Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

by Matthew Sullivan

David didn’t respond.

  “When he died, he did,” she added. “In his pocket.”

  Now it sunk in. David dropped his gaze from the windshield and his hands went limp on the wheel.

  “Watch the road,” she said, “watch the road.”

  “Am I hearing this right?” he said, squinting into the dark. “This guy Joey dies with a photo of you and your pal Raj, then Raj comes barging into our lives, interrupting everything, and you don’t think that’s suspicious? You actually trust this guy?”

  “Of course I trust him,” she said, though in truth she’d never given such skepticism any thought. “Besides. It wasn’t just the two of us in the photo. It was Carol O’Toole, too. The girl who—”

  “I know who Carol O’Toole is. Everyone knows who Carol O’Toole is.” He looked at Lydia sideways. “How did he get a photo of you?”

  “How did Joey? He was in prison in Rio Vista. One of my dad’s inmates, apparently.”

  “So your dad—?”

  “Knew him. Yeah.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Seriously? I mean, why would this con have a photo of you as a kid? That’s warped. If I was you, I’d—”

  “Stop. Stop.” She felt a rising panic and thought she might be sick. “Pull over, David. Please. Now. Now.”

  David whipped onto a side street and parked in front of a small brick house with a flickering porch light.

  “What is it? You okay?”

  Lydia was having a hard time catching her breath. She unbuckled her seat belt and gripped the door handle.

  “Hey,” David said. “Hey. What is it?”

  She rolled down the window. Took a few deep breaths. David tried to wrap her in a protective hug, and after a time she tried to hug him back, but her muscles refused to loosen. She realized she hadn’t been this scared in ages, not even when Joey—

  “Hey,” he said. “You’re fine. We’ll be fine.”

  But she knew she wasn’t fine, knew they wouldn’t be fine.

  He tried to hand her a water bottle, but she lifted the beer from between her thighs and drank from it instead. As she did, she noticed that his windshield was growing little laces of ice, the night outside working its way in.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her face and closing her eyes as he drove her safely home.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The first time Tomas ever spoke to Joey was in the middle of the night, when he was patrolling the prison’s echoing corridors. Because Joey had been charged as an adult but was still a juvenile when he came in—not quite seventeen when his sentence began—he was kept on an unpopulated block of level three that was separate from the other prisoners. He wasn’t totally isolated, but his nearest neighbor was eight or ten cells away. During meals and exercise he was segregated from the adult population as much as possible.

  When Tomas shined his passing light into Joey’s cell on that first night, he saw the young man sitting on his pillow in the corner of his cot, huddled in a gray wool blanket. His black hair was draped along his forehead, not quite covering the bumpy acne beneath.

  —Are you the Librarian? Joey asked, so quietly that Tomas almost didn’t hear him.

  Because Tomas had made the mistake a decade or so earlier of telling one of the other COs that he’d once worked as a librarian, his colleagues and many of the prisoners started calling him that—the Librarian. There was indeed a library in the prison, smaller than some of the storage rooms, but it was run by the warden’s nephew and Tomas’s role in its operation was minimal. He’d been given his own desk in a back corner where he sat alone for a few hours each week, in the quiet of the night, cataloging any books that had been donated to the prison.

  —I used to be.

  —Can I ask you about a book?

  —You can try.

  Joey had recently read Slaughterhouse-Five, he explained, and he wanted to know if Tomas knew anything about becoming unstuck in time, as the character of Billy Pilgrim had. He sometimes wondered if that was exactly what was happening to him.

  —Not scientifically speaking, Joey added. Emotionally speaking.

  —Okay. I could see that. Feeling unstuck like that. In time.

  So they started talking. Despite his own laconic tendencies, Tomas was surprised to find that he had quite a lot to say to this young inmate, especially on the matter of time and its impact on a person’s soul as it bent and stretched between one’s existence and one’s memories, and Joey seemed keen to listen. He didn’t seem to Tomas like the kind of kid who dropped cinder blocks onto moving cars.

