The Lake and the Library (10 page)

I pushed the basket in before me as I crawled out from under the table, my eyes taking their sweet time, as usual, to adjust to the yellow light of the library. I rubbed them and looked around, trying to find where I'd put my basket. It had been at my feet only a few seconds ago, but things going helter-skelter around here really didn't surprise me as much as it should have.

“Li? I'm here! Sorry I'm late . . .”

I waited to hear pages turning, feet shuffling, even a book being shut. But there was a kind of silence now that I couldn't avoid. No paper wings, either, even for having made so many yesterday. Instead, the floor was amply strewn with scattered pages, hundreds of them, and not one of them was talking.

Something dripped onto my head, and I jerked up to find the source. Water, leaking in a steady rivulet from the ceiling, or somewhere high up, anyway, as far as I could tell. It hadn't rained in days . . . but that didn't stop the dripping from becoming more insistent, the
plik plik plik
against the hardwood tapping out a distress signal. After nearly taking a spill forwards, I registered a puddle pooling at my feet, and following it up a ways, saw the source coming from between some books on the shelves in the wall.

Whatever this water was, I didn't think it could be natural. Something was wrong.

“Li, I need to talk to you.” I rounded the stacks and came back out towards my exit, and found him sitting on the long end table, clutching my picnic basket to his chest. His eyes looked small. And betrayed.

“There you are!” Those hurt eyes swivelled up to mine, levelling me, like I had no right to say anything. “I'm sorry I'm late, Li. I
am
! I was . . . held up.”

He clutched the basket tighter, the wind from outside screaming against the library's walls, roiling in through my porthole and stirring the abandoned book pages into a dervish.

“Come on,” I tried, thinking maybe this was a game. “I told you I would come, and I did. Just like last time, okay? Do you want to go outside for a bit? I brought you something . . .”

I reached out but his body stiffened. In my periphery, I saw those single offending drips grow and multiply, the puddle reaching nearly to my feet. The dripping grew into a steady rush on all sides, climbing down the walls and through the shelves like a silent fountain. The library was losing its clarity again, but this time it was more powerful. The lights flickered and buzzed, the wood creaking and swelling as it absorbed the water, and Li's eyes grew darker.

I looked around, bodily chilled at the scene that was unfolding around me. “Li . . . what's happening?” Whatever was going on here, it seemed to be because of him. Or because of me.
He thought I wasn't coming back.

I climbed onto the table next to him, carefully prying the basket from his hands so I could take them in mine. They were freezing. I did my best to look straight at him, ignoring that the water had nearly reached the table. “C'mon, Li. How could I forget about you?”

He finally looked up. The lights settled into themselves again, and the creaking stopped. The water receded when he registered me there, holding his hands, blinking like he had been in the middle of a nightmare. I smiled.

“Look.” I swung my legs from the table, landing on the floor that was now completely dry. I opened the basket and invited him to see. “I brought you something! Sorry, there was more earlier.”

He reached out, but I snapped the lid closed. “Ah ah! Not until you cheer up a bit.”

Slowly, surely, his lips spread into a smile and his eyes crinkled. He had been remembered and, because of that, restored. I could feel the air between us warming, the light of the library radiating brighter.

Li shook his tangled curls, and in one swift leap, he was on his feet, twitching and spinning off the table, slipping the basket onto his wrist as he waltzed me out of the corner.

He dipped me. “Okay, okay!” I protested, giggling. He pulled me back up so our faces were close, but he put up a Polaroid barrier before it could get serious. This time, it was a picture of the winding staircase, notions and whispers hidden in the shadows where the flash could not reach. He waved it in a hypnotising metronome cadence, back and forth, then flipped it into the air. When it came back down, it was a goliath moth, settling on my fingertips.

“Wow,” I sighed. Its leaf-shaped antennae twitched towards the sound of distant flapping, then it rose and drifted off to a lamp, while a small cloud of paper sparrows broke past the rose window and towards another shadow.

The birds had perched themselves all over, some more keen to investigate me than the other way around. Li flaunted down to the middle of the room, bouncing from chair to chair and onto one of the big main reading tables as he swung the basket up under his nose, ploughing through his trappings. His eyes lit up as he took out an apple turnover, holding it under his nose and breathing it in. He dropped the basket absently, admiring instead the pastry's dimensions and sensuality rather than eating it. I kept to the edge of the table, leaning my face onto my fists as I watched him pocket the turnover sacredly, as if eating it would lessen its value. His gratefulness was palpable as he bent, a gentle hand touching my head with affection.

