A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon

by Karen Romano Young

  “Listen, all,” he said, and he read out the email: “‘Please be advised that a real-estate developer (he meant Mr. Dozer) has entered a proposal to buy the library building from the city. At its meeting on October 2, the library board will vote on whether to consider the proposal, which involves repurposing the building for residences. The vote will take into account the library’s consent (or lack thereof) and budget for the coming year. If the proposal is approved for consideration, a vote to decide between the two proposals will be put before the neighborhood in the district vote on Election Day.’

  “So October 2 is the vote on the question,” he concluded.

  “What question?” asked Pearl.

  “Whether the library building can be repurposed—given another use.”

  “Then what?” Pearl said, gaping.

  “Of course we’ll submit our new budget plan. But if the library board votes October 2 to consider the new proposal for the library building, then the neighborhood will get to weigh the apartments against the library on Election Day.”

  “And that could be that,” said Alice. “If they vote for apartments, then no more library.”

  “Unless the voters think we have a better plan, a better budget,” said Bruce.

  “With better circulation,” said Mom.

  “And better neighborhood support,” said Alice.

  There was a frightening silence.

  “They can’t just do that,” said Pearl. She wrapped her arms over her middle, to hold herself strong and upright.

  “We’ll appeal to the city to throw out Mr. Dozer’s proposal, of course,” said Mom.

  Bruce’s shoulders sagged. “Yes, Patricia, but they’ll allow it anyway,” he said. “Look at our circ, up only a few percent, and that’s just because Vincent’s head got stolen and people felt guilty walking in to see that, so they took out a book. No other reason. Nobody cares!”

  Pearl exploded. “This is a library. It’s our library. You can’t just—” She held up her hands as if grabbing a big globe. “You can’t just barge in here and take over and build new apartments because you don’t like what’s already here!”

  “If you have enough money,” said Simon grimly, “you can.”

  “But we—” Still grabbing at the air, Pearl found a phrase she’d heard somewhere. “We perform an important public service!”

  Everyone smiled kindly. Mom said, “There’s only so much room for services performed by the city. The city can’t just give out. It needs to bring money in—or it needs buildings to be at least self-sufficient. Which ours isn’t.”

  And there was something about this thought, this story of the way things were, something so solid, sure, real, and solemn, that all the grown-ups seemed stopped by it. They seemed ready to let the moment to fight pass right by.

  Not Pearl. “This is war!” she said.

  There were some exhalations that were almost little laughs.

  She glared around wildly.

  “Well,” said Bruce. “You’re right that those builders have certainly thrown down the gauntlet.”

  “A gauntlet’s a glove,” explained Ramón, before anyone could ask. “It’s a challenge to the status quo—the way things are.”

  “What’s wrong with the way things are?” Pearl wailed. “This is our home!”

  But nobody answered that. Bruce turned and went back upstairs, and Mom followed him.

  Pearl thought her heart would jump out of her chest.

  The others were giving her sympathetic looks, and she felt even worse, because if they were being sympathetic with her, they must think she couldn’t handle it. “I’ll be on the stoop,” Pearl said sharply, making eye contact with no one, and blasted onto the bustling street full of people going home to their own status quo, not realizing how quickly a gauntlet could be thrown into it, or whatever! Pearl tore down the steps almost to the sidewalk, stopped abruptly, and stood leaning on the iron rail, feeling as if she had run a long distance but still had far to go.

  Nichols came out and sat on the steps, his backpack beside him. Pearl walked up past him, then back down again, then did about seven more ups and downs before he said, “Stop.”

  She stopped. She said, “None of this would have happened if Vincent’s head hadn’t gotten stolen. That’s how those bulldozer guys found out, because it was in the paper. If we could get the head back, it could get in the paper again, and then maybe people would see that, and know the neighborhood cares.” She paused. It was Mom who had called the paper in the first place. If she hadn’t, would Mr. Bull and Mr. Dozer have had their idea to turn the library into apartments?

