LuAnn stepped into the room, one hand on the doorway. “Everyone all right in here?”
“Sure, Mom,” answered Valentina. “Are there fortune cookies?”
“In the kitchen. Go for it.”
LuAnn came up behind Sadie as Valentina ran off. “The family photos.” She picked up one of Lonnie at his college graduation. “His best years. Look at all that hair.”
Sadie tried to match her breeziness, although her voice was shaky. “Ah, now, he’s still a charmer. How’s the geriatric gang doing?”
“I think they’ll be wrapping up soon.” She looked up as Lonnie joined them.
Sadie turned to her brother. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for Mom’s death. I feel bad about that.”
Lonnie shrugged. “It was pretty uneventful, she just passed away quietly, in her sleep.”
“We thought she was doing well, though, right? We thought she was getting better.”
“She was recovering from the pneumonia, but in the night her heart stopped. She was eighty-seven, remember.”
“It just seems so sudden.”
But it wasn’t. Lonnie was right. Sudden was waking up in the middle of the night as an eight-year-old, confused, not sure of what she’d heard. It had been a loud thumping sound, like someone had dropped a bag of potatoes. So Sadie had gotten up, drawn to the light of the bathroom, and gently pushed open the door to find her father on the cold tile, his legs askew, hands palms up, the long fingers slightly curved, like he was playing his bass. She’d rushed to her mother and then waited, kneeling on the floor of the hallway as the paramedics came. She still remembered the scratchiness of the carpet runner on her bare legs.
Their father had been a session musician, playing for advertisements and television shows before embracing the new rock ’n’ roll, one of the few older players who welcomed the new sound. He’d taken Sadie to the Brill Building a little north of Times Square a couple of times to listen in, and she’d been surprised at how much like a classroom the studio looked, a dozen folding chairs scattered across a linoleum floor. But her classroom didn’t have wires snaking around chair legs and curling up microphone stands, or a dozen men smoking cigarettes during the breaks and teasing each other. When her father played his double bass, his body swayed like a tree in the wind, like he was dancing with a partner, Fred Astaire holding a maple-and-spruce Ginger in his arms. When he was hired by the rock bands, he’d switched to a shiny electric Rickenbacker, the chunky strings no hindrance at all to his quick fingering. How Sadie missed him, still. Especially today.
She supposed a death in the family did that, made you dredge up the silt from the bottom of your life.
They stood quietly for a moment. “What was the last thing you said to her?” asked Sadie.
“I think I told her to take her pills. She seemed out of sorts, confused.” Lonnie had a strange look on his face. “She mentioned the library, of all things.”
“She did?”
“She looked at me like she was really looking at me, you know? Like she was completely lucid. Then she said something about how she had to leave the library because of the burning book.”
Their mother had said something similar as Sadie was putting away the game. Telling her not to burn a book.
“A burning book was the reason they had to leave the library?” asked Sadie. “What did she mean?”
“No idea. It was eerie. Like she was terrified.” Lonnie brushed away tears. “I comforted her, and she quieted down until, finally, she fell asleep.”
* * *
Sadie’s Surviving Spinsterhood book recommended every single girl find a hobby to keep her busy and interesting to others. Suggestions included collecting snuffboxes and antiquing, neither of which appealed. Instead, inspired by happy memories of her father, Sadie had begun seeking out music whenever she could. From the soaring voices of an oratorio in Carnegie Hall to the wild improvisations of a jazz club set in an old perfume factory, there was nothing better after a day of answering questions than to sit quietly in a room and let the melody transport her.
The Saturday after Phillip had left for good, desperate to get out of the apartment, she’d checked the listings in the New Yorker and settled on a small club in the West Village where a trio would be playing. She’d sat at the bar, feeling awkward and alone, but during the first set a woman at a table right up front caught her eye. She had long gray hair and bright red lipstick and wore a fur stole from another era. She moved in time with the music, her shoulders swaying. That’s what I’ll be, decided Sadie. Unashamed, unafraid.
Tonight, though, two days after her mother’s death, jazz wouldn’t do. The stress that crawled up Sadie’s spine and tangled in her brain required stronger fare.
The band onstage at CBGB screamed out lyrics that she couldn’t catch, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t the point. She had taken her usual spot at the end of the bar closest to the door, where she could observe the room but not feel quite part of it. Tonight’s band was a young punk trio without much flair but a ton of anger. The thick beating of the bass drum blasted itself into Sadie’s head, almost hurting her ears but not quite.
The bartender pointed to her beer, but Sadie declined another round, and he gave a slight sneer before turning way, as he always did when she showed up.
The walls and ceiling were covered with a sordid mass of stickers and graffiti, the floor gummy and the beer warm. Bands with names like the Cramps called the club home, and the harsh sounds reflected the harsher realities outside its doors. The city was on edge, still uneasy after a bomb had exploded inside the World Trade Center’s parking garage a couple of months ago. Sometimes she imagined her father playing at CBGB, if he’d lived, delighting in the way the guitarists bent the sound with such ferociousness.
When the club had opened its doors in the seventies, it had been a mecca for a new kind of sound, one that veered sharply away from the shimmery disco beats that were all the rage. Twenty years later, it still thrummed with dark energy. Sadie loved to watch the dancing that wasn’t really dancing, just limbs flailing about. Every few weeks, she’d stop by and recharge her batteries, and then she could go back out in the world and act like a fussy librarian again, sort through questions and supply answers, sink back into the logic and order of the Library of Congress Classification system.
Her desire to keep busy had drawn her back to work earlier that day, even though it was a Saturday and she was technically still on bereavement leave. Lonnie and LuAnn had taken care of the arrangements, which meant there was really nothing much for Sadie to do. At her desk in the quiet of the Berg, she’d left a phone message for Miss Quinn, Laura Lyons’s former secretary and executor in London, before going back to the archives and wading through her grandfather’s boxes again, hoping to find some crumb related to Laura Lyons that she’d missed the first time around. She soon became sidetracked by Jack Lyons’s daily calendars. So many appointments and reminders—the man was certainly meticulous, just as Sadie was with her Filofax. She admired his attention to detail, list upon list of upcoming projects, weekly service appointments, coal prices.