The Borrower (15 page)

“Okay, so you can take some things for me. I have some things for my friend Leo that I don’t want to send through the mail. You can drop these at his house, and I’ll give you the address. I tell him you’re coming.”

“Wait, no,” I said. “What kind of stuff?”

He laughed. “Papers. What, you think drugs? You think your father is a drug seller? I’m sending uranium? Your father the Russian arms dealer, this is what you think?”

“I’m just wondering if this could possibly get me arrested.” Law-abiding me.

He went into the study again and came back with a shoebox. “Look,” he said, opening the lid. It looked like mostly receipts and some other papers, folded in half. “This is small potatoes, okay?”

I said, “I don’t really want to mess with this.”

He closed the lid of the box and put his fingers to his temples. “Lucy, you are translucent,” he said. “You are not okay. So all right, you go to Pittsburgh and do this, maybe everything turns out just fine. The apple does not fall off the tree.” Whether he was implying that I was my father’s daughter, or that he wasn’t going to let go of me, I wasn’t sure. Either way, he didn’t know what he was talking about.

I shook my head and said, “Fine, okay.” I wanted to go to bed. I knew, on some level, that as soon as I agreed, I was obligated to go as far as Pittsburgh, even if Ian suddenly decided to go home. If I didn’t deliver the box, it might be a minor inconvenience, or someone might get killed. I’d rather not have a murder on my conscience, even if it meant extending the kidnapping a few more days. I shouldn’t have agreed at all. But I was tired, to the point where my blinks were longer than the spaces in between.

“You’re a good Russian girl,” he said. He disappeared with the box, and when he came back he’d secured the lid with a wide strip of packing tape that ran all the way around. He wrote down the address on the back of an envelope. He said, “I tell them you’re coming.”

T
his is the mess that Lucy made.

This is the boy who lived in the mess that Lucy made.

This is the man who told tales to the boy who lived in the mess that Lucy made.

This is the chocolate that flavored the tales that were told to the boy who lived in the mess that Lucy made.

This is the mayor, all forlorn, who was bribed by the chocolate that flavored the tales that were told to the boy who lived in the mess that Lucy made.

This is the Russia that might be a myth that cradled the mayor, all forlorn, who was bribed by the chocolate that flavored the tales that were told to the boy who lived in the mess that Lucy made.

This is Lucy, all forlorn, on her parents’ couch on Wednesday morn, considering the compulsion that prompted the abduction of the traumatized boy who read the books that lived on the shelves that lined the walls of the little brick building that brewed up the mess that Lucy made.

Ian and I slept in that morning, but my father slept later. “You don’t want to know about his stomach,” my mother said as she scrambled some eggs. “The hotel should make us pay for the damage.”

Ian just poked at his eggs, but drank five glasses of orange juice. I wanted to tell him to stop so we wouldn’t have to pull over all morning for him to pee, but my mother thought I was just driving him back to the hospital.

Before we left, I went into the library and stepped over the air mattress to get my passport out of my mother’s file cabinet. It was something I should have had anyway, but a passport was the kind of thing she insisted on keeping for me, lest I lose it. I wondered if she pictured my apartment floor carpeted in dolls and sticker books and glitter, if she thought I’d lose it under my bed behind my fourth grade math book. It was right there in my document file, in front of my birth certificate and my
SAT
scores and a lot of early report cards that said ominous things about my inability to sit still at a desk. I was twenty years old in the passport photo, bright-faced and ready to fly to Italy with my parents. I put it in my purse. I took it not because I planned to flee the country, but because it was mine, and because I wanted to be prepared. It was like Ian and his ridiculous pool pass. (And maybe, for some reason, we were both just desperate to identify ourselves: Yes, this is me, this smiling, over-lit person. Not the refugee you see before you.) My father’s laptop was on, and I realized I was going to look online whether I wanted to or not. When I first decided to stay here, it crossed my mind that I wouldn’t be able to log on to the computer, and I’d been surprisingly relieved. I didn’t want to know what was out there. I still didn’t want to, but now the computer was up and running, and here I was searching Ian’s name. It seemed there were a few news articles in regional papers (“Local Youth Missing,” “Hannibal Boy Missing Since Sunday”), but when I tried to follow the links they all wanted my password. I’d have to pay a monthly fee for access and give them my name. I looked up the home page of Hannibal Day and found nothing but a photo of bright-hatted children smiling in the snow, and an outdated reminder of the Winter Break schedule. Finally I looked up Pastor Bob, and found that in the past couple of months he’d started a sort of prayer blog—essentially one press release per week, disguised as a prayer.

