Not that she would ever quit the store. Six years ago, when Lydia had put on a flannel skirt and a loose-hanging blouse and stepped into Bright Ideas for a job interview, the spotty résumé in her hand held little ripples where her sweat had saturated the paper. The manager that day was a reformed radiologist and country music fiddler with a tidy gray beard, and as he steered Lydia toward a couch in the Philosophy section, her nerves began to settle. When he folded her résumé and placed it on the floor near her feet, saying that interviews around here were a little less formal than all that, she let out a gusty sigh and tapped her fingertips together and began to speak of her shoestring travels (Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia), the classes she’d loved in college (World Religions, Renaissance Lit), her many fleeting jobs (orchards and farm stands, hotels and pet shops), and for the first time in a long time she found herself speaking openly with a stranger, and not feeling as if she were splashing through the conversational equivalent of a shark attack. At the end of the interview, in one of the most consequential moments of her life, the manager leaned back and simply said, “Recommend a book to me.” The title she picked was telling—One Hundred Years of Solitude, as her own years of solitude were coming to a close—but even more telling was the tranquillity she felt afterward as she explored the enormous store, sliding books in and out of their slots, sizing up her new comrades.
She felt typically shy that day, avoiding eye contact and wearing her mild smile, but she could tell from the start that Bright Ideas was just the kind of sanctuary she’d been seeking for much of her life. Her fellow booksellers ran the demographic gamut, from a sixty-eight-year-old ex-nun with a brazen taste for erotica to a seventeen-year-old dropout who, despite the Churchillian monocle tattooed over her left eye, had landed second place on last season’s Jeopardy! Teen Tournament. They wore their hair dreaded and Afroed, waist length and shaved clean. Some of the older, loftier lefties looked like models from the 1974 Sears catalog, while others wore bolo ties and sassy dresses and hats that could only be described as Parisian. Even on that first day she knew that these booksellers were happier—or at least more tuned in to what happiness really was—than most, which had always seemed reason enough to stay.
Lydia hopped off the loading docks and rounded the corner into the alley behind the store. She was just gathering the guts to go inside, strategizing ways to get through her shift, when the sound of footsteps touched the air behind her.
“You know it’s not your fault.”
She turned to see Plath walking toward her, dressed in baggy black, fogging the air with a cigarette.
“Do I know that?” Lydia said. “I guess I do.”
“He’d be dead no matter what. It’s really not your fault.”
A woman on the edge of fifty, Plath had worked at Bright Ideas since its opening day, and at other indies and libraries for decades before that. She was a benevolent oddball with unnerving beauty: silver hair cropped close to the skull, wide green eyes, slender arms. She never wore makeup and sported her wrinkles proudly. And she often showed up at work with gifts for Lydia—startling things, like the creepy doll with no hair or the tin of Japanese candies that tasted like meat. Though she didn’t know for sure, Lydia assumed that Plath was single because she was too headstrong to get suckered by love, and most men, she imagined, would be made flaccid by her testimonials about Gilded Age vibrators, which she claimed were effective largely because of their threat of electrocution. Lydia sometimes saw Plath as the woman she might someday become: caring, creative, content—but inaccessible to nearly everyone alive.
“He would’ve found a way,” Plath said, “with or without you. Suicides are persistent like that.”
“It just doesn’t make sense.”
“You were good to Joey,” Plath said. “It makes me mad he did this to you.”
Lydia felt too empty to speak.
“And the bookstore, too. We were like his second home.”
Lydia pulled at a coil of her hair, silent.
“I mean, I loved the guy, I really did, but what the hell, Joey? Now I don’t have anyone to talk to about the Bermuda Triangle.”
“I’m sure you’ll find someone,” said Lydia.
“I just don’t get the drama,” Plath said, lighting a cigarette off of her cigarette. “Hanging himself in the History section? This from a guy who blushed when you said hi? Unless you were Lydia. The lovely Lydia.” Plath reached out and held Lydia’s shoulder. “I mean it,” she continued. “The kid adored you. You were really good to him.”
“He was a good guy.”
“I know,” Plath said. “But the next time he decides to kill himself, he should go backpacking in the winter in his undies. Swallow some cleaning products in a canoe. Just leave you out of it.”
