A Short Walk to the Bookshop

by Aleksandra Drake

  "Lovely day." He said to me as he reached down to pat her nose. I didn't know if he was being sarcastic or not. With anyone else, I would assume that they were, given the greyness and the persistent drizzle. But Diedrich’s eyes smiled through the raindrops on his glasses as if it were sunny and warm.

  "It is."

  Not knowing how to continue, I shifted slightly to the side to keep walking, but Diedrich turned around and walked a few steps with me in the direction he had already come. He didn't say anything, and when I didn't tell him to scram he settled into step with Athena and I.

  "I decided I would walk in the park because I thought you might be tired of us." I said when we were rounding the corner of the playground and heading into the wooded area of the path.

  "Tired of you?" He asked, looking confused "Not at all. Part of the reason why I opened a bookshop was so that people would come to me and save me the trouble of having to maintain friendships."

  Athena, who had been walking between Diedrich and I, quickened slightly and pulled ahead of me when I laughed and touched her ear.

  "I guess you’re closed today though. I didn't even consider..."

  "Yes, it's Sunday."

  "I just assumed the bookshop is always open," I said thoughtfully.

  "Well, the doors are closed on Sundays, but I'm just upstairs. For emergencies,” he explained.

  "I think it's very romantic that you live above the shop. When I'm in the store...it sort of feels like I'm at your place. If that makes sense. It feels home-y there."

  "Blurring the lines between my private and professional lives often has the effect of making me feel like I should always be working, and feeling guilty when I'm not, even if there isn't much more to be done" he said. A group of starlings pecking the ground across the trail ahead of us burst into flight in a sudden flurry of movement.

  "Oh. Sorry,” I said.

  Though he was watching the birds as they now flew over the nearby trees, it was understood that his smile was for me. "I'm not sorry. I just didn't know what else to say. But I should let you get on with your walk.”

  It took a bit of convincing him that it was fine. In fact, I was happy to have him with me. It was easier than walking alone. He was so quiet, being with him wasn’t any more strenuous than being alone. We listened to the rain dripping off the trees and the crunching of our footfalls on the poorly maintained trail.

  He was watching Athena and, from the corner of my eye, I watched him. It was surprising to me that he hadn’t asked about her yet. Probably he thought it might be rude to draw attention to the fact that there must be something wrong with me.

  "When I moved here, I wasn't sure if I wanted to have Athena wear her vest or not. She's not required to, legally. But it keeps people from asking questions. Like, I can take her inside places. I know it makes people wonder about me though and I didn't know if I wanted to be so obvious." I started talking, letting one sentence run into the next recklessly. Diedrich didn't say anything, but his eyes were on me and that was almost as bad as talking. A shiver ran down my spine and my hands trembled as I spoke.

  "The thing is, I thought it would be a good idea to move into grandma's house way up here because no one would know anything about me and it would be good to have a blank slate. But that's a problem too, because it means that, if anyone is going to know about me, I have to tell them." I glanced up at him but quickly looked away. He was still watching.

  "Telling it is hard." I said quietly, then I laughed "I've been thinking about when you said you could learn a lot about a person by the books they read. I've been wondering what I'd have to read to tell you without telling you."

  "I didn't have any intention of asking,” he said just as quietly "Do you want me to know?"

  I nodded, and I did. It would be easier if I could tell him about how I was feeling. I hadn’t been planning on unlocking my tragic backstory to anyone that day, but looking around at the dripping cedars and pines, I thought then was as good a time as ever. If we were going to be friends, he had to know, because how much of me was there left to know outside of what had happened? Not much. Not much at all.

  "Back in Texas, I had a stalker. For a while. Well, we aren't sure how long. At least two months. There were times when he was in my house. He stole things. It really scared me. And even when it seemed like he'd gone, I couldn't stop feeling like I was being watched all the time. Even in my house. Just...all the time. Every minute. I couldn't get over it. I still can't, sometimes, even after moving. I guess it really messed me up." My words came out choppy and staccato.

  He was quiet and immediately I regretted saying anything. This was a lot. Too much to spout off to a casual friend, even if he was my only one.

  "Of course it did,” he said finally. "I'm sorry that happened to you."

  I nodded, my ears growing hot. He touched my arm very softly but enough to make me stop and forced me to look up at him. He looked so kind, full of concern. I swallowed thickly, wavering between embarrassment and relief. Now he knew. And he was good, he would care. He'd ask in on me if I got worse.

  "Words aren't so easy for me,” he said "But I really am sorry. That shouldn't have happened to you."

  Stupid tears pricked my eyes and I pressed my lips together to keep my chin from wobbling like some kind of cartoon character. I thought with horror that he might try to hug me. It looked like he was thinking about it.

  "Words aren't easy for you? Really?" I managed a watery smile.

