A few hours later, during drunken sunrise omelets, she would find out that David had been a deep-fried mathlete in high school—his words—when one shitfaced night at a party he accidentally dropped a shot glass into the garbage disposal. He was fishing it out, hand groping the bladed depths, and flipped the light switch above the sink to see better what he was doing. Only it wasn’t a light switch.
—My mom told me it made me less of an asshole, he said.
—Then you musta flipped the right switch, Lydia said.
Back in their first months of dating, she’d begun to notice that nearly every woman under forty eyeballed David like he was breakfast in bed. To all these gawkers Lydia felt like his presumed sister, his drinking buddy, the girl who could beat him in a belching contest—until, by chance, their sight fell upon his half-a-hand. She could see it sparkling in their eyes: Is he holding something? An uncooked chicken breast? A knot of bread dough? In their worst moments together, Lydia couldn’t help but wonder if it—his hand—had been their main matchmaker.
But that was early on, and if it was really only David’s hand that had kept them together, then by now their relationship would have been long over. As Plath once slurred, “Three missing fingers does not five years make.” Lydia agreed: she and David were onto something. She just didn’t know what it was, or whether she could handle it.
Negotiating boyfriends had never come naturally to Lydia. As a teenager, when she lived in her father’s mountain cabin in Rio Vista, whenever boys asked her to dances or out for a drive she usually quivered and claimed that her father was oppressive to the point of violence. This was a half-truth at best—oppressive, yes; violent, no—but the boys always backed away slowly and settled on those hometown girls who got all their jokes and knew their parents from church. That was okay with Lydia. With the exception of the single hallucinogenic night when she lost her virginity to a metalhead atop a picnic table, this reputation of being untouchable protected her through the end of high school. Once she fled Rio Vista and moved to San Francisco—vowing to get as far away from her father as possible—she ramped in the other direction, sleeping recklessly with strangers at first, then slowly easing into a scant selection of boyfriends, none of whom lasted more than a month. Lydia honestly enjoyed this short period of penis-hopping, but with each boy the problem was always the same. After singling her out in the grocery line, the Victorian lit class, the taco shop, they inevitably realized that the armor in which she hid was impermeable, no matter how daring their moves. In different ways, they all wanted to share the space that belonged to her the most, but that was impossible. She was the only one allowed in there.
But from the start David had been different. The first time she’d spent the night at his apartment, she’d awakened alone in his bed and could smell something cooking (burning?) in the other room. She assumed that he was making eggs or french toast, but when she slipped into the T-shirt balled on his floor and came out to the kitchen she found him not cooking at all, but rather using an old iron to wax the pair of skis that were stretched across his countertop. A few minutes later, when she went back into the bedroom to get dressed, she nearly tripped over a dismantled VCR—the huge kind with clunky buttons and fake wood paneling—that had been wired to a surplus military bullhorn, a gift-shop strobe light, and the tube screen of an old black-and-white television. Nearby sat a pile of VHS videotapes (Rocky Mountain Wildlife; Coping Skills for Emergency Responders). She suspected it all had to do with a rave or some smart-drink electronica video project, but when she asked David what it was, he said he didn’t know.
—Just fiddling, he said.
—Does it do anything?
—Not yet. May never. Oh well.
Oh well. She smiled. She never saw the contraption again, but its presence signaled the very distracted quality that she realized, in retrospect, allowed their relationship to work. His toothbrush soon appeared in the mason jar on her sink side, his bags of celery and cartons of cottage cheese soon sidled up to her grape jelly and cherry yogurt, and all the while David appeared to have better things to do than obsess over Lydia’s hidden inner life.
In the kitchen, Lydia drank a glass of water, put the kettle on for tea, and began to put away the groceries.
Soon David came in, shirtless, barefooted, with that stupid tattoo of a pork chop just below his rib cage that he’d gotten on a high school trip to Mexico. Lydia had already pulled out the cutting board and unbagged an onion and was just piercing its skin when he pecked her from behind.
