The Mysterious Disappearance of the Reluctant Book Fairy (2 page)

Thus did Monie Reardon get cast into the pages of
To Kill a Mockingbird
in order to witness the attack beneath the great oak tree and to take careful note of exactly who was wielding the knife upon whom. And can it otherwise be believed that Monie came back an altered individual? She was wide-eyed and open-mouthed and aside from “That Jem Finch is
adorable
,” her only remark upon her return to the potting shed was, “How did you
do
that?” which was quickly followed by, “More! More!”

It would have been lovely had Monie been able to keep this skill of Janet's to herself, but this was an impossibility, for Monie was a talker. In very short order, Janet found herself with a line of schoolmates outside the potting shed, all of them wanting to “do the book thing,” as Monie so unromantically called it.

Harry Potter's world was, naturally, the choice of many of the boys. Most of girls wanted Edward and Jacob to be in love with
them
instead of Bella. So tedious, repetitive, and downright pedestrian did the demands for literary travel become that Janet began sending individuals where
she
felt they best belonged which, as you can probably imagine, was not a popular move.

To the boys who wanted to ride a broomstick during a game of quidditch, she gave the voyage to Colchis in the company of Jason to have a look for the Golden Fleece. To the girls who believed their lives could not possibly be complete without a vampire's love, she offered the passion of Mr. Rochester discovering his life's great love in plain Jane Eyre. Greeted with the complaints of the literary travelers she so generously accommodated in her woodland potting shack, Janet's retort would be, “Hey! Try reading a decent book for once,” herself not being drawn to the great commercial successes of her day. For her were the Greek and Roman myths, the great masterpieces of Victorian literature, the tales of derring do penned by America's mighty writers. And never one to be dragged along as part of a crowd, Janet was a girl who stuck to her literary guns. Thus over time, her grousing school companions either fell by the wayside or became her devotees. There was, as it developed, no middle ground.

So things went for her: through middle school (providing Gilbert Blythe's proposal to Anne Shirley to the romantically inclined; introducing Natty Bumppo's adventures in a juvenile America to those wanting a bit more action) and through high school (a half hour on the rolling decks of the
Pequod
for the boys, Portia putting the psychological thumbscrews to Shylock for the girls). There was plenty of scope during this latter period once Janet became enamored of Dickens, as well. How about a meet and greet with Magwitch? No problem. Want to see what Bob Sikes was truly like? That could also be arranged.

The conclusion of high school brought the big change: both to Janet Shore and to what she did with her curious talent. For off she went to college where she was drawn to library studies (can there be any surprise in that?) and where, unfortunately, cupid's arrow pierced her heart for the first and last time.

Can there be any doubt that, in the mind of a young woman given to taking literature into her very heart, true love exists? Is there any reader of this tale who would argue
against
the likelihood of Janet Shore's locking eyes with a dark-haired stranger across a crowded room and knowing that love can happen in an instant? A reader of this tale might wish to try, but all the arguing would be in vain. For across the crowded Vegetarian Medley station of her university's student dining room, Janet spied one Chadbourne Hinton-Glover. And while the double barreled surname should have told her much and his startling resemblance to Charlie Sheen should have told her more, all she could see was the blaze in his eyes and all she could assume as that blaze devoured her soul—as she would tell it later—was that they had been struck simultaneously by a thunderbolt of love that was bigger than both of them, as these things generally were.

Although she'd been at the Vegetarian Medley station for reasons having largely to do with corn muffins, she became a vegetarian instantly. A question to Chadbourne Hinton-Glover about quinoa (which she disastrously mispronounced in such a manner as nearly to give away her entire omnivorous history prior to the moment) led to earnest talk about puy lentils, the virtues of sprouted nuts, the value of cracked wheat versus whole wheat, and what
tempeh
(also terribly mispronounced) could be transformed into in the hands of a skilled chef. By the time Chadbourne and Janet had worked their way to the end of the Vegetable Medley station and were presenting their food cards to the attendant, they were a couple.

