The Borrower (18 page)

I took one hand off the steering wheel to hit it on my jeans in applause.

“This is great!” he said. “I could not have a tongue and I’d be fine!” It reminded me of what Sophie Bennett had said about him, that he was the kind of kid who would turn out all right no matter what. But I couldn’t
really
believe that, or else what was I doing out here?

Now that Glenn was out of the car, now that the monotony of the drive had dulled my adrenaline to the point where I could almost think linearly, I felt I had to try to talk seriously with him. I wanted to say something helpful and profound that he could remember after I’d been locked away. If I ran the risk of his getting so angry that he turned me in—so be it. Better than this all being for nothing.

I said, for some inane, incomprehensible reason, “You know, the first real librarians were monks and nuns. They copied books by hand, and they kept them safe in the monastery.”

“Oh.” He put his foot back up on the dashboard. The great thing about ten-year-olds is they don’t balk at non sequiturs. “Is that why libraries are so quiet? Because the monks couldn’t talk?”

“Maybe. I never thought of that before.”

“Why do monks stop talking?”

“For religious reasons. I’m not exactly sure.”

“But the Bible never says not to talk. I know that
definitely.
”

“I think they partly just liked it that way. They liked living in the mountains in a quiet place.” I was being ridiculously cautious—trying just to crack the lid on the can of worms, not bust it open on the sidewalk. “I mean, none of them ever got married. They chose just to live with other monks. Or other nuns. People have been doing that for a long time, just choosing not to get married and to live with their friends instead. You used to have to be a monk or a nun to do it, but that’s a really hard life. Now a lot of people just do it to be happy.”

He leaned the passenger seat back as far as it would go. “If people visited the library, did they have to not talk at all?”

“I don’t think people really visited. The monks just
kept
the books. Sometimes they chained them down to the shelves, so they wouldn’t be stolen.”

“Because they were so valuable?”

“Right. They had all those illuminated letters, and each one took months to copy. “

“If I were copying a book, I would always put in some of my own words, or a secret message. About some really huge secret. Do you think they ever did that?”

“Maybe. Sure. What kind of secret?”

“About treasure. I think I’d like to be a monk.”

“I think you’d talk too much.”

I tried to come up with another angle of approach, but a few minutes later he was asleep on the leaned-back seat.

A
s I drove, I made a list in my head of all the people who could link me to Ian’s disappearance. If the authorities got the slightest hint, one anonymous phone tip, they’d have their pick of witnesses now. My father would know to lie for me, but my mother would make a mess of it, and who knew what Glenn would do. Loraine, of course, would recognize Ian’s name on posters or in the papers, but she didn’t know quite how much time he spent with me. Tim the landlord would notice I was gone, but he wouldn’t know about Ian. I realized I should call and tell him I was out of town. Sophie Bennett, the teacher at Hannibal Day, was also a concern. She knew I was worried about Ian. But she knew the family well enough that she’d assume they’d locked him up somewhere. She was probably dying to tell me about it, asking at the library when I’d be back. If she started talking to Rocky, if he told her I’d vanished, that would be the worst. But nobody talks to Rocky.

Rocky could figure it out easily, all on his own. Maybe he already had. And yet somehow I wasn’t worried about him. Why was that? My stomach lurched. “Because he’s in love with you,” it said.

When Ian was in the bathroom at a gas station, I stood in the snack aisle and dialed the downstairs library extension on my cell, knowing Sarah-Ann would answer. She did.

“I’m just checking in,” I said.

“Oh!” I could picture her sitting there, surrounded by books she couldn’t figure out how to re-shelve, reading a magazine from upstairs. “Are you back?”

“No, I’m not—I think it has to be a few more days. My friend is very sick, and I’m helping with her children. It’s worse than I thought.”

“Oh, my heavens, well I’m sure you’re a blessing!”

“Can you handle everything for a while?”

“Yes. Well, we had to redo the computer, because things got in there backwards. But it’s just fine now, and yes, it’s wonderful!”

I wasn’t going to bother imagining what that meant. “And Chapter Book Hour is 4:30 on Friday,” I said.

“Oh dear, it is, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.
The Borrowers
, by Mary Norton. The one about the little people who steal things. It should be in the top left drawer.”

