Thunderstruck & Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

  The man’s son, who looked just like him, though with a beautiful complexion, hadn’t seemed at all disturbed or surprised by the delinquency of his library card. He was a quiet kid who had to lick his lips several times to get his mouth to work, and then he’d said only, “OK.” It turned out he’d been checking out books for his grandfather, anyhow; the clerk at the desk told his father the kid should just bring in his grandfather’s card.

  We got asked for love advice and job applications, the whereabouts of relatives. “Did you see a girl?” a kid would ask, and the head of circulation would answer wearily, “I’ve seen lots of girls.” One man called because he wanted to know whether his daughter, whom he had not seen in five years, had a library card she’d used recently.

  “I’d like to see her again,” he said when he was told library records were confidential. “I think maybe she tried to contact me a few years ago.”

  When somebody like this called—for instance, the woman who wanted to know how to stop having bad thoughts—the circulation desk happily sent the person to reference, because, after all, it sounded like a job for a professional librarian.

  Juliet surprised us, coming back every day, clean, starched. Usually, the people who showed up like that looked slightly worse every visit. She never did get that library card, but many of our most beloved patrons never did. She favored the children’s room. She became special friends with the children’s librarian, a young woman who said everything as if she were reading a story, as if the end of her sentence contained a wonderful surprise: a beggar revealed to be a lost prince, a talkative young bear no longer afraid of the dark. The children’s librarian had no friends at the library. She wore peasant skirts and thick-soled shoes and pendants on long black strings. Juliet smiled, listened to the librarian’s stories, consoled her the day the Harriet Tubman impersonator failed to show up for the Black History Month program. Once a week, they ate lunch together in the park in front of the building, at one of the concrete tables with an inlaid chessboard. Frequently, Juliet talked to the rabbit. The bunny eyed her with its usual unhappiness, another grubby pair of hands reaching into the cage. Human flesh gave our neurotic bunny the willies.

  In this the rabbit was not so different from the head of reference, who had been cranky for so long his bad mood had turned to superstition, a primitive who believed that the requests for addresses and statistics from the reference collection were akin to soul stealing. He was particularly suspicious of Juliet. Too sunny, that one, and the way she said hello, every single time: she wanted something. She was formulating an immense, subtly impossible, demanding, deadly reference question, one that would begin in the almanacs kept at the desk and then lead to encyclopedias, newspaper articles, and finally some now-unknown reference book kept in the basement, some cursed volume that turned its opener to dust. Even then, there would be no answer.

  “I don’t trust her,” said the head of reference. “She wants something.”

  The other librarians bumped into one another behind the reference desk, trying to intercept patrons before they got to the head of reference, who claimed to be ignorant of any subject that sounded vaguely scientific.

  We heard the big news slowly. There had been a murder. A woman. A woman from our town, killed in her own house. A woman stabbed ten times, twenty, sixty-three. It was as if the police were taking forever to examine the body and called up the local gossips to report: we found five more wounds in the last hour. You could see the cops, turning the body over and over, looking for what was neither evidence nor cause of death—she’d died after her poor body had caught the knife only a few times—one officer with a pencil and white pad, making hash marks. The final count was ninety-six.

  A murder. We hoped for two things: that we did not know the victim and that the murderer did. Please, we prayed, though we never said those prayers aloud, let it be a husband, a boyfriend. We wanted to read in the paper: Last week, she filed for a restraining order. Hadn’t every murdered woman? None of the library staff had ever asked for a restraining order, except the assistant director, who’d filed one against his sister. That was entirely different.

  And then, on the evening news, we saw her picture: Juliet.

  It wasn’t the usual blurry victim snapshot, the kind that makes it seem as if the last thing the person did, before hauling off and getting killed, was to indulge an elderly uncle with a camera. Juliet’s picture—the one that appeared on all the newscasts, on the covers of all the papers—was clear and sharp and pretty. Her hair was done. She was wearing a white strapless gown. Depending on how the paper or channel cropped the picture, you could see the shoulder of her date, wearing a white jacket and black bow tie. He was still alive; you didn’t need to see any more of him. He wasn’t a suspect.

  Her name was Suzanne Cunningham. She was thirty-four. She was, in fact, divorced (we’d suspected) and had three children (we’d had no idea). The oldest, a boy, was fifteen; the two girls were twelve and thirteen. The children’s librarian had known all of this, of course, but would not answer questions. In fact, she had taken several days off work around the time of the murder, and we made a few dark jokes about how suspicious that seemed. Oh, that sweetness and light and arts-and-crafts stuff, that didn’t fool us. She must be a sadist. Look how she treats that poor rabbit.

  We didn’t believe our jokes, but we needed them. Our town was near a big city, but it wasn’t the big city. The famous names of murderers and murdered women—they often shared the same name, of course—were featured in the metropolitan paper, not ours. We had never seen the faces close up or walked by the houses.

  The only thing the children’s librarian said, when she came in to ask the director for the rest of the week off, was, She knew. She knew someone was after her.

  One of the reference librarians confirmed it: Suzanne Cunningham had once asked for a book that would tell her how to keep people out of her house. Burglars? the librarian had asked. Anyone, Suzanne Cunningham answered. I think someone has been sneaking into my house. So the librarian had found a crime-prevention book, which Suzanne Cunningham smiled at and set down on a table without reading.

  That made us feel better—a boyfriend, surely, or even her ex-husband—but we wondered why the newspapers didn’t say so. The book she carried: it must be a diary—it must have clues. We wondered why she hadn’t called the police. Someone sneaks into your house, you have to be worried, don’t you?

  Maybe not. Maybe you don’t know that someone has been there—you just suspect. Nothing is broken or rearranged; no pets have been menaced. There’s just the lingering, careless presence of someone who doesn’t know how the house works. The back door has to be closed with both a knee and a shoulder; the kitchen faucets must be turned off with a wrench; mud must be knocked from shoes and the portable phone doesn’t always want to hang up and the fridge door will float open if you aren’t careful. And then one day, when the kids are with their father—thank God, as it turns out—you come home and surprise him in your kitchen. Maybe you’ve known all along who it was.

  And maybe he even has a crush on you. That’s the thing about crushes—sometimes they fly below the radar, the way in high school, when someone told you a boy had a crush, you could tell by the way he ignored you. The way he ignored you meant everything. A terrible word, crush—you could die from crushing, from having one, anyhow; you remember listening to music that meant the world to you and nothing, you were quite sure, to your beloved. Who knows what teenagers listen to today; your own boy plays music that you can’t imagine swooning to; your own boy is friends with this boy, who is now in your kitchen, licking his lips nervously to oil up his mouth. You know everything about this kid: a neighborhood babysitter, sixteen years old but enormous, big enough to gently swing a laughing five-year-old over his head without fear; an altar boy who goes to the library to pick up books for his grandfather, in his pocket the grandfather’s faultless library card; a part-time drugstore clerk; a good boy who loves his parents, whose p
arents love him.

  What you don’t know is that he has a knife, and that you have frightened him.

  Ninety-six times, though. We couldn’t imagine it. We tried it ourselves, started to hit our own knees softly, ninety-six times. We gave up, we got tired, we made ourselves sick.

  Four days later, they made the arrest. The accused was the blond boy whose father had come in screaming. Another library patron. We all knew him, too: Tommy Mason. The Masons were a big, famous family in our town. Tommy Mason’s grandfather had been mayor once, back in the 1950s.

  An altar boy, a good boy, a boy with a library card. Could such a boy possibly be guilty? He lived across the street from the dead woman. He had shoveled her walk in the winter; his sisters had sold her Girl Scout cookies. He was good friends with Suzanne Cunningham’s oldest child, Kevin. Kevin Cunningham had found his mother’s body.

