Chapter 24 The Empty Novel

She did not go to the book club for a month. It was not that she meant to stay away. She meant to go, every Tuesday evening; she even got as far as putting on her coat. But at the door of the children's section she would stop, the way she had stopped at the door of her novel, and she would turn around and go home. The club had been Samuel's, and Samuel was gone, and the part of her that had loved reading the club's chosen novels had gone quiet in the same month that Owen's voice had gone quiet in the world. Her editor at the magazine noticed. "Lily," she said, "your last three essays have all been about silence. Are you all right?" Lily said she was fine. She was not fine. She was a woman who had bought a single week with her brother and paid for it with everything he had ever said. She had walked into a library that should not exist and rewritten a night that could not be rewritten, and now her memories were full of a boy who moved his lips and made no sound, and the novel she had carried for fifteen years was a dead thing in her desk drawer. At the end of the month, Arthur called her. Arthur was ninety-three. He had been old when Lily joined the club, older when Samuel died, and he was now so old that the town treated him like a landmark, a church that happened to be alive. His voice on the phone was thin and precise, like the crackle of an old record. "Lily," he said, "you are missing meetings. That is unlike you. Come for tea on Saturday, and bring your book." She went. His house was small and warm and full of the smell of pipe tobacco and lemon. They sat in his kitchen, and he poured tea with hands that trembled, and he did not ask her about the novel. "Samuel came to me once," Arthur said, "after his first visit to that library. He was a wreck. He had saved a woman's life and lost his book in the trade, and he did not know whether he had won or lost. I told him, the way an old man tells a young man, that losing a book is not the same as losing the story. The story lives in the teller, not the page." Lily set down her cup. "Arthur." "Yes?" "How did you know about the library?" Arthur smiled, and his eyes, behind their glasses, were young and sad. "Samuel told me, in the end. On the last night he could talk, he told me everything—the key, the Librarian, the price, Margaret, all of it. He said he was passing the story on because a story that is not passed on dies. And then he asked me to watch out for the ones who took the keys at his funeral." Lily was very still. "You knew I took one." "I knew," Arthur said. "I hoped you would not use it. But I knew you would. You have the same hunger Samuel had, the same unfinished sentence. So I will tell you what I told him, only this time I mean it for you." He leaned forward, and his voice was gentle. "The library does not give second chances, Lily. It trades them. Every revision is a bargain, and the library always knows what it is worth. Samuel paid twice and learned to stop. Margaret paid once and spent twenty years regretting it. The only person I ever knew who came out of that place with more than he went in with was Samuel, and that was only because he finally stopped trading and started living." Lily looked down at her hands. "I changed one night. One fight. I wanted the last words, Arthur. I wanted him to hear me say I was sorry and that I loved him." "And did he hear you?" "Yes. I have the memory. He heard me. He was not alone." "Then you did what you came to do," Arthur said. "The rest—whatever the library took—is the part you have to learn to live with. That is the lesson. That is always the lesson. You cannot have the words without losing something the size of them." Lily thought about the tapes, the choir, the answering machine. She thought about her novel, dying in the drawer. "I didn't know the price would be his voice," she said. "No one ever knows the price," Arthur said. "That is what makes it a price. If you could see it before you paid, you would never pay it, and you would never grow. Now you know what it is worth. The question is what you will do with the knowledge." She stayed until the light began to fail, and she helped Arthur with his dishes, and she walked home through the streets of the town she had lived in her whole life, and all the way home she heard her brother's silence, huge and patient, walking beside her. That night she dreamed of the library. She dreamed of the green book, and the page with her handwriting, and the pen lying where she had left it. And in the dream she wrote again. She wrote the fight back—the cold words, the slammed door, the silence that followed. And when she woke, her brother's voice was in her ears, rough and laughing, saying her name the way he had said it for sixteen years. She sat up in the dark, and she wept, because the dream was the first time she had heard him in a month. The key was in her jewelry box. It was warm. She took it out and held it in her hand, and the warmth of it was the warmth of a door left open for her. She could go back. She could write the original night back into existence, and the silence would be gone, and his voice would be everywhere again—and the cruel words would be real again, and the empty hospital room, and the fifteen years of wondering what she had said. Either way, she lost something. That was the whole of it. She went to the public library the next morning, and she walked down into the basement, and the door was there in the wall between the two stacks, with its keyhole shaped like an open book. She stood in front of it for a long time. And then she turned the key.