Her dad spent plenty of time with her talking about books, but this was different—it was like spending a day being a person with him, and not just a kid. When he had given her the Wrinkle in Timeand talked excitedly about tesseracts and folding time and IT, the one mind that took everyone over until Meg and Calvin fought against it, she decided that she would read it the second she could. She’d been too tired that night, and had gone to sleep, the book set on her dresser. Three days later she’d been consumed with homework and hadn’t gotten to it yet, and that night he'd died.
She cradled the book in her hands, turning it over, and then the tears came, mixing with a diffuse fury so great that her arms began to shake. She had never read the book. It represented everything that she hated about her life. It represented the death of her father, the metaphorical death of her mother, the complete 180 shift in her life, and her own self-abuse at the fact that she had not made reading the book and talking about it with her dad a priority, instead letting silly, childish things get in the way.
She’d been watching Darla that night, babysitting. They were at her house playing. Their parents were supposed to come home that night around eleven. When they didn’t, Josie just thought that they were late. Morning had come, and still no parents. She’d walked next door to ask Mr. Topper, the neighbor, what to do. He was an old, retired man, a bit grumpy, but completely shocked and surprisingly compassionate when she explained that her parents hadn’t come home. Darla was happy munching Cap’n Crunch cereal and watching Saturday morning cartoons as Josie sat in Mr. Topper’s kitchen, drinking an offered glass of orange juice in one of those tiny juice glasses that old people seemed to always have. He’d called the police station, and then very grimly set the phone down, a tortured look in his eyes that had disappeared rather quickly when he cleared his throat, and wouldn’t make eye contact again.
“Someone’s coming, Josephine. They’ll be here soon to…figure all this out.”
The rasp in his voice on his last word had made a hot ball of lead form in her stomach. She was smart enough to know that what Mr. Topper wasn’t saying, told her everything she needed to know. So she didn’t say anything, because what could she say?
“I have to get back to my little cousin,” she hadfinally said, and now as an adult looking back, it was quite remarkable that he had let her, standing in the doorway and watching her make the trek back to her house, where she had walked past Darla, who was now openly fishing handfuls of cereal out of the box, picking out the red berries and eating them while throwing back the rest.
Seventeen years flashed past as she remembered how her room smelled, like the fabric softener her mother had used. The bed wasn’t made, but the rest of the room was tidy, dusted even, back when Marlene did that sort of thing. She had picked up the Wrinkle in Time book and sat down on her bed, turning to the first page. She had started reading it, and made it to page eleven when the doorbell had rung. The appearance of the police hadn’t surprised her, but she hadn’t expected the woman in the dress who told her that they were there to take her and Darla to go somewhere while they figured out what to do about their parents.
Darla had stood there, her giant mop of curls pouring down her shoulders. Wild and crazy, those giant green eyes like saucers. Her hand was all the way in the box, down to the elbow, and she was wearing Powerpuff Girls pajamas. “What’s goin’ on?” she’d asked, and the lady had nearly fallen apart.
“I need you to come with me, honey.”
“Why do we need to go with you?” Josie had snapped, her finger marking the place where she had stopped reading in the book.
“We’re trying to figure out what happened to your parents, and children can’t be left alone when their parents are…”
The cop had cut her off with a hard look. Josie recognized him. Sometimes he came to the library where her dad worked. His last name was escaping her, but she knew that he had a daughter two years older than her in the school. Jane…Jane…something. And then, like an angel, the assistant librarian in town, Mrs. Humboldt, had swooped in. To this day, Josie didn’t know whether Mr. Topper had called her, or whether she had heard the news, or whether, as Josie liked to imagine it in her eleven-year-old mind, by starting to read the book that her daddy had given her, she had somehow sent a cosmic message to the world.
That a fellow librarian needed to come to another librarian’s child’s rescue, and rescue she had.
Emphatic and officious, in a way that only a small-town librarian can be, she’d beaten the cops and the woman, who turned out to be a social worker, into submission. She had insisted with the ramrod-straight back of a woman quite accustomed to being listened to and obeyed that the girls were now in her custody, and that had been that.
As she sat in the room she was clearing for Darla, all of those memories flooded her, as if the book were transmitting them by some sort of pulped paper osmosis. She hated this book. She hated herself. She hated her mother, and her uncle, who had made a terrible, terrible mistake and paid for it with his own life, and her father’s life, and her mother’s sanity. But most of all, she hated that she was such a coward, that she could not bring herself to read that f**king book, yet she carried it around with her, and always would.
Not being with Alex was the right thing. She was too f**ked up to be worthy of anyone, to be of any good to anyone other than Darla.
The phone rang, shaking her out of her angry reverie. Of all of the times for Marlene to choose to call, she picked this one. Ignoring it, she let her voicemail click in. She took the book and put it in the farthest corner of the back closet in her bedroom, where it needed to rest, hidden but omnipresent. And then, folding her heart in half like a tesseract, she finished the job with a coldness that filled her with a sense of relief.
Somehow, Darla had convinced one of the two guys she was with to come all the way out to Sturbridge, pick her up at some truck stop, and bring her into Cambridge. She’d accomplished all of this at one in the morning, though, and had failed to call Josie, so the quiet knock at the door in the middle of the night had made her grab a baseball bat and tiptoe to her own front door. The problem was that she was wearing a cami and underpants, and nothing else. So as she stood there, holding a baseball bat, half naked, when she pulled the curtain aside on the window of her front door, she nearly shoved the baseball bat into Darla’s face.
“What the hell are you doing here at 1 a.m.?” she hissed. The taillights of a car moved back down to the main road.