The Book of Speculation

27 JULY 23RD — JULY 24TH

We flee the rain, clinging to the library’s walls. Blue security lights fix us flat like a photograph, burning everything away: Doyle, ink and skin; Enola, bones and a ravenous stare. She hasn’t spoken to him since the car. Alice’s key trips into the lock and turns with a satisfying crunch. The alarm squeals the moment the door opens. I find the keypad, punching in the numbers my hand has memorized the same way it knows to hold a pen or turn a page. The air is musky with paper, dust, and Grainger’s unique redolence of disrepair. I move for the lights.

“No worries, man. I got it,” says Doyle. He trots over to circulation and puts his hand to a desk lamp. One at a time, the fluorescents stutter on with percussive hisses, bathing books in cold green light. It’s an uncanny thing to watch, but Doyle merely shakes out his hands when he’s finished, as though this is as mundane as tying his shoes. Enola walks ahead, a visible shiver working its way up her spine.

“Little Bird,” Doyle calls. She flips him the middle finger and disappears upstairs, heading toward the whaling archive. He starts to go after her but I stop him with a hand on his elbow.

“Don’t. Let her go.” Enola can sulk effortlessly for days. She once refused to speak to me when I brought Lisa Tamsen home after a shift at the Pump House. She shouted that Lisa smelled like old fry oil. I got seven days of silent treatment before she admitted that Lisa’s sister had filled her locker with dissected grasshoppers from the biology lab. She’d glared at me as if I should have known what I’d done. I know what Doyle’s done. “What do you know about us? I mean everything.”

“Pretty much what I said.” He shrugs and searches for somewhere to sit. He props his feet on one of the lounge chairs in periodicals and they land with a squish. “My friend collected circus stories so he’d have shit to talk about. He was big on accidents. Like, I bet you didn’t know that they lynched an elephant in Tennessee, right?”

No. I did not. The wind has started clawing at the windows. Lights flicker.

“Yeah, this circus elephant snapped and killed somebody — trampled or strangled, I don’t remember — so the town decides to put it down, but they can’t figure how. They wind up using a crane to hang it. Anyway. He used to talk about train wrecks, fires, people breaking their necks on the high wire, trapeze stuff. Sometimes I think he was just waiting to see if I’d electrocute myself. I told him it doesn’t work that way.” He doesn’t elaborate on how exactly it does work. “So, we’re down somewhere around Atlanta and it’s so unbelievably hot, and we’d just spent all day putting up tents. I guess I said something about wishing we had a dunk tank, and that starts him on a jag about mermaids. He says there are these women that pop up on the circuit every once in a while, they can hold their breath for an insanely long time and swim like they’re half fish. They’ve been around forever. It’s one family and they all look the same — black hair, and so skinny you could break them. Everybody takes them on, no matter what show, since a woman like that brings in cash like crazy, because you’re watching the impossible, the actual impossible.” He looks at me. Impossible meeting impossible. “The whole time I’m listening for the catch. His stories always had catches.”

“They die.”

“Yeah,” he says. “They drown. Hardly any of them ever make it past thirty.”

“Did you ask him how he knew about the women?”

“No. Dave had this way of picking up stories. I figure most of them were bullshit. I mean, drowning mermaids?”

“But you believe it now.”

“The breath-holding? I’ve seen you swim.” He grimaces, showing a slight snaggletooth. “The rest? A couple years later I’m working for Rose’s. The first time I showed up with Enola, Thom took one look at her and I swear he nearly crapped his pants. He asked if I knew who I had with me. I told him she was the best damned tarot reader I ever saw. Thom kept asking if she swam or not. I said all I know is that she does cards. Pretty soon he tells me almost the same story Dave did.”

“You know they drown.” I won’t say we. A question floats between us. Doyle nods.

“Enola doesn’t swim. She reads cards,” he says.