  “Well, what are you gonna do?” said Nichols. It may have just been something people said when there wasn’t anything to say, but Pearl took him seriously.

  “Find the head myself!” She thought about Harry Potter, how the adults in those books were always telling the kids things were under control, but they never were, and how the kids always had to sneak around figuring things out for themselves. And Pearl didn’t even have magic on her side.

  “Who do you think took it?” Nichols stood up and pulled his backpack onto his shoulders.

  She was silent, but her mind whirled.

  Nichols said. “Work on that, Pearl. G’night.”

  “Bye,” she said. He disappeared into the crowd. Pearl sat down. Rush-hour people tramped in and out of green-haired Rosita’s Rosebud bodega and home, carrier bags over their arms. Gully’s Buck-a-Buy looked busy, too. The lights were on upstairs in Francine’s apartment. Things seemed calm but felt the opposite.

  Pearl thought back on the head’s disappearance and all the theories people had put forth about the thieves in the two weeks since then.

  1. Alice had guessed idiots. (That could be anybody.)

  2. Gully had accused punks, gangs, college students. (Also unspecific.)

  3. The police figured it was pranksters. (But the head hadn’t turned up anywhere they had suggested it might.)

  4. One cop had suggested Ramón. (No way.)

  5. Bruce himself thought it was criminals, robbers. (Obviously, but who?)

  6. Pearl suspected the raccoons. (Too small, not strong enough. Good climbers, though.)

  Pearl stopped. In Mom’s stories, anyway, the raccoons saw and heard everything that happened in the garden. That’s how they’d learned to read, after all, according to the stories. (Pearl couldn’t believe her own crazy thoughts.) But still: Had the raccoons in the trees seen the head get stolen?

  Alice, Simon, and Ramón came out just then, and trooped down the front steps to the sidewalk. Ramón backed his pickup truck out of the alley driveway and drove off. Simon threw his leg over his bicycle and whizzed away, his guitar case on his back. Alice walked to the corner to wait for Danesh to pick her up on his way home from the school where he taught. Last of all, Mom came out and said, “Ready?”

  “Where’s Bruce?” said Pearl.

  “Writing the appeal,” said Mom. “Going to battle.”

  Pearl and Mom walked two blocks along Lancaster Avenue, then turned left on Beep Street, and up the stoop to their tiny apartment.

  Pearl picked up the mail from the floor. “Look, the New Yorker,” she said, knowing Mom would be glad, and Mom gave a little “Hooray!” The New Yorker1 was Mom’s one treat to herself, and she took one evening a week to read it cover to cover, no matter how late she had to stay up to finish it.

  Mom heated the skillet and melted butter. Pearl microwaved peas, got out the milk and eggs, and put English muffins in the toaster. When the eggs went sizzling into the pan, she asked, her throat opening just enough to let the words squeeze out, “Can those guys really go building all over the library if they want to?”

  “Not if the city doesn’t decide to sell the property. But now they’re first in line to make a bid, and the city is willing to at least look at a bid, and maybe accept it. We’re surely not making the city any money. So we have to prove we’re doing the city good in another way.”


  “But why?”

  “Because the city owns the library building. But they just built a new library, so maybe they think there’s a more economical use for our building. And the contractors are asking for the library board to say that the building can become residential—a place where people live.”

  “Will they let it?” Pearl wished Mom would say the library, not the building.

  “Probably. Everything else around here is both commercial (that’s businesses) and residential, so I’m sure our building can be both.” Pearl thought of all the stores that had apartments on their upper floors.

  “But the city is saying the library gets to counter-propose,” Mom went on. “If we can make a case—if Bruce can—then they’ll let the district vote on what they want the building to be.”

  Mom dished up the eggs and buttered the English muffins. Pearl spooned peas onto the plates and felt Mom waiting for her to ask the next question.

  “When will we know if the district gets to vote?”

  “October 2. You heard the email.”

  “October 2 is too soon!”

