1
The Letter
Books are like life, and just like life, they hold secrets. They’re like an ark full of treasures and hidden secrets, waiting for someone to open them up and air their mysteries.
I’ve always thought books are tiny confessionals where authors hide their most private thoughts. A way of telling the world what brightens or darkens their souls. The way they free themselves of all those burdens a person can accumulate over time. Tales of love, guilt, desire, and many other feelings twist together through the pages, expressing an urge to tell a story that couldn’t be told any other way. Footnotes visible only to those who know how to look with their eyes closed.
This belief means I’ve always read with a slight excess of curiosity, making conjectures, with my feelings whispering to me that this or that passage may conceal a higher truth, may represent an act of atonement both real and impossible at the same time.
Books have a strange power, but not everyone knows how to appreciate it. For a time, we live in them, and after that, they live in us. It’s a perfect symbiosis between reader and written word that makes both live more vibrantly than they could otherwise.
Books are little portions of happiness. Even when they’re sad or frightening, they bring you memories that put a smile on your face.Books are winter evenings sitting in front of the fireplace, spring mornings in the park, summer vacations on the beach, autumn walks crunching leaves underfoot.
They even smell good. I mean, isn’t that the best smell there is? I can’t understand why the famous perfume houses haven’t thought of putting it on the market. What lover of reading wouldn’t like a fabric softener that smells like a new book? A lotion that smells like ink and recycled paper. An air freshener that smells like a used book shop. Essence of first edition. Library-scented deodorant…
Imagine having those aromas around you all the time.
Books have always been my refuge when everything is going wrong. Taking one down from the shelf, opening the cover, glancing at the first page, is as bracing as a gust of fresh air after an eternity being unable to breathe. Books are the antidote to sorrow, worry, fear, even to a broken heart. I’d be willing to say they cure everything, as long as you can find the right one.
But not even that first page could give me the air my lungs needed when I was lying to myself, telling myself it would be easy to make a decision. And the page I was looking at wasn’t just any first page; it was in a book by Alice Hoffman, one of my favorite writers. Even she couldn’t save me from the confusing and hurtful thoughts that had been assailing me for days.
I put the novel back on the new release table and dragged my feet to the armchair in the corner of the YA section. I sighed and flopped down in it under the faint orange glow of a lead-crystal floor lamp. That was my favorite place in the bookstore, my favorite place in the whole world. I used to sit there when I was a girl and my feet didn’t even touch the floor. I had practically grown up there.
My grandmother had bought the bookstore forty years before, when her husband, my grandfather, had abandoned her to go to the Yukon and look for gold. She never heard from him again.
She had a small inheritance she invested in a musty ground-floor space that was falling apart, but that soon became the most magical place on Montreal’s Plateau. It wasn’t easy at first, especially with a little girl to take care of—my mother, I mean, not me—but she managed to get ahead and built a future for them in those walls full of stories, novels, and manuals.
She called it Shining Waters—le Lac-aux-Miroirs. Like the famous lake that appears in L.M. Montgomery’s books about Anne Shirley.Anne of Green Gableswas always her favorite book, and my mother’s, and mine, too. It was the first book my mother taught me to read, and its pages gave me the most wonderful gift anyone ever could: a passion for reading and a secret desire to write one day if I was ever brave enough to try.
I miss my grandmother.
I miss both of them.
“You can read it a thousand times, and the words aren’t going to change.”
I looked up and saw Frances staring back at me from the counter. She was surrounded by invoices and account books. She pointed and my eyes wandered down to the letter that had come out of my pocket and was once again in my hands. I had no idea how it had gotten there.
“I know, but I just can’t understand why she did it. She knows better than anyone that my life is in Toronto. Coming back here isn’t an option.” I sighed and sank deeper into the chair. “It’s not fair, what she’s asking of me.”
“She’s not asking, Harper. She left you the most valuable thing she had, and she gave you the option of what to do with it.”
“Why me, though? Why didn’t she leave it to you? That would have made more sense.”
“Because Sophia knew me, and she knew she was the only thingthat kept me tied to this city. We talked it over many times, Harper, especially during the last months. If she went first, I’d go back to Winnipeg. My sister and my nephews live there. They’re all the family I have left.”
I rubbed the rough surface of the paper with my fingers.
“I thought I was your family,” I said softly.
Frances came out from behind the counter and approached me. I couldn’t look at her until I felt her hand on mine, calming my frantic fidgeting. She smiled gently, a slight tremble in her lips. I remembered I wasn’t the only one who had suffered.
She had shared every second of her life with my grandmother for the last three decades. They had met when they were girls and had been inseparable ever since. They grew up together and remained side by side, supporting each other in everything. One day, that friendship turned to love. And she was still there when my grandmother left her.
Or maybe they had always loved each other and just weren’t brave enough to admit it.
“Of course you’re my family. I love you, Harper, but my place isn’t here. There are too many memories.”
I bit my lip, trying to hold back the tears. A week had passed since the funeral. Three days since the reading of the will, when Frances had given me the letter. I still couldn’t believe I’d never see my grandmother again.
