A Short Walk to the Bookshop

by Aleksandra Drake

  "Well, You're one of us now, for better or for worse." His voice sounded muffled as if he was speaking into my hair at the top of my head. I was overwhelmed by the scent of him, noticing how familiar it was and being perplexed until I remembered the incident with the scarf and the walk home in the dark.

  When he released me the air rushed back into my lungs and I swayed slightly.

  "I'll see you soon," He said at my door. I agreed and he left. The house was empty again. That was good. I didn't have time to be let down by the familiar silence before my phone rang in the other room. I'd been wondering when my mother would get around to calling me. I grinned as I went to answer the phone, excited to tell her about the party.

  Chapter Seven

  Sparrow looked different when she walked in to the shop. Diedrich had just opened the store and she was there within a minute. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but there was a sizable lock that hung loose at the nape of her neck that she'd missed. Her skin looked ashen and her eyes were bloodshot. Perhaps she had just woken up. He didn't know whether to be pleased that she wasn't too self conscious to come to visit him without fixing her hair first or putting on makeup, or whether he should be concerned and ask her if she was ill.

  "Good morning, Sparrow," he greeted her as usual.

  "Hey." She sounded tired, but she smiled at him.

  "Coffee?" He asked on instinct, already heading to the coffee machine rather than wait for her answer. She was still standing when he turned around to hand her a cup.

  "Do you mind if I just sit and read for a while?" she asked, taking a small sip to test the temperature of the coffee.

  "What a question! Of course I don't mind. I'll leave you to it.” He paused, not certain if a place to read was all she needed. "Unless...there's something else you need?"

  She shook her head and smiled again, but there was something subtly off about her expression that made Dietrich's heart clench. She moved towards the back of the shop where the old but comfortable couch was and Diedrich returned to counter to agonize over that interaction.

  He was so behind on book logging that even looking at the stack of new acquisitions behind the counter made him want to walk upstairs and take a nap. But he sat on the stool and quietly got to work. He'd been doing this for so many years that typing in authors and publishing dates in the spreadsheet wasn't enough to keep his mind occupied and, ten minutes later, he realized that his entire body was holding tension, straining to listen to Sparrow. On the other side of the store, he could only make out the faint shuffling sounds of her shifting in her seat or turning the pages of the book she was reading. He rolled his shoulders and loosened his jaw. If she needed him, she would ask. Wouldn't she?

  The distraction of a customer brought new noise to focus on. An elderly woman who he knew to be named Evelyn but remembered nothing else of walked in slowly, leaning heavily on a hot pink aluminum cane.

  "Good morning, Diedrich," she said and he cringed inwardly, certain that she remembered him better than he remembered her, which was never comfortable.

  Evelyn expected him to wander the shop with her, retrieving things from shelves and carrying her books. He remembered her then. Normally he didn't mind waiting on customers, but today he was unconsciously short with her. It felt like an invasion of privacy, somehow, to have someone in the shop while Sparrow was reading. He glanced at the back of the shop where she was sitting on the couch. She'd let her hair down and it created a curtain around her face as she bent over what looked like a book of poetry.

  It took an hour, but Evelyn eventually settled on her stack of books and when she left Diedrich retrieved the coffee carafe and carried it back to the little reading nook. His intention was to refill her cup, and thus to check in on her.

  When he rounded the bookcase corner, she was slumped into the corner of the couch. She'd kicked off her shoes and her bare feet were crunched up against her and she was curled up in a ball. She looked tiny.

  She was asleep.

  Athena, who was laying down on the floor near her, looked up at Diedrich intently. “What are you going to do about it?” she seemed to ask.

  Diedrich stood, holding the glass coffee carafe and not knowing what to do. Her faint, steady, breaths eddied around himself and the bookcases and the coffee, silently, but with the sensation of moving water.

  He sidled away as quietly as he could, returning the coffee to the warmer and himself to his position behind the counter. Now he was more than a bookseller, he was a guard. He hoped no one else would come in until she woke up. What if she slept there all day? Would she want him to wake her up? Should he pretend he didn't notice she was asleep?

  He decided to read.

  An hour later his hair was standing on end from how many times he'd raked his fingers through it and he slapped his book closed, hoping that it might wake her up and that she would pretend nothing had happened and nothing more would have to be said about it. But there was no sound of movement from the back corner.

  When he returned to her she was in the same position, but her head had lolled to the side in a way that she would surely regret when she woke up. He tiptoed towards her and reached out a hand to rouse her. Then he pulled it back. He had no right to touch her.

  "Sparrow?" he whispered.

  No response.

  He listened to her breathing for a moment while he gathered his courage then recklessly reached out to brush her hair away from her face. Her eyelids crinkled and she made a faintly annoyed sound.

  "Sparrow?" he whispered again.

