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  For Libby

  All words are masks, and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

  —Steven Millhauser, “August Eschenburg”

  As always we take up again where we left off. This is where I belong after all.

  —Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lydia heard the distant flap of paper wings as the first book fell from its shelf. She glanced up from the register, head tilted, and imagined that a sparrow had flown through an open window again and was circling the store’s airy upper floors, trying to find its way out.

  A few seconds later another book fell. This time it thudded more than flapped, and she was sure it wasn’t a bird.

  It was just past midnight, the bookstore was closing, and the final customers were checking out. Lydia was alone at the register, scanning a stack of paperback parenting books being bought by a teenage girl with pitted cheeks and peeling lips. The girl paid in cash and Lydia smiled at her but didn’t say anything, didn’t ask what the girl was doing alone at a bookstore this late on a Friday night, didn’t ask when she was due. When the girl got her change, she met Lydia’s eyes for a moment, then rushed out without any bookmarks.

  Another book fell, definitely somewhere upstairs.

  One of Lydia’s comrades, a balding guy named Ernest who walked like a Muppet but always looked sad, was standing by the front door, guiding the night’s final customers into Lower Downtown.

  “Are you hearing that?” Lydia said from across the store, but her voice was too quiet and anyway Ernest was occupied. She watched him unlock the door he’d just locked to let in a clubbing couple who looked drunk.

  “They need to pee,” Ernest said, shrugging in Lydia’s direction.

  Outside, a few scruffy BookFrogs lingered on the flagstone sidewalk, zipping up backpacks and duffels, drinking from gallon jugs of water they’d refilled in the bathroom. One had a pulp crime paperback crammed in his back pocket. Another had a pencil on a string tied to his belt loop. They stood together but none of them spoke, and one by one they slumped separately into the city, off to sleep in a run-down basement in Capitol Hill, or on a bench in Union Station, or in the sticky cold of Denver’s alleys.

  Lydia heard another faint flapping. Definitely a falling book, followed by a few more in rapid succession: flap-flap-flap. The store was otherwise quiet.

  “Upstairs empty?” she said to Ernest.

  “Just Joey,” Ernest said, but his eyes were fixed on the corner of zines and pamphlets that flanked the bathrooms where the drunk couple had just disappeared. “Do you think they’re screwing in there?”

  “He knows we’re closed?”

  “Joey?” he said. “You never know what Joey knows. He asked after you earlier, by the way. It may have been the longest conversation we’ve ever had. ‘Seen Lydia?’ I was touched.”

  Most days Lydia made a point of tracking Joey down wherever he’d settled into the store—a corner table in the coffee shop, or the former church pew in the Spirituality section, or even under the Story Tree in Kids—to see what he was reading and how he was feeling and whether any odd jobs had come his way. She had a soft spot for the guy. But tonight she’d gotten caught in the store’s after-dinner rush and never tracked him down.

  “Lyle is with him, right?” Lydia said. Though decades apart in age, Joey and Lyle were all but inseparable, like two halves of one smart and awkward beast.

  “No Lyle. Not tonight. Last I saw, Joey was all alone in History. He had masking tape on his fingers.”

  “On his fingers?”

  “I think he must’ve cut himself or burned himself. Made bandages with Kleenex and tape.” He looked at his watch. “He’s not a crackhead, is he? They’re always burning fingers.”

  Lydia heard another fluttering book. The store occupied three cavernous floors, and when it was quiet like this, sound traveled between them as if through an atrium. She imagined Joey all alone lobbing books up there, some kind of bibliomancy or I Ching toss. She’d be the one to stay late and reshelve them.

  “Count the drawer for me?”

  “Goddamned couple,” Ernest said, coming around to the register without unpeeling his eyes from the bathrooms. “They’ve gotta be screwing in there.”

  Lydia crossed the store’s gritty floors and headed up the wide, tiered staircase that reached through the building like a fattened spine. Ernest had gone through earlier and turned off most of the overhead lights upstairs, so she felt as if she were climbing into an attic.

  “Joey?”

  The second floor was quiet, shelf upon shelf of books standing still. She continued to the third.

  “Joey?”

  Joey was the youngest of the BookFrogs, and by far Lydia’s favorite. This wouldn’t be the first time that she or one of her bookselling comrades had done a final sweep at closing and found Joey knocking books off the shelves, searching for a title that may or may not have actually existed. His glossy hair would be draped over his eyes, and he’d be wearing black jeans and a black knit sweater with the collar just low enough to see the top of his tattooed chest. The wooden floors around his feet would be spread with books about subjects as far-reaching as his thoughts: Sasquatch sightings and the Federal Reserve, Masonic rites and chaos theory. He was a shattered young man, Lydia often thought, haunted but harmless—a dust bunny blowing through the corners of the store.

  She liked having him around.

  “Joey?”

  The third floor was dim and peaceful. Lydia stepped into a familiar warren of tall wooden shelves and followed their angles and branches into different alcoves and sections, each holding a chair or a couch, a table or a bench: Psychology, Self-Help, Religion, Travel, History.

  Something squeaked.

  “Last call, Joey.”