  Mom studied Pearl as if wondering whether she could handle the truth, then announced, “It’s probably been in the works since well before the Knickerbocker branch opened.”

  Pearl fingered the mailing label on the New Yorker cover, stuck and unstuck it on her hand, silently counting months. “Almost a year?” she asked. How could these plans have been going on without the library itself knowing about it? How was that allowed?

  “Pearl girl, I know it feels awful and sad, but we’re going to have to get our heads around it,” Mom said. “Change might be coming.”

  Pearl folded a whole English muffin into a bundle and stuffed it all into her mouth so tight she could barely breathe. She chewed a long time and finally swallowed. “So you’re just going to let the library get sold?”

  “What can I do if that’s the way things turn? What can anybody do? Look at poor Bruce, trying to write an appeal so the city will keep the building. Especially because there are so many physical problems with it. If the city decides it’s too expensive to address them—”

  “Would they give you a job at the Knickerbocker branch?” asked Pearl.

  “I doubt it. They’ve already got a circ librarian. Maybe if they needed a new library director, but—”

  “What about Bruce?”

  “Who knows. He’s always talking about going back to his park.”

  “What? Why? Wouldn’t you want to go with him?”

  “I’m not thinking about that, Pearl,” Mom said.

  It was a weird answer.

  “There’s a lot of staff,” she went on. “I don’t see how any one branch could have jobs for all four of us.”

  “What about Simon? What about Mr. Nichols? What about me? Would I have to go to a different school if we moved?”

  Mom said only, “Pearl, hand me the milk.” Then she leaned in so close that their noses nearly bumped. “We will survive. We can survive anything. And be sure of one thing, Pearlie. If we have to move, it won’t be because I didn’t try to stop it.”

  “But how? What can anybody do if Bruce’s appeal doesn’t work?” Pearl was sticking and unsticking the mailing label furiously now. She hadn’t seen Mom do much of anything except call up the paper—which seemed to have been the start of all our problems, Pearl thought meanly.

  But Mom snatched the mailing label away from Pearl and smacked it back on the magazine cover, right over the title. “That’s it,” said Mom. “New Yorkers!”

  “What about them?” Pearl remembered something. “You mean Unique New Yorkers? Like the ones that Jonathan Yoiks wants to find?”

  “Some of his Unique New Yorkers are a little too unique for my taste,” said Mom. “Tightrope walkers! Cat-castle builders! I’m all for being talented, but I prefer regular neighborhood people who do unique things. Brave things.”

  “What kinds of things do you want neighborhood people to do?”

  “We have to get the neighborhood to want to save the library. We need a marketing plan! You’re the detective, Pearl—” She tapped her fingertip on her daughter’s forehead. “Who was the last person to come in the door for the first time?”

  Pearl thought a moment. “Francine,” she said. “Is she special?” She sure hoped not.

  “Absolutely right. What brought her? Books?”

  “Vincent,” said Pearl.

  Mom nodded. “Now there was a Unique New Yorker. But for doing what? Not climbing skyscrapers, although heaven knows New York needs that, too. But for just being good at what she did every day, which was writing poems.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do, scream every day?”

  “Francine doesn’t come to hear you scream,” said Mom. “She looks at books. We need to figure out how to make more Francines.”

  But Pearl heard something else underneath what Mom was saying about the library. She heard something that was just about Francine—and about Pearl herself. Francine had come for the scream and stayed for the books, but now she kept coming for Pearl, too.

  It was out on the stoop, many rounds of gin later, when the traffic finally seemed to go quiet and Mom glanced over her shoulder.

  “Oh, look!” she whispered, so quietly she was practically mouthing the words.

  A large humpbacked raccoon had emerged from the shadows below the stoop of the next house and was loping along the front of their house. It skirted the stoop, then scuttled along the front edge to the shadow of the next stoop. The raccoon was surprisingly fast. Before Pearl could react, it had reached the corner and turned toward Seventh Avenue, just like any neighbor heading for the subway.

