18. Margot
MARGOT
Every November I reread the book that raised me. This year, it tried to tell me something.
The book is a battered novel called The Leaving Season, and out of every title in a shop that holds four thousand of them, it is the one I have never once been able to part with.
Josie gave it to me the winter I came to live with her, when I was nine and furious and grieving in a language neither of us had the words for yet.
She did not promise me it would help. She only set it on the end of my bed and left the lamp burning.
I have opened it every November since, when the first real cold comes down the block, and I read it slowly to the last page, the way you reread the final letter from someone who is gone, knowing every word by heart and needing them anyway.
Her handwriting is still inside the cover, faded now to the soft brown of old honey.
For Margot, who reads the endings first. Some of us have to.
She understood me before I understood myself, which is the whole of the job of the person who raises you, and the reason the empty place they leave never quite closes over.
So today I keep the appointment. I make the cup of tea I will forget to drink, and I turn the sign to the side that means the world can wait, and I settle onto the stool behind the register with the cat arranging himself nearby to pretend he is not supervising.
Then I open The Leaving Season to its first page for the fifteenth year running.
And this year the book is heavier in my hands than it has any right to be.
I feel it before I understand it, the way I feel most things one useless second too late.
The spine has gone soft with all its rereadings, the way a loved book does, and where the pages meet the glue there is a gap that either was never there before or has always been there and never once asked me to notice it.
Pressed into that gap, folded the long way and flattened by fifteen years of my own unknowing hands, are leaves of onionskin paper I have never laid eyes on.
I ease them free the way I would work a splinter out from under my own skin. There are three of them, thin as breath and covered corner to corner in Josie's slanting hand, and not a single line of it means anything I can hold.
It is not a letter, or not one meant for a person.
It is a ledger with the life drained out of it, numbers set against initials, half a date, a word that breaks off in the middle as though she heard a step on the stair and hid the page.
Now and then a phrase surfaces out of the nonsense and sinks again.
One line simply says the oranges are late.
Another gives a name with a single clean stroke drawn through it.
My own name appears once, near the bottom, with nothing after it but a colon and an empty space, as if she meant to tell me one last thing and ran out of time, or of nerve.
I should be more unsettled than I am, and I am unsettled the low way you are by a phone ringing in a house you know is empty.
But Josie was a magpie for exactly this kind of thing.
She left me a drawer of keys to locks that no longer exist and a tin of buttons sorted by a logic she carried into the ground.
A dead woman's cipher for nothing is the most Josie inheritance I can imagine, and I decide it is a keepsake and not a warning, because deciding a thing has always been what I do instead of asking it.
I decide it hard enough to almost quiet the cold thread walking the back of my neck.
I am still holding the pages up to the window, trying to make the columns confess, when the bell goes and the temperature of the room drops in a direction that has nothing to do with the weather.
He has been in twice before, this one. The first time he offered to buy Josie's entire collection unseen and named a figure that made Birdie inhale her smoothie.
The second time he narrowed it to the old books, the pre-war ones on the low shelves that no one ever browses, and he cared for the word no even less at a slower speed.
He gives his name as Mr. Grant, and everything about him runs a size too smooth, a suit built to be believed and a smile that never once climbs as high as his eyes.
"Miss Ellis." He leaves his gloves on, which tells me the rest before he says it. "I had hoped you might have reconsidered. My client is a patient man. Patience, though, is a sum, and I have very nearly spent the last of his."
"Then it's lucky my answer is still free of charge," I say. "It was no in a better suit last month. It is no today. It will be no in whatever you decide to wear to ask me next."
"Your grandmother held certain volumes my client has wanted for a great many years.
" He lets his gaze travel the shop, slow, taking an inventory I do not like the shape of.
"Sentiment runs expensive, Miss Ellis. A lease like this one.
A neighborhood like this one. A young woman on her own above a shop with a back door I understand was recently, and rather anxiously, replaced.
" The smile holds. "It would be a shame to learn how expensive. "
He knows about my back door, and he means for me to know that he knows, and the cold thread at my neck stops being a thread and becomes a hand.
"You keep saying my client as though the words should frighten me," I say, and I am absurdly proud of how level it lands, given that my pulse has quietly taken up sprinting.
"Here is mine. The shop is not for sale.