  When she stepped into the Western History alcove, she could feel her eyes trying to shut out what she was seeing: Joey, hovering in the air, swinging like a pendulum. A long ratcheted strap was threaded over a ceiling beam and looped around his neck. Lydia’s body sprung with terror, but instead of running away she was suddenly running toward him, toward Joey, and hugging his lanky legs and trying to hoist him up. She heard someone’s scream curdle through the store and realized it was her own.

  Lydia’s cheek pressed into Joey’s thigh and his jeans were warm with urine. A lump in his pocket smelled of chocolate and she assumed it was a knot of melted Kisses, swiped from the bowl on the coffee shop counter. His hands were clenched into quiet fists and she could see the masking-tape bandages on three or four of his fingertips, but she wouldn’t look up again at the popped purple sockets of his eyes, nor the foamy saliva rolling down his chin, nor the blue swelling of his lips.

  She could see the cemetery of books that had flapped to the floor as Joey had climbed the shelves, and the others he’d shoved aside to create footholds as he threaded the strap through the ceiling, and still others that had dropped as he’d tried to kick his feet back to stop himself from dying. By now she’d locked her hands together on the far side of his thighs and was trying to lift him up, but her sneakers kept slipping on the wooden floor, and each time she slipped the ra
tcheted strap cinched tighter around his neck. She must have stopped screaming because a ringing silence suddenly swallowed everything when she saw, a few inches from her face, poking up from Joey’s front pocket, a folded photograph of her.

  Lydia.

  As a child.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Lydia?”

  Ernest was hustling up the steps.

  “Lydia? Where are you?”

  Lydia plucked the photo from Joey’s jeans. In it she was ten, wearing frizzy braids and a blue cord vest, blowing out candles on a chocolate cake.

  “Oh Jesus!” she heard Ernest say as he rounded the shelves into the alcove. “Here, here. Joey, c’mon, c’mon, man, don’t—”

  In the dim bookstore light, in the stench of Joey’s death, in the warren of those shelves, Lydia slid the photo into her back pocket and tried simply to breathe. Ernest—responsible Ernest, who moments ago had been downstairs counting change, guarding the Bright Ideas bathroom from horny club rats, and who half a decade ago, in a previous life, had driven through sandstorms in the Persian Gulf War—Ernest dragged a footstool over and hopped to the top and yelled about an ambulance as his hands went to work. Lydia stepped back and realized that the drunk couple from the bathroom was now standing behind her, holding each other and looking on, and she accidentally stepped on the woman’s high-heeled foot and whispered, Sorry, and the woman said, That’s okay, and both of them started crying at once. Someone put a hand on Lydia’s shoulder and she shrugged it off.

  “Is he moving? Does anyone see him moving?”

  The long nylon strap that Joey had earlier unthreaded from a dolly or a cart had a metal ratchet built into it. Ernest released it high above his head and the strap unspooled like a whirring whip and Joey hit the floor.

  All went quiet. No one attempted to move him, to defibrillate or resuscitate. Joey was obviously over.

  Someone’s ride honked on the street out front, and the Union Station sign glowed red against the windows. Lydia felt a sharp stirring in her abdomen, something much more terrifying than sadness or shock, and she stooped to her knees and began scooping up the books that Joey had kicked to the floor, and once she had them all in a pile she began reshelving them because she didn’t know what else to do. Books that were pushed too far back she scooted forward, and books that were too far forward she scooted back, and then an older woman with thick glasses who worked part-time at the store took Lydia’s elbow and led her toward a couch in the Self-Help section, where she waited for the police, out of sight of Joey’s body.

  After being interviewed by the reporting officer, sipping a cup of green tea with a coat from the lost-and-found draped upon her lap, Lydia went outside to the sidewalk and watched Joey’s bagged body get wheeled on a gurney into the back of an ambulance. She declined a few offers for a ride home and instead caught a slow bus up Colfax Avenue, where she could be alone with Joey’s photo.

  Her late-night city passed by outside, streetlights and neon glowing over the noodle shops and cantinas, the fast food and the porn, the basilica and the temple, the wig stores and salons. She passed the diner with sixty-five-cent coffee and the dry cleaner’s with the ceramic Buddha in the window. Hooded figures drank out of paper bags and a pair of nuns pushed a grocery cart full of blankets. She loved riding the Colfax bus, with its potholes and its people.

  Once the bus had emptied out some, she slipped the photo out of her back pocket. Her hands were damp and she felt as if she were breathing through a straw.

  Lydia couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a girlhood photo of herself and she was fairly sure she’d never seen this one. The spare snapshots of her childhood had been buried so deep inside her bedroom closet that she wasn’t certain they were even there anymore—all of which made Joey’s possession of this photo even more impossible. It had been taken during the only real birthday party she’d ever had, two decades ago, in the little bungalow off Colfax where she’d spent her early years, just a mile or two east of here. Inside the photo’s yellowing border Lydia was a ten-year-old girl leaning over her birthday cake, deep in a candlelit bliss. She found it hard to believe that her dad had been able to wrangle her curly black hair into those tight braids, and even harder to believe that this joyful little girl was her. But unquestionably she was: her big brown eyes, her blue cord vest, her crooked yellow buttons. So much had not yet happened.

