“Mom,” Marxy said. “I can do it myself.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, and kissed him on his pumpkin face, very fast, before leaving. She did not close the door, so I went and closed it behind her.
I asked Marxy what happened.
He said, “I was playing basketball by myself, at the park down the street, and someone came up to me and punched me.” His nose made the squiggly sound. “I don’t know why. He just punched me.”
“Villain,” I said.
“My head hurts,” Marxy said. “Can you come here and sit near me?”
I went onto the bed and put my arms around him until he stopped breathing so hard. The door handle jiggled and I could hear Pearl on the other side, asking if everything was okay.
“I am okay,” Marxy shouted, and he took a Kleenex from the box beside his bed and blew his nose. It came out red. He put the Kleenex into the garbage can very gently.
“Did he steal anything?” I asked. “In our neighborhood people do that when they want to steal from them.”
“He took my Larry Bird ball.” He turned his head to me and asked if we could kiss for a bit but when we tried his mouth hurt too much, so I just sat in the bed until he fell asleep. He started snoring and so I had to get up slowly. I did not want to wake him up.
While I was leaving, Pearl walked me out. On the way I said good-bye to Mark, who was watching football on the television set in the living room. He did not say anything and only lifted his hand and shook it a little bit.
When we got to the door Pearl asked me if I could come by tomorrow. I was surprised.
“You want me to come back again?” I asked.
She picked a string off of her shirt. For the first time I really looked into her face, into her eyes, and she did the same.
“You make him happy,” she said. “And right now, I just want that for him.”
Before I left the house, she did something she had never done before: she hugged me.
* * *
It was a villainous world and I was angry that it had hurt Marxy, who was so innocent and pure, even if he wasn’t my fair maiden anymore. I put on my angry face so that nobody would try to talk to me until I got off the bus at the library. My shift was starting in less than an hour and Carol had scheduled me at the computer, where patrons went to check out books. This is the most powerful position in the library and Carol was counting on me.
When I got there, I went inside the library and said hello to Larry the security guard and went back to the staff room, where Carol was eating a salad from a plastic container.
“I am technically not late,” I said, pointing at the clock.
“Never said you were.” She put a fork of vegetable leafs into her mouth.
I went to get ready for my workday and saw Marxy’s Larry Bird basketball. It was sitting in the Lost and Found box.
“Where did this come from?” I asked, holding the basketball in my hands.
Carol swiveled in her chair. “I found it on a table with some National Geographics. Why?”
Why was a question I was also asking myself. It did not belong there. If I had found it on a basketball court, that would have made sense. But then Carol showed me the spot where she found it and I realized it was the same place Toucan had sat in. Then I remembered that Toucan had threatened me. At first I did not combine these two facts. Then I started to understand that Toucan had left the basketball for me.
Which meant that he had been the one to hurt Marxy.
Which meant that I was the one who was responsible for getting Marxy hurt.
* * *
When I got home from the library, I looked at myself in the mirror and felt very small and stupid.
“You are not a legend,” I said to my reflection and decided I would stay in bed forever.
But when I walked by my computer I saw a message that I thought would never come. “Praise Odin,” I whispered, and clicked the e-mail that said, “From the desk of Dr. Joseph Kepple” and started reading.
Dear Zelda,
My apologies for not answering your messages earlier—I was out of the country for some time, and my assistant had neglected to inform me of your adventures. However, your letters are unlike any I’ve received, and so I feel almost like I know you.
Going through your messages, I see that you’ve found yourself the hero of your own legend. I remember being your age and finding myself just as lost as you seem to be.
I hope you find what you’re looking for. What I can say is that sometimes life finds us, and when it does we have to rise to the occasion and have courage. And we make lists, rules, and try to order things, trying to control them, when actually the most important parts of life, the parts really worth cherishing, are the things that we don’t expect.
Please do keep in touch.
Best,
Joseph Kepple, PhD
Professor Emeritus, Stanford
I read over Dr. Kepple’s letter many times. Dr. Kepple had been lost, but had become a powerful writer who knew everything about Vikings.
The last line he wrote was very powerful, too. It said that sometimes the parts of life that are the best, which is what “worth cherishing” means, are the things that we cannot put on a list, because we don’t know that they are coming, or are possible.
That was when I finally understood.
In many legends, where heroes had to defeat powerful villains, the villains always hurt innocent people who the hero loved. And once a hero is pushed too far by the villain, the hero goes to battle.
The hero in a Viking legend is always smaller than the villain. That is what makes it a legend. Toucan was bigger than me. That did not matter. What matters is the size of your heart. Like the Karate Kid, who in the movie got beaten up by a bigger fighter until he uses his special technique, the crane kick, to defeat his opponent. Courage makes a hero. I am not big, except when it comes to courage and protecting people that I love, like Marxy and Gert.
I took many deep breaths before I realized that my legend was coming to its end. There was one villain left to defeat, according to my list.
In Viking legends, the hero goes to the monster in its cave. I did not have Toucan’s address. It was not in the library system like Hendo’s. But I did know that there was a place where Toucan could be found, where he and his tribe spent time smoking and being villains.
I got my Viking sword. I took a Kleenex and made the blade shine very nicely, then I put it in my bag. It poked out, so I wrapped it in one of my old shirts and prepared my heart for battle.
chapter thirty-three
The place Toucan hung out a lot was in front of a store that sold cigarettes and smelled gross. He liked to sit on a plastic lawn chair and smoke and sometimes people came to see him. Gert had gone to see him a bunch of times, and sometimes I saw him sitting there when I rode the bus to the library.
Toucan was not in his plastic lawn chair, but there was another man sitting in it. It was the Fat Man. He was looking at his phone and yawning.
He got up off the lawn chair when he saw me. He asked me what I was doing on the wrong side of the tracks. I told him that he did not know what he was talking about, since the railroad tracks that go through the city go nowhere near where we live.
“We both live on the same side of the tracks,” I said.