“You’re happy,” she said.
“I found a semicolon in the program where a colon should’ve been.”
“Is that good?”
“Really good,” he said. “Thousands of lines deep. Boss gave me a clumsy high five. It was awesome.”
She studied him for a clue that he was being sarcastic, but he wasn’t.
“I just saved our department about a week’s worth of headache,” he added, fumbling through a basket of fruit. “What about you? Any better at work today?”
It was a question David had asked her every day for the past week, ever since Joey. It still didn’t make sense, she thought, what the kid had done. A few days ago while emptying the front counter trash, she’d come across a crumpled wad of yellow crime-scene tape that someone had shoved into the dumpster like an unspooled cassette, and she’d stared at it for a long time, unable to peel herself away, as if its cursive loops might explain why Joey—young, bright, damaged Joey—had climbed the shelves and tightened a strap and stepped into his death. She thought about the books she’d seen him reading in the weeks before he’d died—fractal geometry and microbial art and Petrarchan sonnets—but as far as she could tell they reflected the same tastes, both broad and narrow at once, he’d always indulged. In her search for an answer, she’d even gone up to the third floor earlier today and stood in the center of the Western History section, wondering if his choice to kill himself there, around those titles, signaled some deeper meaning.
Just as she was about to give up and head downstairs to help at the counter, Lydia noticed that the floral chair in the corner where Joey had spent his last living hours had been shoved too far against the wall. When she leaned over to reposition it, lifting and tucking its cushion for good measure, she spotted something tiny and white, about the size of her pinkie nail, sitting in the seam behind the cushion. She reached past a penny and a few oyster crackers to dig it out. A tab of paper. A perfect little rectangle. At first, she wondered if Joey had been dealing panes of LSD that night or cutting chains of paper dolls, but when she placed it on her palm and saw that it had clearly been cut from a book, she thought that he might have left her a suicide note, after all. She held it under the light, anticipating a single word that might tease out Joey’s death—sorry; hopeless; murder—but discovered instead that the letters printed on it were fragmented, nearly indecipherable: an almost e, an almost j, an almost l, an almost m, some almost others. A biopsy of a page that added up to nothing.
Lydia’s hands were holding the onion and the knife, but they weren’t moving, and she was staring blankly at the silver toaster in the corner of the counter.
“Work was fine,” she said to David. “I guess I’m getting over it.”
He nodded, rolling an apple against his palm.
“Listen,” he finally said, “maybe this isn’t the best time, and I know it’s out of nowhere, but can I ask what’s up with you and your dad?”
Lydia felt her blood grow warm and her skin prickle cold. David took a bite of apple, then spat the apple’s sticker into the sink.
“You’re right,” she said, suddenly focused on chopping, dicing, swiping. “It’s really not the best time.”
“His name is Tomas, right?” David said.
Hearing her father’s name, Lydia felt like a child lifting the lid of a coffin. All it took was a peek.
“He called this morning,” he added. “Just after you left for work.”
She co
uld feel her face flush and she quickly made a scene of washing her hands—pumping the soap dispenser, cranking the faucet to scalding.
“He needs to leave me be,” she said. “David, did you talk to him?”
“A little.”
She looked up from the sink and stared at David for a sign that her father had told, that David now knew who she really was: Little Lydia. The bloody-faced girl beneath the sink, the survivor from the evening news. Because no one from her present life knew. No one could know.
“If he calls here again,” she said, “please hang up.”
“All parents suck when you’re a teenager, Lydia,” he said, irritating in his calm. “Maybe he’s just trying to reconnect.”
“This is different,” she said, and she could feel a painful bubble expanding inside her throat. “He moved me to the middle of nowhere, then he just checked out. After the age of ten I basically raised myself.”
“Okay.”
“So hang up if he calls again. Please.”
“Okay.”