The old books are not for sale. And the next time you would like to put a price on my grief, you can do it through a lawyer, because that is the only version of you I will ever let back through that door. "
He does not leave. He takes one unhurried step closer instead, near enough that I catch the cold coming off his coat and the expensive nothing he wears beneath it, and the smile finally sheds its good manners.
"Your grandmother understood what certain books cost a person to keep," he says, very softly.
"It would grieve me to watch you learn that same arithmetic the hard way. "
I do not hear Daniil move, which is the only way he has ever moved.
One moment I am alone in front of a man appraising my fear the way another man appraises a rug, and the next Daniil is at my shoulder and a half step ahead of it, set at the exact angle that makes Mr. Grant speak through him to reach me.
"She has answered you." He does not raise his voice. That is the part that empties the air out of the room. He sets the words just under the volume of ordinary talk, so that Mr. Grant has to lean toward the man who is quietly ending his afternoon.
Something crosses between the two of them that I am not quick enough to catch, a recognition landing, a price being recalculated behind a smooth face. Mr. Grant's smoothness develops a hairline crack.
"You," he says, and the word carries a new thing in it now, and the new thing is fear. "I didn't know he was…"
"Now you do." Daniil lets the pause carry a portion of the work.
"You will take that knowledge back to the man who sent you, and you will tell him you found nothing in this shop worth the trouble of returning for.
You will be convincing. The alternative is that I become convincing, and I am told that is the one thing I have a real gift for. "
Mr. Grant apologizes to me. A grown man who sixty seconds ago was pricing my grief and my lease apologizes for the intrusion, touches the brim of a hat he is not wearing, and leaves so fast the bell overhead has to scramble to keep up with the door.
Here is where I would like to tell you that I was frightened, or sensibly appalled, or even mildly concerned in the way any woman ought to be when the man who reshelves her poetry turns out to speak fluent menace without an accent.
I will file the truth instead, for the record.
Some feral back room of me, the same one that has been writing Vera's dangerous men for six years, watched Daniil send a threat retreating without once lifting his voice and thought, at a deeply unhelpful volume, oh.
So that is the thing I have been trying to put on the page all this time.
My taste would like to lodge a formal complaint.
It has been overruled. It is always overruled.
This is the same woman who once dumped a perfectly kind architect for being too easy to imagine a future with, and who is now going weak in the knees over a man who just disarmed a criminal with a well-placed silence.
I appear to contain no instinct for self-preservation whatsoever.
I contain an editor, and she is delighted, and she is taking notes.
Then Daniil turns back to me, and the danger folds itself away as quickly as it unfolded, and he is once more the man who alphabetizes my grief, reaching to see whether I am all right. And then he sees what is in my hands.
I watch it happen to him. I watch the onionskin register, and Josie's drained little ledger, and I watch the thing he just did to Mr. Grant come up through his own face from somewhere underneath, the mask slipping exactly the way it slipped over the photograph in my back room, except this time he is a half second too slow to catch it.
"Where did you get those." It is not the voice he uses on me. It is the voice he just used on the man in the gloves.
"They were hidden in the spine of my grandmother's book," I say, slow, watching him the way you watch a stranger who has just said your childhood name out loud.
"The one I reread. They have been in there for fifteen years, and I never once knew.
" I do not hold them out to him. For the first time since he first walked into my shop, I have no wish at all to hand this man the thing he is staring at like a starving creature.
And then it all arrives at once, the way a sum does when you have refused it for weeks and it finally adds itself up behind your back.
There is the buyer who wanted only the old books, and the lock rebuilt by a man braced for a siege, and the cup of coffee made exactly right.
There is the morning he knew what I had eaten on a day I never told a soul, and the man who can make a career criminal apologize on his way out of my door and mean it.
And there is the same man who held me in the dark two nights ago and told me I had no idea, in a voice I chose to hear as tenderness because I wanted it to be.
"Daniil." My voice comes out steady, which astonishes me, because not one other thing about me is. "I am going to ask you one question. I need the true answer, not the useful one you keep in your other pocket for me." He goes very still. He knows the question already. I ask it regardless.
Holding the strange pages, I ask him point-blank what he really does, and tires scream at the curb as a car swerves up and the first shot cracks the window.