Bruce looked at Pearl steadily, not as if he believed what she was saying, but as if he believed that she believed it. He said, “I never heard of raccoons like Mrs. Mallomar until I met your mother. City Wildlife’s goal is to teach people ways to live alongside animals they normally think of as nuisances: raccoons, skunks, pigeons, opossums, coyotes. As a ranger, I was the reason a lot of people quit putting out poison, or feeding their cats outside, or shooting pigeons with BB guns. But the raccoons—” Bruce walked to the sealed-up fireplace. “Raccoons are just one more nail in the coffin for this library. I don’t know where those kits are going to go if the library building gets repurposed. We’re not going to be able to rescue them if we can’t rescue ourselves.”
“Maybe the reading raccoons will rescue us,” Mom said.
Bruce was shaking his head, but Pearl started to pace, from the desk to the window, the only narrow, clear path in the rat’snest office. “Reading raccoons to the rescue . . . save a raccoon and save the library . . .” She did little circles around Bruce’s piles, making a breeze. She looked crazy. She felt crazy. But there had to be a way to use the raccoons to save the library—to save the library because of the raccoons.
Bruce sat down and picked up the scandalous Star tabloid. “Let’s say the reading raccoons were real, Pearl. How would you get anybody to believe it?”
He was asking her seriously, she knew, meeting his deep brown eyes behind his big glasses.
“Okay, so maybe nobody’s going to believe it’s true,” she began. She felt the way Mom must have felt all those years.
Mom said, “But they will all wish it was true.”
Pearl realized, “They will never find out if it really is true.”
“Why not?” said Bruce and Mom at the same time.
“Because it could be true. Because they will want it to be true. Because . . . because we will act like it is! Because we know it is!” She looked at them: Bruce, his paintbrush hair, his gangly elbows leaning on his gangly knees; Mom, small and upright, on her toes in her high heels. “And in the meantime, we’re going to make them love raccoons and protect the raccoons all at once.”
“How?”
“Mary Ann—my raccoon friend at the paper—can help me write their story. Everybody will think it’s me telling raccoon stories and pretending they’re factual, but they’ll let themselves believe it’s really raccoons.”
“And why would they let themselves believe that?” Bruce was kind. He was trying to be kind, anyway. He thought he needed to be kind because Pearl was crazy. But she knew what she knew.
“Because! It’s like Disneyland, or Santa Claus, or shooting stars. It’s more funny and fun and easy to believe that raccoons at a library can read. Yes!” Pearl thumped her hand on Bruce’s desk. “They’ll be our mascots. If you join the library, you’ll become a Reading Raccoon of Lancaster Avenue! And that will make people not want to X-terminate the real ones. And it’ll all be drama and good press and it’ll make people think about our library in a good way.”
“It is true that humans are exceptionally good at convincing themselves to believe in things they want to be true,” said Bruce.
Pearl’s heart lifted. Did he approve?
“We just need one more answer.” Bruce said, his eyes bright. “What do raccoons eat?”
What did that matter? “Okay, what do they eat?” said Pearl.
“They use the profits from the newspaper to buy food at the raccoon grocery store.”
Pearl paused and squinted at him. “Where’s the raccoon grocery store?”
“Oh, stop it,” said Mom.
“Is it real, or am I making it up?” asked Bruce.
Mom smiled. Bruce smiled, too. “Ha! You’re doing it,” Mom said.
“Anyone can do it, if the story’s good enough,” said Pearl.
29: RELOCATION
STILL OCT 2
Later that night, Mom’s phone rang. “It’s Bruce!” she called to Pearl.
Into the phone, she said, “So she’s alive? And healthy?”
“Where is she?” whispered Pearl.
Mom went on listening to Bruce, watching Pearl’s face. “And she was released?”
“Where?” said Pearl.
“What?” Mom asked the phone. “How many did you say they caught? Six.”
“Where?! Who else?”
Mom waved a hand to hush Pearl. “All right, that’s all we can ask for.” She hung up.
“I have to write the Mallomars right away,” Pearl said. “Where’s Eloise?”
“The raccoons?” Mom said. “You’re really going to write to them?” There it was, right there: the dividing line between what Mom knew and didn’t know. Hadn’t Mom been the one who’d made Pearl write notes to the raccoons when she was younger? Didn’t she realize that the raccoons could read them?
“I’ll write them a note,” said Pearl, as simply as if she was talking about writing a note to Ramón or Bruce or Francine. Straightforwardly, directly—that was the only way to convey that something magical was real. “And we can take it to the library tonight and take it down to the basement. Or, if you don’t even want to go into the library I could go in the alley and hold the note up to the window and knock. Although I don’t know if Mary Ann’s got a flashlight. Oh, or I could just go to Mrs. Mallomar’s house. It’s right down our street; Tallulah told me where. Or we could wait a little while until Mrs. Mallomar goes to the newsstand to sell the papers, you know, after the delivery goes in and Tallulah puts the papers up, just give it to her when she goes by.”
