Chapter 19
I don’t remember being escorted out of the Boston Public Library.
I must have left by the newer entrance because I found myself dazed and blinking on Boylston Street, not in Copley Square.
The Boylston Street entrance leads to the modern addition to the library, which looks like a municipal parking garage crossed with a health insurance headquarters, rather than the Copley Square entrance, which leads to what looks like a gracious and storied bastion of learning.
The modern addition is utilitarian and blocky, the kind of library where someone like Elizabeth wants to work.
A library that is updated and modernized, and only one-quarter books.
You’d think Elizabeth would have kept me locked up until tomorrow morning when the rest of the Board arrived, but no.
She knew who she was dealing with; she knew this deadbeat loser in leaky pleather boots wasn’t going to give her any more trouble, so she cut me loose with a final twinkly little warning.
Do remember, Alix—if you’re thinking of ducking out tomorrow morning, heading back to the Library, and disappearing into your favorite book as a way to avoid the Board?
We’ll just send Library Security to retrieve you, and you can’t evade them forever. So really, dear, don’t try.
I’d nodded numbly.
Off you go, then. Entirely restored to complacent good cheer, now that she knew she’d broken me. Get some sleep. Big day tomorrow!
I thought of the lumpy sofa that smelled of Brandon’s weed and Laurel’s cotton-candy vape, and I could have gone back—I was reasonably sure I wasn’t going to have to look for a new living situation, after all.
Elizabeth had promised to float me a small loan (to be paid back, of course, deducted from my pay as a BPL page) so that I could make it worth Brandon’s while not to get rid of a third roommate after all.
I was getting my life back; I’d be able to access my bank account again and I wouldn’t have to move, and all it would cost was my integrity.
I should have gone home and gotten some rest because I’d have to be back here bright and early to meet Elizabeth and the rest of the Board, but instead of heading for the T station I stumbled up Boylston toward the Boston Public Garden.
Not a place you go if you grew up in Boston, because it’s always jammed with tourists, but I went there anyway and made my way down the green pathways and around the swan boats, past the pond that froze over in winter.
All the way to the quiet corner where the bronze sculpture stands of a mama duck and her waddling offspring, the monument not to a war hero or a politician but a book: Make Way for Ducklings.
My mom read me that book when I was little.
I stood there staring at the mama duck, and I did what I’d been dreading. Took out my phone with the cracked screen and did a search for an online shop called Bookish Notions.
As Elizabeth said, it wasn’t hard to find.
A cute website in purples and blues, curly script, neat online catalog for book-shaped earrings, book-shaped key chains, book-shaped stickers and paperweights and coffee mugs.
Based out of San Diego, my mom listed as owner—new surname; no wonder my earlier online searches hadn’t found her. There was a phone number.
I’d never felt so numb in my life as I did when I dialed it.
A woman’s voice, just a little breathless, answering on the third ring. “Bookish Notions, may I help you?”
I stood there, breathing silently into my phone.
“Bookish Notions, may I help you?” Slightly more impatient now. “If I can—sweetie, stop that, you’ll break it.” Scolding, but with a laugh in it. And I heard a child’s voice in the background: “Moooooom, you said you’d read to me—”
Gently, I hung up.
Maybe it was another of the Library Board’s tricks; someone impersonating my mother.
But I didn’t really see Elizabeth going to quite those lengths once she already had me on the hook.
It was probably real—the online store, the San Diego number, my mother’s new life.
Complete with a kid just the age I’d been when she walked out on me. Sounded like a girl.
I wondered if she’d read her new daughter Make Way for Ducklings.
Mom had always been a good reader: did all the voices, the gasps of astonishment and the cries of joy and the shivers of fear.
She could curdle my blood with her rendition of Where the Wild Things Are, but she’d never let me go to sleep afraid.
She always finished up with Make Way for Ducklings, so I’d go to sleep nestled in feathers and a mother’s (duck’s) love.
She shouldn’t have been such a good reader, not if she was going to leave me.
A shitty mom should be shitty all the way; should leave you with nothing but bad memories so you can cut the cord dry-eyed.