Listening to Plath’s wandering thoughts, the obvious suddenly occurred to her: Joey had wanted her to find him. He’d wanted Lydia to be the one.
“And he didn’t even leave a note?” Plath said.
“No note.”
“I’m sorry,” Plath said, shaking her head, “but that’s like not tipping your waiter.”
No note, Lydia thought. Just a birthday photo of me.
“If I was going to kill myself,” Plath continued, “I’d leave a note just to get a few last digs in. Insult the guy who took me to prom. Give my parents one last guilt trip. Criticize my ex-husband’s penis. Make it count, you know? It’s not like you’d have anything to lose.” Plath stopped rambling and squeezed Lydia’s forearm. “Are you okay?”
“Mmm.”
But Lydia wasn’t okay. Something had been happening inside her. An old tight knot was beginning to unravel.
“You sure you’re okay?”
A hairy wrist tucked into a white latex glove. A white latex glove gripping a claw hammer. A claw hammer spun through with a girl’s hair. And blood. Always—
Lydia wiped her eyes on the threadbare sleeve of her sweater, breathed deep for a minute, and waited for the images to fade. She didn’t need a therapist to know that Joey’s hanging had opened doors long closed.
“So what did David say?” Plath asked.
“What does David always say?”
“The right thing,” Plath said. “Makes me sick how adorable he is. You should really go home and rest your soul. Spend the week reading with David at your side.”
“David’s usually more of a doer than a reader, if that makes sense.”
“Spend the week in bed with him then.”
“He reads,” Lydia said, smiling. “Just not like crazy. It’s mostly just the Sports section and crosswords and stuff for work. Last year for his birthday he asked for a programming book called C Plus Plus, whatever that means.”
“My god, Lydia, that’s the saddest thing you’ve ever said.”
“I feel better now.”
Plath bit her lips and looked to her hand for a cigarette that was no longer there.
“Listen,” she said. “I know this is freaky, and I really don’t want to add any more chaos to whatever you’re going through right now. But . . .”
“But?”
“It was in this morning’s paper. The event. The incident. No article or anything, just one of those captions beneath a photo of the scene.” Plath grimaced. “You were in it.”
“Me? In the photo?”
“In the photo. In the caption. It’s too bad you’re not the attention-getting sort. This would really make your day.”
Plath dived into the black bladder of her purse and retrieved a crumpled newspaper. Lydia glimpsed an image of Clinton giving a thumbs-up from a podium while Gingrich grumbled behind him. Plath flipped the page over. “See? That’s you by the door covering your mouth with your hands. Look at your wonderful hair. How do you get it to look so weed-whacked?”
“Oh god,” Lydia said, feeling the flush of self-consciousness that arrived at any mention of her appearance: the giant brown eyes that gave her a look of perpetual alarm; the slight curve in her shoulders that gave h
er a beaten hunch. Though she’d only recently turned thirty, Lydia couldn’t help but notice the gray sprigs that had infiltrated her hair and the new lines alongside her mouth that, when she relaxed, gave her the look of a frowning rabbit. She very nearly hyperventilated at the fact that this photo had accompanied a hundred thousand morning coffees. She wondered who had seen it—who had identified her.
“There’s the ambulance,” Plath said, pointing at the page, “and the gurney and poor Joey in his body bag. Why do they have to use black bags for bodies anyway? No wonder everyone’s afraid of death. Why not teal? Oh, and did you see what they called Joey in the caption? Unidentified man.”
Lydia sighed and glanced up the alley toward the sidewalk, where a couple of guys were locking a shopping cart to a lamppost.
“How sad to think of Joey like that,” Plath continued. “Unidentified man.”
“They all are,” Lydia said, and walked toward the wide window with red casing that cut through the store’s brick back wall. There they were, already populating the store and not yet noon—an entire world of unidentified men: the BookFrogs.
During her first weeks of working at Bright Ideas, Lydia had noticed that not all the customers were actually customers, and a whole category of lost men began to formulate in her mind. They were mostly unemployed, mostly solitary, and they—like Joey—spent as much time in the aisles as the booksellers who worked there. They napped in armchairs and whispered in nooks and played chess with themselves in the coffee shop. Even those who didn’t read always had books piled around their feet, as if fortressing themselves against invading hordes of ignoramuses, and when Lydia saw them folded into the corners for hours at a time, looking monastic and vulnerable, she thought of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, Beatrix Potter’s dapper frog who was often portrayed reading a newspaper with his lanky legs in the air. They were like plump and beautiful frogs scattered across the branches of the store, nibbling a diet of poems and crackers.
“What are we going to do with you?” Plath said, gently putting her arm around Lydia.
Lydia leaned into her. “I wish I knew.”
In other lives many of the BookFrogs may have been professors or novelists, but now their days were spent obsessing over bar codes on toothpaste and J. D. Salinger conspiracies. Early each morning when the store opened, a handful of them always shuffled in to grab the day-old pastries and fill their fast-food cups with milk from the coffee counter. To the inexperienced, many BookFrogs appeared as derelict or homeless, but to the seasoned eye it was clear that they’d shed themselves of the world, rejecting its costumes and rules in favor of paper and words. For her part, Lydia gravitated toward them with a tenderness that bordered on gullibility, especially those loquacious few who could guide interesting conversations (though, in truth, as was always the case with Lydia, these conversations were heavily one-sided). A few of the BookFrogs were so erudite that their rambling lessons in literature seemed easily as insightful as those that had come from her professors years ago in San Francisco, where she’d cobbled together an English degree. A few others—like the man who made a habit of leaping out of stalls in the bathroom with a plunger above his head—were banned for months at a time, but most were quiet and benevolent, thankful for the chance to read and stare and, most importantly, leave their solitude at the door.
Lydia sometimes wondered if she’d stick around without them.
“Have you seen Lyle yet today?” Plath said, cupping her hands and peering into the window. “He’s got to be taking this hard. How was he last night?”
Lydia pulled the newspaper from under Plath’s arm and looked more closely at the photo: Joey’s body, zippered into darkness, rolling out of the store, his gurney surrounded by gawkers and cops. She could see herself and a few of her comrades, but Lyle wasn’t anywhere in sight.
“Lyle wasn’t here,” she said.
“Lyle’s always here.”
“Not last night he wasn’t.”
Lyle and Joey, Joey and Lyle: the two BookFrogs were as attached as a couple of matryoshka dolls. Though Lyle was easily in his sixties, he’d taken Joey under his wing years ago, first playing the role of a BookFrog philanthropist, a moneyed patron who supported Joey’s bibliophilia, and later as his genuine friend. It was Lyle who made sure that Joey ate every day, fulfilled his group-home duties, and showed up for his piss tests and parole meetings, but more importantly, Lyle was responsible for steering the kid into that leapfrog of new authors that expanded his inner life. They were an odd pair: Joey was jumpy and battered like a sad, scared puppy; Lyle was tall and prissy like a sloppy British schoolboy. Seeing the pair slouch daily through the store, Lydia often thought of their many iconic predecessors: Ernie and Bert, Laurel and Hardy, Steinbeck’s George and Lennie. Watching them opening books before each other’s eyes, brushing each other’s elbows as they browsed, nodding cerebrally over cups of cooling tea, Lydia had witnessed an affection that she rarely saw in grown men. As far as she could tell, Lyle was the only person—besides perhaps herself—whom Joey opened up to, whom Joey maybe loved. Without Joey, it only now occurred to her, Lyle would be destroyed.
Plath slammed her cigarette into a coffee can and popped a mint.
“Stop it,” she said.
“Stop what?” Lydia said.
“Wigging out over Lyle. His absence is not your problem.”
“Says you.”
“Listen, Lydia, I’ve got to get inside, but promise me you’ll stay away from sad men today. Just this once. Just the sad ones. Just stay the hell away.”
“Promise.”
Plath swiped a smoky hand through Lydia’s waifish bangs, then joined the dozen or so booksellers who buzzed through the store with pens behind their ears. Lydia watched them rush between ringing phones and computer pods and tried, without success, to shift her mind away from the specter of unidentified men.