  Each shift when Tomas walked his rounds, he would find Joey sitting up in his cot, unable to sleep, waiting for his visit. As far as Tomas could tell, he’d become Joey’s only meaningful human contact, and in a way, Joey had become his. Maybe because he’d been living alone for a decade by then, Tomas talked and talked, sharing stories about Lydia and Raj, about the library and the doughnut shop, and when he was standing against those bars in the dark, telling Joey all about his life before—his real life, he always called it, back in Denver—it felt at times like Joey was the one helping him.

  Of course Tomas never mentioned the O’Tooles or the Hammerman.

  The day that Joey turned eighteen was an eventful one. For starters, that morning, as Tomas was ending his shift at sunrise, Joey was gathering his folders and his notebooks and heading out to the courthouse in Salida for some hearing or other that had to do with his legal coming-of-age. When Joey returned to the prison that afternoon, his solitary cell on level three had been emptied out and he’d been moved in with a skinhead from Lubbock who, within fifteen minutes, had beat the living shit out of him—broken ribs and nose, bruised cheekbones, split lips and brow—purportedly for reading any book but the Bible. Rather than trying to figure out a safe spot to move him, at Tomas’s urging, the correctional counselor and warden agreed to allow Joey to move back into the isolated cell he’d recently moved out of, just as soon as he was released from the infirmary.

  When Tomas shared the news with the bandaged Joey, he suggested that the kid do some decorating of his cell since he was hopefully going to be there for the remainder of his sentence.

  —Make it more homey, Tomas said. Plus the Pooh-Bah might be less likely to move you around if you make it your own.

  —Make it my own?

  —Usually people hang up photos or something.

  —I have no photos, Joey said.

  —They don’t have to be of family or friends, you know.

  —I have no photos of anything. I don’t really get it, to be honest. I never have.

  This was one of the toughest moments Tomas had ever had while working in the prison: having to explain to this brilliant kid why people took and kept photographs of their lives.

  —I think it comes down to capturing happiness, Tomas said, before it gets away. Other things as well, but usually happiness.

  —Does it always get away?

  —Has for me.

  Joey nodded along, but the walls of his cell remained bare.

  Not long before Joey was to be released, two years into his sentence, Tomas was assigned to work the graveyard shift on Christmas Eve, but he didn’t mind. He’d worked enough holidays to know that those shifts were different, and that even the prison on those days could feel more like a community than an institution. They’d play Christmas carols over the PA system and give the inmates more time for phone calls and chapel and holiday shows on television. Joey didn’t participate in any of these attempts at festivity. But Tomas wanted to provide him with some semblance of cheer, so when he did his rounds that night he arranged to let Joey out of his cell and he led him, in shackles, down to his desk in the back of the prison library. He threaded his ankle chain through the chair and loosened his cuffs a little and gave him a popcorn-and-honey ball the size of a small globe that he’d made for him at home. As Joey peeled back the wax paper and bit into the sticky popcorn, Tomas p
ointed to the stacks of cardboard boxes that lined the wall opposite his desk.

  —Those are books, he said. You can choose a few. Any ones you want. A gift.

  —You don’t need them for the library?

  The books had all been donated, Tomas explained, castoffs from thrift stores and estate sales, and 95 percent of them never made it to the prison library’s spare shelves.

  —No more room. And, to be honest, not much interest.

  Joey ate through his popcorn ball and looked around. On a corkboard behind the desk, near sheets of departmental phone numbers and a printout of the library’s classification system, Tomas had pinned a dozen or so photographs that he’d culled from his gunmetal box at home.

  —That’s Lydia? Joey said, pointing to an old photo of a toddling girl in a pile of leaves.

  —That’s her. From that spot there we could hear cars on Colfax every few seconds: Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. You get used to it.

  After two years of Tomas projecting his memories through the bars as if they were old home movies, Joey had had all the context he needed to understand the people and places stuck in time on the glossy photos before him. Tomas gestured to pictures of Lydia in various Halloween costumes (Nancy Drew, Cleopatra, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle), of Lydia sitting on the steps of the library, and one of Lydia with her friend Raj and a redheaded girl—barely in the photo—leaning over a chocolate cake at her tenth birthday party. Looking happy.

