No Book but the World: A Novel (2 page)

And where exactly are you, Fred, on this drenched November morning, eight days after they initiated the search, five days after they found you, four days after they found the boy they say you took into the woods? You’re some four miles from me, closer than we’ve been in almost two years. But where are you precisely, in that long, yellow brick building? At one of the windows, perhaps, its own pane crazed by the sideblown rain, looking out at the midmorning darkness? What might you be seeing beyond the storm? The boy? The boy whose only image I’ve seen is the sixth-grade school photo that has been reproduced in all the papers and on all the television news updates, a very nearly generic image of a boy in a red and blue rugby shirt, yet with something disconcertingly familiar about his look: the unkempt dark hair and full cheeks, the smile just wide enough to reveal the frank thrust of his top front teeth. Not so much rabbity as game-looking, that bite of his. Is that how he looked to you? Game.

As you were always game. Do you remember that, how game you were, back in those days when we played our own game in the woods?

But maybe you’re seeing something else at this moment beyond the streaming pane, its vista erased by a network of rivulets, replaced by images of whatever it is you did with a different child in a different woods. Is that what you see, not the boy himself but the stages of the event as it unfolded? Do you replay those steps in your mind? What are they, Fred? I need to know. When you see me, will you explain?

Or perhaps you are focused instead not on the event as it occurred but as you’d intended it to occur—whatever your intention was I do not know, only that it differed, must differ, from what actually came to pass. That much is certain. That much about you I assuredly still do know. You are no plotter, no predator. Of all people—you, who were allowed to grow into a natural man, who were not put into a press, are you not, as our parents might say, incapable of evildoing?

I can’t help imagining that as you look out your own window at the tossing darkness of this morning, you might be seeing me. Is it ego that binds me to you, makes me see you seeing me? Seeing me beside you, before you, up on the flowered couch, kneeling by your bed, standing over you as you lay on the stone slab in the woods, taking you by the hand, leading you places.

Is it guilt?

Freddy,
come
. How many times did I urge you on, tug your wrist, yank your elbow, even at the risk of upsetting you? Because as everyone knew you did not like to be touched. I touched you anyway, and you let me. Sometimes. You let me more than anyone else. I was the big sister. I could take your hand, pull your thumb from your mouth, pry the stick from your fist.
Freddy, come on. Let’s go.
I could guide you into the woods, out to our special spot. Dress you in silks. Cover your eyes. Prick your finger.

But I never did that: prick your finger. Nor did Kitty. That is one thing we never did.

Or is it our parents you visualize as you look out the window? I see them often, and always in tandem. Even when I picture them physically apart, they remain paired, joined by a kind of invisible thread. You could feel it running between them, this thread, pliable and strong, holding them together, eternally allied through every superficial disagreement.

Mostly I picture them together. In the front seat of the car, the backs of their heads silhouetted against the windshield, hers a good three inches higher than his. On the flowered couch, her feet in his lap, their voices rumbling above us as we maneuvered our toy cars around our father’s shoes. I see them diverting themselves from whatever conversation they were having to regard us from a bemused distance, from high in the ether, twirling in the thin atmosphere of their thoughts, their philosophy. Floating above our heads like paper dolls cut from a single sheet of construction paper, their hands joined at the fold. Their free hands extended as if to summon us forward, although couldn’t the gesture as easily be interpreted as a staving off, their hands flexed at the wrist, bidding us go be independent?

We succeeded in that, Fred, you and me. We were independent, inhabiting our home like two small grown-ups, or no, like gnomes, solid little earthbound creatures, hiding and tunneling and exploring on our own. We mined every corner of our house for mystery, for treasure. Is that what you see in the opaque surface of your watery windowpane? Our house, with its soft pine floors so quick to take an impression (the many impressions, for example, of your own pounding fists and heels during your frequent tantrums, or the dents you made tapping out erratic rhythms with building blocks or the blunt ends of butter knives); its potted plants, so fiercely healthy, their vines running rampant along shelves and sills and spilling over to snake across the floor; its listing door and window frames, every one just a little bit warped, a little bit crooked, so that nothing ever hung plumb?

