The Borrower (8 page)

“You know, Ian,” I said, “you can check out a lot of stuff right before we close and bring it back after.”

“That’s not true. Because then we’re out of
town
. For almost a whole week, until New Year’s, and my mom will check my suitcase. So I’d have to get stupid books, like Hardy Boys, and then I could only get ten books anyway, because I’m only allowed to check out how old I am.” A lot of families had that rule: a five-year-old could borrow five books, and so on. He leaned back against the big potted tree by the wall and almost sent it crashing down.

“I think ten books should be plenty, don’t you? You don’t want your suitcase to get much heavier than that.”

“And my mom would never let me bring extra books because she
never
lets me do
anything
.”

“Sounds tough,” I said. I went back behind my desk. He looked between his arms to see if I was still watching him, which I was. He picked at the leaves of the plant for a minute, breathing loudly, then stomped over to the mythology shelf.

He ended up checking out the first ten Bobbsey Twins books. “Are these as stupid as they look?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“Awesome.”

At the end of the day, Glenn appeared at my desk with the library copy of
1,000 Great Date Nights
. “Pick one,” he said.

I hadn’t invited him to come see me at work, and the presumption bothered me. We’d seen each other quite a few times since the night of the concert, and he’d been e-mailing me constantly, but lately I’d been keeping my replies short. There was something a little too slick about him, the way he’d ask me questions straight out of GQ’s date guide, like “What’s your favorite childhood memory?” And the way he would just show up like this, flashing his piano-key teeth.

I was glad there was no one around. I’d had a few desperate and fruitless requests that afternoon for
The Polar Express
and
The Night Before Christmas
, but right now the basement was empty.

“Let’s be spontaneous,” he said. He was saying this a lot lately, like it was some great virtue. For a jazz musician, I suppose it is—four bars to fill, and a horn in your hands—but it doesn’t do a librarian a hell of a lot of good.

I started flipping through the book. “Don’t take me to feed the ducks.”

“Hey,” he said. He leaned over the desk. “I’ll take ya to the moon, baby.” Cheesy Sinatra voice and wiggling eyebrows.

I could hear Loraine’s heels clunking unevenly on the stairs. “Okay,” I whispered. “Pretend to browse, fast.” I stood up and yanked the white bed sheet off my desk chair and tossed it under the desk. I’d been using it all week, hoping it would protect my skin from the chair fabric, but if anything, my rash had gotten worse. I was considering switching to one of the beanbag chairs, propping it up on a wide stack of books like a giant orange beanbag throne.

Loraine leaned over the desk to hand me a sealed envelope, which I knew from experience probably contained a twenty-dollar gift card to one of the chain restaurants by the highway. “Merry Christmas!” she said. “And Hanukkah too, of course. Make sure you get some sleep. You could really use it.” Glenn stood there pretending to be fascinated by the Junie B. Jones books. When she left I closed up, and Glenn and I walked upstairs together. We passed Rocky at the main desk, and I thought of introducing Glenn as an old friend, but of course Rocky had seen him at the benefit. So instead I just said, “Merry Christmas! I’ll call you for a movie!” and Rocky gave a look like he was trying not to laugh. No: more like he was trying hard to look like he was trying not to laugh, but couldn’t get it quite right.

Glenn and I went to Trattoria del Norte and drank a lot of wine, and I struggled to make conversation. We didn’t have much in common, I was discovering. And the more I thought about it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to date someone whose magnum opus was inadvertently based on a tile cleaner jingle. Nor did I want to be around when someone pointed this out to him. He didn’t seem even slightly aware of my ambivalence, though, and he just kept grinning at me from across the table, trying to stare into my eyes. I’d watched
The Music Man
enough times as a child to be wary of smiling musicians. The way they waltz into your library singing, swinging that con man briefcase and telling you to be spontaneous. They tell you this whole damn town could be saved with a little luck and a good marching band.

