Chapter 51 The Dog-Eared Book

He did not remember deciding to cross the street. That was the first thing he would tell them, later, when they asked him how he had come — that his feet had made the decision somewhere in the middle of the intersection, while he stood waiting for a light that had already changed, and that by the time his mind caught up with his body he was standing under the awning across from the building with the lit window, listening to the rain ease off the awning's edge in a thin silver thread. He had walked past this block four thousand times. He had lived in the town all twenty-eight years of his life except for the two years he had tried to leave, and he knew its streets the way a man knows the lines of his own hands, which is to say completely and not at all. There had never been a window lit on the second floor of this building. He was almost sure of it. He was almost sure of everything, right up until the moment he pushed open the door at the top of the stairs and saw the light coming up from below, golden and warm, like something rising through water. "Hello?" he called down. His voice came back to him off stone, softened, made older somehow, as if the staircase itself had been waiting a long time to hear a voice and wanted to hold on to it. He started down. The stairs were narrow and worn in the middle, worn the way church steps are worn, by the passage of many careful feet, and the shelves along the walls began almost at once, rising on either side of him, books stacked to a height he could not see the top of. He did not touch them. Something in the set of their spines made him walk carefully, the way you walk through a room where someone is sleeping. At the bottom, the corridor opened out, and there was a woman standing at the foot of the stairs as though she had been standing there for years, as though the whole architecture of the place had been built around the simple fact of her waiting. She was perhaps fifty, with grey coming into her dark hair and an air of unhurried attention, and behind her the room opened into shelves and golden light and a blue chair, and at a long table a girl of seventeen was writing in a notebook with the fierce privacy of someone who has finally found a wall to write against. "You came in from the rain," the woman said. It was not an accusation. It was more like a welcome that had gotten ahead of itself. "I'm sorry," the young man said. "I saw the light. I've never seen the light. I don't — " He stopped, and looked around him, and the looking seemed to take more out of him than the stairs had. "Is this part of the public library?" "It's part of something," the woman said. "My name is Lily. I keep this place." "Keep it?" "Tend it. Shelve it. Listen to it." She studied him without hurry, the way she studied every reader who came down those stairs, and what she saw was a young man in a wet coat, tall, tired in the specific way of someone who has been carrying something heavy for so long that he has forgotten it is heavy — he thinks that is just what arms are for. "And you? What is your name?" "Ezra," he said. "Ezra Marsh." Something passed through the golden light then. Later, Iris — who had come to stand beside Lily, drawn by the particular silence of a threshold being crossed — would say that it was like a draft, except that there was no wind, and like warmth, except that it moved toward him instead of away from the lamp. The girl at the table looked up from her notebook. Even the shelves seemed to lean, very slightly, inward. "Well, Ezra Marsh," Lily said, and her voice was as calm as ever, but Iris could hear the care in it now, the way you can hear a hand placed gently on a railing. "You'd better sit down." They put him in the blue chair, because that was where everyone went first, though none of them said so. He sat the way people sit in that chair, which is to say he sank, and stared at the golden light, and said nothing for a while. The girl — June, she told him, June Reyes — went back to her writing but did not stop glancing over, because she recognized the look on his face; she had worn it herself, eleven days ago, dripping on the mat. "There's a book in my coat pocket," Ezra said at last. "I've been carrying it for eleven years. I want you to understand that I don't make a habit of telling strangers about it. I've never told anyone about it. My mother doesn't know I have it. I took it out of a box in her garage when I was seventeen and I never put it back." His hand had gone, without his seeming to notice, to the left side of his coat, resting over the pocket the way you rest a hand over a wound that has healed wrong. "But tonight I saw the light in your window, and I thought — I don't know what I thought. I thought maybe this was the kind of place where a person could ask a strange question." "Ask it," Lily said. "My father used to read to me." The words came out of him slowly, each one placed like a foot on ice. "Every night. One chapter. It didn't matter how late he got home — eight