What had my father been doing all this time, avoiding me? What was the point of sleeping all day and working all night, if you weren’t working on the great American novel? If you were scribbling rows and rows of circles? Escaping from your only child? Did Amma know? Was everyone in on the joke but me?
It’s not your fault. Don’t do this to yourself.
This time I was the one out of control. The anger welled up inside me, and I pushed his laptop off his desk, sending his papers flying. I knocked over the brass lamp, and without even thinking, yanked the sheet off the painting over the couch. The painting went tumbling to the ground, knocking over a low bookshelf. A pile of books went flying to the floor, sprawling open on the rug.
“Look at the painting.” She righted it, amidst the books on the floor.
It was a painting of me.
Me, as a Confederate soldier, in 1865. But it was me, nonetheless.
Neither one of us needed to read the penciled label on the back of the frame to know who it was. He even had the lanky brown hair hanging down in his face.
“About time we met you, Ethan Carter Wate,” I said, just as I heard my father lumbering down the stairs.
“Ethan Wate!”
Lena looked at the door, panicking. “Door!” It slammed shut and bolted. I raised an eyebrow. I didn’t think I was ever going to get used to that.
There was pounding on the door. “Ethan, are you okay? What’s goin’ on in there?” I ignored him. I couldn’t figure out what else to do, and I couldn’t stand to look at him right now. Then I noticed the books.
“Look.” I knelt on the floor in front of the nearest one. It was open to page 3. I flipped the page to 4
and it flipped back to 3. Just like the bolt on the study door. “Did you just do that?”
“What are you talking about? We can’t stay in here all night.”
“Marian and I spent the day in the library. And as crazy as it sounds, she thought the books were telling us things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know. Stuff about fate, and Mrs. Lincoln, and you.”
“Me?”
“Ethan! Open this door!” My dad was pounding now, but he had kept me out long enough. It was my turn.
“In the archive, I found a picture of my mom in this study and then a cookbook, opened to her favorite recipe, with a bookmark made of rosemary. Fresh rosemary. Don’t you get it? It has to do with you, somehow, and my mom. And now we’re here, like something wanted me to come here. Or, I don’t know—someone.”
“Or maybe you just thought of it because you saw her picture.”
“Maybe, but look at this.” I flipped the page of the Constitutional History book in front of me, turning it from page 3 to page 4. Once again, no sooner had I turned it than the page flipped back by itself.
“That’s weird.” She turned to the next book. South Carolina: Cradle to Grave. It was open to page 12.
She flipped it back to 11. It flipped to 12.
I pushed my hair out of my eyes. “But this page doesn’t say anything, it’s a chart. Marian’s books were open to certain pages because they were trying to tell us something, like messages. My mom’s books don’t seem to be telling us anything.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of code.”
“My mom was terrible at math. She was a writer,” I said, as if that was explanation enough. But I wasn’t, and my mom knew that better than anyone.
Lena considered the next book. “Page 1. This is just the title page. It can’t be the content.”
“Why would she leave me a code?” I was thinking out loud, but Lena still had the answer.
“Because you always know the end of the movie. Because you grew up with Amma and the mystery novels and the crosswords. Maybe your mom thought you would figure out something that no one else would get.”
My father half-heartedly banged away at the door. I looked at the next book. Page 9, and then 13. None of the numbers went higher than 26. And yet, lots of the books had way more pages than that….
“There are 26 letters in the alphabet, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it. When I was little, and couldn’t sit still in church with the Sisters, my mom would make up games for me to play on the back of the church program. Hangman, scrambled words, and this, the alphabet code.”
“Wait, let me get a pen.” She grabbed a pen from the desk. “If A is 1 and B is 2—let me write it out.”
“Careful. Sometimes I used to do it backward, where Z was 1.”
Lena and I sat in the middle of the circle of the books, moving from book to book, while my father banged on the door outside. I ignored him, just like he had been ignoring me. I wasn’t going to answer to him, or give him an explanation. Let him see how it felt for a change.
“3, 12, 1, 9, 13…”
“Ethan! What are you doin’ in there? What was all that racket?”
“25, 15, 21, 18, 19, 5, 12, 6.”
I looked at Lena, and held out the paper. I was already a step ahead. “I think—it’s meant for you.”
It was as clear as if my mom was standing in the study, telling us in her own words, with her own voice.
CLAIMYOURSELF
It was a message for Lena.
My mom was there, in some form, in some sense, in some universe. My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locks and the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper.