by Gayle Forman
Sales had been declining, and customers dwindling. Mom had hoped a café would bring in revenue, and also people. We couldn’t afford to hire anyone to do the work, so she ordered a bunch of DIY books and started to do it herself. She was halfway through when the asteroid hit.
“See,” Richie crows. “Bookstores oughta have coffee.”
“Shut up!” I tell him.
“Aaron!” Ira scolds. “Manners. And will you please find Bev her book?”
“I can come back another time,” Bev says. “You seem busy.”
“No!” Ira says forcefully. “Aaron will find you the book.”
“How will I find her the book?” I yell. “We can’t find anything in here.”
“You would if you had an organizational system and a database,” Chad pipes in.
“Shut up, Chad!”
“Aaron!” Ira gasps. “What’s gotten into you? Talking to customers that way.”
“It’s all gravy, Mr. Stein. He had a long night.”
“I think I’ll go,” Bev says.
“Don’t!” Ira says. Then he adds, in a wavering voice, “Please.”
“Nurse lady. What did you say the book you were looking for was called?” Garry calls.
“When You Reach Me,” Bev replies. “And my name is Bev.”
“This the book, Bev?” Garry trots to the front of the store, holding, miraculously, a copy of When You Reach Me. “Uh-oh,” he says, flipping through the pages. “Looks like someone wrote in it.”
I grab the book, check the title page. “The author wrote in it.”
“Well, that was disrespectful.”
“It was signed by the author.”
“Signed?” Bev asks. “You have author visits? How wonderful!” She claps her hands together in delight. “Is there an events schedule? Or is it online?”
“They don’t have a website,” Richie says.
“We have a website!” I say. “It’s just down.”
“But we can get it back up,” Ira says. “After the renovation. So check then.”
“What renovation?” I cry.
“I will,” Bev says, paying for her book. “The bookstore in my old town had so many events. Author readings and a book club knitting circle. They called it Knit and Lit.” She plays with her glasses chain and smiles dreamily. “I miss that.”
“Knit and Lit,” Ike says. “Not a bad idea.”
After Bev leaves, I pull Ira to the side. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”
“I know. I’m sorry. I should’ve asked you. But after you left yesterday, Ike and the boys came back, and we got to talking about improvements.”
“Ira,” I object.
“I know! I know. But Ike says a lot of the material could be salvaged. And Joe Heath is retiring.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“He’s getting rid of his inventory for cost, below cost. A lot will be free.”
“Let’s assume that’s true, which I doubt it is—what about the labor?”
“Ike says we could pay them in coffee.”
“Coffee?”
“And creamer,” Ira adds. “Ike likes French vanilla and Garry’s a hazelnut man.”
“Ira.” I reach for his hands. They’re so thin and frail. He’s only fifty-two years old. When did he become so old? “This can’t be real. You see that, right?”
“But why can’t it?” Ira asks, pulling his hands back to gesticulate around the store. “We aren’t talking about major work. Just a few pieces of Sheetrock, a fresh coat of paint. To spiff up the place. Why couldn’t we do author events again? Knit and Lits, even? Why can’t this place get a second chance?”
Because there are no second chances after asteroids hit. Just ask the dinosaurs.
I need to tell him.
Why can’t I tell him?
I can’t tell him.
“What if it’s too late?” I ask.
“It’s not too late. Not if we work together. Remember that book I used to read to you? Stone Soup.”
Stone Soup is another one of those feel-good classics for kids that, like The Giving Tree, is built on a dangerous lie. Three hungry soldiers get the stingy townspeople to give them food by pretending to make a soup out of stones. In the book it all ends happily. But think about real life: What would happen when the townspeople realized they’d been Lucied? They’d run after those soldiers with pitchforks and torches.
Ira can’t see it but I do: He’s being fed rocks and water by Ike and the Lumberjacks. He’s being fed rocks and water by his own coward of a son.
“At least let them fix the shelf,” Ira implores. “It was the first one we bought for the store. Your mother picked it out.”
The look on Ira’s face, so open, so hopeful—it guts me. It’s like he believes that fixing a splintering shard of wood will change anything. But it won’t. It won’t bring the store back. It won’t bring them back.
“Ira,” I begin. “It’s not gonna work . . .”
I watch my father’s face crumple. There’s only so many times you can break someone’s heart. Unlike wood, it can’t be fixed.
And it’s one shelf. What harm can that do?
As it turns out, a lot.
The Scent of Desire
The olfactory bulb is a tiny bit of the brain deep in the amygdala that, according to a book I read a few years ago called The Scent of Desire, is why you can be walking down the street and smell something—perfume or drying pine needles or stale cigarette smoke—and bam! You’re transported to some other place in time associated with that smell. It’s not a memory. It’s more powerful than that. It’s as close as you can get to a time machine.
When I wake up the next morning to the aroma of coffee, I am transported to a different world, a different time: Mom is in the kitchen wearing Joseph, dancing around, using the robe’s strap as a microphone that she sings into. Sandy is up early, sipping his coffee, teasing Mom for playing the same song every damn day. “Don’t you ever want to switch it up?” Sandy asks. And Mom says, “No more than I want to switch you up.” Ira is downstairs in the shop, getting ready for the new day. And for a minute, all is well.
