NOS4A2(26)

Maggie removed her gray fedora and tossed it at the coatrack. In the soft light from the fish tank, her metallic purple hair glowed, a thousand burning neon filaments. While Maggie filled an electric teakettle, Vic wandered to the desk to inspect the revolver, which turned out to be a bronze paperweight with an inscription on the smooth grip: PROPERTY A. CHEKHOV.

Maggie returned with Band-Aids and motioned for Vic to get up on the edge of the desk. Vic sat where Maggie pointed and put her feet on the worn wooden chair. The act of bending her legs brought the stinging sensation in her knee back to the forefront of her mind. With it came a deep, nasty throb of pain in her left eyeball. It was a feeling like the eye was caught between the steel prongs of some surgical instrument and being squeezed. She rubbed at it with her palm.

Maggie touched a cold, damp washcloth to Vic’s knee, cleaning grit out of the scrape. She had lit a cigarette at some point, and the smoke was sweet and agreeable; Maggie worked on Vic’s leg with the quiet efficiency of a mechanic checking the oil.

Vic took a long, measuring look at the big fish tank set into the wall. It was the size of a coffin. A lone golden koi, with long whiskers that lent him a wise appearance, hovered listlessly in the tank. Vic had to look twice before her eyes could make visual sense of what was on the bottom of the tank: not a bed of rocks but a tumble of white Scrabble tiles, hundreds of them, but only four letters: F I S H.

Through the wavering, green-tinted distortion of the tank, Vic could see what lay on the other side: a carpeted children’s library. About a dozen kids and their mothers were gathered in a loose semicircle around a woman in a neat tweed skirt, who sat in a chair that was too small for her and who was holding up a board book so the little guys could look at the pictures. She was reading to them, although Vic could not hear her through the stone wall, over the bubbling of the air handler in the fish tank.

“You’re just in time for story hour,” Maggie said. “Ss-story hour is the best hour of the day. It’s the only hour I care about.”

“I like your fish tank.”

“It’s a whore to clean,” Maggie said, and Vic had to squeeze her lips together to keep from shouting with laughter.

Maggie grinned, and the dimples reappeared. She was, in her chubby-cheeked, bright-eyed way, more or less adorable. Like a punk-rock Keebler elf.

“I’m the one who put the Scrabble tiles in there. I’m kind of nuts for the game. Now twice a month I’ve got to haul them out and run them in the wash. It’s a bigger pain in the ass than rectal cancer. Do you like Scrabble?”

Vic glanced at Maggie’s earrings again and noticed for the first time that one was the letter F and the other was the letter U.

“I’ve never played it. I like your earrings, though,” Vic said. “You ever get in trouble for them?”

“Nah. No one looks too closely at a librarian. People are afraid of going blind from the glare of ssss-ssso much compressed wisdom. Check it out: I’m twenty years old, and I’m one of the top five SS-Scrabble players in the whole state. I guess that might say more about Iowa than it says about me.” She pasted the Band-Aid over Vic’s scrape and patted it. “All better.”

Maggie crunched out her cigarette in a tin can half filled with sand and slipped away to pour the tea. She returned a moment later with a pair of chipped cups. One said LIBRARIES: WHERE SHHH HAPPENS. The other said DO NOT MAKE ME USE MY LIBRARIAN VOICE. When Vic took her mug, Maggie leaned around her to open the drawer. It was the drawer where a PI would’ve kept his bottle of hooch. Maggie came up with an old purple faux-velvet bag with the word SCRABBLE stamped into it in fading gold letters.

“You asked me how I knew about you. How I knew you were coming. SSS-SS-SSS—” Her cheeks began to color with strain.

“Scrabble? It has something to do with Scrabble?”

Maggie nodded. “Thanks for finishing my sentence for me. A lot of people who sss-stammer hate that, when people finish their sss-sentences. But as we’ve already established, I enjoy being an object of pity.”

Vic felt heat rise into her face, although there was nothing sarcastic in Maggie’s tone. Somehow that made it worse. “Sorry.”

Maggie appeared not to hear. She planted herself in a straight-backed chair next to the desk.

“You came across the bridge on that bike of yours,” Maggie said. “Can you get to the covered bridge without it?”

Vic shook her head.

Maggie nodded. “No. You use your bike to daydream the bridge into existence. And then you use your bridge to find things, right? Things you need? Like, no matter how far away they are, the thing you need is always right on the other s-ss-side of the bridge?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Only I don’t know why I can do it, or how, and sometimes I feel like I’m only imagining all my trips across the bridge. Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“You’re not crazy. You’re creative! You’re a s-ss-ss-strong creative. Me, too. You’ve got your bike, and I’ve got my letter tiles. When I was twelve, I saw an old SS-Suh-Scrabble game in a garage sale, going for a dollar. It was on display, the first word already played. When I saw it, I knew I was s-ss-suh—had to have it. I needed to have it. I would’ve paid anything for it, and if it wasn’t for sale, I woulda grabbed it and run. Just being close to this Scrabble board for the first time threw a kind of shimmy into reality. An electric train turned itself on and ran right off its tracks. A car alarm went off down the road. There was a TV playing inside the garage, and when I saw the SSS-Suh-Scrabble set, it went crazy. It started blasting s-ss-suh—”