Ramsey Shehadeh: Red

“And it’s called May 15th? ”

“ May 15th: A Deconstruction, ” he said. “Or something like that. It has a white cover.”

“Ok,” she said, studying a cart of unshelved books. “Well, don’t worry. We’ll find it.”

“Her,” said Ansel. He reached the end of the LIBRARY, turned on his heel, and started back the other way.

“Her,” said the LIBRARIAN, eventually, the edge of certainty in her voice gone.

It was better, thought Ansel, when his mother cried herself to sleep. He’d lie curled into himself those nights, head jammed into a pillow to muffle the sounds coming from the other side of the wall: her desperate sobs, his father’s sotto voce attempts to comfort her. That was bad. But their silences were worse.

He pushed the sheets away and swung his legs over the side of the bed, rocking back and forth on his hands. The moonlight streaming in through his window tattooed itself on the floor in four identical squares, slightly oblique, separated by the cross of the window’s framing.

He studied the cross. A presence in negative. Or: an absence made manifest by the things surrounding it.

He levered himself off the bed and crossed to his door, opened it, and stepped into the hall. Glanced right at his parents’ room—their door was slightly ajar, as always—then turned left and padded down the hall, stepping carefully around the loose floorboards. He and Louise had compiled a detailed mental map of the hall’s creak-topography over many years of sneaking downstairs, individually and together: to cadge forbidden snacks or peek at Christmas presents or watch Late-Nite Horror Freakshow! with the sound turned all the way down.

An image flashed through his mind: he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor between the coffee table and the TV, watching a black-and-white swamp creature stagger out of the marsh. He turns to Louise, sitting on the couch behind him with a cushion clutched to her chest, peering over the top of it with wide, terrified eyes. She catches his glance and lowers the cushion just enough to smile at him, conspiratorially.

An old memory, and a good one. He carried it with him into Louise’s room.

It was dark in there, and smelled slightly musty. He moved across to the window and opened the curtains. Moonlight fell on the dresser, illuminating her collection of pewter animals: Bashful Bear sitting on his haunches, legs splayed; Tigger resting on his corkscrew tail; Mrs. Elephant lifting her trunk to Senõr Giraffe—and so on, down the line. She’d been collecting them since she was two.

The bed was made up, her stuffed animals clustered together against the headboard. The stack of books beside it was like an archeological dig of her interests, each stratum a different phase: Pooh at the bottom, then L’Engle, Tolkien, Plath, King, Orwell, Faulkner. Loose pages from her sketchbook sandwiched in between. All of it covered in a thick layer of dust.

He looked out her window. The street was quiet, the identical houses that flanked it dark. He’d glanced incuriously at them thousands of times over the years, those houses, but tonight he found himself trying to see through their placid facades, and imagine the sadness or heartbreak or violence that lay behind them.

He lay down on the floor and turned on his side in the moonlight, waiting.

Ansel stepped out of the east door of the LIBRARY onto the narrow cobbled street, the book tucked under his arm.

The LIBRARIAN had found it under a table, pressed up against the wall. It had a gray cover, not a white one, and it was so worn that you couldn’t really read the title. But he was sure this was it. Pretty sure, at least.

You really weren’t supposed to be able to take anything from the buildings. He’d been as surprised as the LIBRARIAN when he walked out with it.

Across the street, the doorway of the JEWELRY STORE stood open. His father’s voice filtered out into the street, running robotically through the standard list of questions:

When was the last time you saw THE MISSING PERSON?

Did the MISSING PERSON have any enemies?

What were you doing on the afternoon of May 15th, 1987?

He heard the JEWELER mutter answers he’d already given a hundred times. They would lead his father—as they’d led Ansel—to the GROCER, and from there to either the POLICE STATION or the NEWSSTAND, and from there to the SUBWAY. And there it would end.

He turned and headed downboard, toward the PHARMACY. And then stopped. His mother was coming up the street, toward him. She moved quickly, head down, hands jammed into the pockets of her yellow trench coat

“Mom?” he said.

She hurried past, turned left onto BEAL AVENUE and disappeared.

Ansel stood listening to the receding sound of her footsteps. His mother didn’t bother questioning people anymore. She didn’t look for evidence, or interview suspects, or buy clues. She just walked. She haunted the streets.

He waited until the sound of her faded away entirely, then turned into the PHARMACY.

The PHARMACIST was still behind the counter.

“Weren’t you just here, man?”

Ansel shrugged and turned to the shelves lining the walls. The artist who’d drawn this place had either never seen a modern pharmacy, or thought everything had gone downhill right around the turn of the 20th century. The shelves were stocked with glass jars half-filled with odd powders, opaque brown bottles with inscrutable labels— Ointment of the Duodenum, Flybelly Extract, Philosopher’s Tincture —and baroque, mysterious brass instruments.

The PHARMACIST was watching him intently. “So. Got a question for me?”

Ansel pulled one of the instruments off the shelf: some sort of uneasy cross between a stethoscope and a bellows. “Do you know the missing person?” he said, absently.

“Sure, I know her. Great girl. She really liked to hang out in the LIBRARY. You might try asking the LIBRARIAN when…”

“No,” said Ansel.

He blinked. “No?”

“No. You don’t know her.”

A long silence. Ansel put the stetha-bellows down and picked up a pair of clamps. “Do you know what her favorite kind of ice cream is?”

The PHARMACIST shook his head, puzzled.

“There are two answers to that question. There’s the kind she tells people she loves, which is rocky road. And then there’s her actual favorite, which is mint chocolate chip.”

He shrugged. “Ok.”

“Why doesn’t she just say mint chocolate chip?”

The PHARMACIST was equipped to answer exactly six questions. He’d come into the world standing behind his counter, waiting for customers in trench coats and hats to come into his shop and ask them. The answers would slip into his mind and then boil away in the act of answering. But this kid wasn’t asking the right questions.

“I don’t know, man,” he said.

“Because she likes secrets. Not big secrets. Just little, harmless ones. She hoards them. Do you know why?”

Something like panic entered the PHARMACIST’s eyes. “She was last seen at the corner of 45th and Pasadena,” he said.

“Because she wanted to save them for the people she loved,” he said. Or tried to say. He couldn’t quite get the words out. He blinked at the shelves through a sudden scrim of tears, scanning desperately, until his eyes lit on a divining rod, short and brass and bifurcated at its base.

The walk home from school took fifteen minutes, worst case. Two minutes down Rock Spring Drive, then anywhere between four and nine (depending on the lights) on Old Georgetown, to the street where they lived.

But it took a lot longer when he walked home with Louise, because there was a little shopping center she loved along the way. It catered to affluence—gourmet grocer, tea emporium, olive oil vendor, that sort of thing—but Louise always insisted on stopping there anyway. “Let’s peruse the baubles!” she’d say, brightly, and duck into the narrow artisanal jeweler, or the old-timey apothecary, or the increasingly-politically-incorrect fur shop.