What business did she have reading me all those books and doing all the voices, if she was just going to dump me into foster care because a lousy boyfriend with a tech start-up didn’t like kids?
All so she could somehow end up married to a guy who evidently did like kids because she’d replaced me with a newer model?
I stood there staring at the bronze mama duck and her scurrying bronze ducklings, thinking: My mother didn’t choose me.
And the Astral Library didn’t choose me either.
It just got hacked, the way that my life got hacked when a Board vote convened a focus group to determine the best means of accessing a magic library, and really, I should have known.
Nobody chooses me. Not my mom, not any of the fantasy worlds I’d been reading about since I was eight, not Beau, and certainly not the Astral Library.
I didn’t belong there. I never had. I was the walking example of life’s undefined—I might as well not exist.
A huge ugly sound burst out of me, too guttural to be a sob, too low to be a scream.
A woman in an Atlanta Braves cap gave me a startled look and hurried her toddler along.
Good for you, lady. Keep your kid safe; it’s what the best moms do—or really, it’s just what adequate moms do; it’s the bare minimum of parenting, but some of us don’t even get that.
I swiped at my eyes, and realized my bag was still hanging on my arm—the reticule Beau had given me, eons ago.
Not much in it but a set of keys, the old bumper sticker from Mom, and my ancient copy of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
I wanted to hurl the book into the pond, because I never should have gotten myself hooked on stories that promised magic doors.
I’d finally gotten a magic door and it had turned out to be an illusion.
The worlds that lay behind it weren’t for me—the only door in my future led back to ten-hour shifts doing data entry, probably for finance bros in Hugo Boss suits who said Smile, honey!
I stared at the book, but I’d have to backtrack through a horde of tourists if I wanted to hurl it into the pond, and I’d probably be cited for littering, so I kept on stumbling out of the Boston Public Garden toward the T station.
But I never made it home.
There was a little free library on the corner one block west of my apartment building.
Nothing cute like you’d see on Instagram, with a shingled roof and a jaunty sign saying TAKE A BOOK, LEAVE A BOOK!
—mostly it was a dumping ground for old textbooks and ancient Stephen King paperbacks missing their covers.
I’d once scored a beat-up copy of A Court of Silver Flames there, though, so I always gave it a hopeful once-over.
Even now I checked mechanically, wedging the warped door open and flipping past a Boston Conservatory workbook on entry-level music theory and a few Colleen Hoovers.
My hand found the splintery wood at the back, and then suddenly it wasn’t there anymore; suddenly my fingers were scraping air and smelling parchment, and it really was true that the Astral Library could open a door from any library in the world, because it yanked me in through a little free library nailed to a listing post in Southie.
One moment I was standing on wet concrete on a street corner near a Dunkin’ Donuts, and the next moment I was back at the head of those sweeping stairs, looking at the emerald-green windows and the endless shelves of fluttering books.
“You dumb library,” I said aloud to those sentient, beautiful walls as I came down the green-swarded stairs.
“You just invited a Judas back into the fold. You should have rescinded my library card.” But the books just rustled, because thanks to Elizabeth and the Board and their hacking job, I’d been illegally added to the guest list. I’d be left on it till I handed over the keys to the fucking castle.
And the Librarian still lay on her couch, chest barely rising and falling under the lambswool blanket.
“Please wake up,” I heard myself saying softly, gazing down at her. “You’d know what to do, wouldn’t you? You’ve been fighting the Board for who knows how long; you’d know how to Aslan your way out of this. You’d even forgive the traitor, just like Aslan did.”
She lay there, arm still wrapped in bandages, the slash across her eye now healed to a thick stripe of a scar. She looked like a sleeping pirate queen, one who’d been recently wounded in battle.
I made a hopeless stab at the email function on the green tablet again, hoping against hope that I could get a message out to the Programmer or the Gallerist. They’d help out, they’d know what to do .
. . But the tablet just blinked at me: Access denied.
Email function accessible to Librarian (status) only.
Just like it had the first time. I threw the tablet down and found myself sinking to the floor beside the Librarian’s chaise, listening to the huge clock tick loudly like a drumbeat to nowhere.
“What do I do?” I asked.