by Gayle Forman
“That’s what Ira says.”
We reach the top of the hill. Off to the side is a rocky promontory, a series of boulders jutting out from the craggy hillside, as if in defiance of gravity. Mom whistles and the dogs come running. She leashes them and ties them to a pine tree, which is gnarled but strong, reminding me of Ike. She plops down at the edge of a flat rock, her legs dangling into the canyon.
“Why didn’t you say something? Tell anyone?” she asks as I sit down next to her.
“I don’t know,” I admit, throwing a rock into the ravine. “I meant to. But then things just sort of got out of control. I sold to Penny and the Lumberjacks came and I tried to get out of it, I tried to tell the truth, but I just kept digging myself deeper. And every day I’d wake up and think: ‘Today is the day I’ll fix it.’ But then the day passed and I couldn’t do it.”
“You know who you sound like?”
“Ira,” I reply.
“No, Sandy.”
“Why do people keep saying that? I’m nothing like Sandy!”
“Aren’t you?”
“No! I like books, not music. I look like Ira, not you. And I’m not an addict. I’ve never even had beer.”
“The secrets. The lying. The justifying. Making and breaking promises to yourself. That’s your brother in a nutshell.”
“Yeah, but at least I didn’t ruin anyone’s life . . .”
As soon as I say this, I see Ira’s broken face after I told him I’d sold to Penny. And Ike’s hopeful face as he vowed to not be the termite that destroyed the wood. And Chad’s betrayed face when I called him a dinosaur.
Suddenly, I see it. A flaming piece of rock hurtling through the atmosphere.
Oh my god. I’m the fucking asteroid.
“But I never meant for this to happen,” I say. “Things, they just, I don’t know, spun out of control.”
“I imagine your brother felt the same way.”
Instead of objecting, drawing a Kryptonite line between me and Sandy, as I have done for years, I let myself feel how Sandy must have felt: caught in the undertow of his mistakes, trying with everything he had in him to set things right—and still failing.
And with that, I begin to understand. He didn’t mean to destroy our family any more than I chose to destroy the store. He got caught up in something he couldn’t control.
Same as me.
* * *
The next day, we go out to lunch at a diner in Silver’s City’s tiny downtown. The place is a lot like C.J.’s, the same well-worn booths, laminated menus, whipped-cream-laden pies in the display cases. Donna, the waitress, already knows Mom’s name and her order. “The usual?” she asks.
“I’m celebrating Thanksgiving a day late with my son,” Mom says. “We’ll have two hot open-faced turkey sandwich platters, please.”
“Turkey’s always better the next day anyway,” Donna says, scratching the order onto her pad.
“I’m going to hit an Al-Anon meeting after lunch,” Mom says after Donna drops our food. “If you want to come. I think it might do you good.”
“Maybe another time,” I say. “I went to an NA meeting last week and I’m still in recovery from that.”
“You went to an NA meeting?” Her look is more amused than concerned.
“I went with Hannah, the girl I was seeing.”
“Was?”
“She dumped me.”
“How come?” Mom asks.
I scoop up a hunk of mashed potatoes and splat them against the plate. “She said I had some shit to deal with, if you can believe that.”
“Don’t we all.” Mom swirls the gravy into the cranberry sauce. “I have a crazy idea.”
“Yeah?”
“You could stay here. Work out your shit. With me. Silver has three bookstores, a public university, and three hundred sunny days a year. Not the worst place to make a home.”
“You’re gonna stick around?”
She nods. “I think so. I feel at peace in the mountains. The animal shelter where I volunteer has offered me a job. Also”—she glances at me and smiles—“I have a porch swing now, so I need somewhere to hang it.”
“What about Ira?”
“Ira wants you to be happy. And he has Bev now.”
“Can I think about it?”
“You can do whatever you need to, my love.”
* * *
When Mom heads off to her meeting, I walk toward downtown, a cluster of low-rise brick buildings dwarfed by the mountains behind them. I find the bookstore immediately and as soon as I step inside, my olfactory bulb kicks into gear. I’m transported to Bluebird Books, and in that moment I yearn to be back there. And then I remember that there is no more there to go back to.
“Can I help you?”
The man behind the counter looks nothing like Ira—he’s short, brown-skinned, and balding, wearing a bunch of turquoise rings—except I can tell right off the bat, they are brothers of a sort. If there were such a thing as a bookseller covenant, this man would be a signatory.
“I’m looking for a book.” I used to scoff at people who said that. What else would you come to a bookstore for? But I think Mom always understood that bookstores were about the people inside them, the ones on the pages, and off the pages too.
“You’ve come to the right place,” he says. “Would you like help finding one?”
“I would.”
“Tell me: What’s the last book you read that you loved?”
The question stumps me at first. I’ve reread The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs multiple times, but I’m not sure that’s a book I loved so much as clung to. But then I remember Hannah and me, a few days ago, reading aloud from my first love.