That week’s entry was called “And Off We Go! Spreading God’s Love Across America!” It was hard to read: calligraphic font on a pale blue background. It came back to me suddenly, my friend Darren Alquist at the mall that last year of high school, as we walked by the window display of Good Pastures Christian Books, the framed, flowered poems, the paperbacks with sunset covers: “How do they know God likes calligraphy so much? What if God
hates
calligraphy?” We’d say it again, for weeks afterward. I’d write it in his yearbook: “God hates calligraphy!” It looked appropriately Christian here on Pastor Bob’s site, but it was maybe not the best move for someone trying desperately not to seem gay.

Halfway down the page, after the announcement of his departure for an East Coast tour with DeLinda “in the BobMobile!” was the following:

Please pray for Ian D., a young sheep in our St. Louis fold that the Lord has allowed to let wander. We pray for his return, and for his loving parents who have been my loyal supporters. “Put on his finger a ring, and on his feet put sandals. Bring forth and slaughter the fatted calf. We shall feast and celebrate, for this is my son who was dead and is now alive; he was lost and now is found.” Luke 15:22–24.

I’d like to say it was hard to hate Pastor Bob when he was (or seemed) so sincere. It wasn’t. I stared at the blurry photo of Bob and DeLinda on the steps of the BobMobile (disappointingly, just a large blue bus), at the way his arm flopped pudgy and pale out of the sleeve of his yellow polo and around her shoulders, at her drugged-politician’s-wife smile, and it was all I could do not to stab a pencil through the screen of my father’s laptop.

I quickly logged onto my own e-mail account, where there were eighteen new messages, but none that looked relevant right now. I wrote to Rocky: “Saw Loraine’s identical twin today on the street! You would’ve died! Don’t know if I told you, the reason I’m here is to take my shift helping out a sick friend from high school . . . So my phone’s off when I’m at the hospital, but please leave me a message and let me know the library still stands!” I felt marginally better, now that the two stories kind of matched. There were probably too many exclamation points, but I couldn’t bear to erase them. I wanted to take shelter behind their manic enthusiasm, their idiotic sparkle.

When I reemerged, Ian had gotten his clothes from the dryer, and my mother was folding up the big white undershirt of my father’s that Ian had slept in. I went into the bedroom to say good-bye to my father. He was sleeping with an ice pack on his head, like always. It wasn’t that he had headaches—he simply couldn’t sleep unless he felt the cold of a Russian night. The blankets were only for my mother. I woke him up and kissed him on the cheek, and he said, “Stay out of trouble.”

“I will,” I said. My father, God bless him, pretended to believe me. He can believe anything he wants.

It was almost ten by the time we got into the elevator, gleefully sniffing the sleeves of our freshly washed clothes. The envelope of money was folded into my jeans pocket, a huge lump I kept checking. Ian had his backpack, and I had my purse and plastic superstore bag and the shoebox. It was an old Hush Puppies box, the trademark beagle gazing from the lid with those awful eyes.

“Can we see the lobby?” Ian asked. Yesterday we’d come up through the garage. I pressed the “L” button.

“It’s not much to see. It’s not like a hotel.”

“Is there a doorman?”

“No, it’s not the kind of building people come to on foot. But there’s a security guard.”

But when the elevator opened and we stepped out, the desk by the front door was vacant. “Is he arresting that guy?” Ian pointed out through the glass front doors, to where the security guard was talking to a man. The man was wearing black jeans and holding a duffel bag and a huge bouquet of red roses.

The man was Glenn.