A Sidebar About Storage
“Rats once ruled the basements,” Grandmar often reminds me. After the bats found their way into the library basement, it was rats that chewed an old pipe hole into an entrance, loosening the brownstone enough for Grandmar and her children to dig out more. But rats can be “bought.” The rats traded with my ancestors: The raccoons got the basement, if the rats got first-picking rights on the trash from blue-haired Rosita’s Rosebud bodega. The agreement has stood ever since.
Since then, our family has resolved to raise literate kits. My family was brought up on sandwich scraps, apple cores, and stories. We pass them down voice to ear, raccoon to raccoon, a secret from humans, stored only in our memories. But now, for the sake of Pearl, I’m putting it into words.
Words are something humans invented. Words are storage for stories that are passed in boxes called books, paw to paw, hand to hand. Think of Vincent with her hand out, a story that’s there for everybody, but also just for you. Think of Pearl with her manuscript in her hand, getting ready to perform it for a bunch of kids who could love it or hate it. Think of me, writing a history for the whole city to see. A city that thinks of raccoons as invaders. Or vermin. And the only way they just might listen is with words—our tools.
Words are all we have. So it’s up to me.
Pearl says raccoons who can read are like magic, a word she likes. She says we’ll be embraced. She says we should do what we can to help the library. She says the story I’m writing could help. I’m choosing to believe her.
I’m crossing my claws that Pearl’s right, that my words can keep our home from getting torn apart. If nothing else, reporting on my family’s reading, putting it into words, may be our last hope of being remembered. Because I remember another billboard that hung at the subway station when I was learning to read: NO GUTS, NO GLORY. Maybe it ought to be “NO GUTS, NO STORY.”
—M.A.M.
She didn’t know why she was babbling until she realized that Mom wasn’t responding at all. Mom was listening without speaking, the green of her eyes as bright as a go-light. Mom had been the one who told Pearl that Mrs. Mallomar worked at the newsstand, long before Pearl had seen it with her own eyes. Now she was letting Pearl tell the story.
“Mom, where’s Eloise?” Pearl demanded.
“That’s the trouble.”
“What?” said Pearl darkly.
“The X-terminator trapped half a doz
en raccoons last night around the city. She didn’t know there was anything special about ours. The last time anyone noticed which one Eloise was, it was me in the driveway.”
“Didn’t they bring them all to the same place?”
Mom shook her head.
Pearl felt cold all over. “Then where did they take them?”
Mom looked very tired. “They sprinkled them all over Manhattan,” she said. “From Battery Park to Inwood. From Riverside to Carl Schurz Park.”
“So Eloise could be in any park in the city.”
Mom nodded sadly.
Pearl was losing patience. “Okay, so, I have to go! Now! So I can tell them!”
Mom was studying Pearl, trying to read her like a book in a made-up language. She took Pearl’s hands and held them firmly. “Pearl. Well . . . Mrs. Mallomar’s not home, anyway.” She laughed lightly and looked off to one side. She did not wait for Pearl to say, “Do tell.” She just went on, “She’s got Tallulah taking her shift while she spends the night with her daughters and the little kits, at the library. I’m not going to disturb them with this news. Tomorrow is soon enough.”
Pearl tried to place Mom’s tone, and she thought she recognized the vague way that parents explained things to children when they weren’t telling the truth. Mom was looking at Pearl as if Pearl had told her she was going off to hunt for an alligator she had seen in the subway. It made Pearl feel jangly, off-balance, like she was walking a narrow curb.
“If the library closed, you’d get another job, right?”
There was a beat.
“Yes, eventually,” said Mom. “I mean, I’d find something somewhere. There might be a job open in the system, but I could also look into college libraries, or even school libraries.”
“And the library raccoons—”
“They might be better off if they were all just relocated,” said Mom.
“Without books?”
Mom met her eyes. “It’s how they were meant to be,” she said, and added, “That’s what Bruce says.”
“But they’ve adapted to city life—that’s what Bruce told me,” said Pearl.
“Did he?” Mom laughed a weird light laugh.
“But, Mom,” said Pearl. “You and I are on the same page. The reading raccoons are real.”
Just like that.
“Real enough for me,” said Mom. “But not for Bruce.”
“Bruce would be the first one to tell you how smart raccoons are,” protested Pearl. She thought of how Sterling North, the author of the memoir about his pet raccoon, Rascal, had turned to nonfiction to learn more about Rascal’s relatives.
Mary Ann’s back had a hump in it, like all raccoons’. It wasn’t her fault it made her look hunched, grumpy, and hostile.
Quit assuming raccoons are stupid.
“Sorry!” said Pearl. “And anyway, they’re not all as smart as you, are they?” If they were, they’d take over the city.
They haven’t all had the good fortune of being born in a library.
Pearl had to laugh. “Hey, both of us were born here!” she said. “But what about Eloise . . .” She hesitated, trying to read the raccoon’s deep black eyes, her expression like Batman’s, peering out from behind the mask that kept him secret.
We have a plan. The library isn’t big enough for all the reading raccoons we want there to be. We want many more raccoons to become readers.
“So do I,” said Pearl. “And Mom, and Francine.”
There was a silence. Mary Ann raised a paw palm up and wiggled her claws. It was her way of saying “Do tell.”
