Chapter 20
NOELLE
The bookshop on Clark Street had been closed for eleven days when Noelle called the number on the realtor's sign in the window.
She'd walked past it again the morning after the sidewalk with Elias — the green trim, the secondhand hardcovers, the handwritten sign that said OPEN — COME IN — WE HAVE WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR. She’d stood on the sidewalk with her coffee, looked at the dark interior and seen, for the first time, that the sign had been taken down and a realtor's card had been taped to the inside of the glass.
The woman who'd known the Burgundian gardens book was gone. The shelves were still there.
She'd walked past it again the next day. And the next.
On the fourth day she'd written down the number.
On the fifth she'd called.
The realtor was a woman named Jean who had a small office on Halsted and a way of talking about commercial leases that reminded Noelle, in a way she couldn't quite place, of her grandmother: direct, unhurried, unimpressed by the address on Noelle's driver's license.
Jean had walked her through the storefront on a Wednesday morning.
The space was narrow and deep, with pressed-tin ceilings and oak floors that had been under carpet for a decade and needed refinishing.
The back room had a utility sink, a half bath, and enough square footage for receiving and storage.
The front windows caught the morning light on Clark Street from the east, and by afternoon the whole room turned gold.
"The previous tenant was here for seven years. Good foot traffic. The neighborhood's getting younger but the readers haven't left yet."
Noelle stood in the middle of the empty rooms and looked at the shelves the previous owner had left behind: old library shelves, solid, shelves a person built a room around rather than the other way around.
"I'd like to see the lease," she said.
"The lease is clean," Jean said. "Five years, renewable. The landlord's reasonable."
"I'd like to see it today."
"All right."
Henry had confirmed, in a call that had taken less than a minute, that the funds from her trust were available.
The lease was signed by the end of the week.
The keys, two of them, brass, old-fashioned, went onto her keyring beside the key to the Mathieus' apartment.
She stood on the sidewalk on Clark Street with the keys in her hand, looked at the green trim of the storefront, the dark windows, the shelves inside, and let herself for the first time in many weeks want something without immediately examining whether the wanting was going to cost her.
It was going to cost her. She was ready to pay it because the alternative to paying it was to go on sitting in the Mathieus' library reading other people's books in other people's rooms.
She was going to need a room of her own.
This was going to be the room.
The weeks that followed were weeks of work.
The oak floors got refinished: she chose the stain herself, a warm honey that caught the afternoon light the way she'd wanted it to.
The tin ceiling got cleaned and sealed. An electrician came and rewired the overhead fixtures, and she chose pendant lights with brass fittings that threw warm pools down onto the shelves.
A plumber fixed the utility sink in the back.
She painted the back room herself, on a Saturday, in a pair of old jeans and a sweater she'd bought at a thrift store on Division because she hadn't owned a piece of clothing she was willing to get paint on in years.
The books came next. She drove to estate sales in Evanston and Oak Park and bought boxes of hardcovers from the libraries of women who'd died and whose children didn't read. She bought the inventory of a retired professor in Hyde Park who'd spent forty years collecting various editions of books.
She shelved them herself. She spent evenings on Astor Street with the Mathieus' dining room table covered in books, sorting them into the categories she was building — gardens, art, architecture, travel, biography, fiction.
She carried them to Clark Street in the morning in canvas bags and put them on the shelves in the order she'd decided on, which was not alphabetical and not by subject but by something else, a logic of adjacency that put the Morisot biography next to a book about Giverny and the Giverny book next to a memoir about a woman who'd restored a farmhouse in the Luberon, because the books belonged together the way certain conversations belonged together.
If a customer picked up one she wanted them to see the next.
She was building a room. The room was hers. The building of it was the first sustained act of creation she'd performed in her adult life. It was making her, in increments so gradual she could only see them when she looked back across the span of a week, less afraid.
Noelle was still afraid. She was still, underneath, a woman who ached for a man she'd told herself she was done with.
The aching came at night, mostly. It came when she was lying in the Mathieus' guest bed looking at a ceiling that wasn't hers.
It came when she heard a voice on the street that sounded, for a fraction of a second, like his.
