Our Missing Hearts (14)

He’s seldom around so many books, and for a moment it is dizzying. Shelves and shelves. So many you could get lost. At the front desk, the librarian—a dark-haired woman in a pink sweater—glances his way. She sizes him up over the tops of her glasses, as if she knows he doesn’t belong, and Bird quickly sidles away into the aisles, out of view. Up close, he can see that here and there books have been removed, leaving gaps in the rows like missing teeth. But still he senses that there are answers here, caught somewhere between the pages and filed away. All he has to do is find them.

Placards hang at the ends of the shelves, a list of subjects that live down each aisle, perplexingly numbered and inscrutably arranged. Some sections are still lush and thriving: Transportation. Sports. Snakes/Lizards/Fish. Other sections are dry deserts: by the time he gets to the 900s, nearly everything is gone, just rows and rows of skeletal shelving, slicing the sunlight into squares. The few remaining books are small dark spots against all that bare. The China-Korean Axis and the New Cold War. The Menace at Home. The End of America: China on the Rise.

As he roams, he notices something else, too: the library is all but deserted. He is the only visitor here. On the second floor sit rows of bare study carrels and long worktables with wooden chairs, all unoccupied. All the way down to the basement, just empty seats and a forlorn sign reading: changed your mind? please place unwanted books on the cart below. There is no cart anymore, only a bare stretch of linoleum tile. It is a ghost town, and he, still alive, is intruding in the land of the dead. With one finger he traces an empty shelf, making a clean bright line in the thick fur of dust.

Far downstairs, in the back corner, he finds the poetry section, scans the shelves until he reaches M. Christopher Marlowe. Andrew Marvell. Edna St. Vincent Millay. He isn’t surprised to find that the shelf jumps straight from Milton to Montagu, but he’s sad not to find her name.

Coming here was a mistake, he thinks. This place feels forbidden, the whole undertaking unwise. In his nostrils, the sharp scent of iron and heat. He inches toward the front, where at the desk the librarian sorts through a crate of books with ruthless efficiency. He’s afraid to catch her eye again. When she turns around, he thinks, he’ll slip out.

Peering through a gap in the shelf, he watches, waiting for an opening. The librarian pulls another book from the blue plastic crate on the desktop, consults a list, makes a check mark. Then—and here Bird is puzzled—she quickly riffles through the book, fanning the pages like a flipbook, before shutting it and placing it on the stack. With the next book, she does the same. Then the next. She’s looking for something, Bird realizes, and a few books later she finds it. This time she scans the list once, then again, and sets her pen down. Evidently this book isn’t on it. Slowly she flips through the pages, one at a time, pausing finally to extract a small white slip of paper.

From where Bird stands, he can just make out a few lines of handwriting scribbled across it. He leans around the shelf, trying to see more, and it is at this point that the librarian looks up and spots him peeking out.

Swiftly she folds the paper in half, hiding it from view, and marches toward him.

Hey, she says. What are you doing back there? Yes, you. I see you. Up. Stand up.

She jerks him up by one elbow.

How long have you been there, she demands. What are you doing back there?

Up close she’s both older and younger than he expected. Long dark brown hair threaded with iron gray. Older, he thinks, than his mother would be. But there’s a youthful quality to her, too: a small flash of silver in her pierced nostril; an alertness in her face that reminds him of someone. After a minute, he realizes who. Sadie. The same glinting dare in her eye.

I’m sorry, he says. I’m just—I’m looking for a story. That’s all.

The librarian peers at him over her glasses.

A story, she says. You’ll have to be more specific.

Bird glances at the maze of shelves around them, the librarian’s hand clamped on his arm, her other fist clenched—around what? His face flushes.

I don’t know the title, he says. It’s a story—someone told me a long time ago. There’s a boy, and a lot of cats.

That’s all you know?

Now she’ll throw him out. Or she’ll call the police and have him arrested. As a child, he understands instinctively how arbitrary punishment can be. The librarian’s thumb digs harder into the crook of his arm.

Then she half closes her eyes. Thinking.

A boy and a lot of cats, she echoes. Her grip on his arm slackens, then releases. Hmm. There’s a picture book called Millions of Cats. A man and a woman want the prettiest cat in the world. Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions of cats. Ring a bell?

It doesn’t sound familiar, and Bird shakes his head.

There’s a boy in this story, he repeats. A boy, and a cabinet.

A cabinet? The librarian bites her lip. There’s a sudden light in her eyes, an alertness to her, as if she is a cat herself, on the hunt with ears pricked and whiskers twitching. Well, there’s a boy in Sam, Bangs and Moonshine, she says, but no cabinet, that I can recall. Lots of cats in Beatrix Potter, but no boys. Is it a picture book, or a novel?

I don’t know, Bird admits. He has never heard of any of the books the librarian is describing, and it makes him slightly dizzy, all these stories he hadn’t even known existed. It’s like learning there are new colors he’s never seen. I never actually read it, he says. I think it might be a fairy tale. Somebody just told it to me, once.