One of the earlier shelves in Madeline’s library containedAs I Lay Dying,A Very Easy Death,The Painted Veil, and several other books that at their core were stories of death. Alice gasped. Was this when Gregory died? Several shelves over to the left were rows of what could only be considered eternal love stories. This must have been the period when Madeline met Gregory. She searched the titles, waiting for one to announce itself.
There was a single copy of each title on this shelf. In Madeline’s story of how they met, she’d mentioned five copies of the book that connected her and Gregory—the one she found in the park and the four she left notes in—all of which Gregory had bought. It would stand to reason that she would have those five copies in her library, even if she’d given away all of Gregory’s other books. Those copies didn’t belong to him but to them as a couple. So, Alice was looking for a book with five copies. And not just five copies—five of the same edition, a detail Madeline had noted in her story. Madeline had also mentioned that Gregory could not reread the title in a single day. Somewhere on these shelves, were five copies of a long book, all the same edition.
Five was a common number. In science. In the Bible. In Madeline’s library. She had five identical copies of several lengthy books. Alice picked up one of the five copies ofTinker Tailor Soldier Spy, wondering what the novel had to do with love. John le Carré was her father’s favorite author. When Alice was in middle school, the family had created their own book club. Paul choseTinker Tailor Soldier Spyfor his month’s pick. He’d readThe Bridges of Madison CountyandEven Cowgirls Get the Blues. The least they could do was humor him with the very foundation of modern spy novels. Maybe Alice was too young. She really did try. More than her mother anyway. At the end of the month neither had read more than a few pages. “It’s just so dry,” Bobby complained. “It’s complex,” Paul protested. Then her father said something about how he thought Bobby was more sophisticated than that and things erupted from there. It was one of the few times Alice could remember her parents fighting. After that, the family book club unceremoniously dissolved. They each settled into their reading preferences, medical journals and romances for her mother, fantasy and coming-of-age tales for Alice, and spy novels for her father. Alice still had her copy ofTinker Tailor Soldier Spy,the one her father had bought her for the book club, on a shelf in her apartment with the rest of his favorite books.
When Alice cracked open one of the five copies in Madeline’s library, she was immediately struck by how engaging the prose was, how the narrative consumed her from its first moment. Yet it did not seem to fit with the story Madeline had told Alice about how she and Gregory first met. Reluctantly Alice slipped it back onto the shelf.
Sandwiched between seven copies ofOf Mice and Menand two ofFlowers for Algernon, Alice found five copies ofThe Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, all the same edition. Alice had read McCullers’s novel in high school and had found it to be...sad. This was not a particularly astute reading of the novel, but it was how she’d felt. She had a hard time imagining that something so maudlin could bind Madeline and her beloved to each other. Plus, while hardly short, it wasn’t a particularly long book. She kept looking.
In the far corner, a shaft of sun hit a gold-leaf mosaic design on the spine of a maroon book. Alice approached it, discovering five of those gilded spines, all reading,The Wings of the Dove.
She traced the embossed title on the spine of one copy, then the next, stopping on the spine of the third book, which was broken in a few places, the edges of the pages yellowed from time.People leave their marks on books, Madeline had said,more so when they love them. Spines get broken. Ink gets smudged. Books bruise like any other body.When she took the book from the shelf, it was warm to the touch, as though it had just been held. It smelled like love. Alice didn’t realize love had a smell. It was sweet and musty, ink and paper.
Alice had tried to read the novel twice but had never owned it. When she’d first attempted it in middle school, on the recommendation of her language arts teacher, she was far too young, the book far too long. When she confessed that she could not get through the first hundred pages, her teacher told her it was supposed to be difficult. This did not entice a fourteen-year-old girl devoted to books that were silly or suspenseful. In college, when she approached the text again, she still found it dense although not inscrutable. It was one of the rawest portraits of ruinous love she’d ever read.
Despite the ominous ticking of the grandfather clock, Alice was in no rush to leave the library, to stop reading. She was completely absorbed by “the game” as Henry James called it, the way the three protagonists were entangled, how Milly died but was forever there. Alice read so long her knees started to ache, so she leaned against the shelf, accidentally knocking over a candelabrum. She froze expecting it to make a crashing sound that would wake Madeline.
Only, the candelabrum didn’t fall. It remained tipped at a forty-five-degree angle. The edge of the bookshelf was no longer flush with the bookshelf beside it but ajar. A seam of darkness appeared behind it. Alice dug her hands into the crack between and pulled the bookshelf door open.
13
The Library Within the Library
The hidden door opened wider as Alice tugged on it, emitting a plume of stagnant air. The enclosed area behind the bookshelf was completely dark. Alice reached for her phone in her back pocket. She had reception, although the screen did not display the time, just a strange error message. Alice tapped the flashlight on, its beam swallowed by the space. She pulled the door as far open as she could, using her hip to get her weight behind it. The door scraped the floor as it inched wider, swollen from time. Alice slipped through and stepped into the hot, breathless unknown. There was just enough light to see the shallow dimensions of the room, a closet really. It had no windows. The entirety of its walls was lined in books. Alice had never heard of a library within a library before. Would there be a book in here that led to another secret door, a library within a library within a library, until the libraries were so small Alice could not fit her pinky toe inside?
