The Borrower Read online

  2

  Trouble, Right Here in River City

  A woman came down the stairs alone one afternoon early in October, in slacks and heels and a brown silk blouse. Obviously a parent, not a bedraggled teacher or nanny or tutor. Beautiful, with red hair in a ponytail that didn’t taper sadly like mine, but ended straight and thick like an actual horse’s tail. She put a book on the counter. Her silver earrings swung in sync. I’d never seen her before.

  “Are you busy?”

  I capped my pen and smiled. “Sure. No.”

  “I’m Ian’s mommy.”

  “I’m sorry?” She was making such insistent eye contact that I couldn’t quite process her words.

  “My son is Ian Drake?”

  “Oh, Ian. Yes, of course. How can I help you?” I was a little astonished to realize that I’d never encountered this woman before. And to realize that I’d never thought about it, even with all the discussion of what books his mother would or would not approve. When Ian was younger, he always came with a babysitter. Now he often came alone on his bike, wearing an empty backpack that he could fill with books.

  “Well, he brought home this novel, Tuck Everlasting?” She shoved it closer to me, as if I might want to look it over. “And I’m sure this is just a wonderful book for slightly older children, and we so appreciate your suggestions. He’s just a little sensitive.” She laughed lightly and leaned forward. “What Ian really needs right now are books with the breath of God in them.”

  “The breath of God.”

  “I know you do such a job of nourishing their minds, but of course we also need reading that will nourish our souls. Each one of us.” She smiled, eyebrows raised. “And Ian’s still so young, he needs your help. I’m sure you can do that for me, Sarah-Ann.”

  I must have stared with my mouth open, until I saw that I’d left Sarah-Ann’s nameplate on the front of the desk. I was strangely flattered that Ian hadn’t told her my name, that our daily conversations were something he wanted to keep private. I wasn’t about to correct her. If she thought Sarah-Ann Drummond was the one in charge of selecting books with the breath of God, so much the better.

  I smiled, making sure she was done. “Actually, since we’re a public library, we don’t censor what any of our patrons access. It’s our job to make everything available. Although parents can certainly choose for their children.” I could have gone on at length, but I found myself holding back. I didn’t want her to spook and tell Ian he couldn’t come to the library anymore, and (as much as I wasn’t normally a fan of unaccompanied children in the library) I didn’t think his reading experience would be enhanced by this particular mother hanging over his shoulder, making sure all the words Judy Blume wrote were sufficiently God-suffused. So I certainly wasn’t going to mention that he could also check out any of the books upstairs in the adult section and access pretty much any Web site in the world from our computers.

  “He really does love the library,” she said. She was missing a rich southern accent, I realized, one of those charming Kentucky belle ones. It would have complemented her perfectly. She pulled a folded piece of notepaper out of her purse, thick cream with the name Janet Marcus Drake in shiny pale blue script at the top. “This is a list of the content matter I’d like him to avoid.” She had abruptly flipped from the southern belle and was now putting on the extremely businesslike air of those perfectionist women who’d only worked in the professional world for two or three years before stopping to have children and were now terrified of not being taken seriously. She handed the list over and waited, as if she expected me to read it aloud. It read:• Witchcraft/Wizardry

  • Magic

  • Satanism/Occult Religions, etc.

  • Adult Content Matter

  • Weaponry

  • The Theory of Evolution

  • Halloween

  • Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, Harry Potter, and similar authors

  “You understand what is meant by adult content matter?”

  I managed, somehow, to open my mouth and assure her that I did.

  “And I neglected to list it, but I also understand that you have candy available for the children.” She didn’t need to put it so formally. She was staring right at the bowl of Jolly Ranchers on the edge of my desk. “I just don’t want him running around here with a sugar high!” And she laughed again, right back to Scarlett O’Hara on the porch.

