The Little Library

by Kim Fielding

  With that out of his system, he stomped over to the armchair and threw himself down with all the melodrama of a fourteen-year-old. Which was appropriate, perhaps, since he seemed to be emotionally stunted.

  He had to give Anna and Ladd credit. Instead of making a hasty exit, which is what he would have done in their position, they sat on the couch. They asked him for details. They sympathized. At one point, Ladd even heated a plate of leftovers and insisted Elliott eat them. While their compassion made Elliott feel better, he grieved that Simon was receiving no such comfort and support. Kind, good Simon, who deserved far better from life.

  In the end, they didn’t give him advice. Maybe there wasn’t any to give. But they hugged him and told him they loved him, and Ishtar joined in too, and that helped a bit.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Elliott’s students were not happy. They’d returned from Thanksgiving break to the realization that the semester was almost over, and now they were emailing with tales of woe, pleading for due-date extensions or extra credit, begging him to give them Incompletes or a No Credit instead of an F. He tried to be patient with them, he truly did, but his responses tended toward terse. For once, he was grateful not to face them in person. If they’d been standing in front of him, he would have yelled.

  An entire week passed. He ate all the leftovers Ladd and Anna had brought, and he never once saw Simon. Oh, he was tempted. Sometimes he jogged by Simon’s house and considered ringing the doorbell on the pretext that Ishtar missed him. Which she did; she was a little mopey actually. Elliott kept running on by.

  Miss you, Elliott texted to Simon on Tuesday, followed immediately by But I’m not stalking you.

  Simon replied right away. Miss you too. A lot. Still thinking though.

  Got it. Are you okay?

  Simon answered with a thumbs-up emoji.

  On Thursday night, Simon texted first. Drove to Columbia today. Don’t know why. No fun without you.

  That almost made Elliott cry, which was really dumb. He texted back with Simon’s final sentence: No fun without you. That was true.

  After that, they sent messages to each other a few times a day. Nothing extensive or earthshaking, just reminders of where their hearts were. Elliott sent a few photos of Ishtar. It was all slightly ridiculous since they were only a couple of blocks apart, but sometimes a couple of blocks might as well be a million miles.

  Other than that? Elliott ran a lot, even though the weather was cold and sometimes drippy enough that Ishtar refused to go with him. He didn’t buy more books.

  Business was brisk at the little library. Melanie came by almost every day. He’d catch sight of her in a bright-red jacket as she selected new books and replaced them with some of her own. She always waved at him. Other people came too, ten or twelve every day. They represented a wide range of ages, but what struck Elliott was that every one of them smiled as they walked away with fresh titles clutched under their coats to keep them dry.

  On Friday, Elliott was restocking the library when the mail truck pulled up to the community mailbox across the street. Elliott ambled over while the mail carrier was unlocking the big door that provided access to the entire block’s incoming mail. “Hi,” said Elliott, feeling awkward.

  Apparently the mail carrier had no such reservations; his thin face lit up in a broad grin. “Oh, hey! I’m glad I finally get to see you. I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I love your library idea.”

  “Well, it really wasn’t my idea.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen a couple others around town. They’re great. Now I know why you need all those Amazon deliveries!”

  Elliott laughed politely. He didn’t mind that the guy knew of his book addiction, but he wasn’t used to being enthused at so cheerfully. “I enjoy keeping it up.”

  “Hey, would you mind if I borrow a book now and then? I know I don’t live here, but—”

  “Help yourself.”

  The mail carrier smiled even wider and waved a handful of envelopes and sales circulars. “Thanks! I’ll return ’em, of course.”

  “No worries. I have plenty.” This time, Elliott’s smile felt less forced. He was genuinely pleased to know his library’s use could expand outside his little circle of neighbors.

  “Thanks. Hang on. I’ve got stuff for you.”

