The Library of Lost Things

by Laura Taylor Namey

  five months or yesterday.

  —Andrea Wells, in the blank space after Chapter 11 in

  J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan

  I wasn’t certain I’d heard my mom correctly. So hungry for answers, I’d faced her directly and prepared my heart for anything. But her revelation was another kind of anything. “What do you mean, you left me?” My throat burned. “I’ve lived with you all my life.”

  Andrea Wells spoke to the carpet. “You were such a beautiful baby, Darcy. So beautiful.”

  “Mom.”

  She didn’t hear me, and the words continued to spill out of her. “After I first had you, I thought David would eventually come back. He had to see you. But it got harder as you grew and that day never came. I was so devastated, so broken and alone. It took me over, and I started to...envy the fact that he was able to scrap all the difficult parts and move on.” One hand flipped. “Just move away and forget I had ever happened.” She pierced my face with wild eyes. “Forget you had ever happened.”

  My body squeezed and contracted. Sometimes truth was like this. Sometimes it pruned like a blade through growing things. “When?” I whispered.

  Silence.

  “When, Mom? Tell me.”

  “You were nine months old.”

  Oh. A baby. Just a little baby.

  “I—we—were still living at your grandparents’ house. One night, I...”

  “Say it.”

  She shook her head.

  “Say it. Once and for all.” Saying it makes it real.

  “I decided to run, too,” she raced out, as if time and choice had finally caught up to her. “I chose to leave and start again, all on my own. I packed my clothes and left a note. I just knew you’d be better off with Grandma and Grandpa. They loved and cared for you, so much. I was such a failure, and you deserved so much more.”

  Nine months old.

  “I got in the car and drove east. I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t even thinking straight. I slept in the car or stayed with friends, then even friends of friends. I was so stupid, so rash.”

  “But you—”

  “I was gone sixteen weeks. I missed your first birthday.” She held up shaking fingers. “After four months, I broke again. I was staying with an old college friend, and her sister brought over her new baby. I realized what I’d done and how unforgivably I’d behaved. I began to see around myself and suffered a terrible hole in my heart for you. For my baby. I called your grandparents and told them I was coming home as fast as I could drive.” Step by step, she moved backward, sitting as the blue tweed couch met her legs. “Back to you.”

  Then, silence.

  * * *

  For the first time in four years, Grandma Wells stood in the doorway to our apartment. Bleary-eyed and disheveled, I moved aside to let her in. She sneezed and drew a handkerchief from her purse.

  I knew she would come; some things were bigger than pride and boundaries. When I’d called a half hour ago, my voice taut with emotion, I asked her to do something that was probably the most difficult thing I’d asked in eighteen years: to come here and be a mother again.

  Grandma—this woman who had mothered me for four months, and hidden it for eighteen years—stepped through the door. I led her through the walled path of boxes and gestured to the couch. My mother was burrowed there behind too many pillows.

  “Andrea.” Grandma Wells looked her over, shaking her head on a sigh.

  Hearing the voice of her own mother, Andrea Wells lifted her head. “She knows. She knows what I did.”

  “Eighteen years, you hid this from me,” I said, turning to Grandma Wells. “That night you decided to start telling me some truths, you left out the biggest one of all.”

  Grandma’s face wilted, like delicate petals under heat. “I couldn’t, Darcy. Your mother was already too fragile and unstable. And it was her burden to share with you.”

  Mom stood in a tempest I didn’t expect, raking hands through her hair. “Don’t blame her. I begged her never to tell, made her promise. When I came back, I had to beg, too. I had to swear to my own parents that I could be a fit, caring mother. That I would never abandon you again.”

  I tried, but couldn’t pull the words from my blood. They flowed on, part of me now.

  Grandma Wells moved into my space and set both hands on my shoulders. “We allowed your mother to take you again, but watched her every move. We got her into her own place and urged her to return to work. She needed that. Grandpa and I took care of you during the day, but we noticed when she began collecting things. We tend to do that in our family, but with her, it was truly a lot of things. Still, at that time, it was nothing like what you live in now.”

