Chapter 31 #2
tears when I was getting sober. She wiped away some of my tears too. All of you turned your lives upside down just to save
mine. Well—all right. To save Arthur. But I was a beneficiary. I always figured the bill would come due someday. Time to pay
the check. What about you? You know, when you walk out of this library in an hour . . . you don’t have to come back.”
“Yes, she does. She’s holding the robe and the mirror,” Donna said. “But . . . maybe she shouldn’t stay. It’s hard to see
how five women are going to achieve what attack helicopters and F-16s couldn’t. Allie, you could try again, yourself, in a
month, when he’s at his absolute weakest. Get him while he’s as small as a kitten and just as helpless.”
“He’s never that small and never that helpless, and don’t you dare lock me out,” Allie said, her voice shaking. Donna and
Tana glanced at one another. Allie knew what was on their minds and jumped to her feet, her hands balled into fists. “I mean
it. I see every thought you’re thinking. Unthink it.”
“Why, though?” Robin asked. “They’re right. You could bring us what we need, to do tonight’s work, and then go. Be ready to
fight again if we fail.”
“What do they say in those AA meetings? We pray for the strength to do the next right thing?”
Tana nodded.
“This is the next right thing. I’m part of this. One hundred percent.”
Donna said, “You may be in one hundred percent . . . but you are sixty percent foolishness, twenty-five percent a chirpy pain in the ass, ten percent bullshit statistics, and about five percent adorable. Sit your scrawny ass back down and stop hyperventilating before you fall over.”
Allie sat. And when Donna took her hand, Allie let her.
Allie left just before four, closed the door behind her, and turned off the light in the conference room. The others sat together
in the whirring dark. Gwen snored. Tana smelled blood. Sick blood, a whiff of something coppery and rancid. Around four thirty her son sent her a text.
Went by the house. Where you at woman? I brought fried chicken. I’ve got the overnight shift.
I got a couple fires of my own to put out tonight, she wrote back. Eat it yourself. Leave me a leg. You know I like a tasty bit of leg.
Ew, gross, how many times have I told you not to text me about your sex life, dammit. Followed by a laughing face emoji.
She thought for a long time how to reply. Finally, she answered with three hearts, because it seemed for some emotions, some
deeply held feelings, no words would do.
A few minutes before 7:00 p.m., Tana realized Gwen was staring at her, her eyes the brightest thing in the gloom. It startled
her. She didn’t know how long Gwen had been watching.
“This was a mistake,” Gwen whispered. “I shouldn’t have let any of you talk me into this. I was too weak to fight you off.
If I can’t fight off four middle-aged women, hell if I know how I’ll fight off a dragon.”
“If it’s a mistake, it’s not your mistake. It’s ours. Let us make it.” Tana put her head back against the wall. “Trust me, I made my share of ’em.” She felt an anxious clench of anticipation,
realized what she was about to say, hesitated, hung up on her own nerves, then decided to hell with it, if it was a foolish
thing to admit, she wouldn’t have to regret it for long. “I made one with Arthur, you know. Long time before you got together.
He probably told you.”
Gwen considered her with calm, untroubled features and said nothing. Tana prickled with worry, wished already she could take it back, kept her fool trap shut.
“Yeah, well. Don’t worry. He wasn’t ever in love with me. I made sure there was no chance of that. I told him—ah.” Tana put a hand over her face, alarmed by her own sudden rush of feeling, a surge of loss and humiliation.
“What did you tell him?”
“That it was all part of the deal with Jayne. Something we were throwing in extra for stealing those books. I couldn’t say
Jayne had nothing to do with it. I couldn’t tell him it was something I did—something I wanted for me—because he was a nice guy and I was never with a nice guy. Then Jayne found out I had been with
him. She overheard me talking to him on the phone or something. She even complimented me, said it was a good move, gave us
another way to control him. Do please forgive me, Gwen. It wasn’t the worst thing I ever did in those days, but it was the
worst thing I ever did to him. And a course I never said nothing to you. I needed you even more’n I needed him. So anyway.
That’s the kind of person you saved, Gwen Underfoot. Jayne Nighswander wasn’t the only user in my family.”
Gwen lifted herself up on her crutch. She came across the room, slowly, methodically, until she was leaning right over Tana.
Tana lowered her head, her cheeks hot, and waited for Gwen to strike her. Instead, Gwen bent and cupped the back of her head
and kissed her above the left eyebrow.
“Never let the thought trouble you again,” Gwen said.
She slid to the floor to sit next to Tana and took her hand. The two women who had loved Arthur best sat side by side, with
the crutch across their thighs. After a while, Tana let her head rest on Gwen’s shoulder and wondered again how she had come
through her life to this point, in the company of people who, against all reason and sense, still cared for her. That was
a thing as fantastic and improbable as any ghost, any dragon.
They sat together for most of an hour, and then Donna said, “It’s time.”
Tana and Robin helped Gwen back up and they left Conference Room A in single file.
Their hushed voices rose to the vaulted ceilings and banged around up there, so it sounded as if ghosts were whispering about them from the shadows.
Tana had never been in the Brooks Library until today and felt as if she had stepped out of the conference room and into Westminster Abbey or the Tower of London.
She wished she had read more books. It had never come easy to her, was a struggle to fight her way through a thicket of words
and into the story. But then, that was like wishing she hadn’t been born in Gogan, that Daphne Nighswander hadn’t been her
mother, that Jayne hadn’t been her sister. Sometimes, at AA meetings, Allie would read from the Big Book, and Tana felt she
was hearing the words for the first time, felt as if the whole book had opened to her, as accessible as watching a woman speak
on TV. She wondered if Allie would read to her sometime, then remembered they would all be dead by morning.
They descended to the basement. The other women flocked into the toilets, desperate for a pee, while Tana made her way to
the radiator against the far wall. There was a narrow window up there, set with panes of frosted glass and hidden behind hedges
on the other side. It was the exact same window Colin Wren had come through twenty-six years before, with a can of spray paint
and a plan to frame townies for Arthur’s theft of a quarter million dollars in rare books. Tana climbed onto the ancient,
cobwebbed radiator and fought with the latch, which was painted shut. It snapped open all of a sudden, glossy shards of paint
splintering and falling away. No sooner had she swung the window open than Allie pushed Gwen’s messenger bag through. Tana
leapt down and Allie wiggled through on her stomach, legs flailing for purchase. Tana took her thighs and helped her place
her feet on the radiator.
“If your head was any farther up her ass,” Donna said, “you’d have to get a hotel room.” She had emerged from her stall and
regarded them with something close to total dismissal. She bent and peeked under Robin’s stall. “Oh, hey. You piss sitting
down! I was wondering.”
Robin laughed softly. “Yes, darling. Do you?”
Gwen exited her own stall on her crutch, moving slowly, grimacing slightly. “Take it easy on her, Robin.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Tana said. “Don’t be too hard on her. Even I can see McBride is useful to have around in a fight like
this.”
“Useful for what?” Robin asked.
“Human shield,” Tana replied.