Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

So the day the children’s librarian went up to reference and ran into Tommy Mason’s sister might have been the first day the two had met at all. Circulation knew the Mason girl well; reference saw her as she deliberated among the mysteries. The children’s librarian rarely left her room, its puppets, its jigsaw puzzles. Somebody else had taken over feeding the finches and the fish.

She recognized Tommy Mason’s sister from news reports or neighborhood gossip. She stared for a while, confirmed the identity with the head of reference. No harm in answering, he thought.

Tommy Mason’s sister was in the mysteries, because that’s what her grandfather still read. Maybe he needed to read them especially now, to know that murders happened in this way: someone was killed, and there were clues and an explanation, and at the very end a madman or bitter wife was led away, and nobody but the murderer wept. She looked at the books, at the skull-and-crossbones stickers the cataloging department stuck on the spines of mysteries. She selected three and tucked them close to her chest and was halfway across the floor to the stairs when the children’s librarian stepped in front of her and said, “I knew her, you know.”

Tommy Mason’s sister looked towards the ground. That was where she always looked. The children’s librarian tried to lower herself into eyeshot.

“I knew the woman your brother murdered.” And then, in her storytelling voice, the calm one that explained that Rosetta Stone was a thing and not a person and wasn’t that wonderful, she said, “Your brother’s a monster. A freak.”

Everyone watched the two of them, the children’s librarian with her tough, tiny soldier’s shoes, Tommy Mason’s sister dressed the way all the library teenagers dressed: baggy pants, sneakers, a hooded warm-up jacket — ready, the way they all were, for an escape. Except she didn’t. She stood there, and then she turned away and walked to a table. The children’s librarian went downstairs. She gave her footsteps extra echo. Tommy Mason’s sister sat and began to cry.

It didn’t look serious at first, and people tried to give her privacy. She held the books to her as if they were a compress for her heart, and tears slid down her face and onto the table, which was itself carved with hearts, declarations of love and being: CK WAS HERE. WANDA + BILLY. We didn’t know anything about her. We didn’t even know her first name.

She stayed there for an hour. The reference librarians didn’t know what to do. One of them approached her, said, “Dear, can I call somebody?” The girl didn’t move. Her tears were so regular they seemed mechanical, manufactured inside her for this purpose: to darken the wooden table in front of her, to pave the carved grooves of graffiti.

The head of reference called down to the children’s room. “I don’t care,” he said into the phone. “You come up here.” The other librarians thought that this was like asking the snake that bit you to come suck out the venom.

You could tell the children’s librarian expected to be chewed out. She figured that the girl she’d accused was long gone, that her matter-of-fact words were just one more thing that the Masons would discuss, outraged, over dinner. But there the girl was.

So, then. The children’s librarian sat at the table. Such a clumsy young woman, really. She whispered something to the crying girl. She reached to touch the girl’s elbow. The elbow stayed put.

I didn’t , said the children’s librarian.

No response.

I’m lost—

— for words, — without her .

A dead person is lost property. You know this. Still, you’ve been searching for what was taken. You know — you’ve been schooled in this fact — that what you owned will never be returned to you. But you’re still owed something. You can’t eat lunch with your friend, her fingers marking chess moves across the board. You can’t hear those same fingers on a computer keyboard or feel them on your shoulder at a time you need them. People take their hands with them, no matter where they go.

Surely there is happiness somewhere in the world. And God will forgive you if, for a moment, you labor under the common misconception that happiness is created — you’d swear one of the students has done a science-fair project on this — when two unhappy people collide and one of them makes the other unhappier. It’s steam, it’s energy. It works: you feel something rise in you. But it doesn’t last.

The children’s librarian began to cry, too. Not like Tommy Mason’s sister, beautiful in her sorrow, but like one of the toddlers refused longer visiting hours with the bunny. She rearranged her features into something terrible. When she caught her breath, you could hear it, you would think it hurt. Nobody felt sorry for her. Then she left the table and walked up the stairs to the balcony to watch what would happen. As she passed the reference desk, she said, “Call her family.”

They had to find the phone number by looking up Tommy Mason’s library record. His card was still delinquent.

“Is this Mr. Mason?” the head of reference asked. That sounded frightening. He tried, “Your daughter—” but that was worse. Then he said, “This is the library—” as if the building were calling. “This is the library, Mr. Mason. Your daughter is fine, she’s here, but I think you better pick her up.”

The entire family arrived, and the father with his florid face sat next to her at the table. Sarah , he said, don’t you want to go home? Let’s go home, Sarah , and then the mother and sisters said it, too: Let’s go home, Sarah . They stayed there awhile, and we wondered whether they’d ever leave. Maybe they’d move in. There were worse places for a troubled family to live. We had plenty of books and magazines. We had a candy machine downstairs. They could move into the religion section in the corner, a quiet, untouched neighborhood with a window. They could string up a curtain and never be bothered. A nice cul-de-sac far from the chaos of the cookbooks, the SAT guides.

They did not look up to see the children’s librarian on the dull staircase. Sarah did not direct them there.

The Masons bundled Sarah up in their eight bare arms, the devoted family octopus, and led her out the door. She was a child who could be rescued. She could be taken home and given a meal and put to bed; they could slip the puffy sneakers she wore off her feet. In the morning, the sneakers would still be there where she’d left them, waiting for her to put them on and pull the laces tight and live the rest of her life.

The books in her arms set the alarm off on the way out. No one stopped her.

Up on the balcony stairs, the children’s librarian stopped crying. She didn’t move. The few patrons there stepped around her, because there was only the one staircase. The head of reference went to her. He sat down; he set his hand on her shoulder to steady himself.

“You’ve done a terrible thing,” he said, and she nodded. Then he took her hand, the way he wished he had taken Juliet’s hand, or Sarah’s — or a dozen sad girls he’d known before but never discussed. “Everyone does,” he said.

“Not everyone,” said the children’s librarian.

“You just know that you have, that’s all.”

The Masons would have been home by then. We thought we could feel the door of the house, closing behind them.

It’s been months since Sarah left us, more months since Juliet died. The Masons gave up and moved to another city nearby; Tommy Mason hasn’t even gone on trial yet, though they’ve decided that when he does, it will be as a juvenile and not as an adult. He’s in the news every now and then. The family goes to another library, in a town where the grandfather was never a mayor and Mason is an unremarkable name and their blond looks don’t mean anything. But they don’t know that their library is in our computer network. Their new library is a relative of ours, which means we can look their cards up on the computer if we want to, we can renew their books and erase their fines and wonder if they ever think about us.