Читать книгу The Bookshop Of Yesterdays - Amy Meyerson - Страница 11
ОглавлениеWhile the brick facade of Prospero Books looked just as I remembered, everything around it had changed. Sunset Junction, once little more than a relic of the old railcar system, had become a destination of its own, complete with cafés, a coffee bar, a cheese shop and boutiques. Every metered spot along Sunset Boulevard was taken. The sidewalks were lined with diners brunching under awnings, with couples pushing strollers.
I stood outside Prospero Books, staring at the store’s old sign, repainted but otherwise the same. Prospero towered above the window, staff in right hand, a book in left, purple cape and white hair windblown behind him. The picture window looked the same, too, only it displayed titles by Lionel Shriver, Isabel Allende and Michael Pollan in place of the new releases of years before.
The smell of the store hit me as soon as I entered. Freshly cut paper. White musk. Jasmine. Black pepper. Coffee beans. I’d forgotten the sound of the brass bell on the door, the corkboard in the entryway, now covered in flyers for personal trainers and Pilates classes. The store itself was smaller than I remembered. The ceilings not as high. The shelves more narrowly spaced. They were divided, then subdivided. Fiction into literary, popular, banned, historical, classic, feminist, LGBTQ, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, noir, foreign language and small presses. The lime green of the exposed brick walls still looked fresh. The mosaic tables still glittered blue and gold in the café’s bright light. I didn’t see Lee. I didn’t see any of the poets in trench coats sipping espresso, the pretty girls in overalls stalking the shelves. There were still pretty girls. They were skinnier now, without as much eyeliner. Every table in the café was still occupied, customers intensely typing on laptop keyboards instead of writing in notebooks. Everything buzzed with activity, the store still alive with the possibility of Prospero’s magic books.
Against the far wall, the wild-haired, Dylan Thomas–reciting man from Billy’s funeral was inspecting a shelf, scratching checkmarks beside a list of titles. His T-shirt read Smile, You’re on Camera.
“You were at Billy’s funeral?” I asked as I approached him. He glanced up from his clipboard. His crystalline eyes regarded me with little recognition. “You read the Dylan Thomas poem? I’m Miranda.”
He surveyed me with those candied eyes, their flit clinical rather than flattering. “The prodigal niece appears.”
“That’s me.” I smiled in the way that usually made strangers think I was cute—never sexy, always cute—but he didn’t return the smile. I held out my hand. He shook it perfunctorily.
“Malcolm,” he said as if I should have already known his name.
The phone rang, and he released my hand to walk over to the desk.
“Prospero,” he said as he picked up. His tone changed as soon as he started to talk about books. “White Teeth is out of stock. We can order you a copy.” He held the phone in the crook of his neck as he typed something into the ancient computer monitor behind the desk. The desk area wasn’t private enough to be the mess that it was. An overflowing bin of advance reader copies, unpacked boxes of books, a calendar with first names and publishers scrawled onto several dates. “It should be here in two days. Have you read On Beauty? It’s more like White Teeth than NW, but I think you’ll find... We have a copy... Sure, I’ll set it aside for you.”
I wandered around the literature section, listening to Malcolm answer the caller’s questions about Zadie Smith, whom I hadn’t read. Book after book across the shelves I also hadn’t read, many titles I didn’t recognize, subsections of literature I hadn’t realized needed to be distinguished from each other. I couldn’t recall how they’d been organized when I was a kid. I never paid much attention to the adult books. Malcolm continued to talk about the stylistic differences between Smith’s older novels and her most recent one. I walked around the stacks, trying to determine why he would pretend not to recognize me when he’d clearly seen me at the funeral, when my eyes had locked with his. The teen section was now termed Young Adult, twice its former size, consuming the entire length of one of the interior shelves. I used to think that all of those books had been selected just for me, but as I scanned the YA titles, I saw only a handful of books I remembered.
“Do you read?” Malcolm asked, reappearing at my side.
“Mostly nonfiction. I’m a history teacher.” I waited for him to ask me what grade I taught or what type of history, questions that typically followed I’m a history teacher in polite conversation. “Where books are prized above dukedom,” I said when he didn’t ask me about myself. He looked confused. “That’s how we used to answer the phone when I was a kid. ‘Prospero Books, where books are prized above dukedom.’” I don’t know why I said we. I’d never answered the phone at Prospero Books before.