Unfortunately for Janet, the love that bloomed between them was a fragile thing: a rhododendron blossom best left on the bush and not plucked and put into water where it will quickly fade and die. In her innocence Janet did not see this, for even if things turned out disastrously for them, had not Heathcliff and Cathy shared an eternal love? Had not Gabriel waited faithfully for that silly Bathsheba to come to her senses? Jude had Sue and if it hadn't worked out (when one's children are killed at the hands of their half-sibling, it rarely does), how they had worshipped each other for a time! And that was point: the time, its length, which was supposed to be longer than four months in duration.

Janet gave herself to the relationship whole-heartedly, for she knew from her novel reading that there was no other way. For Dorothea Brooke had finally found bliss in the arms of Will Ladislaw, had she not, even if it had taken a good while—not to mention a hell of a lot pages—for her to arrive at this position? So like the innocent she was, she became Chadbourne's schoolmate, soulmate, and bedmate in very short order, eschewing the company of her immediately erstwhile female friends who could have told her much about Chadbourne's proclivity to allow his hands and lips and other body parts to roam as much as he allowed his eyes to do so.

Discovering him enthusiastically engaged with a bronzed Brazilian swimming goddess drove a stake into Janet's heart. The fact that he was embroiled with the young woman upon the Egyptian cotton sheets that Janet had saved her part-time job money to purchase was a further blow. The additional horror of Chadbourne not actually recognizing Janet as his beloved when she came into the room and found him entwined in the arms and legs of the bronzed Brazilian swimming goddess made matters so devastating that no later claim of being without his contact lenses at the moment of discovery could go any distance toward salving the wounds to Janet's heart and soul. She decamped at once, taking her sheets with her.

When one's first great love is so cruelly revealed to be a rodent, recovery is often difficult, and this was the case for Janet. She left the university forthwith and threw herself into the only thing she could come up with to rescue what little self-esteem she had left: an alternative life style. This involved two years of travel on a converted school bus with a merry band of do-nothings who had been deeply influenced by the film
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
and who had made the decision to duplicate as much of that adventure as they could, albeit on the west coast of the United States. This duplication was achieved through several very long drives to Burning Man during which the music of ABBA played at a disturbing volume, copious amounts of dope were smoked, and alternative garb was created, dependent heavily upon sequins, beads, bell-bottom trousers, and very tight and very plunging tops. And while the ancient school bus did not, alas, make it to Burning Man for a third go (having broken down repeatedly and finally irreparably in Arcada, California), Janet did ultimately find herself in a welcoming community of earnest back-to-the-landers who reminded her of her own family, who treaded the earth in Birkenstocks and flannel, and who expressed their individuality by changing their names from those chosen by The Birthers, as they referred to their parents, to something more reflective of who they were striving to be.

Hence, Annapurna. It must be admitted that Janet chose this name merely for its mellifluous nature. She found that it gave her a sense of being more than she was and of hiding away that part of her that had been so crushed by Chadbourne Hinton-Glover. So she remained Annapurna and she remained in Arcada, California, for fifteen more years till the amount of rainfall and the long bleak winters and a letter from her old friend Monie Reardon—now Monie Reardon Pillerton—suggested a change was in order.

Monie Reardon Pillerton knew about Chadbourne, of course. She knew of the school bus adventure and its final demise in Arcada. She knew that her old friend Janet Shore was no more and in her place was Annapurna. But she also knew of a job that had become available on Whidbey Island, and it was her earnest belief that Janet-who-had-been and Annapurna-who-now-was would be perfect for this position. It must be said that Monie also had an ulterior motive for enticing Annapurna back to Whidbey Island. Married for twelve years to the world's most faithful man who was, alas, also the world's biggest dullard, she had produced four children in quick succession thinking they might at least provide conversation in the evening prior to lights out. Unfortunately, Monie soon discovered that the production of offspring alone could not a thrilling marriage make. However, not wanting to divorce the man—for how can one divorce someone whose greatest sin is merely to be boring?—Monie was aching for some kind of excitement and when she saw the position of town librarian advertised in the
South Whidbey Record
, her memory of dazzling hours spent inside the cemetery potting shed in the company of everyone from Nancy Drew to Hester Prynne was sparked. Oh, to have at least that much escape from the well-meaning but terminally dull Dwayne Pillerton! To have a few hours away from laundry, housecleaning, grocery shopping, cooking, dog walking, and the required attendance at youthful athletic events! To Monie Reardon Pillerton, the return of the long gone Janet Shore in the person of Annapurna was the answer to what had gone badly wrong in her life. So she got herself appointed to the search committee for the new librarian, penned the letter to Annapurna, and set about making absolutely certain that Annapurna was the chosen one.

