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Copyright © Matthew Sullivan 2017
Cover created using images from Getty
Cover design by Lauren Wakefield
Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Matthew Sullivan has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in the United States by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. in 2017

William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

All words are masks, and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

—Steven Millhauser, “August Eschenburg”

As always we take up again where we left off. This is where I belong after all.

—Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

CHAPTER ONE

LYDIA HEARD THE distant flap of paper wings as the first book fell from its shelf. She glanced up from the register, head tilted, and imagined that a sparrow had flown through an open window again and was circling the store’s airy upper floors, trying to find its way out.

A few seconds later another book fell. This time it thudded more than flapped, and she was sure it wasn’t a bird.

It was just past midnight, the bookstore was closing, and the final customers were checking out. Lydia was alone at the register, scanning a stack of paperback parenting books being bought by a teenage girl with pitted cheeks and peeling lips. The girl paid in cash and Lydia smiled at her but didn’t say anything, didn’t ask what the girl was doing alone at a bookstore this late on a Friday night, didn’t ask when she was due. When the girl got her change, she met Lydia’s eyes for a moment, then rushed out without any bookmarks.

One of Lydia’s comrades, a balding guy named Ernest who walked like a Muppet but always looked sad, was standing by the front door, guiding the night’s final customers into Lower Downtown.

“Are you hearing that?” Lydia said from across the store, but her voice was too quiet and anyway Ernest was occupied. She watched him unlock the door he’d just locked to let in a clubbing couple who looked drunk.

Outside, a few scruffy BookFrogs lingered on the flagstone sidewalk, zipping up backpacks and duffels, drinking from gallon jugs of water they’d refilled in the bathroom. One had a pulp crime paperback crammed in his back pocket. Another had a pencil on a string tied to his belt loop. They stood together but none of them spoke, and one by one they slumped separately into the city, off to sleep in a run-down basement in Capitol Hill, or on a bench in Union Station, or in the sticky cold of Denver’s alleys.

Lydia heard another faint flapping. Definitely a falling book, followed by a few more in rapid succession: flap-flap-flap. The store was otherwise quiet.

“Just Joey,” Ernest said, but his eyes were fixed on the corner of zines and pamphlets that flanked the bathrooms where the drunk couple had just disappeared. “Do you think they’re screwing in there?”

“Joey?” he said. “You never know what Joey knows. He asked after you earlier, by the way. It may have been the longest conversation we’ve ever had. ‘Seen Lydia?’ I was touched.”

Most days Lydia made a point of tracking Joey down wherever he’d settled into the store—a corner table in the coffee shop, or the former church pew in the Spirituality section, or even under the Story Tree in Kids—to see what he was reading and how he was feeling and whether any odd jobs had come his way. She had a soft spot for the guy. But tonight she’d gotten caught in the store’s after-dinner rush and never tracked him down.

“Lyle is with him, right?” Lydia said. Though decades apart in age, Joey and Lyle were all but inseparable, like two halves of one smart and awkward beast.

“No Lyle. Not tonight. Last I saw, Joey was all alone in History. He had masking tape on his fingers.”

“I think he must’ve cut himself or burned himself. Made bandages with Kleenex and tape.” He looked at his watch. “He’s not a crackhead, is he? They’re always burning fingers.”

Lydia heard another fluttering book. The store occupied three cavernous floors, and when it was quiet like this, sound traveled between them as if through an atrium. She imagined Joey all alone lobbing books up there, some kind of bibliomancy or I Ching toss. She’d be the one to stay late and reshelve them.

“Goddamned couple,” Ernest said, coming around to the register without unpeeling his eyes from the bathrooms. “They’ve gotta be screwing in there.”

Lydia crossed the store’s gritty floors and headed up the wide, tiered staircase that reached through the building like a fattened spine. Ernest had gone through earlier and turned off most of the overhead lights upstairs, so she felt as if she were climbing into an attic.

The second floor was quiet, shelf upon shelf of books standing still. She continued to the third.

Joey was the youngest of the BookFrogs, and by far Lydia’s favorite. This wouldn’t be the first time that she or one of her bookselling comrades had done a final sweep at closing and found Joey knocking books off the shelves, searching for a title that may or may not have actually existed. His glossy hair would be draped over his eyes, and he’d be wearing black jeans and a black knit sweater with the collar just low enough to see the top of his tattooed chest. The wooden floors around his feet would be spread with books about subjects as far-reaching as his thoughts: Sasquatch sightings and the Federal Reserve, Masonic rites and chaos theory. He was a shattered young man, Lydia often thought, haunted but harmless—a dust bunny blowing through the corners of the store.

