20
To the Lighthouse
After the visit to Walter and Esther’s, the changes in Madeline were both immediate and profound. She buzzed around the house with a newfound vitality, dusting mantels that were already spotless, rearranging furniture to capture the afternoon sun, talking at a higher octave about their plans for the day. These plans grew more extensive too. Longer walks, more hours in the secret library poring over the red books. Every love story that persisted invigorated her, and soon Alice began to wonder if the fatal illness that had seemed so imminent was really just a loss of hope. Madeline’s skin grew rosier. Her muscles engaged. It was as if she’d shed ten years.
The house itself began to change. The orange poppies across the bedroom walls were all in full bloom, bathing in a brighter light that poured through the windows. The hallways, once dark, now glittered with sun dust. The grandfather clock did not tick so much as chime. Every piece of furniture grew softer, fluffier. Even the food, which Alice would not have imagined could be any tastier, became sweeter, more complex.
In her spiral pocket notebook, Alice sifted through her records on other clients until she found a blank page to draft a new list, a color key beginning withRed = lasting love. There was something satisfying about seeing the meaning so plainly displayed. Those 206 red books were the easy cases, though. There were another 2,192 books in the library that were not red. This was where Madeline and Alice’s journey truly began, with the books that had switched color. Alice didn’t know what she feared more: discovering what the changes might signify about the couples united by those stories or how they might affect Madeline.
Still, she remained steadfast. She and Madeline had a gift. They helped people find the love they wanted in their lives. In their own way, the other books would show this too. They had to. Alice was not about to lose their bet, not about to stop writing.
On the day Madeline returned the last red book to the shelf, she giddily asked, “Which color shall we explore next?”
The room was daunting. So many books. So many colors. So much unknown. Alice could feel the uncertainty twisting in her stomach. She willed herself to exude confidence.
“Yellow,” she said without hesitation. Yellow was her mother’s favorite color. After she became a doctor and was able to buy her husband the house of his dreams, the first thing Bobby did was hire painters to brighten the white stucco facade to yellow. She wanted their home to greet the sun each morning, to welcome it in, to be its own energy source when the fog shrouded it. “Let’s explore the yellow books next.” Madeline grinned, exposing teeth that Alice was certain were whiter than before.
They worked through the afternoon into night, Madeline pulling a yellow book from the shelf and reading the first line for Alice to cross-reference in the ledger. Then, they searched online to locate Madeline’s clients. Many were happily married, some were single, others gone from this world. The single consistent thing Madeline and Alice discovered about the clients from the yellow books was that none of them were still involved with the people they’d met after working with Madeline.
“What do you think it means?” Alice said, scrolling through the profile of an advertising executive who had hired Madeline fifteen years before. Her social media account went back that far, and Alice found several photographs over the course of four months showing her with the man she’d met through Madeline. Then he disappeared from her account, replaced by other men. This kind of fleeting romance accorded with the experiences of the other clients from the yellow books, who had short-lived attachments to the people they met through Madeline’s story before moving on. “Were they all just flings?”
Madeline frowned, peering over Alice’s shoulder at the smiling woman now in her midforties. “Or maybe the stories had no effect on them? Is it possible that our magic might not work on some people?”
“There are people who are immune to everything,” Alice said.
“But there are so many of them. That’s not immunity, that’s ineffectiveness.”
Nearly a third of the books were yellow, the second most popular color after blue. Madeline walked away from Alice, shoulders drooping. Was her conviction so fragile that a little doubt could crumble its very foundation? Perhaps she was not as strong as Alice considered her to be.
As Alice debated how best to rally Madeline, one yellow book caught her eye, blinking like a lighthouse beckoning her. She walked over to it, pulling it from the shelf. The flashing intensified, its light too bright to confront directly.
