An excerpt from a novel by Virginia Zimmerman ’92
Chapter 1
For ten years, my father’s furniture and books lurked in the study he abandoned. I don’t remember a time when we thought he might come back, but his belongings were like a bookmark, holding a place in our lives, until Mom found out he’d moved to London. She decided to reclaim the place his absence had haunted all these years. In that brisk, decisive way of hers, she said, “Well, that’s that. The room is yours, Rosemary, if you want it.”
After movers got the heavy stuff in place, Adam and Shelby came over to help lug armfuls of my life down the hall.
Shelby chattered easily about this book and that one. “Oh, I remember when we all read this.” She pointed her chin at the battered book on top of the tottering stack she carried. “Don’t you? It was summer, and Adam thought it would be boring and didn’t want to read it, but then he did, and he couldn’t put it down, and then we all read it again. And a third time, I think.”
“I didn’t think it would be boring!” Adam was sitting on the floor refolding my shirts.
“You did!” I remembered. “You didn’t want to read a book with an old guy on the cover.”
Shelby set the books on the floor between my bed and a broad bookcase, the only piece of my father’s furniture I kept. The stack slumped against the wall, the familiar covers fanned out in a welcoming display.
We must have done stuff other than read and reread that book, but when I reach into my memory, the book frames the hot lazy months of that summer, the first one when Shelby was old enough to be responsible for us and we didn’t have adults trailing us everywhere. Adam and I were nine, so Shelby was twelve, a year younger than we are now.
Adam squared a box of school supplies against the edge of the desk. “I didn’t have a problem with the old guy. I just wanted to read different stuff from Shelby.”
“Michelle,” Shelby corrected, pulling her long hair into a messy knot on the top of her head, which made her look older. She’d lately been insisting we use her full name. “It really is a great room,” she said, but her attention was on her phone, and her thumbs flew as she texted.
I was suddenly exhausted. “Now that everything’s here, we can set it up tomorrow,” I said. “If you want to come back.”
So now I lean against the door frame, waiting for Adam, not quite letting myself hope that Shelby will come, too. I’ve put away my books and most of my clothes, but I can’t face doing any more on my own. Something inside me tries to shuffle out of the way so I can feel at home here, but the room isn’t mine. Not yet.
Now that most of my dad’s stuff is gone, I miss it. I really only know him through the things he left behind. He like a big, heavy desk, and he kept a lot of books from English classes in college, and he put up a big copy of that annoying Escher print with the stairs that go around and around forever. Those things defined him once, giving me something to latch on to. But now I understand that those are the things he didn’t care enough about to take with him.
A battered hardcover Norton Anthology of English Literature with thin, translucent pages and a big, brown Riverside Shakespeare had stood like guards at either end of a long shelf. In between was a group of Dickens novels with black covers. Each one had a crease in the spine less than half an inch in, like he read around a hundred pages and then gave up.
I can’t imagine having once loved certain books and not loving them anymore. In a way, you are what you read, so abandoning books is the same thing as abandoning a part of yourself. And the truth is that his leaving the books behind baffled me more than his leaving Mom and me behind.
So, when Mom said she’d pack up the books for the library book sale, my heart clenched, and I replied without thinking, “No, I want them,” but I didn’t really want them. I just wanted them to be wanted.
Now his books sit like intruders in the familiar landscape of my books, Saving them was the right thing to do, but they keep my father’s absence present in the room.
Adam cries out, “You did the books without me!”
“Don’t worry. We can re-do them.” I cross to the bookcase. “I kept some of my father’s, but . . . I don’t like them mixed in with mine.”
He doesn’t ask why. He just trots forward and starts pulling books off the shelves and piling them on my desk. He knows which ones are mine and has no trouble picking out the intruders.
Shelby kneels with her head cocked to one side, reading titles.
“I love your books,” she sighs.
“That’s because they’re the same as yours,” Adam points out.
He’s right. So many of my books are ones she recommended. If you are what you read, then Shelby’s been a big part of making me who I am.
“Are these organized in any way?” Adam frowns at the shelf.
“Well, they’re together by author — ”
“Of course.”
“Yeah, and then the ones that are most important are nearest my bed at pillow level, you know, so I can get them quickly.”
“In a reading emergency.” Adam grins at me, but his eyes are serious. We’ve both experienced those times when only the right book will anchor you.
At some point in the near future he will volunteer to make labels for my shelves, and I’ll let him. It’ll make him happy, and I like the idea of Adam putting his personal stamp on my room.
“What do you want to do with these?” Adam rests a hand on the stack of my father’s books.
“I don’t know.” I bite the inside of my lip. “It seemed wrong to give them away, but I don’t exactly want to keep them, either.”
