For the briefest moment the house went silent. Until Carol screamed again, and in between she seemed to be struggling for air, pivoting in the hallway, scampering to get away. The Hammerman quickly found his footing and the sounds that followed would follow forever: the man’s thick boots trailing Carol and Carol’s screams and Carol’s screams extinguished.
An egg dropped. Another egg dropped. Another.
Almost immediately the O’Tooles’ bedroom door creaked open and Lydia could hear Mr. O’Toole grunting with confusion and then she could hear someone’s back crashing full-force into the dresser, the door, the doorjamb. She could hear knickknacks knocked from a shelf and drywall caving in and she could hear man-screams as the eggs began to drop, one at a time, all upon the bedroom carpet.
With the blanket fort limp against her shoulder, Lydia could hear whimpering in the darkness. She thought it was just herself making the noise until she realized that her cries had been joined by other cries down the hall: Mrs. O’Toole, whimpering, then pleading, then shrieking. Lydia heard the box spring squeak as someone lunged over the mattress. She heard the mattress sigh and then she heard eggs dropping all over in there.
In that moment, something rare happened inside Lydia: she stopped herself from knowing. She made a choice not to know, and by doing so she was allowed to unfreeze. Nothing was happening down the hall. Nothing was happening, so why not slip out from under this blanket and make her way over the carpet to the kitchen, through the kitchen to the back door, out the back door and into the snowy night? She found her hands and knees and the blanket sagged over her back and then was gone. As she crawled full speed ahead she looked through the darkness at the orange glow of snow in the back-door window. She swished across the living room, burning her knees on the carpet, and she moved faster now, gaining speed with each slide, and then her forehead thudded straight into the corner of the coffee table and the darkness sparkled with pain. Her face grew wet with blood that dripped into her mouth, but she kept crawling. Her eyes were wet. Her nose and lips and chin were wet. The carpet dropped into the kitchen’s cold linoleum and a cereal flake crunched beneath her palm, and then her other palm squished a puddle of melting snow tracked in on the Hammerman’s boots. The back door was only a few feet away and the snow out there seemed to uplift through a trance of streetlight but she heard the Hammerman’s heavy footsteps coming closer, closer, and before she gave it a thought she was cutting a sharp left and holding a cabinet handle in her fingers and then she was underneath the kitchen sink, squeezing next to buckets and cleaning products and pulling the cabinet door closed and pressing her cheek into the cold silver pipes.
Silence beneath the sink. Nothing was happening out there but he had to have seen her. He had to have heard her. She didn’t move, she didn’t breathe, and in her silence she thought she heard spilling: a gallon of milk tilted on the hallway carpet, glug-glug-glug, mixing with broken eggs like a recipe for her dad’s birthday cake.
Minutes passed and the darkness grew wet and heavy on her face. She found a withered sponge beneath her foot so she pressed it against her forehead and it stuck to her skin. She squeezed her knees and rested her elbow on a bucket rim. One of her socks, thick and pink, was missing. On the living room floor. Inside the blanket fort. Just outside this cabinet door. Maybe she would never know.
She heard the approach of boot steps, then a smudge of brightness lit the slit between the cabinet doors: a flashlight, its faint orb erasing the world around it. As he approached the sink his boot steps stopped and his shadow darkened everything. She could hear him breathing and her muscles tightened and the garbage disposal felt like a rock propped atop her shoulder. Inches away she could sense the pressure of his knees against the cabinet door.
Ke-tick. But the door didn’t open. It didn’t open.
Instead the Hammerman dropped his hammer into the sink and Lydia heard it perfectly next to her ear, steel striking steel. He dropped the flashlight and turned on the water, scalding hot, and she felt the drainage pipe warm against her cheek. Even when it began to burn she didn’t pull away. A wave of mildew tickled her nose. The Hammerman rinsed his hands and swiped his fingers through the splash—a drumming-fingertip sound, as if he were pressing spaghetti through the garbage disposal’s black baffle. Then he turned on the disposal and its rage of blades chattered Lydia’s teeth. This moment—this gurgle of blood and hair and splintered bone whirring inside her mind—this was the only moment in Lydia’s life.