The third floor was dim and peaceful. Lydia stepped into a familiar warren of tall wooden shelves and followed their angles and branches into different alcoves and sections, each holding a chair or a couch, a table or a bench: Psychology, Self-Help, Religion, Travel, History.

When she stepped into the Western History alcove, she could feel her eyes trying to shut out what she was seeing: Joey, hovering in the air, swinging like a pendulum. A long ratcheted strap was threaded over a ceiling beam and looped around his neck. Lydia’s body sprung with terror, but instead of running away she was suddenly running toward him, toward Joey, and hugging his lanky legs and trying to hoist him up. She heard someone’s scream curdle through the store and realized it was her own.

Lydia’s cheek pressed into Joey’s thigh and his jeans were warm with urine. A lump in his pocket smelled of chocolate and she assumed it was a knot of melted Kisses, swiped from the bowl on the coffee shop counter. His hands were clenched into quiet fists and she could see the masking-tape bandages on three or four of his fingertips, but she wouldn’t look up again at the popped purple sockets of his eyes, nor the foamy saliva rolling down his chin, nor the blue swelling of his lips.

She could see the cemetery of books that had flapped to the floor as Joey had climbed the shelves, and the others he’d shoved aside to create footholds as he threaded the strap through the ceiling, and still others that had dropped as he’d tried to kick his feet back to stop himself from dying. By now she’d locked her hands together on the far side of his thighs and was trying to lift him up, but her sneakers kept slipping on the wooden floor, and each time she slipped the ratcheted strap cinched tighter around his neck. She must have stopped screaming because a ringing silence suddenly swallowed everything when she saw, a few inches from her face, poking up from Joey’s front pocket, a folded photograph of her.

CHAPTER TWO

Lydia plucked the photo from Joey’s jeans. In it she was ten, wearing frizzy braids and a blue cord vest, blowing out candles on a chocolate cake.

“Oh Jesus!” she heard Ernest say as he rounded the shelves into the alcove. “Here, here. Joey, c’mon, c’mon, man, don’t—”

In the dim bookstore light, in the stench of Joey’s death, in the warren of those shelves, Lydia slid the photo into her back pocket and tried simply to breathe. Ernest—responsible Ernest, who moments ago had been downstairs counting change, guarding the Bright Ideas bathroom from horny club rats, and who half a decade ago, in a previous life, had driven through sandstorms in the Persian Gulf War—Ernest dragged a footstool over and hopped to the top and yelled about an ambulance as his hands went to work. Lydia stepped back and realized that the drunk couple from the bathroom was now standing behind her, holding each other and looking on, and she accidentally stepped on the woman’s high-heeled foot and whispered, Sorry, and the woman said, That’s okay, and both of them started crying at once. Someone put a hand on Lydia’s shoulder and she shrugged it off.

The long nylon strap that Joey had earlier unthreaded from a dolly or a cart had a metal ratchet built into it. Ernest released it high above his head and the strap unspooled like a whirring whip and Joey hit the floor.

All went quiet. No one attempted to move him, to defibrillate or resuscitate. Joey was obviously over.

Someone’s ride honked on the street out front, and the Union Station sign glowed red against the windows. Lydia felt a sharp stirring in her abdomen, something much more terrifying than sadness or shock, and she stooped to her knees and began scooping up the books that Joey had kicked to the floor, and once she had them all in a pile she began reshelving them because she didn’t know what else to do. Books that were pushed too far back she scooted forward, and books that were too far forward she scooted back, and then an older woman with thick glasses who worked part-time at the store took Lydia’s elbow and led her toward a couch in the Self-Help section, where she waited for the police, out of sight of Joey’s body.

After being interviewed by the reporting officer, sipping a cup of green tea with a coat from the lost-and-found draped upon her lap, Lydia went outside to the sidewalk and watched Joey’s bagged body get wheeled on a gurney into the back of an ambulance. She declined a few offers for a ride home and instead caught a slow bus up Colfax Avenue, where she could be alone with Joey’s photo.

Her late-night city passed by outside, streetlights and neon glowing over the noodle shops and cantinas, the fast food and the porn, the basilica and the temple, the wig stores and salons. She passed the diner with sixty-five-cent coffee and the dry cleaner’s with the ceramic Buddha in the window. Hooded figures drank out of paper bags and a pair of nuns pushed a grocery cart full of blankets. She loved riding the Colfax bus, with its potholes and its people.

Once the bus had emptied out some, she slipped the photo out of her back pocket. Her hands were damp and she felt as if she were breathing through a straw.