  —That’s the boy from the doughnut shop? Joey said.

  —That’s him. Lydia’s best friend.

  As the carols faded from the crackling speakers, Tomas focused on the task at hand.

  —Let’s get you some of these books before I get in trouble.

  He stooped to his knees and began sifting through the boxes.

  —Thought you might like these, he said, handing back a small pile of sci-fi paperbacks. Bradbury, Heinlein, Clarke.

  Joey licked his fingers to avoid getting the sticky popcorn on the books, and looking at him Tomas felt the kind of affection he might have felt for a fallen son.

  That night, after Tomas locked Joey and his new books back inside his cell, the kid seemed more fragile than usual, more shaky, and Tomas found it difficult to walk away and leave him alone on such a lonely Christmas Eve.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Lydia stood beneath the stinging shower, attempting without success to wash away the ungodly hangover pulsing through her eyeballs. When she stepped out of the bathroom—dizzy and hungry, wondering how she was going to make it through a nine-hour shift at work—she found a sympathetic message on her machine from Irene, the counselor from the Vital Records office.

  She braced herself as she learned that her application for Joey’s adoption records had been rejected.

  “Sorry,” Irene said on the message. “I really did all I could.”

  Lydia believed her, but that didn’t change the fact that, where Joey was concerned, she’d hit another dead end.

  Lydia was working alone in the Psychology section, tidying up stray titles from tables and couches and spills on the floor, when she received a phone call from Raj.

  “I need you to meet me,” he said with urgency. “Can you come now? Lydia?”

  Lydia ducked behind the Psych desk. Cluttered around the phone were a ceramic phrenology brain, a giant rubber-band ball, and a bearded GI Joe action figure with a peace sign Sharpie’d over his bare chest.

  “Raj? Where are you, anyway?”

  “The capitol building,” he said. “Get here as soon as you can. And you’re going to need a car.”

  “What’s going on, Raj?”

  “Just get here,” he said.

  “Is this an emergency? I’m in the middle of my shift.”

  “An emergency? Not life-threatening, nothing like that, but I need you, Lydia. Borrow a car. Please. I’ll wait for you on the steps. Trust me. Please.”

  Lydia found Plath smoking against a brick wall up the block, reading Poems of Nazim Hikmet. A few butts were scattered around her feet, and their smoky scent conjured an image of the burned papers in the bottom of Joey’s trash can. That felt like eons ago.

  “How is it that you can look so exhausted,” Plath said, touching the black ashy shrub of Lydia’s hair, “yet still have that whole Fraggle Rock beauty thing going?”

  “Found you.”

  “Let me guess: you want to borrow my car again.”

  “Is that okay?”

  “What’s mine is yours, sister. But what’s with all the field trips? Sidelining as a drug mule?”

  “Helping out a friend,” Lydia said.

  “That boy?”

  “What boy?”

  “The hottie with the hair and the smile.”

  “Raj?”

  “I knew it!” Plath said, slapping her thigh with the book of poems. “You two-timing bird! So? Who is he?”

  Lydia stammered. Then, in as few words as possible, she told Plath about Raj, and about their childhood, and about all the afternoons they spent together at his parents’ doughnut shop.

  “He’s the heir to a doughnut shop?” Plath said. “Be still, my heart! Which one?”

  “Heard of Gas ’n Donuts?”

  “Just stop right there, Lydia. The Gas ’n Donuts? That stately pleasure dome over on Colfax?” Plath shook her head and lit another smoke. “I don’t want to get involved, Lydia, but David is fucked.”

  Lydia laughed. “I’m not two-timing anyone.”

  “Yet,” Plath said, holding up her cigarette. “And there’s something else, as long as we’re talking about your stable of beefcake. Is it true that last night you had a steamy date with Hi Guy? Sounds like trouble. Everything okay?”

