Eleanor brushed past her, headed for the borning room.
She knelt on the floor by the bookcase. Someone—Cam, probably, but maybe the girls—had already taken the books off the shelf. They had been stacked in the corner, awaiting sale.
This was my life.Eleanor didn’t say the words out loud, but she was thinking them.
She allowed herself to look, for a moment, at the cover of the first book she picked up.The Little House—the story of a cottage built on a piece of land in the middle of a field with nothing else but trees in all directions, and how, page by page, a town and roads and then a whole city grew up around it until the little house was almost swallowedup. It struck her now as a sad story, though at the time she had not viewed the book this way, and neither had her children when she read it out loud to them.
The Poky Little Puppy. Stone Soup. Frog and Toad Are Friends. One Morning in Maine. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths—the one whose illustrations of Zeus had once reminded her of Cam. They were all here.Charlotte’s Web,naturally. When she read certain parts from that one out loud to her children, Ursula would cover her face with a pillow.No no no no. It’s too sad.But when Eleanor put the book down, it was always Ursula who begged her to keep reading.
Coco had followed Eleanor into the house. She stood in the kitchen, a few feet back, as if whatever it was that possessed Eleanor might be contagious. “Maybe you should talk to Cam about this first,” she offered, but even as she spoke the words, she must have recognized their futility.
Eleanor had started out setting the books, one by one, into the first plastic garbage bag, but she was flinging them in the bag now—all the beloved stories, familiar covers, characters who had been, for her children, as real as friends—a half dozen at a time. Picture books and chapter books.Where the Sidewalk Ends. Madeline. A Chair for My Mother. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble.Baby books, books of poems, books about rocks and minerals, the solar system, dinosaurs. All those wonderful Laura Ingalls Wilder stories they loved, about the homesteading family off in the woods, a little like them. Only not.
When the first bag was filled, Eleanor started in on the next. She was sweating now, only in part from the heat of the day. Coco stood a few feet back, saying nothing.
In the end, it took four garbage bags to contain all their children’s books, with a few stragglers that didn’t fit.
The bags were so heavy she couldn’t lift them. One by one she dragged them across the kitchen floor that she’d mopped a few thousand times. Coco still stood there, watching.
There had been a time when Eleanor and Cam had sanded this floor together, by hand. Here was the place where the slant of thefloorboards was so extreme, Toby could let go of a truck and it went by itself.
She remembered how, when Alison was just crawling, she had cut out pictures of babies from magazine ads for Pampers and taped them onto the inside of the low cupboard doors for Alison to see while she sat there. Her first word, spoken to the image from the Pampers ad, when she opened the cupboard, had been “baby.”
When she had all the bags in the back of the station wagon, Eleanor went back in the house one more time for the handful that still lay on the floor. As she passed through the kitchen with the last of the books, Coco pointed to a paperback in Eleanor’s hands and said in a whisper, “I gave Toby that one.”
Eleanor studied the cover. Coco was right.
It was a stupid book, the kind she would never have bought for their children, a pop-up whose main character was a cartoon character from television, with buttons that made noises when you pushed them.
“Then you should keep it,” she said, holding out the book. Her voice carried a tone of magnanimity. The image she summoned for herself was of Princess Diana, extending her hand to an AIDS sufferer. Diana—regal and beautiful and, like Eleanor, wronged by her husband—visiting the site where land mines exploded, offering comfort and compassion to the victims.
Coco stood there holding on to the one last book. At some point during the heist, despite the heat, she had put on a sweater. Eleanor recognized it as one of Cam’s. Maybe Coco had realized how easily a person could see through her nightgown.
“Have a great day,” she said, as Eleanor got in the driver’s seat and turned the key. As she made her getaway, she took in a last glimpse of her ex-husband’s young wife, barefoot in the dirt. Standing in the driveway in her nightgown, still holding the pop-up, along with a paperback copy ofThe Berenstain Bears Visit the Dentist. Another of her contributions to their library, evidently.
As Eleanor drove back down the road, her car was so weighed down that its belly skimmed the gravel. She should have drivenslowly, till she reached the tar, but she flew out of that place like Cruella de Vil with her carload of dalmatian puppies. When she got home, she saw the oil pan was punctured. Later, when she got the repair bill, it came to three hundred dollars.
Later, Eleanor told Darla the whole story of the raid on their children’s books. The friendship was unequal that way. Eleanor told Darla everything. For Darla, though she made joking references to Bobby’s impossible behavior, there remained areas Eleanor knew she wouldn’t go—bruises covered with makeup, visits to the emergency room she didn’t mention. Darla told Eleanor about Kimmie’s recently acquired habit of pulling out her hair, but when Eleanor tried to raise the reasons why she might be doing that in the first place, Darla went silent. They could talk about what Cam did, but seldom if at all about Bobby.
“I’m glad you’re not with him anymore,” Darla said, speaking of Cam. Darla did a better job of defending her friend than she did defending herself.
“You know the funny thing?” Eleanor said. “I know Coco must have told Cam what happened when I came to take the children’s books, but he didn’t say a word about any of it.”
“If I tried something like that with Bobby,” Darla said, “you’d be shopping for a funeral arrangement.”
Cam wasn’t the type to display anger, least of all to Eleanor. In some ways, his anger would have been easier to take, because a person who is angry at you is at least acknowledging your existence. But Cam drifted along like a cork person. The kind that somehow, miraculously, makes it all the way down the brook without getting caught in the weeds.
65.
You Don’t Live There Anymore
It was not the marriage that killed the last of the good feeling between them. It was the divorce.
At their children’s school performances and soccer and basketball games now, they sat on opposite sides of the bleachers, opposite corners of the room. When Cam arrived with Coco beside him, Eleanor could feel her body stiffen, but he always looked happy and relaxed. Once, when the two of them had attended the 4-H fair in Akersville where Ursula and Toby were displaying a pumpkin they’d grown, Cam’s face had lit up at the sight of their old friend, Harry Botts, on the other side of the room, with his entry in the annual pie contest. But Cam had not greeted Eleanor. Ever since the day she had come to refer to (though only in her head) as the Great Children’s Book Heist, his gaze passed over her as though she no longer existed. Beyond exchanging information concerning drop-offs and pickups, the two of them no longer spoke.
Somewhere over the course of those months, their old dog Sally had died. Eleanor found out months later, when Toby mentioned they were getting a puppy at their dad’s house, and Eleanor asked how Sally was dealing with having another dog around.
“I wish you’d told me,” she said when she learned the news.
