The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  21

  Choose Your Own Fiasco

  You are alone in a strange hotel. Next door is Ian, a child you’ve inadvertently abducted. Down the hall is Glenn, who is starting to get suspicious. Under your bed is a shoebox filled with Lord knows what. You are expected in Pittsburgh. If you choose to run away in the night, go to number 1. If you choose to stay put, go to number 2. 1. You flee on foot, leaving your car behind so Glenn can more conveniently turn Ian in to the authorities. After hitching a ride to the Cleveland airport, you face the ticket agent with your father’s cash in hand. If you decide to fly to Alaska, go to number 3. If you choose St. Louis, Missouri, go to number 4.

  2. You wake in the morning to Glenn pounding at your door, accompanied by two police detectives and a reporter from the local NBC affiliate. You are trapped. If you choose to seduce the NBC reporter and elope with him to Alaska, go to number 3. If you decide to let yourself be handcuffed, go to number 5.

  3. Alaska turns out to be quite cold in March. You are reminded of your grandfather, vanishing into the Siberian wilderness. Suddenly, you become aware of a man staggering toward you across the tundra. It is your grandfather, calling to you in Russian. If you choose to embrace him, go to number 6. If you panic and get on a plane back to Missouri, go to number 4.

  4. There are cops all over the St. Louis airport, and your photo is on every wall. In your absence, Ian has been reunited with his family, and is being interviewed on the Today show. A man in livery is holding a sign that reads HULL. If you go with him, skip to number 7. If you throw up your hands and surrender, go to number 5.

  5. You receive a reduced sentence in exchange for turning in your father and his shoebox full of plutonium. Your years in prison aren’t pleasant, but you do get a lot of reading done, and Loraine isn’t around to ask why your shirt is wrinkled. You could do worse. The end.

  6. Your grandfather is dead, and so are you. You have crossed over to the other side, which looks and feels remarkably like a large, snowy field. Fortunately, you are wearing your puffy orange coat. The end.

  7. Your chauffeur whisks you away. When he takes off his cap, you realize he is the most handsome man in the universe. He invites you to his vacation home in Alaska. If you accept, go to number 3. If you order him to take you to Ian’s house, go to number 8.

  8. Ian is not as pleased to see you as you hoped. Tuna the guinea pig bares her fangs, and Larry Drake has you in his rifle cross-hairs. After your arrest, Janet Drake displays her Christian mercy to the world by convincing the judge that instead of jail time, you be sentenced to five years of rehabilitative therapy with Pastor Bob. The five years start tomorrow. The end.

  9. Your hard work has paid off. The treasure you collected in Florida is worth millions, and the noise in the street turns out to be your ticker-tape parade. Ian’s adoption by Tim and Lenny is now official, and the Hull Library will soon be complete. Congratulations!

  22

  I Could Not Have a Tongue

  The next morning, we all piled into the car with doughnuts and coffee and orange juice from the table in the lobby. I was wearing my new red shirt, and it felt like a clean, soft cocoon. Glenn just stared out the window, and Ian seemed to be asleep in the back. A few miles onto the highway, though, he said, “I can’t wait till Dude leaves, because then I can sit in the front.”

  “No you can’t,” I said, although I’d let him before. I hoped he wouldn’t bring this up right now.

  “You’re too short,” Glenn said. “Look what would happen.” He pulled the shoulder strap higher up on his own body and mimed falling forward into it with his neck. He made a choking noise and stuck his tongue out.

  Ian said, “My mom lets me if I put the belt behind my head. And also I’m in a very high percentile for height. Look, this is from last summer and I was already four foot six.”

  I wondered what on earth he could be handing to Glenn that was from last summer when I remembered the pool pass, the one with his name on it and “Hannibal Public Pool” across the top, and an orange-tinted photo of Ian with wet hair and steamed-up glasses, droplets of water still clinging to his shoulders. He was holding it there between the seats, waiting as Glenn reached for it.

