The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  Pastor Bob’s Web site, meanwhile, was predictably oblique and self-congratulatory. “A lot of media attention has come our way since the disappearance and blessed return of a young man in our flock. We always welcome the chance to spread God’s word to a wider audience, especially those with contrasting points of view, who have yet to see the light of Jesus. God is challenging us, to be sure, right now, but we know that the return of our precious sheep is a sign from Above, and that just as the Prodigal Son returned to his father with understanding and humility and grace, our young friend has returned to his Heavenly father and to our ministries with a Glad Heart.” I rolled my eyes and flipped my middle finger at the computer screen, as if someone were watching me and caring what I thought. No one was watching, and no one cared.

  I had the stomach, finally, to look through every single page online, every false lead, every link to a man named Ian Drake who was a plumber on Cape Cod, every Class Notes link: Ian Drake, Colgate class of 1985. Ian Drake, Berkeley class of 2000. I found Ian Drake married to Elizabeth Westbridge in 1888. Ian Drake had a criminal record in Amarillo, Texas. All day, while my father went to meetings in empty Greek restaurants and my mother volunteered herself around town, I lay on the couch reading magazines, unable to tolerate anything as long as a book, and when I got tired of that I’d make a peanut butter sandwich and plant myself in front of my father’s computer.

  I had been waiting, really, for someone to come and get me. I took each day that passed as a sign that Ian hadn’t ratted me out, that he was still telling them all about the Met. I made myself wait ten whole days, and then I made myself call.

  “Loraine wants to know if she should go ahead and replace you.” It was the first thing Rocky said when he heard my voice.

  “Well, probably.” I didn’t have time to think, but I didn’t need to. I couldn’t conceive of going back there. I said, “I need to be up here with my parents now. My father had an accident, and I’m here with him. Lots of medicines.”

  “Lots and Lots of Medicines. By Robert McCloskey.” It wasn’t even funny, and he knew it. “So Ian Drake came back.”

  “He did?” I was really asking. “I mean, I saw it online, but I wasn’t—So he really did?”

  “He just showed up, a couple weeks ago.” He didn’t say that he showed up at the library, and I wondered if Ian had changed his mind, had walked home and rung his own doorbell. More likely, he was spotted on his walk from the Greyhound station.

  “Where was he? Is he okay?”

  “No one’s saying, except that he ran away. It’s not exactly the kind of thing the Hannibal Herald would cover in detail. In that it’s not about a bake sale or an Eagle Scout.”

  “Right. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “And then apparently the parents took him out of the Day School, and no one’s seen him since he’s been back. He hasn’t shown up here at all. I talked to that teacher from his school, the one who comes in all the time.”

  “Sophie?”

  “Maybe. She said the family called the school the day after he came back and said they’d be homeschooling him. She was a little freaked out. I think she’s worried they’re locking him in a closet.” He paused, but I was afraid to react in any way. “She told me that one time last year, he came into school with a big rug burn on his forehead because they made him kneel on the carpet all night with his head down to repent for something. I’m thinking you were right about him.” I wondered if it really was Sophie, since she’d always told me he’d be fine. But of course, that was back when he’d had the school and the library.

  I was quiet. I couldn’t accept, suddenly, that I didn’t know where Ian was or what he was doing. I imagined him kneeling in a closet or packing for a yearlong retreat with Pastor Bob. What killed me was that two months ago, if these things happened, it was horrifying and wrong, whereas if they happened now, they were not only horrifying and wrong but also my fault, because I’d let him go home.

  I could have turned myself in right then. I could have told Rocky and the police and the Drakes that none of it was Ian’s fault, that I’d taken him against his will. But I couldn’t, or at least I didn’t. And I honestly don’t think it would have made much difference. I don’t even think Ian would have gone along with the new story. Of all the things that happened, this is the one I refuse to feel guilt over. It might also be the one thing that sends me to hell.

  “I gotta be honest,” Rocky said. “Until he came back, I thought he might have been with you.”

  “What?”

  “Lucy, you disappeared the very next day. And you were crazy about him.”

  I said, “I’m not a kidnapper, Rocky.”

  “I know that.” He didn’t sound sure.

  “Maybe he was with that pastor. That guy does sound extremely creepy. Look, tomorrow I’ll send Loraine instructions for the summer. You know you’ll need to help her get into her e-mail, though. And tell her to go ahead and start hiring. I’ll pick up all my junk sometime.”

  “Call when you’re here.” He said it as if he doubted I ever would be.

  38

  . . . And It Was Still Hot

  Two months passed before I had the nerve to go back. My father had been sending Tim rent checks so they wouldn’t throw my things in the street or raid my wardrobe for costumes. It was June, 7:00 at night, and after a long, cold winter and spring it was finally warm out. I drove slowly into town, looking at each person I passed, at all the kids outside the ice-cream shop, not recognizing anyone.

  I actually knew Ian’s address now, courtesy of the Post-Dispatch’s crack reporting. I drove down the street slowly, but not too slowly. I didn’t know what he’d do if he looked out and recognized my car. He might laugh, or he might run screaming to his mother, or he might dash out into the street and fling himself on my hood. The house was lovely and white, peonies and irises blooming out front. There was a large window downstairs, but the curtains were drawn. A white SUV in the driveway. I turned at the end of the block and passed it again. There were no protesters on the lawn, no prayer groups camped on the porch, no taunting classmates throwing pebbles. Ian’s face was not pressed to his bedroom window in agony. There were no screams, no hallelujahs, no loud strains of Christian rock. The recycling was by the curb. I kept driving. What else could I do?

  I parked behind the library, which had been closed for over an hour. My key still worked. The sun was low in the sky, sending thick yellow beams through the windows. Things were different: new books out front, the five-cent cart moved. I slipped my shoes off when I went downstairs, because it felt better to be silent. The beanbags were rearranged. In this light, a thin layer of dust glowed over everything. I took the brown bear from the puppet box and ran it along the edges of all the shelves, and then I grabbed a rolling stool and stood on that to get the tops of the fiction shelves, where it looked like no one had dusted in a long time. I half expected Ian to whisper my name from down below, from deep in the science section. “I’ve been living here for months,” he’d say. “What took you so long?”

  I saw that Heidi was coming apart at the binding. I got the roll of adhesive book cloth from the desk drawer and sat down in the middle of the shaggy blue rug. It felt good to sit there working. It was almost dark down here, with the lights off and the sun hitting the high street-level windows only obliquely. Overhead, I could see a hundred cobwebs that must have been invisible in the day, reaching between the wooden ceiling beams and windows. They shone across the shelves, stretching for impossible distances, as if the spider had leaped off the window ledge in some great suicide and trailed her silk behind her, a failed parachute. I thought of Charlotte’s web, and the silkworm in James’s peach. I could see why Ian had wanted to sleep in the library. It must have been like heaven.

  That night, absorbing the silence and the stillness, was the first time it hit me that I seemed to have thrown away more of my life than I’d intended. I understood that I could never have my own children, because if I did, I
would realize, finally and fully, what it would mean to lose them. The more I loved them, the more it would hurt, and I knew I couldn’t live my life feeling the Drakes’ pain. Not because I didn’t want it, but because I couldn’t survive it.

  I will be the thirty-five-year-old who pushes her boyfriend away. I will be hounded at parties by well-meaning friends with vital information about the biological clock. I will write a book: What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting.

  Maybe it’s for the best, really, to end the Great Hulkinov Lineage once and for all. My father is the only Hulkinov left, at least the only one in America, and I am his only child. There will be no more legacy of flight and betrayal and fabulization. Or at least not in this particular family. So Hulkinov gets shaved down to Hull, then down to nothing at all. Thousands of years of Russian winters, Russian food, Russian survival, and then one day, finally, a child was born in America. The end.

  I made myself stand up and ransack the desk for any artifacts of my life there. Half the drawers were empty, and the other half were full of someone else’s folders and sweaters. I finally found my own things in a cardboard box down below. To-do lists, pens, Thermos, Ian’s origami e-mail from that Christmas (still refolded, as I’d left it), Tylenol. I filled the rest of the box with the few things I wanted from the closet, and then before I left I got a pen and found our most ancient copy of The Hobbit. It was a hardcover, the plastic protector turning yellow and splintering and taped together. It was the copy Ian would have chosen, out of all of them. It was the most likely to be haunted. On the old, forgotten name card in the front, underneath “Matthew Lloyd, 4/2/91,” I wrote “Ian Drake,” followed by the date we’d left town. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, and it felt almost like one of those notes serial criminals leave for the cops, the kind that seems like a taunt but is really a prayer to get caught. It wasn’t that, though, I was sure. Nor was it a message to Ian—it couldn’t be, if he was never coming back to the library.

  I imagined him finding it when he was thirty, maybe, coming back to town for his father’s funeral, revisiting his childhood haunts. By then, I hoped, he’d have read the book, and maybe this would remind him that I’d meant something, however vague and inept, by directing him to a novel about a small man who sets out on a journey and conquers all the monsters. But really the metaphor didn’t fit, and now that I thought about it, I was the one who had more in common with that unwitting burglar who has adventure so forcefully thrust upon him. I looked across at the title page and saw the subtitle, which I’d surely known at one point: There and Back Again, it said. Of course. You always go back again. And I hadn’t even killed the dragon on the way.

  I drove to my apartment next. It had been almost two months since Tim had said Charlton Heston was there to question me, but even so, I didn’t want to risk going in my usual door. I went instead through the theater entrance, through the empty red-carpeted lobby, past the framed programs and the basket of cough drops.

  I got my things, but just a few boxes’ worth. My father promised he’d buy me new furniture, new clothes. I didn’t want to know where he got the money, but I’d take it. I didn’t even want my old things. They were dusty and so still, and they hadn’t been touched in months. It was like a haunted house: someone used to live here, but she’s long gone. Careful not to disturb her ghost.

  I brought the boxes through the lobby and out to my car one at a time. There was no show that night, but I heard the buzz of rehearsal in the theater. On my last trip out, I stopped in the doorway and watched the actors on the stage, knowing they couldn’t see me. They weren’t acting—they were all crouched down looking at something, and when my eyes adjusted I could see they had about five CPR dummies spread out there. A big bald man with a Blackhawks jacket and a clipboard was shouting instructions: “Pinch them noses, or the air will go right back out again! You gotta pinch them noses!” I wondered whether they were all learning this for some legal reason, for the potbellied baby boom playgoers of the greater Hannibal region, or if it would be used in a play. Or maybe it was a play. Or just Tim’s idea of a party. Tim, kneeling downstage, puffed air into his dummy’s mouth, and as the dummy inflated it rose from the floor. He plunged his hands into the rubber chest again and again, his hair falling out of its ponytail in blond streaks.

  Across the stage, the red-haired actress was laughing as she felt her dummy’s neck for its nonexistent pulse. She picked it up by the shoulders and shook it. “For God’s sake!” she screamed. “Don’t leave me, Clyde! Don’t leave me now! Who will look after the baby?”

  “Okay,” the coach said, “you don’t wanna shake your victim. You’re checking the airway now. Okay, lay that on down.”

  But she had an audience. She wasn’t stopping. “You!” she cried, pointing at empty seats, “Don’t just stand there, call the ambulance! You! This man is my lover! I didn’t mean to shoot you, baby! You know I need you!”

  The other actors had abandoned their dummies and circled around her to weep and laugh and flail, except for Tim. I watched him pumping away alone in the yellow light, as if he could blow life back into the plastic form, could restart its blood. For the smallest moment, I believed he could.

  39

  Tim Ex Machina

  In my car, the conditioned air blasting my cheeks, I felt suddenly jolted awake, as if for the first time in months. It felt like the summer in college when I’d broken my leg and then finally stopped the Vicodin and realized how out of it I’d been for the past week, without even knowing it.

  What I’d forgotten this time, what I’d been too fogged-up to see, wasn’t what I’d done, or the repercussions, or even the stark reality of the Hannibal to which I’d so briefly returned, but that I had the ability to plan. To put it in the terms of the obnoxious self-help books Rocky and I held dramatic readings from when we did inventory: I’d been a fish in the current so long, I’d forgotten I could swim.

  So I breathed, and I planned, and then I drove to the Hannibal mall, where the stores would still be open. I found, as I knew I would, a Christian bookstore, as full of calligraphy as Darren Alquist and I could have hoped, and I found a magazine called Born Again Teen!, with an ecstatic skateboarder on the cover, midleap. It was perfect, and I bought two identical copies, smiling sweetly at the rosy-faced woman behind the counter, and I drove back to my building, where the actors were still saving their dummies. I sat at my desk and made a list. Then I made seven more. I found a glue stick in the top drawer, and I pasted each list onto a separate page of one magazine, careful not to let the edges of the papers stick out. I smashed the whole thing flat under my dictionary. And then—deliberately, joyously—I walked to the bathroom and flushed the toilet.

  Tim was at my door in two minutes, eyes wide, grin wide, arms wide, and he actually picked me up when he hugged me. “I thought you’d been kidnapped!” he said.

  “I was. Come in.”

  “I heard you flush, and I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus, is that a ghost?’ And they all made me come up and check. And it’s you! You’re here! We weren’t in rehearsal, or I’d wring your neck.”

  “No, I know,” I said. “That was your bat signal. I need your help.”

  Tim sat on the arm of my couch and bounced. He was still sweaty from the CPR, and when he plowed his fingers through his hair they left wet ridges.

  I said, “Do you remember the boy who went missing? The one from the Bob Lawson thing?”

  “Sure,” he said, and started to say something, and stopped himself. My face must have spoken volumes, and I didn’t care. I sat on the couch, my feet up, facing him. I tried to start at the beginning, but I wasn’t sure what the beginning was. The day I met Ian, or the day I found him crouched in the stacks? So I started in the middle. I said, “One day he brought me this origami Jesus.”

  I told him the whole story. The short version, at least. I’m not sure why I knew I could trust him: because he loved drama, perhaps, or just because he was Tim, or because I could see him as a child, crou
ched on the floor of the library, reading Bunnicula and bouncing just like he was now. But I was right. I could trust him. I could have trusted him even if I still had Ian right there with me, still missing, still hunched under his overstuffed backpack.

  “This is amazing,” he kept saying. “It’s just, like, amazing. I mean, we thought you were this mild-mannered librarian and everything. And there you are, all vigilante and shit, and risking your life!”

  It was oddly irritating to be seen in such flattering light, and so I stopped him. “I need your help,” I said. “You and only you, and you can’t tell anyone.”

  I showed him the magazine, and I showed him the lists, and I told him what I needed him to do. “You can have everything in the apartment,” I said. “Everything that’s left. For payment. You can keep it yourself, or use it for props, I don’t care. Or sell it.” He looked around at the coffee table, the lamps, the oriental rug my father had sent me for Christmas. Nicer than most of the things in the prop room.

  “I’d do it for free,” he said, and I could tell it was true. He was pacing gleefully around the room, like I imagined he did backstage before each entrance. “You just gave me the best role of my life.”