Before I could drag Ian back into the elevator and escape to the car, Glenn saw me through the window and waved and pointed at me and held up the flowers and said something to the guard. I couldn’t run now that he’d spotted me, especially since he must have seen Ian, too. The guard looked at me for approval, and I apparently nodded. Glenn came through the door in a blast of cold air and walked with the flowers held aloft.

“Surprise!”

“Yes, it is!”

“I tracked down the building, but they wouldn’t let me in without an apartment number!” He handed me the roses and was moving in with his arms open when he noticed Ian standing beside me, staring up.

“Who’s the dude?” Ian said. The word
dude
sounded as strange in his mouth as the word
Pittsburgh
in my father’s.

“I was wondering the same thing.” Glenn plastered a grin on his face, determined to look like a guy who thought kids were absolutely great.

Before Ian could introduce himself, I said, “This is Joey.” Because who knew what was on the St. Louis news about a missing boy named Ian. Plus, even though I’d refrained from telling Glenn about the origami e-mail, I must have mentioned Ian before. He was the center of most of my library stories. “Joey is the son of the friend I was telling you about. Janna Glass. I’m taking care of him for a while. Actually, I’m driving him to his grandmother’s house in Cleveland, to stay there while his mother recovers.”

Ian stuck out his hand. “Joseph Michael Glass.”

Glenn shook Ian’s hand, grinning less and less convincingly.

Ian said, “I guess I’ll just keep calling you Dude.”

“So here’s what happened.” Glenn turned back to me, apparently satisfied that he’d paid sufficient attention to the kid. “You know yesterday, when we talked? I was calling to say we’d have to put off the date because I was going to be, guess where—”

“Chicago?” Ian said.

Glenn ignored him. “I told you how sometimes I sub with the
CSO
, and I got a call Monday morning, so I caught a ride up here and did the concert last night—which was mind-blowing, by the way—and I spent the morning trying to find your place. Not easy! I remembered you said Lake Shore Drive, though, so I did some detective work, and long story short, I’m at your deposal!”

“My what?”

“I said, I’m at your disposal, milady.” He bowed at the waist.

I remembered right then that there were security cameras in the lobby. Every second we stood there, we were being videotaped. If police came on my trail my father would cover for me, but the security guard would certainly remember us after this spectacle, and the tapes would be Exhibit F in court.

“That’s
so
sweet,” I said. “The problem is that we’re leaving. We need to get Joey to his grandma’s.”

“This is tragic!” Glenn said, but he was laughing. His feelings weren’t going to be terribly hurt, not until I was thrown in jail and he realized he’d been dating a madwoman.

Meanwhile Ian was turning in circles, holding his backpack out as ballast. “Guess what, though!” he shouted. “We have two more seats in the car! You can come with us!”

I couldn’t talk or breathe, and Glenn chose this moment to finally acknowledge Ian. “Now
that
’s a great idea. I love Cleveland!” He turned to me. “Is that okay? I have a couple days off, because they’re doing the string quartet series. I mean, I’ve got all my stuff right here.” He meant the duffel bag lying at his feet. Had he been planning to stay on my parents’ floor?

Since no good lie came to me, I found myself nodding. I considered breaking up with him right there, but on what grounds? How? And if he went back to Missouri, he might watch the news. He obviously hadn’t yet, or he would have recognized Ian. Whereas if he went home in a couple of days, at least maybe the story would be dying down.

We rode the elevator down to the garage. I balanced the roses on top of the shoebox and tried to keep from throwing up.

While Glenn put his bag in the trunk, I got in the front and Ian got in the backseat next to the shoebox and the roses. I turned and whispered to him.
“What were you thinking?”

“I felt sorry for him. Roses are extremely expensive.”

Glenn got in and squeezed my knee, and we were off.

“Hey,” Ian said when we were out on Lake Shore Drive again, the sun glaring onto the water and the midday joggers. “If you’re Dorothy and I’m the Scarecrow, then Dude is the Cowardly Lion! And this box of stuff is the Tin Woodman!”

“Maybe you’re Toto,” I said. He laughed and started barking. It was true, the Scarecrow didn’t fit him. He didn’t need more brains. Courage, he would need lots of. A strong heart. I tried to remember what vital organ Dorothy lacked. Oh, yes. She wanted to go home.