  While Elliott waited for him to sort the mail, Mike Burgess shot out of his house and marched over at full speed. He didn’t bother greeting either Elliott or the mail carrier. “Last week somebody else’s mail was in my box!”

  Judging from the mail carrier’s long-suffering expression, this wasn’t the first time he’d heard this complaint. “I’m really sorry to hear that, sir. We try very hard to deliver accurately, but sometimes—”

  “It’s your job! You guys get paid far too much to stroll around doing a job a trained chimpanzee could get right. Then you stand around lollygagging all day.” Burgess gestured angrily at Elliott.

  “Lollygagging?” Elliott asked. Who wrote Burgess’s script?

  While Burgess glared, the mail carrier seemed unperturbed. “I was just complimenting Mr. Thompson on his library, that’s all.”

  “That!” Burgess spat. “It’s illegal!”

  “What the hell’s illegal about it?” demanded Elliott. He didn’t add that his maybe-boyfriend, a former cop, was an enthusiastic supporter of the library.

  “You’re trumpeting your agenda where children can access it.” Burgess said agenda as if it were a dirty word.

  “My agenda is to get people to read, so yeah. I think that’s good for kids.”

  “I mean your other agenda! Which is obscene.”

  “I think, Mike, you should look up the proper definition of obscene. And if you don’t like my books, don’t read them. Simple as that.”

  Although he didn’t add to the discussion, the mail carrier looked as if he were enjoying it. He’d angled his body closer to Elliott, perhaps to clarify his loyalty.

  Burgess growled. “That filth shouldn’t be where children can see it.”

  “It’s not filth, and I think I’ll let the kids and parents decide for themselves what’s appropriate.”

  “Appropriate!” Burgess’s face had turned red. “You people come in and you act like you deserve special rights, and you wave your politics in everyone’s faces all the time. It’s disgusting!”

  “‘You people’? What people are those, Mike? And exactly what special rights do you think I’m demanding?”

  Burgess pointed at Elliott’s house. “That! Those books and that sign.”

  “So the First Amendment is a special right?”

  Burgess sputtered, but before he managed an answer, the mail carrier addressed him. “I think a person’s choice of reading material is his own business.” He raised his eyebrows and cast a significant look at Burgess, whose face flushed even more.

  “Just . . . do your job!” Burgess shouted. He turned on his heel, marched back to his house, and slammed the door as he went inside.

  “He orders some interesting magazines?” Elliott asked.

  The mail carrier’s smile was back. “I can’t divulge. But . . . yes.”

  “Ew. I don’t even want to know.”

  They chatted for another minute or two while the mail carrier finished sorting. Then he handed a few items to Elliott. “Guess I oughtta quit my lollygagging. Have a good weekend!”

  Elliott smiled. “You too. And help yourself to the books.”

  He was still smiling as he crossed the street and walked up his driveway, shuffling through his mail as he went. But when he got to the final envelope, his stomach clenched. The return address was a prison in Washington.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Dear Elliott—

  The handwriting was familiar. Elliott had first seen it scrawled on chalkboards and, in red ink, filling the margins of his exams and papers. Later it had adorned numerous versions of Elliott’s dissertation because John Davis didn’t believe in using Track Changes. “Ink
is better,” he used to insist. “More organic and conducive to thought.”

  The letter was written in black ink, not red, and the words crowded closely across the page. The paper itself was somewhat wrinkled, as if John had handled it repeatedly before putting it in the envelope. Or maybe prison officials were to blame—didn’t they read outgoing mail?

  Elliott sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of him and Ishtar near his feet. He could have read the letter in the living room, but that was his space to share with Anna and Ladd and Simon—not with John. The kitchen was better. Maybe somewhere impersonal like a Starbucks would have been best, but his hands were shaking and he didn’t trust himself to drive.

  “Should just throw the fucking thing away,” he said to Ishtar. But he couldn’t bring himself to follow through. The pull of words was just too strong.

  Dear Elliott—

  The arrival of the holiday season has made me introspective and inspired me to reach out. The holidays are a melancholy time in prison. Some of the staff make an attempt, a bit of a nod toward the season, but the food remains awful and the atmosphere gloomy.

  I hope you, at least, are enjoying the season. I asked my attorney to find your new address, so I’m aware you’ve relocated to California. You must appreciate the proximity of your relatives and the comparatively balmy climate, but it’s a shame you’ve retreated so thoroughly. I do hope you’re not squandering your potential. You have it in you to become a fine scholar.

  Speaking of scholarship, I’ve been thinking a great deal about my book. Of course, my access to research sources is severely limited here, but I’ve been able to flesh out my thesis and outline, and that part is going well. When complete, my book will be an excellent contribution to the literature.

  My attorney is working now on obtaining my parole, and I expect to be released by early spring. Once my book is published, the royalties will provide an adequate income, and I expect the quality of the work will persuade institutions to overlook my unfortunate history and offer me employment. Until then, however, I will need a place to live and access to academic libraries. This will be your opportunity to obtain the goal for which you’ve been pestering me for so long—we can finally move in together. You will have to relocate, as I cannot leave Washington while I’m on parole, but I assure you that you’ll be better off here.

  You should begin investigating positions in Washington at once, if you’ve not already begun to do so. Even Portland would be acceptable, as it’s close enough to the border that we could live in Washington and you could commute. I understand that moving again might be difficult, but you can assist me with my book, and I’ll list you as second author. That should offset the inconvenience.

  In the meantime, Elliott, do keep up with your own work. If you’d like to send some of it to me, I’d be happy to provide feedback. One thing I can continue to do while I’m stuck in this place is provide mentoring to you.

  I look forward to our reunion.

  Yours,

  J

  For a long time, Elliott stared blankly at the letter, the lines of writing blurring before his eyes. He felt disconnected from his own thoughts, noting like a clinical observer that his hands were curled into tight fists and his jaw was clenched hard enough to make the muscles jump. He was breathing rapidly, as if he’d just returned from a long run, yet his skin felt icy.

  Rage. This was rage. And the focus wasn’t so much on John as on himself. How could he have been such an idiot? How could he have allowed himself to be seduced by such grandiose lies? How could he have pinned his entire life, his future, his heart to a narcissistic fuck-wad like John Davis?

  “I don’t deserve Simon,” he whispered. He didn’t deserve anything. Not his loving family. Not his fancy degrees. Not the potential position in Nebraska or the online jobs he had now. Not the sweet dog who stood beside him, burrowing her head into his stomach.

  For a long, cold minute, he seriously considered walking Ishtar over to Simon’s house, leaving her there, and then . . . disappearing. Erasing himself. Because continuing onward felt so fucking hard.

  But that wouldn’t be fair to Ishtar and Simon, and it wouldn’t be fair to Anna and Ladd and his parents. They’d blame themselves. While he might have fucked up his life, he wasn’t about to ruin theirs too.

  Fine then. If he couldn’t erase himself, he could at least start with a blank slate. He would move to Nebraska—or somewhere else far away—and begin a new career with people who didn’t know him. He would leave Simon to find his own way, because Simon was strong and wonderful and would recover from the loss of his family. Because Simon didn’t deserve to be saddled with someone who’d let himself be so easily conned by blatant deceits. Soon enough someone better than Elliott would discover Simon and help him find the life he deserved.

  The only things Elliott would take from his old life were Ishtar and his books. Not even all of his books—just the ones he truly needed. He’d give the rest away.

  That decided, he dashed off a quick note.

  John,

  Fuck you.

  E

  He put the note in an envelope, printed the address, and slapped on a stamp. Then he went to prepare for a run.