“I’ve never heard anyone answer the phone that way.” He bent down to pull a copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower stuffed incorrectly in the T’s. The cover was as lime green as the walls of Prospero Books.
“It could have been taken right here.” I walked over to the wall and did my best to look like one of the young actors on the front of the novel. Nope, nothing from Malcolm, not even upturned lips. I’d never thought of my students as particularly generous but they always humored me with an eye roll at the least, acknowledging, if not appreciating, my effort.
“I hate movie tie-in covers.” He filed the copy under C where it belonged.
“I’m not here to close the store down, if that’s what you’re so worried about.” It was the most logical explanation for his coldness.
“Who says I’m worried about anything?” he said indignantly, and I could imagine him as an adolescent, defiant and stubborn, likely too smart for his own good.
“Billy used to bring me here as a kid. I know how important this place is,” I told Malcolm. He didn’t respond, focusing his attention on the toe of his dirty white sneaker as it pressed into the scuffed wood floor. The floorboards creaked under his weight. “Did Billy tell you he was leaving his store to me?”
“His lawyer did. I didn’t know Billy had any living family.” He turned his focus toward the shelves, crossing his arms across his chest, gestures anyone who spent time with teenagers could recognize as evasion. The wiry man with bifocals who had sung at Billy’s funeral signaled to him from a table in the back. “Excuse me,” Malcolm said, and headed toward the café.
“Did you know he had any family that wasn’t living?” I called to him. He shot me a funny look, like I’d asked him if he slept standing up.
Malcolm kept his back to me as he leaned over the wiry man to review one of the many books open on the café table. I continued to reacquaint myself with the store, counting all the sections I’d never paid attention to before, the books I didn’t know, the colorful spines aching to be read. In the noir section, a caricature of Malcolm smiled from the shelf. His cheekbones were more pronounced in the drawing than in life, his unruly hair neater, his eyes kinder, less wary. A speech bubble floated on the drawing above his portrait. It described noir as LA’s lifeblood. Chandler, its Homer. Philip Marlowe, its Odysseus. I studied Malcolm’s picture, wondering what he wasn’t telling me. He was close enough to Billy to have read at his funeral. He’d avoided my eye contact when I’d asked him if he’d heard of me. He knew more than he was letting on about Billy’s living family, probably about his deceased family, too.
Along the interior shelves, the history section was separated into World, American and Californian. The books were not only divided by region but organized by subject, alphabetically rather than chronologically. Most bookstores organized history books that way, as though history was a collection of discrete episodes rather than a fluid series of events that evolved over time. It reflected the misguided way we often taught history, the erroneous chaptering of the past. Jay often told me I was a hopeless romantic when it came to history. What else could I be? It was our past, something that shouldn’t be alphabetized.
I bent down to browse the titles on the lowest shelf of Californian history, filed under seismology and earthquake history. Books on the 1906 earthquake, the San Andreas Fault, predictions and forecasts. Here, on this modest, ankle-level shelf, was the Billy of my youth. I pulled out a book on the Northridge earthquake. It was one of those nights everyone living in Southern California at the time remembered. Joanie and I were asleep, startled awake as books fell off the shelves. When my bedroom stopped shaking, Mom ran in, checking us for cuts and bruises before the room began to rumble again. The first aftershock ended, and Dad screamed that we had to get out of the house. We followed him downstairs where broken glass littered our hardwood floors. Joanie and I didn’t have shoes on, so Dad carried us through the living room. In our backyard, the fence hid the damage beyond our property, brick chimneys torn from our neighbors’ homes, electrical wires slithering down the street. Dad turned on the radio, and we listened as the reporters filled gaps of information. Dawn brightened the sky. The death toll rose. Mom made Dad turn off the radio. Joanie clung to me, her body shaking like the earthquake was inside her, but a warmth spread through me, an undeniable thrill. The earth had moved here, beneath my feet, and that meant Billy wouldn’t have to travel to some distant land to study the damage. He would stay here with us. That was the best gift Billy gave me as a child. Whenever the earth shook, I became excited once the confusion subsided. At some point, I’d stopped connecting that feeling to Billy, but it never went away. Even as an adult, I felt a guilty pleasure whenever the floor oscillated with the earth.
