“The one on the left.”
The blonde.
“Iris McGinnis. She was in my art history class in the spring. She doesn’t know I’m alive. I’m insanely crazy about her.”
“This isn’t your defining secret, is it?”
Instead of answering, Renny said, “Look at her. No one will ever be in love with me.”
“You’re not the only one in the world with a terrible love life. I’m right there with you.”
There was no need for him to know about the policeman in the parking lot or my friends’ boyfriends in high school or the fact that I liked the way the burns on my arms felt, what they reminded me of. Sitting there with Renny, I wondered if choosing the red dress had been an accident. Was there a part of my brain that could still sense red, just as it sensed desire?
When Renny went to class I walked to my car and headed for the library. I had decided to get the library records in order. It was the least I could do to make up for all my absences. I was taking Frances’s handwritten notations and entering them into the word processor. On each patron’s card Frances had painstakingly recorded every book he or she had checked out. There was one woman, for instance, who had withdrawn every book on architecture that we had, then had ordered more. I wondered if she’d be a possibility for Renny until I came to her birth date and discovered this particular patron was nearly eighty years old. No match, I supposed, for the beautiful Iris McGinnis.
It was a Thursday afternoon, and as I worked I couldn’t help but overhear the preschool reading group. Frances was reading Andersen’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” in which the pious heroine is nothing like the Goose Girl in the Grimms’ tale. There were no heads nailed to the wall in this story. No cases of mistaken identity that weren’t easily rectified. A few of the mothers eyed me. I suppose there might be toddlers who continued to have nightmares from my time in command of story hour. No wonder their mothers wanted me kept at a distance. If I spoke, anything at all might drop from my lips: blood, frogs, death wishes, desire.
I kept to my files. I was in the A’s all afternoon. Before long my brother’s name came up. I hadn’t seen him in weeks; now it was as though I had stumbled upon him, face-to-face. I was surprised Ned had ever been to this library, when the university facility was so superior. The science library in the north quad ranked alongside the University of Miami’s collection, the result of a major donation by an Orlon alum who had invented a plastic attachment for failing kidneys. But my brother indeed had a library card here, and as it turned out, he had used it. I slipped his card into my backpack to look at later on.
When I went home, the wind had risen. A hot wind. I parked and got out. I had the sense of being lost that I often had here, as though I’d been transported to Florida by means I didn’t understand. I’d blinked and my life had disappeared. There was Giselle, sitting in the weeds, her tail flashing back and forth. My familiar. She followed me in the door, and when I sat down on the couch, she leapt up and stared at me. The wind came through the screens and made the ceiling fan spin, though it was turned off. I took out my brother’s library card and Giselle tapped at it with her paw.
Knock, knock. Who’s there?
I couldn’t imagine my brother reading anything but scientific journals and texts. Yet he had withdrawn the complete Grimm’s fairy tales not once, but twice. He’d actually had to pay an overdue fine. What would he have done with such stories? Why on earth had he wanted them? I’d had to force him to read them to me when we were children. Please, this one. That one. Not one about Death. He’d always had some comment to make: Genetically impossible for men to turn into beasts. Ridiculous to imagine that a woman could sleep for a hundred years. Absurd to think the dead could speak in rhymes and the living could make wishes that came true. But the logic of fairy tales was that there was no logic: bad things happened to the innocent, children were set out in the woods by their parents, fear walked hand in hand with experience, a wish spoken aloud could make it so.
I fed the cat, then took a cold bath. The blisters were still on my skin. To me they looked like flecks of snow. I shivered in my tub of water and watched the light fade. I had gone to Lazarus Jones because I thought he could help me understand what had happened on that January day when I was a child. Her very last moments, that’s what I was interested in. Did a person’s life flash before her eyes, all she’d had and all she’d lost? Or was it the last few instants that mattered most of all? Did the immediate past last forever, a tape that kept playing somewhere in the universe? Was the last thing my mother saw a sheet of ice? Was she listening to the radio, singing along? I suppose what I really wanted to know was if she despised me for the wish I’d made, whether it was possible in any way, in any world, for her to ever forgive me.