The café had emptied and repopulated in the time I was gone. Ray the screenwriter was still there, dutifully clocking his nine-to-five. The other writers’ tables were now occupied by teenagers talking loudly as they drank mocha lattes. At $5.50 a pop, I calculated how much the store made off the teenage girls, the customers who took their afternoon fix to go. The café was indeed profitable, but like Elijah said, there was only so much you could make off lattes and blueberry scones.
I sat at one of the empty tables and opened the binder Elijah had given me, filled with spreadsheets of the store’s finances. I wasn’t sure what I was searching for, some glimmer of hope that might reveal how to turn a profit. All I saw were losses at the end of each page, numbers in red that ranged from two thousand dollars around the holidays to eight thousand dollars in August. Even during the most festive of times, Prospero Books was still depressed.
My phone buzzed. I opened a text from Jay, a photo of a donkey with a quotation bubble that read, What an ass! When I didn’t write back fast enough, he followed with, Will you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?
When you went to the trouble of finding that picture, how could I resist? I wasn’t sure the tone was right over text or if he knew me well enough to intuit my sarcasm as apology accepted, so I quickly added, Already forgiven.
The older man from Billy’s funeral sat at the table beside mine, humming as he cleaned his bifocals with a handkerchief. The tune was buoyant, absent of the forlorn timbre his voice had had when he sang at Billy’s funeral. Between his white goatee and wire-framed glasses, the broken capillaries across his cheeks, he was the perfect picture of an aging and eccentric intellectual, of someone who would have been Billy’s friend.
I introduced myself as Miranda, Billy’s niece. He introduced himself as Dr. Howard.
“I liked your hymn, at the funeral.”
“I’m afraid I hardly remember it. When there’s whiskey flowing, my glass is never empty.” Dr. Howard tapped his head and jotted something into his notebook.
“You were close with my uncle?” I asked.
“He taught me the art of science. I taught him the art of poetry. I’m afraid neither of us entirely understood the other’s medium, but we shared an affinity for passion.”
I closed the binder of spreadsheets. “Do you remember any specific books Billy liked about science? Something about the muscular system or muscle fibers? Or anatomy?”
“Anatomy was far too pedestrian for our Billy. He gave me a biography of Charles Richter once. I’m afraid I found it dreadfully boring.” A biography of Charles Richter. That didn’t have anything to do with muscles and fibres and exceptional height. It didn’t fit with The Tempest, Jane Eyre, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, either. They were famous works of literature. Classics most readers would know. Not the biography of a seismologist, famous for scaling magnitudes of destruction.
“How long have you been coming here?” I asked Dr. Howard.
He counted on his fingers. “Half a score at least.”
“So, you didn’t know the original owner?”
“Lee?”
“No, Evelyn. Billy’s wife.”
“I didn’t realize Billy was married.” Dr. Howard tugged at his long goatee contemplating this fact. “‘For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams/Of the beautiful Annabel Lee/And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes/Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.’”
“That’s lovely,” I told him. “Did you write it?”
“Oh, how you flatter me. I fear you’ve never felt love if you don’t know Annabel Lee. Worry not, you’re still young.” And when he saw my embarrassment, he chuckled. “It’s Poe, dear,” he explained. “Edgar Allan Poe. How he loved his wife, the beautiful Annabel Lee.”
The beautiful Annabel Lee. The beautiful Evelyn Weston. Even if Dr. Howard didn’t know about Evelyn, he understood that Billy’s essential passion wasn’t for science. But there was another person at Prospero Books who had been close enough to Billy to have read at his funeral, someone who knew what poems he liked, someone who might have known about the woman buried beside Billy at Forrest Lawn.
Malcolm was stationed in nearly the same position I’d left him in that morning, reading. My chair skidded on the floor as I stood from Dr. Howard’s table. I waved goodbye, and he winked back at me before reaching for one of the hardbacks open on his table. I grabbed the financial binder and headed toward the front desk. It was time to find out what Malcolm was keeping from me.
He jumped when I dropped the binder on the desk, as though I’d snuck up on him.
