Her fingers smelled like cat food. She thought absently of her father.
A Universal History of the Destruction of—
Joey.
The smell of old smoke left a prickly itch in Lydia’s nose as she leaned over Joey’s desk. She wondered why he’d piled all of his other books into a milk crate, while this one he’d left on display. In the tiny tin trash can alongside the desk Lydia expected another cauldron of ash, but instead found a dozen or so wads of tissue, each spotty with small dark drops of blood, as if he’d been suffering from bloody noses or shaving cuts. She recalled the night he died, and the masking tape that had been wrapped around three or four of his fingertips, and she realized that those cuts had happened right here, at this desk. She lifted the can and stirred aside some of the Kleenex, and discovered, at the bottom of the trash can, a few tabs of paper, tiny and white, just like the one she’d found the other day in the alcove where he’d hanged himself. One tab was stuck to a pink knot of bubble gum on the bottom of the can, but the rest were sprinkled around, and when she pinched them into her fingers and looked at them in the light, she saw that these also didn’t hold any words, per se, at least not whole words—more like pieces of words and letters, bisected and trimmed until they’d lost their meaning. Lydia brushed them back into the trash and sat silently at the desk.
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books.
She opened the book and flipped through, and soon came across a page that held exactly what she’d been looking for: little holes, little windows, cut randomly into the paper. She began to read.
Nine or so tiny rectangles and squares had been sliced out of the paper, so that when she held the open book up to the light the page resembled a child’s cutout of a skyscraper. Because of the size and dimensions of the cuts, she first assumed that words had been sliced out, that Joey had been cutting and pasting sentences together for some anonymous project, like—good god—a ransom note, or maybe some kind of magnetic-poetry collage. Or a suicide note. But as she looked closer at the holes she saw that there were no missing words at all: the cuts intersected white space and words with no discrimination, so that the words themselves had been largely bisected out of comprehension.
And she noticed something else on the page as well: ink. Rusty red ink, smudged in the periphery of the holes. Only this wasn’t ink, she realized as she tilted the book under the light: this was blood. From Joey’s fingers.
In something close to panic, Lydia set aside A Universal History of the Destruction of Books and grabbed the first title she could from the milk crate. It too was peppered with little windows, as was the next book, and the next book, and the rest—
Little windows, she thought as she clicked off Joey’s light and dragged his crate of books with her to the door. Little windows through which Joey was inviting her to climb.
CHAPTER SIX
It had taken Carol’s father, Bart O’Toole of O’Toole’s Plumbing, several afternoons of wriggling and climbing through that tight little crawl space to replace the corroded valves and update the pipes that had caused the flood beneath Gas ’n Donuts. During those days, Carol came to the shop with her father, and as he worked she managed to slink, one stool at a time, ever closer to Lydia and Raj’s booth, and eventually began joining them on their daily walks to the library.
At first, Tomas had celebrated Carol’s arrival into his daughter’s life, convincing himself that any attention for Lydia was better than none, but it wasn’t long before he understood that this Carol was the Carol—the holy terror he’d heard stories about since Lydia’s earliest days at Little Flower—and that his cherished library had now become her new territory. One afternoon, he found a photocopy of a girl’s squished ass on the floor next to the Xerox machine, followed shortly after by a copy of a five-dollar bill jammed into the cash slot of the Coke machine. Another time, over the course of a single day he caught the kids spinning folk albums backwards on the record player, booby-trapping shelves so the slightest touch would bring a tumble of books crashing down, and cutting coupons out of 1950s-era magazines (We’re gonna get a sweet deal on cake mix! he heard Carol exclaim). But perhaps most upsetting was that with Carol’s arrival, Raj didn’t seem to hang around as much. Tomas had found him more than once reading alone on the basement beanbags, looking so solemn and disheveled that it was impossible to miss what was happening: the boy was being replaced.
For weeks Tomas had been trying to err on the side of optimism when it came to Lydia’s infamous friend, but this wishful thinking would end one weekday morning in the fall as he was eating toast and reading the newspaper at the kitchen table. Lydia had been uncommonly quiet that morning, ducked behind a box of Raisin Bran, slurping her cereal in a trance.
—You about ready for school?
The messy crash and plunge of Lydia’s spoon came to a halt.
—i need your signature.
Tomas folded the newspaper over and looked at Lydia. He resettled his horn-rims with a blink and scratched his beard.
—You need my signature? What does that mean?
Lydia slid up from the table with her head down and jogged over to the hook by the front door where her backpack hung. A moment later she jogged back and handed Tomas a pink piece of paper. Still head down.
—What’s this?
—read.
Tomas knew what it was; he just couldn’t believe it had come from his daughter. Across the top its heading read Discipline Sheet, and further down it explained that Lydia Gladwell of 4th Grade, Room 2 had been found guilty of both Behavioral Problems and Disrespect for Authority. Under the Comments section, Sister Antoinette wrote simply, Inappropriate games during lunch. Last warning.
Tomas cleared his throat and lifted his chin.
—i got in trouble yesterday for playing a game.
—You and Carol?
—and raj.
—But this was one of Carol’s games?