It came when she was shelving a book and her hand passed over a spine and she thought, without meaning to, he would've liked this one.
She let the aching come. She didn't fight it. Fighting it would've required the attention she was spending elsewhere. She'd made a decision about where her attention was going, and the decision was holding.
Her mother came to see the shop on a Sunday.
Noelle hadn't invited her. Her mother had called that morning and said I'd like to see what you've been doing, in the voice her mother used when she'd already decided to come and was extending the courtesy of phrasing it as a request.
Her mother stood in the doorway of the shop and looked at the room the way her mother looked at rooms, which was with an attention that missed nothing and commented on very little. She looked at the shelves, the pendant lights, the honey-stained floors, and she didn't say anything for a while.
"You did the floors yourself," her mother said. "The color is right."
"Thank you."
Her mother walked the length of the room. She ran her hand along one of the shelves and stopped at the back. She turned.
"Noelle."
"Yes?”
“Your father—he’s not good at apologies. I know he’s sorry for putting you in that position. Terribly so. But … I also owe you an apology."
Noelle could see, in her mother's face, that her mother had been composing the words in the car and possibly the night before.
"For what?" Noelle said, though she knew.
"For training you," her mother said. "For training you to hold your face, hold your voice, hold your composure and hold everything, everything inside, because I was afraid that if you didn't hold it you'd end up — " She stopped. "I was afraid you'd end up like me."
"Mother—”
"Let me finish. I trained you to survive a marriage," her mother said.
"I trained you to endure it. I didn't train you to leave one, because I didn't know how.
I'd never done it. I'd never — " Her mother's voice did something Noelle had heard it do perhaps twice in her life, which was to thin at the edges.
"I'd never been brave enough to do what you did. "
"That isn't — "
"It is. It's what it is, Noelle. You walked out of that hall and you didn't look back and you built this.
" Her mother gestured, once, at the room around them.
"You built this without asking anyone's permission, and I am — " Her mother stopped again. Her mother pressed her lips together. “I’m proud of you. I’m proud of who you've become, and I'm sorry for every piece of the training that made it harder for you to become her. "
Noelle crossed the room and put her arms around her mother. Her mother put her arms around her and they stood like that, in the middle of the bookshop, for a long time without saying anything else.
The package arrived on the day before the shop opened.
It was left at the Mathieus' building by a courier. It was wrapped in brown paper with her name written on it in a handwriting she recognized before she'd finished reading the first letter.
She stood in the entryway of the apartment with the package in her hands and she didn't open it immediately. She took off her coat, made tea. Then she got up and brought it to the chair and opened it.
It was a book. A first edition of The Gardens of the ?le-de-France, which she'd mentioned to the professor in Hyde Park as the one book she hadn't been able to find for the Gardens section, which she hadn't mentioned to anyone else, which meant that Elias had, at some point in the weeks since Clark Street, found out what she was building and had gone looking for the one thing she was missing.
Inside the front cover was a note. His handwriting.
Noelle —
I won't be contesting the proceedings any further. James is withdrawing the extension motion today. You'll have what you asked for by the end of the month.
I saw what you're building on Clark Street. I didn't go in. I won't.
I hope the shop is everything you want it to be.
Elias
She read the note twice. She held it in her hand and she looked at the window of the library where the elms on Astor Street were, she noticed, beginning to bud.
The winter was ending, which meant the season in which she'd left her marriage, built a bookshop, cried on a hotel floor and put her hand against a brick building on Dickens to keep her knee from failing was a season that was, at some point in the next weeks, going to be over.
He'd let her go.
Noelle sat with that. She sat with it for a long time. He'd let her go. He'd let her go by finding the one book she was missing and sending it to her without asking for anything in return. He'd let her go by telling her he wouldn't go in.
It was, she saw, the first thing he'd ever done for her that hadn't also been for himself.
She didn't know what to do with it yet.
The aching hadn't stopped. The aching was going to be with her for a while yet. She thought about the book, about his handwriting. She thought about the sentence I didn't go in. I won't.
There was a part of her, she admitted to her traitorous heart, that wanted him to come in.