To fill the silence I almost started telling Glenn about Ian’s temper tantrum, but thought better of it. If I was already bothering Rocky, who knew the kid and worked with me, how much would I annoy someone who
really
didn’t care? And amid the five hundred stupid decisions I made that winter—decisions that pointed straight to jail or worse—this drunken, half-arbitrary choice was probably the one that saved my life.

I
tried to be objective in the way I watched Ian that winter, after read the origami e-mail. I don’t think I was imagining the way his eyes had gone dull or how he tended to shifted his weight heavily back and forth between his feet now, as if he were angrily waiting for a bathroom. He had always been moody, but before there had been good moods, and slightly manic moods, and now there weren’t. I gave him
The Search for Delicious
in early January, and he returned it the next day.

“It was too boring,” he said. “I stopped.” I was shocked.
The Search for Delicious
, which my best readers will finish in a day, skipping dinner if necessary.

“Well, what do you want now?”

“Something else stupid.”

“You want something stupid?”

“Well, it’s all stupid, so I guess I don’t care. I’ll read a baby book.” He squeezed himself into one of the plastic chairs built for three-year-old rear ends and picked
Blueberries for Sal
without looking. He flipped the pages so fast I worried he’d rip them. “This book is the smartest book ever. This book is a genius. This book is too hard for me. Yay.” He shoved it back horizontally on top of the other picture books.

Another day, he came bolting down the stairs, his coat still zipped. “Don’t tell her I’m down here!” he whispered, and ran past my desk and into the aisles. In the brief second I saw his face, it didn’t look scared, but it didn’t look exactly like a child playing a game, either. It looked like he was trying to be bad.

A minute later, Mrs. Drake came down the stairs as fast as she could in her stacked heels and jeans and gray cashmere. “I’m sorry, Sarah-Ann, have you seen my son, Ian?” My God, she was thin. Her elbows were the widest part of her arms.

Ian couldn’t see me from where he was, so I pointed silently down the biography aisle. She disappeared where he had, and after I heard Ian’s high screech, I watched her drag him back to the stairs, pink fingernails around his shoulder. Ian’s voice echoed down the steps: “But Mom, you can’t be mad at me, because—
ow!
—because when I was hiding, I already repented! Mom, I already repented, you’re not allowed to get mad!”

I should have paid more attention, then, to his sneakiness, his slipperiness, his tendency to hide. I also should have noticed, the next week, when he started asking about the janitor. He stood in front of my desk, his face studiedly bored, his voice a monotone.

“Who cleans this stupid library?”

“I’m sorry, Ian, I didn’t understand that.”

“I said, who cleans the library.”

“A very nice lady named Mrs. Macready comes and vacuums. She has white hair.”

“Does she clean it every day?”

“I have no idea. Probably not. More like every other.”

“Does she clean it before you get here, or after you leave?”

“Okay, I have some work to do.”

“I thought your work was answering questions for kids.”

“Yes, questions about books. Do you have a question about a book?”

He picked up
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch
from the edge of my desk. “Yes. If I dropped this, and we waited for the janitor to clean it up, would she clean it up before the library opened, or after it closed?”

“The answer is
you
would clean it up, because you made the mess.”

He dropped the book on the floor and ran upstairs.

I didn’t see him for ten days after that, which might have been a record. The next time he came in he brought me a plate of cookies, each covered in bright blue frosting with a splotch of green in the middle. He looked almost like his old self, walking on tiptoes to where I stood by the return cart. I had decided not to sit down in my desk chair for a week, to see if the rash would clear up. Sonya waved at me, pointed her daughter toward the puppets, and headed back upstairs.

“Even though it’s still January, I made cookies for St. Patrick’s Day, because it’s the next good holiday! The blue is to represent the ocean, and the green is to represent Ireland! I food-colored the frosting, and my hands are still blue.” He put the cellophane-covered paper plate on the return cart and showed me his pale blue palms.

“You look like a Smurf.”

“A what? And also, I’m sorry about throwing your book.
And
, the reason I haven’t been here is I had my baptism, and we had a party, and I got about five thousand books.”

I peeled back the cellophane and took out a cookie. “What did you get?”