  “Just trying to figure some things out.”

  “Which is why you need the car.” Plath unspooled the Volvo key from her key ring and placed it in Lydia’s palm. “It’s up the block hogging a space. I’d offer to go with you but I know what you’d say: I got this. I’m good. No thanks. I’m fine. But really, Lydia, are you?”

  “I don’t know, to be honest.”

  “Will you talk to me?” Plath said, frowning. “Please? Just until I finish my smoke. Five minutes.”

  “I’m kind of in a hurry.”

  “Then let’s get to it. Did you hear that Ernest quit? He said Joey’s ghost ruined the best job in the world.”

  “I didn’t hear,” Lydia said, but she wasn’t that surprised by the news. Once a comrade had vanished backstage it was often only a matter of time before they quietly slipped away altogether, to grad school or a publishing career if things were going well, and if not, to jobs whose advertisements had been stapled to telephone poles, slinging nutritional supplements or assembling toys at home. It could wear you down, which was why people like Plath were so admirable. They, like the store, survived.

  “I’ll never quit,” Plath said. “Of course they might fire me.”

  “Why? For smoking seven cigarettes on a ten-minute break?”

  “Touché.”

  Lydia looked up the block at the brick belfry and spire of the city’s clock tower.

  “What are you doing out here anyway?”

  “Lydia,” Plath said after a cold pause, “that is one question you should never have to ask a bookseller. Bright Ideas is not Victoria’s Secret. It takes style to work here. We can’t just run errands during breaks like we’re all accountants. We must smoke on corners and read. We are decor.” She dropped her butt casually to the pile already around her feet. “What’s going on with you, anyway? Really. I’m worried. Ever since Joey’s hanging, you haven’t really been here. Psychologically speaking. Which is fine but, you know, maybe you should talk to someone, go sit in a circle of fold-up chairs in the basement of some church and drink coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Or screw the group and just tell me. Open up some.”

  Plath was right. For most of Lydia’s shifts lately, whenever she’d come upon customers standing in front of shelves, holding slips of paper in their han
ds, she’d veered away from them without offering to help. Maybe she’d finally reached the point of hiding backstage.

  “I’m just distracted,” Lydia said. “My heart isn’t in it these days.”

  “Your heart? Sweetie, you’ve got too much heart. Do yourself a favor and let it shrivel. Read some Henry Miller. Some Ayn Rand. Some Deepak Chopra. That’ll shitten your outlook. And besides, you are the most natural bookseller I know. You’re the bare-knuckled bookseller—you have the bookseller élan.”

  Lydia grunted. “I spend most of my time lately hiding from customers.”

  “Aloof is all the rage. When customers see you climb up from under a pile of books they know they are in good hands. The best hands.” Plath peered into her cigarette pack but decided against it. “Listen. I guess I’m telling you that your presence on this planet is requested, okay?”

  Lydia looked at Plath and wondered, not for the first time, how much she really knew about Lydia’s life.

  “Time’s up,” Lydia said, and rushed up the block to find her friend’s car.

  Within minutes of borrowing Plath’s Volvo, Lydia had driven through downtown and parked on Broadway. As she walked toward the capitol, she could see traces of some earlier snowstorm in small curdled mounds along walkways and under trees, but much of it had melted, leaving soggy grass and slushy gutters and enormous puddles underfoot. The capitol’s golden dome glimmered against the sky.

  Raj, as promised, was standing on its western steps, beneath the trio of porticos. His hands were buried in his jeans pockets and he was wearing a light suede jacket that smelled like a goat when she hugged him. The light was dusky with dark clouds blocking the sunset, but she could still see prunelike swells under his eyes and she wondered if he’d been crying.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Just great. Thanks for coming.”

  They sat down on the engraved step marked One Mile Above Sea Level. Raj touched the words with the tips of his fingers. “Remember coming here for a field trip when we were kids?”

  “I guess so,” Lydia said. “What’s wrong, Raj? What did you call me up here for?”