“Sorry about the circumstances,” he said. “But I’m dying to know what’s up with your name. The caption in the paper gave the Lydia part. But Lydia Smith? What happened to Gladwell? You got married? Let me see those hands again. I don’t see a ring.”
“My dad changed our name back when we moved. We were supposed to be anonymous.”
“So you’re not married.”
“Mmph,” she said. “No.”
“I’m kind of surprised by that,” he said, then crossed his legs and tugged a frayed thread from the cuff of his jeans.
“But involved,” she said, though it sounded as if it were a question.
Raj shifted on the bench.
“They never caught him, did they?” he said.
Lydia stared at the argyled mannequins and rainbow kites displayed in the window across the way, and the young woman with a shaved head shouldering her acoustic guitar down the sidewalk.
“Raj,” she said, “I’d rather not go there.”
“It’s old news, anyway.”
She thought she should say something more but a sudden lump filled her throat, and up and down her spine she could feel the familiar fronds of discomfort that accompanied most reminders of her childhood. She thought about asking him not to mention her past to anyone, but one look into his eyes—a soft dark brown, like sea glass, and as kind and wary as ever—and she knew her past would always be safe with Raj.
She took a deep breath. “And you, Raj? What are you doing with yourself?”
He shrugged, then pointed loosely in the direction of Union Station. “I live above a bar just over there, where that construction is happening? And I’m a cashier at a copy shop, but I guess I’m trying to be a graphic designer.” He opened his wallet and pulled out a card and handed it to her. “I’m calling it my own company,” he said, “but really it’s just whatever jobs I cull from the copy counter.”
Lydia studied the card.
“And what about your dad?” Raj added. “Is he—?”
“Crazy?” she said. “Oh yes.”
“They only get nuttier with age, don’t they?”
“He has, that’s for sure.”
“Mine too,” Raj said. “Both of them. So tell me.”
“We aren’t speaking,” she said. “My dad and I, I guess we’re— What’s the word? Over.”
“Really? Because your dad was so—”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ve just realized.” She stood spontaneously and gathered her coffee, then lifted the pair of Joey’s books into the air, as if they signified some kind of serious business. “I’m in the middle of something here. Work.”
Raj stood too and stuck his hands in his pockets, and for a moment he looked boyish again, brooding and smart and, in the right light, easily as handsome as David.
“Can we do this another time, though?” she added.
“Of course,” he said. “I see you drink coffee. We could do that together.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s do that. Soon.”
When she was a good fifty feet down the block, she heard him yell, “My number’s on the card!”
She spun around and gave him a high thumbs-up, and a pair of passing women in bright ski parkas and bright lipstick looked at her as if she were drunk.
Lydia hadn’t planned on heading back to the bookstore any more than she’d planned on escaping from Raj, but now that she was walking in that direction she felt an unexpected mix of clarity and unease. She needed to be done with Joey, she decided, and wash her hands of his death. She’d return The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac to its empty slot on the Parenting shelves and give serious thought to donating Joey’s crate of butchered books to a thrift store. As she headed toward Bright Ideas, she could feel a certain stride entering her walk, and she swung her satchel back on her shoulder and slid Joey’s books together, cupping them in her palm.
The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books.
Lydia spent so much time carrying books up and down the stairs of the store that she was pleased at how nicely this pair fit together. They were simply snug, easy to carry, no bumbling or sliding apart, almost like a pair of Lego bricks— In the middle of the sidewalk Lydia stopped cold. A ponytailed man jogging with a stroller huffed and veered around her. Lydia mumbled an apology, but her focus was already on the books in her hand.
She looked at the books side by side, spine by spine, back-to-back.
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books. The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac.
She pressed the books atop each other. They weren’t just the same size, they were the exact same size. No lip, no overhang, no difference but the words.
Okay, Joey. Words.
Last words?
Lost words?
Words. Words. Words—
I make the codices speak.
There on the sidewalk she opened A Universal History to its first cut-up page—page 128—then she opened The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac to its own page 128, which was wholly intact. It was an awkward process—folding back the cut-up book without stressing its spine—but when she slid them together and lined them up perfectly, page 128 on page 128, the little cut-out windows were now filled in by the words and letters of the book behind. A perfect fit.
A key finding its lock. A message from the grave:
you
. Fo
und
mea
gain
ly,
di
. A
, j
CHAPTER TEN
Lydia’s skills as a bookseller came mainly, she believed, from her ability to listen. A raging case of bibliophilia certainly helped, as did limited financial needs, but it was her capacity to be politely trapped by others that really sealed her professional fate. From bus stops to parties to the floors of the store, Lydia was the model of a Good Listener—a sounding board for one and all. Strangers and acquaintances and the occasional friend unloaded on her by the hour—add booze and it was every five minutes—and Lydia’s main conversational contributions consisted of Yeah or Hmm or Great or Jeez or Ouch or Yikes or Wow.
The unloading voice this time belonged to a middle-aged BookFrog named Pedro, a tender man with red suspenders and white sneakers who’d cornered Lydia twenty minutes ago next to the potted ficus in Genre Fiction. Pedro was unable to speak without intense fidgeting, so throughout his entire riff he pruned the tree by hand, dropping one leaf at a time to the wood floor, as if to punctuate his points. He was talking about his favorite sci-fi authors, explaining the worlds they’d created with enough detail for Lydia to formulate spaceship blueprints, and she politely listened—Yeah, she said, and Hmm and Great and Jeez and Ouch and Yikes and Wow—appreciating not so much the worlds themselves, but the fact that Pedro had become so lost in their trance that he was unable to stop himself from sharing them. All the while Lydia nodded along, admiring his penchant for details and finding it sweet that he wasn’t hitting on her, and probably more than anything, feeling grateful to be focusing on something besides the message she’d discovered yesterday in Joey’s books—You found me again, Lydia—and the subsequent pair of messages she’d managed to decode before work this morning as well.