Our Crooked Hearts(19)

The raw hems of Marion’s jeans caught on her Cons as she led us through the streets of her cushy college town, past houses perched like sailboats on grassy swells. When she turned onto a slate path that led to a Craftsman cottage, Fee and I looked at each other behind her back. It was sharp as a box cutter, that look.

We moved like creepy crawlers through Marion’s pristine house. Inspecting objects that had no function but to be pretty, opening the fridge to find fresh orange juice and hummus tubs instead of Old Style cans and irradiated deli meat. Marion was the klepto, but that place gave me itchy fingers. I nicked a Buffalo nickel from a wooden ashtray and a slim book titled Dream Work off the arm of a rocking chair. Fee watched me do it, mouth flat as the horizon.

That house was a confessional. Marion’s sins laid before us: that she lived in a place with a piano and washed her hair with brand shampoo. That she went to sleep each night in a four-poster bed with a flowered canopy. Even the bed wore a skirt.

From the nightstand I picked up a photo in which an adolescent Marion beamed, sallow in a yellow satin dance costume and stripe of stage lipstick. My thumbs smudged its glass front, nails painted in chipped black Wet ’n Wild.

We’d been quiet all through the tour, but now I laughed. Inside that laugh was all my jealousy, all my betrayal, boiled down into disdain. Fee was reaching for a blown-glass unicorn caught mid-prance. Her voice when she turned was as harsh as I’d ever heard it.

“Why do you even need it?”

The magic, she meant. It had only been a couple of days that we’d known it was real, and already we sensed magic didn’t grow in soft places.

Marion stood in the center of her little rich girl’s room, planted like a weed in the yellow carpet. “If I tell you, will you listen?”

We shrugged. We were two skittish city mice, making bruises in the carpet’s pile. But by the end, we were listening.



* * *



Marion was the surprise child of her parents’ old age, born after their sons were grown and gone. Her mother and father were indulgent but distant, happy to trust her upkeep to a string of nannies.

Marion tried to be a dutiful daughter. She had the sense of owing it to her parents, of tiptoeing like a guest through their house. She believed the distance they kept was her fault alone, and something she still might fix. But the older she got, the more they withdrew.

She was twelve when she finally gave up on pleasing them. It took her that long to look around her life and see that not one piece of it was truly hers. Her younger self came to feel like a departed sister still haunting their house. Her photos covered the walls, but it was Marion who slept uneasily in her ruffled bed. Or maybe Marion had it wrong. Maybe she was the ghost.

When she wasn’t at school she roamed the campus where her parents taught, sneaking into the backs of lecture halls and reading books on the green. There were two university libraries and she spent lots of time at the main one, a redbrick hive of student activity and brightly lit carrels. The other library—a scholar’s haven, annexed sometime in the 1940s—Marion never bothered with. She wasn’t even sure where it was.

On a frigid Monday evening, she found it.

She’d been wandering since school let out, killing time beneath a midwinter sky that was blue as a mood ring. It was almost dinner but there was no one waiting for her—her mom had office hours, her dad a late seminar. She was a mile from home and had forgotten her scarf and she felt like crying for no good reason. She was distracted enough to mistake an unfamiliar stretch of sidewalk for a shortcut.

The lamps on the path were old. They tinted her skin an ugly orange and gave off a teeth-itching hum. She figured out pretty quickly she was going the wrong way but kept moving anyway, until the path poured itself into a bowl of frozen lawn.

Beyond it was the weirdest building she’d ever seen. It was a multistory Frankenstein, afflicted with strangely shaped windows and unexpected outcroppings. It was, according to the brass sign on its front, the other library.

Marion checked her orchid-pink Swatch: 5:35. She let herself in through the carved wooden doors, and it took her fewer than the twenty-five minutes before closing to fall in love.



* * *



The library was eccentrically designed, as full of secrets as an advent calendar. There were hidden alcoves and dead doors, half-stairs and galleries and a third-floor reading nook Marion claimed as her own. Here and there you came upon stained glass: a girl holding a knife and an apple at the top of a staircase; a fox curled beneath a rosebush in a third-floor hall.

Only faculty and visiting researchers had browsing rights, but Marion was the brat of two tenured professors, her mother the fearsome chair of the anthropology department. And she was the right kind of quiet. Not shy, not cute, just hard to see, bobbing along below the float line of adults’ notice. Soon the guard at the door just waved her through.

The library was always cold as a cathedral. Coldest was the basement, its warren of shelves studded like a Christmas cake with dank reading rooms. Its carpets ate sound, so you always thought you were alone until you came, suddenly, upon some old-fart prof who gawked at you like you were one of the Shining twins.

Marion didn’t believe in hauntings, not really—her parents had a tendency to debunk her fears in chilly academic terms, and though annoying, it worked—but that floor of the library felt layered, let’s say. You could feel the way history accreted there, laying its scaly paw over your neck. Mainly she stayed out of the basement.