  He rose to his full height and scoffed casually. I realized then that he'd been slouching, lowering himself to my height. When he started walking again, looking straight ahead, it was a relief from the intense attention but it also felt like stepping outside into the cold.

  "How does Athena help?" he asked conversationally.

  I exhaled deeply, my nerves settling back down to normal. "Mainly she just stays near me. Usually that's enough. But she can sort of tell when I'm scared and she can give me an excuse to leave places. Like, she'll act like she needs to go out even if she doesn't so I can get out of social interactions. Also, she runs in first into my house. You remember."

  He nodded silently.

  "She runs in and turns on the lights, checking that all the rooms are empty before I go in. She'll do that any time I ask her, actually. And she's been trained to alert me if there's someone tailing behind me."

  "That's incredible." He said, watching as the border collie in question happily padded along next to us. "I'm glad you have her."

  "Me too."

  We lapsed into silence again but I was getting used to it now. For the rest of the circuit around the park, we didn't speak at all save for maybe a comment or two on the birds or the smell of the rain. His presence was soothing and my shoulders relaxed more than they normally could whenever I was out in public. Diedrich felt like a buffer between me and the outside world. Being near him felt like being inside, warm and hidden.

  "Do you want me to walk you home?" He asked when we had circled back around to the playground near the road.

  "Oh, no. Thank you. I am fine, really,” I said. "Thank you for listening to me, but I'm okay."

  "I'll see you around then,” he said, waving.

  Walking along the road back towards home, winding around the puddles, I was cold. Walking alone had lost much of its appeal in the past hour.

  Chapter Six

  Diedrich woke up with an intense itch to throw away everything he owned and start over. This happened to him sometimes. Most of the time he was a bit of a packrat. He could never throw away things that had once belonged to someone he loved or things that people had bought for him. That he collected books to an unusual and occasionally alarming extent went without saying. But some days he just wanted to throw everything out the second-story window.

  He was antsy as he made his coffee, buttered his toast, put on his shoes and combed his hair. The monotony did nothing to quiet his nerves, if anything it made them worse. Before going down to open the store
that morning he went on a purge of his medicine cabinet, throwing away expired cold medicines and half-empty containers of crumbled antacids. It helped momentarily to take that grocery bag full of old medicine down to the dumpster behind the building, but that feeling didn't last.

  In the store the feeling was even worse than upstairs, somehow. The spines of certain books that had been on the shelves for years without so much as being glanced at mocked him. It was so still and quiet downstairs that it was deafening. Not for the first time he thought that he should get some kind of radio down there to fill up the space in his head. As always, he decided against it and instead started tearing apart the Westerns section with gusto. This section always got to him. The whole shop was full of decaying old books and dust but the westerns all had these yellow covers to portray the mood of the old west, and the illustrations and colors made the whole section seem dirtier than the rest of the shop.

  He'd brought the westerns to the front of the store in an effort to get them to move faster, but that had been a fruitless business move. He decided to move them back, switching them with the slightly more active sci-fi section.

  He funneled armloads of books back and forth between the two sections of the store, his mind going pleasantly blank in the hustle. He was only occasionally interrupted by bookstore patrons. For the most part he spent the entire morning pacing back and forth, creating stacks, and rearranging things.

  When he found himself surrounded by teetering piles of books on the ground, he paused, sighing deeply. Throwing everything out a window would have been much easier than all this. The street outside was dead on that Thursday afternoon. If a customer came in he would step over the wall of unshelved books on the floor and laugh at his own fit of hubris. With no conveniently distracting customer making an appearance, he rationalized that, really, he deserved a cup of coffee as a reward for all the work he had already done.

  When Sparrow came in wearing her work shirt and carrying a shopping bag, it was an hour later and he was standing in the arts and crafts section reading about the lace knitting traditions of Estonia.

  “What’cha doin’?” She asked him with a wry grin.

  “Reading,” he replied.

  There was a pause, and when he looked up she was smiling and raising an eyebrow.

  “Oh, you mean the mess,” he said, remembering the chaos he’d left in the Westerns and Sci-Fi sections.

  “Yes, I mean the mess,” she laughed. She had a sweet laugh, quiet usually, and shy. Every time she laughed it seemed like she was doing it despite an effort to hold it in.

  "I'm shuffling the deck. Swapping the sci-fi and western sections." He put the Estonian knitting book back on the shelf.

  "This is the arts and crafts section," she said.

  Diedrich raked his fingers through his hair as he looked at the mess in dismay.

  "Yes, well, I always deeply regret shuffling once I make it halfway through."

  "So why..?"