“If you can get the next ten people who walk through that door to each buy a book, I’ll give you a raise.” I smiled. Malcolm coughed more than laughed at my attempt to be charming, shooting me an uneasy gaze I was beginning to recognize. “Are you this suspicious of everyone you meet or is there something special about me?”
“Something about you, I suppose,” he said, his tone not entirely unfriendly but not quite friendly, either. He closed the advance reader copy he was reading and put it beneath the counter. He folded his hands and leaned against the desk, bracing himself for whatever was about to ensue.
“Did Billy ever talk to you about Evelyn?” I asked.
“Evelyn who?” His expression remained neutral as he kept his gaze fixed on mine. He had a good poker face.
“Evelyn Weston.”
He shrugged, the name seemingly unfamiliar to him. Maybe Malcolm hadn’t heard of Evelyn. Dr. Howard was the closest thing the store had to an old-timer, and he didn’t know who she was. Still, I could see in Malcolm’s fidgety fingers, in the way he startled each time he saw me, that if it wasn’t Evelyn, he was certainly hiding something.
“Did Billy ever put on any games in the store? Maybe a scavenger hunt? Or a treasure hunt? Something interactive? Or with puzzles?”
“Not that I can think of. Why?” He continued to regard me with his big, cautious eyes. His irises were like gemstones, their facets catching the light and shimmering. An animal instinct kicked in, and I felt intuitively that I shouldn’t tell Malcolm about Billy’s quest.
“No reason.” I angled the folder with the financial numbers toward him. He thumbed through spreadsheets of Prospero Books’ financial data, monthly gross margin, occupancy expenses, operating costs and, a number in red at the bottom, net income—better termed net loss.
“Did you know how bad it is?”
Malcolm picked at a piece of loose skin on his thumb. “Billy never let me look at the finances.”
“I thought you were the manager?”
“I take care of the day-to-day stuff, ordering books, meeting reps, taking inventory, making sure the café’s up to code. Billy always took care of the money.” He tugged harder at the loose skin until it tore off, creating a bead of blood.
“Did Billy give you a budget for books?”
“We buy a few copies at a time. If it sells out, we’ll order more from a wholesaler.” He sucked on his bloody finger, then realized I was watching him and hid his hand beneath the desk where I couldn’t see it.
“How could you even afford to buy books?”
“You don’t have to pay them back for a month or two, sometimes even three. If they don’t sell, we’ll send them back.”
“But sending them back costs money, too?”
“Yeah, it costs money, too.” Malcolm pulled the binder toward him to take a closer look at the spreadsheets. “You got this from the lawyer? That guy’s been pressing Billy to close for years. You can’t trust anything he says.”
“His sole purpose is to offer advice,” I argued.
“He’s an illiterate hack. He has no appreciation for the written word.”
“The law’s a profession of the written word. Do you know what most lawyers want to be? Writers.”
“Not divorce lawyers. That guy sucks the money out of people’s bones.”
“So why’d Billy trust him?”
“Because Billy had a hard time giving up on people.” Malcolm’s expression changed, suddenly apologetic. Even if he didn’t know about Evelyn, he knew about the people Billy had given up on. He knew about me. “It was easier to stay with him than find a new lawyer. The devil you know sort of thing,” he tried to recover.
“Sure, the devil you know,” I said.
Malcolm abandoned our conversation for the computer and began to sort through the store’s emails. I wasn’t sure why he was pretending to know less about Billy’s past than he did or how exactly that gave him the upper hand. I didn’t know why I was gauging his actions like we were in a power struggle. If nothing else, being a teacher taught you to be collaborative, a team player. A bookstore seemed like a prime place for a communal spirit, especially when it was a bookstore that we both loved, a bookstore we both didn’t want to see fail.
I left the financial binder with Malcolm, hoping he’d review the numbers when I wasn’t around, that in privacy he’d seriously consider the doom they foretold. I didn’t know enough about the bookstore to know how to save it. I needed his help, but as I watched Malcolm commune with the oversize computer monitor, refusing to look at the binder I’d left open on the counter, I wasn’t certain we’d be able to work together.