  Because I couldn’t think of anything nonprofane to say at that moment, I said nothing. It wasn’t so much good manners or restraint as a sort of paralysis of the tongue. I wanted to ask her if she’d ever heard of the First Amendment, if she was aware that Harry Potter was not an author, if she thought we had books about Satanism lying around the children’s section, if she was under the impression that I was Ian’s babysitter, reading tutor, or camp counselor. Instead I took my pen and added another line to her list: “No candy.”

  “I’m so glad for your cooperation, Sarah-Ann,” she said.

  I wanted to get rid of her, and I wanted to placate her, but I couldn’t sit there and make a verbal contract to defy the Constitution. So I said, “What I can do is avoid recommending books with this content.”

  “But surely you understand that he might find it on his own.”

  I nodded, which she was free to interpret however she wished, and said (reassuringly, conclusively), “I have it all written down here.” I patted the list and stood to extend my hand.

  A girl came up behind her with a stack of books. Mrs. Drake looked back at her, winked at me as she shook my hand, and walked away.

  The girl heaved the stack onto the counter. Seven books, all on Marco Polo.

  I spent the next few minutes leaning back in my chair, practicing my yoga breathing and trying to figure out if I’d just compromised my morals. I was still clutching Janet Drake’s folded list. The next thing I registered was Loraine swaying down the stairs, then lurching forward to lean on my desk with both hands. Her short brown hair was a mess, clumps of it sticking to her forehead in a lacquer of gel and sweat.

  “Lucy,” she said, much too loudly. “Were you able to calm that woman down?”

  “Yes.” I slid my feet back into my shoes. “She tried to give me this list.” I started to unfold it, but Loraine waved her hand. She’d seen it already.

  “Just don’t let him check out any more wizard books. Leave a note for Sarah-Ann and Irene, too.”

  I was almost used to Loraine by that point, to her philosophy that if the community was ever going to buy us new chairs, we needed to keep the community happy, civil liberties be damned. She was usually in favor of quickly and permanently removing from the library any book that any patron bothered complaining about. Instead of calling her an alcoholic old bat, instead of picking up the phone to alert the ACLU, I took the path of least resistance. I said, “How am I supposed to do that, exactly?”

  Loraine swayed slightly and gripped the edge of the counter. Her fingernails were painted dark red, as was the skin around each nail. “Oh, just tell him it’s a reference book or something. Tell him it can’t be checked out.”

  “Sure.” I wasn’t at all concerned about Loraine enforcing this, or even remembering it a month later. And if she tried to fire me because I’d checked out a book to a patron of the public library, I’d have so much free legal representation within ten minutes that her gin-soaked head would spin.

  “Are you feeling ill, Lucy? I only ask because your shirt is so wrinkled.”

  “I’m just fine.”

  “Well, yes, I’m sure you are.” She took her hand off the counter and walked carefully off to the children’s bathroom.

  At 6:00 I turned off the computer, re-shelved the books from the cart, and went upstairs. Rocky wheeled himself out from behind the desk as I came up. He wore glasses with black frames and lenses so thick they distorted his eyes, which were already somewhat swallowed by his heavy cheeks. Several patrons had confided in me (as I nodded, somewhat horrified) that they were “surprise
d he could speak so articulately.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  We locked up and went across the street to the sandwich place. Rocky waited outside, because there was a step to get in, and I brought his coffee out. I sat down on the sidewalk bench and he wheeled up beside me. I sipped my coffee through the hole in the lid and burned my tongue. “So Ian Drake’s mother yelled at me today,” I said, which wasn’t true but was exactly how I felt afterward. “And then Loraine yelled at me about Ian’s mother.” I was like an eight-year-old, calling it “yelling” just because I hadn’t liked it. “She’s telling me to censor his reading. Loraine is.”

  He opened his coffee and blew on it. Why was I always the one to burn my tongue? Why did everyone else think to take these precautions?