“I don’t see anything but staplers!”

“That’s the right. Look on the left.”

“Oh, good! Where do I start?”

“Right where the bookmark is.”

“Now Lucy, you need to talk to Rocky. He was trying to reach you. Did he reach you? There was something terribly important. Shall I connect you upstairs?”

“No, I’ll call him. Tell him I’ll call very soon.” I hung up and bought Oreos and a box of tampons.

How to jog like a ten-year-old boy:

1. Swing your arms violently, as if shadowboxing.

2. Lift your knees very high. Remember: moving forward is not your primary goal.

3. With every step, scream the word “JOG!”

Back in the parked car, I told Ian we had to stop in Pittsburgh, but that after that he needed to pick the road. We were using my Swiss Army knife to spread peanut butter on the crackers from Ian’s backpack. We watched the stream of travelers rubbing their rear ends as they walked into the Shell.

“I’m tired of deciding.”

“Okay, but this is your trip. If you don’t tell me where to go, I’m taking you home.” I felt almost as if I were saying this for legal reasons, as if this defense would hold up in court. I never took him anywhere he didn’t tell me to go, Your Honor! Except to make a brief Mafia drop in Pittsburgh!

Ian was flipping through the map book angrily, the way he’d flipped through
Blueberries for Sal
months before. “Why do you always make everything my fault?”

“I don’t think anything’s your fault. What do you mean, exactly?”

“You’re making me do all the bad stuff, telling us where to go. You never did anything bad, just me.”

“Hmmm.”

“But really you’re the worst one. You’re the kidnapper.” But he was trying not to laugh.

“I think you’re the librarian-napper,” I said. “And now you have to choose someplace, or I’ll choose. And what I’ll choose is Hannibal, Missouri.”

He closed the book and flapped it open randomly. “Vermont.” It was in the middle of the book, on the page with New Hampshire. “That’s where the Green Mountain Boys were from, anyway. I know all this stuff about them. And it used to be its own country. Only it and Texas ever used to be their own countries. Oh, and Hawaii.” I worried he’d launch into his song again, but his mood seemed to have shifted back to serious. Vermont was much, much farther than I wanted to go, but it seemed as logical a mouth to this crazy river as any. Inertia would carry us at least half the way there.

I said, “Okay. Buckle up.”

“And also, it’s definitely where my grandmother lives.”

A few of the myriad questions you must face when transporting a ten-year-old boy and a box of illegal materials across the country: Do felony laws differ depending on which state you are apprehended in, or does it all go federal and therefore not matter? Are prolonged stress and the life of the fugitive perhaps more damaging to the child psyche than being raised by an overbearing anorexic evangelical? If you were a Cyclops, what color would you want your eye to be? If you had all your fingernails surgically removed, would they eventually grow back? Is it possible that your Mafioso father’s cash is marked as illegal and the police are currently tracing your path from gas station to fast food franchise, hoping to arrest someone named Dmitri the Glove? What do you get when you cross a meatball with an elephant?

And then, at dusk, twenty miles from Pittsburgh: red lights, blue lights, that surprisingly gentle siren. We pulled over. We were on a smaller road, for the scenic route.

“Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot,” Ian whispered, only many more times, as we watched the cop talk into her radio in our rearview. Ian was in the backseat again, thank God, having climbed back in the middle of the afternoon to stretch out. I hadn’t yet sworn in front of him, not that he’d heard, and I didn’t now. A long time later, she walked up to my window with that wide-legged swagger all women cops have. Normally at this point I tell the officer exactly what I’ve done wrong—failing to stop fully at a stop sign, usually—and my honesty has won me about ten warnings and no tickets. I wasn’t about to try honesty now.

“Yes?” I said.

She had short, curly hair and I could smell the mint from her gum. I wanted to trade lives with her.

“You aware your left brake light is out?”

“No,” I said, in a voice like she’d just handed me a diamond necklace. “No, I did not realize that.”

“Mommy, who’s the scary lady?” Ian said from the backseat. I tried to shoot him a look in the rearview. “I’m frightened, Mommy.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Thank you so much for telling us. They can fix that at a garage, right? I mean, we’re from out of state as you can see, we’re traveling, so we’ll need to get it fixed right away. In the morning.”