She hasn’t shown him. She’s said nothing of the breath-holding lessons, the hours I spent teaching her how to float on her stomach, how to push all the air out of her then fill up her belly, how to dive and listen to the water, or how we used to pretend that our mother was there in the deep. She’s out there past the rocks, plucking mussels from the boulders, eating scallops from the bay. She feels you holding your breath. Enola’s black bathing suit made her into a slick seal pup, a little selkie girl who trusted me when I held her face into the water. The trust is gone; she’s been keeping secrets from Doyle, from me. “I’m worried about her.”

“So why’d we burn that stuff? It wasn’t about Frank, was it?”

“No.”

Enola’s footsteps pound down the stairs. Perhaps it won’t be a long sulk this time. “It’s freezing in here. I need a blanket or something.” Her arms are hugged tight across her chest, her hoodie drenched. The whaling collection is kept cold; it’s better for the books.

“There’s always a coat or two in the lost and found. It’s in the back of the kids’ section, downstairs.”

“I’ll go,” Doyle offers. He walks toward the steps, touching every outlet and computer plug as he goes.

“Does he pick up charge from that?”

“Don’t know,” Enola says. She curls up in the chair next to me. “He says it feels good.”

“Strange guy.”

“He’s okay.”

“You didn’t tell him you can hold your breath.”

“Why would I?” She stares down at her feet. Her red tennis shoes are wet all the way through. She peels them off, shivers, and tucks her feet beside her.

“Did anyone ever tell you about our family? If Doyle knows, someone must have told you. Thom Rose spotted me right away and I barely asked him anything. Did he tell you something?”

“No.” A small tic in the upper lip.

“What did he tell you?”

“He asked me if I swim, the same as he asked you. I told him Mom was in a carnival. That’s all.” She takes the cards from her pocket and begins laying them out on the chair arm. A quick horizontal line of six, then clear. Repeat. Her fingers crab walk.

“Thom would have told you.”

Quick six, clear, repeat. “I told Thom that I read cards, I don’t swim. The same as I told Doyle. I said that if he bugs me, I leave and Doyle goes with me.” A tap of the cards. Slide, shuffle, repeat. “Doyle would go, too. Nobody wants to lose him. He’s special,” she says. “I didn’t know he knew about us.” The cards slip against each other fiber against fiber, a little molecular exchange. Paper that old means the cards have bled into each other, becoming a single object, a single mind. “He should have told me.”

“Why?”

The cards stop moving. “Because nobody tells me things. He doesn’t. You don’t. You think I don’t know things, but I do.” She resumes shuffling.

“You keep secrets. From me, from Doyle.”

She shoots me a look. “Because it’d be good for him to know that I’m capable of carrying on in the footsteps of my suicidal mother. Who drowned.”

Doyle nearly killed me trying to pull me up. Yes, it might be safer if he doesn’t know. “Maybe.”

“I wonder how long she was planning to do it. What if she woke up every morning for a year knowing it was one day closer? Maybe that made things seem more precious.” She fans out the cards and then snaps them together into a neat pile.

“I don’t think it works like that,” I say.

“How would you know? Is there something you’re keeping from me?”

“No.” Silence stretches between us, filled only by quiet shuffling. She looks tired, washed out. “Are you sad?”

“I’m not like Mom,” she says, softly. “I’m careful. I read cards, I don’t swim. I don’t tempt stuff. When you come with us, I don’t want you saying anything to Thom or Doyle.” She deals a perfectly balanced row on the chair arm. The Fool, the Eight of Swords, the Queen of Swords among them, startlingly familiar. They’re faded, worn. Familiar is not even the word. I’ve seen these pictures before. This is a hand-drawn deck. Maybe it was hard to recognize because I’d seen them in brown ink, but I remember the curling shoe on the Fool, the tortured expression on the Eight of Swords.

“Found you a coat.” Doyle jogs up the stairs holding an enormous black parka that looks like it’s made from garbage bags. Enola stuffs the cards back in her pocket. He approaches and she hops up, letting him put the ugly thing around her shoulders.

“Simon?” she says.

“What?”

