Inside, past an entryway hung with flyers for toddler music classes and dog-obedience training, was a large room. Blue walked quickly past the circulation desk, where a gray-haired woman sat, a pot of orange mums next to her.
The librarian glanced at Blue, smiled, and returned to her work taping a cover to a book. Blue shuffled by, trying not to hit anything with the guitar case. She made her way to a terminal in the center of the room and sat down with her pack between her feet and the guitar to her side. From somewhere farther back among the bookcases came a cough, but no other signs of people existed.
She had a seat, she was warm, she had Internet access. Now what? Should she look up cheap bus fares? Ways to travel without money? How to get the devil to leave your soul alone?
That last seemed the most important, but she doubted that what she needed to know she would find online. She started searching for motels instead. Nothing she found was under ninety bucks a night. Maybe a phone book? She glanced back at the librarian. The woman didn’t look up. New problem. Even if she could check out the library phone book, she couldn’t check out a voice to use with it.
But the librarian might call for her. Blue looked around, saw no one else, decided it was safe to leave her bag for a minute. She wrote her question out before going up to the desk, taking pains with her penmanship.
The librarian finished taping a label on the spine of a book. Blue handed her the notebook, waited while the librarian read her note.
“Laryngitis is the worst. You’re smart to rest your voice instead of trying to whisper.” She reached under the desk, offered Blue a phone book. “You can take it back to the table if you want. Just bring it back, okay?”
Blue smiled in response. At the table, she tried motels, found only one that she hadn’t seen online. A name alone, nothing about cost or location. No website. She searched the name anyway, came up with nothing.
On to Plan B. She went back to the librarian, her new question printed out. The librarian pushed her glasses back on her head and studied Blue. “I don’t know if that’s really a place that you’d want to stay,” she said at last. “I could recommend some nicer ones.”
Blue pointed at her question, mouthed the word please. The woman lowered her glasses and dialed the phone. Blue watched, breath held.
“Hello, I’m calling from the Heffleland Library. I’m wondering if you could tell me what your nightly rates are. Yes, and do you have rooms available for tonight?”
The woman wrote as she listened, upside down, so Blue could read it. Sixty-five dollars. She had just over eighty dollars. Enough for the room tonight. Tomorrow, she could make some more money in the park. Enough to get out of town and then . . . Well, the guitar was the answer, right? She’d just keep playing in each town she stopped in.
Get directions for me?
The librarian studied her so carefully that Blue felt that the parts of her face were being catalogued, labeled, and stored away. Close up, she could see the pale powder caught in the woman’s soft wrinkle lines, the brown pencil she’d used on her eyebrows. The woman smelled of chicken soup, and Blue’s stomach growled.
“I’ve been reading a lot about the Great Depression recently. Do you know much about it?” The woman paused. Blue shook her head. Who read about the Great Depression on their own? Was this librarian one of those women who were always taking classes? If Blue had free time, she couldn’t imagine spending it in history classes. Then again, she wasn’t totally sure what she would want to do. Unbidden, the memory of playing in the park came, of how it felt to have people listening to her music.
“Well, it was a time of hoboes. Drifters. Men without work, young folks without many prospects. A hard, hard time. One cool thing—these drifters, some of them would leave messages in the places they’d travel. A lot of different symbols, a kind of secret language. They warned each other of folks who were intolerant; they pointed out places to find food. One mark, a cat, was the sign of a kindhearted woman. Someone on the road saw that, they’d know they might get a meal or a safe place to sleep for the night.”
Blue shifted, wondering where all this was going. All she could think of was the motel room, of a shower and a bed.
“It’s a personal interest for me. My father was one of those drifters, looking for work, for hope. There’s a story he always told when I was little. One rainy night he was very sick, feeling close to dead. The way he told it, the rain nearly washed the life right out of him. He’d been chased away from a railroad yard, and the nearby town had a reputation for being hard on travelers, and he thought he’d just lie down in a ditch somewhere and meet his maker.