This was, some would say, her defining moment.
That night Denver glowed with snow. Plows went out. People slept in.
And late in the morning, Tomas had a defining moment all his own—one that came after Lydia and Carol didn’t show up at the library to help him with Saturday-morning story time. As planned.
He read Where the Wild Things Are to a few toddlers chewing mittens, and once they bundled up and left he phoned the O’Tooles. No answer. On the radio yesterday Tomas had heard that the state should brace for another stock show snowstorm, the annual January cold snap that coincided with the country’s largest livestock fair, but he hadn’t expected it to blow like this. This was something else. Finally the snowfall was slowing but the wind was icy and relentless, carving drifts in the barren white. No cars were out. No one was in the library but him. The morning was empty and frozen and Tomas was exhausted. Lately he’d been just beside himself and last night’s lonely excursion to the mountains had made it all the worse. He’d taken the last ski bus out of Breckenridge and didn’t get dropped off downtown until almost midnight, and then with the storm it took him forever to find a cab home. Now he was on his third cup of coffee and still could barely keep his eyes open. Again he stared out the window. The snow out there, a good fourteen inches of shifting drifts, was deeper than he’d realized. Deep enough to call it quits.
With a feeling of gratitude he hung a sign on the door and locked the library and walked over to the O’Tooles’ home, ten blocks that felt like twenty as his feet struggled through the billows.
As he walked he could see places where a few brave neighborhood kids had made angels in the drifts or tried to roll a snowman, but none had lasted very long. When Tomas finally reached the O’Tooles’ single-story home he found not a soul out front and no footprints anywhere. It made sense enough: it was Saturday morning and Carol was definitely the cartoon-watching type. He whistled through the white driveway and was surprised that Bart O’Toole, with the way he worked, hadn’t already been out to shovel a path.
Tomas shuffled up the porch steps and peeked through the little door window. His vision blurred and his breath stopped cold when he saw, on the white wall of the hallway, just below a plastic light switch, a smeared handprint of blood.
The front door was locked, but within seconds Tomas had run around the house and found the back door slightly open, with a dusting of snow blown across the kitchen floor. He crossed the kitchen and lunged through the hallway and found Carol and Bart and Dottie O’Toole dog-piled on the soggy carpet just inside the master bedroom doorway. To say he’d never seen so much blood in all his life would imply that he’d seen blood before, when he hadn’t—not blood in the way that this was blood. A gag creaked out of him. The family looked inside out. Pulverized. He pulled on their shoulders and flopped their limbs, searching in a panic for his daughter. He would do anything if—
Lydia wasn’t among them, and soon he stood in the kitchen spitting into the sink and tried not to look at the hammer, sticky red, poking up from the disposal like a broken bone. Without thinking he grabbed a damp rag folded on the sink side and wiped his lips and put it back. He wanted to scream for Lydia but remembered that no footprints marked the outside snow, meaning no one had left recently, meaning whoever did this could still be in the house. So he gripped the hammer and stormed through the hall and into the rooms, leaping over the body pile. There was urine in the toilet and a small squat of floating tissue just like Lydia’s when she forgot to flush at home. He felt
sick and charged through the kitchen and even lunged down the steps to the unfinished basement. Crashing doors. Spinning circles. And finally screaming.
—Lydia!
No one answered.
Back in the kitchen he punched 911 and noticed a few stalks of red hair sprouting from the V of the hammer’s claw. The dispatcher on the phone enraged him with her patronizing calm and he was just about to throw the hammer through the window when he saw his own bloody boot prints spread over the floor like steps for some diabolical dance. He noticed the drips here and there, the drizzles, the smears. He paused. The dispatcher said he had ten minutes max before the cops arrived and to sir please make sure you’re safe. But with the snow piled in the streets the way it was Tomas thought twenty minutes would be optimistic.