  I jerked the car half a lane to the right. It wasn’t intentional, just what happened when I tried to yank my hand back to swat the pass away from Glenn without letting go of the wheel. We didn’t hit anyone, but we barely missed a Jeep lagging a few feet behind us in the right lane, and by the time we got straightened out we were all hyperventilating and Ian was screaming. The angry honks escorted us down the road for the next five seconds, like the other drivers were building walls of sound to control us, to keep us in line.

  “What in the hell was that?” Glenn said.

  I said, “Please don’t swear in front of Joey.”

  Glenn grabbed a napkin and scrubbed at the coffee that had run down his white oxford. When I looked in the rearview, Ian was zipping his backpack. He grimaced into the mirror to let me know he realized what he’d done and had put the pass away.

  After that, I put on the radio as loud as seemed natural for that early in the morning. I was already sick of every song on frequent DJ rotation. When I’m ninety years old, if someone asks me what songs were popular that March, I’ll still be able to rattle them off.

  We pulled up to the art museum at about 11:30, and Glenn ripped his bag out of the trunk like I’d stolen it from him. I’d gotten out to help him, and Ian stayed in the backseat doing a book of invisible ink puzzles.

  I still didn’t quite know how to get rid of Glenn. My throat was burning from last night’s cigarettes. I said, “Look, I’m not sure how long this is going to take.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean, I might need to stay there with them. And then, honestly, if I go back to Chicago, it’ll be to help my friend. She might need a bone marrow donation, and I’ve been thinking about seeing if I’m a match.” Glenn had never asked what was specifically wrong with Janna Glass, and Ian hadn’t given him the movie-of-the-week version.

  He sighed and stared over my shoulder. “Let’s make this easy. I have friends here I can probably crash with. I’m in a weird head space right now. How about we do the romantic weekend sometime when you’re not babysitting.”

  “That’s good. You’ll call me?” I couldn’t have engineered it better—he was staying away from Missouri for now, and he didn’t completely hate me.

  “Yeah.” He slung his bag strap over his shoulder and kissed me on the cheek. “Stay out of trouble. Don’t drive crazy.” He disappeared through the museum doors.

  When I got back in, Ian said, “Can’t I sit up front again? I seriously am tall enough,” and I was too exhausted to say no. I was actually relieved not to have him next to my father’s shoebox, which this morning I’d tucked back under the driver’s seat, after sleeping with it under my bed. Ian had been using it as a lap desk for his invisible ink book all morning, though, and now it was just sitting on the middle of the backseat. Maybe it looked less suspicious there. I wasn’t so much concerned for the safety of the contents as terrified that someone would see that sad old beagle, intuit what was in the box, and slap the cuffs on me—not for the crime I’d actually committed, but the ones my father had.

  An hour later, and an hour closer to Pittsburgh, Ian was loudly composing a song called “States You Can Say Without Closing Your Mouth.”

  “Oh, Iowa, Ohio, Oahu, Hawaii!” he sang. “Ooh, yeah! Uh-huh! Hi! Woah, Hawaii, wow!”

  He took his feet off the dashboard and looked at me. “Do you think I could use Rs? You don’t really close your mouth—your tongue doesn’t touch anything. Especially if you had an English accent.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Definitely.”

  “Where are you, Ohio?” he sang with a British accent. “Oh, here! Oh, Iowa, Ohio, Oahu, Hawaii!”

  I took one hand off the steering wheel to hit it on my jeans in applause.

  “This is great!” he said. “I could no
t have a tongue and I’d be fine!” It reminded me of what Sophie Bennett had said about him, that he was the kind of kid who would turn out all right no matter what. But I couldn’t really believe that, or else what was I doing out here?

  Now that Glenn was out of the car, now that the monotony of the drive had dulled my adrenaline to the point where I could almost think linearly, I felt I had to try to talk seriously with him. I wanted to say something helpful and profound that he could remember after I’d been locked away. If I ran the risk of his getting so angry that he turned me in—so be it. Better than this all being for nothing.