“He sat down next to a mailbox. Glanced up, just because, and saw a little stick cat drawn on the underside. So he dragged himself to his feet and walked up to the house, figuring the worst that would happen is that he’d be shot, and he already expected to die. He didn’t, though, because the woman who lived there took him in, and she kept him a whole week, in a warm guest room bed, with more food than he’d had for months. Patched him up, and once he was well enough to move on, she told him that she expected he’d do what he could for others along the road.”
Blue looked up, suddenly understanding.
“My father took that debt seriously. I do as well. This world can be the kind of place where a man can die in a ditch without anyone stopping to help, or it can be the kind of place where we all look after each other. I think you might be a person in need of help. If that’s the case, well, I have a room you could use overnight.”
Blue hesitated. Last night had been more than enough to persuade her never to stay with strangers again. But if she saved her money by staying, then she could buy a bus ticket in the morning and arrive in her next town during the day. Enough time to check things out, maybe even find another park to play in.
The librarian might be like Amy, or she might be the way she felt—warm, gentle, kind. Lou had said to trust herself. This woman, with her salty chicken-soup smell, and the soft creases of her face, and her story, didn’t scare Blue.
K, thanks!
The librarian had to work until six. Blue stayed, reluctant to leave either her stuff or the library. First, what if she left her bag behind the desk and the woman stole from it? Hard to imagine, but anything was possible. And second, what if she took her stuff with her and the librarian closed up the library and left? Mama had left. Cass had left. Even Tish had gone. Blue’d come to assume that within her dwelt something unlovable and easy to leave behind. She had no reason to believe this stranger wouldn’t choose to leave her, too.
Instead, Blue worked. When she was little, she’d imagined that the air in libraries was filled with whispers, with books telling their stories to one another. The air here held nothing more than the creak and snap of the baseboard heating and the growls of traffic outside, but there was magic in the order and peace, nonetheless. Shelving books made her a part of it.
A few kids her age came in after school let out. She wondered how she looked to them. Like any other new girl, chipped green polish on bitten nails, curly frizz escaping from the tight elastic holding back her brown hair. Her jeans had dirt on the knees, and she kept pulling leaves out of her barn coat’s pockets as well as her hair.
Okay, maybe she wasn’t like any other new girl. Maybe just like a new girl who had arrived straight from the woods.
Cass had cared so much about how she looked. Every morning she’d blow-dry her hair into perfect straightness, the edges in a silky taper around her face. She kept her nails perfect, too. Not gaudy—just single smooth colors, multiple coats brushed on until they shone, slick and even and wet-looking. She ordered expensive makeup online, using Lynne’s credit card, then paid her back with waitressing tips. You’d never know that underneath it she was as blotchy as any other girl.
At least that was how she had been. Was she still the same? Two years ago, Blue had still had braces and had liked to wear snug pink sweatshirts with hoods and zippers. What would Cass look like at ni
neteen, and would she recognize who Blue had become? Would she look at the faded streaks in Blue’s hair where she’d dyed it with red Kool-Aid, alone on a Saturday night, looking for anything to distract her from the quiet? Would she run her fingers through the tangles and say, “I have a better idea”?
“All set?” The librarian had put on a long black coat and a watercolor-print scarf, winding it twice around her neck. Something about the action made Blue shiver. Maybe it was the slenderness of her neck and the casual way the girl in the basement had studied the sparks dropping onto the rags as the others slept above them. But Blue wasn’t staying long. She hadn’t even given away her real name, so she should have three weeks, not three days. The librarian was safe from her. As long as she didn’t stay.
The librarian lived in a little brick house. They entered it through a side door that led into the kitchen. Books lined the inside, on shelves, on counters, in piles on the floor. The woman didn’t apologize for the clutter. She just took off her scarf and coat, slinging them over the back of a scarred wooden chair at the table, and stooped to pick up a bowl from the floor.
