River’s father motions us to sit on the tall stools, and he puts out three glasses, and he fills the glasses with orange juice, which I will not drink because it is raining and orange is not green, and he puts out a big bowl full of blueberry muffins, which I also will not eat because blueberries are also not green and because I am a baker’s daughter and can tell that these muffins will not taste good. I feel a howl starting to build in the back of my throat.
But before it can come out, River’s father does the most amazing thing. He walks over to the sink and fills a glass with water straight from the tap and drinks it all down!
Mab is staring at him with her mouth open. My howl is shocked into silence.
“Are you a pastor, priest, rabbi, or reverend?” I ask instead.
“Me?” River’s father says or, to be more accurate, yelps. “No one’s ever accused me of that before.”
“I am not accusing you,” I correct him. “But the only person in Bourne who drinks water from the tap is Pastor Jeff, and he has faith as a man of God.”
“Ahh. I see. Well, I don’t trade in faith, but I do believe.”
“In God?” I ask which he must have been hoping for because he smiles.
“I believe in Bourne. I believe the water and everything else here is pure and clean and safe as houses.”
“Are houses safe?”
“Very, Monday. They’re very safe. Clean. Clear. Healthy. Perfect. I believe Bourne’s going great places.”
“Where?” I ask.
He points his finger up, but when I look, all I see is they painted over the mural of rainbows and clouds which is usually on the Children’s section ceiling. Now it is just beige. “The eaves?” I guess. “The roof?”
“The sky, Monday. The sky’s the limit.”
I do not know what this means or what it has to do with the tap water, but before I can ask more questions, River interrupts his father.
“Come on,” he says. “I’ll show you my room.”
I do not think Mab will want to see his room, but she gets up so I do too. I have a guess that she follows him because she does not like him less than she does not like his father who sounds kind but feels like something else.
“Thank you for coming by to welcome us, Monday and Mab,” River’s father says as we leave the Children’s section.
“That is not why we came,” I say.
“Then we were both surprised,” he says. “How wonderful.”
“Lie,” I say, but I do not think we are playing anymore.
River leads us past the New Releases section where there are three fat, puffy chairs that sit up or lie down with their feet out, past the Mysteries and Thrillers section where there is a fancy, old-fashioned dining-room table with lots of wooden curlicues and knobbly legs ending in carved feet with actual carved toes, plus three equally old, toed chairs. (You could also shelve mysteries and thrillers in General Adult Fiction, but Mrs. Watson made them a separate section because sometimes people are dead on the covers of mysteries and thrillers, and a lot of readers in Bourne feel traumatized by looking at dead people without warning like if they were just browsing for a book all the characters live through.) In the Audiovisual section are stacks of boxes and pictures in frames and lamps—I guess because the Templetons moved in only recently and have not yet unpacked—separated into three groups. It is like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It is also like Apocalypse Now. Both of these are movies I checked out approximately four feet away from where I am currently standing. I slide my gaze over to Mab who looks like her eyes are having the same problem mine are, and I am glad to know I am not overreacting or upset by myself. I can feel my howl trying to come back.
“That’s my dad’s office.” River waves as we walk past the big study room. It is the biggest, but it is not the nicest because it is also the smelliest, but maybe his father does not know that yet, or maybe, like Mr. Beechman, he has lost his sense of smell. A more accurate name than study room would be loud room anyway since what people did in it was be loud. Bourne kids used to hang out and talk in there because you have to be quiet in all the other parts of the library. Bourne adults used it for holding organizing and task force meetings, back when there were more adults besides Mama who still wanted to organize and force tasks. The door is open, and inside I can see a giant chair and a giant desk and a giant painting of a giant.
“Who is that giant?” I ask.
“That’s Uncle Hickory.” River keeps walking and does not even look where I am pointing. He knows what “who” I mean. Maybe he really is magic. “His eyes follow you everywhere. It’s creepy.”
“Why is he a giant?”
“I don’t know. That’s just how portraits were back then I guess.”
“Why is everything in your father’s office so big when your father is a normal size?”
“Overcompensation,” River says, and Mab laughs for the first time since we came inside the library, but I do not know what that means.
“My room’s upstairs,” he says, so we follow him up the grand staircase to Reference and Research where the dictionaries and encyclopedias are, and the tables and chairs are laid out in a grid system of rows with enough spots for many people to sit and read but enough space for wheelchairs or walkers or people with an armload of books to maneuver without accidentally touching anyone. I used to have to borrow one of the dictionaries to sit on, but now my feet touch the floor and my elbows touch the table and my butt touches the chair all at the same time, and this is good because butts put germs on dictionaries.
But at the top of the stairs, instead of the shelves and sets of books and the perfect seating grid, there is a twin bed with a brown comforter and two blue pillows, a dresser with twelve drawers, and a coatrack on wheels that should be downstairs by the elevator in the lobby for winter but instead is up here holding a bunch of flannel button-downs and sweatshirts. The far wall is naked except for the scars where the bookcases were bracketed, and in their place is a television tall and wide and flat as the world map which used to hang up here. (The map was not life-size of course—you cannot fit a life-size map of the world on the world—but I remember when Brazil was taller than I was.) There is one singular solitary beautiful lonely bookcase left, but it does not hold books because instead it holds a cape, five balls, two decks of cards, one stack of boxes, one pile of coins, and ten tied-together red and blue handkerchiefs.
My howl spills over. I drop to my knees, then my side, hands clamped over my ears, howling. Shrieking, to be more accurate. Dozens of the tables and chairs—I would count how many to be exact but I cannot stop screaming—are heaped atop one another, some broken and some scratched, pushed and piled into the corner as if they were washed there by a storm at sea. I can smell them through my screaming and also in my memory, a deep gold smell. Deep gold is practically yellow.
Mab grabs my wrists and tries to pull my hands from my ears. She is saying something to me, but I cannot hear her because I am shrieking. She is saying something to River too, but his hands are over his ears as well. She grabs me under the arms and hoists me upright, pushes me toward the stairs, and I start running, hands still in protective place, and she is running after me, and we go down down down, past the mother coming up the stairs with a tray of brown drinks and orange chips, past the checkout desk, past the father who emerges from New and Notable Releases to stare at us openmouthed with what looks like terror and fear, though I am bad at reading faces, but why he should be afraid of me, instead of the other way around, I cannot tell.