  “But you know to ignore her. Are you actually letting this bother you?” Rocky’s persistent viewpoint was that I took everything too personally. And he was so used to Loraine, after twelve years in the library, that he couldn’t be shocked by anything she did. He also seemed, lately, to take a perverse pleasure in pointing out my own naïveté by acting as if he himself had expected, and was even bored by, all unusual human behavior: a four-year-old projectile vomiting on our new Britannica set, Loraine storing an old Sprite bottle filled with vodka in the staff refrigerator, the president of the United States claiming Jesus wanted us to be at war. “Do you have your theme for the summer?” he said. He wasn’t going to let me fixate.

  “No.” I would spend a good part of my winter and spring making flyers and cutting out construction paper race cars or comets to hang on the north wall for Summer Reading Club. There were kits you could order, of course, but I believed they were soulless, and Loraine believed they were expensive. “Loraine wants something about a magic journey again.” Two years earlier, the theme had been “There Is No Frigate Like a Book,” which was disastrous because none of the children knew what a frigate was, and several parents thought it was something dirty.

  “‘Devour a Book’? You could have a shark eating a book. A dinosaur.”

  “Not bad.”

  “It’s better than the frigate.”

  I turned sideways on the bench and put my feet up. “How about ‘Witchcraft and the Satanic Occult’?”

  “‘Being and Nothingness’! You could give them little Sartre badges!”

  “ ‘Civilization and Its Discontents!’ ”

  We kept at this for a while, and at least it made me feel better. Which seemed to be our entire relationship. Probably my fault. We went to old movies together at the Film Forum—not dates, just movies no one else wanted to see—and we rolled our eyes at each other all day long, till he decided I was overreacting and told me so.

  He tugged at the end of my sweater sleeve. “You told me to give you hell if you ever wore a cardigan again.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “I’m just following orders.”

  I hated that I’d started to look like a librarian. This wasn’t right. In college, I’d smoked things. My first car had angry bumper stickers. I came from a long line of revolutionaries.

  I stood up and stretched, and then felt irrationally guilty for doing that in front of Rocky, who couldn’t. I got so tired of sitting all day, and I was sure it would give me gangrene or hemorrhoids. I made excuses at work to walk through the aisles. The return cart rarely had three books on it, because I was out of my seat to re-shelve them every five minutes.

  And for what portion of human history had people even had desk jobs? Maybe the last four hundred years, out of four million? It wasn’t natural.

  My father’s favorite joke: What is one Russian? A nihilist. What are two Russians? A game of chess. What are three Russians? A revolution.

  But what do you call a would-be revolutionary stuck at a desk? Antsy, maybe. Trouble. A dormant volcano.

  3

  The Nothing Hand

  On Halloween, I passed out candy from behind my desk to the costumed children whose parents preferred they trick-or-treat in businesses rather than the ostensibly razor-blade-ridden homes of East Hannibal. I had put a poster on the front door that week declaring that children dressed as a character from a book got two times the candy plus a bookmark, but so far we’d had only two Harry Potters, one Dorothy, and a boy who claimed Michael Jordan counted because there were a lot of books about him.

  Ian came down the stairs with his mother’s manicured hand on his shoulder. I quickly grabbed my nameplate and stuffed it in the top drawer. I wondered if I’d ever see Ian alone again. He wasn’t dressed up, just wearing his regular blue coat. I remembered from his mother’s list that they didn’t do Halloween, but he peered a long time through his glasses at the two children leaving in their space suits before he showed his mother where the C. S. Lewis shelf was. A few minutes later, Mrs. Drake went to the chapter book feature shelf, where I’d put out a bunch of forgotten New-bery winners and runners-up. She was frowning and skimming The Golden Goblet when Ian shuffled up to the desk. He pushed his left hand out from where it had been hiding in the sleeve of his coat. His index finger was wrapped in wrinkled tinfoil, with a pointed top and some Sharpie lines indicating a face.

  “Miss Hull!” he whispered. “I’m not dressed up, but my finger is the Tin Woodman!”

  I laughed and mouthed “Oh my goodness” and gave him two Kit Kats and a bookmark.