Pearl smiled. Well, there was no benefit in trying to sugarcoat things. “It’s a new version of the story.”
What’s it about?
“It’s got reading raccoons in it.”
Mary Ann looked around as if she wondered whether anyone had heard.
They won’t believe it.
“They have to.”
Mary Ann shrugged.
What Pearl said next sounded, even to her own ears, like a speech: “If they don’t believe it, then they might not save the building. And then where will you and your family live?”
Mary Ann’s small eyes deepened even further. Then the raccoon reached for more catalog cards and dipped her head to write.
poison
traps
cages
It was as though Pearl saw those things through Mary Ann’s eyes.
And another thing:
relocation
Pearl said, “I understand. I know it’s scary. But do you really think relocation is just as bad as being killed? If they move you somewhere else, you could teach the raccoons there to read. Besides, listen! Bruce says they’re not allowed to transport animals outside the borough they’re found in. So you guys are stuck in Manhattan. But there are really nice park wildernesses up on the north end.”
Mary Ann took another card.
the river
And she made a choking, glugging sound, and sank to the floor. She meant they drowned the raccoons instead of taking them to the wilds of the parks.
“Oh, no!” said Pearl. “This is what we have to do, then. I’ve got to make my story as real as nonfiction. So real it’s practically unbelievable, like some of those things you can’t believe are true until some spokesperson for science comes along and tells you. The key is going to be an outside expert.”
Who?
“You.”
Pearl hadn’t realized raccoons had eyebrows until Mary Ann’s shot up.
“It’s going to be the reporting assignment of your life, Mary Ann. Not just for raccoons. Not just for the library. For all of New York.”
30: DO TELL
OCT 4–5
In the playground at school there was a new favorite game, just in time for the eerie Halloween season. It was called Rock Lady, of course, and it was based on Francine’s performance. Francine stood, eyes glazed, hand stretched out, and dared kids to touch her hand, until after some secret number of touches, she came to life and chased them, screaming.
Pearl wasn’t sure what she should do to keep new kids coming to the library, but then, of all people, Elsa picked up on the drama of Francine’s game and started performing it herself. Pearl shouldn’t have been surprised—playing Rock Lady was a great way to get attention, and there was nothing Elsa loved more. Good. Let the outgoing, popular kids build up the game while the creative force (Pearl told herself that’s what she was) turned her energies to marketing raccoons.
On the way home from school the next afternoon, Pearl told Francine, “I’ve been working on a new part of the story.”
Francine nodded. “What’s it about?”
Pearl felt encouraged. “It connects Vincent with the raccoons.”
There was a number of kids trundling along with them on their way home from school, including Oleg and Jaime, but Pearl ignored them, talking quietly, intently to Francine.
“So,” Pearl said, “say Vincent is a neighborhood lady who is up a lot in the middle of the night writing poems. She’s friends with some neighborhood cats, and leaves milk out for them. One night when she’s sad, she finds raccoons diving into the cats’ milk, and that makes her laugh.”
Jaime butted in. “We’ve got a big raccoon living right under our steps.”
“So?” said Pearl, and waved him away.
“Keep going, Pearl,” said Francine.
“She keeps leaving milk out for the raccoons, so pretty soon they aren’t afraid of her anymore. Also, she stands in her garden and reads them poems. She looks a lot like the statue in the garden when she does this.” Pearl struck Vincent’s pose, head up, hand out.
“So how does this connect to the raccoons?”
“Well, she tosses all her lousy poems in the garbage, and later the raccoons will find them. They already know what the poems say, but now they figure out how to write those sounds down.”
“So that story is how they learned how to read?”
“Yep,” sai
d Pearl.
“It’s a good story,” said Francine.
“Is it?” said Pearl. But she already knew it was.
“Add it in,” said Francine.
“Take a look,” said Ms. Judge, the school principal. She spread a pile of drawings across her desk in front of Pearl, Francine, and Oleg.
“Pretty creative,” said Oleg. In one drawing, a man carrying a gray head was running away from a gray headless creature. Blood and gore were pouring out of the bottom of the head.
Francine put her finger on a drawing of a tank running over the Rock Lady. “Seems kind of extreme,” she said.
“Someone has been scaring the pants off the first graders with a story about a woman made of rock.” Ms. Judge was wearing the long gray sweater she always wore at school, and she held her hand out in a demanding way. “She stands waiting for some kind of an offering, and if the right thing isn’t offered, she chases you.”
So Pearl told her a new piece of the story about the stories coming out from Vincent’s hand and moving through the air, like invisible flying books that materialized into the hands of kids who came to the library. “And yes, she’s got her hand out because of that, and some people say she wants something, and if only she could walk, we’d know—”
“If she could walk?” said Ms. Judge.
“We made a kind of ghosty story about her,” said Francine.
“A kind of ghosty story?” Ms. Judge was smiling.
“She didn’t used to be ghosty!” Pearl protested. And she told about how the head had been stolen, the police were called, the “lost head” signs posted, the newspaper articles printed, the photos taken, the rock expert and the stonemason consulted.
A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon Page 19