  My arms spread wide. “If not because of my father, then why? How did it get to this?”

  “Darcy, the more you grew, the more extraordinary you became,” my mother said.

  Extraordinary. I’d heard that word before, from lips I trusted more.

  “I read to you every night, but at three years old, you were reading back to me. Not baby books—actual literature, light-years away from usual. You started reciting Jane Austen and Shakespeare in kindergarten and first grade, taking over English lessons at school—your teachers called me, dumbfounded. Then you started memorizing everything.”

  I nodded. “But what does—”

  “I left you!” she cried. “I was given this extraordinary creature to love, and I was so selfish, I left her. Every child is a gift. No child deserves to be abandoned. But to me, you were the kind of child I didn’t even dare to dream of having. Someone far beyond me. The kind who can change worlds with her brilliant mind and spirit.” Her eyes flooded now. “And I came too close to missing out on all of it. Every book I picked up—pages you could read so easily—taunted me.”

  I pushed out a breath. “You felt guilty. So you rejected books because I was good at them?”

  Mom looked through my room to her old collection, then back to me, finally nodding. This idea was so new, I couldn’t speak any more around it until Grandma laid her palm on my back.

  “Yes, Darcy. Guilt made this hoard, not lost love,” she said. “Books reminded your mother of what she left behind.”

  “I tried,” Mom said, her voice low and muffled. “I tried and tried to fill the hole I made. I’m still trying to fill it, fill my home over and over again. I have to pull things into my world, because it helps cover that ugly part who recklessly gave away just one thing. The most extraordinary and precious one. You.”

  Did she think the constant buying could change her into a keeper instead of an abandoner? I didn’t ask—I couldn’t, because my past flashed over the rest of my thoughts. “But you lied! When we went to counseling, the psychologist said you could begin to break the hoarding cycle by admitting the reason out loud. By owning it and moving on from there with all the coping techniques he taught us. You stood in that office and talked about my father abandoning you, and leaving this gaping hole you had to fill. But that wasn’t the real reason or the whole story. That wasn’t the truth.”

  I saw it now, clear as glass. “And that’s why you’ve never been able to stop. Why all those techniques have only bandaged you, and us, but have never healed anything.”

  Then, to my grandmother: “And you—you knew. You sat there and listened to her half-truths and let them ride. Let us drown.” I picked up items, throwing them, destroying them—I didn’t care. “Drowning in wood, in plastic. In cloth and porcelain.”

  I grabbed my tote. It was my turn to leave. My family was good at it. Both women called after me, but I ran out into the dusk. No books came with me. I needed to fit myself into real life.

  As the Honda’s engine turned, images swarmed my head anyway. They wouldn’t stop. Not from Pride and Prejudice or Bone Gap, or from any title from my bookcase. These scenes came from my own memory—from so many years ago and days ago and months ago.

  When I was in the seventh grade, most of us turned thirteen. I got invited to a lot of sleepo
ver birthdays because a couple girls decided that was the best way to celebrate thirteen, and we should all do it. I even went to some of them. October, it would’ve been my turn.

  Spring of junior year, Bryn went rogue for three hours from rice cakes and protein powder. In a group text, she declared she was gonna jump in her car and raid everyone’s pantries. Be ready. Marisol was waiting in her doorway with homemade plantain chips. People started filming the goofiest, giggliest Bryn ever, and we watched the edited montage of all her snacking videos the next day.

  And just last week, Asher texted a last-minute idea to pick me up from my house for dinner at this cool café in La Jolla, before we went to Jase’s party.

  Two things were true about these events and countless more. First, none of them actually happened all the way. I’d made sure of that—no friends but Marisol ever came through my door.

  As for the second truth—as much as I wanted to deny it, that truth wouldn’t leave.