“I got some origami books, and then these five books from this series called Towards the Light. It’s about these kids at the end of the earth, and most people have risen to heaven, but these kids stay behind to try to get everyone else saved. They’re really for teenagers, but they’re easy.”

“Huh. Are they any good?”

“Yeah, they’re really fun. There’s a movie of them, too, but my mom thinks it might be too scary. She has to watch it first, to see. Do you have any here?”

I was trying to swallow the cookie, which was somehow both dry and sticky at the same time. “You know, we don’t have a lot of kids’ fiction that’s religious. But we do have nonfiction books about religion.”

“Oh, yeah. There’s the ones like the stupid Eyewitness book with the dumb India gods with all the arms. I already read them all. You should get Towards the Light.”

I knew the kind of series Ian was talking about. One week when I was twelve and staying with a born-again neighbor, I read three books off her daughter’s bookshelf and found them tremendous fun, the closest thing I’d ever read to a romance novel or a crime thriller. The only one I can still remember started on a charter plane flying over Africa, with a “backslidden” Christian noticing that the pilot prayed before he ate his sandwich. He asked him about it and they talked, but before long the plane crashed, leaving them all lost in the Sahara, et cetera, et cetera, until everyone found Jesus or died. But I hadn’t actually thought those books were
good
. How could Ian, the child who’d read
The Wind in the Willows
seven times, fall for it?

“Anyway, it was pretty cool because I got to have friends from church come to my open house after, and that’s all I get this year because I’m too old for a birthday party.”

His birthday was in April, I knew from his computer account. “What, eleven? That’s not too old at all,” I said. “Is no one in your grade having a party this year?”

He sighed, peeled back the cellophane, and rearranged the cookies to fill the gap from the one I’d taken. “It’s not exactly that. It’s more that, okay, last year? I had my party and all the people I wanted to invite were girls, and we had this very fantastic party that was mostly just a treasure hunt outside. But my dad said this year it has to be either all boys or exactly half and half. And no one even does a half and half party anymore. Everyone does a sleepover, and I just really don’t want to. So my dad said I can’t have a party at all, and then I said okay, could I have my friends from this religion class thing instead, and he said definitely not, but I don’t even get why. So then he said I was too old for birthdays anyway, and I should just save up my allowance and buy myself something.”

Ian seemed sad—devastated, really—but I got the impression the wound wasn’t fresh. His birthday was still four months away, but he’d already been stewing on this one awhile. I had tried, all along, to be noncommittal, the neutral and friendly librarian—kind of like the therapist who just sits and nods. But in this case, I couldn’t help taking sides. I said, “Ian, that really doesn’t sound fair. I don’t think that’s fair at all.”

He smiled at me, looked over his shoulder to make sure Sonya wasn’t coming down the stairs, and helped himself to an Ireland cookie. I took a second myself, although the first was still mostly lodged in my throat.

What I needed right then was the perfect novel to put in his hands, the one that would fly him fifty thousand miles away from his mother and Pastor Bob Lawson and Hannibal, Missouri. Instead I said, “These cookies are fantastic.”

I
found Tim the artistic director leaning against the wall outside his apartment, his eyes wet and happy. I was back early from Glenn’s, having made an excuse about work in the morning.

“Lucy the librarian!” He kissed me on the cheek. “I’m completely drunk! We’re having a State of the Union party! I’m getting the costumes! Come help me!” He sat on the floor to tie his shoe. Inside his apartment people were laughing, and it sounded like plates were breaking.

“Tim, here’s a question for you,” I said as we headed down to the costume shop.

Tim unlocked the door and pulled the chain on the overhead lightbulb. This was the room where I came to do my laundry and had once shrieked at what I thought was an animal on the table but turned out to be a wig. It was a carefully organized space, with rows of labeled plastic bins: “Sparklies,” “Hats,” “Military,” “Tights,” “Women’s Shoes, 7–9,” “Elastics.” The walls were decorated with old show posters and an enormous buck’s head with a straw hat hanging off one antler.

“Yes!” he shouted. “A question! Ask!” He pulled a cardboard box from under the table in the middle of the room and started pawing through it.