This was a family of important words and their important histories. Words and life and home were all rolling together in the shell that held four.
Click
When they became parents, Dashel and Summer decided that the usual parent names didn’t fit them. After trying a few things out, they settled on Dash and Sum. As they gradually became Dash + Sum + Early + Jubie, the phrase Dashsumearlyjubie clicked together with an irresistible ta-ta BOOM-ta BOOM-ta rhythm. Like a cluster of refrigerator magnets, Summer said. Hard to pull apart.
Inside every dictionary and all the special family books, Dashel wrote Dashsumearlyjubie in his neat, blocky letters. There were many Pearl families in the world, but only one Dashsumearlyjubie.
Click
Everyone knew the plan. Dashel would apply for a scholarship, borrow money from the bank, and get his degree. That would be when Jubie started kindergarten and Summer worked during the school day, hopefully in the neighborhood. Later on, when Dash was a full-time librarian, she’d go to a college or university, too, maybe to get a guidance counselor’s degree. She liked the idea of helping teens who weren’t getting much advice or support. And one day the Pearls would have their home, and everyone would head home after a long day, to a place that would be theirs forever. Early loved the slow way Dash said head home, as if those two words felt good to say.
The most treasured thing they owned, their family plan, was invisible, but everyone felt as if it were as solid as a building. As dependable as a road. It was there, and theirs, and that was all there was to it. It was Dashsumearlyjubie.
Click
Dashel told stories about his favorite teacher, Mr. Skip Waive, who’d been a poet teaching deep on the South Side of Chicago. He was “tough and skinny as a stick and as pale as skim milk,” and used a small Fourth-of-July flag as a pointer. He’d been arrested a bunch as a teenager, but somehow got straightened out and into college. How that happened he never got around to telling them.
“No offense intended,” he’d say, sticking the flag behind one ear, “but our flag is about the best tool I could imagine! Doesn’t belong in a corner.” When he tapped it on the board, the fabric waving caught everyone’s attention. Once it snagged in his necktie. Sometimes it got covered with chalk. “A symbol packed with usable power,” he’d say, giving it a shake.
There was something in Mr. Waive’s teaching voice that made his students hush up and listen. Dashel said it was a beat, timing that turned whatever he said into a once-in-a-lifetime secret, a glittery gem of information that you’d be a fool to miss. Something that made his South Side kids believe that what he was sharing could shape their lives. That numbers and words mattered; they were out-in-the-open valuables that could be used in a million ways. Used and kept, no stealing necessary. No locks to pick! No cops to trick!
“I am here as a catalyst,” he liked to say. “Look it up! I enable. I give, you take it away! Send me a postcard when you get there.”
Mr. Waive acted like rhythm and numbers and words were all part of the same subject. Mathematics, he said, was a search for order, pattern, and beauty. Arithmetic and numbers fit inside that definition, but didn’t fill it. Language was a code, like numbers, he said, and depended just as much on rhythm for its power. One of Mr. Waive’s favorite poems was by Langston Hughes, and Dashel could still recite it:
Problems
2 and 2 are 4.
4 and 4 are 8.
But what would happen
If the last 4 was late?
And how would it be
If one 2 was me?
Or if the first 4 was you
Divided by 2?
“Huh?” Early had asked, the first time he recited the poem for her. “What does that mean?”
Her father laughed. “It’s the story of most of our lives. What do you think it means?”
“I think it means you’re confused!” she shouted, and they both laughed. “How can a person be a number?” she said.
“How can a 4 not be what it looks like?” Dashel shot back.
Click
For the last month, two boxes of books a week arrived at their apartment. Dashel explained that an international bookseller by the name of Lyman Scrub had sent them to be sold in Chicago.
Although Dash had never met him, his new friend, Al, who had been hired as a Library Page around Thanksgiving time, had. Dash described Al as a jumpy but “clever as clover” guy, someone who loved playing around with words and numbers. Al told Dash that Mr. Scrub had approached him in the stacks on the sixth floor at Harold Washington one day, saying that he needed two strong young Library Pages to help him process and transport some old books. This would be after library hours, of course. Al picked Dash, who said yes almost before the question was asked.
As Mr. Scrub had explained it to Al, wealthy book collectors often donated their personal libraries to a larger one when they died, and although many of these thousands of estate books were kept, hundreds weren’t, especially if the library already owned copies. These extras could then be sold, and this was where Mr. Scrub came in.
Dash explained to Early that his part of the job was to make a list, box by box, of what arrived at the Pearl apartment, including the author’s name, full title, publisher, date of publication, and number of the printing. After the list was made, Dash was told to sign it and slip it in with the books before resealing the box with packing tape.
“What’s a printing?” Early had asked. She loved the way her father shared information; his tone always made a plain old fact feel like something special.
“Books are produced in batches, and the first printing is like the first batch of cookies from the oven. It’s the one everyone wants,” Dash replied, giving her a wink. “It’s funny math, because the number of books printed also matters. If a thousand books were made in the first edition, what survives is more valuable than if ten thousand books were made. In this case, less is more.”
