Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Two
Anton Chekhov, the legendary Russian short story writer and playwright, had a famous dictum about plotting. One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.
This is known as Chekhov’s Gun or, in our case, Chekhov’s Security Guard. Duke had brought up the possibility of security guards, and lo and behold, here one was, like we’d summoned him.
“Not moving,” Duke said to the guard.
“I’m definitely not moving,” I added. “The ride’s not on.”
The security guard, a lean, tall man with intelligent but wary eyes, strode up to us.
He stood about ten feet away from Duke, still standing at the ride’s controls, and I stayed on my hare, hands tight on the pole. And yes, I did feel unbelievably stupid about the whole thing.
“You two have permission to be here?” the guard demanded.
“Define ‘permission,’?” I said.
The guard looked at me. “Someone said you could be here?”
“Well, no. We don’t have permission, then,” I replied.
Duke lifted his hand slightly in my direction, the universal signal of a man telling a woman to let him handle this. Well, good luck, Chicago. If there was a way to get out of this guy calling the cops on us, I didn’t see it.
Then again, I wasn’t Duke.
“Look, old chap, I’m terribly sorry. This is all my doing,” Duke began.
He put his hands back into his jacket pockets and shrugged.
“Her father brought her mother here on their first date years ago. And I brought her here on our first date. My work is about to transfer me to the East Coast, so I wanted to see the old place one last time. Romance and all that. She didn’t even know what I’d planned. ”
The security guard was unarmed, it appeared.
No gun in sight. He might have had pepper spray on him, but it was his walkie-talkie that worried me.
All he had to do was radio the authorities, and we would be dragged out in handcuffs.
And when they tried to book Duke and found out he had no identification on him? Disaster.
“That’s all? Why don’t I believe you?” the guard asked us.
His hand began to lift toward his walkie-talkie.
“Well, to be perfectly honest with you…it’s not all,” Duke said. He glanced over his shoulder at me and grinned. “I didn’t want to do it like this, but it seems fate had other plans.”
Duke pulled his hand from his pocket and showed my ring to the security guard.
“Do you mind?” he asked the guard. “Before you lock us up and throw away the key?”
The guard was a half-step ahead of me; I was still trying to figure out why Duke had told the guy my parents had come here on their first date.
Then the guard broke into a smile, and when I saw that ear-to-ear, can’t-wait-to-tell-the-guys-about-this grin, I knew what was happening.
“Go for it,” the guard said. “I’ll take pics.”
Duke walked over to me and got down on one knee.
“Rainy, my darling…If you were a book, I would read every page of you in one sitting and then when it was over, I’d start back at page one and read you again.
If our life together was a story, I’d want it to be a million pages long, a billion pages.
I hope there are scenes in the book of our love that burn holes in the paper.
I hope the happy chapters are the longest and the saddest chapters are barely a page.
And I hope and pray that however our story ends, it ends with us together and the last word of the story of our life is ‘forever.’ Will you, Rainy March, please do me the honor of letting me become your husband? ”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. “Well?” the guard said. “Don’t leave the poor guy hanging. Yes or no?”
“Sorry, I’m in shock,” I said. “I never imagined I’d get proposed to while I was sitting on a giant hare. But yes. Yes, I will marry you. And, um…thanks for asking.”
Duke took my left hand and put the ring on my ring finger, where it belonged and always would belong.
Before I could say anything, he stood up, leaned in close, and tenderly kissed me.
“This is great,” the guard said, laughing and waving his phone at us. “I took a bunch of pictures. I’ll text them to you. A couple breaking in to get engaged on the carousel was not on my bingo card.” He laughed again.
Duke chortled in triumph. “Told you it was a carousel.”
And that’s how we managed to escape arrest. Because it turns out the security guard was a hopeless romantic. Lucky us.
After we’d posed for the last picture—Duke standing on the carousel next to me while I held up my left hand in the classic Envy me, for now I am an engaged woman pose—the guard said he would need to escort us out before we got him fired.
And so Adam—that was the guard’s name—led us to the main gate, chatting the whole time about how excited he was to witness the proposal, that the other guards would be jealous.
“Usually when something weird shows up on the security cams,” Adam said, “it’s two elk making baby elk by the ice cream shop.”
“Who doesn’t like ice cream?” I said.
We reached the entrance.
“Thank you for being so understanding, Adam,” Duke said at the gate.
“You betcha,” he said. “I hope you two are very happy together for a long time. Come back and show me wedding pictures. But let’s wait until the park’s open next time, all right?”
“We absolutely will,” I said. “Promise.”
Duke held out his hand to Adam.
When the guard took Duke’s hand to shake it, a strange look came over his face.
“You…” he whispered to Duke. “Do I know you?”
—
Adam’s eyes widened, and he froze as if under a spell. This happens sometimes when a reader of a story meets a character face-to-face. Like all Book Witches, I possessed a special power, and I used it right then. Narrowing my eyes, I reached out to see Adam and Duke’s past together…
I saw a sleek leather sofa in a starkly minimalist apartment in Portland.
I saw a man in sweatpants, the beginnings of a beard on his face and the start of a drinking problem showing around his red-rimmed eyes.
A case of toilet paper sat by the front door, and bottles of hand sanitizer lined the coffee table like dominoes.
And I saw it was Adam on that sofa, staring at his phone, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling his life away. Unshowered. Unshaven. Unhappy. Alone.
And then, as if it were my own phone in front of my eyes, I saw what he was seeing.
A friend he follows has posted a book review. A Duke of Chicago book. The post’s caption reads, Latest five-star read. I loved these books when I was a kid. Glad to see they hold up. And man, it was nice to escape 2021 for a day.
