Illuminated (12 page)

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Authors: Erica Orloff

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He shook his head. “Maybe the book is bad luck. It’s cursed. It brought you to me, but look at my father . . . Someone doesn’t want us finding Astrolabe.”
“But we can’t let that stop us.” My breath left me. I needed to find Astrolabe, for Miriam. And for me. He shrugged.
I bit my lip. “August . . . it’s a book
.
It’s not the
book’s
fault. And it’s not your fault, either. It’s not Astrolabe’s fault. The book is extraordinary. You said that. Uncle Harry told me everything has its secrets, even books. I really think Astrolabe is trying to tell us something from across the centuries. He wants us to find him. To find proof of his existence. That this book was his. Until this happened, your father was as excited as any of us. He wouldn’t want us to stop searching.”
“Maybe,” he said softly. “But look what happened when I left him alone. I can’t let that happen again. How can I go to Paris?”
I could hardly face the idea of Paris, of continuing on without him. “You can’t not go. This is
our
hunt. We can’t let some book thief stop us.”
He looked at me. “Do you understand that the palimpsest, if we can prove it belonged to Astrolabe, would be priceless? This isn’t just some book, Callie. It’s not a game. It’s not even a detective story. If the book is what we think it is, if it truly is that valuable, there are people who would stop at nothing to get it. This whole thing could be dangerous. I don’t know that we’ve thought this through. Not all the way.”
We heard a doorbell chime.
“That’ll be the police.”
“Do you want me to stay?”
“You know, let me handle this. I haven’t decided if we should tell them about the Book of Hours. I’ll let them think this is about
Leaves of Grass.”
“Are you sure?” If he really was right about the danger we could potentially face, I wasn’t positive withholding information from the police was the smartest thing we could do.
“I’m not sure of anything right now.”
I nodded, but my stomach hurt. I could see August retreating from me, the way the handwriting in the book faded when the ultraviolet light was turned off. Whereas in the bed at Miriam’s we had breathed together as one, now he was pulling the air away from me. I felt like I was suffocating. My legs shook.
“Okay,” I whispered.
I watched him retreat into the house. I waited in the garden for a half hour, but I felt useless. Restless. Finally, I walked to the back gate, turned the iron key, and let myself out. Even if August wasn’t sure about continuing the hunt for Astrolabe, I was. Miriam’s story had captivated me.
I wandered to Washington Square Park. Once there, I entered beneath the tall white stone arch and made my way to the speed chess players beneath leafy trees. I loved watching their lightning-fast moves, some concentrating intently, others using trash talk to mock their opponent.
My father played chess. He had liked me to play with him. I remember being a little girl and memorizing the shapes—the rook, the bishop, the queen, and the king. He had this enormous set, the pieces carved of marble. My little hand could scarcely wrap around the base of them. He never knew, but I used to play house with the pieces, acting out this elaborate soap opera on the chessboard. I never really enjoyed playing.
Chess, to my father, was like the law—a way to move pawns and go for the jugular on your opponent. He played ruthless chess—striking fast and without mercy—defeating me time and time again as a way to “build character” in me as a little girl. He didn’t care that half the time, my eyes were brimming with tears.
I wandered the park, as in-line skaters sped past me. I needed to talk to Harry. Instead of taking a cab, I rode the subway. I remembered August telling me he liked trains—but hated elevators. His rules made no sense to me. I worried about him, with his eccentricities like his dad. Maybe I had just been so swept up in the idea of a summer romance with a really cute guy. I started to wonder if this was just one of those relationships that starts out hot and then dies just as fast.
When I finally arrived at Harry’s apartment, he wasn’t home yet, and Gabe had already left for the theater. I opened the fridge and scoped the nearly barren shelves. I grabbed a Diet Coke. Shutting the fridge door, I looked at my cell phone. It had been on silent. There were four messages. All from August, but I didn’t listen to them.
I shut my eyes and pictured Miriam’s in the dark. August was so self-assured, and when we kissed, it had been intense. He was like no one else I’d ever met—from the instant I first saw him, I was infatuated. He wasn’t like any other kind of guy. Maybe I just needed a little bit of time to chill out. After all, at the end of the summer, I’d be heading back to Boston. Maybe this whole thing was a mistake.
Calliope, be practical
, my father would say. Except, for a mistake, it felt so perfect.
At loose ends, I wandered into Harry’s small office area and started pulling the “Mom books” down from his bookshelf. He had photo albums from their childhood, and then from when they both moved to New York City together after college. They’re hilarious. Can I just say big shoulder pads in the ’80s were a huge fashion tragedy? I’m not sure what my mom was thinking—and Harry was worse. There are even a few pictures of him in some kind of refugee-from-a-New-Wave-band getup. Positively horrifying!
It was comforting to me to go through the books. One after the other, I turned pages. There were pictures of my parents’ wedding. My mother wore a sliplike dress of long ivory satin and carried a simple bouquet of daisies, with a couple of flowers in her hair, no veil. She and my father looked happy—in fact, it was an uncharacteristic picture of him, since he usually favored what I called “the Scowl.”
There were pictures of me when I was first born. Then there was a lengthy gap in pictures, which was where I usually stopped looking at pictures. But for some reason, today I pressed on to just a few pages of photos of her with no hair, wearing a scarf, deep circles under her eyes. Harry was in a few of them, lying next to her in her bed, the two of them smiling for the camera. In two, there was a man I didn’t recognize. I made a mental note to ask Harry who he was.
Bored, I opened the doors to cabinets beneath the bookshelf. I wasn’t intending to snoop or anything, I was just looking for more Mom boxes. There was a box with my name on it. It wasn’t a present, but a box filled with more old stuff of my mom’s. I could tell, since a high school yearbook peeked over the top of it.
