“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“Is that why you went to the library today? To look for your mom?”
I looked at Lena, pushing her hair out of her face. I nodded, pulling the rosemary out of my pocket and placing it carefully on the counter. “Come on. I want to show you something.” I pulled her out of the chair and took her hand. We slid across the old wood flooring in our damp socks and stopped at the door to the study. I looked up the stairs to my dad’s bedroom. I didn’t even hear the shower yet; we still had plenty of time. I tried the door handle.
“It’s locked.” Lena frowned. “Do you have the key?”
“Wait, watch what happens.” We stood there, staring at the door. I felt stupid standing there, and Lena must have too because she started to giggle. Just when I was about to laugh, the door began to unbolt itself. She stopped laughing.
That’s not a Cast. I would be able to feel it.
I think I’m supposed to go in, or we are.
I stepped back and the door bolted itself again. Lena held up her hand, as if she was going to use her powers to open the door for me. I touched her back, gently. “L. I think I need to do it.”
I touched the handle again. The door unbolted and swung open, and I stepped into the study for the first time in years. It was still a dark, frightening place. The painting, covered with a sheet, was still hanging over the faded sofa. Under the window, my dad’s carved mahogany desk was papered with his latest novel, stacked on his computer, stacked on his chair, stacked meticulously across the Persian rug on the floor.
“Don’t touch anything. He’ll know.”
Lena squatted down and stared at the nearest pile. Then, she picked up a piece of paper and turned on the brass desk lamp. “Ethan.”
“Don’t turn on the light. I don’t want him to come down here and freak out on us. He’d kill me if he knew we were in here. All he cares about is his book.”
She handed me the paper, without a word. I took it. It was covered with scribbles. Not scribbled words, just scribbles. I grabbed a handful of the papers closest to me. They were covered with squiggly lines and shapes, and more scribbles. I picked up a piece of paper from the floor, nothing but tiny rows of circles. I tore through the stacks of white paper littering his desk and the floor. More scribbles and shapes, pages and pages of them. Not a single word.
Then I understood. There was no book.
My father wasn’t a writer. He wasn’t even a vampire.
He was a madman.
I bent down, my hands on my knees. I was going to be sick. I should have seen this coming. Lena rubbed my back.
It’s okay. He’s just going through a hard time. He’ll come back to you.
He won’t. He’s gone. She’s gone, and now I’m losing him, too.
What had my father been doing all this time, avoiding me? What was the point of sleeping all day and working all night, if you weren’t working on the great American novel? If you were scribbling rows and rows of circles? Escaping from your only child? Did Amma know? Was everyone in on the joke but me?
It’s not your fault. Don’t do this to yourself.
This time I was the one out of control. The anger welled up inside me, and I pushed his laptop off his desk, sending his papers flying. I knocked over the brass lamp, and without even thinking, yanked the sheet off the painting over the couch. The painting went tumbling to the ground, knocking over a low bookshelf. A pile of books went flying to the floor, sprawling open on the rug.
“Look at the painting.” She righted it, amidst the books on the floor.
It was a painting of me.
Me, as a Confederate soldier, in 1865. But it was me, nonetheless.
Neither one of us needed to read the penciled label on the back of the frame to know who it was. He even had the lanky brown hair hanging down in his face.
“About time we met you, Ethan Carter Wate,” I said, just as I heard my father lumbering down the stairs.
“Ethan Wate!”
Lena looked at the door, panicking. “Door!” It slammed shut and bolted. I raised an eyebrow. I didn’t think I was ever going to get used to that.
There was pounding on the door. “Ethan, are you okay? What’s goin’ on in there?” I ignored him. I couldn’t figure out what else to do, and I couldn’t stand to look at him right now. Then I noticed the books.
“Look.” I knelt on the floor in front of the nearest one. It was open to page 3. I flipped the page to 4 and it flipped back to 3. Just like the bolt on the study door. “Did you just do that?”
“What are you talking about? We can’t stay in here all night.”
“Marian and I spent the day in the library. And as crazy as it sounds, she thought the books were telling us things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know. Stuff about fate, and Mrs. Lincoln, and you.”
“Me?”
“Ethan! Open this door!” My dad was pounding now, but he had kept me out long enough. It was my turn.
“In the archive, I found a picture of my mom in this study and then a cookbook, opened to her favorite recipe, with a bookmark made of rosemary. Fresh rosemary. Don’t you get it? It has to do with you, somehow, and my mom. And now we’re here, like something wanted me to come here. Or, I don’t know—someone.”
“Or maybe you just thought of it because you saw her picture.”
“Maybe, but look at this.” I flipped the page of the Constitutional History book in front of me, turning it from page 3 to page 4. Once again, no sooner had I turned it than the page flipped back by itself.