Although Early wasn’t as interested in those tiny numbers inside the front of every book, she enjoyed the way Dash shared their power with her. It was his glance at an old page, the way he tapped it gently with a finger, the way he lowered his voice that kept her listening.
Dash liked to show Early the most exotic-looking books: One had a leather cover with dragons and leafy vines pressed into it. Another was robin’s-egg-blue velvet and worn bare in spots as if someone had loved it so much, they’d carried it everywhere; yet another had shiny gold on the edges of every page. Only once, he kept an old book for the Pearl family, estimating a generous value and carefully subtracting its price from what he was paid.
“An easy sell,” he explained to his family with a grin.
Dash gave Al his two boxes at the end of each week, and Al gave Dash a sealed envelope with cash when he came by in his car, always in the evening, to pick up the load. Al said that he then drove the books to a secret location in Marquette Park, about ten minutes away from Woodlawn. It seemed that Mr. Scrub had his rules, and simply wanted each Library Page to do his part and keep quiet about it. Al was told not to ask what Dash was paid, and vice versa. Even Sum wasn’t supposed to know.
“It’s business,” Dash had assured her. Early was listening; there wasn’t much privacy in their small apartment.
Pleased as she was to know extra money was coming in, Sum wondered about it all. “Why would a bookseller be going through all these expensive steps instead of sending the books straight to Marquette Park himself?” she asked one evening, as Dash taped up a box with one of his tidy lists inside.
Dash shrugged. “Book people can be a bit strange.” He smiled. “But who are we to judge? The world of books is big, complicated, and this guy probably likes the idea of working with employees of the Chicago Public Library. You know, as a distinction.”
Sum was folding laundry and paused, frowning. “Hope it’s only that,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Early piped up, looking from one parent to the other.
Su
m said nothing, and Dash gave her a hug. “You’re as prickly as a pineapple when you get worried,” he said gently. “But oh, so much sweetness underneath …”
Sum laughed and flapped him away with a clean T-shirt. “Okay, okay! You are one go-getter guy, Dashel Pearl. I worry sometimes that everyone in the world isn’t as good as you think they are, you know?”
“Now, when have you ever heard of criminals going to a public library in order to get help selling beat-up old books?” Dash had his hands open, palms up. “Books like this aren’t worth enough! I just enjoy fussing over them.”
Sum laughed again. “You win,” she said and reached across Early to give Dash a kiss.
Click
The book that Dash had kept was The First Book of Rhythms, by Langston Hughes. Written for kids, it had a red paper jacket with five wavy white lines running across it like a river. Early studied the picture of Mr. Hughes at the back and thought he looked a lot like Dash, only older and tidier. Under the jacket, the book cover was the green of new leaves.
The copy they had was worn, but a first printing, and the book was out of print; this meant there were only old copies left, no new ones for sale in stores. It was kept on a special shelf at home and no one was allowed to read it while eating.
“It’s a No Sticky Fingers treasure for us to have always,” Dashel explained.
Early had heard the up-down dance of Langston’s language so many times in the past couple of weeks that she remembered some of the words in the book. Without looking. He’d said stuff about how each person who starts a rhythm, whether in print, a drawing, a sound, or the movement of their bodies, does it in her or his own way.
Your circles and rhythms are yours alone, Langston Hughes had written. Early had liked that. Yours alone. Circles. Rhythms.
Langston, Early realized when she thought about it, was an honorary Pearl. Dashsumearlyjubie had clearly adopted him.
Click
What happened at 4:44 on that grim January day was wrong. Wrong was the perfect sound for what the word meant: It was heavy, achingly slow, clearly impossible to erase. Wrong. The word had a cold, northern root as old as the Vikings.
Where was Dash? How could he have vanished into that icy, freezing moment?
No one could add up the facts; they just didn’t fit. And Dash had been thinking about adding. Adding times of day to find a pattern. Or a rhythm. He’d once told Early that a pattern was something that repeated, but a rhythm had time inside it and wasn’t always predictable.
Here was the last entry in her father’s notebook, the one found under a car:
∗ ∗ ∗
1:11 ~ 1 + 1 + 1 = 3
2:22 ~ 2 + 2 + 2 = 6
3:33 ~ 3 + 3 + 3 = 9
4:44 ~ 4 + 4 + 4 = 12
If 4:44 = 12, what if 1 + 2 = 3?
If 5:55 = 15, and 1 + 5 = 6, does that mean it’s all a circle? A rolling rhythm of 3, 6, 9 when you repeat one digit in telling time? Or just a beat of 3s?
Must research number rhythms.
∗ ∗ ∗
After looking through it, the policeman had shrugged and given the notebook back to Summer. Sum had tucked it into her underwear, next to her heart, and that was where it stayed. Whenever Early asked to see it, her mother handed it over but later slipped it back in place, as if that might help to protect Dash. Early opened the notebook now for what felt like the hundredth time in the past few days.
What on earth had Dash been thinking about when he wrote this?
He’d been trying to understand something. A rolling rhythm of 3, 6, 9 when you repeat one digit in telling time … or just a beat of 3s … As Early said it aloud, it made her think of Langston’s poetry. Was that a clue?