At the center of the store, an oak table displayed the staff recommendations. Malcolm’s were The Sun Also Rises, Infinite Jest, The Maltese Falcon and Ask the Dust. A Lucia offered Roberto Bolaño, Gabriel García Márquez, Julia Alvarez and Junot Díaz. A Charlie displayed James and the Giant Peach, Hugo Caberet, two Lemony Snicket titles and an Edward Gorey picture book. Billy’s recommendations were all classics: Portrait of a Lady, The Grapes of Wrath, Tender Is the Night, The Age of Innocence. I’d expected Billy’s books to be classics, but classics of a different nature—Robinson Crusoe, The Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes. I imagined the assortment of American history books I would have selected for my recommendations, the blurbs I would have written about the women of the Revolution and Lincoln’s steadfast cabinet.
I flipped through the novels on Billy’s side of the table, unsure what I was looking for. The antique key Billy had left with Elijah was still in my pocket. It had to lead somewhere in Prospero Books, only I didn’t see any safes or antique cabinets it may have opened. Still, something in the store had to guide me to the other side of that keyhole. Billy’s recommendations were all untouched, save a series of numbers written in faint pencil inside the back cover of The Grapes of Wrath.
I felt Malcolm lean over my shoulder to review the page.
“Billy’s secret language with the books he resurrected from hospital thrift shops.” He lifted the book from my hands and held it closer to his face. Malcolm explained that the two numbers before the decimal indicated the quality of the book. The four after the decimal the date Billy had bought it, although they didn’t translate clearly into a year. The letter noted the month. The next series of numbers commented on the different aspects of the book—the edition, the imprint, the font—and the final letter the season where, if the book hadn’t sold, its price would be marked down.
“Does it need to be so complicated?”
Malcolm closed the book and returned it to the table. “It was how Billy liked it.”
I ran my finger across Billy’s name on the card resting beneath his books. A sketch of his middle-aged face stared back at me. Slender nose, wide smile, hair perfectly coiffed. The smile was ripe with melancholy.
“I’m not the enemy,” I said.
“That remains to be seen.” For the first time, a smile flashed across his face, vanishing as quickly as it had materialized. He was kind of cute when he wasn’t glowering at me. “Come on. I’ll get you a coffee.”
I waited at one of the mosaic tables while Malcolm journeyed behind the café counter, and started texting Jay. We were having difficulty connecting with the three-hour time difference. He had to wake up early for soccer camp, which meant that he went to bed while I was still having dinner with my parents. Other than our phone call after Billy’s funeral, we’d only sent text messages. I’d reported to him about my unexpected inheritance, the next clue, about my memories of Prospero Books. Sounds like a cool place, he’d said, then proceeded to talk about camp. He sent me a video of his players shouting they missed me and making kissy faces, as well as other equally gushy texts. While I was aware of the vulnerability it required to get a group of teenage boys to participate in a romantic scheme, I wished he’d asked me about Jane Eyre, about whether I was nervous to revisit Prospero Books. I snapped a picture of the bookstore and sent it to Jay, along with the message, Welcome to Prospero Books. He sent back a smiley face. It would have been better if he hadn’t responded at all.
Behind the café counter, Malcolm stopped to talk to the Latina girl I’d met at Billy’s funeral. Her hair was woven into a bun, coffee grinds were smeared across the white apron tied around her waist. When the girl spotted me watching them, she waved enthusiastically. Malcolm looked over, too, his expression more cautious than the girl’s. He filled two cups of coffee and carried them over to my table.
I reached for the mug he held out to me and took a sip. The coffee was black and strong, but I drank it, anyway. Adding milk or sugar seemed like admitting weakness.
“Don’t you worry?” I pointed to a key dangling unsupervised from the cashbox as the girl wiped down the espresso machine. The key was modern, nickel or some metal composite. It didn’t resemble the antique key Billy had left me.
“Our infantry of regulars. They may only buy a cup of coffee, but they’re our eyes and ears.”
“Do you keep a safe somewhere?” I didn’t see any other locks that might match the key.
“There’s no money in it. I went to the bank this morning.”
“I wasn’t asking for money,” I said.
