still brings a lump to her throat when she sees it.
“Who’s that handsome guy?” She smiles, gesturing to the photo on the back.
He looks at her then, really looks at her, and she worries she’s said something wrong. But his face is warm, his eyes soft. He looks at the picture again and laughs. “Remember?” he asks.
She nods, shakes her head and laughs.
She thinks of a thousand things then: a meal at home in San Diego with Monty to celebrate the National Book Award nomination for
The Art of Hunting
(lobster raviolis and a bottle of Chianti), Finn riding his skateboard down the driveway that night, swerving back and forth like a dancer, the tinkling of the wind chimes on the back deck, the smell of hibiscus. She thinks about Franny twirling on the deck in that orange bathing suit, while the grown-ups drank and laughed and toasted Sam’s brilliant career. She remembers creamy sauce spilled on the tablecloth, the broken street lamp, the way Finn would be there one instant and gone the next when he rode into one of the black holes created by the absence of light. She remembers Franny falling asleep on the rusty old chaise, and she remembers the sound of dishes and glasses being cleared, the crashing of waves, and Sam’s hands. God, later, Sam’s hands on her face. How she’d said,
You’ll never forget me? When you’re accepting your Nobel Prize?
Sam’s hands on her face, on her waist, on her breast, on her thighs as he said,
No, I have you memorized.
She waves as he gets in the car to go into town for the book club meeting. She stands at the door and watches as that beast of a car backs out of the drive, as the headlights disappear into the black abyss of this starless night.
A
fter his dad takes off for his reading, and his mom is busy in the kitchen kneading dough for the
psomi,
Finn sneaks out of his room and into the night. He knows the way to the garden by feel now, like a sleepwalker navigating his midnight kitchen in search of a snack. The air is cool and wet; he pulls the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head and crams his hands in the pockets. He feels the Baggie of weed inside, measures, calculating with his fingertips exactly how long it will be before it runs out. Muppet’s connection got busted. He’s got nothing. Finn figures his stash will maybe last another week or so. If he’s careful. His sneakers are wet by the time he gets to the garden, the grass already slick with dew.
He finds the stump that he’s come to think of as his own personal smoking throne, and notices about a half dozen new toadstools growing on the bark. He plucks one off, and a familiar pain stabs at his chest.
Shit.
He’s been here before. He and Franny, a long time ago. How could he have forgotten this?
A summer years ago. Back when they were maybe seven or eight years old.
Eight
. It was the summer after second grade. He remembers, because it was the same summer he lost both of his front teeth. Every time he opened his mouth to talk, he whistled. It was also the first summer they were allowed to play outside by themselves. They discovered the junk pile in the woods first. They spent hours, days, playing among the wreckage. They had so much freedom then. He should have enjoyed it while it lasted.
One afternoon, it had been raining and they were stuck inside the cabin all day. When the sun finally came out, they’d practically bolted out the door. “Be back by dinner!” their mother had yelled after them.
They made their way through the woods to their normal spot, the place where all the junk was, and then Franny said she was bored and wanted to go exploring. Finn had shrugged his shoulders and followed her. That’s the way it worked with Franny; you just followed her lead. Everybody did.
They’d found the tree almost immediately. And back then it was alive, the craziest tree he’d ever seen. It was the perfect climbing tree, with a dozen limbs twisting and turning upward, a canopy of thick green leaves.The trunk itself was massive and gnarled, riddled with all sorts of holes, like little caves. Finn shimmied up to the top and looked down at Franny through the canopy of green.
“It’s a fairy’s castle,” Franny said, nodding.
“Look.”
Curious, Finn climbed back down, scratching his arms and legs as he descended. Franny knelt down on the damp ground, pointing to a place at the base of the tree and, sure enough, there was an arched entrance. A doorway. Finn could almost imagine the gossamer wings shimmering in the moonlight, hear the tick-ticking of their flight.
“Let’s leave a note,” she said.
“Okay.” Finn shrugged.
Franny found a piece of birch bark nearby and pulled a Magic Marker from the backpack she always carried with her. It had her spy notebook, her art supplies, and snacks.When she was finished, she rolled the bark into a tiny scroll and tied it with a piece of yarn she retrieved from a pocket in the backpack.
“What does it say?” Finn had asked.
“I can’t tell you,” she said, standing up. The knees of her jeans were soaked through.
“Why won’t you let me read it?” he had asked then, angry that she was keeping it a secret.
“It’s written in a language only fairies understand,” she had said matter-of-factly.And with that, she had bent down and stuffed the scroll into the small crevice in the tree. Finn thought about it, wondered what the words were, imagined tiny hands unrolling the scroll. Imagined the words being spoken by tiny clicking tongues.
“Let me see it,” he said.
“No, you have to wait. It won’t look like anything to you, because you don’t know fairy language.”
Finn felt the same way he felt whenever Franny made up the rules. Franny was always the one who knew the secret languages, always the one who cast the spells. He suddenly wanted to see what she’d written on the scroll more than anything in the entire world.
“That’s stupid,” Finn said. “You only know how to write in English.”
She stood with her hands on her hips and shook her head.
Anger welled up inside him like a storm. “Fairies aren’t even real,” he spat, and knew the second the words came out of his mouth that he’d made a mistake.