“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
“Ah yes,” he says. He looks at me for a long moment, sizing me up, the way Ira used to with customers. “I think I have just the thing for you.” He disappears into the stacks. When he returns, I expect to get another of the Narnia books. Or another fantasy series. Harry Potter. His Dark Materials. But he hands me a slender volume, its cover a sketch of three red birds.
“A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis,” the bookseller tells me. “He wrote it after his wife died, trying to reconcile his faith with his loss before coming to realize the two aren’t at odds; they’re bedfellows. It’s nothing like Narnia, but I thought it might be of interest.”
I look at this man, who doesn’t know me, or anything about me, but who knows, like Ira always knew, like all the best booksellers know, not just what their customers want, but what they need.
* * *
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I read the opening lines of the book, and it’s like my own pages are coming unstuck. For so long, all I’ve felt is fear, and all this time, it was grief. I continue reading, remembering why I used to love books. Because they show us, in so many words, and so many worlds, that we are not alone.
A miracle, in twenty-six letters.
* * *
I’m reading the book when Mom finds me that afternoon. I read it the rest of the day as the long shadows fall, Ramón occasionally perching over me, as if he’s reading over my shoulder the way Ira sometimes does. By the time I finish, I know that I will not stay here with Mom. I will go back and face up to the fear and the grief, that which I’ve caused and that which I’ve been the victim of.
“Do you want me to drive up with you?” Mom asks when I tell her before bed that I’ll be leaving in the morning.
I shake my head. She’s stopped running away. Let her stay, with her birds. I’ll come back another time. Figure out a way to be family.
She tucks the covers around me. “Want me to sing to you?” She’s half joking, unsure.
But I do. “Please.”
She sits down on the edge of the bed. When she begins, the ye
ars fall away, as she sings us all the way back to that day that started us all.
Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.
My Brother
Mom insists I stop somewhere along the drive, so arrangements are made for me to spend the night at a motel in Boise. When I pull up, the clerk tells me the room has already been checked in by the other party.
“What other party?” I ask, even though I know the answer to that even before I see my father through the window, reading a book by lamplight.
I have so many questions. What is he doing here? How did he get here? Does he forgive me? What about Chad and Ike and the Lumberjacks? But instead I speak in the language that’s always come most naturally to us. “What are you reading?”
“Funny you should ask.” He holds up his book. Something by Jamaica Kincaid. It’s called My Brother. “It’s a memoir,” Ira explains. “Kincaid processing the grief after her brother died of AIDS.” He shakes his head. “Not processing. That’s the wrong word. Processing makes it sound like you digest your grief. It reminds me of the mourner’s kaddish, somehow. Like she’s singing her grief, because words are not sufficient. Maybe that doesn’t make sense.”
Mom, singing me to sleep. Hannah, singing to tell a story. Bev, singing away her panic attacks. “Actually, it kind of does.”
“I thought it might be of interest to you.” He pauses. “But only if you want.” He looks pained. “Are you really not reading anymore?”
“I haven’t really been able to read since Sandy died.”
“And all the books I assigned you . . . ?”
“I’ve been faking. About that. And a lot of stuff.” I take a deep breath, forcing myself to keep going. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about selling the store. I sort of did it in a panic, after I saw your credit cards, but the truth is, I just wanted out.”
“Out of what, exactly?” Ira asks.
“The store.”
“Hmm.” Ira strokes his beard. “See, the thing that perplexes me is, if you wanted out of the store, you could’ve sold it months ago. And after you did sell it, you went to a lot of trouble to try to get it back.” Ira shakes his head. “I might be bad at running a business, but you’re terrible at shuttering one. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t quite buy this.”
Hannah called me an unreliable narrator. And maybe I am. The thing with unreliable narrators is that sometimes even they don’t know why they do what they do.
“I ask again: What is it you want out of?” Ira asks, leading me to an answer he already knows.
I think of Chad, falling off the cliff, those three seconds when he was sure he was going to die. It’s like I’ve been suspended in those three seconds ever since Sandy got sick.
“I want out of inevitability,” I tell Ira.
“Inevitability?” Ira asks.
“Knowing that something bad is going to happen, whether you want it to or not, to the point that you just want it to happen so you can stop dreading it.”
“You mean like your brother dying?”
I swallow the lump in my throat and nod. “And Mom leaving. I knew that was coming, and I just wanted it to be over. Same with the store.”
“And you think you have the power to make people live or die? To impact consumer trends?” Ira chuckles. “I didn’t realize I’d fathered a god.”
When he says it like that, it does sound kind of ridiculous.
Ira continues. “You should also know something: I told Annie to leave after Sandy died.”
“You did?”
Ira nods. “She was flailing, caught in this loop of grief. I was afraid what would become of you if she stayed.”
“I wanted her to leave because I was afraid what would happen to you if she stayed.”
