The Borrower (35 page)

Come closer for the final page now, and push aside the girl who keeps getting in your way. Demand to know first if it’s a happy ending or a sad one, if the good are rewarded and the evil punished. Peek at the last words. See if you can tell. Ask it again: Does it all turn out in the end?

But I don’t know. I don’t know. It depends what you mean by end. The end of my story, or the end of his? Here is all I know: I still search for him, in the recesses of my computer, and I still come up with the Cape Cod plumber. But if he gets out, when he gets out, I’ll be able to find what becomes of him. There are a million ways it could all come out fine. There are a million ways it could end very badly. He must be fifteen by now, and maybe I won’t have to wait much longer to see. I remind myself again and again that in this day and age, we don’t really lose each other forever. There is no more Siberia.

Squirm on the carpet and look at the clock. Ask if this story was true.

Here are the final pictures. Here are the helpful captions. Here are some hopeful last words for the peekers-ahead, the ones like Ian and me who couldn’t help but read the last sentences first. (Perhaps I’ve misled them, the way I myself was misled—the way that deep down, I always assumed our courage was some kind of guarantee, that a happy ending was waiting for us, if only we could get there. Or perhaps I haven’t. Because who can say that it won’t still come true?)

So here, patient listeners: your soothing epilogue. Imagine him happy. Imagine him spinning in circles. If I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Imagine him hiding those lists for eight long years. Imagine his heaven, where he can float through characters and books at will. (Let’s dream him up a king, a giant, a boy who can fly.) Imagine him already there, under his covers with the flashlight. For a blissful eternity, such a world should suffice. For now, it should save him.

Let’s say that it does.