  Eyelids fluttered open and her eyes focused on his face alarmingly. He straightened.

  "What happened?" She mumbled.

  "You fell asleep," he said, still whispering.

  "What time is it?"

  "About noon."

  She rubbed her face, digging the heel of her palms into her eyes harshly.

  "Oh my god," she groaned. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened."

  "Sparrow," he said, wondering if he could convey everything he wanted to say in those two syllables and not need to say anything more. When she glanced up at him blankly he knew he couldn't. "Are you alright?"

  "I'm fine," she said quickly. Too quickly. "I don't know what came over me. Coffee crash maybe."

  She was getting to her feet, sliding her toes back into her shoes while leaning unsteadily against the bookcase. He reached out again, lightly touching her upper arm so that her eyes darted back up to his. They seemed brighter than usual, frantically blue, set as they were in her strangely colorless face.

  "You don't look well," he stated. "You don't need to leave in a rush."

  She blinked and it felt like an invisible fishing line snapping. Suddenly, she was leaning against him, collapsing against his chest and balling her fists in the fabric of his shirt. He reflexively hugged her against him as she buried her nose into his chest. Diedrich held his breath, he couldn't tell if she was crying or not. It seemed like she might be, but she made no sound, there were no sniffs, and she was deathly still. Her lungs deflated and it made her even smaller, though it registered somewhere in his mind that she'd been holding her breath too.

  When she still didn't move, he moved his hand to her hair, brushing his fingers through it and resting his cheek on the top of her head. He wanted to tell her it was alright but the quiet was so thick it felt even more difficult than usual to open his mouth and make words come out.

  He thought he heard her mumble "sorry" but her face was turned down and he couldn't hear her.

  "Have you eaten?" he asked.

  She shook her head, still making no move to break away from him or even look up at him. After another moment he reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys. The metallic sound of them seemed to awaken her and she leaned away from him, crossing her arms over her chest and looking down. He flicked through the keys, handing them to her by the one to his apartment.

  "Go on upstairs and eat something. There's stuff for sandwiches in the pantr
y. Or leftovers in the fridge. Eat. Sleep if you want. I will walk you home when you're on your feet again."

  "I'm on my feet," she argued weakly.

  Diedrich smiled equally weakly. "Please?"

  Her fingers wrapped around his house key. She looked defeated and so very tired, but when he led her out to the stairs she walked up them and went into his apartment.

  -----

  I told myself that I was just too groggy from my weird nap to argue, but deep down I knew that it was a relief to stay in someone else's house for the day.

  I'd been awake for 48 hours when I walked to Chapter One that morning. I just needed to not be alone anymore. I needed to not be in my house. When I woke up on his couch, I couldn't remember the walk to the bookstore. The realization scared me and I was too impaired to do anything but fall into that man's arms like some kind of drunken damsel.

  He'd been so solid. He just stood there and held me. There was some part of me that knew that I would have to explain this at some point, but he thankfully didn't press the matter. He just sent me upstairs like a wayward child being sent to her room. It was easy to let someone else decide things for me then, and I walked, flatfooted and mindless, to his kitchen just like he told me to.

  As I chewed on a white bread peanut butter sandwich, I thought about how an upstairs apartment was more secure than a ground level home. No one could look in the windows. And Diedrich was downstairs in the shop with the big bay window, like a guard.

  I brushed the crumbs off my hands onto my thighs and, in a sleep-deprived trance, I pulled a throw blanket off the back of a chair and curled into his couch. Athena hopped up as well, sleeping on top of my feet.

  The last thing I remember thinking before I fell asleep was that Diedrich Vogel's blanket smelled just like him.

  I woke up to the sound of Diedrich coming in, but I pretended to still be asleep, curled into the couch, hiding my face in his blanket. Now that I had a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, I could think straight again. Meaning, I had the cognitive ability to marinate in the embarrassment of throwing myself on the compassion of a man I was still hesitant to consider a friend more than an acquaintance.

  I felt bad listening to him tiptoe around his own home, so I pretended to yawn and sat up slowly.

  "You're up," he said.

  "Seems so." I shrugged. His curtains were drawn, but there was still sunlight coming in through the cracks, illuminating speckles of book dust swirling around in the shafts of light.

  "What time is it?" I asked, feeling my pockets. I hadn't even brought my phone.

  "It's five. I closed an hour early to check in on you."

  I rubbed my hands down my face inelegantly. "You didn't have to do that. I'm okay."

  "Okay," he agreed, but I didn't buy for a second that he believed me. "I was thinking of walking to the Chinese place to get carry out."

  "I'll get out of your hair," I said, standing up and straightening my rumpled clothes as best I could.

  "That's not what I meant," he smiled, avoiding my eyes.

