The Bookshop Of Yesterdays. Amy Meyerson

reread the letter, trying to imagine how Billy must have felt receiving it. He never wrote back. I would have remembered that. I would have written to him again, letters back and forth until they amounted to a correspondence, possibly more. He must have wanted to write back. Why else would he have kept the letter? He must have known, for reasons still unclear to me, that he couldn’t.

      I slowly refolded the letter. Was this it? Had Billy led me to this desk simply to show me that he’d never forgotten me? What an underwhelming end to our last great hunt together.

      As I dropped the letter into the desk, I noticed something written along one of its edges in tiny, precise script: Down. I didn’t make anything of it until I returned the photographs to the desk and saw the word repeated on their backs: down, down, down, down, down. And on the photograph from the pet shop, a phrase: down went Alice. The next clue.

      I raced around the room, looking for a bookshelf or a stack of hardbacks, any battered old copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There wasn’t a single book in the living room.

      I took a deep breath before returning to the bedroom. I had no choice; I had to go in there again. The spines of the hardbacks on the bookshelf were so muted their titles dissolved into the faded canvas. Little Women, Death on the Nile, The Color Purple, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues—novels I couldn’t imagine Billy reading. Between Sylvia Plath and Colette, a thin crimson spine all but disappeared. In peeling gold leaf, Lewis Carroll.

      The cover was understated. Red with a small portrait of Alice in gold at the center. I ran my hands along Alice’s embossed hair, her frilly dress, an approximation of which I wore for three Halloweens until I could no longer zip the polyester costume. Did Billy see me in that blue dress? Did he remember that I wanted a pet rabbit to dress in a waistcoat? I flipped the cover to look inside.

      Alice fell down, down, down, upon sticks and leaves, unharmed and curious. She tried several doors. They were all locked. She found a golden key, too big for some locks, too small for others until she peeked behind the curtain. The key fit but the passageway was too small, and Alice couldn’t reach the garden. There, Carroll’s words were highlighted in crisp yellow.

      [S]o many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

      So Alice got pragmatic or as pragmatic as one could get after she’d followed a talking rabbit down a long and dark tunnel. She looked for a book of rules; instead, she found a bottle. DRINK ME, it said. I flipped through the book and found an envelope tucked into the back. READ ME, it said.

      Inside the envelope was a thick stack of papers. On the cover page, beneath Cedars-Sinai’s emblem, a Dr. Nazario had written to Billy: This letter is to inform you of your results. Our office will be in contact to schedule a follow-up visit. Dr. Nazario’s name was circled in red. The following pages detailed the tests Billy had undergone, the clinical indication of shortness of breath and tightness in chest, the impression of aortic stenosis. The tests were dated March, two years ago.

      I read the highlighted passage again. Very few things indeed were really impossible. I could picture the illustrated copy of the novel I had as a child. Alice in a blue dress. Hearts and spades and diamonds and clubs floating around her. I’d like to remember Billy giving it to me, that it was from Prospero Books, but Mom had purchased it at a children’s bookstore on the Westside. Billy and I never read the novel on those nights when he tucked me in and made me feel indeed that nothing was impossible. Still, he knew, like Alice, I would follow him down, down, down until there was nowhere left to fall.