He slammed down the phone even as the dispatcher was still speaking and held his hand over his mouth and looked down the length of the hallway where Dottie’s arm flopped out from the pile, stiff and darkening, her hand bent into a claw. He quickly turned back to the kitchen and didn’t know why but opened the refrigerator and saw hot-dog casserole and sticky ketchup and crusty buttermilk and god help him, he thought, these were the fragments of Lydia’s last meal.
Then from the sink came a sound.
He spun on his heel with the fridge door open and its jars and bottles rattled like church bells. He shushed them with his fingers. The sound of a bird. The faintest of whimpers. Bent in half, nose as close to the floor as he could get without falling over, he followed the whimpers like they were fairy-tale bread crumbs until they stopped beneath the sink and just as he extended his arm to rip open the cabinet door the cabinet door opened on its own. He raised the hammer instinctively, but then Lydia climbed out—her shirtfront soggy from all-night sucking, her face and forehead masked with blood—and she scampered right up his chest and into a desperate hug.
CHAPTER NINE
Lydia scratched the faint scar on her forehead as she walked, head down, toward the Children’s section of Bright Ideas. Her beaten leather satchel was slung over her shoulder and Joey’s copy of A Universal History of the Destruction of Books was tucked under her arm. Today was Lydia’s day off, but she arrived at the store twenty minutes before it opened. She loved roaming the stacks when it was early and empty like this, feeling the quiet hopeful promise of all those waiting books—but today she stayed on task: Joey.
When Lydia arrived in Kids, her comrade Wilma, a sharp-tongued and warmhearted eighty-year-old, was standing in the center of the picture book alcove, wearing her usual navy slacks, crocheted turtleneck, and pearlescent glasses. The alcove was still ripped apart from last night’s cocktail crowd and Wilma stood at its center, holding a two-foot-tall board book with googly eyes, furry arms, lights, buzzers, bells, and rubber tentacles that bounced toward her shoes like Slinkies.
“Wilma?”
“In what world is this a book?” she said, and her mouth was puckered as if she had cat hair on her tongue. “How are you supposed to read this to a child?”
“I think it reads itself,” Lydia said.
“There goes humanity,” Wilma said, then she turned to a shelf of stuffed animals and slapped a sock monkey off his perch, just because.
“Do you know anything about this?” she said, handing Wilma the copy of A Universal History of the Destruction of Books but pointing to the label on the back.
Wilma lifted her glasses and squinted at the label, then turned the book over and looked at the cover.
“It’s obviously been mislabeled,” she said. “Everything okay?” Before becoming a bookseller, Wilma had spent decades working as a grade school librarian, and something in the way she lowered her voice and turned her head made Lydia feel like a wounded child.
“I don’t know, to be honest,” Lydia said.
Wilma nodded and led Lydia by the forearm into the quadrant of parenting books, then slid out a book with a photograph of a disheveled bed on its cover. In serious font, it read, The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac: Folklore, Wives’ Tales, and Cures from Around the Globe. It was indeed missing its label, but none of its pages had been cut up and it was in perfect condition. In fact, other than its font being slightly larger than usual, nothing seemed to stand out about it at all.
“Is that boyfriend of yours a bed-wetter?” Wilma said, gesturing to the book.
“Only when he’s drunk.”
Wilma smiled, then grew serious. “This is about Joey, isn’t it?”
Lydia nodded, and Wilma gently guided her to the rocking chair near the pop-up books. Joey’s favorite seat.
“I didn’t like that Joey kid at first,” Wilma said, stroking her papery fingers over the nearby shelf of fairy tales, “coming down here and hogging the rocking chair while moms nursed their babies standing up. I thought he was clueless, maybe a bit sinister. I can’t tell you how many times I came through here and caught him sitting in that very seat, tilting back and forth, staring at little kids over the top of his book. Creepy, right?”
