The Book That Matters Most (16 page)

Of course, she thought, reaching for her phone. Librarians know how to find anything.

She stared out the window as she listened to Cate's phone ringing. It had been a cold spring, but this afternoon the sun had unexpectedly come out and warmed the city. Ava could see the purple of crocuses around the base of the trees on the street, the yellow tips of daffodils in her neighbor's yard.

A woman cut across Ava's line of vision. A woman in a leopard coat that was too warm for this spring afternoon. She was walking a very large dog.

Ava squinted against the bright sunlight.

That wasn't any woman. It was Delia Lindstrom.

“Hello?” a voice in Ava's ear said. “Ava?”

Ava had forgotten she'd dialed Cate's number, forgotten the phone pressed hard to her ear.

“I can't believe this,” Ava said, her gaze following Delia Lindstrom's long-legged stride down her street.
Her
street.

“Delia Lindstrom is walking a dog right in front of my house,” Ava said, her voice rising. “I think it's the kind that rescues people stranded on mountains.”

“St. Bernard?” Cate asked, as if it mattered.

“I don't know. Maybe.”

The dog paused to pee on the crocuses, and Ava shouted, “Stop that!”

“Ava?”

She had to keep herself from tapping on the window. Did Delia know this was her house? The house where she and Jim had raised their children? Did she know their Christmas tree had stood right here, in front of this very window, every year? Jim used to wrap the railing on the front stoop with boughs of evergreen, the kind that had the little blue berries on them. Did Delia know that?

The dog's big square head turned toward Ava, as if it knew she was standing there watching.

“It might be the other kind,” she said. “The ones raised by monks?”

“Ava,” Cate said, “walk away from the window. Go in the kitchen. Or upstairs.”

But Ava seemed stuck in place, her eyes glued to the woman and the dog trespassing on the sidewalk in front of her house.

“He hates dogs,” Ava said softly.

“Maybe she came with a dog,” Cate said. “Gray doesn't like cats, but when we met I had two of them. Package deal.”

Package deal
, Ava thought. Jim was a package deal too: he came with a wife, two kids, a twenty-five-year history. Delia smoothed a strand of hair out of her face, stood with the bright red leash in her hand, and looked around. The dog sniffed the crocuses, the base of the tree.

“Is she gone?” Cate asked.

Ava had forgotten about the phone again, and Cate's voice startled her.

“She's standing there like the Queen of England,” Ava said.

Did Delia Lindstrom know that Jim had planted those crocuses? That every fall, after the first frost, he planted bulbs? Tulips mostly, because those were Ava's favorite.

“Hang up,” Cate said. “Get away from the window.”

The dog moved suddenly, jerking Delia forward. Ava watched as Delia regained her balance, laughing and talking to the dog as she did. She didn't look back as she walked down the street.

Ava waited until she was out of sight before she said anything more.

“Is this going to happen every day?” she said to Cate. “I can't even look out my own window or step outside for fear I'm going to walk right into her and Cujo?”

“She's gone?”

“Jim hates dogs,” Ava said again.

“Maybe you should talk to him,” Cate said in her problem-solving voice. “Tell him that it's too upsetting for you to worry about running into her. Tell him they need to respect your space.”

“You can't tell someone not to walk down a street,” Ava said, sounding cross. Then she remembered why she had called Cate
in the first place. But she couldn't ask her how to find Rosalind Arden. Then her friend would know she'd made up that she was coming.

A
va put
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, a beach blanket, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in her big straw bag and drove to Elephant Rock Beach. Jim didn't like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And he didn't much like the beach either. Or at least, he didn't enjoy sitting on the beach and watching the waves. If Jim went somewhere, he needed to do something, to keep moving.

The ocean appeared before her, reflecting the brilliant blue of the April sky. Ava parked in the nearly empty lot, and made her way onto the wide stretch of smooth sand. A young couple tossed a Frisbee to their puppy. Two women walked along the water's edge, heads bent close as they talked together. Ava inhaled the salty air, spread her blanket, ate her sandwich, and fell into the magical world of Colonel Aureliano Buendía as he recollected the years in Macondo, when a band of gypsies brought technological marvels to the dreamy, isolated village.