This post reminds Adam of something, that he, too, loved the Duke of Chicago books when he was a kid.
And, God, does he want to escape 2021…
So he closes whatever social media app it was that was sucking his soul from his body through his eyes and opens his library app.
Quick thumbs pull up what he wants, and in an instant, Adam has downloaded the very first Duke of Chicago book.
He begins to read…
In the first chapter of the first book, the Duke stands by the graves of his three brothers in the rain. He’s just inherited a title he never coveted and an estate so large it feels like a millstone around his neck.
The sight of his brothers in the ground reminds him of Ebenezer Scrooge being shown his own lonely grave by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
In a moment of clarity, he realizes he is next.
Even if he doesn’t die physically, even if the wars and diseases and disasters spare him, he will die another way.
His dreams will die, and like a failing heart or brain, they will take the rest of him with them.
His mother, the dowager duchess, stands next to him and coldly says, “It’s all yours now, my son.”
And in a moment of quiet rebellion the Duke speaks a line that became a kind of protest anthem for fans of the books, akin to Bartleby the Scrivener’s famous I would prefer not to.
Duke simply says to her…
“No, thank you.”
Then he turns on his heel and walks away. By the next chapter, he’s in Chicago, starting his new life as a private detective whose only qualifications are that he’s rich, charming, and handsome, which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be his superpower.
Duke’s effect on Adam’s life flashed before my eyes.
Adam Nguyen read that book on the sofa of his sleek apartment during a long Covid lockdown when the only things keeping him from losing his mind were the books and movies that distracted him from the relentless bad news in the real world.
Something about that moment, that line, rang a bell deep inside his heart.
His boss had offered him a promotion—twice the money but triple the work, and Adam had never liked the job anyway. He wasn’t even sure what they did sometimes or why they did it. Most days felt like a game of Monopoly, moving play money around a game board, killing time, helping no one.
His parents would be thrilled when he told them about the job offer and the raise. So many people struggling? Yet here he was being offered a promotion?
But what he wanted, what he dreamed when he let himself dare to dream…was to go back to school to become a teacher. A sixth-grade teacher, because that’s when the kids got to read really good books like A Wrinkle in Time, The Giver, and his personal favorite, Louis Sachar’s Holes.
And it’s when they start learning interesting history like the sinking of the Titanic and World War II.
His own sixth-grade literature teacher, Mr. Jordan, had been his favorite. When he’d asked Adam what he wanted to be when he grew up, Adam had said a teacher, not an “Assistant VP of Data and Analytics.”
But he can’t be a teacher. It would pay almost nothing compared to what he was making.
It would take him years to get his teaching certification.
He’d be thirty-five by the time he could have his own classroom, even if he started the next day.
And he’d have to work part-time to pay the bills while going to school.
Nights and weekends. Huge sacrifice, and all for what?
Useless joy? Wasteful happiness? Selfish personal fulfillment?
Personal fulfillment, after all, wouldn’t pay the bills.
So of course, he would take the promotion and the money.
But he could finish the book. And he did. Then he read the next Duke of Chicago book, then the next.
Shot, stabbed, chased, falsely accused of terrible crimes…
No matter what happened to Duke, he stayed endlessly polite, endlessly charming, endlessly hopeful.
He never gave up, never gave in. His mother was furious at him.
His peers, the aristocracy, thought he’d gone mad.
He’d given up the promotion, the money, the respect of his family and countrymen…
And all for what? Happiness. Purpose. All because he’d had the courage to say those three words. Those three magical words…
Maybe if it worked for Duke, it would work for him?
After finishing the third Duke of Chicago book, Adam wrote his boss back an email of three little words: “No thank you.”
The next day he showered, shaved, and enrolled in Western Oregon University’s online teaching program.
To pay for it, he worked two jobs, including the weekend security guard job at the Enchanted Forest Park.
He quit drinking, quit doom-scrolling. Now that he was taking care of his dreams, he’d somehow, almost by accident, started taking care of himself.
“Magic” isn’t a strong enough word for that. This goes way beyond your average storycraft. No, this is alchemy, turning base things into gold.
It had happened to me too. It happens to most of us if we’re lucky enough. The fictional characters we love stamp their names on our hearts. They show us how to fight our battles, how to change, how to make it to page three hundred a different person than we were on page one.
But because they’re fictional, there’s no way to ever thank them for the good turn they did for us, for showing us when we needed it most what a hero looks like.
Except in these rare moments when a reader meets his hero on a misty autumn day in a strange Enchanted Forest.
I reached out, took Duke’s other hand in mine, and let the vision of Adam’s past flow from me into him. Duke saw what I had seen, the change he’d wrought in this young man’s life. Real change from a fictional detective.
“Have we…” Adam asked, brow furrowing. “Have we met before?”
“Unfortunately not,” Duke said. “I’d remember meeting a good man like you.”
“Oh, sure. I could’ve sworn…”
Duke patted him on the shoulder, and Adam finally released his hand.
We started to leave through the front gates, and Duke turned back one more time.
“Thank you again,” he said to Adam, who still wore a look of awe and wonder in his eyes.
Then Adam said to Duke’s face what every reader who ever loved a storybook hero wanted to say to their hero’s face.
“No,” Adam said, still dazed and dazzled by his brush with magic, “thank you.”
Duke and I walked away.
“ Now you understand how important your books are to the world?” I asked him.
Too moved to speak, he merely nodded.
“And that,” I said, glancing back at Adam, “is why I’m a Book Witch.”