  I screamed over it behind rolled-up windows. I plugged my ears and blasted metal jams I’d always hated, but I couldn’t stop the deafening rush between my ears. Trying to ignore it did nothing.

  I finally killed the engine and gripped the wheel. I couldn’t escape. All I could do was listen. And when I did, that one truth shrank into three small words.

  I knew them well. I’d said them to myself a lot this week. I’d said them to Marisol. But I had never said them to my mother. Did she even deserve them, after basically admitting we’d been living under a sham for years? Yes or no—it didn’t matter. In this one way, we were the same. We’d survived and coped in the same way.

  That, I understood. And for that, I would say the words.

  But to say the words, I had to stay.

  I creaked open the car door, my feet instinctively moving through the courtyard. The new table stood empty. I stopped and passed my hand over the slick white surface. No trusted friends sat here today. No mosaic cracks provided hiding places for my spills and secrets. But I didn’t need them anymore.

  I climbed up to our end-unit apartment, slowly, with quiet steps. I filled my lungs then turned the doorknob. From the doorway, I saw something I hadn’t seen in more than four years. My mother and grandmother were embracing in a tight circle. They hadn’t heard me; Grandma was brushing one hand over my mother’s hair, whispering to her.

  “Mom.” I started like that.

  The part that happened next began with my mother’s look—her eyes wider than this room had ever felt, stretched to the skin and bones to hold so much.

  I crept forward as Grandma stood aside. “I lied, too.” Three words tagged and quoted by myself.

  Mom shook her head. “It’s not the same. You were just a child. Just a girl forced to deal with all of this.”

  I was so straight and tall here. My spine was an arrow, like that bracelet I’d shown Asher at Yellow Feather. “I pretended in all sorts of ways. I told school friends they couldn’t come over because the place was being tented, or the carpets were being cleaned, or we were painting, or you worked weird hours.” I marked lies with my fingers. “I said you had a thing against sleepovers. And before today, I didn’t want Asher to pick me up at the door, because he might look inside, so I met him everywhere. See? It was easier to be invisible. People stopped asking, and I got out of situations when they did by lying. I faded away into words and books.” I pointed to my bedroom library. “I hoarded them.”

  Her mouth parted.

  “Yeah, let’s use that word. Hoard. I hoarded them. And I let half-truths ride because I was ashamed.”

  I thought of Asher, the homespun warmth of his arms, the way his laugh jetted straight to my knees. Write it however you want, he’d said.

  “I lied, but now I’m going to own who I was and who I am.” That’s how I wanted to write me. That’s how the beginning went. And if I could get real about my past, my mom could, too. Then we could both change our future.

  Mom pushed fingers into her temple. “What I did was so much more than a lie, and I can’t see past it.”

  “This is what happens when you try to see past it.” I waved my arms through the room. “Don’t see past it. See it.”

  “Every day, I still...” She paused, her words watery and weak. “I still picture myself driving away.”

  “Leaving me was wrong, and nothing you or I can say or do can go back and make it right. But we—you and me—can be right. We can be okay.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “You can be the mom who left me a long time ago, and then came home and never left again. You can be who you really are, too. Even if she’s messy.”

  Her brows jumped.

  I exhaled, a rough, caustic sound. “You’re messy, and so am I.” I pointed. “And so is Grandma. And everyone in my class, and all those ladies you put eye shadow and lipstick on. They’re messy underneath. We all are.”

  Mom opened her mouth, then shut it. Maybe three or four times, turning her head into the hoard. But finally, she stood as steadfast as I’d ever seen her. “I left my baby.”

  It was enough of a declaration for me. And so true, I cried. She wound her arms around my back and pulled me close, into more home than she had ever made for me in this house. Welcome.

  Quiet moments passed before her hand rose to my cheek. “How can you forgive me?”

  “I think... I think I already did.” That surprise opened like a gift, sweeter than birthday cupcakes.

  She kissed my forehead and, for the first time in years, picked up a book. Her old Peter Pan rested in her hands, the cover butterflied across her palms—familiar, like she’d never truly grown up from it. “I’m ready to clear away some things. Inside and out.”