Thus Annapurna returned not only to the island of her birth but also to the town in which she had grown up. She had been gone for years, of course, and while she had stayed in communication with her parents and siblings during the long period of her travels and the longer period of her life in Arcada, California, she had no wish to engage intimately in family matters. She longed to live a life she had become used to: one of isolation, contemplation, and self-recrimination. For she had not, you see, been able to forgive the Janet Shore-who-had-been for her youthful errors in love. That young person's mindless and utterly naïve devotion to matters literary had led her to heartbreak at the hands of a soulless man, and so grave had her heartbreak been that Annapurna had not once allowed herself to become remotely close to any individual—male or female—since. Indeed, she'd kept those Egyptian cotton sheets as a reminder to trust and give her heart to no one, and if they became softer and softer with repeated washings as promised and if their 500 thread-count allowed for their astounding durability, they also served as testimony to the fact that happily ever after can last six months or less and can end in an excruciating betrayal if one does not keep one's eyes peeled for telltale signs of a fellow human's fallibility from the moment of introduction to the moment of that fallibility's inevitable appearance.

Thus it must be said that she felt no loyalty or kinship to anyone on Whidbey Island despite being the actual kin of at least fifty-two individuals at this point, her siblings having grown up to be a familially ambitious and remarkably fecund group. Her only relationship of any note was with Monie Reardon Pillerton who, over skinny vanilla lattes one late afternoon at the village's trendiest coffee house, worked what had been a desultory conversation about persistent tooth decay in her eldest child into a reminiscence of Annapurna's decades-long dormant ability to propel herself and other people into a literary scene of their desire.

“Oh, I don't do that any longer, Monie,” was met with a stare of outright incredulity.

“But … but … but why not?” followed that stare, for it was inconceivable to Monie Reardon Pillerton that such a talent would not be used on a daily basis, especially if one had small children whose continuous squabbling and frequent demands for maternal attention begged to be met either by a quick trip down the rabbit hole with Alice or a tag-along with the Pied Piper of Hamlin. Monie, however, was not likely to say such a thing about her children to Annapurna. Rather she pointed out to her old friend—in somewhat sonorous tones, it must be admitted—the responsibility one had to use one's God given talents for the good of mankind.

Annapurna, however, was not to be moved on this issue. She had suffered too much at the hands of her own talent, as we know, having prompted within herself a belief in happy endings following hard on the heals of true love (it must be admitted that she'd never been a great fan of
Romeo and Juliet
, from which she should have learned much on this topic), which had led her to abject misery.

For Monie, there was only one recourse. Annapurna had to be exposed to children to enhance her understanding of a mother's need for blessed escape. Not just any children would do, of course. Annapurna needed exposure to Monie's own. For surely two or three hours in their company—particularly when they were ravenous with hunger—would be sufficient to encourage within Annapurna a desire to help her old friend—if no one else—through the simple means of a dreamy escape to … Monie had been delving a great deal into Monte Carlo lately, having just completed her tenth reading of
Rebecca
. Just the scene in which Maxim proposes to the unnamed narrator, she told Annapurna. Really, that's
all
that she would ask although she was also partial to the thrilling moment of “
I
am Mrs. de Winter now,” that so memorably put the evil Mrs. Danvers in her place. Of course, that foul creature ended up setting fire to Manderley as a possible result of this moment of assertion on the narrator's part, but some things, Monie knew, could not be helped.