“Are you making more bookshelves?” she said, mouth dry, fighting vertigo.
He set the brush in a black jar of spirits and ungloved his hands, keeping his back to her. She’d assumed he would be happy to see her but his posture expressed only reticence. Maybe he just couldn’t face her.
“Almost out of space,” he said, “for real this time.” He gestured toward the planks he’d been staining. “Let’s see, these are the new shelves for the bathroom in the cabin. Above the toilet. You think this is a lot, wait till you see inside.”
“You have books in the cabin too?”
“Let’s just say it got a little tight in there.”
Lydia hadn’t expected her father to be so fixated, so delusional. The thought of this man reaching deep into his memory to help her decipher the past seemed suddenly ludicrous. She shifted her satchel and unbuttoned her coat and cardigan.
“Are you ever going to turn around? You haven’t even looked at me.”
Without a pause he unsnapped his mask and faced her.
In Lydia’s mind her father was the man she’d last seen well over a decade ago, snoring in his bed on the morning of her high school graduation, when she’d snuck out of the cabin with a map and a backpack and hitched a ride to the bus station in Leadville. Ever since then, his increasing age had always been abstract, something she associated with Over the Hill! birthday cards and Metamucil ads. Now it was perfectly concrete. He was into his sixties but he appeared at least a decade older. His face was spotty and dry and white whiskers furred his cheeks and neck. He was back to wearing black horn-rimmed glasses, but gauging from the scratched filth of his lenses he’d pulled them from a memento drawer. But most noticeable was how frail he’d become. The waist of his jeans was cinched by rope and his elbows dangled limply against his ribs. The man was rank, encrusted, but worst of all malnourished. The reality of this sent her screaming at herself: if she was going to cut him out of her life, she should’ve at least made sure he was healthy.
“Are you eating?” she said, nearly choking on the words.
“I’d be dead if not.”
“How often?”
He leaned forward and squinted. “You doing okay? You look kind of worn out.” He reached out a hand but stopped it midair.
“What are you eating?” she said.
“Back to that,” he said impatiently, and shuffled head-down toward a large storage bin on the far side of the workshop, set like an island a few feet from the wall. Lydia followed. The bin held canned soup, beans, chili, pears. On the floor alongside it, at the base of a ticking woodstove, was a gray sleeping bag looking larval atop a mattress.
“Sometimes I live out here,” he said, playfully swiveling a can opener. “Especially lately.”
The sight of his tumbled canned goods added to the sadness she was feeling, so she walked along the bookshelves and tried to find her footing. He trailed behind her.
“You’re getting a lot of reading done, anyway,” she said.
“Actually not. I don’t really have the energy, to be honest. Plus I’m long overdue for new glasses.”
“Then why books?” she said, running her hand along the edge of a shelf.
“I guess I didn’t know what to do with myself after you left. Then I started doing it and this is what it became.”
“But where’d they all come from? You couldn’t’ve bought all these.”
“Courtesy of the Rio Vista State Penitentiary. Donations. Books come in from thrift stores, estate sales, libraries—a lot of books no one wants end up being sent to the prison, and those that the prison doesn’t want end up here. This is the dreck that doesn’t make it to those carts you see on sidewalks in front of bookshops. A lot are missing pages or covers or are moldy or torn. Sometimes they arrive on pallets. I think word got out that we’d take anything.”
“?‘We’? I thought you quit.”
“I did. But I still go over about once a month and pick up whatever they discard. Which is most of them.”
“To the prison?”
“I go at night. They think I’m nuts. But they’re happy not to have to deal with them.”
“It’s quite a library, anyway,” she said, trying to sound upbeat.
“I’ve begun to think of it as more graveyard than library. End of the line, you know. Where book-of-the-month club comes to die.”
As they spoke, Lydia had been walking along the shelves, sliding out the occasional title. For all of their tatter and wear the books did have an overall tidy appearance. She noticed a few wooden rulers hanging from nails and realized that each book had been placed exactly one inch from the lip of its shelf. Staring toward the raftered ceiling, following the compulsive plumb lines of all those spines, Lydia felt a stitch in her neck. No wonder he had no energy for reading.
“I need to know something,” she said, turning to face him, surprised at the boldness of her voice.
“Is it about what I think it’s about? Let me see it.”
It took her a moment to realize what he was talking about, and when she did she turned slightly away, as if to guard the satchel hanging on her shoulder. “You mean Joey’s photo?”
“It’s not Joey’s photo,” he said. “It’s mine. He obviously took it off me, but—”
“I don’t want to talk about the photo,” she said, eyes closed, palms flattening the air much more intensely than she’d intended, “or Joey. Not now. I want to talk about what you did at the O’Tooles’. Or to the O’Tooles.”
“What did Moberg tell you I did?”
“Why was your blood on Dottie’s body? Let’s start with that.”
“Because I cut my goddamned hand.”
He turned around and began tugging the purple latex gloves back onto his fingers. Their sight made her stomach swim.
“I want to hear what you did.”
Tomas craned halfway around and stared at her for a long time. “Are you seriously asking me this?” he said. “Because I’ve been waiting a long time to have this conversation. I’m likely to tell you more than you’re here for. I’ve been in that kind of mood since I quit the prison.”
“I need to know.”
“Fair enough,” he said, ripping the gloves off again. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
For a couple of seconds Tomas stood dazed in the O’Tooles’ kitchen, squeezing Lydia to his chest and listening to the ticking of the clock and the breathing of the house. A few feet away, the cabinet door beneath the sink was still open—the contact paper inside dotted with his daughter’s blood—and in his dread he understood its invitation, as if it were a doorway to a better dimension. The linoleum was spread with bloody tracks turning watery from the snow he’d dragged in underfoot, and at their center was the hammer he’d been holding a few minutes earlier when he’d stormed through the house, searching for Lydia. Its wooden handle was so syrupy with blood that it had stuck to his palm.