Ira strokes his beard and smiles sadly: “How very ‘Gift of the Magi.’”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s that O. Henry story where the husband sells his pocket watch to buy his wife combs for her hair, and she sells her hair to buy him a chain for his pocket watch.” He pauses. “They both try to do something for the other but they kind of lovingly blow it. Like us.”
“Like us,” I repeat. “Are the answers to all life’s questions in books?”
“Of course,” he says. “That’s what makes them miracles.”
* * *
The next morning, I wake to a call from Penny Macklemore. It’s Sunday at eight thirty, but tomorrow is D-Day. December 1. “Just reminding you we have an appointment at my office at ten o’clock.”
“I’ll be there.”
I wake Ira, an idea forming. “Did some guy come for the records?” I ask him.
“Huh?” he asks. Bleary-eyed.
“I sold Sandy’s records. To a guy named Daryl. He was supposed to drop off a check for Chad and get the records. Did he come?”
“Oh, that fellow. He came.” Ira yawns. “I sent him away.”
“Why? He was gonna pay eight grand for the records. I was going to pay back Chad and the guys. I need to make amends.”
“That you do, but the records are worth at least five times that.”
“How do you know that?”
“Your brother had the collection appraised.”
“He did?”
“What do you think that index is for?”
“If you knew how much they were worth, why didn’t you sell them?”
“They aren’t mine to sell,” Ira says.
“But they could’ve saved the store!”
“Sandy didn’t leave the records to me. Or to the store. He left them to you.”
“He didn’t leave anything to me. He gave me the key and made me promise not to sell them.”
Ira cups his fingers. “I think he meant not to sell them when he was alive,” he says in a soft voice. “It wasn’t lost on him that we mortgaged your future to try to save his. I think he wanted to set something aside for you in case the worst happened. I always assumed the records were his legacy to you, and when you were ready, you’d do something with them.” He kicks off the sheets and gets up. “But not for eight thousand dollars.”
I let this sink in: Inheritance? In case the worst happened? Had Sandy seen the asteroid? Did he know his days were numbered? And if so, when did he know? And why didn’t he say anything to me?
But as we get into the car to head home, I realize I need to let this one go. My brother’s thoughts on his own extinction are—like the dinosaurs’ thoughts on theirs—a mystery that will never be revealed to me.
The Great Good Place
Though the store has been all fixed up, when we walk in that night it feels as empty and desolate as it’s been these past few years. Chad and Ike and the Lumberjacks have been fixtures for only a few weeks but their absence is as glaring as the now-fixed broken shelf was. Hannah was right: time is no measure of something like love.
“You want dinner?” Ira asks.
“In a bit. I have to go see Chad.”
Ira puts a hand on my shoulder. “He might need some time. He’s pretty hurt. They all are.”
“I gathered that.” On the drive up, I texted him a dozen times but got no response. “But time is the one thing we don’t have.”
* * *
Aside from that day I was tricked into building the ramp, I’ve never been to Chad’s house. His mom knows exactly who I am and leads me down a wide hallway to the converted garage that’s now his lair. The floor is full of books, our books.
“Your mom let me in,” I say when he greets me with silence.
He grunts in response.
I gesture to the books. “How’s the indexing going?”
“Like you care.”
I walk toward him, stumbling over a copy of Pride and Prejudice. “I do care. I’m so sorry, Chad. If I’d known you were pulling out of
the Stim for the store . . .”
“You think that’s what I’m pissed about?” He shakes his head. “Man, for someone who’s supposedly so smart, you can be hella stupid. I pulled off the waitlist because I changed my mind.”
“You did? Why?”
“Because it’s risky and unproven and maybe love is not dependent upon a person’s genitalia.”
“So what are you pissed off about?”
“Aside from you lying to me for weeks on end?”
“Yeah,” I say, chastened. “Aside from that.”
“You got my hopes up, dawg.” He fiddles with the seams on his gloves. “You got me believing in a great good place.”
“What’s that?”
“Damn, don’t you read your own books?”
“Not all of them.”
“You should read this one.” He wheels over to his side table and pulls out a paperback titled The Great Good Place. “It’s about these spaces, like bookstores, like coffee shops, where people can come together. How important they are. And I thought the store was going to be my great good place. Not just a bookstore but a musical venue, and a place to have your dad’s tai chi classes, and Bev to have her Knit and Lits, and Jax’s twelve-step meetings and my support groups.” He holds up the book. “It coulda been so great. A place for everyone. You let me believe we could have that.” His voice breaks. “You let all of us believe that.”
“If it’s any comfort, I let myself believe it too.”
Chad’s head whips up. “But you said you don’t want the bookstore. You sold it.”
“I don’t want to own the bookstore,” I tell Chad. “But I do want to be a part of a great good place. I just didn’t think it could happen here. I’ve lived above that bookstore all my life but it never felt like a great good place . . . until you showed up and made us build you a ramp.”
Chad nods slowly. “Conned you into building me a ramp, you mean.”