Franny’s eyes welled up, and she shook her head. “I’m going home. Don’t follow me. And if you touch it, you’ll mess everything up. They won’t come. They might even leave the tree. They can’t live in a place where people don’t believe in them. It makes them sick. It makes them
die,
” she said.
Finn remembered Tinker Bell then; he remembered the way they had sat on the floor of the living room in their sleeping bags watching
Peter Pan,
the way Franny had wept as Tinker Bell’s light flickered, clapped her hands furiously to keep her alive. He felt awful, like somebody punched him in the stomach. He was always messing things up. Even then.
And sure enough, the next day, the scroll was still there. The fairies had not retrieved it.
“I didn’t read it,” he had said. “I swear.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she had said, kneeling down next to the knotted stump. “They’re gone now.”
He’d seen the sorrow in her shoulders, heavy in her the way she hung her head.
“I’m sorry,” he’d said. And he was. “I didn’t mean to.”
He sits down on the stump now, looks up at the sky, and starts to roll a joint. He wonders what happened to the tree, and he thinks about all the times he let Franny down. That wasn’t the first time, and it certainly wasn’t the last. He licks the sweet edge of the paper and then lights the joint.When it’s gone, and he feels that warm quiet of his high descend, he pulls another piece of rolling paper from the pack. It is as thin as a whisper. He’s got a pencil in his pocket, and he scratches the words, in the only language he knows, onto the tiny fragile square.
I’m sorry
. And then he rolls it into a tight little scroll and stuffs it into the fairy’s doorway.
S
am enters the library and is struck, once again, by how very little has changed since he was a kid. His father would bring him to the Athenaeum on the weekends from the time he was a little boy until he was in high school. They’d have breakfast first at the Miss Quimby Diner (red flannel hash, fried eggs and homemade toast for both) and his father would bring his leftover coffee with him to the library. In the main room, his father would spread out the newspapers on the long wooden tables in the room with the fireplaces while Sam wandered the stacks of books. He dreamed about those labyrinthine stacks still, the knotty pine shelves and musty scent of the old encyclopedias. He never cared for the children’s room with its noise and colors and papier-mâché sculptures. Instead he preferred the quiet alcoves and dark corners of the upstairs. The card catalogues and books with thick creamy paper, the smell of ink settled into the pages. Later, when he came home from college, he and his father continued this tradition. He remembered the smell of the fire in the fireplace, the stain of newsprint on his father’s hands.
And later, he brought his own kids here. Finn would disappear into the basement, and Sam and Franny would wander the stacks together. When she was very small, they would play hide-and-seek in the library, quietly so they didn’t get caught. And then when she was old enough to read, she’d carry as many books as her arms could hold to the room with the cozy couches. They’d sit together, her feet curled up underneath her or her head buried into the crook of his arm.
Effie greets him at the giant double doors to the library. It is after hours, but there is a faint glow of pale peach-colored light coming from inside.
“I’m early,” he says, by way of apology, glancing at his watch even though he knows he’s not due for another fifteen minutes. He’s always been like this, too eager. Never late, not even punctual, but chronically early.
“Oh, that’s fine. Just fine. I hope this is okay,” she says, ushering him into the library and gesturing toward the reading room.
Effie has arranged a semicircle of folding chairs around the fireplace and put an overstuffed wingback chair in front of the hearth. “It looks like
Masterpiece Theatre,
” he says.
Effie laughs.
He can see that some of the book club members have already taken their seats.There is one woman rifling through her purse and another clutching a library copy of
Small Sorrows
. There is also an elderly man with a handlebar mustache dressed in overalls reading
The Wall Street Journal
. The other seats are still empty.
“Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee? Water?”
“Coffee would be great,” he says, though he knows better. He’ll be up all night. But the coffee that’s bubbling in a pot near the circulation desk smells good.
“I used to come here,” he says. “When I was growing up. My kids used to come too. But Finn ... I don’t think he’s seen the inside of a library in years.” He doesn’t know why he’s sharing this with her.
He thinks about the way the pages felt as he smoothed the books open on the table next to his father. The purity of those moments alone with his dad. He is overwhelmed by a sense of something lost. So many things lost. His father. Franny. The emptiness that is ever present, a permanent ache. But this is new, this feeling that he has let something else slip. Finn. Mena. It’s like dropping a china plate: first alarm, then regret, then just a sense of everything being shattered.
“What made you think of writing about a missing girl?” the woman sitting closest to him asks. She is wearing a thick, heady perfume. She leans in close for his answer, and he can hear the hum of her hearing aid.
“It started with a dream,” he says, speaking up so she can hear him. “When my children were still small. I had a dream where I was walking through the woods at night and suddenly arrived at the edge of a murky pond. In the water, I saw a child, floating in her nightgown. I woke up and knew that I needed to find out what had happened to her. How she came to be there.”
What he doesn’t tell them, the eager readers thumbing furiously through their copies of his novel, is that in the dream he’d seen the child’s face, and it belonged to Franny. That he thought if he wrote the words they might act as some sort of magic spell, an incantation, an inoculation against the unthinkable. What he doesn’t say is that he knew, long before it happened, that they were destined to lose her.