The Lake and the Library (12 page)

I
rubbed my eyes and staved off a yawn as I sat cross-legged on one of the reading tables, sketching the deer clock frantically. I had created a few of these drawings now, desperate to reclaim what I'd felt in reproducing Li yesterday, his words etched on a page and over my soul:
This is
your
kind of magic
.
I sat and waited for him, this being the first time since we'd met that I had truly shown up first.

I hadn't slept at all last night, the only lights shining against the velvet sky the floodlights on the grain elevator. I stared for hours at the shadows they cast onto my floor, lying in bed and listening, at first, to my mother coughing down the hall, and then plagued by the water sound in the back of my ears. I figured that this was a normal phenomena, just like when you hear a consistent ringing for no real reason, but it was oddly comforting, the tone of it like a small swell lapping against a rock, over and over. I followed its cadence and let it take my troubled thoughts: how I felt for pushing Paul away, how I had plainly ignored my mother's presence . . . how every day at home and out of the library made me feel like I was sleepwalking. As the night deepened, my subconscious became infected by the vision of books floating in Lake Jovan, bobbing to the surface and stuck in the reeds. I reached for them, but they sank away. And there was that woman, white haired and floating among them, but she was reaching for me, instead.

There were a few paper birds hanging about the stacks, but not the flocks that usually did. And those that I saw were sleeping, little folded heads tucked under wafer-thin feathers. It seemed that, without both of us, the library functioned at a halfway point potential.

Something heavy fell on the other side of the room. I lurched up.

“Li?”

I uncurled my legs from under me and slid off the table. I trod lightly, knowing that this had to be another one of his games, his tricks, but I was poised for flight anyway. I searched row by row until I came upon the source of the noise; there were a handful of books on the floor, looking as if they'd been pulled from the shelves. I started putting them back into the holes they'd made, but as I did so, I realized that the shelf right next to them was a
trompe l'oeil
, just like the vault of the library's ceiling — books painted deftly on the flat wall, a perfect imitation. I ran my hand down the place where the optical illusion met the real shelves and found a seam. A door. It was slightly ajar, and when I looked down there was a puddle of water gathering at the threshold.

I swallowed, once more calling Li's name, wanting to be sure he was on the other side. I'd been seeing, and hearing, so much water lately, that I was beginning to think it signified something sinister, something I didn't yet understand.

“If you're trying to scare me,” I said in an attempt to convince myself, “it's your most feeble attempt yet.”

I pushed the door open a crack just so I could see inside. It was completely dark. I peered in, and seeing that there wasn't any kind of light inside, I opened the door wider to let the small amount of library light shine in. It was a small room, kind of like the hidden sitting room upstairs, but there was nowhere to sit, and it wasn't nearly as inviting. The carpet was rotting, the wallpaper bubbling and peeling, and there was a consistent series of drips coming from the ceiling. This had to be the worst-kept room in the library, considering how every other part of it glowed like a rococo dreamscape.

But the waterlogged crown moulding wasn't what got my attention; there was some kind of portrait hanging on the back wall. It was medium-sized and pictured a woman; she was swan slight and long limbed, with wheat-coloured hair. She had an amusement to her grey eyes as she sat by a window, a book turned face down in her lap and her mouth parted in a laugh. She was beautiful. I stepped in, entranced. My footsteps squished on the wet carpet as I moved in for a closer look. The painting was in nearly perfect condition, compared to everything else in the room, but when I got up to it, I realized that the woman wasn't alone. She was holding the hand of someone, a small child, maybe, but that part of the canvas had been bubbled up and eaten away. It was hard to tell anything else, and when I reached up to touch the brush strokes, a huge dollop of water hit the back of my outstretched hand. I jumped back and tried to look past the gloom to see any hint of the source, but what really made me leap out of my skin was that the sliver of light coming in from the hall behind me was shrinking. Someone was closing the door.

“Hey!” I said, springing towards it, the water now running in tear-streaked rivulets down the walls, the wallpaper swelling under it. I grabbed the door by its edge, pulling hard and fighting against the person on the other side.

“This isn't funny, Li, it's dark in here!”

Something bumped against my ankle. I looked down and saw that, in the rising water at my feet, a book bobbed to the surface, and one I had seen already. A silver cover, winking at me, followed by other books clotting the floor. I didn't have enough hands to reach out and grab the silver book, and just as the struggle turned in my favour, I looked out through the crack between the door and the jamb, thinking that if I showed Li the anxiety stamped into my face, he would give me some pity.

But it was not Li's face I saw on the other side of the door in that split second before I won; it was the face I'd tried to part yards of white hair from, the face at the bottom of the lake. Her flesh was fish white, her eyes whiter still, and what was worse was that I recognized her from somewhere else as our gazes locked. I kept pulling, and in a single blink she was gone from the other side of the door, and now inside the room with me. I hadn't even have a chance to shriek before the door swung out, and I pitched forwards, flat on my face in the bookcase aisle. The
trompe l'oeil
door slammed shut behind me.

I bolted, tripping to my feet.
“Li!”

I raced out of the row and ploughed directly into him; he had been running towards my voice, but he caught me like a skilled quarterback before I could knock both of us over.

“You're here,” I panted, half-collapsing in his arms. I jerked out of them the instant that the woman's face flashed back into my mind. “There's someone else here, Li! Did you see her come this way?”