A string dangling from the ceiling made itself visible in the modest light. Alice pulled it, illuminating a spherical glass ball with one extremely bright bulb, blinding if you looked directly at it. The room erupted into a tapestry of color. Every book was a hardcover bound in bright leather. The books were all the same height, the same depth, varying only in width and hue. There were no titles etched into the leather spines, no names debossed along the cobalt, emerald, sunflower, violet, and crimson. The consistency of the books’ sizes gave the shelves the orderly look of a decorative library, the kind where the pages of the books were blank or harbored secret compartments. Alice scanned the shelves looking for signs of age, violet faded to mauve, crimson gone cherry at the edges, cobalt frayed cerulean. All the books were in mint condition, seemingly new despite the mustiness hanging in the air.
Alice stepped further into the room and ran her fingers across the spines, expecting their tips to be coated in color when she pulled them away. They remained the peachy pink of her flesh, tingling with anticipation of all the stories behind the covers waiting to be read. Carefully she tilted a red book from the shelf, afraid a cage might fall from the ceiling and imprison her in a trap. Instead the book slipped forward like it was any other book.
At first Alice didn’t understand what she was reading. The font was clear enough. Garamond, one of the most common. The story was about a woman whose job it was to feed the skeleton of a horse spread across a plush velvet blanket. Each day she offered the bones apples, hay, and carrots. Slowly the bones began to gather bits of decomposing flesh that formed muscles and tendons, eventually a coat. The mane was the last to grow, and when it did, it was thick and golden. Fully reformed, the horse stood and bowed its head so the woman could climb onto its back. Together, they galloped away.
It went on for pages, lengthy descriptions of the mane, the sensation of the wind in the woman’s long, shiny hair as they ran. Alice slipped the book back and selected another at random, a blue book about a carpenter who was building a house on a hilltop for the woman he knew would find him there. He built and built and built, hoping that once he had the perfect house, the perfect woman would follow. He kept building until the house was too big for its foundation and it toppled. Rather than giving up, he built again. And again. And again. The same thing continued to happen. Bigger and bigger until the house was nothing more than debris.
Alice flipped through a yellow book and a green. Another red. Two purples. She consumed the words like a silky wine. The stories all had the same lofty tenor, the same generous prose. Prose that was so much better than Alice’s writing. Prose that simultaneously made her feel like she should never try to write again and like she had to race back to her desk. The stories were bolder than Alice’s, the metaphors both more obvious and more significant. The lessons wiser. As Alice compared these stories to her own, overwhelmed by an intoxicating mix of impostor and aspirer, she realized—Madeline had the same gift Alice had. She was also a love scribe.
Alice sank to the floor, staring at the colorful shelves. This was why Madeline hadn’t told Alice the title of the book that united her and Gregory. It would lead Alice to her hidden library. It would expose her secret. Every thought returned Alice to this bald fact: Madeline was a liar. Alice could not write an honest story for a liar.
There were too many questions coursing through her, none of which she could answer from the cold floor of a secret library. Her knees cracked as she stood. She scanned the shelves a final time, making sure everything was returned to its exact position. Then she slipped through the crack in the wall and carefully pushed the door shut, surprised that the library outside felt and looked the same as it had before she discovered Madeline’s secret, right down to the blazing fire.
In the hall, she could see that it was still night. She turned the key once to reset the detector dial, clicked the woman’s leg back into place, and made her way to Madeline’s bedroom to return the key. Alice had no idea what she was going to do about her new discovery. Part of her wanted to storm into Madeline’s room and start screaming, but this would not be productive. Madeline would not be cowed by an attack. Besides, there was the unfortunate truth of the key Alice had taken, the act of betrayal it signified. How quickly Madeline would shift the conversation to Alice’s deceit rather than her own. No, the only way to deal with someone like Madeline was to play on her terms, to continue to visit her and get to know her, acting as though she had not discovered the secret library. Except now, Alice would have the upper hand. Now she would be in control. Alice could lie too. They could both be liars. Maybe their lies would cancel each other out, leading Alice to the truth. Maybe then she could write Madeline a story.
14
Cassoulet
Now that Alice knew Madeline’s secret, she watched her like one would watch a spider, inching too close. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, so she studied Madeline’s every gesture, every word. Madeline did not seem to notice, which confounded Alice. How could someone so insightful on the page, someone whose allegories were as unique as every walk through the woods, not intuit that something had changed between them? It charged the room. Raised the temperature. Echoed in the ticking of the grandfather clock. The presence of Madeline’s secret sat heavy on Alice. Each moment Madeline did not confide in Alice, she continued to make it impossible for Alice to write her a story.
Over cassoulet, as Madeline prattled on about the first time she had tasted the dish in Paris, Alice’s lingering hope soured to anger.
“You never forget your first cassoulet,” Madeline said, swallowing a mouthful of beans. This was Alice’s first cassoulet, and she was entirely certain that as promised, she would not forget it either.
Madeline continued to eat greedily. “Gregory and I were in Paris. It was one of those biting nights when winter’s fingers massaged the cold into our skin.”
Winter’s fingers.No matter how many stories we tell, no matter how many sentences we wield, we rely on the same words woven together in new patterns, familiar phrases that reveal the truth. Everything new is old. Every phrase we assemble we’ve already spoken. Or written.
Winter’s fingers.A green book, about a man who tries to capture the sun for his frozen love. Instead of thawing her, it incinerates him. It was one of Madeline’s more violent stories.
Madeline continued to detail her first cassoulet, oblivious to Alice’s watchful eyes. “Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. The cold was too much—” She pounded her stomach. “A hunger that needed to be satiated.”