  “We need to go back to counseling,” I said, her words running around and around my heart.

  Grandma Wells stepped up between us. “I would like to go, too.” Each of us nodded, making it so. And as we linked arms, with Mom’s old novel in the mix, I thought of another story.

  It was the one where an invisible girl left her library and found real life. And in the chapter after everything fell apart, a flying boy gave her a pen and a wide-open book as big as a globe. She wrote him into her most thrilling adventure yet, and edited all her impossibles into possibles. But his gift was so good, the girl passed it on. She gave it to her mother.

  Later, I would share an ocean view with Asher and finally answer his question.

  This one. This was my story, and it was my favorite.

  Epilogue

  Day Eight

  Two Months Later

  We hung out at the new courtyard table only on Saturday mornings, and only in one, carefully contrived manner. Marisol and I lay on the tabletop, feet dangling off the side, eyes lifted to a cloudless January sky. Her blueberry smoothie sat next to my large cup of mango, and the white resin surface stayed clean. From now on, all hearts and stars kept to the gold around our necks.

  Lately, when I looked up to my end-unit apartment, I saw past the new gray paint and into a home that was transforming, little by little. There was more empty space than ever between the walls. But somehow, my home had never felt so full.

  My phone rang, but Marisol was quicker. “Ha! I knew it. Flyboy on line one. I think I’ll answer and see—”

  “Give me that.”

  Dramatic sigh as she plunked the phone into my hand.

  “Hey, you,” I said to Asher. “Sorry it rang forever. Marisol was being...Marisol.” I shot my friend a goofy look, which she lobbed back. Goofier.

  Asher laughed. After a pause, he said, “It’s day eight, Darcy.”

  “What? You mean...?”

  I felt his dazzling smile through the line. “I do mean. How about lunch in Santa Barbara today? Will you fly with me?”

  “Yes. Yes, I will,” I said breathlessly. I glanced at my friend, who somehow already knew, her lip poked out and hands crossed over her heart.

  “Come to the hangar. I’m already here starting preflight.”


  “Soon as I change. What does one wear for lunch in Santa Barbara and flying with a hot pilot?”

  He chuckled. “Ask Marisol.”

  An hour later, I was kissing him from the best shotgun seat of all time. Then I let him work. We both wore headsets, and I marveled at his skill. The way he set controls and checked the majestic aircraft into safety, point by point. The way he communicated with the tower in a secret language, then taxied the Piper Meridian to the runway. He wore dark jeans and a thick navy pullover, requisite aviator sunglasses fitting his angled face.

  Asher was always beautiful. But today, holding both our lives in his dream element, he was breathtaking.

  While we waited our turn, he said, “I don’t know when the next time will be. But today, I’m flying.” He smiled. “And you’re with me.”

  “Flying or not, I’m always with you.”

  At the tower’s signal, he held up our storybook thimble, now at home on the console. I reached for the gold chain holding his acorn around my neck. Then he pushed the throttle and said, “This is the part that happens next.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes in the air with him had me addicted. I relished the recklessness of chasing the wind with the boy I loved, riding the comet tail of his dream. I’d flown commercial before, but in the more intimate turboprop, the atmosphere coursed under my body.

  “You like this, Darcy Wells?” Asher said into the headset.

  I peered at a blue-jean sky and a watercolor horizon. We pushed north along the Pacific coastline, ant-sized life to our right, sapphire ocean waves at our left. “I love this.” I looked at him, my heart whirling like the silver prop with all he’d given me—more than love, more than midnights with no spell-breaking clocks. He was the home for all my words, even the ones I hadn’t defined yet. He was the home for all my stories, even the ones I hadn’t imagined.

  Possible. The word took flight, real and true. And right then, I decided to make his day eight, my day one.

  “You keep paper in here, right?”

  He pointed to a closed compartment near my right knee. “A notepad in there.”