Lydia couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a girlhood photo of herself and she was fairly sure she’d never seen this one. The spare snapshots of her childhood had been buried so deep inside her bedroom closet that she wasn’t certain they were even there anymore—all of which made Joey’s possession of this photo even more impossible. It had been taken during the only real birthday party she’d ever had, two decades ago, in the little bungalow off Colfax where she’d spent her early years, just a mile or two east of here. Inside the photo’s yellowing border Lydia was a ten-year-old girl leaning over her birthday cake, deep in a candlelit bliss. She found it hard to believe that her dad had been able to wrangle her curly black hair into those tight braids, and even harder to believe that this joyful little girl was her. But unquestionably she was: her big brown eyes, her blue cord vest, her crooked yellow buttons. So much had not yet happened.

Though Lydia occupied most of the frame, there were two other kids in the photo, her only fourth-grade friends. Raj Patel was seated to her right, wearing a light blue jumpsuit with silver buckles and staring with an adoring smile, not at the cake or at the camera but at Lydia, the birthday girl. Carol O’Toole was there too, on her left, but she’d been fidgeting so much that only a blurred corona of her orange hair could be seen. The photo’s composition was odd, canted and crisscrossed by twists of crepe paper, and Lydia realized this was because her father must have been trying to get all three of them into the frame as Carol bounced around and scraped her fingers through the frosting. It hadn’t worked.

Lydia’s stomach churned. Fourth grade, she thought, the same year she and her father had left—fled—Denver. And they’d fled all right, a month or two after this photo had been taken, straight from the hospital to the mountains without saying good-bye to a soul.

The bus jostled to a stop in the gut of Capitol Hill. Lydia hopped off and walked the rest of the way home.

In their second-floor apartment, David was still awake. He was perched at the kitchen table, wearing a headlamp and tinkering with a computer motherboard. A soldering iron and a small spool of wire sat on the table near his hands. The counter behind him was crowded with dirty bowls and cutting boards, garlic peels, a jar of olives, a zesting grater, and the lopped stem of an artichoke. The room smelled of soldering flux and baked chicken, and Lydia could hear Cobain screaming in the headphones that cupped his neck. It was the middle of the night but David was acting as if it were the middle of the day, and she could tell that his evening had once again disappeared into whatever project was currently dissected on the table. He tilted his head slightly when she came in, but his sight remained focused on the tiny circuitry below.

She planted a kiss on his temple. This was the man she’d fallen for five years back, the guy who’d rather take apart a television than eat nachos in front of it. David wasn’t perfect, she knew, and she sometimes was annoyed by the computer cords and old hard drives stacked on a shelf in their bedroom, or the splintery skateboard with its box of wheels and bearings that had been under their bed, unused, these past four years, or the autographed Broncos poster that couldn’t be hung near the bathroom because the shower steam could potentially crinkle Elway’s jersey. But despite such minor irritations, David was truly a pure-hearted guy, an upbeat mama’s boy with wavy hair and beautiful eyes who just wanted to split breakfast burritos with Lydia until death. She was glad to have him in her life.

As soon as David looked up, he must’ve sensed something was wrong. He stood and clutched her shoulders.

Her gut was swimming. She leaned against the sink to steady herself and told David all about Joey. Except for the part about the photo. She shared almost everything with David—her bizarro sci-fi dreams, her fears about the future, her shifting rotation of phobias and anxieties—but not the ruins of her childhood. Some things were off-limits, even for the guy she loved.

“Oh, babe,” he said. “I just assumed you went out for drinks after work. I had no idea. I should’ve come down there.”

David was a fervent believer in comfort food, so without registering how late it was, and without asking whether Lydia was even hungry, he pulled a plate of artichoke chicken out of the fridge and warmed it in the microwave, careful to be precise in cook time and power level (3:05 at Reheat 4). Lydia took the opportunity to slip into the bedroom and hide the birthday photo in the depths of her sock drawer. The microwave beeped just as she was finally washing the smell of chocolate and urine from her hands.

On the Bright Ideas loading dock, Lydia listened to the rhythmic beeps of a truck reversing up the alley. She’d been told last night to take the week off, but here she was pacing with the pigeons behind the bookstore—unable to be away, yet unable to go inside.