When she looked up from the book, the couple with the puppy was gone and the two women were in the distance, walking back toward her. The sun had dropped lower in the sky, and Ava shivered in the cool air. For the first time since Jim left, she'd passed a few hours without thinking about him. In fact, she'd enjoyed the time alone, immersed in the novel. With a sharp ache, she thought of her mother and the bookstore she'd owned. Ava could almost smell the shop, a crowded, seemingly disorganized store with books stacked on tables in her mother's and aunt's own
peculiar system. Over the years since Lily died, Ava worked hard not to think of her mother, or Lily, or her childhood. But sitting here on the beach alone with the sun starting to set and a book in her lap, Ava couldn't stop.

Lily's small sticky hand in hers.

Their mother, perched in the rocking chair between their twin beds, reading to them at night, her deep raspy voice lulling Ava to sleep.

Afternoons after school in the bookstore, flopped in a beanbag chair, that smell—patchouli and dampness and books—all around her.

Family dinners. Her mother's thick rich soups and homemade bread.

But those memories always,
always
, got shoved aside by the other ones. The sirens. The police. Lily's lifeless body. Her mother's screams.

And later, her mother's retreat from them. At first, she just stayed in bed. Family dinners became makeshift efforts by her father. Hot dogs and canned beans. Hamburger Helper. Scrambled eggs. Later, she stayed at the store. She went in early and sometimes didn't come home at night, sleeping on a cot in the back office. Ava stopped going there after school. The once comforting smells, the way the beanbag chair would mold itself into the contours of her body, her mother's happy chatter, all of it was gone.

And then, the next summer, her mother left. No note. No goodbye. One morning she got into her car and drove away. By then, Aunt Beatrice had left too, leaving Ava's mother to run the store alone, unable to cope with Lily's loss and how it had affected all of them.

Then came the call telling them she was dead. Her car had been found on the Jamestown Bridge, the engine still running, the driver's door open. Workmen standing below saw something drop into the water.

That was the summer Ava read
From Clare to Here
. It was about a family in England who lost their young daughter, Clare. The parents' relationship is strained, and the remaining daughter tries desperately to comfort her mother. On a weekend trip to Stonehenge, they get lost and end up at another stone circle. The mother and daughter wait while the father goes to park the car. It begins to rain, and the wind picks up. Frustrated, the mother decides to enter without her husband. The girl, Jane, follows her mother around the massive stones, the wind howling around them. They seek shelter in what appears to be a clearing beneath some of the stones, but once there they find stairs leading down. Jane urges her mother not to go, but she doesn't listen. Frightened, Jane follows. They walk along a descending sloping corridor, giant stones all around them, the light growing dimmer, Jane pleading for her mother to stop, until they reach the bottom. There, they find the souls of the dead, blurry images of people, bursts of light. And from this, Clare emerges, holding her arms out to them. The mother, overjoyed and relieved, takes her dead daughter into her arms.

Ava closed her eyes as she remembered the story.

So many details she thought she'd forgotten came back to her. The way those souls looked. The mother's joy. And then the realization that they can't take Clare back with them. If they want to be with her, they have to stay there.

From far above, they hear the father calling to them.

Jane and her mother's eyes meet over Clare, who has nestled onto her mother's lap.

“Go,” the mother tells Jane.

Jane shakes her head. Her father's voice calls her name, desperate.

“Go.”

“Not without you,” Jane says, crying, frightened.

“Jane,” her mother said evenly, “you deserve to live a beautiful life. I deserve to give mine up.”

Her mother is holding on so tight to Clare that Jane understands her mother will never leave. And she runs. She runs up the long stone corridors, the sounds of all those souls echoing behind her. She runs and runs until she bursts through the clearing. The rain has stopped and the sun is bright and sharp. Her father sees her. He turns his tear-stained face toward her, and now he opens his arms, and Jane runs into them, rests her head on his chest, and listens to the steady, comforting beat of his heart.