* * *
Traffic west was light, somehow making my parents’ house feel farther away. When I walked inside, Mom was on the couch, watching a network procedural.
“Miranda,” she said like she wasn’t expecting me. She paused the show on an attractive lab technician leaning over a microscope and squeezed my arm as she walked past me into the kitchen. “I’ll fix you something to eat.” There was never the question of whether I was hungry.
I sat on a bar stool at the kitchen island, watching Mom cut peppers and cucumbers.
“Where’s Dad?”
“Where do you think?” She motioned toward the garage, now Dad’s wood shop. A steady grind churned from behind the closed door.
I watched Mom’s calm, pretty face focused on the blade of the knife as it sliced through the cucumber’s flesh. A picture of domesticity, elegant and poised, as though this was any other trip home, as though I hadn’t just come from her dead friend’s bookstore.
“Why didn’t you tell me Evelyn opened Prospero Books?”
Mom glanced up at me, perplexed. “We talked about this the other day.”
“You told me the store was named after her. You never said that she opened it.”
“I didn’t mean to confuse you.” She arranged the cucumbers on a plate and found a Tupperware dish of yogurt dip in the fridge. “I made it with dill, how you like it.” She scooped out the dip and placed the plate before me. I searched her face for the glint of a lie, but she looked like Mom, patient and loving, always prettier than I was. I felt the same ambivalence I’d experienced with Malcolm, the tug-of-war between my instincts telling me something was off and my desire to trust what was plain before me. I’d always trusted Mom; then again, I still hadn’t told her about Billy’s scavenger hunt. She was avoiding me, but I had started to avoid her, too.
“The store’s in trouble. The finances are a complete mess. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
She looked surprised. “Aren’t you going to sell it?”
“How can I sell it? Billy left it to me.”
“Honey, no. That’s not fair to you.”
“I’m not going to quit my job or anything, but I can’t let it go bankrupt.”
She capped the yogurt dip. “You can’t clean up Billy’s messes, trust me,” she said to the inside of the fridge.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Mom shut the fridge and turned to face me. “It’s been a really long day. My assistant double-booked appointments and I’ve been putting out fires ever since.” She found the remote and hit Play on the television. “I need to decompress, okay?”
Only, her next day was equally long, just as draining. Then the day after that, she claimed a headache, followed again by another stressful day. After four days of returning to my parents’ home to find Mom vacantly staring at the television, I couldn’t take it anymore. Not her secrecy. Not mine. Not her sadness, either.
* * *
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be here where you have your own room?” Mom said when I told my parents I was going to stay with Joanie.
“It’s too much, driving to the east side every day. It’s easier if I’m over there,” I said.
“But doesn’t Joanie live with her boyfriend? Isn’t that a little intrusive?”
“Susan,” Dad said. “It’s what she wants to do.”
“I’ll be home Sunday, for our barbecue,” I promised.
“Do you know how long you’re staying?” Mom asked.
“Not yet. Another week or two? I want to be back by the Fourth.” Some couples looked forward to spending their first Valentine’s Day together. Others, New Year’s. Or Christmas. For me, it was the Fourth of July. To hold Jay’s hand as we watched the fireworks from the lawn beneath the Museum of Art’s steps. To walk back to our apartment in the balmy night, passing revelers drunk on American beer and too many hot dogs. Even if July 4 was an arbitrary selection for our nation’s birthday, the day Congress had approved but neither signed nor consecrated the Declaration of Independence, I still loved the Fourth of July, especially in Philadelphia.
“Well.” Mom forced a smile. “We’re happy to get you for as long as we can.”
As I repacked my suitcase, Mom stood at the threshold of my childhood bedroom, watching me fold a sundress.
“You know you can always come back. If sleeping on Joanie’s couch gets to be too much, we always have your room here for you.”
“If it gets to be too much, I’ll probably stay at the bookstore,” I said, gingerly placing the dress on the top of the other clothes I’d already packed. “There’s an apartment. Billy lived there.”