The rattling sound of nearby jackhammers didn’t help to calm her nerves, but by now she’d grown used to them, just as she’d grown used to the walls of scaffolding and flapping plastic that cloaked this part of town these days. For decades this entire brick district had been a network of underused rail lines and concrete viaducts, honky-tonks and stockyard stomps, and the only residences had been stacked above shit bars with names like Drinks and the Drinking Hole and A Place to Drink. Even the neighborhood’s name—Lower Downtown—had always felt fitting because these blocks marked the low point where the city’s runoff collected: the soup-kitchen-and-skid-row crowd, the salvage and warehouse trucks, the wastewater sloshing from driveway to sewer grate to the trashy foaming currents of the Platte. It felt then like a city should: reeking of its own past. But change was on the way. The viaducts had been ripped out, cobblestones scoured back to life, and buildings that had sat abandoned for decades were being converted into galleries and apartment lofts. Along with a single brewery and a couple of coffee shops, the bookstore had been one of the first new businesses to move in, and over the course of a few years it had gradually expanded through the lower three floors of a onetime lightbulb factory. (Hence the name Bright Ideas, and the retro bulb that defined its front doors and bookmarks.) The store was growing busier by the month and down the street a ballpark—a ballpark!—was even under construction. Lydia sometimes wondered what she would do when this end of town, with its buried cowboys and hobo stories, began to cast the dull hue of any other.

Not that she would ever quit the store. Six years ago, when Lydia had put on a flannel skirt and a loose-hanging blouse and stepped into Bright Ideas for a job interview, the spotty résumé in her hand held little ripples where her sweat had saturated the paper. The manager that day was a reformed radiologist and country music fiddler with a tidy gray beard, and as he steered Lydia toward a couch in the Philosophy section, her nerves began to settle. When he folded her résumé and placed it on the floor near her feet, saying that interviews around here were a little less formal than all that, she let out a gusty sigh and tapped her fingertips together and began to speak of her shoestring travels (Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia), the classes she’d loved in college (World Religions, Renaissance Lit), her many fleeting jobs (orchards and farm stands, hotels and pet shops), and for the first time in a long time she found herself speaking openly with a stranger, and not feeling as if she were splashing through the conversational equivalent of a shark attack. At the end of the interview, in one of the most consequential moments of her life, the manager leaned back and simply said, “Recommend a book to me.” The title she picked was telling—One Hundred Years of Solitude, as her own years of solitude were coming to a close—but even more telling was the tranquillity she felt afterward as she explored the enormous store, sliding books in and out of their slots, sizing up her new comrades.

She felt typically shy that day, avoiding eye contact and wearing her mild smile, but she could tell from the start that Bright Ideas was just the kind of sanctuary she’d been seeking for much of her life. Her fellow booksellers ran the demographic gamut, from a sixty-eight-year-old ex-nun with a brazen taste for erotica to a seventeen-year-old dropout who, despite the Churchillian monocle tattooed over her left eye, had landed second place on last season’s Jeopardy! Teen Tournament. They wore their hair dreaded and Afroed, waist length and shaved clean. Some of the older, loftier lefties looked like models from the 1974 Sears catalog, while others wore bolo ties and sassy dresses and hats that could only be described as Parisian. Even on that first day she knew that these booksellers were happier—or at least more tuned in to what happiness really was—than most, which had always seemed reason enough to stay.

Lydia hopped off the loading docks and rounded the corner into the alley behind the store. She was just gathering the guts to go inside, strategizing ways to get through her shift, when the sound of footsteps touched the air behind her.

She turned to see Plath walking toward her, dressed in baggy black, fogging the air with a cigarette.

A woman on the edge of fifty, Plath had worked at Bright Ideas since its opening day, and at other indies and libraries for decades before that. She was a benevolent oddball with unnerving beauty: silver hair cropped close to the skull, wide green eyes, slender arms. She never wore makeup and sported her wrinkles proudly. And she often showed up at work with gifts for Lydia—startling things, like the creepy doll with no hair or the tin of Japanese candies that tasted like meat. Though she didn’t know for sure, Lydia assumed that Plath was single because she was too headstrong to get suckered by love, and most men, she imagined, would be made flaccid by her testimonials about Gilded Age vibrators, which she claimed were effective largely because of their threat of electrocution. Lydia sometimes saw Plath as the woman she might someday become: caring, creative, content—but inaccessible to nearly everyone alive.

“He would’ve found a way,” Plath said, “with or without you. Suicides are persistent like that.”

“You were good to Joey,” Plath said. “It makes me mad he did this to you.”

“I mean, I loved the guy, I really did, but what the hell, Joey? Now I don’t have anyone to talk to about the Bermuda Triangle.”

“I just don’t get the drama,” Plath said, lighting a cigarette off of her cigarette. “Hanging himself in the History section? This from a guy who blushed when you said hi? Unless you were Lydia. The lovely Lydia.” Plath reached out and held Lydia’s shoulder. “I mean it,” she continued. “The kid adored you. You were really good to him.”

“I know,” Plath said. “But the next time he decides to kill himself, he should go backpacking in the winter in his undies. Swallow some cleaning products in a canoe. Just leave you out of it.”