CHAPTER THREE
In the Bright Ideas break room after work, Lydia gathered her jacket and satchel, then reached into her cubby and found, tucked alongside her sad little paycheck in its sad little envelope, a scalloped postcard of Pikes Peak. Howdy from Colorful Colorado! was printed in a red banner above the massive gray mountain, and below it a caption read, The Most Visited Mountain in North America!
The postcard was addressed to her—Lydia, no last name, c/o Bright Ideas Bookstore—and in fat black ballpoint it read:
moberg here.
just if ever you want more.
That was all, except for the flag stamp and the inky red postmark that, despite its smear, offered a legible origin: it had been mailed from the town of Murphy, Colorado. Mailed to her by Moberg himself. Detective Harry Moberg. Retired. Homicide.
Apparently Moberg had recognized her image in the newspaper last week, which meant that her worst fears were coming true: without her permission, the publication of that photo had opened a portal for travelers from her past. Her arms braced the cubby shelves. She wasn’t ready to allow them in.
There was something terrifying about the postcard’s arrival, in its verification that Detective Moberg was still alive, still secluded in the same snowy cabin where she’d last visited him twenty years before. And that he was probably still attempting to track down the Hammerman.
—We’re going to find him, but we need your help. Understand? So tell me again exactly what you heard. Every sound you can remember, from the moment you crawled beneath that sink until the moment your daddy finally arrived. Lydia, can you do that for me? Think: beneath the sink.
if ever you want more.
She unbuckled her satchel and crammed the postcard inside.
She didn’t want more of that night. She wanted a lot, lot less.
When Lydia stepped into her Capitol Hill apartment after work, the curtains were closed and the only light came from the pair of glowing monitors stacked next to each other on the small desk in the corner of the living room. The coffee table had been pushed aside and David was arching his back on the carpet, wearing pa
jama bottoms and no shirt. A spiral-bound book of yoga poses was open on the floor. He smiled in her direction.
“Hey,” he said. When he dipped back to the carpet a piece of lint stuck to his lips and he sputtered it out.
Lydia was glad to see him, and even gladder to see him occupied.
After a few years of crappy jobs at convenience stores and phone banks, David had taken a job last winter as an IT grunt at a curriculum development company and now spent his days in a windowless office surrounded by programmers and gamers—indoorsy types, he called them. At first he’d worried that fifty hours a week at a screen-lit desk would turn him into a bleeding-eyed drone, but before long the idea of getting paid to solve problems clicked perfectly with his tinkering side, and as an act of rebellion against his coworkers’ diet of Funyuns and Mountain Dew, he made it a point each day to exercise—hence this evening’s yoga.
“Just a minute more.”
“Take your time,” she said, then set her bag of groceries on the kitchen floor and slipped into their bedroom, a bright cube of windows so overrun by a pair of blue spruce that it felt like a tree house. Their apartment was on the second floor of a converted Foursquare home, and details like this one—not to mention their $300 rent—kept them from leaving the neighborhood and disappearing into some condo complex with shuttles to the slopes and mixers by the pool.
Lydia stood in front of her dresser and opened her sock drawer. When she slipped the postcard into the back, behind her summer socks and the itchy teddy she never wore, her fingers grazed the birthday photo.
Five years back, David had surprised Lydia by hovering next to her at a Broadway bar and reaching over her shoulder for a napkin, a toothpick, and an olive before finally getting the nerve to ask her to shoot a game of pool. His interest in her didn’t make sense: David was quite possibly the most beautiful boy in the bar—wiry body, rosy cheeks, lippy smirk—and though Lydia was wearing cutoffs and sandals and a black Bikini Kill T-shirt that left her feeling slightly more comfortable in her skin than usual, she was also cocked sideways by bad gin and tonics, smoking her thirtieth cigarette of the day, leaning on Plath’s shoulder, and feeling as if she’d just fallen off a hay truck. At first she acted shy and overly suspicious, as if his hitting on her had been a cruel bar bet, but as she weaved behind him she noticed that his gait was slightly awkward, and that one of his sneakers was dragging a frayed gray lace. Her suspicions faded even further when he leaned into the pool table’s green felt and she saw, in a moment that warmed her thighs, that his right hand was a mangled twist of missing fingers. His thumb was there and most of a pointer, but otherwise the hand held a trio of squat little nubs.
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 2