The story belonged to Ingrid Olsen, who emigrated from Norway to sunny Santa Barbara when she was eleven. As she lost her native language, she’d told Madeline, she lost a part of herself, so she went looking for relationships that might make her whole again. When they didn’t, when the men she thought were godlike proved themselves all too human, rage consumed her. Generally she was mild-mannered, and this streak of passion scared her. It would have been welcome, if it was channeled toward a career or talent, but we can’t choose what overwhelms us. For Ingrid, it was a failed relationship. Whether she or the suitor was the one to end it, she’d transform into an irrational, angry beast before squandering three days in bed eating ice cream, desolate over all the energy she’d expended on someone who was not the person she’d wanted him to be. After a decade of this cycle, she was ready for a change. For her thirtieth birthday she bought herself a love story, hoping Madeline could send someone to complete her.
“That’s not what she needed,” Madeline said as she and Alice drove toward the harbor in Ventura. Ingrid worked as a ranger on the Channel Islands, so they’d booked a day trip to San Miguel, where she was scheduled that week. They needed to find out what the blinking yellow meant, why hers was different from the other books. “Ingrid was already complete. She was looking for the wrong thing out of a relationship.”
Madeline wrote her a story about a woman whose arm kept getting cut off only to grow back stronger. She’d discovered this by accident during a freak mishap involving her brother and an axe. When the arm grew back, she had her brother chop it off again. Sure enough, they watched it grow even thicker. Again and again they chopped, each time requiring a little more effort to cleave it from her body. Eventually it grew too strong to be amputated, and the woman knew she was complete.
The story, however, was not finished. It needed a translation. Madeline found a Scandinavian studies student at the university to translate it to Norwegian. When Madeline gave Ingrid the red book, Ingrid was taken aback.
“I can’t read Norwegian,” she protested.
“You can,” Madeline encouraged her. “Just try.”
Reluctantly, Ingrid brought the book home and tried to decipher the sentences on the page. They were a code to be broken. Frustrated, she tossed the book aside. Each time she walked by the end table where it rested, it beckoned her like a powerful magnet, until she could not withstand its pull. She continued to approach it like a puzzle, locating the most common short words to deduce their meaning. When the language continued to evade her, she considered hiring a translator but knew that if she couldn’t read the story herself, its magic would never work on her. She wondered if she could read it without trying to comprehend it, instead embracing each word like the indecipherable, unpronounceable hieroglyphic it was. If she just treated it like a pretty picture to linger over, maybe the message would wash over her.
When she stopped trying to determine what the words meant and simply observed them on the page, the language flooded her all at once, a dam broken. She read the story repeatedly. Like the woman’s arm, Ingrid’s command of her native language grew stronger. She began to dream in Norwegian, to think in her lost tongue. At last she understood: she didn’t need someone to complete her. She was complete on her own, if she allowed herself to be.
“That’s when she met Mel. He didn’t complete her, but he did complement her.”
Ingrid went to the library, looking for Norwegian-language novels to read. In the bank of public computers, she spotted one that was free. When she went to sit in the chair, a man bumped her aside and nearly knocked her over. He pretended not to notice her as he logged onto the computer. He’d been waiting for an hour for a free computer and was not about to allow this pale blond woman to skip ahead, pretty though she might be. His lunch hour was almost up, and he needed to check his personal email before he headed back to work. Normally Ingrid would have given up, muttering under her breath that he was an ass, but now she was willing to take a stand.
At first they fought in whispers, which quickly escalated into shouts, too loud and passionate for something as minor as a fifteen-minute window on a public computer. Finally the man at the computer next to them offered his, shaking his head as he walked away. They worked side by side, keenly aware of the scandalized looks the other patrons gave them, and of each other.
“They had this way,” Madeline said as Alice pulled into the parking lot at the harbor, “of talking without speaking, of knowing each other’s thoughts. I was certain they would last.”
“Maybe they did,” Alice said unconvincingly.
The yellow book on Madeline’s lap continued to flash sharp bursts of light, on and off, like a flickering light.