“I’m still used to feeding two cats,” she said as she took a can of cat food from the cupboard. A moment later a black-and-white cat trotted around the corner.
“This is Esmeralda. The other was Chanticleer. There’s a picture of him on the mantel in the other room.” There was the snap of a can being opened, and the cat at her feet began to purr.
The woman showed Blue a place to leave her boots, by the door. The relief came almost as soon as they were off. She needed another pair of shoes for when she wasn’t moving. The whole boot thing wasn’t really working quite the way she’d imagined.
The librarian led her back through the sitting room, all the way through to a staircase just past it. Upstairs were two rooms: one clearly a bedroom, while the other was packed full of more books, with a little daybed stuck in the corner by the window.
“You can leave your things here. Go ahead and slide the books around if you need space. I’d pull the shade if I were you. I leave it open during the day, so Esme can lie in the sun, but the people across the way can see right in. I have towels downstairs, if you’d like to use the shower?”
Blue left her guitar on the bed and carried her pack back down the stairs with her. The bathroom was tiny—just room for a toilet, sink, and shower—and the tile was cold under her feet. The water was perfect, though, hot almost to the point of pain; and she stayed in it a long time.
They had a quiet dinner. The librarian had changed into sweatpants and a ragged-hemmed sweater, and she served them soup in mismatched bowls. Blue didn’t care. The food was hot and filling, some kind of soup with beans and corn, and corn bread alongside. She ate until her stomach hurt.
“I’ll send some bread with you when you go,” the librarian said as she cleared the table.
Blue had assumed that the woman had wanted company. After all—cat, house full of books . . . She had to want people around. By the end of dinner, she wasn’t so sure. The woman seemed happy with silence, and her eyes kept straying to a book that lay open on the corner of the table. She hadn’t even asked Blue’s name, nor offered her own. It was Sharon—Blue had heard her say it on the phone—but she thought of the woman only as the librarian.
Blue’d been so busy wondering if she would be safe that it hadn’t occurred to her what the librarian had risked in bringing her home. She knew who she was: just Blue, seventeen, not spectacular at grades or causing trouble, good at swimming and playing guitar. But this woman had only the outside to go on.
Now, standing by her in the kitchen, Blue knew a secret about the librarian. Music came from within the woman, a soft, sleepy fiddle tune designed to be danced to in a dimly lit room.
Another thing she couldn’t tell anyone. She went upstairs to her room and lay on the bed thinking about how music played from souls like wind chimes on a breezy day. She wondered what her own might sound like. That was what the woman in the red dress had given her—the ability to hear. She fell into dreams of music rolling in great sweeping waves across the land, along the highways, flooding the cities and washing all unhappiness away.
The librarian had to leave for work at 9:30 the next morning. “I have to ask you to leave, too,” she said, apologetically. “It’s not as though I have much to take, but . . .”
Blue had stolen twice in her life. Once innocently—a pencil eraser shaped like an elephant that she slipped into her pocket when she was five. Mama had discovered it when she did the laundry a few days later, and Blue had struggled to remember how it had found its way there. Mama hadn’t made a fuss, just stopped in at the store the next day and paid for it as though she’d come to buy it. “Keep things out of your pocket, kiddo,” was all she’d said to Blue.
The other time had been on purpose. It was a month after Mama died, and Blue had suddenly wanted a candy bar, more than anything. It wasn’t even the candy so much as the feeling, the memory of her and Cass and Mama and Tish on Friday nights before the cancer had come, sneaking cheap candy into the movie theater, the taste of it somehow sweeter, more exotic, than anything they could have bought at concessions.
She’d wanted a candy bar, and she could have asked Lynne for money to buy one, and Lynne would have given it to her, along with a lecture about healthy snacks. She didn’t want Lynne’s money or her lectures. She just wanted. She’d sneaked the chocolate into her pocket at the grocery and left with one eye on Bill Eagleton talking with the cashier, as if she were daring him to say something. He didn’t. No one stopped her. She went around back and ate the candy with great gulping bites. It tasted of sugar and sadness, of nothingness, and she spat the last bite out and walked home alone.
