The Book of Speculation (5 page)

“Blood from a stone?”

At her nod, any hope of a bonus to fix the bulkhead dries up.

“There must be something, a grant somewhere we haven’t gotten.”

“I’ll keep trying, but the realities are what they are.” She doesn’t need to say it. Recessions don’t breed interest in whaling history. “I don’t want to, but I may have to let someone go. It isn’t personal; I’m having this talk with everyone, but provided the town doesn’t budge, someone has to go.”

Someone. It’s no accident that she mentioned the years I’ve been here. Alice is the only one close to me as far as seniority and I have three years on her. Alice also does programming. Programming can’t be replaced by an updated electronic catalog. “I understand.”

“I’ll do everything I can, Simon. Nothing is set, but it felt wrong not to let everyone know what’s going on.”

“Absolutely,” I say. When I started at Grainger I thought Janice was priggish, but after years of watching her I know that the day I met her she was already beaten by cuts, grant denials, and begging. If she let two girls in circulation go she might save me or Alice, but the resigned look, even the way she stretches across the desk as if to reassure me, say that she won’t fire two people to save one. Bulkheads, terracing, foundation repair, roof work. None of it will be possible. I need another way.

“I’ll try,” she says when I get up to leave. “Would you send Alice in?”

“Sure. You’ll get the money, Janice. You always do.” It’s hollow. We both know it.

I don’t need to tell Alice a thing. Janice’s office walls aren’t thick, and everything she heard is written on her face.

“I’m sure it’s me,” she says.

I force a smile. “I’m sure it’s nobody.” Janice’s door closes with a heavy click.

Two women sit by the front windows, knitting. The tapping of their needles echoes through the stacks. Reference is still quiet. I am once more alone at my desk. I put in calls to Springhead and Moreland Libraries to see if cuts are hitting them as hard. They are, which is daunting. I call over to Liz Reed at North Isle. “Tell me something good, Liz.”

“How good?”

“Discretionary dollars, or new pay lines.”

“Don’t talk like that, Simon. I’m a married woman.” Though I chuckle, she knows it’s serious. “Job hunting?”

“Not yet. There might still be a spontaneous nationwide interest in regional whaling history.”

She doesn’t laugh. “I can send you a link to a listserv site that might help. Just remember, we’re not librarians; we’re information professionals. You can use me as a reference.”

“Thanks, Liz.”

I hang up and wait for Liz’s email. From the corner of the desk the book stares at me. An interesting object in itself, it appears to be both diary and account book for a traveling show. Peabody’s Portable Magic and Miracles, a whimsically ludicrous name. Why my grandmother’s name is inscribed on a back page is a mystery. The early pages detail the running of the show, listing various towns, money made, and traveling routes. Elaborate handwriting makes the narrative sections a difficult read, but they center on the development of an act involving a mute boy, Amos. The last portion of the book is horribly damaged. The leather on the back is ruined and the ink on the last pages is a wash of brown, blue, and black—reduced to its base elements by chromatography and time. Thumbing through reveals a second owner; where the earlier pages were filled with sketches, the latter are neat, free of drawings and confined to lists of income, dates, and names. Then the water damage.

Janice’s door clicks open and closed as she works her way through the entire staff. Marci, the children’s librarian, has just gone in when I see it. There, in plain black letters, a name
. Bess Visser. Dead. July the 24th, 1816. Drowned.

I know that name. Worse still, I know the date. The flinch is involuntary and almost painful. My mother drowned on July 24th.

“Simon?” Alice looks over my shoulder. Tired. Frank’s daughter is a neatly put together woman. I know her too well to call her beautiful, though an upturned nose, sharp chin, and thoughtful eyes make her so. She’s just Alice, which is everything and nothing, and awkward because I’ve seen her every day since I can remember. Unrealized or unrequited, choosing between the words doesn’t change what Alice and I are, or that she is off-limits. Because of Frank. Because of my parents. I run my hand down my face. She sighs.

“Janice will find the money,” I say.

“She always does,” Alice says. “Trust in the archive.”

“In the archive we trust. Liz at North Isle is sending over leads. Just in case.”

“Just in case. Right.” Her eyes land on the book and she traces her fingers across the cover. “This is really old.”

“Someone sent it to me. I’m not sure why.”

“Ah, a puzzle. You like puzzles.”

I would agree, but the book feels different now that I’ve seen a familiar name. Drowned on July 24th, like my mother. It’s a small piece of awfulness. “It’s a little off. My grandmother’s name is in it. I spoke with the guy who sent it. He’s a bookseller, antiquarian type. Says he got it at auction. I don’t know what to make of him.”

“Did you run a search on him? This
is
a library; research wouldn’t be unheard of.” She leans against the desk. The subtle curve between her waist and hip is juxtaposed against the reference stacks. Alice in contrast to encyclopedias.

“I haven’t had time. I walked in the door and then Janice…”

We’re both quiet. It’s difficult to breathe when the air is pungent with the stench of oncoming layoffs.

“Dinner. Take me to dinner,” Alice says.

“Sorry?”

“I’ll help. Give me the name of the guy who sent you the book and I’ll check into him for you. In return, you buy me dinner. Not at the Pump House, either. I want to go somewhere nice with good wine. Today is terrible and I want to go out.” She pushes back from the desk, bouncing on her toes.

“I promise I won’t take you to the Pump House.” For so many reasons. Because it’s filled with blaring televisions, bloated people bent over stale beers, and because I worked there and ate enough shift meals that just the thought of the Pump House is nauseating.

“Perfect. Pick me up at seven so I can grab a shower first. What was his name?”

“Martin Churchwarry. Churchwarry and Son Booksellers. Iowa.”

*   *   *

Alice’s apartment is in Woodland Heights near what’s left of a strawberry farm, and when I pull up she is waiting for me. I take her to La Mer because it’s where you take women to dinner. It’s on the water and at night the lights from Connecticut shine across the harbor like they’re crying. The waiters have accents and things come with sauces—there may be a Saucier. Alice wears a short pink dress, cut for people to admire her legs. I do. At work she wears practical pants and flats made for bending, stretching, and the dust that comes with libraries. In high school I saw her legs in her field hockey skirt. They were good then; they’re better now. Her hair is half pinned behind one ear, the rest loose down her back. This is not a date. This is Alice. She smiles when I tell her she looks nice, a slight twist of her mouth.

“You clean up well too,” she says. Then the waiter appears and Alice orders a glass of wine. “Have no fear, I won’t break your bank.”

I laugh. It’s hard not to watch her lips touch the glass. “Did you come up with anything on Churchwarry?”

“I barely got to start. The shop is a real thing. Churchwarry and Son specializes in antiquarian books. It seems like he’s both the Churchwarry and the son. It’s a solo operation. I couldn’t find much on the man himself, though. Maybe he’s lonely and reaching out.”

I shrug. “Strange way of doing it. He didn’t seem that lonely.” He’d sounded cheerful, in fact. Absolutely alive.

“I wanted to dig a little more into his bookstore, but I had to help out in the kids’ room.”

“What happened to Marci?”

“She was crying in the bathroom after meeting with Janice.”

We agree that we deserve drinks while we still have jobs to pay for them.

“You’ll be fine, you know,” she says. “You’re the only one who can stomach reference.”

“Maybe. But half my job can be done by a computer. Ever apply for a grant that could eliminate half of what you do?”

“No, but that’s just because I don’t do grants.” She taps a nail against the rim of her glass. “The question is, have
you
applied for a grant that could eliminate half of what
I
do?”

“Never crossed my mind.”

“See? And that’s what will get you fired.”

We finish our wine and order more. Soon, we’re soft and smiling and talking about a Fourth of July and Frank nearly burning my father’s hand off with a roman candle. Alice swears it was the other way around, that she remembers her mother wrapping Frank’s hand with gauze. It’s difficult to reconcile the girl who launched herself off swing sets with the woman in front of me. I think she’s always had a boyfriend. Men from Rocky Point or Shoreham, vague people I never met. She might have one now. Our food arrives.

“My dad’s worried about your house,” she says, pushing a piece of asparagus around her plate. “I called him last week and he couldn’t stop talking about it.”

“I’m worried too,” I say.

“I don’t understand why you haven’t sold it.”

“There’s a lot of history in it.” My phone rings and Alice rolls her eyes. I promise to get rid of whoever it is, but when I pick up I know that I won’t.

“It’s me.”

I mouth to Alice that it’s my sister and she waves me off. The benefit to knowing someone your whole life is that you don’t have to explain why certain calls must be answered. I excuse myself and go outside. “Hey. Where are you?”