He shushed me, a hand stroking my hair as he shook his head. I grabbed his hand and dragged him back the way I'd come. “Come here and look. It was right here . . .
she
was right here. You have to see this room.”

But when we got there, the door was gone, in its place an actual shelf filled with actual books. And the floor was conspicuously dry.

Li touched the bookcase and looked at me, shrugging. I felt worse than insane. I felt like the library had just turned on me. “But it was here!” I cried, starting to tear books right from the wall as I felt for a seam. “Right here . . .”

He turned me away, shushing me again as he got to his knees in front of me.
Relax
,
his face asserted, taking a deep breath and making me mimic him. Leading me back to where there was light and twenty paper cockatiels tumbling and flirting in the paper sky, he boosted me onto the table beside my sketchbook, feeling my forehead for fever.

“I'm not sick.” I slapped his hand away, feeling sheepish and embarrassed. “I really saw someone. She was . . .” I couldn't even say the word. My heart was still hammering in my ears.
She was dead.

He pursed his lips like a sad puppy, then reached around me for my sketchbook, scribbling something on a fresh page.

I have a surprise for you.
He waggled his eyebrows for effect.

I blinked, “A surprise? Like I need another one . . .”

Wagging a
no no
finger at me, he motioned for me to stand up, and rolling my eyes, I obeyed. He then covered his eyes and gestured at me to copy.

I was hesitant, at first, on that last one. “What if that freaky woman pops up again? Will you protect me?”

Li scratched his temple until his eyes lit in epiphany. He starting unbuttoning his collar, and as I stiffened in apprehension of what exactly he was doing, he pulled out the medallion I had seen earlier when I was drawing him. He slipped it over his head and let it dangle between us. It glinted and spun, hypnotising, then he undid the clasp, and without warning, leaned in to fasten it around my neck.

“Oh, Li, I couldn't—”

He shushed me with a whisper as he fiddled with the clasp, and after a momentary lapse in his usually nimble fingers, he drew away.

I fingered the medallion. Emblazoned on the front of it was St. Anthony. I turned it over, but it was scuffed and worn. I ran my finger over one scuff that looked like it could have once been a cursive
L
,
but I wasn't sure.

“St. Anthony. Patron saint of lost things.” I laughed, looking shyly up at him. “Li, it's . . . it's beautiful. But I can't take this.”

He put a finger to his lips as if to shush me again, then leaned down and kissed the medal. His hands laid solidly on my shoulders, and I understood the gesture.
For protection
.

I couldn't control my skin from prickling and turning red from the heat of his stare. I fiddled with the chain. “Thank you.” I smiled, trying to reclaim the humour. “It's a nice surprise, really.”

At that he wagged his finger and mouthed
ah ah
!
This wasn't the surprise. He bade me, again, to shut my eyes. “Okay, okay . . .” I sighed and did as I was told.

I heard his running footsteps scuffle away, unable to picture what he could have planned, because the possibilities were endless. I couldn't help but smile, wrapping my fingers around his medallion and feeling calmer already. A gift
and
a surprise. He had done something just for me, he had been thinking of me . . . just knowing that made me feel better, momentarily forgetting the terror I'd felt moments earlier —
if it had happened at all
,
I thought. I was reciting that so often day-to-day that now it had become a mantra, a double-edged comfort; if it hadn't happened, then I had nothing to worry about. But these sorts of things kept happening, which meant that some part of me was going mad, or I had fallen down the kind of rabbit hole from which I could never re-emerge.

A paper bird landed on my shoulder. I heard it before I felt it, the tiny thing being as fragile as it was. I couldn't help but open my eyes and smile at it, until another landed on the opposite shoulder. And another. And another. Soon there were at least twenty, thirty book-page birds clinging to the back of my shirt, making me bend forward to accommodate them. Though I was giggling, I couldn't help but feel perplexed. And then I saw Li below me, twirling and fanning his arms like a boisterous conductor, the birds on my back and shoulders swaying with his hands.

I flushed. “What are you doing?”

He just grinned and swooned on, flicking his wrists. And then I could see it; the birds were unfolding back into their original shapes, but then the pages inverted on themselves, transforming again. They folded, they lengthened, and they nestled between my shoulder blades as they layered one on top of the other. The weight sat concentrated there until, Li spreading his hands wide, they unfurled.

Paper wings. And they were mine.

I put a hand to my mouth, neck craning hard to believe what I was seeing. One wing gave an experimental flick, and I felt the warmth of them dazzle up my spine. Yes, I could
feel
them, I could move them. Which meant—

“Can I fly?”

Li bowed, his eyes still locked on mine, twinkling. A current of paper birds swirled over him as they asserted his own pair of wings. He bowed, as if to say,
like so,
and he sprang into the air, somersaulting and landing ever so lightly at my side, lifting me to my feet, then taking both my hands in his and holding them to his chest. This was all for my sake; the total world immersion, our handmade sky, this constant dream that we were sharing. It was a daily gift of gratitude for something I had no idea I did. And Li wasn't about to tell me what that was, either.

I flushed deeper, feeling his eyes above me and the light from the sun we made casting momentary rainbows on us. “You'll be close by, right?”

Letting go of one hand, he semicrouched, eyes never leaving mine.
Always.

I crouched down, too, my wings shivering in anticipation. We looked up into our sky, clouds parting to reveal infinite blue. This newly fashioned world was ours, all ours.

We took to the sky, library melting away behind us into nothing but dawn. We were inhabiting our own story, now.