Somehow, Ava had stood as she remembered all of this.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
had dropped to the sand, and her own heart was beating hard against her ribs. A different young couple with a different puppy ran across the sand in front of her. Slowly, Ava collected her things and walked back to her car.

Maggie

Julien held up what looked to Maggie like a handful of blue and green strings.

“For you,
ma mure
,” he said.

He pressed it against her naked bony hips, pulling the strings across her concave stomach, smiling as he did.

“So pretty,” he murmured.

Maggie was too stoned to respond. You would think a person who saw her friend's dead body wheeled out in a body bag would stop taking drugs immediately. You would think that person would be scared into sobriety. But the opposite had happened.
Last night she had finally convinced Julien to shoot her up instead of having her smoke it. He had pushed the needle into the inside of her ankle. When she'd opened her eyes after the initial surge of the drug through her body, he kissed her on the mouth.

Maggie struggled to remember what he was talking about. They were going somewhere. But where? Soon enough, her head would start to clear, but for now, she was happily wasted. She didn't have to think. No. She didn't want to think. Because if she started to think, she'd see that body bag with Gavin inside it. She'd see the small bruises from shooting up. She'd see the unanswered emails from her brother, the missed calls from her mother.

For now, she stayed on the pink sofa and let his words float around her, the pile of strings against her pasty skin, a bright hot sun streaming in the tall windows.

W
here he was taking her was the south of France. A small town on a bay. A stone house with no refrigeration so that everything that had to be kept cold was kept in the well. A long walk past almond trees and olive trees led to a steep cliff, and at the bottom of that cliff was a rocky beach that looked across the water to Marseille.

Maggie watched Julien as he walked into the crashing waves, ridiculous in his tiny Speedo. A thought flashed through her mind: maybe he would drown. Maybe there was an undertow and he would be swept away. The thought should have frightened her, but instead, she felt relief at the idea. Her next thought: I have to get away from him. Her next thought: But how?

Down the beach three boys around her own age sat on a
blanket, smoking and drinking wine and playing cards. They looked so normal, so ordinary. She wanted to be like that again. Her eyes drifted back to Julien, splashing in the waves. Maggie pulled on the white crocheted top she'd brought and walked over to the boys.

How beautiful they were! In their ordinariness, they seemed more appealing than someone extraordinary. One had curly brown hair, a long face, green eyes. One had short cropped blond hair and pale blue eyes. The other was dark, and hairy, and pudgy.

“Bonjour,”
Maggie said.

The curly-haired one smiled up at her.

“We need a fourth,” he said in heavily accented English. “Do you want to play?”

She glanced toward Julien again.

“Your father's entertaining himself,” the hairy one said, patting the blanket. “Don't worry.”

“He's . . .” she began, but couldn't bring herself to finish. Instead, she sat beside him, and picked up the cards they dealt her. She took the cigarette the blond offered her, and a glass of wine too. The next time she looked up, Julien was gone. Not drowned, as she'd fantasized, but gone from the beach, with their blanket and the small cooler of fruit and cheese and Chablis.

She knew she should get up and follow him. But she didn't. She sat and played cards and smoked cigarettes with these boys, whose names were also ordinary and beautiful. The blond one, Henri, kept smiling at her in a way that made her feel pretty and interesting. Maggie smiled back at him. When they decided to go for a swim, she joined them, lifting the crocheted top over her head, noticing Henri noticing her breasts. As they walked
to the water, she slipped her hand in his. She needed to escape. Maybe Henri, with his clear blue eyes and his long lean body, could help her get away.

“
J
e t'aime bien
,” Henri told her.

They had walked alone together down the beach to where the rocks formed caves and grottos. The sky had darkened to violet and orange, and the tide swirled water around their ankles.

Maggie knew that
Je t'aime bien
literally meant
I love you well
. But in French there was no way to say
I like you. Je t'aime bien
came the closest.