“There’s water coming through the doors.”

Underneath the rubber edge of the glass doors a dark puddle has formed, a black creeping stain on the green carpet. “Shit. Doyle, were there any more coats?”

“Sure.”

“Get them. Coats, sweaters, shirts, whatever’s there.”

There are four exits to Grainger, the main doors, two fire exits, and a service door. Two of the exits are on the basement floor. The lost and found has only an armful of jackets and clothing, barely enough for one door. Doyle carries them all around his shoulders, a human coat rack.

“The rest’s all bags and stuff. Umbrellas.”

Downstairs is filled with children’s books and newspapers, older local documents, and books in storage that no one uses except those writing theses, or me. Downstairs will flood quickly; there isn’t a practical point in trying to save it if water from upstairs is going to rush down. Still. Ruined. Everything on the lower shelves, all those files. I can still feel the edges of each page.

“Simon?”

“Front door. We’ll stop the bottom with coats and figure something else out from there.”

A little boy’s red winter jacket, a dark blue vest, a wool coat covered with cat hair, a stained sweater, a brilliant pink cardigan — I can picture it on Mrs. Wallace. They fill with water, soaking through. Doyle drags two chairs over to hold things in place.

Then comes the painful part.

Reference is sacrificed to the fire exit. A bottom shelf. An encyclopedia is opened and jammed into each crack in the door, volumes stacked upon volumes to make as close as we can to a seal. We tear out pages to fill in the gaps. Push back the water, don’t think about the books. They would have gotten ruined anyway. Don’t think about how tall the stacks felt when I first discovered Grainger. Don’t think about how these shelves held the answers for me, to everything, to what I would be, how they were my own decimal code.

I feel Enola looking at me. “You’re already fired,” she says. “And you’re probably saving books.”

Doyle tears out a page covered in scrawl. “Somebody drew dicks all over it anyway.”

That doesn’t make it better.

When we can push no more paper, when there is no more to do, we climb the stairs to the second floor.

The whaling collection is cold, pristine. Plexiglas cases display scrimshaw, harpoon heads, and a blubber spade. The shelves have worn captain’s logs, ship manifests, drawings, and letters in archival boxes. Sterile. A portrait of a young Philip Grainger hangs by the door; his round wire glasses and close-clipped brown beard convey both wealth and academia. There isn’t a corner of the room that doesn’t fall under his gaze. Alice likes to genuflect when she walks past him. The chairs here are softer than the ones in periodicals; this is where the money comes from and where it goes. If we’re going to stay dry we’ll do it here. Enola curls up in a chair. Doyle slides another chair beside her. She lays her head on his shoulder and tattooed arms snake around her. Somewhere between the car, the coats, and the water, he’s been forgiven.

“Ever think,” she says, “ever feel like the water is coming for you? The house, for sure. Your books.”

“We’re safe here.” I watch her. Doyle’s head begins tipping into the easy sleep of a child. Enola’s eyes dart, eyeing the ceiling for leaks, I presume. “When I first started walking the buoys out, Frank told me that when we were born there were high tides each time, waves so big they washed over the bulkheads, right over the pilings. Everyone thought the docks would break, but they held. Good things can come with the tide.”

She pulls her hood up and tucks her chin to her knees. “Frank is a liar.”

She’s right. I walk out to the stair rail and look over. A black circle has spread beneath the encyclopedias holding the back door.

She falls asleep against Doyle, his tentacles around her, skin embracing, ink embracing. I am out of places to go. Water has taken everything. The storm has even erased the pleasure of the fire. All I’ve done is burn our history and destroy a beautiful book. Then came the rain. Something’s gone wrong.

I get up. The books downstairs may already be ruined but it’s not right to let them go without a witness, and it’s time to check on what Liz Reed found.

Doyle cracks an eyelid. “Where’re you going?”

“Downstairs. I need to watch it go.”

He nods slightly. Enola tosses in his arms, one hand darting out in a spastic thrust. “She’s worried about you,” he says. “That’s why she came here.”