  I said, for some inane, incomprehensible reason, “You know, the first real librarians were monks and nuns. They copied books by hand, and they kept them safe in the monastery.”

  “Oh.” He put his foot back up on the dashboard. The great thing about ten-year-olds is they don’t balk at non sequiturs. “Is that why libraries are so quiet? Because the monks couldn’t talk?”

  “Maybe. I never thought of that before.”

  “Why do monks stop talking?”

  “For religious reasons. I’m not exactly sure.”

  “But the Bible never says not to talk. I know that definitely.”

  “I think they partly just liked it that way. They liked living in the mountains in a quiet place.” I was being ridiculously cautious—trying just to crack the lid on the can of worms, not bust it open on the sidewalk. “I mean, none of them ever got married. They chose just to live with other monks. Or other nuns. People have been doing that for a long time, just choosing not to get married and to live with their friends instead. You used to have to be a monk or a nun to do it, but that’s a really hard life. Now a lot of people just do it to be happy.”

  He leaned the passenger seat back as far as it would go. “If people visited the library, did they have to not talk at all?”

  “I don’t think people really visited. The monks just kept the books. Sometimes they chained them down to the shelves, so they wouldn’t be stolen.”

  “Because they were so valuable?”

  “Right. They had all those illuminated letters, and each one took months to copy. “

  “If I were copying a book, I would always put in some of my own words, or a secret message. About some really huge secret. Do you think they ever did that?”

  “Maybe. Sure. What kind of secret?”

  “About treasure. I think I’d like to be a monk.”

  “I think you’d talk too much.”

  I tried to come up with another angle of approach, but a few minutes later he was asleep on the leaned-back seat.

  23

  One Light, Two Light, Red Light, Blue Light

  As I drove, I made a list in my head of all the people who could link me to Ian’s disappearance. If the authorities got the slightest hint, one anonymous phone tip, they’d have their pick of witnesses now. My father would know to lie for me, but my mother would make a mess of it, and who knew what Glenn would do. Loraine, of course, would recognize Ian’s name on posters or in the papers, but she didn’t know quite how much time he spent with me. Tim the landlord would notice I was gone, but he wouldn’t know about Ian. I realized I should call and tell him I was out of town. Sophie Bennett, the teacher at Hannibal Day, was also a concern. She knew I was worried about Ian. But she knew the family well enough that she’d assume they’d locked him up somewhere. She was probably dying to tell me about it, asking at the library when I’d be back. If she started talking to Rocky, if he told her I’d vanished, that would be the worst. But nobody talks to Rocky.

  Rocky could figure it out easily, all on his own. Maybe he already had. And yet somehow I wasn’t worried about him. Why was that? My stomach lurched. “Because he’s in love with you,” it said.

  When Ian was in the bathroom at a gas station, I stood in the snack aisle and dialed the downstairs library extension on my cell, knowing Sarah-Ann would answer. She did.

  “I’m just checking in,” I said.

  “Oh!” I could picture her sitting there, surrounded by books she couldn’t figure out how to re-shelve, reading a magazine from upstairs. “Are you back?”

  “No, I’m not—I think it has to be a few more days. My friend is very sick, and I’m helping with her children. It’s worse than I thought.”

  “Oh, my heavens, well I’m sure you’re a blessing!”

  “Can you handle everything for a while?”

  “Yes. Well, we had to redo the computer, because things got in there backwards. But it’s just fine now, and yes, it’s wonderful!”

  I wasn’t going to bother imagining what that meant. “And Chapter Book Hour is 4:30 on Friday,” I said.

  “Oh dear, it is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. The one about the little people who steal things. It should be in the top left drawer.”

  “I don’t see anything but staplers!”

  “That’s the right. Look on the left.”

  “Oh, good! Where do I start?”

  “Right where the bookmark is.”

