This child and I were bound together. As boys dream of growing into men, and men dream of the boys they once were, we each took measure of the other half. He reminded me of that nightmare long ago when I was taken, and all at once my long-held fears and anger broke through the surface. The lantern ring bit into my fingers, and my left eye twitched with tension. The boy read my face and flinched. He was afraid of me, and for the first time I regretted what I had taken from him and realized that, in feeling sorry for him, I grieved for my own stolen life. For Gustav. For the real Henry Day. His unknowable life. For all I could have with Tess and with Edward. My dream of music. And who was I in this equation but the product of my own division? What a terrible thing to have happened to such a boy.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and he vanished. Years of anger dissipated as I stared at the space where he used to be. He was gone, but in that brief moment we’d faced one another, my past had unspooled deep inside my mind, and I now let it go. A kind of euphoria raced through my blood, and I took a deep breath and felt myself again.
“Wait,” I called out to him, and without thinking I turned and slid feet first through the opening, and landed in the dust. The space below the library was smaller than anticipated, and I bumped my head on the ceiling when I stood. Their grotto was but a murky shadow, so I reached up for the lantern to better see. Hunched over, I searched with the firelight for the boy, hoping he might answer a few questions. I wanted nothing more than to talk to him, to forgive and be forgiven. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I cried out in the darkness. Wrestling free of the rope, I laid it and the carpet knife on the ground. The rusty lantern creaked in my hand as the light swept the room.
He crouched in the corner, yapping at me like a trapped fox. His face was my own fear. He trembled as I approached, eyes darting, searching for an escape. Candlelight illuminated the walls, and all around him on the ground lay stacks of paper and books. At his feet, tied in a strand of twine, a thick sheaf of handwritten pages sat next to my purloined score. My music had survived.
“Can’t you understand me?” I held out my hand to him. “I want to talk to you.”
The boy kept eyeing the opposite corner as if someone or something were waiting there, and when I turned to look, he rushed past me, knocking into the lamp as he ran. The rusted wire snapped, sending the lamp flying, shattering the glass on the stone wall. The blankets and papers ignited at once, and I snatched my music from the flames, beating it against my leg to extinguish the wisps of fire along the margins. I backed my way to the overhead entrance. As if fixed to the spot, he stood gazing up in amazement, and just before climbing out of the hole, I called for him a final time: “Henry—”
His eyes went wide, searching the ceiling as if discovering a new world. He turned to me and smiled, then said something that could not be understood. By the time I got upstairs, a fog of smoke rose through the hole below. It followed me through the broken window just as the flames began to lick the stacks of books.
After the fire, Tess saved me. Distraught over the damage I had done, I moped about the house for days. The destruction of the children’s section was not my fault, although I deeply regretted the loss of all the books. The children will need new stories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever.
Tess and Edward arrived home from her cousin’s just as the police were leaving. It seems I was regarded as a person of suspicion, for the librarians had reported my spate of frequent visits and “erratic behavior.” The firemen had discovered the lantern in the ashes, but there was no way to link back to me what had once been my father’s. Tess accepted my feeble explanations, and when the police came around again, she told them a little white lie, saying that we had spoken over the phone on the night of the fire and she remembered quite clearly having woken me from a deep sleep. Without any proof, the matter faded. The arson investigation, as far as I know, proved inconclusive, and the blaze passed into local lore, as if the books themselves had suddenly burst into flames.
Having Tess and Edward back home those few weeks before school started was both reassuring and unnerving. Their mere presence in the house calmed my fragile psyche after the fire, but there were times when I could barely look Tess in the eye. Burdened with guilt over her complicity, I searched for some way to tell her the truth, and perhaps she guessed the reasons for my growing anxiety.