I half-blushed, musing out loud, “What
is
the way to your heart, then?”

He winked, tapping his nose as though such a thing at this junction should be obvious. He shuffled his feet, doing a little twist, and kicked over a pile of books that had been sitting on the table. Toeing one up in the air like a hacky sack, he sent it soaring my way, and I had to clamber in order to catch it. It was navy blue and leather-bound, the cover bearing gold foil filigree and latticework, but no title. The spine read
Women of the Classics
. The book must have been at least sixty years old, and I held it reverently as I passed the pages under my fingers.

Li crouched down at my shoulder, eyebrows waggling in their urging way.

“What do you want me to—”

He scuttled closer, his head coming right to my shoulder as his hands reached around mine, thumbing the pages for me. Faint bristles at his jaw rubbed against mine. I held my breath, thoughts tangled up like they usually became whenever he got close to me.
There.
His finger tapped against a new chapter, the facing page a portrait of Helen of Troy. She was a soft, long-necked goddess, pensive and fair, stepping forwards when she should have stepped back. Her eyes misunderstood what was real and what could not have been.

Li's well-boned hands drew away, the tops of mine suddenly missing the touch. I shoulder checked after him; he'd settled back on his hands, relaxed and waiting. I blinked. He waved me on, pointing and pointing.
Go on
, he urged.
Read!

“Okay.” I cleared my throat.

My voice filled the room as I read of Helen's tragedy and betrayal. Helen argued with Aphrodite after finding Paris at her table. The goddess had entwined the two, but Helen rallied against it. But no mortal can protest the will of the gods. So Aphrodite erased Helen's past, and Helen lost herself to another world. Paris met her, and she, probably trying to claw out of the deception placed over her like a veil, let him take her “twixt the lily and the rose.”

I raised my head from the page. The library had melted away, vanished, and there was, very clearly, a night sky above us. It was a colour that I couldn't pinpoint, torchlight fighting for focus against the stars. I was standing in the middle of a road made of individual stones and painted with peonies, olive trees dancing in the lilting breeze, and the night was hot against my cheeks. I plucked a flower petal from my hair, and it dissolved. Li was standing there with me, plucking a bloom from a nearby tree, and he slid it into the book, beside the portrait of Helen. He closed the covers.

I scarcely breathed, watching as the clay buildings, the stone road, the flowers, and the trees rippled and moved backwards, melting into the ground and dissolving in a quiet whirlpool. The shelves reconstituted, the floors reassembled. We were inside a Rubik's cube, watching the pieces click back into reality.

Li just smiled at me, taking the book out of my trembling hands and replacing it with another one. His hands enclosed mine.
Go on,
they said.
Read.

This was just the beginning.

My fingers traced the lines and details of my painted, defiant princess, her face refusing to keep promises or secrets. I went back over her pigments like someone retracing steps that have led them to a deep and unknown country, marvelling at how little it took to get them lost. The shades and hues of the paint built my princess's figure, set her a course, and promised her a future. I decided I would be her Aphrodite and define for her the duty she owed her maker.

I twisted the easel around to reveal the canvas's backside hollow, tucking in the two Polaroids that Li had returned to me, the first pieces of my secret collage. It was surreal just to look at the pictures, the clock and the stairs, and feel relieved that the photos, at least, could exist in the outside world, that the dream didn't let reality get the better of it.

The house phone rang as I turned the canvas back around. Now for my next trick. I grabbed a book from my bedside pile, and without thinking about it, I tore out a page and held it in my hands. I got down on my knees, because this was a sort of ritual, and it was the only position that could keep me still enough to focus. I stared at the page, concentrating, letting my heart build up to a shiver, just like it had under Li's hand. I pictured the pressure of it, tried to draw strength from that. I thought of his eyes and took a quick intake of breath — eyes that were always plunging beneath my skin and making my pulse jump.
Pulse. Pulse. Pulse
. . . I held that feeling close, tried to pump it through my fingers and into the paper. I made enough birds in the library to know the drill, but there I was being helped along by other forces. Out here it would take something extra.
Pulse. Pulse . . .

