NOS4A2(151)

A single park bench remained. Once it had been dark green, with wrought-iron arms and legs, but the paint had peeled and the wood beneath was splintery, sun-baked almost to colorlessness. Maggie dozed upright, chin on chest, in one corner of the bench, in the direct, unforgiving light of day. She held a carton of lemonade in one hand, a fly buzzing around its mouth. Her sleeveless T-shirt exposed scrawny, withered arms, spotted with the scars from dozens of cigarette burns. She had at some point blasted her hair with fluorescent orange dye, but the brown and gray roots were showing. Vic’s own mother had not looked so old when she died.

The sight of Maggie—so worn, so emaciated, so ill used, and so alone—hurt Vic more sharply than the ache in her left knee. She forced herself to remember, in careful detail, how in a moment of anger and panic she had thrown papers in this woman’s face, had threatened her with police. Her sense of shame was exquisite, but she did not allow herself to shove it aside. She let it burn, the tip of a cigarette held firmly against skin.

The front brake shrilled as Vic settled to a stop. Maggie lifted her head, pushed some of her brittle-looking sherbet hair back from her eyes, and smiled sleepily. Vic put the kickstand down.

Maggie’s smile vanished as quickly as it had come. She rose unsteadily to her feet.

“Oh, V-V-Vic. What did you do to yourself? You’ve got blood all over you.”

“If it makes you feel better, most of it isn’t mine.”

“It doesn’t. Makes me f-f-f-feel ffff-fffaint. Didn’t I have to put Band-Aids on you last time you were here?”

“Yeah. I guess you did,” Vic said. She looked past Maggie at the library. The first-floor windows were covered over with plywood sheeting. The iron door at the rear was crisscrossed with yellow police tape. “What happened to your library, Maggie?”

“S-s-seen better days. Like muhmuhmuh-mmm-mmme,” Maggie said, and grinned to show her missing teeth.

“Oh, Maggie,” Vic said, and for an instant she felt very close to crying again. It was Maggie’s uneven grape-soda-colored lipstick. It was the dead trees in a pile. It was the sun, too hot and too bright. Maggie deserved some shade to sit in. “I don’t know which one of us needs a doctor more.”

“Oh, gosh, I’m okay! Just m-muh-my s-stuh-stammer is worse.”

“And your arms.”

Maggie looked down at them, squinting in puzzlement at the constellation of burns, then looked back up. “It helps me talk normal. Helps me with other s-s-st-st-stuff, too.”

“What helps you?”

“P-p-p-puh-puh-pain. C’mon. Let’s go in. Mama Maggie will fffffffix you up.”

“I need something besides fixing, Maggie. I have questions for your tiles.”

“M-m-muh-might not have answers,” Maggie said, turning up the path. “They don’t work s-ss-so well anymore. They st-st-st-stammer, too, now. But I’ll try. After we get you cleaned up and I muh-muh-mother you some.”

“I don’t know if I have time for mothering.”

“Sure you do,” Maggie said. “He hasn’t muh-muh-muh-made it to Christmasland yet. We both know you can’t catch him before then. Be like trying to grab a handful of fffff-fffog.”

Vic gingerly descended from the bike. She was almost hopping to keep the weight off her left leg. Maggie put an arm around her waist. Vic wanted to tell her she didn’t need a crutch, but the truth was she did—she doubted she could make it to the back of the library without help—and her arm went automatically over Maggie’s shoulders. They walked a step or two, and then Maggie paused, twisting her head to look back at the Shorter Way, which once again spanned the Cedar River. The river seemed wider than Vic remembered, the water boiling right up to the edge of the narrow road that looped behind the library. The thicket-covered embankment that had once lined the water had been washed away.

“What’s on the other end of the bridge this time?”

“Couple of dead people.”

“Will anyone ff-f-ffuh-ffollow you through?”

“I don’t think so. There are police looking for me back there, but the bridge will pop out of existence before they find it.”

“There were p-p-puh-police here.”

“Looking for me?”

“I don’t know! Muh-mm-mmmmmaybe! I was coming back from the drugstore and s-s-saw ’em parked out f-f-f-front. So I took off. I stuh-st-stay here s-s-s-sometimes, s-s-sometimes other puh-p-places.”

“Where? I think the first time we met, you said something about living with relatives—an uncle or something?”

Maggie shook her head. “He’s gone. Whole trailer p-puh-park is gone. Washed away.”

The two women limped toward the back door.

“They’re probably looking for you because I called you. They might be tracking your cell phone,” Vic said.

“Thought of that. Dumped it after you called. I knew you wouldn’t need to call again to f-find m-m-mmme. No worries!”

The yellow tape across the rusting iron door read DANGER. A sheet of paper, slipped inside a clear plastic envelope and stuck to the door, identified the structure as unsound. The door was not locked but held ajar by a chunk of concrete. Maggie ducked the tape and pushed it inward. Vic followed her into darkness and ruin.

The stacks had once been a vast, cavernous vault that smelled fragrantly of ten thousand books, aging gently in the shadows. The shelves were still there, although banks of them had been toppled like twelve-foot-tall iron dominoes. Most of the books were gone, although some remained in rotting heaps scattered here and there, stinking of mildew and decay.