  Within twenty-four hours, every library staff member who knew how had looked up the accused’s library record. Tommy Mason’s card was still delinquent, told us nothing: a single book called Soap Science, no doubt for school. We looked at the record for the book daily—the title, the author (Bell), the publication date (1993), the due date (May 4, two years ago). We wanted to know something. These were the only facts we had.

  We weren’t supposed to do that, of course. We were supposed to be bound by ethics and privacy, but it felt as if we could break them, the way that cannibalism, in certain extreme cases, is acceptable.

  He was put in jail, and nothing could persuade the judge—also a patron, as it happened—to let him out on bail. Reports came down from the neighborhood and on the TV news. Mr. and Mrs. Mason let themselves be interviewed in their kitchen. They swore that it was impossible, that time would prove them right. Ask anyone in the neighborhood: Tom was the best kid. He wasn’t even interested in girls—why would he kill one? The Masons’ hands were woven together on the kitchen tabletop; their fingers were the same pink, their hands a solid knot. Mr. Mason was calm and reasonable. We wondered whether Tommy Mason was taking the fall for him. We remembered the screaming father, bright red with the idea we’d denied Tommy Mason anything; surely he turned that anger on his family.

  The papers interviewed neighbors. Such a nice boy. There was something about him. He didn’t have a temper. You know, he was off—he didn’t have what you’d call emotions. He was shy. He was a loner. He was a daydreamer. Sometimes he stared through people’s windows.

  Really, there was no prior proof other than vague gossip. He really was, or had been, a good kid, and who knew? The book Juliet had carried was discovered in her living room; it contained only sketches of her children. Maybe Tommy Mason’s parents—and some of the people on the street, who’d already lost one neighbor—were right. Maybe Tommy Mason was innocent and the two men he said he’d seen fleeing the scene were at large, dreaming of their perfect crime. A single perfect crime: the woman was not raped, the house was not robbed, the door had not been tampered with.

  There were two bloody fingerprints, Tommy Mason’s, in the cellar. Bloody, but not his blood. The police said that, and we believed them.

  Tommy Mason stayed in jail, and people stopped believing he hadn’t done it. Of course he’d done it. TV reporters were no longer interested in his parents’ version of the story. One day, at a community picnic in the park, a Little League coach began his remarks, “With all the troubles in our neighborhood in past months …” and one of Tommy Mason’s sisters was there. She went home to tell Mrs. Mason, who returned and stood at the edge of the baseball field. Mrs. Mason was a small woman to have had such a big son, and she looked smaller, cut into diamonds by the chain link of the backstop. “You’ll be sorry!” she screamed. She curled her fingers into the fence. “You’ll see, my Tommy never did it! You’ll see, you assholes!” Some people wondered whether they should go to her, say something comforting. But she scared them, rattling the backstop. Maybe she’d start climbing up it. People walked the other way. They waited for her to stop.

  And perhaps she never will stop. What can you do? Your son, your only boy—whether he killed somebody or not, though he didn’t—is lost to you. He never could have killed anyone. He never even liked horror movies. He was always respectful. He believes in God. And if—though he didn’t!—if he did kill her, that’s one life gone already. Your child used to live in your house, and he has been taken from you, and all you can hope for is that eventually he will be returned. He will already be ruined. The best you can hope for is your ruined boy back in your house.

  Tommy Mason—no matter what—has no doubt already been ruined. The newspapers refer to the Tommy Mason Case, not the Suzanne Cunningham Murder. In fifty years, neighborhood kids will choose kickball teams with rhymes about Tommy Mason, not knowing exactly who that was. Tommy Mason had a knife / Tommy Mason took a life / How. Many. Times. Did. He. Stab. YOU.

  You better be good, or Tommy Mason will get you.