“Billy lived above the bookstore? And you’d want to stay there?”
“It’s convenient.” I didn’t tell her that the apartment gave me chills every time I stepped inside. Partially, it was that Billy had lived there until he died. Mostly, it was that picture of Evelyn, her ominous beauty, the way it forced me to confront a version of Billy I didn’t want to know.
“And you’re still thinking about keeping the store?” Mom asked.
“At least until I find someone I can trust.”
“Just remember you have a whole life. I would hate for you to jeopardize everything you’ve built over a failing bookstore.” She tapped the doorframe before pushing her body back into the hall. “We’ll see you Sunday night?” She smiled as though she didn’t recognize the threat her words belied.
* * *
Joanie and her boyfriend had recently moved into a bungalow a mile from Prospero Books, up the hill from the reservoir. A small grove of fig trees separated their rental from the landlords’ home. Joanie said I could stay with them as long as I needed, and if she still lived alone in her bunker in West Hollywood, I would have planned on staying with her for my entire visit, but their one-bedroom was small for two, let alone three, people. Plus, they were in that honeymoon phase where they kissed each other every time they walked into or out of a room, not yet annoyed by each other’s television and dishwashing habits.
I wanted to be in that honeymoon stage, too. Instead, I was on the opposite coast from Jay, communicating in bursts of texts when we could steal a few minutes. When we finally managed to connect again on the phone—Jay half-asleep, me on Joanie and Chris’s porch, shivering in the cold night—we talked about picnics on the lawn at Independence Hall and the bocce games we would play at Spruce Street Harbor Park, the lineup for the free concert on the Fourth of July, our first summer as a couple, filled with humid nights and fireflies and memories we would build together. Jay didn’t ask about Prospero Books. He didn’t ask about Billy. In turn, I didn’t ask him what he thought fibres and muscles and brains meant. I didn’t tell him about the store’s finances, to try to make use of his background in economics. Besides, it had been years since Jay studied microeconomics and, despite his current profession, he’d never been much of a student. Instead, Jay said he wished he could warm me up when my jaw started to rattle. I told him he would get to soon, even though nights in Philadelphia stayed hot and I wouldn’t need his body heat to increase my own.
In the morning, Joanie was getting ready to audition for a staging of The Three Sisters. She painted a heavy coat of black eyeliner on her upper lids and wore a loose beige dress woven from all-natural fibers.
“Are you sure you don’t want a little more color?” I asked as she stepped away from the mirror to evaluate her appearance.
“Sensuality is natural. You don’t want to look like you’re trying too hard.” Joanie gathered her bags—she packed for a vacation every time she left the house—and I followed her outside as she walked to her car. The morning was brisk but the sun bled through the fog, etching dark pools in the hollows of the fig trees. Mornings in Los Angeles smelled mildly floral and peppery. I’d forgotten how wonderful that smell was.
“Maybe tonight I can take you to dinner, a thank-you for letting me stay?” I suggested. I still hadn’t gotten to tell her about any of the clues Billy had left for me.
“I have to help Jenny. She sold a painting or something.” Joanie’s other sister was named Jackie. Joanie, Jenny and Jackie. The similarity had no great significance. Their mom had simply been distracted, too uninspired to come up with three distinct names.
“Tomorrow, then?”
“Chris has the night off, so we’re going on a date.” She squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of time to hang.” Joanie played hopscotch with the fig trees’ roots as she headed to her car. She stopped abruptly. “I forgot. I mean, I remember figuring out the bus route with you, but I forgot his bookstore was in Silver Lake.”
“Have you been to Prospero Books?”
She shook her head slowly. “If I’d remembered that was the name...”
“It’s not your fault, Joanie.”
She solemnly bowed her head before her slender figure disappeared behind the fig trees. It wasn’t her responsibility to remember Prospero Books. It wasn’t her responsibility to remember Billy, either.
