“Are you?” Madeline asked, genuinely curious.
“Yes?” Alice said.
“Alice, you shouldn’t apologize for things you aren’t sorry for.”
“I betrayed your trust.”
“True, but if you’re honest with yourself, you don’t regret it. You would do it again.”
“I would,” Alice said quietly, her gaze fixed on one of the overlapping Persian rugs, its geometric eight-point flower heads vibrating slightly like they’d caught hold of a gentle wind. She braved a glance at Madeline. “Are you mad?”
“On the contrary, I’m impressed. Although your stealth could use a little work.” Madeline laughed. “Did you really think I didn’t notice you leaning over me in bed? And, Alice, the door to this library is mahogany. While you may assume a light wood is quiet, it whistles. The detector lock is not the only way I know if my library has been infiltrated.”
“If you wanted me to find your books, why didn’t you just show them to me?”
“I never said I wanted you to find them. I wanted to see if you were capable of it. Now I know that you are.”
“So you were testing me?”
“Oh, don’t look so put out. Life tests us all the time. That’s how we learn who we truly are.”
Alice walked across the library to the empty chair beside Madeline’s and sat down. The fire danced wildly. The flowers on the rug continued to sway. She had so many questions about this house, how a fire was always blazing the moment they stepped into the library or the second they walked through the door from the dining room to the parlor downstairs, how the grandfather clock set the beat to the house but didn’t keep time, how the flowers on the rug had suddenly started moving, how the dishes were surreptitiously cleared, the fridge always stocked even though Madeline never appeared to leave her home, how the food waiting on the patio could still be hot after it had been outside for longer than Alice knew, the drinks still cold, how the poppy wallpaper ebbed in and out of bloom. These were practical curiosities. Alice had something essential to ask her.
“So you’re a love scribe too?”
“I’ve never heard it called that, but yes, I have the gift.”
“Are there others?”
“You’re the first I’ve learned of. That’s why I had to find you, to get you to stop.”
“Why would you want me to stop?”
Madeline’s eyes remained fixed on the fire as she lifted her bony index finger to point to a shelf on the far side of the room. “When Gregory was alive, I used to store my stories there. I was so proud of them. I wanted them displayed beside the books that had inspired me. The books that taught me to write. The stories that taught me to love. When I first wrote them, I bound them all in red leather. It was a little trite maybe, but I liked seeing all those crimson books, all the love I’d spread to others. At the time, I thought I had so much love I could give some away.”
When Gregory was alive, Madeline was drunk on love. It was easy to believe that everyone deserved to be as happy as she was. Surely if everyone could love as much as she did, it would solve all the world’s problems. When Gregory was alive, she was convinced she was doing something holy, something vital. Her clients reaffirmed this. The way they loved. The way they praised her. The way they sent her more people to help.
After Gregory died, there was emptiness. Unending swaths of time. Isolation so complete it became her companion. Still, the requests for stories persisted. People wanted love, even if Madeline knew she could no longer manufacture it for them. She had no love left in her to give.
When Gregory was alive, she could control her stories. Her love was so strong that it held a firm grip on others’.
After Gregory died, her hold on her stories weakened. The stories were only beginnings. As Madeline let go, they started to have their own endings.
“I’ll never forget that first call. Maggie Sims.” Madeline tapped the small end table between their chairs. “I had a phone back then. I was sitting here when I answered it. She was so hysterical I could barely make out what she was saying. There was only one reason for that kind of despair. If I’d known why she was calling, I wouldn’t have picked up.” Her husband, Luke, was forty-two. A marathon runner. A pescatarian. The paragon of vigor. His heart had a congenital defect that was not diagnosed until, walking hand in hand with Maggie after a particularly satiating dinner, he fell to the sidewalk never to stand again.
“I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me. I don’t think she was either. I’m not sure she wanted anything. So I cried with her. I told her about Gregory. We shared our grief.
“When I hung up, I stared into the fire, collecting my thoughts. I glanced over at my books, hoping they could offer me a modicum of comfort too. Amidst the crimson spines, one was a deep maroon, so dark it nearly looked black. It was swollen, like it was waterlogged, and it began dripping down onto the books beneath it, the dark red collecting on the floor like a small puddle of blood. I didn’t dare touch it, didn’t dare wipe the blood or whatever it was off the floor. I knew it was Maggie’s.”
Madeline shivered despite the warmth from the fire.
“After that, there were a few more calls. The endings they told me were as different as the lovers the stories had summoned. Not all were deaths. John found his wife in bed with his cousin. Rachel came home to discover her husband’s closet emptied, a note on the kitchen counter saying,I can’t do this anymore. Jean suddenly and irreversibly could not look at her partner of twelve years without being completely repulsed. And Liz, Liz simply felt nothing anymore. She no longer cared about her husband enough even to hate him.
“I watched each of their books change. John even showed up at my door, called me horrible names, cursing at me like I was the one who had cheated. In a strange way it felt good to be punished like that, to feel something besides grief. When I returned to the library, there was one emerald spine amidst the red.
“Rachel’s book turned while I was on the phone with her. I watched it fade from crimson to rose to quartz then to blond, canary, lemon, until it became a bright sunflower yellow. Her voice was so calm. Reasonable. If I could write a story to make her husband fall in love with her, couldn’t I also write her something to make him pay for abandoning her, a hex so he would regret every day he spent without her? I told her that if he was willing to give up on love, he was already cursed. She seemed to accept this, but I’ll never forget what she said after that. ‘Still. I’d like to see him pay for wasting so much of my time.’ She’d been one of my earliest stories.
“With Liz and Jean, their books turned before I found out what had happened. I walked into the library to find another yellow book, a second green, and I spent the day waiting for the phone to ring. After that I stayed away from my library for a week. It was torturous to abandon my books like that, but I was afraid to look at them, to see how they were shifting. Sure enough, when I grew brave enough to return, even more books had changed color. And there was a new shade. Blue.