  "A small town bookshop like this does almost all of its business with a core group of regulars." He picked up a stack of Westerns and brought them up to the Sci-Fi section, pausing for her to follow him. "Most of my customers walk in and know exactly where they are going and they make a bee-line for the same aisle every time. The thing is, they see mostly the same books every time they come. Shuffling the deck confuses them. If I move things around, they might notice a book for the first time even though they've seen it a hundred times."

  "Well, let me help you then,” she said "It's not so bad..."

  "I can only pay you in coffee and my glittering companionship," he warned. "And besides, you came to eat lunch, right?"

  He motioned at the shopping bag she was holding. Since she had gotten a job at the market across the street, she had taken to visiting him during her lunch break and eating at the table at the back of the store. Occasionally one of the guys would be in at the same time and they'd sit together at the table and chat. Diedrich had come to look forward to these little islands of company in the middle of his quiet days.

  "I can eat fast," she said.

  Diedrich frowned, then shrugged, then tossed a few more novels on top of the stack she was carrying. "Fair enough."

  While she sat at the table and tore through her lunch bag, Diedrich went back to the task at hand, reluctantly putting the knitting book away. Knowing that Sparrow would be throwing away part of her lunch break to, essentially work for him for free, lit a fire under him. By the time she appeared, freshly fed and waiting for direction, he had made another respectable dent in the job.

  "Just start grabbing handfuls from that pile there." He said, pointing with his toe because his hands were full. "Bring them to the front where the other ones are and get them on the shelf. As you put them up, double check that they're in correct alphabetical order."

  Now that he had someone else there working on it with him, he felt silly for getting so overwhelmed in the first place. They stood side by side in the newly shelved westerns section near the back of the shop and worked silently. Many of the novels were not in correct alphabetical order, probably his own fault. She sat on the ground, working on the bottom row while he worked at the top.

  She was even quieter than usual, and seemed to be getting more quiet as the hour went on. Much of her enthusiasm had dwindled, it seemed.

  "You really don't have to help, you know. You can just relax," he said.

  "I know," she rebutted "I'd rather not sit there with nothing to do while you work.” Her tone seemed a bit short to him, and he wondered if he'd done something to upset her. He couldn't think of what it might have been, he'd hardly said two words to her since she'd arrived.

  Maybe that was the problem.

  "Are you alright?" he asked, hoping that it was an appropriately friendly thing to ask.

  "Yeah. Just tired."

  "Long day at work?"

  She dropped both of her hands into her lap as she sat there with her legs crossed on the floor. Diedrich stopped alphabetizing to look down at her.

  "No, not really. Long night. I can't seem to get to sleep these days."

  "Is that out of the ordinary for you?"

  She looked up at him and gave him a fake smile. "No. I should be used to it. It just catches up with me sometimes." She stood up and wiped her hands on her black work pants. "I better head back to work."

  "I’ll repay you for helping me." Diedrich promised without knowing how he would do that.

  "That's alright. Don't worry about it."

  She was gone as suddenly as she had appeared and, even though the job he'd started was then nearly done, he found he'd gotten no satisfaction form that interaction at all. Spending time with Sparrow always left him off kilter somehow, either with a quiet excitement at having a new acquaintance, or with a foreboding impression that's he'd hurt her feelings somehow or made her angry.

  He wondered if her inability to sleep was related to the situation with her stalker, and he hoped that if she needed someone to talk to that she knew he was available.

  The insidious dissatisfaction that he'd woken up with was no better by the time he closed up the shop that evening. He was unsettled. And, unusually for him, he couldn't sleep that night either. He felt like there was a tempest raging in his mind but there was no single, concrete thing he was worrying about or turning over. He was just...unsettled. He laid in bed, wondering if Sparrow was up and how much it would cost to rent a dumpster. He thought about Catherine, and how she would always put him at ease one way or another, even in the tumultuous days of his adolescence. She'd always been the equalizer, the practical one. He wondered how long it would take for him to get back to his accepted normal this time.

  -----

  After a while the horror of the facebook page began to fade. The fear that he was out there looking for me still crept in from time to time, especially at night, but the original nauseating horror of it had passed. And then, one morning, the lilacs bloomed.

  I passed that brambly bush by
the mailbox every time I went out, but in the winter it had never drawn my attention. My eyes simply slid off of it, not noticing it at all. I'd never visited my grandma in the spring, so I'd never known the plant by the mailbox as anything but background foliage.

  It was almost warm that day. The sun was stronger than it had been since I'd moved in and it warmed the bundles of tiny purple flowers. I walked into the scent like walking into a wall. The scent of lilac is like nostalgia itself. Not a nostalgia for any particular time or place, but just the essential feeling of it. I hunched down, crouching close to the bush and listening to the fat bumblebees that drifted lazily through its leaves, and by the time I realized the time, I'd waited too long to walk to work. Hastily plucking one of the bunches from the bush I took the car and drove into town.