David started to reach for her but turned at the last moment and wiped some crumbs from the counter instead.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lydia’s father, a horn-rimmed librarian named Tomas, was a quivering wreck from the moment his infant girl entered the world. Only minutes before Lydia had taken her first breath, he’d been pacing the waiting room at St. Joe’s and worrying about his wife, a flush-faced bookworm named Rose, who was down the hall in labor. When an overeager candy striper asked if he was ready to meet his new baby girl, Tomas rushed toward the delivery room so energetically that he’d barely gotten his mouth covered with the surgical mask before barging in. It turned out that the candy striper, still a full hallway behind him, had mistakenly beckoned the wrong new daddy, so Tomas arrived in the cold delivery room during the worst moments of Rose’s emergency cesarean. One of the more experienced nurses lunged in front of him and tried to spin him back to the hall, but she’d been too late to prevent him from seeing his newborn daughter get cut from the womb of his dying wife.
At the nurse’s insistence Tomas turned away and faced the door, but he refused to leave the delivery room. Behind him the anesthesiologist whispered that someone should take off Rose’s wedding ring before the corpuscular swelling made it impossible to remove without cutting, and Tomas found himself wondering if he’d meant cutting his wife’s finger or cutting his wife’s ring. A minute later a different nurse taped the ring into a square of gauze and buttoned it into his jacket pocket while he stood there like a mannequin being readied for display. The ring itself held a dainty silver rose with ruby petals and an engraving along its inner wall. A rose for my Rose.
In a dark fog Tomas watched one of the nurses pull a sheet over Rose’s body and roll her gurney toward the basement. He wanted to follow the gurney, but the doctor placed his newborn daughter into his arms and told him in a gentle voice that right now his girl needed her daddy. Tomas felt her squirming inside her blanket and began to understand. He held her close and her eyes, oily black, opened up his world.
During those first months, Tomas had nightly deliveries of casseroles and condolences, but one by one, as he returned baking dishes and stuffed bereavement cards into drawers, what little comfort these gifts had brought him began to fade. Because he was ashamed to expose his own ignorance of child rearing, he never asked anyone for help with Lydia, and with the exception of a single parenting book he found on Rose’s nightstand, he was determined to figure out all this baby stuff on his own. He scalded Lydia’s tongue with overboiled formula. He fed her nibbles of rice cereal long before she could lift her head. In the middle of the night he leaned over her swaddled form and listened to her irregular breathing and had no idea if she was freezing to death or choking on upchucked paste or simply as tuckered as he was.
When the time came for Tomas to go back to work at the local library, he tried placing Lydia with day-care providers all over the neighborhood, but none lasted more than a few days: this one’s playground had a rusty swing set and low fences; this one’s shelves held hardly any books; this one’s staff looked as if they came straight from the Screw Farm. As far as he was concerned none was up to snuff, so he did what he’d secretly hoped he’d have to do: he brought her with him to work. Where it was safe.
Lucky for Tomas, the tiny branch of the Denver Public Library that was under his watch serviced such an old and forgotten community that its patrons were well schooled in bendable rules. No one would complain about the constant presence of a child because low expectations had trained them not to complain. Volunteers sometimes helped with story hour and shelving, but most of the time Tomas sat behind the circulation desk alone, keeping one eye on his library, one eye on his daughter.
For those first few years, Lydia dawdled behind the desk, rode through the aisles on the bottom shelves of roller carts, and dozed in Daddy’s lap as he cataloged. The elderly patrons seemed to stay longer with Lydia around and books were read to her by the dozen. Her learning thrived even more when kindergarten approached and Tomas sent her to Little Flower Elementary, a small Catholic school close enough to the library and their bungalow home that they could walk between them without enduring the expense of a car. Though it was rougher than most private schools, Tomas’s fears were assuaged by the Madeline-like image of Lydia huddled in a yellow raincoat at the knees of towering nuns, on the safe side of a chain-link fence.
As Lydia grew, Tomas learned to braid her hair and polish her shoes and dress her up in plaid skirts and sweaters. With few exceptions—mainly during the terrible twos, which lasted for one month when she was three—he was pleased with his decision to keep her around the library. She kept herself busy after school by spinning through the records and filmstrips, building bean bag forts, and exploiting the Popsicle sticks and cotton balls of the craft room. Though he’d always believed in the value of solitude—Tomas felt himself like its lonely ambassador—each afternoon when he showed up at Little Flower to pick her up he began to notice that she was always alone, dragging her fingertips along the chain links with rarely a classmate in sight. The other kids swarmed the playground like ants on a pile, and even the nuns smoked in laughing clusters on the steps, but Lydia was always on her own. He began to worry about her solitude, and to wonder if he was somehow to blame.
So it was something of a big deal when they were walking home on a wintry afternoon in first grade and Lydia, kicking pucks of ice along the shoveled sidewalks, pointed at the neon doughnut that rose high into the sky above Colfax Avenue and asked if they could stop there, at Gas ’n Donuts, the bustling gas station/doughnut shop on the corner up ahead.
—For a doughnut?
—for a friend.
—What friend?
—he’s waiting for me. with a doughnut.
Tomas looked around as if the street they walked every day had just been unpeeled.
Tucked into Denver’s boot like a straight razor, Colfax Avenue was the longest street in America and the most dangerous street in town. It was the place to get a vacuum fixed or eat ethnic foods, to buy secondhand slacks or a bicycle pump, but it also held the city’s highest concentration of gun shops, prostitutes, strip clubs, drug dealers, dive bars, and hot-sheet motels. In the single mental snapshot he took while holding Lydia’s mittened hand, Tomas counted a dark cocktail lounge, a used auto dealership, a nail salon, a pawnshop, a fabric store, a motorcycle parts outlet, and a nightclub advertising nude Jell-O wrestling.
And a doughnut shop. Slash gas station.
—he’s waiting for me.
—With a doughnut. You said.
Tomas was feeling wary and overprotective, to say the least, so it came as a relief when they entered Gas ’n Donuts and were greeted by a smiling woman wearing a knitted scarf and a white apron over a yellow sari. She seemed amused by the sight of this bearded father and his big-eyed daughter, holding hands in winter coats, stomping snow from their feet. At one of the booths along the back wall a chubby bo
y wearing a red down vest and a matching knit hat was reading some plucky adventure story with a shark circling a sailboat on its cover. He didn’t budge when they entered, nor did the few figures hunched over ashtrays and newspapers at the counter. It was late in the day and the display-case trays were mostly empty, their wax-paper sheets holding little footprints of frosting. When Tomas turned to ask Lydia which of the remaining treats looked good she wasn’t standing next to him anymore, but rather strolling toward the booth where the boy was reading. Tomas took a seat on a swiveling stool and watched as his daughter tugged off her mittens, cleared her throat, and knocked on the hard cover of the boy’s book. The boy lowered the book with half-lidded eyes, far enough to peer over its top, then rested it facedown on the table.
—Nobody’s home, he said with exaggerated grumpiness, then started cracking up.
A smile filled Lydia’s face as she slid in next to him. A chocolate doughnut waited for her on a plate at his table, just as she’d predicted.
Tomas ordered a cup of coffee from the woman behind the counter. Maybe it was the flowy fabric of her sari, or possibly the drape of her woolen scarf, but as the woman shifted trays and dumped coffee grounds she moved with such fluidity that he immediately pictured her dancing, eyes closed, alone on a colorful floor. He was somewhat ashamed of this exotification, yet as he studied the way her hair was pulled into a bun and speared with something that looked like a painted pencil, his shame was not great enough to halt his fantasy of sliding that thing out with his teeth and letting her thick black hair gush down her back. Beyond the bank of coffeepots, behind a swinging door, the metallic clunk of kitchen work sent Tomas into a mild panic. A man back there coughed.
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 3