  ***

  Monday was a strange day. Ginny Holmes called from Nebraska State to let him know they’d be contacting him with travel arrangements later that week. He tried to sound enthusiastic about the prospect, but he’d been numb since Friday. Simon texted him twice—once to ask for a book recommendation for Miri and once to warn him that a big storm was forecasted. Elliott answered both, but he felt that the messages between them carried more unsaid meaning than actual words. Too bad he couldn’t decipher what Simon meant. A student emailed with an unlikely excuse about having to go to Washington, DC, to meet with her congressman, and when Elliott replied with skepticism, she sent him a phone number for the congressman’s staff. Elliott called and the story checked out. So he apologized to the student, granted her an extension, and wished her well.

  Shortly after lunchtime, the sky went an odd yellow color. “We’d better run while we can,” Elliott told Ishtar, who’d been restless all day. He put on his running gear, but Ishtar—who usually threw herself around the living room in ecstatic celebration when he geared up—hovered near the couch with her tail hanging low.

  “It’s not raining yet. And even if it does, you won’t melt.” As he clipped on her leash, he wondered whether pets really could sense earthquakes and, if so, whether that was Ish’s problem. Hell, something felt off to him too. Maybe it was simply the drop in barometric pressure.

  Although Ishtar wasn’t exactly eager, she didn’t hesitate to join him when he left the house. He locked the door as usual, tucked the key into the pocket of his jogging pants, and began to run. He didn’t take his phone this time. If it did storm, he didn’t want to worry about it getting wet. Besides, listening to music would make it harder to maintain an emotional connection with Ishtar, and if her anxiety increased, he wanted to be aware of it.

  They took one of his usual routes past the edge of town and out into farmland, where a few cows and goats watched them race by. Since the livestock seemed calm, maybe no calamity was in store—just some rain and perhaps some wind. Hell, Elliott was going to have to endure a lot more than that if he ended up in Nebraska. “Blizzards!” he said breathlessly to Ishtar. “Hailstorms. Tornadoes!” She wasn’t impressed.

  They reached an old farmhouse he’d always liked. Its white siding needed fresh paint, but he liked the wide front porch and wondered what the owners had done with the attached structure that had once housed a water tower. In late spring, the people who lived there sold cherries for two dollars a bag, usually on the honor system, with the fruit set out on a wooden table near the road. During the summer, their front yard was a veritable jungle of vegetables and bright flowers. Even with the calendar turned to December, a few blooms survived near the front porch and the short row of orange trees near the driveway promis
ed a large harvest very soon.

  Elliott would miss that house when he moved. Sure, Nebraska had plenty of farmhouses. So did just about anywhere else he might end up. But none of them would be this familiar place with the tire swing hanging from an oak tree and the chipped concrete fountain near the lavender hedge.

  Although he often ran farther, today Elliott turned toward home.

  He gave in to a bit of weakness and detoured by Simon’s house, but he didn’t stop. Sometimes Ishtar would tug him toward Simon’s door, but today she pulled him down the sidewalk, apparently eager to get home.

  They turned the corner onto their street. Elliott was looking down at his feet, idly wondering how many miles they’d taken him over the years and how many miles remained. It seemed odd to realize you could measure out your lifetime one small stride at a time. He didn’t look up until they’d nearly reached home—and when he glanced toward his house, he cried out and came to an abrupt stop.

  The library was in ruins.

  The books were still there, but they’d been ripped to pieces. Paper scraps were now scattered across his lawn like the victims of a terrible war, bleeding words into the damp grass. The library’s wooden post was broken near the base, and the stump ended in a ragged edge. The larger part of the post lay on the sidewalk, while the book enclosure was only bits of ruined plywood and cracked plexiglass.

  Elliott had dropped Ishtar’s leash, but while he stood still as a statue, she remained at his side, whining worriedly.

  Elliott steeled himself. All right.

  Moving deliberately, he picked up the leash and led Ishtar into the house. He disconnected the leash and hung it on the rack near the door. Then he found his phone and texted a brief message to Simon: Come get Ish.