Listening to Plath’s wandering thoughts, the obvious suddenly occurred to her: Joey had wanted her to find him. He’d wanted Lydia to be the one.

“I’m sorry,” Plath said, shaking her head, “but that’s like not tipping your waiter.”

“If I was going to kill myself,” Plath continued, “I’d leave a note just to get a few last digs in. Insult the guy who took me to prom. Give my parents one last guilt trip. Criticize my ex-husband’s penis. Make it count, you know? It’s not like you’d have anything to lose.” Plath stopped rambling and squeezed Lydia’s forearm. “Are you okay?”

But Lydia wasn’t okay. Something had been happening inside her. An old tight knot was beginning to unravel.

A hairy wrist tucked into a white latex glove. A white latex glove gripping a claw hammer. A claw hammer spun through with a girl’s hair. And blood. Always—

Lydia wiped her eyes on the threadbare sleeve of her sweater, breathed deep for a minute, and waited for the images to fade. She didn’t need a therapist to know that Joey’s hanging had opened doors long closed.

“The right thing,” Plath said. “Makes me sick how adorable he is. You should really go home and rest your soul. Spend the week reading with David at your side.”

“He reads,” Lydia said, smiling. “Just not like crazy. It’s mostly just the Sports section and crosswords and stuff for work. Last year for his birthday he asked for a programming book called C Plus Plus, whatever that means.”

Plath bit her lips and looked to her hand for a cigarette that was no longer there.

“Listen,” she said. “I know this is freaky, and I really don’t want to add any more chaos to whatever you’re going through right now. But …”

“It was in this morning’s paper. The event. The incident. No article or anything, just one of those captions beneath a photo of the scene.” Plath grimaced. “You were in it.”

“In the photo. In the caption. It’s too bad you’re not the attention-getting sort. This would really make your day.”

Plath dived into the black bladder of her purse and retrieved a crumpled newspaper. Lydia glimpsed an image of Clinton giving a thumbs-up from a podium while Gingrich grumbled behind him. Plath flipped the page over. “See? That’s you by the door covering your mouth with your hands. Look at your wonderful hair. How do you get it to look so weed-whacked?”

“Oh god,” Lydia said, feeling the flush of self-consciousness that arrived at any mention of her appearance: the giant brown eyes that gave her a look of perpetual alarm; the slight curve in her shoulders that gave her a beaten hunch. Though she’d only recently turned thirty, Lydia couldn’t help but notice the gray sprigs that had infiltrated her hair and the new lines alongside her mouth that, when she relaxed, gave her the look of a frowning rabbit. She very nearly hyperventilated at the fact that this photo had accompanied a hundred thousand morning coffees. She wondered who had seen it—who had identified her.

“There’s the ambulance,” Plath said, pointing at the page, “and the gurney and poor Joey in his body bag. Why do they have to use black bags for bodies anyway? No wonder everyone’s afraid of death. Why not teal? Oh, and did you see what they called Joey in the caption? Unidentified man.”

Lydia sighed and glanced up the alley toward the sidewalk, where a couple of guys were locking a shopping cart to a lamppost.

“How sad to think of Joey like that,” Plath continued. “Unidentified man.”

“They all are,” Lydia said, and walked toward the wide window with red casing that cut through the store’s brick back wall. There they were, already populating the store and not yet noon—an entire world of unidentified men: the BookFrogs.

During her first weeks of working at Bright Ideas, Lydia had noticed that not all the customers were actually customers, and a whole category of lost men began to formulate in her mind. They were mostly unemployed, mostly solitary, and they—like Joey—spent as much time in the aisles as the booksellers who worked there. They napped in armchairs and whispered in nooks and played chess with themselves in the coffee shop. Even those who didn’t read always had books piled around their feet, as if fortressing themselves against invading hordes of ignoramuses, and when Lydia saw them folded into the corners for hours at a time, looking monastic and vulnerable, she thought of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, Beatrix Potter’s dapper frog who was often portrayed reading a newspaper with his lanky legs in the air. They were like plump and beautiful frogs scattered across the branches of the store, nibbling a diet of poems and crackers.

“What are we going to do with you?” Plath said, gently putting her arm around Lydia.