o'clock, midnight, once it was two in the morning and he still woke me because he'd promised. He read me the same book for four years. We weren't fast readers, him and me. Or we were slow in the way that matters. We kept stopping to talk about it. He'd put his finger in the page and say, what do you think he'll do now, and I'd say, I don't know, and he'd say, neither do I, and we'd lie there in the dark feeling like the question was a fire we were both warming our hands at." The golden light had gone very steady. Iris noticed that. Steadier than she had ever seen it, as though the whole library were leaning in to listen. "What book?" June asked, from the table. She couldn't help it. Ezra smiled, and the smile cracked something in his face, some seal he had kept intact since he was nine years old. He took his hand off his pocket, and reached inside it, and brought out the book, and set it on his knee. It had once been a paperback, the kind that sold for a dollar ninety-five in shops that no longer existed. Now it was soft at the corners as an old glove, swollen with damp years and dry ones, held together with yellowed tape at the spine, and its cover — what could be seen of it under the wear — showed a lamplit road and a figure walking away from the viewer, and letters that time had rubbed to ghosts. And along its edges, thick as fur, ran the dog-ears. Dozens of them. Corners folded down and never unfolded, marking page after page after page like a coastline charted by someone who loved the shore. "The Leaving Season," Ezra said. "By an author nobody's ever heard of. There's nothing about it anywhere — I've looked. No reprint, no record, no photograph of the writer. It's as if the book fell out of the world." He turned it over in his hands, and the dog-ears whispered against each other like small wings. "My father's copy. His father's before him, I think. Maybe further back than that. My father read it to me every night until I was nine, and then — " He stopped. "And then one night I was tired," he said. "Nine-year-olds are tired. There was something on television. I remember saying, God, Dad, do we have to, and I remember the look on his face — not hurt, exactly. Just the look of a man closing a door gently because he doesn't want to slam it. He said, tomorrow night, then. That's all. Tomorrow night, then." Ezra looked up, and his eyes were wet, and he was twenty-eight years old and nine years old in the same breath. "There wasn't a tomorrow night. There was a Tuesday morning, and a phone call, and an artery in his brain that he'd been born with and nobody had ever found. They told me it was instant. Everyone always says instant, like it's a comfort. He was forty-one. The book was in the bedroom with a corner folded down where we'd stopped." He touched the nearest fold with one finger, barely, the way you touch a rail crossing. "I've carried it every day since I was seventeen, and I have never — not once — read past that page." He looked around at them: at June, whose pen had gone still; at Iris, whose hand had risen unconsciously to the place where she kept the memory of a phone that had rung eleven years ago; at Lily, who had welcomed a hundred readers down these stairs and had never once seen one arrive holding the thing they could not open. "Why not?" June asked softly. "Why never past that page?" "Because my father is in it," Ezra said. "Up to that page, I can hear him. Every sentence, I can hear his voice doing the voices, the low one for the fisherman and the high one for the sister, and if I read the ending it won't be his voice anymore. It will be mine. It will just be me, alone, in my own apartment, finishing a story my father didn't live to finish. And then the book will be done, and the done-ness will close over the top of it, like water." He looked down at the dog-eared cover, and the golden light lay on it warmly, and he said, in a voice that had run out of whatever had been carrying it, "So I carry it instead. That's the strange question, I suppose. Can a person carry a book their whole life without ever finishing it? Because that's what I've been doing. Eleven years. And tonight I saw your light, and I thought — maybe somebody here would know whether there's another way to hold it." For a moment no one spoke. Then Lily stepped forward, and knelt beside the blue chair, and looked at the book in his hands with an attention so complete that Ezra felt it land on his skin like warmth from a fire. "May I?" she said. He gave it to her. And the moment the book left his hands and settled into hers, the golden light did something it had never done in Lily's twenty years of keeping: it bent. Not flickered — bent, the whole roomful of it leaning toward the worn paperback the way every stem in a windowless room leans toward the one bright pane, and beneath the floor, far below, deep enough that none of them could have said how they knew, the library sighed — the long, shaken sigh of a house that has watched the road for a hundred years, and has just seen someone coming home.