The Borrower
For Lydia and Heidi
May all doors—and all books—be open to you both
Although I’ve had to demolish my childhood fantasy that Penguin Books is somehow run by Mr. Popper’s penguins, I’ve happily replaced it with the knowledge that it is populated by wonderful people who were willing to arrange an editing and production schedule around the birth of my second child. Boundless thanks to Kathryn Court, Alexis Washam, Tara Singh, Kate Griggs, and Carolyn Coleburn at Viking, and also to Yuki Hirose for her time and help. Nicole Aragi appeared from the sky one day and turned my pumpkin into a chariot, and I still can’t believe my luck or sufficiently express my thanks. David Huddle was an early and supportive reader, and Heidi Pitlor’s championing of my short fiction gave me the momentum to keep working and publishing when I might otherwise have lost steam.
Very few writers thank their mothers for keen editorial insight; I’m happy to be the exception. And finally, for most of this book’s life, its sole audience was my husband, Jonathan Freeman. Only his students, past and present, will understand how fortunate I am to have such a kind and perceptive man as my first reader.
I
might be the villain of this story. Even now, it’s hard to tell.
Back at the library, amid the books and books on ancient Egypt, the picture the children loved most showed the god of death weighing a dead man’s heart against a feather. There is this consolation, then, at least: one day, I will know my guilt.
I’ve left behind everyone I used to know. I’ve found another library, one with oak walls, iron railings. A college library, where the borrowers already know what they’re looking for. I scan their books and they barely acknowledge me through their caffeinated haze. It’s nothing like my old stained-carpet, brick-walled library, but the books are the same—same spines, same codes on yellowed labels. I know what’s in them all. They whisper their judgment down.
The runaways, the kidnappers, look down from their shelves and claim me for their own. They tell me to light out for the Territory, reckon I’m headed for Hell just like them. They say I’m the most terrific liar they ever saw in their lives. And that one, old lecher-lepidopterist, gabbling grabber, stirring his vodka-pineapple from the high narrow shelf of
N-A-B
, let me twist his words. (You can always count on a librarian for a derivative prose style): Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what I envied, what I thought I could fix. Look at this prison of books.
Before this all began, I told Rocky that one day I’d arrange my books by main character, down through the alphabet. I realize now where I’d be: Hull, snug between Huck and Humbert. But really I should file it under Drake, for Ian, for the boy I stole, because regardless of who the villain is, I’m not the hero of this story. I’m not even the subject of this prayer.
E
very Friday at 4:30, they gathered cross-legged on the brown shag rug, picked at its crust of mud and glitter and Elmer’s glue, and leaned against the picture book shelves.
I had five regulars, and a couple of them would have come seven days a week if they could. Ian Drake came with chicken pox, and with a broken leg. He came even when he knew it had been canceled that week, and sat there reading aloud to himself. And then each week there were two or three extras whose parents happened to need a babysitter. They’d squirm through chapters 8 and 9 of a book they couldn’t follow, pulling strings from their socks and then flossing their teeth with them.
That fall, five years ago, we were halfway through
Matilda
. Ian came galloping up to me before reading time, our fourth week into the book.
“I told my mom we’re reading
Little House in the Big Woods
again. I don’t think she’d be a fan of
Matilda
too much. She didn’t even like
Fantastic Mr. Fox
.” He forked his fingers through his hair. “Are we
capisce
?”
I nodded. “We don’t want your mom to worry.” We hadn’t gotten to the magic part yet, but Ian had read it before, secretly, crouched on the floor by the Roald Dahl shelf. He knew what was coming.
He skipped off down the biography aisle, then wandered back up through science, his head tilted sideways to read the spines.
Loraine came up beside me—Loraine Best, the head librarian, who thank God hadn’t heard our collusions—and watched the first few children gather on the rug. She came downstairs some Fridays just to smile and nod at the mothers as they dropped them off, as if she had some hand in Chapter Book Hour. As if her reading three minutes of
Green Eggs and Ham
wouldn’t make half the children cry and the others raise their hands to ask if she was a good witch or a bad witch.
Ian disappeared again, then walked up through American History, touching each book in the top right-hand row. “He practically lives here, doesn’t he?” Loraine whispered. “That little homosexual boy.”
“He’s ten years old!” I said. “I doubt he’s
anything
-sexual.”
“Well I’m sorry, Lucy, I have nothing against him, but that child is a gay.” She said it with the same tone of pleasure at her own imagined magnanimity that my father used every time he referred to “Ophelia, my black secretary.”
Over in fiction now, Ian stood on tiptoes to pull a large green book from a high shelf. A mystery: the blue sticker-man with his magnifying glass peered from the spine. Ian sat on the floor and started in on the first page as if it indeed contained all the mysteries of the world, as if everything in the universe could be solved by page 132. His glasses caught the fluorescent light, two yellow disks over the pages. He didn’t move until the other children began gathering and Loraine bent down beside him and said, “Everyone’s waiting for you.” We weren’t—Tony didn’t even have his coat off yet—but Ian scooted on his rear all the way across the floor to join us, without ever looking up from the book.
We had five listeners that day, all regulars.
“All right,” I said, hoping Loraine would make her exit now, “where did we leave off?”
“Miss Trunchbull yelled because they didn’t know their math,” said Melissa.
“And she yelled at Miss Honey.”
“And they were learning their threes.”
Ian sighed loudly and held up his hand.
“Yes?”
“That was all two weeks ago.