In other lives many of the BookFrogs may have been professors or novelists, but now their days were spent obsessing over bar codes on toothpaste and J. D. Salinger conspiracies. Early each morning when the store opened, a handful of them always shuffled in to grab the day-old pastries and fill their fast-food cups with milk from the coffee counter. To the inexperienced, many BookFrogs appeared as derelict or homeless, but to the seasoned eye it was clear that they’d shed themselves of the world, rejecting its costumes and rules in favor of paper and words. For her part, Lydia gravitated toward them with a tenderness that bordered on gullibility, especially those loquacious few who could guide interesting conversations (though, in truth, as was always the case with Lydia, these conversations were heavily one-sided). A few of the BookFrogs were so erudite that their rambling lessons in literature seemed easily as insightful as those that had come from her professors years ago in San Francisco, where she’d cobbled together an English degree. A few others—like the man who made a habit of leaping out of stalls in the bathroom with a plunger above his head—were banned for months at a time, but most were quiet and benevolent, thankful for the chance to read and stare and, most importantly, leave their solitude at the door.

“Have you seen Lyle yet today?” Plath said, cupping her hands and peering into the window. “He’s got to be taking this hard. How was he last night?”

Lydia pulled the newspaper from under Plath’s arm and looked more closely at the photo: Joey’s body, zippered into darkness, rolling out of the store, his gurney surrounded by gawkers and cops. She could see herself and a few of her comrades, but Lyle wasn’t anywhere in sight.

Lyle and Joey, Joey and Lyle: the two BookFrogs were as attached as a couple of matryoshka dolls. Though Lyle was easily in his sixties, he’d taken Joey under his wing years ago, first playing the role of a BookFrog philanthropist, a moneyed patron who supported Joey’s bibliophilia, and later as his genuine friend. It was Lyle who made sure that Joey ate every day, fulfilled his group-home duties, and showed up for his piss tests and parole meetings, but more importantly, Lyle was responsible for steering the kid into that leapfrog of new authors that expanded his inner life. They were an odd pair: Joey was jumpy and battered like a sad, scared puppy; Lyle was tall and prissy like a sloppy British schoolboy. Seeing the pair slouch daily through the store, Lydia often thought of their many iconic predecessors: Ernie and Bert, Laurel and Hardy, Steinbeck’s George and Lennie. Watching them opening books before each other’s eyes, brushing each other’s elbows as they browsed, nodding cerebrally over cups of cooling tea, Lydia had witnessed an affection that she rarely saw in grown men. As far as she could tell, Lyle was the only person—besides perhaps herself—whom Joey opened up to, whom Joey maybe loved. Without Joey, it only now occurred to her, Lyle would be destroyed.

“Listen, Lydia, I’ve got to get inside, but promise me you’ll stay away from sad men today. Just this once. Just the sad ones. Just stay the hell away.”

Plath swiped a smoky hand through Lydia’s waifish bangs, then joined the dozen or so booksellers who buzzed through the store with pens behind their ears. Lydia watched them rush between ringing phones and computer pods and tried, without success, to shift her mind away from the specter of unidentified men.

CHAPTER THREE

IN THE BRIGHT Ideas break room after work, Lydia gathered her jacket and satchel, then reached into her cubby and found, tucked alongside her sad little paycheck in its sad little envelope, a scalloped postcard of Pikes Peak. Howdy from Colorful Colorado! was printed in a red banner above the massive gray mountain, and below it a caption read, The Most Visited Mountain in North America!

The postcard was addressed to her—Lydia, no last name, c/o Bright Ideas Bookstore—and in fat black ballpoint it read:

That was all, except for the flag stamp and the inky red postmark that, despite its smear, offered a legible origin: it had been mailed from the town of Murphy, Colorado. Mailed to her by Moberg himself. Detective Harry Moberg. Retired. Homicide.

Apparently Moberg had recognized her image in the newspaper last week, which meant that her worst fears were coming true: without her permission, the publication of that photo had opened a portal for travelers from her past. Her arms braced the cubby shelves. She wasn’t ready to allow them in.

There was something terrifying about the postcard’s arrival, in its verification that Detective Moberg was still alive, still secluded in the same snowy cabin where she’d last visited him twenty years before. And that he was probably still attempting to track down the Hammerman.

—We’re going to find him, but we need your help. Understand? So tell me again exactly what you heard. Every sound you can remember, from the moment you crawled beneath that sink until the moment your daddy finally arrived. Lydia, can you do that for me? Think: beneath the sink.

When Lydia stepped into her Capitol Hill apartment after work, the curtains were closed and the only light came from the pair of glowing monitors stacked next to each other on the small desk in the corner of the living room. The coffee table had been pushed aside and David was arching his back on the carpet, wearing pajama bottoms and no shirt. A spiral-bound book of yoga poses was open on the floor. He smiled in her direction.

“Hey,” he said. When he dipped back to the carpet a piece of lint stuck to his lips and he sputtered it out.