  “Where do you think he’s going?” Pearl asked, thinking of the paw inside the basement window of the library. Those prints had seemed to be the same size as the ones in the garden. This raccoon’s paws were definitely bigger.

  “She,” Mom told her. “Work, of course. That was Mrs. Mallomar.”

  “Do tell,” invited Pearl. Her mouth was hanging open. It was the first time Pearl had ever seen Mrs. Mallomar—or any of Mom’s raccoons—in person.

  Mom studied her cards a moment, then folded the hand into her lap and began. “Well. Mrs. Mallomar must have just put the midnight Moon to bed.”

  “What?”

  “That’s a press term. ‘Putting to bed’ is finishing the paper so it’s ready to be printed and sold.”

  “What’s the lead story?” Pearl asked.

  “You know,” said Mom, “there hasn’t been much news lately, so it’s been a while since the midnight Moon went to press with anything but gossip and personal ads. Mrs. Mallomar and her staff have been combing the neighborhood for events. Naturally they interviewed the coyotes.”

  Pearl laid her cards facedown on the stoop and folded her arms comfortably, settling into the story.

  “There are plenty around here, and they’re even more stealthy than the raccoons. Coyotes have always got their noses to the ground, like good detectives. But the coyotes didn’t have any gossip. So Mrs. Mallomar went to the skunks, but they hadn’t caught a whiff of anything, either.”

  Pearl couldn’t help but laugh. Mom was a good storyteller, you couldn’t argue with that.

  “The opossums said Matilda was looking for a nest in the pine trees, but they had the story upside down as usual. Matilda was up in the tree trying to talk to the flying squirrels, who had been talking to the bats. And the bats finally revealed something interesting. You know how the library has two chimneys?”

  It did. There was a fireplace in the reading room, and another in the reference room, both long-ago sealed up.

  “Well, the bats had winkled their way into one of the chimneys and found it was not completely closed off. They couldn’t get into the fireplaces, so they couldn’t get into the library, but they had found a route to the basement.”

  “There are bats in the basement?”

  “No, they’re just scouts. They don’t
want to live inside anyway,” said Mom. “They told the flying squirrels about a certain space behind the drainpipe on the garden wall. They’d been in there doing research. That is, eavesdropping. Typical bat behavior. The bats’ editorial column this week is all about the contractors’ proposal.”

  Pearl’s head spun. “So what’s Mrs. Mallomar’s story about?”

  “It’s about the impact of new construction on raccoon habitats near the library. If the library gets turned into apartments, they’ll cut down the trees for parking, and all the raccoons in those trees will be at risk. Think of all the little raccoon kits running around—that’ll be dangerous for them.”

  “Mom,” said Pearl. “Do you think the raccoons saw who took Vincent’s head?”

  “Hmm,” was all Mom said.

  “So where’s Mrs. Mallomar going now?” Pearl asked. She pointed down the street in the direction the raccoon had taken. She was pretty sure telling this story was cheering Mom up, and she wanted to keep that happening.

  “To take the midnight shift at the newsstand, of course,” said Mom. “Just because she’s put the paper to bed doesn’t mean she goes to bed. It’s the middle of the day for a raccoon! And Tallulah has to sleep sometime.”

  “Did you ever think Tallulah and Mrs. Mallomar could be related?” she asked her mother. “Like she’s the human version of Mrs. Mallomar and Mrs. Mallomar is the raccoon version of her?”

  “The question is why Mrs. Mallomar has chosen to let us see her going about her business now, when she never has before.”

  “Then how did you know her business?” Pearl asked.

  “Oh, that was just—”

  Pearl knew Mom wanted to say “a story.” Instead she reached for Pearl’s cards. “Time to put you to bed.”

  1 The New Yorker is an actual magazine.

  11: THE INVADER

  SEP 9

  At 3:17 a.m. Saturday morning, Mom’s phone rang. Then: “Someone’s broken into the library!” she told Pearl, whispering her awake. “The police are on their way. Bruce wants us to meet them at the library. He’ll be there, too.”