  “Now Lucy, you need to talk to Rocky. He was trying to reach you. Did he reach you? There was something terribly important. Shall I connect you upstairs?”

  “No, I’ll call him. Tell him I’ll call very soon.” I hung up and bought Oreos and a box of tampons.

  How to jog like a ten-year-old boy:1. Swing your arms violently, as if shadowboxing.

  2. Lift your knees very high. Remember: moving forward is not your primary goal.

  3. With every step, scream the word “JOG!”

  Back in the parked car, I told Ian we had to stop in Pittsburgh, but that after that he needed to pick the road. We were using my Swiss Army knife to spread peanut butter on the crackers from Ian’s backpack. We watched the stream of travelers rubbing their rear ends as they walked into the Shell.

  “I’m tired of deciding.”

  “Okay, but this is your trip. If you don’t tell me where to go, I’m taking you home.” I felt almost as if I were saying this for legal reasons, as if this defense would hold up in court. I never took him anywhere he didn’t tell me to go, Your Honor! Except to make a brief Mafia drop in Pittsburgh!

  Ian was flipping through the map book angrily, the way he’d flipped through Blueberries for Sal months before. “Why do you always make everything my fault?”

  “I don’t think anything’s your fault. What do you mean, exactly?”

  “You’re making me do all the bad stuff, telling us where to go. You never did anything bad, just me.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “But really you’re the worst one. You’re the kidnapper.” But he was trying not to laugh.

  “I think you’re the librarian-napper,” I said. “And now you have to choose someplace, or I’ll choose. And what I’ll choose is Hannibal, Missouri.”

  He closed the book and flapped it open randomly. “Vermont.” It was in the middle of the book, on the page with New Hampshire. “That’s where the Green Mountain Boys were from, anyway. I know all this stuff about them. And it used to be its own country. Only it and Texas ever used to be their own countries. Oh, and Hawaii.” I worried he’d launch into his song again, but his mood seemed to have shifted back to serious. Vermont was much, much farther than I wanted to go, but it seemed as logical a mouth to this crazy river as any. Inertia would carry us at least half the way there.

  I said, “Okay. Buckle up.”

  “And also, it’s definitely where my grandmother lives.”

  A few of the myriad questions you must face when transporting a ten-year-old boy and a box of illegal materials across the country: Do felony laws differ depending on which state you are apprehended in, or does it all go federal and therefore not matter? Are prolonged stress and the life of the fugitive perhaps more damaging to the child psyche than being raised by an overbearing anorexic evangelical? If you were a Cyclops, what color would you want your eye to be? If you had all your fingernails surgically removed, w
ould they eventually grow back? Is it possible that your Mafioso father’s cash is marked as illegal and the police are currently tracing your path from gas station to fast food franchise, hoping to arrest someone named Dmitri the Glove? What do you get when you cross a meatball with an elephant?

  And then, at dusk, twenty miles from Pittsburgh: red lights, blue lights, that surprisingly gentle siren. We pulled over. We were on a smaller road, for the scenic route.

  “Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot,” Ian whispered, only many more times, as we watched the cop talk into her radio in our rearview. Ian was in the backseat again, thank God, having climbed back in the middle of the afternoon to stretch out. I hadn’t yet sworn in front of him, not that he’d heard, and I didn’t now. A long time later, she walked up to my window with that wide-legged swagger all women cops have. Normally at this point I tell the officer exactly what I’ve done wrong—failing to stop fully at a stop sign, usually—and my honesty has won me about ten warnings and no tickets. I wasn’t about to try honesty now.

  “Yes?” I said.

  She had short, curly hair and I could smell the mint from her gum. I wanted to trade lives with her.

  “You aware your left brake light is out?”

  “No,” I said, in a voice like she’d just handed me a diamond necklace. “No, I did not realize that.”

  “Mommy, who’s the scary lady?” Ian said from the backseat. I tried to shoot him a look in the rearview. “I’m frightened, Mommy.”