Сьюзен Виггз - The Lost and Found Bookshop

The very sweet pop song was one he’d heard on Blythe’s radio many times, so he knew when the melody was winding down. He took out his handkerchief again and checked on Natalie, the silent sadness beside him.

His granddaughter’s face was a portrait of everything they were both feeling. Her eyes mirrored his pain. The shock and grief of losing Blythe were so deep and intense that it felt as if a new and devastating emotion had been invented just for them.

Natalie noticed his attention and tucked her hand inside his. Leaning over, she whispered, “Are you doing all right?”

No , he thought. A man is not meant to outlive his daughter.

“Yes,” he whispered back, the lie hissing through his teeth.

“If you don’t want to speak . . . if it’s too much for you—”

He squeezed her hand. “I know what I want to say. I’ll get through it.”

“You’re incredible, Grandy. I’m so glad I have you.”

“And I you.” He sat still as the officiant did another reading. He tried to think about what he wanted to say. What he needed to say.

How did one honor a woman’s life in a five-minute speech?

He had suffered losses through the years, certainly, as anyone his age had. Long ago, Lavinia had walked away from him and into the arms of a man who promised her something better. May Lin had come back into his life briefly at the end, bringing latent joy that was all the sweeter for having been delayed, and she had died in his arms last year.

Maybe that was the start of his decline. Dr. Yang called it a decline. A gradual slide down a hill into a pile of nothingness.

Andrew could not pinpoint the precise moment his memories had begun to slip and his thoughts turned to a jumble. Sometime after the hip debacle, he supposed. Before then, and even during his stay in the hospital and rehab, everything had been clear to him.

Then, once he’d finished with the rehab and returned to Perdita Street, Blythe had moved his living quarters to the main floor. Stairs were out of the question now. The room by the garden used to be a storage area for his father’s apothecary infusions, medicines, and herbs. Later, Andrew had cluttered the space with the tools of his own trade—Stoddard solvent, brushes, tiny pincers and lubricants and cleansers for repairing typewriters.

As he’d settled into his new quarters, which were not unpleasant, the fog had closed in, bit by bit. Fatigue dragged at him, and his stomach was upset by everything he ate. Food tasted like metal. His days started to fade, and his life turned as thin as lukewarm water. He was a ghost in a world that appeared through a glass that was ash-colored and wavy.

At some point he’d lost the proud man who used to swagger around the neighborhood, a regular cock of the walk. These days, he wandered, seeking a way out, and then he asked himself—out of what? He wanted to go home. Then he would remember that he was home.

He was Odysseus one moment, the Ancient Mariner the next, an ordinary man like Tom Joad or a seeker like Douglas Adams’s hitchhiker. He wandered in search of a past that existed only inside himself. He sought fields of flowers and towering cliffs that jutted out over the ocean and mountaintops that pierced the clouds.

Maybe he wandered because he had spent his entire life in one place—the shop on Perdita Street. He used to live upstairs, first with his parents when he was a boy. Then with Lavinia, the wife who had betrayed him. Then with Blythe, whom he had raised with no help from Lavinia. And now he was obliged to bury his daughter with no help from anyone at all.

* * *

The reading concluded and soft music trailed from hidden speakers. And then it was Andrew’s turn. With Natalie at his side and his cane in hand, he made his way to the podium. He turned slightly, letting his granddaughter know he was all right standing on his own. Then he set aside the cane. The least he could do was stand for his daughter.

Then he took off his glasses and tucked them into his breast pocket. He didn’t need to look at any prompts. Notes were not necessary when speaking from the heart.

“On the day she was born, my beautiful daughter, Blythe, became a part of my life’s journey, and we followed our common path until . . . until . . . the unthinkable happened. So let us not dwell on the way she died. Let us celebrate the way she lived.” He had to pause, then, as despair took his breath away. Recalibrate. Speak of Blythe, who could no longer speak. “What can I tell you about my child who died?”

He heard a few gasping sobs. “I can tell you that she had a happy life. I can tell you that her life was too short and mine is too long. At my age,” he explained, “I thought I knew what grief is. In all my years, I have known loss—my parents, dear friends, the woman I loved. But until the day my daughter was taken from me, I had no idea that grief could cut so deep or feel so painful.”

He paused, hearing Natalie’s soft, broken breaths. “And that is all I shall say about my feelings, because today is not about me. It’s about my daughter, Blythe Harper. On the day she was born, she changed my life. And the day she departed, she left an indelible mark on us all. And in between, she led a remarkable life.”

4

Andrew Harper’s wife left him on a Monday. He would always remember it was a Monday, because that was the day May Lin delivered the finished laundry, crisply folded and wrapped in a paper parcel. Then she would pick up the week’s bag, marked Harper and tagged with Chinese characters.

The bag of soiled items was considerably smaller without Lavinia’s clothing. She had packed everything in a battered steamer trunk she’d made him drag up from the basement. The trunk was a mysterious family heirloom that had once belonged to Colleen O’Rourke, the grandmother he’d never known. Colleen had migrated from Ireland in the 1880s, arriving at the age of fifteen. She had found work as a maid in the very building that was now the bookstore, somehow making her way in the world alone.

Now her trunk would be traveling with the gloriously beautiful Lavinia, not on a steamer but on a train to Los Angeles, where her rich lover had promised to give her the life she always claimed she deserved.

Her farewell to Andrew and Blythe had been terse. “I can’t be happy here,” she had said that Monday morning as the taxi driver loaded the trunk into his bulbous Plymouth van. “You’ll be better off without me.”

Blythe, less than a year old and still in diapers, had gurgled and clapped her hands, a string of teething drool pooling on Andrew’s sleeve. The radio was playing that inane Sonny and Cher song, “I Got You Babe.” The baby reached both starfish hands out to her mother. Lavinia paused, but the brief flicker of hesitation in her eyes quickly hardened into icy resolve.

“Be well,” she said, and then she was gone.

A few moments later, May Lin arrived with the laundry delivery. Andrew was still standing in the middle of the shop, frozen, surrounded by his customers’ typewriters, cash registers, and adding machines, with Blythe snuggled against his chest.

The sight of May thawed him out. He and May had fallen in love as teenagers, but her family forbade her to be courted by Andrew, a gweilo . His own parents had not forbidden it, but they’d warned him that there could be no easy future with a Celestial—their archaic term for Chinese people in America. May Lin entered an arranged marriage to an older man from her father’s district in China. He had a laundry, he needed a wife, and that was that.

Heartsick, Andrew had sought solace in the arms of Lavinia. She was stunningly beautiful, and when she got pregnant, he was foolish enough to believe the sense of obligation that bound him was a kind of love.