When we tired of our house, we’d move outdoors—by then we often had Kitty with us, too—and go scavenging in the tangled meadow and the scratchy woods. We did not limit ourselves to the woods as we found them, but invented within them a realm of our own, a place no one else knew about, no one else could enter or even perceive. It lay, this place, no more than a quarter mile behind our house, but it was unreachable by others. We, too, were beyond reach there. We did as we’d been bid: we acted independently in that realm.

Perhaps this is what you see, staring out your barred window—for I think it must have bars; I see it with bars; I have invented that detail—staring through silvered slashes of rain that light up your memories with the faltering flicker of an old film projector. Perhaps you see what I am seeing now, as I write: Batter Hollow, with its cluster of five mismatched cottages, and the jagged pines spreading densely back for acres, and what we fashioned out there, Fred—you and Kitty and me.

I
PLANNED MY ROUTE
on Monday afternoon, on an old gas station map spread across the kitchen table, using a highlighter pen to mark my destinations in order: first the building where Fred is being held, eleven miles off the highway and two miles southwest of the black dot that is the town of Perdu; then Mrs. Tremblay’s, two and a half miles east of the same. I used the first joint of my index finger to calculate distances as per the legend, and these numbers I penciled above the roads. I tallied the mileage this way.

“Why don’t you just map it online?” asked Dennis, behind me. He plunked the kettle back on the stove and leaned over my shoulder.

“That’s all right.”

“Want me to? I’ll print it out.”

“No.” I closed my eyes and breathed. “Thanks.”

I could feel him trying to think what else he might offer, felt the burden of his hopeful hesitancy. Or not his hesitancy, but my own inability to respond. Once it had been a novelty: the idea that I could take care of him by letting him feel he was taking care of me. Once I would have said
yes, please
. Once I thought I could become the sort of person who would find comfort in the usual gestures. Now what I feel most often toward Dennis is sympathy and regret that he has ended up with an irregular wife.

I turned my upper body halfway from my map. “I just like doing it this way, Den.” And stayed with my face inclined toward him until he bent and put his mouth to my cheek and rested it there, not kissing, just holding still with his parted lips against me, making a warm chamber against my skin. His blond stubble fine as grains of sand. He smelled of wool sweater and soap and tea. He is lovely with me, patient and undeterred.

Yesterday, rolling by the long yellow building, coasting with my foot off the gas, I tried to feel that Fred was there behind the walls and could not. And because I could not, it gave me the absurd notion that perhaps he
was
not—that perhaps they have the wrong person, someone using Fred’s name, someone who might have stolen his identity, while the real Fred is far away and safe somewhere, still in the woods, tramping unhurriedly over sodden leaves, alone and safe from those who cannot understand him.

Also yesterday, for the first time the TV news aired a mug shot of the man they say is Fred, and although there was undeniably a resemblance, the man in the picture looked different from my brother as I last saw him. The hair on his head was cut severely close to the skull, and his face looked whittled, gaunt. More jarring was the darkness of his eyes, shaded beneath a promontory of brow. They had a smudged, exhausted look, a crepuscular quality that went beyond hue or shadow.

Until I saw that photo yesterday, flashed so briefly across the television screen, I had struggled to picture Fred as a grown man. When I last saw him, close to two years ago, he was twenty-eight, but try as I might to recall what he looked like then, I kept seeing him instead as he was when I first began to read to him, when he was little, Freddy, and most mine.

I’d see the two of us up on the sagging gray couch, whose flowers, once blue and red, had faded to variations on gray. I’d see us at ages five and three, me an imperious, middle-aged sort of child, Freddy in diapers still. He was large for his age and slow at everything the world held in regard: toileting, ambulating, speaking, minding. He minded me, though. Or sometimes did. Or nearly did. He minded when I told him to do something he was already about to do. I made a sport of it. It was a game of unwitting cahoots and it was all in the timing: “Take another bite of carrots, Freddy.” “Chew, Freddy.” “Throw your spoon on the floor, Freddy.” “Throw your dish down, too.” “Scream.” “Turn red.”

The fury my game provoked in him seemed evidence he wasn’t as slow as people believed. It wasn’t exactly fury in any case; it was something else, more nuanced than frustration or anger, for all I had to do was fall silent and he’d leave off having his fit and turn to me with a curious, ripe kind of look—a look whose meaning was not, as I thought the first few times, simply to egg me on. It was keener, more particular. As if he were marking a thing beyond ordinary apprehension, the way a dog can hear a whistle pitched beyond the range of human hearing. And I’d feel between us then—not love, exactly, but a kind of tight excitement, the heady trill of possession. As if he were saying we belonged to each other, were parts of the same one thing.