BUT
, when last we left our heroine, she was learning of Miss Trunchbull’s history as a hammer thrower, and also we were learning of the many torture devices she kept in her office.”
“Thank you, Ian.” He grinned at me. Loraine rolled her eyes—whether at me or Ian, I wasn’t sure—and tottered back to the stairs. I almost always had to cut Ian off, but he didn’t mind. Short of burning down the library there was nothing I could do that would push him away. I was keeping
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
behind the desk to sneak to him whenever he came without his babysitter. Almost every afternoon for the past week he had run downstairs and stuck his head over my desk, panting.
Back then, before that long winter, Ian reminded me most of a helium balloon. Not just his voice, but the way he’d look straight up when he talked and bounce around on his toes as if he were struggling not to take off.
(Did he have a predecessor? asks Humbert.
No. No, he didn’t. I’d never met anyone like him in my life.)
Whenever he couldn’t find a book he liked, he’d come lean on the desk. “What should I
read
?”
“How to Stop Whining
,” I’d say, or “
An Introduction to the Computer Catalogue,
” but he knew I was kidding. He knew it was my favorite question in the world. Then I’d pick something for him—
D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths
one time,
The Wheel on the School
another. He usually liked what I picked, and the
D’Aulaires’
launched him on a mythology spree that lasted a good two months.
Because Loraine warned me early on about Ian’s mother, I made sure he read books with innocuous titles and pleasant covers. Nothing scary-looking, no
Egypt Game.
When he was eight, he came with a babysitter and borrowed
Theater Shoes
. He returned it the next day and told me he was only allowed to read “boy books.”
Fortunately, his mother didn’t seem to have a great knowledge of children’s literature. So
My Side of the Mountain
crept under the radar, and
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
. Both books about running away, I realized later, though I swear at the time it never crossed my mind.
We finished two chapters and then I stalled until 5:30, when half the mothers would bounce down the stairs in their tennis skirts and the other half would emerge with their toddlers from the picture book pit. “Who is the hero of this book?” I asked. This was easy. It was always the main character. In children’s books, there is rarely an antihero, an unreliable narrator.
Aaron sounded like he’d been practicing his answer for days: “Matilda is really the hero, but Miss Honey is kind of a hero, too, because she’s very nice.”
“Who’s the villain?”
“Mrs. Crunchable!” shouted Tessa. “Even though she’s the princibal! And princibals are usually nice!”
“Yes,” I said, “I think you’re right.” Even when the bad guy isn’t a man in a black mask, they have a fairly good sense of villainy. A few bright ones understand how broad the category can be.
“Because a villain could be anyone, like a bunny in your garden,” Tessa said.
“Could it even be someone’s parents?” I asked. I wanted them to think about Matilda’s wretched, TV-addicted mother and father, the book’s other antagonists.
“Yeah,” said Tony, “like if your mom has a gun.”
These were wise, modern children, and they knew: a mother could be a witch, a child could be a criminal. A librarian could be a thief.
Let’s call the scene of the crime Hannibal, Missouri. (Of course there’s a real Hannibal out there minding its own business, living on Twain tourism and river water. I only ask to borrow its name.)
This
Hannibal had no river, but it had a highway straight through town, and if you drove past and saw only the McDonald’s, the Citgo, the grime and corn and car fumes, you’d never know the hedged lawns, the schools with untattered flags, the big houses to the west and the smaller ones east with their gravel drives and shiny mailboxes.
And there was the library, right off the main road, its unfortunate’70s brick architecture masked by Fall Fest banners and three waist-high iron squirrels. Noble squirrels, their heads in the air, they stood sentry to the book drop and public entrance. Before pushing open the heavy front doors, every child felt compelled to touch each one, or to brush the snow off the tails, or even to climb up and perch on the tallest squirrel’s head. Every child somehow believed these acts forbidden. Thundering down the stairs to the basement, the children’s cheeks were red. They passed my desk in bright, puffed-up parkas. Some smiled, some practically shouted their greetings, some avoided my eyes completely.
At twenty-six I was the head children’s librarian only because I was willing to work more hours than the other two (much older) women, Sarah-Ann and Irene, who seemed to see the library as some kind of volunteer work, like a soup kitchen.
“We’re so lucky they give us their time,” said Loraine. Which was true, as they were often busy remodeling entire rooms.
I was four years out of college, had started biting my nails again, and was down to two adult friends. I lived alone in an apartment two towns over. A simple maiden lady librarian.
Observe, for the record, my genetic makeup, indicating a slight predisposition for criminal behavior, a hereditary proclivity for running away, and the chromosomal guarantor for lifelong self-flagellation.
Things Inherited from my Father:
Taste for mud-thick coffee.
Two bony knots on my forehead, one above each eye, just below the hairline. (No trauma at birth, no drop to the floor, just confused nurses rubbing my brow, my father baring his own in explanation. If we two are not the villains of the story, why these family horns?)
A revolutionary temperament, dating far past my great-grandfather the Bolshevik.
Half a family name, Hulkinov shortened to Hull by a New York judge, the joke lost on my father’s immigrant ears as he stood in his refugee shoes, a hull of his Russian self.
Pale Russian hair, the color of absolutely nothing.
The family crest my father brought all the way from Moscow on a thick gold ring, with its carving of a man—book in right hand, severed head on pike in left. (This most famous Hulkinov was a seventeenth-century scholar-warrior, a man who heard the distant trumpets, left his careful books, fought for justice or freedom or honor. And here I am, the end of the line: twenty-first-century librarian-felon.)