  Though Lydia occupied most of the frame, there were two other kids in the photo, her only fourth-grade friends. Raj Patel was seated to her right, wearing a light blue jumpsuit with silver buckles and staring with an adoring smile, not at the cake or at the camera but at Lydia, the birthday girl. Carol O’Toole was there too, on her left, but she’d been fidgeting so much that only a blurred corona of her orange hair could be seen. The photo’s composition was odd, canted and crisscrossed by twists of crepe paper, and Lydia realized this was because her father must have been trying to get all three of them into the frame as Carol bounced around and scraped her fingers through the frosting. It hadn’t worked.

  Lydia’s stomach churned. Fourth grade, she thought, the same year she and her father had left—fled—Denver. And they’d fled all right, a month or two after this photo had been taken, straight from the hospital to the mountains without saying good-bye to a soul.

  The bus jostled to a stop in the gut of Capitol Hill. Lydia hopped off and walked the rest of the way home.

  In their second-floor apartment, David was still awake. He was perched at the kitchen table, wearing a headlamp and tinkering with a computer motherboard. A soldering iron and a small spool of wire sat on the table near his hands. The counter behind him was crowded with dirty bowls and cutting boards, garlic peels, a jar of olives, a zesting grater, and the lopped stem of an artichoke. The room smelled of soldering flux and baked chicken, and Lydia could hear Cobain screaming in the headphones that cupped his neck. It was the middle of the night but David was acting as if it were the middle of the day, and she could tell that his evening had once again disappeared into whatever project was currently dissected on the table. He tilted his head slightly when she came in, but his sight remained focused on the tiny circuitry below.

  “Let me just wrap this . . .”

  She planted a kiss on his temple. This was the man she’d fallen for five years back, the guy who’d rather take apart a television than eat nachos in front of it. David wasn’t perfect, she knew, and she sometimes was annoyed by the computer cords and old hard drives stacked on a shelf in their bedroom, or the splintery skateboard with its box of wheels and bearings that had been under their bed, unused, these past four years, or the autographed Broncos poster that couldn’t be hung near the bathroom because the shower steam could potentially crinkle Elway’s jersey. But despite such minor irritations, David was truly a pure-hearted guy, an upbeat mama’s boy with wavy hair and beautiful eyes who just wanted to split breakfast burritos with Lydia until death. She was glad to have him in her life.

  “I didn’t get to the dishes,” he said, “but there’s some food . . .”

  As soon as David looked up, he must’ve sensed something was wrong. He stood and clutched her shoulders.

  “Lydia, what happened? Oh shit. Was I supposed to pick you up?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what?”

  Her gut was swimming. She leaned against the sink to steady herself and told David all about Joey. Except for the part about the photo. She shared almost everything with David—her bizarro sci-fi dreams, her fears about the future, her shifting rotation of phobias and anxieties—but not the ruins of her childhood. Some things were off-limits, even for the guy she loved.

  “Oh, babe,” he said. “I just assumed you went out for drinks after work. I had no idea. I should’ve come down there.”

  David was a fervent believer in comfort food, so without registering how late it was, and without asking whether Lydia was even hungry, he pulled a plate of artichoke chicken out of the fridge and warmed it in the m
icrowave, careful to be precise in cook time and power level (3:05 at Reheat 4). Lydia took the opportunity to slip into the bedroom and hide the birthday photo in the depths of her sock drawer. The microwave beeped just as she was finally washing the smell of chocolate and urine from her hands.

  On the Bright Ideas loading dock, Lydia listened to the rhythmic beeps of a truck reversing up the alley. She’d been told last night to take the week off, but here she was pacing with the pigeons behind the bookstore—unable to be away, yet unable to go inside.

  The rattling sound of nearby jackhammers didn’t help to calm her nerves, but by now she’d grown used to them, just as she’d grown used to the walls of scaffolding and flapping plastic that cloaked this part of town these days. For decades this entire brick district had been a network of underused rail lines and concrete viaducts, honky-tonks and stockyard stomps, and the only residences had been stacked above shit bars with names like Drinks and the Drinking Hole and A Place to Drink. Even the neighborhood’s name—Lower Downtown—had always felt fitting because these blocks marked the low point where the city’s runoff collected: the soup-kitchen-and-skid-row crowd, the salvage and warehouse trucks, the wastewater sloshing from driveway to sewer grate to the trashy foaming currents of the Platte. It felt then like a city should: reeking of its own past. But change was on the way. The viaducts had been ripped out, cobblestones scoured back to life, and buildings that had sat abandoned for decades were being converted into galleries and apartment lofts. Along with a single brewery and a couple of coffee shops, the bookstore had been one of the first new businesses to move in, and over the course of a few years it had gradually expanded through the lower three floors of a onetime lightbulb factory. (Hence the name Bright Ideas, and the retro bulb that defined its front doors and bookmarks.) The store was growing busier by the month and down the street a ballpark—a ballpark!—was even under construction. Lydia sometimes wondered what she would do when this end of town, with its buried cowboys and hobo stories, began to cast the dull hue of any other.