After a few years of crappy jobs at convenience stores and phone banks, David had taken a job last winter as an IT grunt at a curriculum development company and now spent his days in a windowless office surrounded by programmers and gamers—indoorsy types, he called them. At first he’d worried that fifty hours a week at a screen-lit desk would turn him into a bleeding-eyed drone, but before long the idea of getting paid to solve problems clicked perfectly with his tinkering side, and as an act of rebellion against his coworkers’ diet of Funyuns and Mountain Dew, he made it a point each day to exercise—hence this evening’s yoga.

“Take your time,” she said, then set her bag of groceries on the kitchen floor and slipped into their bedroom, a bright cube of windows so overrun by a pair of blue spruce that it felt like a tree house. Their apartment was on the second floor of a converted Foursquare home, and details like this one—not to mention their $300 rent—kept them from leaving the neighborhood and disappearing into some condo complex with shuttles to the slopes and mixers by the pool.

Lydia stood in front of her dresser and opened her sock drawer. When she slipped the postcard into the back, behind her summer socks and the itchy teddy she never wore, her fingers grazed the birthday photo.

Five years back, David had surprised Lydia by hovering next to her at a Broadway bar and reaching over her shoulder for a napkin, a toothpick, and an olive before finally getting the nerve to ask her to shoot a game of pool. His interest in her didn’t make sense: David was quite possibly the most beautiful boy in the bar—wiry body, rosy cheeks, lippy smirk—and though Lydia was wearing cutoffs and sandals and a black Bikini Kill T-shirt that left her feeling slightly more comfortable in her skin than usual, she was also cocked sideways by bad gin and tonics, smoking her thirtieth cigarette of the day, leaning on Plath’s shoulder, and feeling as if she’d just fallen off a hay truck. At first she acted shy and overly suspicious, as if his hitting on her had been a cruel bar bet, but as she weaved behind him she noticed that his gait was slightly awkward, and that one of his sneakers was dragging a frayed gray lace. Her suspicions faded even further when he leaned into the pool table’s green felt and she saw, in a moment that warmed her thighs, that his right hand was a mangled twist of missing fingers. His thumb was there and most of a pointer, but otherwise the hand held a trio of squat little nubs.

A few hours later, during drunken sunrise omelets, she would find out that David had been a deep-fried mathlete in high school—his words—when one shitfaced night at a party he accidentally dropped a shot glass into the garbage disposal. He was fishing it out, hand groping the bladed depths, and flipped the light switch above the sink to see better what he was doing. Only it wasn’t a light switch.

Back in their first months of dating, she’d begun to notice that nearly every woman under forty eyeballed David like he was breakfast in bed. To all these gawkers Lydia felt like his presumed sister, his drinking buddy, the girl who could beat him in a belching contest—until, by chance, their sight fell upon his half-a-hand. She could see it sparkling in their eyes: Is he holding something? An uncooked chicken breast? A knot of bread dough? In their worst moments together, Lydia couldn’t help but wonder if it—his hand—had been their main matchmaker.

But that was early on, and if it was really only David’s hand that had kept them together, then by now their relationship would have been long over. As Plath once slurred, “Three missing fingers does not five years make.” Lydia agreed: she and David were onto something. She just didn’t know what it was, or whether she could handle it.

Negotiating boyfriends had never come naturally to Lydia. As a teenager, when she lived in her father’s mountain cabin in Rio Vista, whenever boys asked her to dances or out for a drive she usually quivered and claimed that her father was oppressive to the point of violence. This was a half-truth at best—oppressive, yes; violent, no—but the boys always backed away slowly and settled on those hometown girls who got all their jokes and knew their parents from church. That was okay with Lydia. With the exception of the single hallucinogenic night when she lost her virginity to a metalhead atop a picnic table, this reputation of being untouchable protected her through the end of high school. Once she fled Rio Vista and moved to San Francisco—vowing to get as far away from her father as possible—she ramped in the other direction, sleeping recklessly with strangers at first, then slowly easing into a scant selection of boyfriends, none of whom lasted more than a month. Lydia honestly enjoyed this short period of penis-hopping, but with each boy the problem was always the same. After singling her out in the grocery line, the Victorian lit class, the taco shop, they inevitably realized that the armor in which she hid was impermeable, no matter how daring their moves. In different ways, they all wanted to share the space that belonged to her the most, but that was impossible. She was the only one allowed in there.