“She didn’t have to.”

He looks around, lights sputter and blink — whether from him or the storm, it’s difficult to say. “I don’t know, man. Bad things have a way of happening around you. Just keep it together at Rose’s, yeah? It’s a good job and I don’t want to have to find another.” In his voice lurks the vaguest hint of a threat. His face remains calm, one eye half-open, nearly asleep. It should have been Dad’s job to keep dangerous men away from her; now she’s surrounded herself with an electric fence.

“I’m just going to the lower level. I won’t be long.”

The floor is wet, a thin layer of water gives the dark green carpet an enticing gloss, and a sucking sound follows each hobble. A deep ache sits in my ankle. I move books, put them on tables, but it isn’t enough. It’s hard to breathe; the room is thick with the stench of wet paper. I move everything I can from the children’s books and lift them to higher ground — save the Thornton Burgess, the fairy tales, the Potter, empty the lower cabinets of any papers, everything I loved. I can’t stomach watching books drown. A light hisses and pops, darkening the bank of microfiche machines. The tables fill too quickly and it becomes impossible to choose.

I wind through the rows of file cabinets — newspapers and journals stored on microfilm, microfiche, and paper yet to be digitized — unaware of what I’m looking for until I find it. The Beacon, for the week of my birth, then for Enola’s. The Boater’s Companion section with the tide tables and weather reports. High tides brought us, swells without the storm. The blame was laid on full moons. After the water rushed the land, the tide pulled the Sound back, emptying it nearly to Connecticut both times. For Enola there is a picture of a man standing out in the middle of a sand field where the harbor had gone dry. Boats ran aground. Fish died. Hundreds of bluefish and fluke drowned in the air. High tides brought us, and brought death. Under flickering blue fluorescents I look for my mother and find her storm. The week she died passed in a blur, leaving only the memory of being fed eggs and watching her leave, but there had been an event — a squall that came in fast, a red tide, and a beach filled with horseshoe crabs.

I go to my desk, what was my desk down here until a few weeks ago, it’s still here, though it has changed. The book repair tools have been cleared away, the banker’s lamp replaced with a fluorescent, the traces of me erased. All that remains is the computer.

It turns on with an alarming flash, but survives logging into my email. While it can’t be safe to use electronics in a storm like this, time is of the essence. It’s the twenty-third, and the relief that came from the bonfire vanished with the storm.

Liz’s email is perfect, detailing an accident during the New Orleans flood of 1825, an entire showboat swallowed by the Mississippi River after days of rain. She found it in the Louisiana State Gazette. Most of the performers and animals perished with the boat’s sinking. Among the five named survivors are Katerina Ryzhkova and her daughter, Greta. The child’s father perished in the flood. The show’s owner, Zachary Peabody, was taken to a hospital to recover. He later embarked on a long and disreputable career as a dance hall proprietor. As I suspected. Liz finishes her email with a small token: “Sanders-Beecher Archive is trying to get in touch with you. Your phone’s out. Fix it. I think you might have a job.”

Raina’s email is next. Less eloquent than Liz’s, Raina’s message contains a list of names and abbreviations. Greta Mullins m. Jonathan Parsons. Three children: Jonathan Parsons, Jr.; Newton Parsons; Theresa Parsons. Jonathan Jr. died as a child, and Newton did not marry. Theresa Parsons, however, did. I read the line. Unsteady, I smash the print screen button. Seconds later an electrical pop comes from the printer. I stare at the screen. Theresa Mullins m. Lawrence Churchwarry. One child. Martin. I can supply the rest. Martin Churchwarry would spend an unremarkable life as a bookseller until one day stumbling across a fascinating book. Martin Churchwarry is a descendant of Madame Ryzhkova. Raina is brief, but her work is always thorough to the point of infallibility.

The computer blinks and the screen goes dark. My chest feels strange, hollow. Martin Churchwarry found the book and found me. He’s a Ryzhkov. Is that why I kept talking to him? Was there a pull in the blood that kept me from hanging up on him? No, I called him. I did it. He sent the book, but I kept calling, pulling him to me. Yanking at his guts.