I pulled it out, excited. Harry had never shown me this before, and I wondered why. Her old yearbooks were haphazardly stored with a trophy from a singing competition and several cards from old boyfriends. They were the things of a girl’s teenage years, the treasures of her life. I had things just like them in my room at home.
Except for one envelope. I picked it up, an expensive, heavy-linen envelope that had the name of a law firm in Boston in the upper-left corner. I opened it.
They were divorce papers. From my father. Against my mother.
My heart slammed against my rib cage. I had told myself that, different though they were, they had some kind of amazing love story, a love story I would understand when I got older. But here were papers that proved otherwise.
I looked at the date through blurry tears of disbelief. He had sued her for divorce as she was
dying.
I shoved the papers back in the envelope, pushed the envelope into the box, put the box back in the cabinet, and slammed the cabinet doors shut. Now I had even more reason to hate my dad. How could he do that to her? She had been diagnosed with cancer. What kind of man abandons a woman when she is sick?
I waited for Harry. When the apartment door opened, he smiled at me. “Hey . . . are you and August coming to dinner with me?”
I shook my head. “Not tonight.” I wiped at tears that had pushed their way to the brims of my eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
First I told him about the break-in.
“I’ll call the Sokolovs right away. He has an alarm system, but my guess is he didn’t have it on. And until we know for sure why someone broke in, August and his dad should be careful. And so should you, for that matter. I should let security at the auction house know, just in case.” He reached for his cell. “Callie, maybe I was wrong to send you on this chase with August. You’re just kids, and there’s real danger here. The stakes are higher than I thought.”
“No. I’m not stopping.”
“Callie—”
I shook my head and held up my hand. “I can’t explain it, Harry, but I have to prove the book belonged to Astrolabe.”
Harry smiled. “Ah. You’ve been bitten by the history bug.”
“Maybe.”
“Fine. But from now on, you can stick to
books
and research. I can only
imagine
what your father would do to me if you came face-to-face with a major thief like the Tome Raider or something worse.”
“Yeah. Dad. That’s the other reason I’m upset.”
“What about him?”
“I found something today. A box . . . ” I let my voice trail off, and Harry’s eyes darted to the cabinet.
“The box with my name on it, Harry. I found the divorce papers.”
Harry sat down in the plush chair opposite me. “You’re going to have to ask your father, Callie.”
“That’s bull, Harry. No.
You’re
the one I’m close to. You tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“No, I can’t. Do you even realize the negotiations I had to go through with your father to get this summer thing worked out? To just be able to see you? It would kill me to lose contact with you, Callie.”
“I’m sixteen. What is he going to do? Take away my cell phone? My computer? Not let me talk to you? And what about when he travels? I mean, come on, Harry.”
“I don’t want to cross him. You have no idea how he can be.”
“Hello? I’m his
daughter,
remember? I totally know what he can be like.”
“Callie, I have to keep the peace with him. Grandma’s coming to see you this summer . . . We’ve already lost so much. So for the sake of your grandmother and Gabe and me, there are some things I avoid talking about.”
“So you’ve been lying to me all these years?”
“No, not lying, exactly.”
“What then,
exactly
?”
“I just promised your father I wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Well, you’re going to have to now. Come on, Harry. What happened? How could he divorce her when she was sick, when she was dying in the hospital? Who does that!? And for that matter, I saw those pictures from then, after she had lost her hair. Why isn’t Dad there? Who’s that guy in the hospital room with all of you?”
Harry stared at me, saying nothing. But I didn’t back down. “You loved my mother, Harry. She was your sister and your best friend. You owe it to her. To me. I
deserve
to know about her life. I am tired of her being as . . . as much of a mystery to me as A. She was
my mother.
”
All my life, my curiosity about my mother was always squashed. I’d ask questions, and Harry or my grandmother or my father would carefully dart around them. Harry would show me beautiful pictures of her and tell me pretty, happy, shiny stories as bright as Christmas presents. They were stories that reminded me of fairy tales, of princesses and ribbons and bright stars. And my father told me nothing. Neither good, nor bad. It was as if she had never existed.
Harry was quiet for a long while. “You’re right. You do deserve to know.”
I tapped the arm of the love seat.
“She . . . Your mother and your father never had what I would call a healthy relationship.” He exhaled. “Who am I kidding? They were relationship
napalm.”
I could believe it. Somehow, it felt as if I were finally hearing the
truth.
“Napalm. They were horrible for each other. But he fell madly in love with her. And to be honest, it hasn’t been like that with any of the women since. Sure, I’ve seen girlfriends come and go with your dad. But this was different. Your mother was so beautiful, and she really didn’t want to get married. She was a free spirit, and he’s . . . your father. I think he figured that he could tame her. That he could turn her into this perfect little lawyer’s wife, a beautiful bird in a gilded cage.”
“That’s exactly like Miriam Rose.”
“A bit. He swept her off her feet, you know. The full-court press. Rooms full of flowers. He once found out she liked lilies of the valley, and at the time, they could only be found—that season—in Hawaii. He special-ordered huge bouquets of them. It must have cost him a fortune. Candlelight dinners at Manhattan’s hottest restaurants, Broadway shows, yacht cruises. I guess after a while, she thought that he really loved her and that they could make it work.”
“And?” I held my breath.
“Marriage doesn’t
change
a person, Calliope. She was still the same free spirit. You could dress her up in a black Chanel dress . . . but she was your mother. She loved to go out dancing and she loved her artsy friends in Soho, and she hung with a bunch of crazy modern-art painters in Brooklyn who’d been squatting in an old building there, this loft where they made films and painted and . . . it was just a wild scene. Trust me, there are films of your mom painting naked somewhere.” He laughed. “She was unstoppable. This ball of energy and ideas. Singing with a band.”

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