But then I hear Ike’s gravelly voice. And I realize Mom is not in the kitchen. Neither is Sandy. Just my olfactory bulb sending me to a world that no longer exists.
Even your own damn brain can Lucy you!
* * *
Downstairs, Ira is bustling around with Mom’s old Mr. Coffee, refilling the Lumberjacks’ mugs. Give him an apron and he could get a job at C.J.’s.
He’s chatting with Ike while Richie and Garry box books from the broken shelf.
“We should probably box a few of the others while we’re at it so we have more room to maneuver.” Ike points to the teetering piles. “What do you think?” he asks me.
What I think is that these guys are playing us, even if I don’t know how.
What I also think is that the books will need to be boxed up to ship to the bulk buyers.
“I dunno,” I suggest, casually, kicking my leg back and forth. “Maybe we should box all the books.”
“All the books?” Ira replies. “That seems unnecessary.”
“It’ll give Ike more room to maneuver, maybe widen the aisles like Chad said, and allow us to organize better.” I sound so convincing, I almost persuade myself.
“No problem here,” Ike says. “I got plenty of boxes in the truck and with three of us, it won’t take long.”
“Thanks, Ike,” I say brightly before turning to Ira. “Hey, I was thinking, maybe we should go out for dinner tonight?”
“Why?” Ira asks, justifiably surprised. Eating out is not something we do. We eat because our bodies require us to. But asking Ira to dinner will signal an event. It will force me to tell him. Plus, I’ve read how restaurants are good
spots for breakups; being in public discourages a scene.
“Are we celebrating something?” he adds, ever hopeful that we might be.
Getting out of this damp, moldy, godforsaken crater, I think. But I don’t tell him that. Instead I say, “Celebrating second chances.”
Ira’s tentative smile blossoms into a high beam and a piece of my heart dies. It’s one thing to be cowardly, another thing to be cruel.
* * *
I settle in on the porch with the Brusatte, opening to a random page about the discovery of an allosaurus in Wyoming that the paleontologists nicknamed Big Al. Big Al was such a find, he got his own TV special. I wonder what he would think about that, not just dead but extinct too, and getting his fifteen minutes of fame. Not everyone gets that kind of second chance.
But not even Brusatte can hold my attention today. The residue of this morning’s time travel still clings to me, and somehow I’m not totally in this world.
I pull out my phone and open a video of Beethoven’s Anvil that I discovered last night. It’s grainy, and the sound quality is terrible, which doesn’t matter because the sound is not why I keep watching. It’s her. It’s Hannah. I watch the video a few times. Replay our conversation from the club the other night. Pick up the Brusatte, put it back down, watch the video again.
Every time I see her, I feel that thing: the inevitable.
The thing is: I don’t trust the inevitable.
I mean, what has inevitable done for me?
Ruined my life is what.
I put away my phone and pick up the book again but wind up just kind of staring into the gloom. There’s not a ton of foot traffic on Main Street on the best November day, but today it’s particularly sparse, so when I see someone heading this way, someone looking remarkably like Hannah, I am pretty sure I am hallucinating.
She comes closer, high ponytail springing, wearing an oversized hoodie, HILLSDALE CHEER SQUAD emblazoned in peeling letters.
It can’t be her.
I mean, why would she be here? In my town? Walking down my street? Waving?
This is not how life works. And definitely not how my life works.
I wave back.
Am I still sleeping? Has the olfactory bulb catapulted me not into the past but into someone else’s future?
“What are you doing here?” I bark. She flinches because it comes out rude, like I’m questioning her right to be here when really I’m questioning the reality of her being here. I soften. “I just didn’t expect you, is all.”
“Sorry I didn’t make an appointment. I can see you’re very busy.” She picks up the Brusatte. “Dinosaurs, huh?” She opens to the table of contents, running a finger down the listing. “Somehow I thought you’d be reading brooding literature. Dostoyevsky or Goethe or something.”
She just name-checked two of my favorite authors. Who is this person?
“Any good?” she asks.
“Probably.” I shrug. “I mean, I’ve read it like four times in a row.”
“Four times?” She shakes her head, flicking the points of her ponytail. “It must be really good.”
“It’s really well written, but that’s not why I keep reading it.”
“Why do you keep reading it?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s comforting.”
“Dinosaurs are comforting?”
“Not them, but more like the reminder that everything ends. Dinosaurs. Families. People. The human race.”
“Oh, yes, very comforting.”
“You think I’m weird?”
“Contemplating extinction at eleven thirty on a Saturday morning is definitely weird.” Hannah pauses. “But my kind of weird.”
My heart pit-pats.
“So let’s go see them books.”
“Shit. I didn’t know you were coming. They’re pretty much boxed up.”
“Why?”
“Minor construction work.”
“Tragic. I came all this way,” she says.
“Is there something specific you’re looking for? I can try to find it.” I know this is impossible. It’s hard enough to find things when they’re on the floor. But for her, I will tear the place apart.
“Nah.” She glances at me, her dark eyes sparkling and full of mischief. “If the books are a no-go, I guess you’ll have to show me the records instead.”
* * *
I lead Hannah through the store while Garry gapes, open-mouthed, as if I’ve brought in a centaur. Ike doffs an invisible hat. Richie makes a kissy sound.
“Don’t mind them,” I tell Hannah as I lead her down the stairs. “They were raised in a barn.”
“Ahh, they’re harmless,” she says.
“Don’t know about that.” I flick on the lights. Hannah’s curious eyes take in the Mom rubble. The bike. The robe. The addiction books. I see the questions forming on her lips. Quickly, I point in the opposite direction. “Behold, the vinyl.” I shake my keys.
“Locked?” Hannah asks. “Is this a vinyl crime zone?”
A little on the nose, there, Hannah. “You’d be surprised.”
I unlock the bins and she starts going through one. “Holy shit. Versus. Velvet Underground.” She turns to me. “Is it all like this?”
“I guess so.”
“Pretty impressive for a music hater.”
For a second, I can see Sandy, stooped over the bins, obsessing over his beloveds.
And maybe Hannah can too. Or maybe it dawns on Hannah the dissonance of a professed music hater having such a collection. Or maybe she reads the look on my face. Because she gets it.
“These aren’t yours?”
Sandy built the cabinets over a single weekend in a burst of manic energy, not stopping to eat or sleep until he’d finished installing them, lining them with special plastic to keep out warping moisture, putting each album in its right place.
“No,” I say. “They’re my brother’s.”
She is holding a Violent Femmes album, tight to her chest. She sets it down and in a quiet voice asks, “He died?”
There are so many reasons why Sandy could’ve given me his collection: Maybe he’s in prison. Maybe he became a Hare Krishna. Maybe he grew out of his collecting obsession and got married, had kids, got old and boring. But Hannah is right.
“He died.”
“That explains it,” she says.
“Explains what?”
“I don’t know. This vibe I got off you. Sadness. I felt it coming off you when you were watching me read.”
“You knew I was there?”
“Yeah, stalker. I was gonna tell you to piss off but something stopped me.”
“I didn’t mean to creep. It’s just you were reading The Magician’s Nephew.”
“So?”
“That book means a lot to me.”
“You said you’d never heard of it.”
“I lied.”
“Why’d you lie?”
“I don’t know. I panicked. I’ve never seen anyone reading that before. And that book, the entire series, it’s like really special to me. They were the first books I ever got into. When I was a kid, I read them obsessively. My mom used to say Narnia was my first love.”
This makes her laugh but in a nice way. “Who’s your second love? Harry Potter?”
YOU, I think. You, you, you.
“Let’s make a deal,” she says. “You don’t lie to me and I won’t lie to you.”
She holds out her hand to shake and it’s like she has one of those prank buzzers because as we do a jolt goes up my spine. A delicious jolt. “Deal,” I say.
She turns back to the bins. “What was he like?” she asks, pulling out a Prince double album. “This brother of yours.”
I see Sandy again, handing me the key. I blink him away. I don’t want
to see Sandy, here, now. “I don’t really remember. It was a long time ago.”
Technically, Sandy died fifteen months ago, but he’d been dying in pieces for years, so this feels true enough that I didn’t just violate our pact.
I gesture to the Prince album. “You wanna listen to that or just fondle it?”
She scopes out the basement. “Is there a turntable?”
“Upstairs. I can bring it down. Give me a sec.”
“Okay. I’ll keep searching for a perfect song for you.”
“You’re gonna be looking for a long time.”
“I love a challenge.”
In the store, Garry and Richie are playing catch with the books. I intercept a copy of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter that Garry is tossing to Richie as if it were a Frisbee. “Show some respect!” I scold.
“It’s a book, not the Bible,” Richie replies.
I don’t even bother to respond to that. “Where’s Ira?” I say, looking around. No way would he stand for this kind of treatment of the books.
“On a walk,” Ike replies.
“Be careful,” I bark at the guys as I climb the narrow staircase up to the apartment.
The one turntable we still possess lives in Sandy’s room, tangled in a Gordian knot of wires and cables, the remnants of his workshop. Sandy was fourteen when he started revamping old stereos out of component parts he nosed out from hidden corners of junk shops and the dump, with the same spidey sense that pinged when he was in the vicinity of rare vinyl. For a while, he did a pretty brisk business, shipping his stereos all over the country. He used the proceeds to buy records. “Funds his addiction,” Mom joked, back when our family could joke about addiction.
I pause in front of Sandy’s doorway, his Milo Goes to College poster barely hanging on to the door. I’d stopped going in here when Sandy became a dick, but even now that he’s gone, I still avoid it. Every so often I catch a whiff of him and then that trickster olfactory bulb sends me time traveling, and I never know where it’s gonna take me: Will it hurl me back ten years, me and Sandy “camping” in a pillow fort? Or will it fling me back to that morning, Mom’s animalistic screams echoing through the house? Sometimes I don’t know which memory is worse.