  He shoved the candy in his pocket and pulled his hand back up his sleeve just as his mother came to the desk with an armload of books. A few Hardy Boys and some biographies, but nothing I thought Ian would like. I stamped them a little vigorously, and smiled back as she wished me a wonderful evening.

  In those moments of small-town pettiness, in those moments where I realized I’d forever be on the responsible adult side of the Halloween candy exchange, in those moments where I looked down and saw myself wearing sensible shoes, I might have cursed my ending up in Hannibal. I could have been living in a loft in Brooklyn, or backpacking across Spain with my father’s money, or finishing a PhD. But I didn’t regret it, at least not totally, because the randomness—the anonymous and insipid randomness—was the appeal. My father would have hooked me up with a hundred good jobs, or at least “good” in the monetary sense. He would have paid for the most self-indulgent, nonfunded MFA in filmmaking at the most expensive university in the country.

  But four years earlier, finishing up my English degree, I had stubbornly refused to tell him if I even had a job lined up at all. That April, I’d walked across campus to the Career Development Office, on the top floor of the student center, and sat in a soft plastic chair until a woman I’d never seen before—a woman with lacquered white hair—welcomed me into her office and asked me a series of increasingly perplexed questions about what I wanted to do with my life. She had a hard time believing that a student graduating magna cum laude could care so very little where she went next. She ended up having her secretary print out a fifty-page list of the addresses and job titles of all the alumni in the database whose careers were considered to be somehow “in the field of English.” These people, presumably, would look out for one of their own and help me find a job. I was a little disappointed, after deliberately turning my back on my father and his connections, to be handed fifty pages of additional connections. But at least they were my connections, not his. The people on the list were teachers, technical writers, tutors, translators, and journalists. Loraine Best, class of ’65, was one of the only ones with a library job, but this wasn’t why I wrote to her. I simply started e-mailing every alum in alphabetical order, until it was time for midterms. I got from Aaronson to Chernack, and then I spent three weeks studying and drinking beer and breaking up with my boyfriend and waiting. Going alphabetically and without discrimination made it seem less like milking the connections and more like leaving it up to chance. We Russians have always been good at roulette.

  I had no library science degree and no experience, but Loraine happened to need a children’s librarian
fast, after the old one was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. She hadn’t even had time yet to advertise the job, and so when my letter arrived she took it as an answer to her prayers and hired me over the phone. I was offered the job while sitting on the top bunk of my dorm room, wearing underwear and a Violent Femmes T-shirt and wooly socks. Kate Phelps had died from the cancer by the time I rolled into town that June.

  And of course Loraine threw it back in my face every few weeks: “I hired you sight unseen because I knew I was getting a Holyoke graduate, and I thought that guaranteed a certain work ethic.”

  When I told my parents I’d be working the children’s desk at a small library in a small town in Missouri, my father said, “This is because of some boyfriend? There are a million good boys in Chicago, and many of them are Russian. At some point you are wanting to be an adult librarian, no? I say this because you need a challenge. There are university libraries where I can pull on the strings.”

  My mother said, “At least you’ll be in driving distance.” When she didn’t add anything else, I realized this was the kindest thing she could think to say.

  Later that same fall, Ian entered the children’s fiction contest. Five minutes before the deadline, he came downstairs alone to hand me his story, in a cover made of purple construction paper and decorated with a bright yellow hand cut from a Cheerios box. It was called “The Nothing Hand.” He pushed his sweaty hair back and bounced up and down as if he expected me to read it right then.

  “This looks great,” I said, and thumbed through the typed pages for his benefit. I looked up at him leaning over my desk, at his hair that was now stuck straight back with sweat, and at the strange marks I’d never noticed before above his left eyebrow. There were four little pink indented dots, all in a straight row, evenly spaced a few millimeters apart. Could that have been from a fork? I’d heard that teachers had to keep files on any suspicious bruises or wounds, and I wondered if I should start doing the same. I was thinking also of Emily Alden, with that huge bruise on her neck last winter that she claimed was from her brother hitting her with a snowball.