Lydia’s neck shrunk into her shoulders.
—Was this one of Carol’s—
—yeah.
One of Carol’s games. Tomas took a sip of tea and braced himself as Lydia explained that they were playing something called Don’t Swallow Your Spit. Apparently the rules were simple: you kept your mouth closed and you pretended you were sucking on an invisible Life Saver and you didn’t swallow your spit. She and Raj and Carol had been playing this at the lunch table in the cafeteria, breathing through their noses and making faces at each other as their mouths welled with warm runny saliva, when Sister Antoinette lumbered their way. Raj and Carol managed to jump up to clear their trays before the old nun reached them, but Lydia got stuck at the table, and when Sister Antoinette snapped at her about making such a horrible face while people around her were eating, Lydia couldn’t take it anymore. Her mouth burst open. The sound was a wet wallop. Spit slid all over her hands and uniform and the tabletop. Sister Antoinette made Lydia stay behind and wipe all the cafeteria tables with a rag and some vinegar-smelling brown water that, Lydia told her dad at the breakfast table, was far more foul than a giant mouthful of spit.
Tomas lowered his newspaper and leaned into his elbows. Lydia seemed pale as she stirred through her soggy cereal. A puddle of foody milk sloshed out of the bowl.
—Do I need to make you stop playing with Carol?
—raj was there too.
—I’ll sign it, he said. But no more of Carol’s games, understand?
Lydia chewed on a braid of her hair and nodded, but he could tell she didn’t really mean it.
There at the table, Tomas could feel his little girl drifting from him, and he began to feel desperate to pull her back. His eyes wandered the kitchen. Their yellow fridge was so covered with Lydia’s drawings that he’d lately taken to taping them on the kitchen walls, and now he thought it looked obsessive, even trashy. Somewhere buried beneath all that paper was an old photo of Rose, Lydia’s mom, and Tomas found himself missing her so much that his jaw hurt.
—Come with m
e, he said.
He guided Lydia into his room. From the top shelf of his closet he retrieved a gunmetal box and, for the first time in her life, showed Lydia the letters and cards he and Rose had exchanged for Valentine’s Day and their anniversaries. Lydia read each thin penciled note and thick colorful card. Inspired by her focus, Tomas reached deep into his closet and dragged down their honeymoon photo album. And from his old cookie tin of tie clips and wheat pennies, he even unearthed Rose’s ruby ring, still taped in its wad of hospital gauze. As he unfolded it and placed the ring in his daughter’s palm he imagined her someday-fiancé (a studious boy with wire-rimmed glasses who could kick in some teeth when the occasion called for it) coming to ask for her hand.
—can i have it? Lydia asked.
—Sure, when you get married. At thirty-five.
—deal!
Lydia smiled and was careful as she folded the gauze back around it, and even ran into the bathroom and clipped off a new piece of medical tape to swaddle the gauze and ensure the ring wouldn’t fall out. He’d rarely seen her so reverent.
—Things will get better, he said mostly to himself.
But as long as Carol was around, Tomas began to realize, things would not really get any better, and he continued to struggle with the long-term implications of Lydia’s new friendship. He didn’t understand, in a cosmic sense, of all the kids whom Lydia could latch on to, why it had to be the one who brought a rash to his skin. It just didn’t fit—
And then, later that week, he met Dottie O’Toole, Carol’s mother, and the world revealed its perfect symmetry.
Of course Tomas had noticed Dottie before she walked into the library that Tuesday afternoon, but before that day he hadn’t known she was Carol’s mother. She’d only been the starlet from afar, the soft-skinned redhead whose hips swayed when she entered the school gymnasium and whose every tendency seemed designed to disarm those around her. Dottie was in her early thirties, with a swirly bob and sticky lashes and blue shadow that rose from her eyes like wings. The few times Tomas had seen Dottie at school events, she’d been wearing short-sleeved sweaters in colors and patterns he’d only seen on couches—pumpkin orange, aqua green—and always they had a triangle of cleavage cut below the neckline that reminded him of an unzipped tent.
And here she was, close enough for Tomas to smell her piña colada perfume. She reached her hand across the circulation desk and introduced herself.
Tomas hadn’t been on a date since Rose’s death and he was never good at reading the so-called signs anyway, but he was pretty sure that Dottie was clutching his hand for longer than was appropriate. In a moment of pure panic, he offered to give her a tour of the disheveled library. She automatically clasped his forearm with both hands—amazingly—and said in a terrible French accent, Lead the way, Monsieur Librarian. He half-expected her to snap her gum.
In the library basement, Tomas was embarrassed to find Carol and Lydia on the carpet, their faces six inches apart, with women’s magazines fanned sloppily around them. In their shared collapse they seemed the embodiment of parental neglect, a judgment only made worse by the uncomfortable proximity of a man reading nearby who smelled as if he’d sprayed himself with bathroom air freshener in order to disguise his must. The man’s sneakers were tumbled next to his bare feet. When Tomas and Dottie arrived, he squinted grumpily over his Asimov paperback.
—Are they troubling you? Tomas asked him.
—Them? the man said. They’re okay.
—You sure?
—They’re okay.