I don’t steal things, she wanted to say. I’d never take your stuff. She hated that feeling, the same she used to get when she and Teena went into tourist shops on the coast and the shopkeepers had watched their every move.
Instead, she nodded.
No prob. I have to move on anyway. Thx so much for the food + bed.
Packing up, she lingered a moment over her keepsake bag. It contained nothing of value to anyone else: a lock of chestnut hair, harvested before chemotherapy had taken the rest; a tortoiseshell guitar pick; a white cotton training bra; a stone curved in the shape of a heart; two pictures; letters tied with brown yarn. She laid the pictures out, touched the images, the faces greasy with wear.
She lifted one and pressed her lips first to Mama’s face, then to Cass’s. Mama, wearing a crown Blue’d made her for her birthday. Cass, giving her best Mad Hatter impression in a giant purple hat.
It wasn’t just sadness that hurt when she looked at the pictures, it was regret. Sorry wasn’t a concept; sorry was a feeling that ate its way down deep inside you and grew until you would do anything to dig it out.
She went downstairs, carrying her things. The librarian looked at the guitar case.
“I assume you have a guitar in there?”
Blue nodded.
“Do you play?”
She nodded again. A little rush hit her, one that said People give me money to play for them.
“Would you play for me?” The librarian waved toward the case. “I’ve never been musical, but I love to listen. My grandfather used to play a fiddle, and my father would try, though he was never very good. I’d love to hear you.”
Payment of a kind, for the room and food. Blue nodded. She played two songs. A blues song that Mama played a lot, and one of Dry Gully’s standards. Tish had written it, not Mama. Mama’s songs were sunshine and woodstoves. Tish’s—Blue understood now that Tish’s were all about the woman in the red dress, the smell of flame and decay and the heat of her lips on a cold night.
“I feel like I know that one,” the librarian said when Blue finished. “Is it something on the radio?”
Blue shook her head.
It was my mother’s band, she started to write, then stopped.
She was leaving today, and it
had only been two days, but what if she didn’t leave? The librarian might figure things out if she knew Dry Gully. Would it still count—would she still be at risk if Blue herself hadn’t said her name?
My music teacher taught me. I like the sound.
“Me too.” The librarian pursed her lips. “Do you have a sleeping bag in your backpack? It doesn’t look big enough to me.”
She shook her head.
“Well, that concerns me. Come on.” She led Blue back through the rooms toward the stairs, turning aside to open a door leading down into the basement. Blue followed. As the stairs creaked beneath their feet, the image of the girl sitting on the freezer came to her, and she could almost hear the snap of the electric lines in her hands.
This basement looked nothing like the other, though. There were neat rows of fluorescent lights overhead, and neat rows of metal shelves beneath, with plastic boxes bearing labels like DOCUMENTS or RAGS. The librarian went straight to the farthest corner, opened a container, and stepped back, a full purple stuff sack in her hands.
“It’s not the lightest or the warmest bag ever made, but it’s better than nothing. I have some cord upstairs. We could tie it on your backpack.”
They tried. It didn’t work, not well. Blue’s bag was too small, the seams already stretched to tearing.
“Well. Let’s try something else.” The woman vanished back downstairs, alone this time. When she returned, she was carrying a frame pack, an old one whose metal frame peeked out from beneath its canvas body.
“This was my dad’s.” Her eyes shone behind her glasses. “Even after all his travels, he still kept rambling after he married my mother. She loved him anyway, but . . . Sometimes love asks for sacrifices. More than lots of people are willing to make. Anyway, it’s silly for me to keep it. I don’t hike, and if I did, I’d get something lighter. You take it. You’ll get more use out of it.”
Devil and the Bluebird Page 8