The phone stopped ringing. A corner of the page twitched. My heart crawled into my throat—

“Ashleigh?”

Mum jolted me out of my spell casting, appearing in the open doorway. My eyes gave away scandal before I could stop them.

“What're you doing?”

“Sitting,” I half-lied.

Her mouth smiled but her eyes were too tired to, detecting my mistruth. “Tabitha's on the phone for you.”

She left my door frame, the thought of my refusing the call never crossing her mind. I called after her. “Tell her I'm not here.”

Mum double-took, sticking her head back into my room. “What? Why, honey?”

Hands clenching my knees again, my impatience reeled back like a wave after a firm flash of it. “I'm just kind of tired, that's all. Tell her I'll call her tomorrow.”

And again, the question. The question that tested both my sanity and my state. “Are you all right, Ashleigh?”

They always assume something's wrong when it's just starting to go right.

I shook my head. “Don't worry about me. I'll call her tomorrow.” Then, over my shoulder, I cast the most sincere of smiles that my mother could do nothing but trust in. She returned it, and shut my door behind her.

I got to my feet, catching the disapproval of my eyes in the vanity mirror.

“Don't look at me like that,” I whispered.

I
t had only just begun, that much was true. I wanted to recapture that moment when we suddenly appeared on an ancient road in Greece, when the air itself tasted sweet and alive just by reading the words. The stories could clothe us and our moments, and we were in a mine of never-ending supply. With our hands serving as pickaxes and audacity powering us on, we went to work.

Li was in the middle of teaching the paper macaw — the one he'd spent the afternoon crafting — how to dance, while I delved into the important matter of finding us the worthiest books I could. I darted up and down the rolling ladders like a dutiful lemur, dumping piles at his feet while the rustling of parchment birds skipped behind me, clouds of them taking to the air as my piles grew and tipped over. I was treating this as very serious business, and Li could see that. He eventually left the parrot to its own devices so he could scamper after me, and he quickly turned book-finding into a competition. His pile grew to challenge mine, and we prepared to duel like the stakes were high and noon was higher.

I dove for my first selection, flipping through manically and smirking. He took on a gunslinger stance, waiting for me to start reading.
“And the crewman knew the song well, and they sang: ‘Fifteen men on a dead-man's chest . . .'”

The floor rumbled, but we were used to this now, the hardwood boards unfurling and peeling back to make room for waves and a ship's deck. The prow burst through, figurehead first, and rose out of the water like it was midresurrection. We busted hard to starboard, and Li was suddenly my crutched Long John Silver, peg leg and all. He grabbed hold of the rigging and followed me to the railing as we gazed out over the sea.

I shook my head, trying to keep my sailor's cap down tight as the salty wind made a reach for it. Absolutely every detail was vivid, everything around us taking on a sepia tone, like the pages themselves, but that just added to the atmosphere even more. “This is too much.”

The deck lurched and I lost the book to the open air and the parchment seagulls floating around us. The covers snapped shut as the book hit the water, and we both tumbled to the library floor when it came back into existence to meet us.

Li reached out and dusted me off, plucking a bit of seaweed from my hair that disappeared with a gentle
pop
when he shook it off.

“It's like we're really there, every time,” I trilled, slumping onto my back and staring at the peaks of the higher-than-high ceiling. I had challenged Li to see if it would be possible to make a paper sky for the paper birds, to make them feel more at home, more alive. Wrinkled parchment cirrus floated above our heads now, and had the sense to develop their own shapes and forms independent of our whims. The birds danced between them, joyous. Li watched me, instead.

“It's just too easy,” I started, but he tapped my head, trying to encourage me out of my logic. “I know, I know,” I said. “I can't ask how, because it isn't that simple.” I shut my eyes. “Maybe it's all in our hearts, then.” I turned my face to him. “But at least we can go to all these places together, right? Then I know I'm not crazy.”

He smiled, giving nothing away as he pointed to my pile. I picked up the one he wanted and clambered to my feet. “Oh, good choice!”