When we sat up on the high flowered couch, the game worked differently, for there he was liable to mind me whether I’d anticipated his intentions or not. “Get us some books, Freddy boy,” I’d say, and likely as not he’d comply, turning onto his stomach to slide backward off the cushions and toddle across the room, his round pink heels going
chud chud chud
across the floor, his plastic diaper crinkling. He’d squat before the row of milk crates lined up under the windows, from which he’d extract, with grave determination, an armload of books, always more than he could manage, and transport them back to the couch. One or two volumes would drop along the way and he’d go back for them only to lose others, so that by the time he’d conveyed them all back up beside me he’d be panting. “Breathe with your mouth shut,” I’d tell him, and automatically he’d bring his lips together and try.

I had to be mean to him when I could.

Our collection consisted largely of Ladybird Books, a few dozen of them, their dry, cracked bindings the colors of oil pastels. Our mother had bought them all at one go at the town library’s book fair the year she was pregnant with me. She’d taken care to write the place and date on the flyleaf of every one: Freyburg, New York, June 1974. Published in England, they brimmed with exotic words—lorry and sweetie instead of truck and candy—and for many years, until I was finally allowed to go to public school, I thought aeroplane and colour were the preferred spellings. The stories reeked thrillingly of disobedience and peril. An old woman exhorted an indifferent pig to jump over a stile. A mother goat slit a wolf down the middle and sewed his belly full of stones. Wayward kittens and bunnies were forever smashing tea sets, spilling bags of flour, running away and falling into rivers and streams.

Certain of the illustrations had the power to produce in me a silvery jelly feeling that was disturbing without being disagreeable. A boy peeping over his blankets in horror as rats dashed freely across his bed; a man in jerkin and tights hacking at thorns, his thighs a mess of bloody gashes; a hooded crone hauling herself up a stone tower on a shining rope of hair; a maiden splayed unconscious, cheeks flushed, her ice-blue gown tightly fitted through the bodice. It all lay in store for us, Freddy and me—I remember believing this quite matter-of-factly. Even as I made the distinction between pretend and real (I would not really grow up to become a princess, a witch, a wolf), still I believed the essence of these stories must in some way seep into or prophesy what our lives would become.

Sometimes I wonder how things might have been different if a grown-up had read us those books. Might it have had a mediating effect? What if my own overly credulous renditions bore a kind of unnatural potency? I think of our mother’s voice, which possessed, even when speaking about ordinary things, a latent musicality, so that her words might rise and fall, glide and rest, carving out pleasant corners in which my attention liked to nestle. This vocal quality suggested a kind of mastery over the events she narrated, a completeness of perception that let me relax into my own spottier grasp of the world. Had the stories in our picture books come filtered through the voice of our mother, would they have reached our ears tamed, contained, stripped in some crucial way of implication? Would we have liked them as much?

But reading to us was not one of the things in which our parents believed.
Reading
, our father used to pronounce with a kind of hammy horror,
is the scourge of infancy.
Also:
Books! What cheerless furniture!
This he liked to roar in mock dismay upon coming into the room and finding us sprawled on the couch among dozens of said objects. Sometimes, in an especially playful mood, he’d contort his face in a mask of revulsion, as if we were surrounded by actual vermin.

We knew these utterances were not original. I understood them to be the words of “Jay-Jay,” whom I imagined to be an old and much esteemed friend of my father’s. I was eight or nine before I learned that Jay-Jay was actually the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no pal of my father’s but his ideological hero, who’d died some two hundred years earlier. His book on education,
Émile
, had been the primary inspiration of my father’s own philosophy and, indeed, career. A reproduction of the Maurice Quentin de La Tour portrait of Rousseau hung behind the desk in my father’s office, and during my childhood I made a long and thorough study of it, determining always to my satisfaction that Jay-Jay had kindly eyes, a trustworthy forehead, a sympathetic, good-humored mouth.

Much later, in college, when my disillusionment with my father was at its most excruciating, I set out to learn more about the philosopher and his life. It was only then that I discovered that the great philosopher, my father’s idol and model, had deposited his own five children in a foundling hospital.