“I guess,” Lydia said. “Joey wasn’t really the creepy type, though—”
“But then I realized something,” Wilma continued, hushing Lydia with the slightest lifted finger. “You know what you see when you’re sitting in that chair? Everything. At least everything in the Kids section. And you know when Joey sat there the most? On Saturday mornings. You know what this place is like on Saturday morning?”
“A zoo.”
“The busiest time of the week.” Wilma pointed to the pair of books in Lydia’s lap. “The time he was least likely to get any reading done.”
“I don’t get it.”
“He wasn’t here to watch the kids, Lydia, and he wasn’t here to read. He was here to watch the families. For whatever reason, he liked watching the moms and dads and kids interacting. It’s a beautiful thing to behold, really. It’s enough to keep you young. Most people don’t even see it until they themselves are prunes like me.”
“That sounds like Joey.”
“Once I realized that,” Wilma said, “I felt bad for misjudging him. That kid had a giant hole in his heart. And he sat right there to try to fill it.”
Lydia gulped, and when she stood from the chair it rocked forward and bumped the back of her knees.
“You haven’t seen Lyle, have you?” she asked.
“Now that you mention it,” Wilma said, “I haven’t. Not since Joey’s death.”
“Let me know if he shows up, will you?” Lydia said, then lifted the bed-wetting book. “And thanks for this. I’ll bring it back in a few days.”
“Take your time,” Wilma said, walking away. “It’s not our most popular title.”
Lydia did take her time, standing in the Parenting alcove and studying the two books side by side, trying to figure out why Joey had labeled the one with the other. As far as she could tell, they had nothing in common except that, at some point, they’d both been in Joey’s hands. She shuddered and gave up. When she left the Kids section, both books tucked under her arm, Wilma was kneeling on a pillow, reading a picture book to herself, dabbing a Kleenex against her nose.
That kid had a giant hole in his heart, she’d said, and if anyone could measure its depths—could drop a pebble into its well and listen for the plunk—it was Wilma.
On the pedestrian mall a few blocks up from Bright Ideas, Lydia sat alone on a sidewalk bench. The morning was cold but sunny, carved with the sharpened shadows of Sixteenth Street.
She set her coffee and the two books on the bench next to her and retrieved a small box of raisins from her jacket pocket. As delicate as a shorebird, she stuck her fingers into the tiny box, moved each raisin to her lips, and chewed. As she nibbled she studied the red box until the sounds of passing traffic disappeared. The woman printed on the raisin box was as she’d always been: young and glowing, wearing a red bonnet and holding her bounty of grapes against a giant yellow sun. Picking, chewing, swallowing, Lydia was a child again. Raisins! How had she forgotten about raisins? The way the smalles
t seeds stuck in her teeth. The way she felt when her fingers were little and—
A shadow crossed her eyelids. A delivery truck hummed past. A man stood next to the bench.
“Is it really you?” the man said. The sun was bright behind him and Lydia had a hard time seeing his face.
“Excuse me?”
“You are Lydia, right? Of course you are. My god. Hello.”
He took a step toward her and Lydia nearly flinched. She thought for a second he had something in his hand, but it turned out it was just his hand.
“Who do you think you are?” she said, but she still had raisins in her mouth, and as usual, she sounded more apologetic than pissed.
“This must seem strange,” he said, stepping back. “Showing up like this, no warning.”
Lydia’s eyes were adjusting to his silhouette in the sunlight and his features soon were clear. His skin was rich and dark, his black hair clean and mussed, and the brown of his eyes was so brown, the white so white, that she felt as if she were looking at a photographic negative. He wore a suede sport jacket, rough blue jeans, embroidered belt. He was slightly chubby but stood sturdy, confident—irritating.
“Lydia? You really don’t recognize me? Little Flower?”
Now she did recognize him.
“Oh my god,” she said, and her breath gave a little jump when she thought about this man, as a boy, wearing a buckled jumpsuit and gazing at her with adoration. “Raj?”
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 8
