Shit. “Why?”
“The only time he doesn’t have his phone on him is when he’s in the shower, so I figured I’d take it then, look through it, forward anything pertinent to myself.”
“That’s a good idea.” I smile encouragingly.
“Yeah, but he takes really short showers here. So we don’t run out of bottled water. I only had a couple minutes. I barely had time to scan through his inbox. My grandfather wrote him yesterday. They went back and forth once. Three dumb emails. That’s all I could get.”
I press the thin folder to my chest.
“I apologize,” he says, “that I was not more worthy.”
“You are worthy.” It seems like the right thing to say, but I’m wondering: Worthy of what?
“I wanted to help but have fallen short.”
“You’ll get more.” Am I trying to convince him? Or me?
“I regret that I’ve failed you.”
I make myself look right into his eyes. “Thank you for helping us.” I try to mean it. I was picturing reams of documents, all unambiguous and implicating and accompanied by dates and signatures, and instead I’ve got one email thread. But he tried. And that’s more than we ever had any right to hope. It is a kindness, and maybe kindness from a Templeton is worth more than incriminating documents and smoking guns anyway. Maybe kindness leads to better things than emails would, no matter what they said. It is, in any case, quite a bit more unexpected.
Two
Mama and Mirabel saw Nathan at the bar (until Mama kicked him out). Tom Kandinsky saw Nathan at Bourne’s Best (and Worst) Pizza. Zacharias Finkelburg saw Nathan at the grocery store where he was buying cottage cheese and sliced turkey and diet cola. Mab and Petra saw Nathan driving on Maple, and he waved to them from his shiny black car. They pretended they did not see him, but they did. Pastor Jeff saw Nathan at church and said he did not sing, but he did stay after for the part where there is juice and cookies, but he did not drink the juice or eat the cookies, but he did talk to a lot of people and shake their hands. Kyle R. said he saw Nathan buying clothes at the Fitwit, and Kyle M. said there was no way someone like Nathan would buy clothes at the Fitwit, and Kyle R. said there was nowhere else to buy clothes in Bourne and Nathan was not going to go around naked, especially not now that it is getting cold out, and Kyle M. said he probably had his old clothes sent from Boston, and that is possible because Lulu Isaacs saw Nathan at the post office.
But no one has seen Apple. It can be assumed that she must leave her house to buy food, water, clothes, shoes, and supplies, but no one has seen her do it. And even if she brought or had sent her old clothes from Boston like her husband might have, it can be assumed she did not bring food and water from Boston, and even if she did, it can be assumed she would have run out by now because food is perishable which means it does not stay good forever.
Unless she is dead.
She could be dead because she did not buy any new food and starved.
Or she could not need to buy any new food because she is dead. Dead people do not get hungry.
Both of these scenarios are possible explanations for why no one has seen Apple anywhere which is why it is a relief but also a shock when the doorbell rings and I open the door and Apple Templeton is standing on the front porch. And relief and shock are opposites.
“You are not dead,” I say.
She looks surprised, but I do not know why because she must have known all along she was alive.
“That’s true,” she eventually agrees.
Her family likes Truth or Dare and a Lie as much as ours. Maybe she is here to play. So I start. “Truth or dare?”
“Pardon?”
So I try again louder. “Truth or dare?”
“You’re inviting me to play Truth or Dare?”
“Truth!” I answer although that was an easy one.
“I…” she begins but then looks like she does not know what to say. “Um. Monday, right?”
“Truth!” She is making this too easy.
“Ah, yes, well.” She is winning, but she looks embarrassed anyway. “I wonder, Monday … I hear the library is run out of your home now. Isn’t that lovely?”
This is cheating because half of this statement is a truth and half is a lie. So I do not say anything.
“I understand you have some materials from my home. House. Uh, from the library. The old library. Not just books. Boxes. Files.”
“Truth.”
Bourne does not have a town hall or a courthouse or a department of records. The town council meets at Bourne’s Best (and Worst) Pizza. The mayoral mansion is a one-room office above the laundromat. It smells like dryer sheets and has a desk for Omar to sit behind while citizens sit in front and yell at him. It has only three filing cabinets with only five drawers apiece. So some of the town paperwork and files and documents used to be stored in the library, back when we had a library. Now they are stored with me.
“Wonderful,” Apple Templeton says, though I do not know why she thinks so. “Can you point me toward them?”
I turn away from her in the doorway and point at some of the places the boxes of files from the old library are: in the closet under the stairs, in the cabinet under the canned goods, in the living room behind my yellow chair. There are lots of places the boxes are, but it is easy to point to them all because our house is small.
“Ah, yes, thank you.” Apple Templeton’s eyes do not want to look at my eyes, and that is good because my eyes do not want to look at hers. “But I suppose what I meant was can I just look around a bit? You know, browse? Is that possible?”
“That is not possible, for you are living in the library.”
Her eyebrows rise up. “I see.”
“I have enough space for the lending of books, but, unlike you, I do not have enough space for the browsing of books.”
“Well”—even though I thought her eyebrows were already as high as they could go, they keep going up more—“I guess you better lend me a book then.”
So I let her in. She follows me through the kitchen into the living room. Her eyes look all around our house, and her face looks sadder and sadder.
“What a … full home,” she says.
I do not know what that means, and she looks like she does not know either, so I remember to be professional. “What kind of book are you looking for, Apple Templeton?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Surprise me.”
“I do not like surprises,” I inform her.
“How about…” She keeps trailing off for long pauses like she cannot find her way out of her sentence. “I bet you have a good writing section.”
“Lie,” I pronounce.
“Oh. Or just … old composition textbooks maybe, editing tips, what have you.”
At last a question I can answer. “What I have is many books piled many places. If you tell me what book you think you need, I will find what book you actually do.”
“Ah. Yes. Well. I see.” A lot of words are coming out of her mouth, but she is not saying anything. “My son—well, you’ve met him—needs to start thinking about applying to college. Among other things. He needs tips. Say, for writing good admissions essays. I fear he’s losing focus, forgetting the plan for his future, settling in somewhere … unsettling.”