Just thinking about her father made Early ache. Alone! Alone! Alone! went the painful rhythm of her heart.
“Dash!” she whispered. “Where are you?”
Click
Darkness. Dash’s cell phone had vanished with him, taking the click out of all four lives. That is, if they were still four and not three.
Crash, from the Middle English crasschen
Verb: to break with violence; to appear uninvited.
Noun: a loud sound, the result of a person or object
falling; the sudden failure of a business.
Crash, from the Russian krashenina
Noun: a rough fabric sometimes used to strengthen
the spine of a book.
Crash
In the confusion left behind, the three Pearls found themselves in a wailing of worries, a wall of wails, a worry of walls. There were tears on top of tears, and endless fears that felt worse when shared. Summer didn’t sleep. She opened the family piggy bank and counted everything inside. She called the police station many times each day, reminding them to continue looking for her husband. Early stayed home from school, not wanting to leave the other two.
The police didn’t seem to take things seriously. “Lots of men disappear for a while and then turn up again,” one detective told Summer.
“You’re not hearing me,” Summer said, her voice hard. “My husband isn’t one of those men.”
The detective asked questions about what Dashel did at his library job; had Summer seen anything illegal or unusual going on?
“Absolutely not,” Summer responded. But Early knew a secret: About a week ago, she’d seen Dashel add to a thick envelope of money hidden inside one of the encyclopedias stacked under a lamp.
He had brought a load of books downstairs early one evening, after calling out, “Book business, be right back!” while Summer was reading to the kids on the bed. Early, tired of listening to Jubie’s story, had moved to the other side of the screen while her mother kept reading. Wanting to finish her own book, Early opened to an exciting place.
When Dashel returned, he hadn’t seen her curled up in the corner, still as a mouse. He’d stepped into the apartment, pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket, slit it open, and counted some bills. Then he’d walked quickly to the nearest stack of encyclopedias, unwrapped the yellow caution tape, and slipped a fat envelope from the middle of a volume before he realized Early was watching him.
Dash hesitated for a split second, something he rarely did, then said, “Curious? Shhhh … gonna surprise your Sum with this one! Not a word now, promise, or you’ll get me in trouble.” He slid the money into the envelope, replaced it, then retied and patted the encyclopedia table, as if to say, Safe here!
Early nodded, pleased to keep her father’s secret. She knew Sum loved a surprise. But now Dash had disappeared. What should she do? She wished she’d never — click! — seen her father with that envelope.
“What should I do, Dash?” she whispered.
No answer. The promise now felt like poison.
“You’ll get me in trouble,” he’d said, but trouble with whom? Was he serious?
What if telling Sum hurt Dash? Or what if Sum felt like she had to tell the police about the money, not understanding why it should stay a secret? What if that got Dash in so much trouble that he couldn’t come home?
Early was caught in a nasty circle of thoughts.
Trouble was a muddy, bad-news word, a sound that disturbed. It stuck in your mouth like gunk from the street clinging to the bottom of your shoe.
Early rarely heard a word she thought was ugly, but trouble was one.
Crash
Dashel Pearl had been gone for four days, and nothing was okay. Jubie whined and asked, “But when is Dash coming home?” again and again; Early felt as though someone had removed her insides, leaving her scooped-out like a melon. She felt as light and strange as she imagined the dead might feel if they could tell you about it. And Summer paced, wept, and moaned to herself and to her husband.
Early put a pillow over her ears at night so that she couldn’t hear her mother murmuring, “Please, Dash, please!” over and over, her feet padding back and forth in the big room.
On day five, Early went back to school. Her friends were glad to see
her, but somehow shy; her buddy Laneesha said, “Don’t worry — after my dad left, it was bad for a while, but things got better. Now my mom even has a boyfriend I like, one who brought us a new TV!”
Early’s face crumpled and she burst into tears. Then she sobbed, “You don’t know our family! My father’s not like yours! He’d never leave!” Laneesha walked away, shrugging as if to say, You’ll find out. When one of Early’s teachers stepped in with a hug and a box of tissues, Early could tell she, also, believed that Dash was gone.
When Sum asked how school had gone that day, Early said only, “Fine.” She didn’t want to tell her mother about the things Laneesha had said. Inside, Early decided to change the rhythm of this story, at least in public.
The next day she walked into her classroom and went up to the teacher. “My dad is home. He was doing book business, and wanted to surprise us with some good news. We might be moving to our own home.” She heard herself saying it, and wondered as the words flowed out if a lie could sometimes persuade the truth to happen.
Laneesha was suspicious, and asked if she could come over to play.
“Soon,” Early promised. “My mother hasn’t been feeling well lately, but she’ll be better.” She didn’t look up, not wanting to see Laneesha’s expression.
Early began to spend less time with her friends at school and more with a book, especially during lunch.
Crash
“Early, what’re we gonna do, girl?” Summer moaned one night when Jubie had finished his bowl of macaroni and cheese and asked for fruit and a cookie. She’d had to tell him there was no more food for that day. He’d looked sad, but had gone off in a corner to play.
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