The cloud cover had dissipated and the day was heating up. I gathered my things and walked toward the store. At the base of the hill, the reservoir glistened aqua. In the dog park beside the reservoir, men with geometric tattoos smoked cigarettes as their mutts wrestled in the open terrain. A concrete divide separated the traffic on Silver Lake Boulevard from the path around the reservoir. I leaned against it, letting the wind knot my hair as the cars raced past.
I took the riddle out of my pocket.
Science is at the root of all life but especially mine. Made of fibres, muscles and brains, eight-feet tall and strong with lustrous black hair and teeth of pearly white, but you would not find me attractive despite these luxuriances.
I tried to approach these words as if for the first time, emptying my mind of assumptions. Fibres, muscles and brains. That line meant something. I Googled famous anatomists and one name stood out: da Vinci. Was he leading me to The Da Vinci Code? It was certainly popular enough, but it didn’t fit with the other canonical novels.
One of the men in the dog park interrupted my musing, joking loudly as he crushed his cigarette under his canvas sneaker. I was overthinking it. I didn’t know how not to overthink it. I tucked the clue back into my wallet and continued the trek to Prospero Books.
* * *
As my days at Prospero Books unfolded into a week, I discovered the patterns of the store, none of which led me to the next title in Billy’s hunt. The store’s activity followed the sun: slow hours in the morning’s June Gloom, afternoons bustling with the day’s heat, the crowd dwindling as dusk darkened into the empty hours of night, lasting until the next morning when the cycle began again. It was a steady life, so unlike the one Billy had had when I’d known him.
Malcolm came to accept me like one does a stray cat, a feral but presumably harmless animal that won’t go away so eventually you give it some milk, hoping it won’t give you rabies. He’d wave hello, otherwise keeping his distance, saying little to me beyond one-to two-word sentences—See you. Thanks. Back soon—when I’d started covering the desk during his lunch break or meetings with publishers’ sales representatives. During those quiet hours without Malcolm, I perused Booklog, the store’s point of sale system, teaching myself how to search the inventory until I could locate memoirs I didn’t know, novels I hadn’t read. After a few blunders with the credit card machine, I managed to ring up customers all by myself. By the end of the week, I could take money in paper or electronic form, although the money was never enough. Malcolm and I didn’t talk about the store’s monetary troubles again, and I sensed that Malcolm wanted to remain in denial. But each day we didn’t talk about the finances, each day the doors stayed open, the lights remained on, the salaries were paid, we were amassing an even greater debt, one that at some point we wouldn’t be able to avoid any longer. The end of September was three and a half months away, which seemed longer than it was. It would sneak up on us, an assassin in waiting.
Each night, I would lie awake on Joanie’s soft couch, listening to helicopters in the distance and the occasional car huffing and puffing up Joanie’s steep block. I would try to picture those pearly whites, that lustrous hair. Joanie had plans most evenings at clubs with private memberships and bars where you weren’t allowed to use cell phones on account of the famous clientele. She always invited me, but I’d been to enough of those networking-slash-socializing-slash-ego-deflators with Joanie to know I would feel out of place. Late at night, I would hear her boyfriend, Chris, tiptoe in after his bar shift, having to eat dinner in the dark kitchen because his living room had become my bedroom. I was overstaying my welcome, but I couldn’t return to my parents’ home, breathing in their secrecy and skirting the conversations we couldn’t have. I couldn’t stay in Billy’s apartment with the ghosts of a woman I’d never met and the uncle I’d known so distantly I couldn’t even solve a riddle he’d written expressly for me.
And I was no closer to solving the riddle when I was in Prospero Books. I’d wander up and down the aisles, my fingers grazing hundreds of titles, without reaching for any of them. When Malcolm tried to convince two teenage girls to buy Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Girl, Interrupted, I listened as though their conversation might hold the answers I needed. The girls popped their gum and stared at him like he was speaking Ancient Greek.
“Don’t you have anything interesting?” one asked.
Malcolm made a valiant case for Joan Didion—did any of her essays discuss teeth?—for the manic ways of Susanna Kaysen—were any of the girls on her ward unattractive despite their luxuriances? I was grasping for anything—but they continued to look at him like he was some alien species until he handed them The Hunger Games.