I thumbed through and picked a page at random of
Journey to the Center of the Earth
,
eyes twinkling in wonderment as the bookshelves fissured into the most beautiful rock features, the ground sloping into a subterranean ocean and the walls looming in complement as they morphed into mushrooms the size of houses. It was dark, but bioluminescent stones flickered in the cracks, highlighting Li's long-limbed grace as he bent down to touch the water. The ripple seemed to go for miles, but he pulled me close when the cry of a mastodon echoed from the black coastline miles beyond us.

“Don't worry, Axel, I'll protect you,” I chided, shutting the book just as lightning cracked across the depths in front of us. As the flash subsided, we were back.

We had been going about this for the entire day, but I couldn't get enough. I jumped up and down. “It's incredible! We have to do
Tales from 1,001 Nights
next!” I shuffled through my pile, flipping through
A Child's Garden of Verses
,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
,
Tennyson, Coleridge,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
. . . “I swear I had it here just a second ago . . .”

I looked to Li for help, but his interests had shifted. He was marvelling at my iPod, turning it over, absorbing its angles, testing the tracker wheel, and shaking it at his ear. It was an old model, all thick and with a duct-taped backing from banging it around too much. I blinked.

“I know it's old, but it still works.” I went back to searching, double-taking as Li brought my ear buds an inch from his eyes.

I thought he was kidding — he
had
to be. But his face was genuinely mystified. “It's an iPod, Li.” I took the ear buds away from him, leaning in and putting them carefully into his ears. I pressed play, and I thought he was going to launch out of his skin. He ripped them out of his ears and threw them at me, looking like a cat that had just been punched off a fence.

“Sorry! The volume must be up all the way . . .” I turned it off, put it away. “You really don't know what an iPod is? How long have you been cut off from the world?”

He looked particularly insulted at that, forehead creasing to a frown as he returned to digging through my bag. “Hey, c'mon, leave that stuff alone and help me.” I went back to the book pile, sorting through a few, but before I could choose between
Don Quixote
and Tennyson, Li had let out a little gasp, and was pulling my sketchbook free.

I dropped both books and sprang after him, reaching. “Don't!” He pirouetted backwards onto a table, bounding far enough to keep me at bay while he browsed. What was, at first, another means of teasing me, quickly became something else. He came back my way and settled on the edge of the table, letting me boost up beside him while he flipped through the pages, touching the lines in wonderment.

Wow
,
he mouthed, using every minute muscle in his jaw. It felt like high praise, seeing the ghost of his awe hang there at his mouth.

“I'm not Van Gogh or anything,” I shrugged, dangling my feet. He playfully pushed my shoulder and smacked the pages with the back of his hand, incredulous that I was being so humble. I just shrugged again, nervous, smiling.

He flipped to a blank page and carefully slid the sketchbook into my lap while he sprang up, jogging backwards and, in a flourish, posing.

I giggled but put the sketchbook aside. “Maybe some other time.” I was more keen to get back into the books, diving into them and feeling the worlds build up around us as I read. I swung down, but Li grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me backwards into the table. He levelled me with his eyes, very seriously, tapping my sketchbook.

“C'mon,” I tried to reason. “Wouldn't you rather spend the afternoon in Arabia? Or Avalon?” I looked away, but he guided us eye to eye with his hand at my chin. He wouldn't let it go. I blushed.

Holding his hands up in a
stop
motion, he bounded to my bag, stuck his hand in, and produced a pencil. Taking the sketchbook in his arms, he started scribbling, and my heart jittered as he forced it back on me.

The letters were crooked, the words messy, but it felt like I was hearing his voice for the first time, loud and clear. “
This is
your
kind of magic
,” it said.

Putting the pencil in my hand, he got on his knees and whimpered like a puppy. If his words didn't break me, his face did. I couldn't keep my smile down. “Okay, okay.” I finally gave in, throwing my hands up in the air. “But you'll probably want to sit.”

His teeth flashed in a grin and he bounded up, showboating with a chair until he settled on it, making a fine impression of an aristocrat as he adjusted his collar, unrolled his sleeves, and buttoned the cuffs. He smoothed his chest down and placed a hand over his heart — poised like a gentleman sitting for his portrait photograph. A curt nod to say
I'm ready now
, and I rolled my eyes, mocking, and dove in.