At any rate, our father didn’t forbid us to read. For all his blustery protestations, he didn’t even discourage it. Simply, books were one of the many things he thought we should be left to discover (or not) on our own.

So it was Freddy and me and no one else up on the couch for long stretches of time, Freddy breathing with adenoidal impediment, the air ruffling thickly around his thumb, which he kept parked in the corner of his mouth, taking the occasional series of rapid sucks before letting it idle again; me enunciating schoolmarmishly (even though at five I had never set foot in a regular school, I somehow had a sense of the role and played it to the hilt). I had been prescribed glasses for amblyopia, and although I reviled them I never thought to rebel, but donned them each morning with a sense of duty that bordered on priggishness. What a homely sight we must have made, the stuffy-nosed and the lazy-eyed, our knees and elbows bumping and overlapping (he did not mind being touched so much when he was very little) as we nested among the cool, gray, disintegrating flowers.

While I read, Freddy sucked his thumb hard and ran the fingers of his other hand over the illustrations, always tracing the pictures with gentleness at first, but often getting overexcited and rubbing faster and harder, scratching at the pictures with his sharp little nails so that I’d have to push his hand away. “Cut it out, Freddy. No.
Stop
.” When that didn’t work I’d shut the book with a smack.

Then he’d let out a rattling scream of protest—I could see the disgusting dangling thing at the back of his throat—and begin to plead and whine for what had been taken away.

Primly I’d tell him: “Calm down. I can’t open the book unless you promise to be gentle.”

But this I well knew he could not deliver. He was incapable of reeling himself in once he’d achieved such a state, and things would inevitably devolve into a kicking fight, both of us with our bare legs and heels delivering a frenzy of blows, and the book would sink between two cushions and the poor faded flowers of our battlefield would fray a little more. If our mother was in the vicinity, she’d swoop down and extract Freddy—always Freddy, not me, even as he grew to be the larger, heavier one—from the tumult, but if our father was there he would only stand by.

“Make him cut it out!” I’d demand.

But he’d lean, untroubled, against the door frame of his study, where he would have been working before the commotion roused him. “Better to work it out yourselves.” And he’d linger there, considering us from across the room with maddeningly genuine curiosity.

Most of the time, though, we were amicable up there on the flowered couch. Burrowed among those sagging pillows and cushions, we’d lose ourselves for hours, willingly, willfully, not so much poring over as pouring ourselves into the words and pictures, illustrated guides of all that life had to offer: treachery, adventure, peril and bliss. Bright little maps, the books seemed to me, second or third cousins of the road maps we’d pick up at corner gas stations on our impromptu wanderings.

That was something our parents did believe in: vagrant rambles, sprung loose from plan or aim. A few times a year we’d set off on excursions in the car—a rattling orange Dasher with a hole in the floor a little bigger than a Susan B. Anthony dollar (I knew because I’d once stuck one through, to see if it would fit)—with little more than our sleeping bags and tent and a vague itinerary. We’d head for Cape Cod and make it all the way up to Acadia National Park, or set out for Delaware and wind up visiting the wild ponies on Assateague. Wherever we went, when we stopped for gas our mother would disappear inside the shop to pay for the fuel, and she’d frequently come out bearing the same three items: a sack of sunflower seeds, a copy of the local paper, and a road map of the sort that used to be free at filling stations. Sometimes she’d emerge carrying drinks, too, but more often we’d make do with paper cups of warm water dispensed from the big red Thermos jug, with its little hinged spout, that rode on the floor between her feet. She’d pass out cups of water and handfuls of sunflower seeds, and Fred and I would make a game of trying to spit out the hulls, once we’d sucked off all the salt and cracked them open between our teeth, through the hole in the bottom of the car.

The age difference between our parents was nineteen or twenty years, depending on what time of year you made your calculation. Our father was fifty-nine when I was born. I only ever knew him with white hair, but it was a youthful head of white, thick and curly and roughly cherubic. In public school, in tenth-grade English, when I encountered the description of Odysseus’s “hyacinthine locks,” it was my father’s hair I envisioned. He was a few inches shorter and more than a few inches rounder than our mother, built, as one of his admirers had once written in a book about progressive education, like a Dutch oven. Our mother was a painter and dancer and musician. We never called them anything but Neel and June.