“That’s weird.” She turned to the next book. South Carolina: Cradle to Grave. It was open to page 12. She flipped it back to 11. It flipped to 12.
I pushed my hair out of my eyes. “But this page doesn’t say anything, it’s a chart. Marian’s books were open to certain pages because they were trying to tell us something, like messages. My mom’s books don’t seem to be telling us anything.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of code.”
“My mom was terrible at math. She was a writer,” I said, as if that was explanation enough. But I wasn’t, and my mom knew that better than anyone.
Lena considered the next book. “Page 1. This is just the title page. It can’t be the content.”
“Why would she leave me a code?” I was thinking out loud, but Lena still had the answer.
“Because you always know the end of the movie. Because you grew up with Amma and the mystery novels and the crosswords. Maybe your mom thought you would figure out something that no one else would get.”
My father half-heartedly banged away at the door. I looked at the next book. Page 9, and then 13. None of the numbers went higher than 26. And yet, lots of the books had way more pages than that….
“There are 26 letters in the alphabet, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it. When I was little, and couldn’t sit still in church with the Sisters, my mom would make up games for me to play on the back of the church program. Hangman, scrambled words, and this, the alphabet code.”
“Wait, let me get a pen.” She grabbed a pen from the desk. “If A is 1 and B is 2—let me write it out.”
“Careful. Sometimes I used to do it backward, where Z was 1.”
Lena and I sat in the middle of the circle of the books, moving from book to book, while my father banged on the door outside. I ignored him, just like he had been ignoring me. I wasn’t going to answer to him, or give him an explanation. Let him see how it felt for a change.
“3, 12, 1, 9, 13…”
“Ethan! What are you doin’ in there? What was all that racket?”
“25, 15, 21, 18, 19, 5, 12, 6.”
I looked at Lena, and held out the paper. I was already a step ahead. “I think—it’s meant for you.”
It was as clear as if my mom was standing in the study, telling us in her own words, with her own voice.
CLAIMYOURSELF
It was a message for Lena.
My mom was there, in some form, in some sense, in some universe. My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locks and the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper.
She lived.
When I finally opened the door, my dad was standing there in his bathrobe. He stared past me, into the study, where the pages of his imaginary novel were scattered all over the floor and the painting of Ethan Carter Wate was resting against the sofa, uncovered.
“Ethan, I—”
“What? Were going to tell me that you’ve been locked in your study for months doing this?” I held up one of the crumpled pages in my hand.
He looked down at the floor. My dad may have been crazy, but he was still sane enough to know that I had figured out the truth. Lena sat down on the sofa, looking uncomfortable.
“Why? That’s all I want to know. Was there ever a book or were you just trying to avoid me?”
My dad raised his head slowly, his eyes tired and bloodshot. He looked old, like life had worn him down one disappointment at a time. “I just wanted to be close to her. When I’m in there, with her books and her things, it feels like she isn’t really gone. I can still smell her. Fried tomatoes…” His voice trailed off, as if he was lost in his own mind again and the rare moment of clarity was gone.
He walked past me, back into the study, and bent down to pick up one of the pages covered with circles. His hand was shaking. “I was tryin’ to write.” He looked over at my mom’s chair. “I just don’t know what to write anymore.”
It wasn’t about me. It had never been about me. It was about my mom. A few hours ago I had felt the same way in the library, sitting among her things, trying to feel her there with me. But now I knew she wasn’t gone, and everything was different. My dad didn’t know. She wasn’t unlocking doors for him and leaving him messages. He didn’t even have that.
The next week, on Christmas Eve, the weathered and warped cardboard town didn’t seem so small. The lopsided steeple stayed on the church, and the farmhouse even stood up by itself, if you set it just right. The white glitter glue sparkled and the same old piece of cotton snow secured the town, constant as time.
I lay on my stomach on the floor, with my head tucked under the lowest branches of the fat white pine, just as I always had. The blue-green needles scratched my neck as I carefully pushed a string of tiny white lights, one by one, into the circular holes in the back of the broken village. I sat back to take a look, the soft white light turning colors through the painted paper windows of the town. We never found the people, and the tin cars and animals were still gone. The town was empty, but for the first time it didn’t seem deserted, and I didn’t feel alone.
As I sat there, listening to Amma’s pencil scratching, and my dad’s scratchy old holiday record, something caught my eye. It was small and dark, and snagged in a fold, between layers of the cotton snow. It was a star, about the size of a penny, painted silver and gold, and surrounded by a twisted halo made of what looked like a paper clip. It was from the town’s pipe-cleaner Christmas tree, which we hadn’t been able to find in years. My mom had made it in school, as a little girl in Savannah.