He nods. “Do you live here?”
“The library? No.” He’s staring so intently, the beam of his white-blue eyes rippling my insides, the words tumble out before I can bite them back. “You know, I don’t. They have this thing about doing laundry in the bathroom. Pretty unreasonable, really. And it’s kind of hard to feel homey someplace when they won’t even let you wallpaper.”
He doesn’t blink.
“It’s a joke,” I say.
“Oh. But you live in Cumberland? Does the bus come out this far?”
Since it’s clear another wisecrack might not go over, I tell him I get a ride into Fort Harmon for school, then pull out the eighth book and flit my fingers across the spines, like my oh my, what was that other book I was looking for?
“Kind of slow out here in the summers, huh,” he says. A stack of five books balances on his skinny hip. Nietzsche. Camus. Hermann Hesse. Two others I can’t see. I can’t resist.
“Slow? Nah—you should have been here last summer. Now, last summer we were low on cockroaches, and let me tell you, that put a damper on all sorts of activities—flea circus, Fourth of July parade...” His dark eyebrows cinch together and his eyes seem to recede beneath them as he watches my mouth intently. “Yeah, so.” I clear my throat. “Are you out at the hotel?”
He shakes his head. “I’m staying with my grandparents this summer—doing some yard work for them, playing a lot of Cribbage.” He looks at me sideways and his smile spreads slowly. We’re standing in front of the circulation desk that I only dimly remember walking towards as he talked. I shove the books across the counter at Mrs. Hammond, wait for her to check them out, and try to figure out exactly how many steps it is to the door. “I could maybe use someone to show me around,” he says. I nod, look away, but I can still feel his eyes on my face.
“The library? It’s not that tough. You just—”
“No, not the library. Around town. You know. Show me what I’m missing.” His lips hitch to one side in a shy smile. “Surely I’m missing something.”
I slide the books off the counter as possible excuses run through my head: summer job, impending house arrest, crippled twin sister to tend... He takes the top book from my hands and his eyes brighten. “Oh, wow. Dickinson?”
“Yup. Gotta go.” I pluck it from his fingers and stop to take a deep breath when I get to the door. The normal thing to say. “See you around.” The street is blinding.
When I walk up to the house after all afternoon noticing everything so hard on Izzy’s behalf, I can’t stop: farmhouse frame of peeling white clapboards, one dusty window next to a tattered screen door at the top of three rickety wooden steps. The hill it sits on has worn away to an abrupt cliff, so the edge of the house flush against the edge of land seems stories high. Some nights I wake from dreams of a door opening into air or the foundation nibbled to sand, one ear to the ceiling hearing a high tide, the other ear to the floor full of the thud of waking up from deep dream.
Father remembered when there was still a landing you could stand on with your back up against the clapboard. From there, a path curved through the beach grass so steep you half slid down to where the water washes up, shells turning end over end in the disappearing glitter. But now, coming up from the beach, you have to climb the steep twenty feet hand over hand, use the side of the house to pull yourself up onto the crumbling flagstones before winding around to the front door.
I’m thinking about the perfectly symmetrical, sharply carved bones of Everett Lloyd’s nose as I walk through the kitchen, hustle through the living room where Grand’s staring at the TV, and head straight upstairs. Izzy is watching the ceiling closest to the window and when I walk in her eyes shift over to me with a sneaky smile. She’s propped up as I left her, our dog-eared D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths open on her chest, the bones of her bird body arranged and absolutely still under the thin white bedspread. A juice glass on the night-stand holds a cluster of beaded flowers, all of them clear crystal but each a different improbable shape. Except for the green florist’s tape wrapped around their stems, they’d look like tiny ice sculptures.
Izzy leans forward and I fluff the pillows behind her downy hair, then flop the two new books and pharmacy bag on her lap. “Oh, and this for your footboard,” I say, pulling from my pocket a curly piece of broken tree root I’d found earlier. She smiles, reaches, for it, runs her fingers over the corkscrew curves, then holds it out towards the collage of scraps and bits of pictures and words she’s torn from books and taped on the inside of her footboard over the years. The pictures are scattered, graffitied over, upside down and overlapping: an old etching of twin brothers fused at the chest half covers a colored pencil drawing of Aphrodite bubbling up from the ocean. Scribbled over the pictures are words like “alluvium” and “scrimshaw” and Izzy’s spindly pen renderings of constellations and magnified neurons. I get the tape out of the bedside table, pull her towards the foot of her bed, and she tapes the root along the edge of a print of a man’s head in profile, his skull labeled in rectangles and trapezoids with words like “loyalty” and “secretiveness.”
When I prop her back up at the headboard she squints at the collage, smiles, tilts her pointy-chinned head as she fans the pages of the Dickinson book for a second, then snaps it closed, folds her hands and gives me a prim look like a teacher listening to a cheater making excuses.
“Yeah?”
She grabs the notepad from her bedside table and writes Carpet color? in her rounded, whisper-light handwriting.
I squint hard. I’ve been paying so much attention to the day-to-day incidentals of the library I never noticed the things that stay the same. Then I remember the sounds I’d memorized and let out a little hoot. “There isn’t any—just the checkered tile left over from the barber shop.”
Her grey eyes light dimly and then turn inward. She writes, How many books in all?
This is new—guessing instead of noting, and she’s the only one who can change the rules of play. “No fair,” I say. “Really, Izzy, if you’d asked me before, I could have checked with the librarian.” I pull back the bed sheet, see the drainage bag attached to her thigh is not quite half full, then check the clock and do the math. Four hours, so it can wait another four.
Izzy’s looking out the window again when I move her legs so she’s lying on her right side for a while. She picks up the pencil and notepad and writes, Going down to the water?
“What do you want?”
Some violet. But careful—the tide’s still high.
I don’t ask how she knows, seeing only sky all day out the window, but when I step off the terrace I see she’s right. The tide’s so high it doesn’t break, just slaps the edge of the cliff so hard I know I’m in for nightmares.
Years since I felt myself drifting inside her, my voice and her voice intermingling and all either of us could hear. Now with the dull silence of a whole body to mind, how she can’t see the little twitchings of feeling as they register on her skin. The tent-pulled tension at lip corners. The flash-stab of her wrong-doing wrist. How when she’s lying her eyes mirror too intentionally or don’t meet mine at all, two flies flitting to every light-spot inch of a window trying to find an opening. How she comes in with the heat of the day in her hair, teeth pasty and dry from smiling. Tangy with the dust of some other place, offerings in hand. I take the books and craft projects and tell her, tell me, then listen beyond her speaking, for the voice fluttering behind her eyelids, but no matter how hard I reach towards her thinking, I can’t hear. That lost-to-me internal voice drowned out by her noise-making throat.
Two
Since there’s no shore to comb and won’t be still for hours, I walk around to the other side of the house. The air feels still, poised on the brink of storm, and then a high quick wind twirls the ends of my hair and ruffles water the color of a mirror-back as I follow the cliff-edge