  The children’s librarian was inconsolable. Her mind wandered; her story times made no sense; she forgot the words to “The Wheels on the Bus.” She also forgot to feed the rabbit, who died a week later. The cage had to be covered with cloth so the children wouldn’t peep in. The rabbit lay in state all morning, till someone from the DPW could come and haul it away.

  “You know,” said the children’s librarian to the head of cataloging that day, “she told me, ‘I’ve had a good life. If I died tomorrow, I’d have no regrets.’ ” The head of cataloging stared, thinking, That rabbit said no such thing.

  “Suzanne,” said the children’s librarian. “I don’t care about the rabbit. I’m talking about Suzanne.”

  Which, when the news made its way around the library, struck us as stupid. She had children who grieved for her—isn’t that regret enough? How could sunny Suzanne, sunny Juliet, with her book and her dark hair and her three beloved and loving children, think that if she had to die tomorrow, she wouldn’t mind? We thought perhaps she had lost her life through carelessness and underappraisal. We wouldn’t be so free with our own lives. The difference is, no one has ever wanted ours.

  Did he love her? We had encyclopedias of criminals, anthologies of love poems, textbooks on abnormal psychology. All useless. The newspaper articles said that he admitted nothing, including love. “He’s scared,” said his lawyer. We never heard him speak, and maybe we never would.

  The bitter head of reference read newspaper articles, sick that he’d ever distrusted Juliet. At night, he had dreams of Suzanne Cunningham standing on the reading-room balcony. He saw himself presenting her things, back issues of magazines, rare tax forms, the best-reviewed books. Anything to win her back.

  The bunny was dead. Perhaps the children’s librarian had killed it, but she claimed the rabbit was simply old, and she was the only one who knew anything about rabbits. That day with the bunny beneath its cloth, we thought we should have a funeral behind the library, out by the staff parking. We could turn it into something educational and useful, a children’s program on death. Didn’t parents always bury pets with a small lecture, a made-up eulogy, a somber taps played on a hand held to the mouth like a trumpet? Maybe—

  “It’s a fucking rabbit,” said the children’s librarian, in full hearing of Preschool Arts and Crafts. “It doesn’t stand for anything.” Then she sighed. “I’ll miss Jessica,” she said.

  Jessica? She must have meant Juliet.

  “Jessica,” she said. “Jessica Rabbit.”

  Tommy Mason had three sisters who looked like him, all of whom seemed to be about the same age, twins or Irish twins or a combination of both. They were tall and blond and had beautiful skin with rosy, radishy cheeks, red with white beneath. They started coming back to the library with the grandfather’s card. He still needed books.

  For a while, they rotated duty. Then one started coming in week after week. She was a thin girl, the oldest Mason kid, someone said. Perhaps twenty years old. Pretty, like Juliet—like Suzanne—but pale, a mirror image. They could have been allego
rical pictures in an old painting, or sisters on a soap opera, even though Suzanne Cunningham had been years older. Tommy Mason’s sister carried the grandfather’s library card and never spoke to anyone.

  Somehow, we loved her. She seemed brave; she nodded when we nodded at her. We almost forgot who she was, the same way we almost forgot that Janice had ever been a nervous young man with a robot obsession and a faint, endearing mustache. She had become herself.

  Ours had been a fine building until the mid-1970s, when it had the misfortune of being introduced to the wrong sort of architect. He knocked down the grand marble staircases that had led from the entrance to the reading room, and sealed off the first floor from the upstairs; he installed coarse brick walls and staircases that were only staircases, only transportation. It was possible for the people who worked in the first-floor departments—children’s, circulation—to go days without seeing their upstairs colleagues.

  So the day the children’s librarian went up to reference and ran into Tommy Mason’s sister might have been the first day the two had met at all. Circulation knew the Mason girl well; reference saw her as she deliberated among the mysteries. The children’s librarian rarely left her room, its puppets, its jigsaw puzzles. Somebody else had taken over feeding the finches and the fish.