“OMG I loved the movie,” the other smacked.
“You’ll like the books even better,” he promised.
“Baby steps,” I advised Malcolm after they left. “You want them to be people but they’re teenagers.”
When a deliveryman arrived with several boxes of books, Malcolm called me over to the front desk. “Might as well make yourself useful.”
He opened one of the boxes. It was filled with used hardbacks in good condition.
“Billy ordered them before... We don’t log used books into the system. We just file them.” He put the box behind the counter and waved me toward the art section. “Billy had a knack for knowing what was valuable.” Malcolm flipped through a hardback on art deco in Los Angeles. “He bought this for three dollars.” The book was on sale for twenty-five. In Malcolm’s tale of Billy’s business acumen, I saw that maybe he was beginning to trust me, at least with the trivial details of Billy’s life.
He grabbed a used copy of The Naked and the Dead. “Other used books he’d buy ’cause he liked the title or the person selling it. We’ll take books in near-mint condition, but not ones that are obviously new, nothing that seems like it was stolen from another bookstore. There are some stores that will do that. Not Prospero Books,” he said proudly.
I flipped through the Norman Mailer novel, searching for an eight-foot-tall character. The sale price of the novel was marked on the top corner of the copyright page.
“Over ten dollars for a used book?” I asked.
“With tax, it comes to $11.10. The day Mailer died, November 10. If the book had something to do with religion, Billy would make the price come to $6.66. Politics, $9.11. If the customer got it, he’d give them the book for free.”
We walked back to the front desk, where Malcolm pulled five hardbacks out of the box. He handed the box to me. “Most used stuff goes upstairs. If you’re looking for something to do, you can go through them, see if there are any titles we’ve sold out of new copies and bring them downstairs.”
“Doesn’t that take forever?” I asked.
“It does.” He smiled, and in his invitation for my free labor, I thought that maybe he was willing to work with me. More likely, he was simply trying to keep me busy.
“No more free books,” I said as I carried the box upstairs.
I filed the used books in the storage closet with the other duplicate copies, none of which had been moved downstairs during my week at Prospero Books. It was a tough squeeze, filing more unwanted titles into the packed shelves. I didn’t spot any books about scientists. Nothing that made me go, Eureka!
I should have found the next clue already. I should have understood where science and fibres and eight-feet tall was supposed to lead me. The answer to Billy’s riddle had to be somewhere in Prospero Books, but that was the thing about the bookstore. There were too many books that didn’t sell, too many titles the next clue may have hid behind.
* * *
By the end of the week, it was time to move out of Joanie’s bungalow. While Joanie would never have asked me to leave, I sensed the tension between her and Chris, heard the hushed conversations behind their closed bedroom door. I still felt like I was being watched every time I stepped inside Billy’s apartment, like something might jump out from the shadows. Or someone. I tried to tell myself that staying there might make me less intimidated by his past. It might even help me solve his riddle. At least, I hoped it would. I’d run out of other options.
Joanie helped me lug my suitcase up the creaky stairs to Billy’s apartment. We stood outside the door catching our breath.
“You ready?” Joanie asked.
I opened the door. The humming of the overhead light echoed through the spacious living room.
“This place is incredible.” Joanie’s eyes danced across the leather couch and mahogany desk. “You made it sound like a crypt or something.”
“Will you stay with me tonight? I know that’s silly, but I don’t think I can do this alone.” I bit my lower lip, waiting for her to say yes.
Joanie squeezed my arm. “Wouldn’t you know, I just happen to have my overnight bag in the trunk.” She darted downstairs, returning moments later with an afghan her grandmother had crocheted, a small duffel bag and a jar of the volcanic mud mask we used to steal from her mom in high school.
I hugged her. “Have I told you you’re absolutely, positively my favorite person in the world?”
“Only for as long as I can remember.” Joanie spread the afghan over Billy’s leather sofa. The blanket’s green hues calmed the room. The space didn’t look like mine, but it looked less like Billy’s.