But from the start David had been different. The first time she’d spent the night at his apartment, she’d awakened alone in his bed and could smell something cooking (burning?) in the other room. She assumed that he was making eggs or french toast, but when she slipped into the T-shirt balled on his floor and came out to the kitchen she found him not cooking at all, but rather using an old iron to wax the pair of skis that were stretched across his countertop. A few minutes later, when she went back into the bedroom to get dressed, she nearly tripped over a dismantled VCR—the huge kind with clunky buttons and fake wood paneling—that had been wired to a surplus military bullhorn, a gift-shop strobe light, and the tube screen of an old black-and-white television. Nearby sat a pile of VHS videotapes (Rocky Mountain Wildlife; Coping Skills for Emergency Responders). She suspected it all had to do with a rave or some smart-drink electronica video project, but when she asked David what it was, he said he didn’t know.

Oh well. She smiled. She never saw the contraption again, but its presence signaled the very distracted quality that she realized, in retrospect, allowed their relationship to work. His toothbrush soon appeared in the mason jar on her sink side, his bags of celery and cartons of cottage cheese soon sidled up to her grape jelly and cherry yogurt, and all the while David appeared to have better things to do than obsess over Lydia’s hidden inner life.

In the kitchen, Lydia drank a glass of water, put the kettle on for tea, and began to put away the groceries.

Soon David came in, shirtless, barefooted, with that stupid tattoo of a pork chop just below his rib cage that he’d gotten on a high school trip to Mexico. Lydia had already pulled out the cutting board and unbagged an onion and was just piercing its skin when he pecked her from behind.

“Really good,” he said. “Thousands of lines deep. Boss gave me a clumsy high five. It was awesome.”

“I just saved our department about a week’s worth of headache,” he added, fumbling through a basket of fruit. “What about you? Any better at work today?”

It was a question David had asked her every day for the past week, ever since Joey. It still didn’t make sense, she thought, what the kid had done. A few days ago while emptying the front counter trash, she’d come across a crumpled wad of yellow crime-scene tape that someone had shoved into the dumpster like an unspooled cassette, and she’d stared at it for a long time, unable to peel herself away, as if its cursive loops might explain why Joey—young, bright, damaged Joey—had climbed the shelves and tightened a strap and stepped into his death. She thought about the books she’d seen him reading in the weeks before he’d died—fractal geometry and microbial art and Petrarchan sonnets—but as far as she could tell they reflected the same tastes, both broad and narrow at once, he’d always indulged. In her search for an answer, she’d even gone up to the third floor earlier today and stood in the center of the Western History section, wondering if his choice to kill himself there, around those titles, signaled some deeper meaning.

Just as she was about to give up and head downstairs to help at the counter, Lydia noticed that the floral chair in the corner where Joey had spent his last living hours had been shoved too far against the wall. When she leaned over to reposition it, lifting and tucking its cushion for good measure, she spotted something tiny and white, about the size of her pinkie nail, sitting in the seam behind the cushion. She reached past a penny and a few oyster crackers to dig it out. A tab of paper. A perfect little rectangle. At first, she wondered if Joey had been dealing panes of LSD that night or cutting chains of paper dolls, but when she placed it on her palm and saw that it had clearly been cut from a book, she thought that he might have left her a suicide note, after all. She held it under the light, anticipating a single word that might tease out Joey’s death—sorry; hopeless; murder—but discovered instead that the letters printed on it were fragmented, nearly indecipherable: an almost e, an almost j, an almost l, an almost m, some almost others. A biopsy of a page that added up to nothing.

Lydia’s hands were holding the onion and the knife, but they weren’t moving, and she was staring blankly at the silver toaster in the corner of the counter.

“Listen,” he finally said, “maybe this isn’t the best time, and I know it’s out of nowhere, but can I ask what’s up with you and your dad?”

Lydia felt her blood grow warm and her skin prickle cold. David took a bite of apple, then spat the apple’s sticker into the sink.

“You’re right,” she said, suddenly focused on chopping, dicing, swiping. “It’s really not the best time.”

Hearing her father’s name, Lydia felt like a child lifting the lid of a coffin. All it took was a peek.

She could feel her face flush and she quickly made a scene of washing her hands—pumping the soap dispenser, cranking the faucet to scalding.

She looked up from the sink and stared at David for a sign that her father had told, that David now knew who she really was: Little Lydia. The bloody-faced girl beneath the sink, the survivor from the evening news. Because no one from her present life knew. No one could know.

“All parents suck when you’re a teenager, Lydia,” he said, irritating in his calm. “Maybe he’s just trying to reconnect.”

“This is different,” she said, and she could feel a painful bubble expanding inside her throat. “He moved me to the middle of nowhere, then he just checked out. After the age of ten I basically raised myself.”

David started to reach for her but turned at the last moment and wiped some crumbs from the counter instead.

MIDNIGHT AT
THE BRIGHT IDEAS
BOOKSTORE

Matthew Sullivan

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE