Chapter 27 The Hollow Man

The reading was held in the children's section on a Thursday evening, because the club had never quite believed in doing things the ordinary way. The chairs were the small blue ones, the kind that make grown adults sit with their knees around their ears, and the tea was poured into plastic cups with the name of the library printed on the side, and Lily stood at the front with her novel in her hands and read the first chapter aloud to the people who had watched her carry it for fifteen years. She had expected to be afraid. She had expected the old familiar terror, the one that lived in her throat since the night she had turned the key—the fear that the words would come out flat, empty, puppets without a ventriloquist. But the words did not come out flat. They came out the way she had written them, slowly, by ear, by feel, and the children's section grew very quiet, and the grown-ups in the blue chairs stopped pretending their knees were comfortable, and when she finished the first chapter and looked up, the retired nurse was crying, and the professor had taken off his glasses, and nobody said anything for a long moment. Then the young mother said, "Read the other one. The silent chapter." And Lily read the silent chapter, the one where the brother stops talking and the sister learns to read his shoulders, and when she finished, the applause was not the polite applause of a book club. It was the applause of people who had just been handed something and were not entirely sure what to do with it, except to hold it carefully. Daniel was not there. Lily noticed halfway through the evening, the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue. Daniel Cross had been coming to the club for three years. He had joined six months before Samuel died, a quiet man in his late fifties with a face that looked as if it had been drawn by someone who did not like to waste ink. He was a retired teacher of mathematics, and he read slowly, and he spoke rarely, and when he did speak it was usually to point out a connection nobody else had seen—a theme echoed across two novels, a symbol that rhymed. The club had learned to wait for his silences the way you wait for a delayed train. He had been present at the reading. He had sat in the back row, near the door, and he had applauded with the others, and then, when the tea was poured and the talk began, he had slipped out. Lily had seen the door close behind him and had thought nothing of it. Now she thought: he left before the silent chapter. And she did not know why that detail refused to let her go. Arthur told her the following Saturday. She had taken to bringing him books—not her own, his. He had been too frail for the reading; his daughter had driven him, but the walk from the car to the children's section had taken the strength out of him, and he had waved her on with a hand that trembled like a leaf. So she went to him on Saturdays now, with a novel under her arm and a jar of the lemon tea he liked, and they read together in his warm kitchen until the light failed. "Daniel took a key," Arthur said. Lily's hand stopped halfway to her cup. "At the memorial?" "At the memorial," Arthur said. "He was the one in the back, the quiet one. I saw his hand go out. I saw it close. I thought about stopping him, but I am old, and the old learn to choose their battles." He looked at her, and his eyes were young and sad. "You took one too. I knew that. I hoped you would not use it. And you used it, and you paid, and you came back with more than you went in with. That is the rarest thing I have ever seen, Lily. I do not expect to see it twice." "What did Daniel use it for?" "He had a daughter," Arthur said. "Rachel. She died four years ago, before he joined us. A blood vessel in her brain, gone in an afternoon. He was at work when it happened. Their last phone call, earlier that morning, had been an argument. Something small—she had been telling him about a job offer in another city, and he had told her not to be foolish, and she had hung up angry, and he had meant to call her back." "He changed the call," Lily said. "He changed the call," Arthur agreed. "He stood at her grave and thought about how he had never said the words, and he went down into that library, and he found the book, and he wrote the call the way it should have been. He wrote himself saying: I love you, honey. I'm proud of you. Go take the job. And Rachel heard it, and laughed, and forgave him, and said she loved him too, and it was the last thing either of them said." Lily was very still. "And the price." "The price," Arthur said, "was his grief." She understood before he explained it. The library took what you valued most, and what Daniel valued most was not the words—he had traded for those. What he valued most was the sorrow, the ache, the proof that she had been real to him. And the library had taken it. Not the memory of her. The memory remained, bright and clean and unbearable in a different way. But the grief was gone, as if it had never been, and Daniel Cross now stood at his daughter's grave with dry eyes and a hollow chest, watching her mother cry and feeling nothing at all. "He thinks it means he never loved her," Lily said. "He thinks it means he is a monster," Arthur said. "He has been coming to the club for three years hoping that reading about other people's losses would teach his heart to bleed again. It has not. And now he has stopped coming. He missed the reading's ending on purpose, and he will miss next week, and the week after, unless someone catches him before he makes it worse." "What do you mean, worse?" Arthur set down his cup, and his hands, folded on the table, looked like the roots of an old tree. "He still has the key, Lily. He told me so. He said he is going to go back down there and make another change—not to get her back, he is not that foolish—but to get the grief back. To trade something else for it. And I told him what I have told every soul who ever came to me with that same hunger: you cannot buy back what you paid. The library does not refund. It only trades new things for new changes, and every trade costs more than the last, and if he keeps trading he will end up with nothing left of himself to spend." "Then why is he going back?" "Because he would rather spend everything he has," Arthur said, "than live one more day as a man who cannot mourn his own daughter. Can you blame him, Lily?" She could not. She sat in the warm kitchen with the lemon tea going cold, and she thought about the week she had bought and the voice she had paid for it with, and she thought about the hollow place in her chest where Owen's laugh used to be, and she understood Daniel Cross better than she wanted to. The grief had made her a writer. It had given her a voice. Daniel's grief had given him nothing but the shape of a hole, and the library had filled the hole with nothing and called it even. "I have no key," she said. "No," Arthur said. "You gave yours back. That was the bravest thing you ever did, and it means you cannot walk down those stairs to fetch him. But you do not need a key to stand at a door, Lily. You do not need a key to be there when someone is deciding whether to turn one." She found Daniel the next evening, in the last place she thought to look. The public library was closing; the lights in the children's section were off, and she was about to leave when she heard it—a small sound from the corridor that ran behind the biography section, a sound like a key turning in an old lock. She walked down the narrow passage, her heart beating against her ribs, and she saw him at the end of it: Daniel Cross, standing in front of the door set into the wall between two stacks, the door with the keyhole shaped like an open book. The key was in his hand. He had not yet put it in the lock. He stood there, still as a photograph, and the light from the reading room fell on his face, and Lily saw that he was not hollow. She saw that he was terrified. "Daniel," she said. He did not turn around. "I know what you're going to say." "Then you know I'm going to say it anyway," Lily said, and she came to stand beside him in front of the old wooden door, and she put her hand on his shoulder, and they stood together in the dim corridor while the key pulsed warm in his fist, and neither of them spoke for a long, long time.