  "Are you worried about me?" He was standing over the little table in what could generously be called the dining room. It was covered in piles of books. I hadn't noticed anything when I walked in the apartment. I realized now that I hadn't noted anything in particular because the upstairs looked just like the shop downstairs. More abandoned coffee mugs and bits of clothing strewn about, but that was the only real difference.

  "Do you mind my worrying?" he answered back.

  I picked up a paperback western from the top of a pile and flipped through the pages absently.

  "I thought I was tired of people worrying about me. But...no. I don’t mind. Thank you."

  “Let’s go before the sun sets,” he said, putting his hand between my shoulder blades.

  I nodded and hurried to put my shoes and jacket back on. I scraped the hair tie off my wrist and tied my hopelessly tangled hair back out of my face and then we were off. The metal stairs down to the street shook ominously.

  "How old is this building?" I asked conversationally, dreading the coming conversation when I would have to explain to him why I had acted to strangely that day.

  He shrugged. "Old. Too old, probably."

  The confrontation I was expecting never came. We walked down to the Chinese place. Ordered. Walked back. And sat down on his couch to eat without more than ten more words being spoken. Somewhere between chow mien and egg rolls I realized that he was never going to ask me what was wrong or demand an explanation. I think he just wanted to directly witness me eating as some kind of measurable marker of my health.

  "I found an interesting book," he said, breaking through the silence with difficulty.

  "Hm?" I looked up, mouth full of oily noodles.

  "Yeah.." He got up to fetch a slim paperback then settled back in. "It's not that common for books in German to come into my shop. But this woman came by with a small stack of them. They seemed mostly like German study curriculum, dictionaries and things, but there was this..."

  He held out the book for me to see. I could tell it was poetry because of the cover. Only books of poetry are allowed to have such ugly covers.

  I swallowed my food. "Will you read to me?"

  I watched the muscles in his neck work as he swallowed too, though he wasn't eating.

  "Sure."

  Things were subtly different now, after I had thrown myself into his arms downstairs. How he'd touched my back at the dining table. How we'd walked so close that our elbows brushed three separate times. Now that I'd touched him once, there seemed to be an understanding that I could do it again and it would be okay. Nothing would come of it and it would be okay. He wouldn't say anything.

  To test my theory, I put my food down on the coffee table and leaned back into the couch, nudging my shoulder against his upper arm and sort of leaning my head near his shoulder.

  As expected, he didn't move an inch. He started reading. I couldn't understand a word of it, but that doesn't matter so much with poems.

  "I am just so tired," I whispered five poems in. "I'm tired all the time. Every second. I go to bed tired and I wake up exhausted. I feel like I've been up for years, never getting any rest."

  I was rambling. I knew I was. But it felt so good to just lean against his bones and close my eyes and let the words bubble up and pop into the air without stopping to make sure they were sensible or that anyone wanted to hear them.

  "It seems to me," He began in a comfortable, sleepy voice. One that sounded like he was just waking up. "That there are a few different ways to be tired. Are you tired because you need sleep? Or are you tired because you need peace?"

  I let myself become heavier against him.

  Both. Obviously it was both.

  "I'm having a hard time falling asleep lately," I said, artfully lying by omission.

  Diedrich's chest rose and fell with a slow breath and he lifted his arm to wrap around my shoulders. I appreciated his silence. His not needing to try to fix me. He held space for me to think things through on my own, comforting me with gentle touches that soothed my skin hunger but never made my stomach roil with the fear of escalation.

  I didn't want to tell him about the door locking rituals, the constant feeling of never being alone. I didn't want to test the limits of his ability to not try to enforce his own ideas of how I should be healing.

  "Sparrow," he began, nearly whispering himself. Why was it that it was so damned quiet every time we spoke? Like we didn't want to interrupt the birds or the rain so we waited until everything was absolutely silent and still before opening our mouths. "I’m grateful to you that you have shared this with me. I'm glad that I know what's troubling you. I don't know how to help, but whatever you need, you can just ask me.”

  There was a pause in which I knew he was not only talking about the insomnia, but about the whole mess of it, my life, my health.

  "I charge my phone by my bed," he said.

  I tilted my head to look up at hi
m as he spoke. His face was becoming so familiar now that there was a simple comfort in the slope of the bridge of his nose and the slight asymmetry of his mouth.

  "So, if you are up late, and need something or want to hear another voice, you can call me. I'll wake up. It's no problem."

  I was feeling much better until later when he walked me home and my house came within sight. Everything, from the short fence covered with climbing weeds to the dirty white porch swing, spoke terror to me. If had too many panic attacks there now, it didn’t have any of that Fresh House Smell anymore. Athena seemed happy to be home, but every part of me was screaming to latch onto Diedrich's elbow and beg him to take me back to his place with him. He'd already done so much for me, though, and I couldn't stay suction cupped to his side for the rest of my life.