I want Shelby’s input, but she’s texting.
“The attic?” Adam suggests.
“That seems cruel.”
He frowns. “To your dad?”
“To the books.”
“Sorry, guys. I’ve gotta go!” In a heartbeat, Shelby’s up and in the doorway.
“OK. Thanks for coming.” I manage a neutral tone. Happy she was here. Fine with her leaving.
“See ya!” And she’s gone.
There’s a pause during which Shelby’s absence is the biggest thing in the room.
“How about the cupboard?” Adam tugs me back to business.
The shallow cupboard sits expectantly in a corner space that used to be a chimney. “OK, I guess.”
Adam opens the top door. “His books will fit here, and then you’ll have them, but you can close the door, and, you know, out of sight out of mind, right?”
It only takes a few minutes to arrange the books in the cupboard. The Riverside Shakespeare leans to the left, holding the others in place.
Adam shuts the door. “There!”
I sit on the bed trying to fall in love with the room. Adam studies the space, reorganizing my stuff in his head.
“What are you going to do with the lower cupboard?” he asks.
“It doesn’t open, remember?”
Adam launches himself out of the low chair. “Let me just try . . .” He drops to his knees and tugs at the small metal knob, painted over many times like everything else in the room.
“We did this already,” I protest. “You know it’s stuck.”
“We were younger then. We didn’t know what we were doing,” he mutters as he examines the door.
“Shelby tried to use a credit card,” I remind him.
“She also tried ‘Open Sesame,’ ” he replies.
“Neither worked.”
“Well, Shelby isn’t a thief or a magician,” he says. “We just need to be systematic . . .” His tongue pokes just slightly out of the corner of his mouth, the way it does in Algebra.
“It’s never opened.” I speak slowly, as if enunciated syllables might make him stop messing with the door.
“But that’s stupid.” He doesn’t look at me. His back flexes as he pulls. “It’s a door. It has to open. Or at least it did, once, so it can . . . Or. Should. Now.” He smacks the small door with each word. Nothing happens.
“Adam!” I hate when he just won’t let something go. “Leave it. It doesn’t matter.”
He’s shifted from smacking to gently twisting the knob.
“I’ve lived in this house my whole life.” I raise my voice, trying to pull his attention away from the door. “And that cupboard has always, always been locked or stuck. Even when my father lived here, he never opened it.”
“Maybe he didn’t try.” Adam looks up at me.
Of course he didn’t try. I bite the inside of my cheek.
The overwhelming desire to not be like my father propels me across the room, and I kick the little door. Hard. I expect it to spring open, in response to my sudden fury. I kick it again. And again.
Adam shifts a little to the side and waits for me to stop.
After four kicks, I’m spent. I drop to my knees and grip the knob. It moves left and right, but the door doesn’t budge.
Adam leans in with me. “It’s like it’s locked somewhere else. You know what I mean? The knob turns, but it doesn’t open the door.”
“Well, there’s no other handle,” I sputter as I twist harder.
He reaches over me and tries to grip the edge of the door, but the crack is too small. “Do you have a crowbar?” he asks.
“I’ll get the tool box.” I push myself up, and the wide floorboard shifts underneath my hand.
Adam’s eyebrows arch. We slide off the board. He presses it with the palm of his hand, and it rocks, just slightly.
“Do you think . . .” he starts.
But I’m already there. I stick a finger into the pinky-sized hole where a knot used to be and lift the board. Adam grasps the end, and together we set it to the side. The space underneath is cluttered with a ragged, grey cotton I recognize as the same insulation that’s in the attic. Nestled in the cotton are a wooden puzzle piece and a marble, dimmed by dust.
Adam pulls out the puzzle piece and blows it clean. “It’s wood,” he observes. “It has flowers or maybe leaves . . .”
I pluck it from the flat of his hand. Whatever was once pictured here has faded to an unrecognizable smudge of ferny green. I set it next to the rectangular opening in the floor and reach for the marble, which manages to glint through the dust.
“What was that book?” Adam asks. “The one where the mean mother person traps kids’ souls in marbles?”
“Coraline,” I whisper, and I dump the marble into Adam’s hand.
“No souls here,” he says lightly. “Just dusty glass.”
Just the forgotten toy of some kid who lived in this house fifty or a hundred years ago, then grew up and grew old and probably died.
Something black catches my eye. A small J-shaped piece of metal hangs down from the base of the cupboard.
I grasp the crook of the J. It’s a handle. I’m sure.
Adam leans in again. “Is it — ”
“Wait,” I breathe.
I push the cool metal to the right. For a heartbeat, the small handle resists, and then, as if with a sigh of relief, it gives.
The cupboard door swings open.