He thinks about her now: Sadie, poised in midair, arms flung wide, slicing across the sky. After she’d disappeared, no one seemed to know where she’d gone; his classmates and even his teachers simply went on as if she’d never existed. As he stands there, he knows the photos from the Common are already beginning to appear online, the trees holding up little figures in their fingers, raising them to the light. A thousand little Sadies silhouetted against the blue.
The next morning, walking to school, he sees the real trees: stripped bare to rough bark again. As if nothing had ever been there at all. Yet there is the sharp bright gash running down each trunk like a scar; there are the broken spots where the web, roughly yanked, has dragged the branches away. There, in the mud, a single strand of red yarn left behind. Something happened here, and he is determined to find out what, and thinking of Sadie, suddenly he has an idea of where to begin.
After school he is supposed to come straight home. Stay in the apartment, his father says. And do your homework. But today he does not follow the path. He turns onto Broadway, follows it out toward the high school, where he’ll have to go in a few years, toward the big public library beside it, where he has never been.
From liber, his father has told him. Books. Which comes from the word meaning the inner bark of trees, which comes from the word for to strip, to peel. Early peoples pulled off the thin strips for writing material, of course.
A fall walk, once. His father’s hands had brushed the flaking birch bark, rising paper-white in curls from the slender trunk.
But I like to think of it as peeling back layers. Revealing layers of meaning.
In the science museum, long ago: a giant slice of tree trunk, taller than his father. Rings of caramel against cream-colored wood. They’d counted the rings, bark to core, then back out again. His father’s finger tracing the grain. This is when the tree was planted, when George Washington was a boy. This is the Civil War, World War I, World War II. This is when his father was born. This is when everything fell apart.
You see? his father said. They carry their histories inside them. Peel back enough layers and they explain everything.
It’s like a castle, Sadie had told him. She’d visited the library daily, a stolen five minutes on the way home from school. Half jogging to get there as fast as she could, sprinting to get home on time after lingering as long as she dared. Sadie, I think you need to start showering more often, her foster mother would say when she arrived home sweaty and rumpled. You’ll get caught, Bird warned, but Sadie was unmoved. Her parents had read to her every night and where stories were grit in Bird’s memories, in Sadie’s they were a rich balm. A castle, she insisted to Bird, her voice swollen with awe. He had rolled his eyes, but now he sees it is more or less true: the library is a huge sandstone building with arches and a turret, though a newer glass wing has been added on, all sharp angles and sparkling panes, and because of this, as he climbs the steps, he feels that he is somehow entering both the past and the future at once.
He’s seldom around so many books, and for a moment it is dizzying. Shelves and shelves. So many you could get lost. At the front desk, the librarian—a dark-haired woman in a pink sweater—glances his way. She sizes him up over the tops of her glasses, as if she knows he doesn’t belong, and Bird quickly sidles away into the aisles, out of view. Up close, he can see that here and there books have been removed, leaving gaps in the rows like missing teeth. But still he senses that there are answers here, caught somewhere between the pages and filed away. All he has to do is find them.
Placards hang at the ends of the shelves, a list of subjects that live down each aisle, perplexingly numbered and inscrutably arranged. Some sections are still lush and thriving: Transportation. Sports. Snakes/Lizards/Fish. Other sections are dry deserts: by the time he gets to the 900s, nearly everything is gone, just rows and rows of skeletal shelving, slicing the sunlight into squares. The few remaining books are small dark spots against all that bare. The China-Korean Axis and the New Cold War. The Menace at Home. The End of America: China on the Rise.
As he roams, he notices something else, too: the library is all but deserted. He is the only visitor here. On the second floor sit rows of bare study carrels and long worktables with wooden chairs, all unoccupied. All the way down to the basement, just empty seats and a forlorn sign reading: changed your mind? please place unwanted books on the cart below. There is no cart anymore, only a bare stretch of linoleum tile. It is a ghost town, and he, still alive, is intruding in the land of the dead. With one finger he traces an empty shelf, making a clean bright line in the thick fur of dust.
Far downstairs, in the back corner, he finds the poetry section, scans the shelves until he reaches M. Christopher Marlowe. Andrew Marvell. Edna St. Vincent Millay. He isn’t surprised to find that the shelf jumps straight from Milton to Montagu, but he’s sad not to find her name.
Coming here was a mistake, he thinks. This place feels forbidden, the whole undertaking unwise. In his nostrils, the sharp scent of iron and heat. He inches toward the front, where at the desk the librarian sorts through a crate of books with ruthless efficiency. He’s afraid to catch her eye again. When she turns around, he thinks, he’ll slip out.
Peering through a gap in the shelf, he watches, waiting for an opening. The librarian pulls another book from the blue plastic crate on the desktop, consults a list, makes a check mark. Then—and here Bird is puzzled—she quickly riffles through the book, fanning the pages like a flipbook, before shutting it and placing it on the stack. With the next book, she does the same. Then the next. She’s looking for something, Bird realizes, and a few books later she finds it. This time she scans the list once, then again, and sets her pen down. Evidently this book isn’t on it. Slowly she flips through the pages, one at a time, pausing finally to extract a small white slip of paper.
From where Bird stands, he can just make out a few lines of handwriting scribbled across it. He leans around the shelf, trying to see more, and it is at this point that the librarian looks up and spots him peeking out.
Swiftly she folds the paper in half, hiding it from view, and marches toward him.
Hey, she says. What are you doing back there? Yes, you. I see you. Up. Stand up.
She jerks him up by one elbow.
How long have you been there, she demands. What are you doing back there?
Up close she’s both older and younger than he expected. Long dark brown hair threaded with iron gray. Older, he thinks, than his mother would be. But there’s a youthful quality to her, too: a small flash of silver in her pierced nostril; an alertness in her face that reminds him of someone. After a minute, he realizes who. Sadie. The same glinting dare in her eye.
I’m sorry, he says. I’m just—I’m looking for a story. That’s all.
The librarian peers at him over her glasses.
A story, she says. You’ll have to be more specific.
Bird glances at the maze of shelves around them, the librarian’s hand clamped on his arm, her other fist clenched—around what? His face flushes.
I don’t know the title, he says. It’s a story—someone told me a long time ago. There’s a boy, and a lot of cats.
That’s all you know?
Now she’ll throw him out. Or she’ll call the police and have him arrested. As a child, he understands instinctively how arbitrary punishment can be. The librarian’s thumb digs harder into the crook of his arm.
Then she half closes her eyes. Thinking.
A boy and a lot of cats, she echoes. Her grip on his arm slackens, then releases. Hmm. There’s a picture book called Millions of Cats. A man and a woman want the prettiest cat in the world. Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions of cats. Ring a bell?
It doesn’t sound familiar, and Bird shakes his head.