“It’s upstairs, in the storage closet.” Malcolm pointed to a door at the back of the café. His finger traveled to the girl behind the counter. “That’s Lucia. She covers the afternoons. Charlie’s here in the morning. Don’t be startled if you hear him downstairs at dawn. He gets here early to open the store.” I was about to ask him why he thought I’d be here before the store opened, then I remembered Billy’s apartment.
“I’m not staying here—upstairs, I mean. My parents live on the Westside.”
“It’s up to you,” he said.
“When did Billy move upstairs? Last I knew, he lived in Pasadena.” Billy’s house was large and had columns that reminded me of the White House, only it wasn’t populated with a first family or aides, just Billy and too many bedrooms.
“He’s lived upstairs as long as I’ve known him.”
“And how long is that?”
Malcolm squinted at me. “Why do I feel like this is a job interview?”
“How do you think you’re doing so far?”
“Hard to say.” And there was that hint of levity across his face before it vanished again. I’d won over arrogant fourteen-year-old girls who wore push-up bras and more makeup than I did. I’d inspired the class clown to write a six-page paper on how the cotton gin increased the South’s dependency on slavery. For fifty-minute intervals, I’d even gotten entire classrooms of eighth graders to put away their phones and be present. I could certainly charm a cagey thirty-something-year-old bookstore manager.
“Malcolm!” The man next to us looked up, suddenly realizing who was seated beside him.
Malcolm introduced me to Ray the screenwriter. “Ray promises not to forget us when he’s won an Oscar.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.” Ray beamed as if he could picture it happening. His expression grew severe. “You look like him,” he said to me.
I instinctively flattened my hair, its reddish brown the same shade as Mom’s, the same shade as Billy’s. In my periphery, Malcolm stiffened.
Lucia wiped down a nearby table, then joined us for coffee. Her tight tank top revealed several tattoos along her shoulders and chest. When she caught me reading a line of Spanish on her forearm she said it was from One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“She doesn’t read fiction,” Malcolm said to Lucia.
“Come on, Malcolm. Everyone knows One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Lucia smiled apologetically at me.
“My boyfriend’s mom gave it to me actually.” Boyfriend. It still sounded funny off my tongue, and Malcolm must have noticed my discomfort with the term because he glanced over, seemingly curious. “I love Márquez,” I overcompensated. Jay’s mother had left One Hundred Years of Solitude in our living room when she came over unannounced, hoping to kill an hour before she met a friend at a gallery nearby. The novel sat on the coffee table for a week until I filed it on the bookshelf beside the other novels Jay had never read.
A girl with an armful of books lingered by the register, and Malcolm rushed to the front desk to help her. Lucia and I watched Malcolm ring up the girl. He said something that made her laugh, and when he laughed, too, I saw the kind eyes from his portrait in the noir section.
“Don’t let him intimidate you,” Lucia said. “He’s really attached to the store. We all are.” Her tone was kinder than Malcolm’s, but her words carried the same vague threat, should I aim to do anything that might ruin Prospero Books.
* * *
I couldn’t help but think of Jane Eyre as I ascended the narrow staircase toward the eerily silent top floor. While I could remember every dusty corner and piquant scent of the bookshop below, I had no recollection of an upstairs. I’d certainly never been up there. There were two doors, one on each side of the hall. I tried the right one first. A storage room, filled with shelves of books, more in boxes, and cleaning supplies. Behind the stacks of books, I located the safe. It had a combination lock. There weren’t any vaults hidden under panels in the floor, any keyholes that might match the antique key Billy had given me. That left only Billy’s apartment.
I creaked open the door waiting for someone to tell me I was trespassing, invading my uncle’s private life. When no one did, I braved a step inside and shut the door behind me.
Sun dust glittered throughout the spacious living room. It looked like a spread from a design magazine: a brown leather couch with an old chest positioned as a coffee table; an antique vanity beside the door with three mismatching vases spaced across its tabletop. I spotted a keyhole on the chest and tried the antique key. It didn’t fit. Besides, it was unlocked. Inside, piles of clothing were folded neatly. Collared linen shirts and waterproof khaki pants, the style of clothes Billy had worn when I knew him. I unfolded an olive green button-down and inhaled it deeply. It smelled of baby powder, pleasant and fresh, but it didn’t remind me of Billy.
I scanned the room for another keyhole. The kitchen didn’t have a door. It reeked of disinfectant. The tiled countertops and stove had been scrubbed clean. The fridge was empty, the ice tray lonely in the freezer. Elijah said he’d had the apartment prepared for me. Logical enough, yet there was so much I could have discovered if the fridge had been stocked with Billy’s food, the trash can cluttered with his waste.
The door to the bedroom didn’t have a lock. It was as quaint and characterless as the rest of the apartment, complete with white wicker furniture and a modest bookshelf beside the door, hardbacks faded from years of sun exposure. On the dresser, a bouquet of dried wildflowers rested beside a photograph of a blonde woman. I lifted the frame from the dresser, blowing off the dust that had collected on the glass. She leaned against a boulder on a narrow strip of beach below the cliffs, her thin, white-blond hair pulled over her right shoulder. She had translucent skin and somber green eyes that matched her earrings, or perhaps I only imagined that they were somber because I knew she was dead.
I removed the picture from the frame, checking for an inscription. The Kodak emblem was stamped on the back, nothing handwritten, no dates, no names. This had to be Evelyn. Mom had offered no details on Evelyn Weston’s appearance, but she looked exactly as I expected. Young, late twenties, early thirties. Blonde. Beautiful, hauntingly so.
I stared at the photograph, searching for some indication where or when it was taken. The rocky bluffs looked like Malibu, but Malibu had countless pockets of beach and this wasn’t one I recognized. Evelyn wore no makeup. Her hair was long and straight. Her emerald earrings were antique. Her white T-shirt could have been manufactured at any point in the second half of the twentieth century.
I put the picture back in its frame and positioned it on the dresser exactly as it had been before. Looking at it, I felt a profound sadness. It was the only photograph Billy had displayed in the apartment. While it must have comforted Billy to return to Evelyn’s likeness each day, it seemed to magnify how empty his personal life otherwise was. Goose bumps rose on my arms. The muscles of my back tensed. His lonesomeness scared me. I scanned the bedroom one last time for a keyhole, and when I didn’t find one, I hurried out, wanting to get as far away from that picture as I could.
In the living room, there was no old bank on the table by the front door. No jewelry box perched on the drop-front mahogany desk against the wall near the kitchen. The desk looked like the one my parents had in their upstairs hall, an ornamental heirloom that had belonged to my father’s grandmother. I ran my hand along the smooth wood, wondering whether Billy had seen the similarity between our desk and his, if he’d sat at this desk and occasionally thought of us. I tried to pull down the front, but it was locked. My fingers traced the ivy carved into the front, a brass keyhole cover that deftly hid the lock. When I slid the antique key into the lock, it fit snugly. I twisted it to the right and the lock clicked open.
The first thing that hit me was the stench of the old wood, its musk. The desk was cluttered with receipts and tattered pieces of cream-colored stationery. I sorted through the crumpled heating bills and yellowed pages of the Los Angeles Times, inspecting each article for the next clue before deciding it was little more than an abandoned article. Beneath the forsaken artifacts of Billy’s daily life, I found a folder filled with the keepsakes he’d concealed for me.
Billy had photographs, a playbill from my middle-school play, flyers from my debate competitions. I laid the artifacts in chronological order and saw the framework of my childhood unfold before me. The timeline began with a photograph of Billy holding me, swaddled in lavender-colored cotton, his expression somewhere between amazed and terrified. Two years later, a snapshot from a dark restaurant, Billy and me eating the same string of spaghetti like in Lady and the Tramp. An action shot from 1991, me running in a sequined bikini. The next January, 1993. My seventh birthday party. The only party I remembered Billy attending. In the photograph, Billy and I posed with a goat. I’d begged Mom to turn our backyard into a petting zoo. I don’t know, Miranda. It sounds unsanitary, she’d said. I’d enlisted Billy, and together we’d prepared a pitch for Mom, filled with facts about the Nigerian dwarf goat—it bred year-round and had a lifespan of fifteen years. About the zedonk—also known as the zonkey, zebrula, zebrinny, zebronkey, zebonkey or zebadonk—which despite its many names was incredibly rare. We outlined the precautions we’d take to ensure cleanliness—a washing station and lots of hand sanitizer—and scientific studies proving how unlikely it was anyone would catch a disease from the Nigerian dwarf goats of Southern California. In the photograph, Billy held the goat like a trophy.
The next picture was from my sixth-grade play, Billy’s arms around Joanie and me dressed in Puritan costumes. Identical bonnets and blue dresses, yet in our postures you could tell who was Abigail Williams and who was a forgettable woman she’d accused of witchery.
In the final photograph, the pet shop looked exactly as I remembered. Speckled linoleum floor, metal cages confining colorful birds. Billy held me close to him as I lifted the puppy toward the camera. We both wore exhilarated smiles. We both seemed happy. How quickly thereafter everything had changed.
I rummaged through the desk, searching for anything else that pertained to me. Amid the credit card advertisements and gas station receipts, I found a folded sheet of lined paper. My handwriting looked pretty much the same, but the words were unfamiliar.
Hi, Uncle Billy!
I bet you’re surprised to hear from me. I know it’s been forever! I graduated high school yesterday. Can you believe it? At graduation, everyone else had tons of family with them. All I had were my parents. That made me think of you, how at one point you might have been there, too.
Do you ever think about me anymore? Sometimes I think about how much fun we used to have together. Anyway, I just wanted to say hi. If you wanted to write back that would be cool. Don’t worry, I won’t tell Mom. Ha, ha!
Love,
Miranda
I reread the letter, trying to imagine how Billy must have felt receiving it. He never wrote back. I would have remembered that. I would have written to him again, letters back and forth until they amounted to a correspondence, possibly more. He must have wanted to write back. Why else would he have kept the letter? He must have known, for reasons still unclear to me, that he couldn’t.
I slowly refolded the letter. Was this it? Had Billy led me to this desk simply to show me that he’d never forgotten me? What an underwhelming end to our last great hunt together.
As I dropped the letter into the desk, I noticed something written along one of its edges in tiny, precise script: Down. I didn’t make anything of it until I returned the photographs to the desk and saw the word repeated on their backs: down, down, down, down, down. And on the photograph from the pet shop, a phrase: down went Alice. The next clue.
I raced around the room, looking for a bookshelf or a stack of hardbacks, any battered old copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There wasn’t a single book in the living room.
I took a deep breath before returning to the bedroom. I had no choice; I had to go in there again. The spines of the hardbacks on the bookshelf were so muted their titles dissolved into the faded canvas. Little Women, Death on the Nile, The Color Purple, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues—novels I couldn’t imagine Billy reading. Between Sylvia Plath and Colette, a thin crimson spine all but disappeared. In peeling gold leaf, Lewis Carroll.
The cover was understated. Red with a small portrait of Alice in gold at the center. I ran my hands along Alice’s embossed hair, her frilly dress, an approximation of which I wore for three Halloweens until I could no longer zip the polyester costume. Did Billy see me in that blue dress? Did he remember that I wanted a pet rabbit to dress in a waistcoat? I flipped the cover to look inside.
Alice fell down, down, down, upon sticks and leaves, unharmed and curious. She tried several doors. They were all locked. She found a golden key, too big for some locks, too small for others until she peeked behind the curtain. The key fit but the passageway was too small, and Alice couldn’t reach the garden. There, Carroll’s words were highlighted in crisp yellow.
[S]o many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
So Alice got pragmatic or as pragmatic as one could get after she’d followed a talking rabbit down a long and dark tunnel. She looked for a book of rules; instead, she found a bottle. DRINK ME, it said. I flipped through the book and found an envelope tucked into the back. READ ME, it said.
Inside the envelope was a thick stack of papers. On the cover page, beneath Cedars-Sinai’s emblem, a Dr. Nazario had written to Billy: This letter is to inform you of your results. Our office will be in contact to schedule a follow-up visit. Dr. Nazario’s name was circled in red. The following pages detailed the tests Billy had undergone, the clinical indication of shortness of breath and tightness in chest, the impression of aortic stenosis. The tests were dated March, two years ago.
I read the highlighted passage again. Very few things indeed were really impossible. I could picture the illustrated copy of the novel I had as a child. Alice in a blue dress. Hearts and spades and diamonds and clubs floating around her. I’d like to remember Billy giving it to me, that it was from Prospero Books, but Mom had purchased it at a children’s bookstore on the Westside. Billy and I never read the novel on those nights when he tucked me in and made me feel indeed that nothing was impossible. Still, he knew, like Alice, I would follow him down, down, down until there was nowhere left to fall.