“Some hole in the wall. Can you talk?” There’s a clinking sound in the background—glass striking glass. I ask again where she is.

“I don’t know. A mall parking lot. Does it matter?”

“Not really. You don’t sound good. What’s going on? I’m in the middle of dinner.”

“I had a really bad reading,” she says.

“What? The cards?”

“Yeah. I feel cagey and I want to talk to you. Can I talk to you?”

I look back in the window at Alice, sipping wine and eating. I catch her eye. She waves. “Yeah. For a little bit.”

“Do you remember when I cut my legs? I don’t know why I thought of it, but I was driving and my legs hurt and I needed to talk to you.”

“Why?” For a moment I think my phone’s gone dead. Three times I say her name before she answers.

“Remember? I slid down those rocks and you carried me. I must have been heavy.”

“Not at all.” I was thirteen and she was eight. She weighed nothing. “Do you need me to get you?” I could take her to a doctor, or a hotel, get her food, anything. “I’m with Alice, she can come too if you want.” Provided she’s still there when I get back.

“We were climbing on those boulders with barnacles all over them. Don’t know why we did that. Were we looking for snails?”

“Yeah. Enola, should I come and pick you up?”

“No, no. I’ll be fine. I had that bathing suit on, the black one with the pink dots. You were on the tall rock, Toaster. Stupid we called it that. I wanted to get to you.”

Inside, Alice chats with a waiter, who laughs and flirts with her. My date—it is a date, isn’t it?—continues without me.

“Yeah, I remember,” I say. At low tide the rocks crawl with life—barnacles, seaweed, sand fleas, and snails. We were on all fours, balancing on ledges, hooking fingers into crevasses.

“My foot slipped on a patch of seaweed.”

I remember the sound of her skin smacking the rocks, and reaching to grab her, but she was small and wet and my footing was bad. She slid all the way down.

“Enola? Can I call you back?”

She doesn’t listen. “The barnacles shredded me and the fucking saltwater stung so bad I thought it was eating me. It was so sharp. Then I got dizzy and everything closed in.”

“I saw you slip and the next thing I knew you were underwater.”

“I sank all the way to the bottom. My feet even got stuck in the sand. I screamed and screamed, and then you were behind me. You got there so quick.”

I grabbed her and felt the open skin on her legs. No, there had been no skin; bits and pieces of Enola hung from the rocks. I flipped her onto her belly and cradled her.

Alice looks out the window. I mouth
One minute.
She shrugs and drinks her wine.

“You carried me home,” Enola says.

She didn’t see the bloody trail we left in the sand. When I reached the house it felt empty though it wasn’t. Dad was at the kitchen table with a newspaper, drinking from a cup of what had once been coffee. He didn’t look up. I carried Enola to her room and dropped her, stomach down, on the bed, then rummaged through the medicine chest. Half of it was filled with Mom’s prescriptions. Six years expired and Dad still kept them.

Barnacle cuts are a wonder of nature—so many different kinds of bacteria and no way to avoid infection.

“You put iodine on me, you fuck.”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

I threw myself over her middle, holding her in place while she screamed. We stayed there for what felt like hours, me sprawled over Enola’s back, Enola on the bed, Mom’s medicine all over the bathroom floor, Dad in the kitchen nursing empty coffee cups.

“You were good to me, Simon,” she says.

I did what I could. She sounds calmer than she did when she first called. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to hear your voice. Sometimes you make me feel better.”

“Okay.”
Bess Visser.
I suddenly remember where I’ve seen that name. It was on a slip of yellow paper with two other names Mom had written down. I found it last year when I moved her dresser to patch a leak. The paper was hidden in the back of a drawer. Mom knew that name.

“Wait, did you say you were with Alice McAvoy?”

“Yes.”

“Alice. Nice. I should go. See you in a few weeks.”

“Enola?”

“Thanks.” There’s a click, and she’s gone.

Back at the table, Alice has finished eating and paid the check. I must look bad because she immediately asks how I am. I tell her that Enola just needed to talk. She raises her eyebrows but says nothing. I make all the proper apologies but everything feels off. My feet feel off. When I walk Alice to the car, I notice she’s listing. She mutters something about her heels and leans into my side, a comfortable weight.