She chewed her gum and looked past me into the car. We looked remarkably unsuspicious, for the number of laws we had broken. “I’m gonna write you a warning,” she said. “Welcome to Pennsylvania.”

“We’re visiting the Liberty Bell!” Ian shouted. But she’d already gone back to her car to fill out the form.

I was just breathing my relief when I realized there was now a computerized record of our being in Pennsylvania on this date. I wondered if they listed in their report the number and ages of occupants in the car, the way they listed the car’s make and color. I was glad again that we hadn’t taken my father’s Mercedes. Who knows what would have come up on the police scanner then.

The cop handed me the warning, and we drove off. The sky had turned dark as we sat there.

“She didn’t even yell at you,” Ian said. “My mom gives much better warnings than that.” It was the first time he’d directly mentioned his parents since we left.

“It wasn’t that kind of warning,” I said, although it might have felt good to be yelled at right then.

I
t was after seven when we got to the suburb where Leo and Marta Labaznikov lived.

“Labaznikov,” Ian chanted from the backseat. “La-baz-ni-kov, La-baz-ni-kov. One Labaznikov, please.”

The town was depressing, a collection of small mid-twentieth-century houses built on about five different floor plans, as if you wouldn’t notice they were all basically the same if they alternated which side the chimney was on.

“Yes, I’d like the Labaznikov special with extra mustard, sir. I shot him in the head with a Labaznikov.”

I found the house and pulled in behind the red and black BMWs, shiny fraternal twins that looked rather out of place in the little driveway. I knew the Labaznikovs from various parties I was stuffed into dresses for as a child, where I had run around under the tables with fifteen other children, all of whom spoke fluent Russian to each other. I knew about ten words, most of which had to do with food. My only full sentence was
“Ya ne govoryu po russki”
: “I do not speak Russian.”

When I reached back for the box, I realized Ian was undoing his seat belt. “You stay here,” I said. “It’ll be about thirty seconds.”

“I have to pee!” He opened his door. “And I’ve always wanted to meet a real live Labaznikov!” And because I was operating with half a brain, I got my lies confused. Or rather I forgot my first lie, to my parents, that I was only watching Ian in Chicago, and was driving out east by myself to visit college friends. I remembered it with my finger halfway to the doorbell, and started to tell Ian that if he waited in the car, I’d pull over at the next bathroom.

But there was Marta Labaznikov, flinging the door open and performing the backward-leaning, open-armed welcome gesture commonly associated with movie versions of old Italian women. My father’s Russian friends became more affectedly European the longer they stayed in the U.S.

“Lucy, you used to be so little!” she cried. If I were overweight, I’d have been offended, but she was simply remarking on the miracle of my no longer being seven years old. “And this is the poor motherless boy!” She swooped Ian into what must have been a suffocating hug. Marta was not a small woman. I wondered if my father had simply told her the story of Ian and she was inferring that he was the same child, or if he had known or guessed that Ian would still be with me and told her to expect two of us. In either case, I could see we weren’t getting out of there anytime soon, which might have been fine but for the thick, chemical smell in the air, like cat litter but stronger. My throat was suddenly tight.

Leo appeared now behind his wife, with the same Italian-woman move. I was surprised how shriveled he’d become, how his head was covered with pale brown spots. I wanted to exclaim, like a Russian grandmother, “Look how
old
you’ve grown!”

Leo moved stiffly forward in the hall, pointing a swollen-knuckled finger at Ian, who had finally been released from Marta’s bosom. “I have a question for you,” he said. Ian looked startled and, for the first time since we’d run away, truly scared. “What is in common,” Leo asked, “between furniture and a sentence?”

“I remember that one!” I said, more to calm Ian down than anything. Riddles were Leo’s primary way of relating to children. He used to come up to me at my father’s birthday parties and say, “Who is bigger? Mrs. Bigger or Mrs. Bigger’s baby?” and I’d say, “The baby is just a little bigger!” He always seemed startled that I could answer. Now Ian looked up at me with a mixture of relief that Leo wasn’t interrogating him and confusion about what I could possibly mean.