I rescue my notes from upstairs, where Enola is now fully asleep on Doyle’s lap, her body stretched across two armchairs. I grab my bag and Doyle quirks an eyebrow. “Notes,” I say. He says nothing.

I make the call from Alice’s desk, because her chair is softer and it’s farther away from the whaling collection than mine; it also smells like her, like salt and lemon. Her drawer is filled with purple pens, the caps ever so slightly chewed. Purple pens are for meeting notes. The receiver smells like her. Doyle stands at the stair rail, craning his neck, watching me, his head propped on one inky arm.

I don’t wait for a greeting. “You’re a Ryzhkov.”

“Simon? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Where have you been?”

“My phones are out. You’re a Ryzhkov. Did you know? The cards in the book, they were your family’s.”

He clears his throat. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I need to know why you sent me the book,” I say. “It’s important.”

“It’s just what I told you. There was something different about the book, wonderful, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I could sell. Ryzhkova? Truly?”

“Libraries would have wanted it,” I say. “A circus museum, maybe. There’s always a demand for something that old, you just need to know where to look. You’re a bookseller, it’s your job to know where to look.”

He sighs. “There’s a circus museum in Sarasota might have been interested, yes. But haven’t you ever felt connected to a book? My wife has a copy of Treasure Island. It’s stained, missing pages, and it’s in horrendous condition, but she won’t part with it. I’ve given her others, beautiful printings, but she’s not interested. That Treasure Island is her book.” I hear chair legs drag across a floor as Churchwarry sits. “I went to the estate auction for Moby-Dick, but I saw that book in the lot and I needed a better look at it. I overbid terribly, but I needed to be certain I had it. Purely speculation, of course — nobody was allowed to get a good close look before bidding — but I thought there was a chance it was my book. The way Treasure Island is Marie’s. But the moment I touched it I knew it wasn’t mine. I knew it wasn’t for selling, either, not at Churchwarry and Son. I can’t explain it other than to say that it was begging to be given away. I kept it for a little while, looking through it to see if I could find where to send it. Then I saw that name. Verona Bonn.”

“My grandmother,” I say. “Martin, it was your book. Your great-great-grandmother was the fortune-teller in the menagerie, Madame Ryzhkova.”

“You’re absolutely certain?” He coughs for a few moments, not for sickness or age, but to gather his thoughts. “Extraordinary,” he says. “The circumstances are so chance.”

“I don’t think it was chance. Books like this aren’t supposed to leave a show or a family, but this one is different. Enola says she’s never seen one like it. It found its way to you, and you found me. Like it was looking for us.”

“How marvelous,” he says, almost giddy with it. He’s no longer listening to me, lost in his own thoughts. “To think of the time I spend procuring books … How fitting: a book procured me. Utterly fantastic,” he murmurs. “I’d like to look at it again. Would you mind sending it back? Or better, could you bring it here? I’d like to meet you as well. It seems we should meet. It’s as if we’ve been pulled together, haven’t we?”

“I can’t. I burned it.”

“You what?” Behind me, the emergency door rattles, pushing against the encyclopedias. “What was that?” he asks.

“The library is flooding,” I say. Churchwarry makes a startled sound before asking if I’m safe. “For the time being. I destroyed the book and everything from Frank’s. I thought that would take care of it, like smashing a curse tablet — exorcism by fire, but then the storm came. Martin, something’s very wrong. I’m worried.”

“You think you’ve missed something,” he says.

The water pushes forward and it’s time to sacrifice another encyclopedia, and tear out another part of me. “I have to hang up, but I wanted you to know. You should know who your family was. I need to block the doors.” I glance over to the chairs where Enola sleeps and Doyle sits, watching.

“Simon,” he says, with a rasp in his voice that I haven’t heard before. “Please be safe.”

His words are heavy with rare things: care and possibility.