Lines and curves started appearing under my hand. A book-page moth landed on the corner of the paper and I brushed it away, only half-aware of it. I decided that I'd only try to tackle his face, but even still capturing Li at all was like grabbing for dandelion fluff just out of my reach. “This is the first time I've ever seen you sit still,” I murmured, my eyes snapshotting every single one of his details. Short of a laugh, he barely stirred.

It was raw, at first. The outline of the face was mild, relaxed, long but not too broad. The mane of the young adventurer curved up at the nape of his neck, fanning gently like damp feathers, starlit sheen dancing in the curls. I stippled around the curves of his cheeks and mouth, that slight bit of stubble needing definition. His eyes stayed on me, intense as always. My heart sped up, but I tried to focus on the task at hand. His posture was relaxed and muted as I drew the rest of him beyond his shoulders. He was entranced — not by the vanity of being reproduced — but by me. I beat myself up for thinking of
Titanic
and all it implied right at that moment. At least he was clothed, and we weren't about to drown in the Atlantic.

Each time I looked up from the page, the rest of him was wholly still, but not the eyes. They flickered over me, seemingly searching my now flailing heart as it climbed into my throat, and by this time, he had to know he was the reason.

I was pleased enough with having captured all his many details, until our copper sun flickered against something at Li's throat. I blinked and realized that it was a golden medallion, and I added it quickly to the drawing.

My pencil stopped when I was satisfied, and when the attention got to be too much. But as I exhaled and leaned back, there he was. Eyes and grin shaped by graphite under my hands, and the likeness was good, but it did zero honest justice to my Li.
My
Li. I felt more nervous about exhibiting this to my audience of one than I had about bringing a world to life with words just a few minutes ago.

My subject had slipped out of his chair right in front of me, and as usual, I didn't hear him creep up at all. I pressed the sketchbook to my chest. “Now don't expect anything amazing, I've got a lot to learn, still.”

But his expression, more sober than usual, was a wordless reassurance from his shining grey irises, hushing my worry as he lowered the sketchbook. He was plainly taken aback, bending closer to the paper as if it was a mirror. As if he had truly been
seen
for the first time.

I leaned forwards, looking with him. “Is it . . . okay?”

Cheekbones drawing up, his smile forced me to clear my throat and look up all the way. “I'll clean it up a little later, when I'm home.” In the clouds we had made, there was a small golden sun that I didn't remember making. I watched it glint as it shifted. “I was thinking of going to the University of Manitoba to study art,” I found myself saying, and was surprised by it, because I'd never articulated these dreams to anyone else. “But most of all, I would give anything to build a story like the ones we jump into. To shape these worlds and live in them forever.” I shut my eyes. “Then I could stay
here
forever. In a way.”

Li was gazing thoughtfully at the sketch, but his head lifted slowly as I spoke. I waved away the gravity of his stare. “Anyway. What about you? What do you want to be when you . . . well, not when you grow up. But you know what I mean.”

Bending down over our pile of books, he grabbed for and flipped through
Le Morte d'Arthur
, marking a page with his finger as he passed it to me.

“Lancelot?” I said, looking down at the indelible ink word and back up to Li. He struck a pose, and for a second the light of our false sun struck him, and around the edges he seemed to be wearing a gleaming breastplate and hoisting a long sword in the air. I snorted and the metal faded.

“Lancelot is a paragon, but he was
flawed
. You remind me more of this guy.” I shuffled through a dainty copy of Coleridge's works, landing on an illustration that looked like it had been rendered in stained glass. It accompanied one of my favourite poems: “Love,”
the tale of the minstrel who sang stories to a girl, and hid his love inside them
.

Oft in my waking dreams do I

Live o'er again that happy hour,

When midway on the mount I lay,

Beside the ruin'd tower.

There was a tower, all right, and it flickered into view behind us. Half of it had been eroded away by time, or else, the idea of time, and we huddled against it in the waist-high grass. In front of us was the statue of the knight, in my arms was a lute, Li holding the book open for me as I strummed — and my fingers had minds of their own, building a melody from the heart of me. But this was a story within a story, the stone knight bursting to life and performing the sad deeds of the song for us. He lay dying in the lap of his lady, and he muttered something we couldn't hear. Li put his arm around me and his head on my shoulder as the song ended. And we sat like this awhile, leaning on one another, listening to the wind.