We sat on the couch in our pajamas, eating Thai food from the container. It felt like old times, before she moved in with Chris, before I moved in with Jay, when we would stay up all night talking about the small injustices of our jobs, the ways our bodies had and would continue to betray us, the people from high school who had become inexplicably successful, all the faraway parts of the world we planned to visit together, and it was almost enough to make me forget the bedroom hidden behind its closed door, the photograph on Billy’s dresser. Almost enough.
Joanie hummed as she mined the take-out container for pieces of chicken.
“You aren’t at all creeped out?” I asked her.
“Of what, the expensive furniture? It is a little too clean for my comfort but there aren’t any spirits here, I can sense it.”
“So, you’re Joanie the medium now?”
“More like Joanie the ingenue.” Joanie allowed the smile she’d been hiding to surface. She was happier than I’d seen her in a long time. “I got it. Irina.” Joanie beamed, talking all at once about the well-known actresses who had signed on to play Olga and Masha, the older sisters in The Three Sisters, the director who in her estimation was a visionary. “It’s going to be big.”
“Joanie, that’s amazing.” My tone was a little less enthusiastic than it should have been, so I tried again. “I’m so excited for you.” It still came out flat. It was an involuntary feeling I had every time Joanie shared good news with me—when she got into acting school, when she met Chris, when they moved in together, when she’d started spending more time with her sisters—a feeling it took me a long time to admit was jealousy that her life progressed without me.
Joanie dangled noodles into her mouth, lost in thoughts of the Prozorov sisters and Chekhov, her daydreams threatening to close her off from me completely when I wanted her here, in Billy’s apartment, in his quest, in the details of his life that were becoming known to me. I walked over to Billy’s closed bedroom door. My hand hovered over the doorknob. I inhaled deeply and twisted it open.
The room had been closed for a week and smelled mustier than I remembered. Muted light from streetlamps on Sunset outlined the furniture. In the almost-dark it looked like a bedroom, nondescript, impersonal, nothing to fear, yet I still felt a chill down my spine. I braved the distance to the dresser, grabbed the photo, and raced out as quickly as I could.
“This is Evelyn.” I showed Joanie the photograph and explained what little I knew about Evelyn, that she and Billy were married before I was born, that she’d died, that she was Mom’s childhood friend.
“She’s gorgeous,” Joanie said. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” There was an edge to her voice. It wasn’t just me. Joanie felt that she might be losing me, too. Only it was different. I wasn’t cocooned in my own world; at least, I didn’t want to be.
I found my wallet and handed Joanie the riddle. She unfolded it like she was unwrapping a present, careful not to tear the paper.
“‘Science is at the root of all life but especially mine. Made of fibres, muscles and brains, eight-feet tall and strong with lustrous black hair and teeth of pearly white, but you would not find me attractive despite these luxuriances.’” She looked at me quizzically.
“I got that from Billy’s doctor.” I expected her to ask again why I hadn’t wanted her help sooner, but she was lost in the mystery of the riddle.
Joanie paced the living room, hand on chin as though she was acting out a scene: young woman thinking. “Pearly white has got to mean something. And eight feet.” She held her arms straight above her head. “Is this eight feet? It’s superhuman.” She stumbled around the room with her hands raised, mimicking an impossibly tall person. Her legs were stiff, as though she walked without knees, and watching her plod across the room, it hit me—a person impossibly tall and superhuman, a person made of science, or rather, a creature made of science.
I sprinted downstairs and found the light switch. Joanie was right behind me. The store looked different at night, almost neon green without the natural light. I scanned S in Classics. Nothing there. Nothing in Literary, either.
“Miranda, what is it?” Joanie asked. “What’d you figure out?”
I dashed behind the desk and waited as the sluggish computer churned and sputtered, the screen waking from its slumber. My fingers were clumsy across the keyboard as I typed the title into Booklog’s search engine, adding extra letters, requiring me to delete and start again.
“Frankenstein. In science fiction,” I shouted to Joanie, and she rushed over to the section, pulling down a glossy black book, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in white across the cover. Joanie leaned over me as I opened the novel to peer inside.