—Girls, put the magazines back and we’ll meet you upstairs.
To Tomas’s great relief, the girls did as they were told.
—Is it really okay for them to hang out here like this? Dottie asked.
—Sure, as long as they’re quiet and polite and clean up their messes.
—No, she said, I mean all these sad men reading. It’s like a Lonely Hearts Club in here.
When Tomas cocked his head to study her—half-alarmed, half-amused—she was picking at a painted fingernail, apparently finished with the topic. In other circumstances, he might have told her that he’d personally encouraged these sad men reading to make the library their diurnal home. And he might have told her that he’d recently been reprimanded by some city bureaucrat who’d discovered the impromptu food bank that he ran out of the library’s back door. Libraries were havens for everyone, he might’ve told her, not just the clean and productive. But his explanation faded under the commotion of Carol and Lydia clambering up the stairs behind them. Maybe he’d have a chance to explain himself another time.
One damp afternoon a few days after this introduction, while picking up Lydia at the Little Flower gymnasium, Tomas spotted Dottie leaning against a tan brick wall and smoking a cigarette. He opened the door to go inside but she stopped him.
—How’s Mr. Librarian today?
They spoke of small things, the Broncos’ popularity and the arrival soon of ski season. She offered him a stick of gum and laughed when he folded it in thirds before putting it in his mouth, as if sliding a letter into an envelope.
—Your husband, he said. He’s the plumber, right?
She cocked an eyebrow.
—I’ve seen his truck, he added.
—You’ve seen it at the library?
—Just around the neighborhood. He works a lot.
—He’s never home, Dottie said, but at least he takes Carol on the job with him sometimes. If she had her way, she’d drop out of fourth grade and take over the family business.
Tomas smirked. He couldn’t tell if Dottie was staring deep into his eyes or studying the flecked lenses of his horn-rims. Either way, he was nervous.
—At least there’s good money in being a plumber, he said.
—Not good enough.
Tomas laughed a little and chomped his gum. Before he went inside to find his little girl, he turned and watched in awe as Dottie pressed the tip of her tongue delicately into her lip.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In her kitchen, Lydia nibbled the crust from her honey toast and waited impatiently for her overworked coffeemaker to finish gurgling. When she looked up, David was there in his towel, red from his shower, smelling of menthol shaving cream. He peered into Joey’s milk crate, which sat in the center of their breakfast table, where Lydia had left it the night before.
“More books?” he said, picking up Joey’s dusty Victorian story primer and turning it over in his hands.
“Can’t ever have too many,” she said lightly.
“Seriously. I like your whole book thing. Just having them around makes me feel smarter.”
“Now, if we could just get you to read them.”
“No need. It’s like free IQ points in every room. On every conceivable surface.”
“Glad to help.”
“Some would call you a hoarder,” he said. “But not me. I call you a collector.”
“That’s the spirit,” she said.
Lydia looked up the length of David’s arm and saw his clean, damp hair and the remnant glow of his shower, and felt the desire to rest her hand on his.
“They’re from Joey,” she said, nodding at the crate on the table. “The books.”
The coffeemaker wheezed and David poured her a cup. She hummed self-consciously, feeling grateful as she sipped. David tilted up the lip of the milk crate and peered at the tumbled titles inside.
“Joey the BookFrog?” he said, and sat in the chair next to her.
“The one and only.”
“And his buddy hasn’t shown up yet?”
“Lyle? Not yet.”
“Fishy?”
“Fishy,” she said, then patted the edge of the crate. “Then there’s this. Gathered from his apartment. My inheritance, apparently.”
“His last good deed,” David said, nodding. “It’s kind of sweet. He obviously knew you’d appreciate them.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” she said.
“I�
��m guessing his apartment wasn’t paradise?”
“More like the inferno. Listen, I know you need to go, but . . .” She told him about visiting Joey’s apartment the night before, and about the books he’d left to her in death and the strange fact that the books had holes cut out of them.
“Holes?” he said.
“Little windows,” she said.
“Why would he do that?” he said in that same cerebral tone he used when describing the way he’d cracked a coding problem at work or figured out which sensor in his car was causing his engine to misfire. “I mean, what’s the point of giving them to you if they’re all cut up?”
“That would be the question.”
“Unless there’s something to them,” he said, and drummed his fingers on Joey’s copy of The Turn of the Screw. “Because with words cut out it sounds like ransom notes.”
“It’s not words cut out exactly,” she said. “Just little random rectangles. They intersect the letters, so no chance of mining them for, say, a ransom note, or suicide note, or—”
“Or a valentine?”
“It wasn’t like that,” she said, unsure if this was jealousy or a joke.
“But you’re sure the holes are random?” he said. “Maybe there’s a pattern somehow, an encryption.”
As David spoke, his voice was fading and she could sense him slipping away, quietly scrolling through his mental records of the Enigma device and Fortran punch cards and player-piano rolls and all things encoded.
“Have a look,” she said, then handed him the cut-up copy of A Universal History of the Destruction of Books.
“Whoa.”
“I know.”
“Are there others?”
“Cut up?” She rested her hand on the crate. “All of them.”
“All of them?” he said.
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 6
