The Lake and the Library (13 page)

I seemed to stop dreaming at night. No dreams of a drowned woman, of books dotting the surface of Lake Jovan, no one reaching out to shut the door and lock me inside someone else's memory. This suited me fine; I felt like I was dreaming so much during the days that I was drunk on them, and come nightfall I needed the break. I'd rather live in dreams than see them leave with the sunrise, anyway.

I found my finger retracing steps again, passing in a circle over the rim of my mug, eyes and thoughts lost in the bronze ocean of my tea. I was engulfed in the memory of yesterday, of doing the impossible, of flying. But it would have been nothing without Li's hand in mine as we soared so high that we danced with the stars. Just like my princess painting.

“Paul stopped by again,” Mum said after clearing her rattling throat, seating herself across from me and jolting me instantly back to reality. As I watched her fill a vase and place it, daisies and all, in front of me, I tried hard to convince myself that she had been there, in the kitchen, all along.

I took a deep gulp of tea. “Mm-hm?”

“Did you three get into some kind of fight?” She slid the notion slyly into the conversation. I could feel my face darkening, but I laughed as though it was unheard of.

“Well!” she sighed. “I was only asking. You seem like you're avoiding them.”

“I'm just . . . busy.” I feebly shrugged.

“Well, if you haven't seen Paul or Tabitha lately, where is it you've been going these days? I barely see you, and what little I do, you're off in la-la land.”

“Everyone's so sad already,” I heard the words ooze out, not conscious that I had formed them in my head, “and it's only going to get sadder. I think it'll make it easier on us if we don't spend every waking moment together before it all has to end.”

She tilted her head. “But they're your best friends, love.”

I have a friend. More than that. And he is all I will ever need.
The thought hissed through to my core, and for a second I thought I had said actually said it, it was so loud.

“We all have to grow up sometime.” I waved her off, getting up to put my mug in the sink. The faucet was dripping, the cadence matching the water I'd been ankle deep in only yesterday. I saw the room, and the portrait, as plain as if they were in front of me, and I couldn't help but give myself up a little.

“You know that building outside the park, right?”

Her index and thumb to her temple, stretching her eye upwards, she nodded. “You three have only been going there since you could run.”

I swallowed, treading thinly. “The people who owned it, who built it. What happened to them?”

Taking the rest of her tea in a mouthful, she frowned. “I remember . . . someone told me it was some kind of accident. But the family didn't stay here for long. Anyway. Can't really say for sure, sweetie. All I know is that the town inherited the rights to it and the land, and that it's been condemned for years. I'm just glad they're finally getting rid of it.”

Over the years, I'd always resisted finding out the answers to the building, our “place,” even despite the obvious fire-wrecked roadblocks. It was Treade's diminished riddle, and I always shied away from unravelling it, even if I could. There had been magic in the place even before I knew it was a library, before I knew what kind of enchantment it held. I didn't want that spell to be broken, and now, more than ever, that was key. I did not want to be grounded in the reality I was desperately trying to escape.

So I shrugged, leaving the kitchen, Mum's reminder of “You know, you should really start packing, Ashleigh” lost on deaf ears, the sound of rushing water coming to my rescue as I clutched the golden medallion around my neck.

T
he days began melting together, blurring the lines between one and the next. The act of getting out of bed, getting dressed, declaring my leaving, and racing off, was purely instinctual, and the world outside the library disappeared from my mind the moment I entered my —
our
— palace. Games and stories enfolded us, and soon the books only served as inspiration as, with our own hands, we built a place entirely separate from them. We soared from peak to valley, dashed from ship to open sea, arm in arm as we burst through the fabric of nothing into ecstasy. We built personalities to suit each occasion, leaping from thieves to kings, pirates to jesters. When we so chose, we assumed more familiar personas, too; Li was my Hook, I his Wendy; he the Priam to my Paris, Minstrel to my Genevieve. We opened pages like we'd opened doors, prancing in to take each world hostage.

Li had given me a kind of strength that I had been missing, a conviction that what we shared was deserved, and long-awaited. Most of all, we felt secure in the presence of each other, revelling as we did in snow showers made of book pages, or chasing each other through the measureless expanse that the library had the potential to be. The truth was, for any of this to work, we needed to rely entirely on one another, to cross into each other over a bridge made of tender threads, despite how hard they quivered thinking of when we'd have to be apart. How long could a story, strung entirely from the scraps of a hundred others, really last? Could we one day just shut the page and stay tucked inside, with reality left none the wiser?

There was a special place in my head where all these thoughts collected; a dark mental cellar that had a hard padlock to it. The thoughts piled up there, and, if I put all my power into ignoring them, I could be with Li. It kept the lens of our wayfaring focused, kept me balanced and certain, and it fleshed out the corners of our story so well that I became convinced that Treade, the place where I kept leaving my friends and family, was the real dream. And that dream was the enemy.

We read, we laughed, we played. We would test each other at sword point, race on paper horseback, swoon around a dance floor at a masquerade. He would hold me down and tickle me if he couldn't get his way, and I would buck free, taking off into the air as we hopped from the chandeliers like they were lily pads. He would snatch me bodily, clean and precise, and I trusted myself in his arms to wherever we might land. We were free to lose ourselves in moments like these. We could be anything we wanted, and live on in each other.

But we weren't so active every waking second. We took our respite from epic battles, Cinderella whirlwinds, and the ziggurats of El Dorado, to the secret room upstairs, bringing books of poetry and the quieter stuff along with us. We retreated into meadows and the forests beneath the lines, listening for infinity. J.M. Barrie and T.S. Eliot took our hands and warmed us beyond the words. Poe startled with a deep antagonism that sought to manage insanity. And we tread lightly, picking our way through the land of Tír na nóg, land of eternal youth and beauty, hoping that it could preserve us and keep us. I wanted to dive into Xanadu, but Li seemed to be saving it for the right moment. I wanted badly to fall into the caverns and the pleasure-dome that Sam left behind for us, and I wondered what might have happened had he continued dreaming. How far would Kubla have gone if he hadn't been woken? If Coleridge taught me anything, it was that there was always someone waiting to spoil your best dream.

Each day I tried to stay a little longer, playing and pretending for just an hour more, but my phone would always go off — much to Li's dismay — and I would be at a loss. Each time we had to part, his face would slacken and his mind would retreat elsewhere. He would sometimes try to convince me to stay overnight, which I knew would never fly, or he would go to great lengths to hide the exit. Once, he nearly succeeded. He was getting better, every day, at making the library bend to his will.

“Li, I really have to go home,” I had said, my phone ringing constantly, though every time I answered it, the signal would drop. He followed me as I made my way to the porthole, but there was a solid wall where it had been. When I whirled at Li for an answer, he just smiled benignly, taking me by the hands and trying to pull me back into the library. I wanted to stay, I would have given everything to, but I couldn't.

“Please give it back,” I asked, eyes turned away from his, which, every time we went through this, grew more and more hurtful. My only comfort was that the next time we saw each other, the hurt would be forgotten, replaced by a great and terrible relief. But I could plainly see the relief hid something else; he was thinking of a way to suspend time and keep me here with him. Knowing him, and knowing what he could do, a part buried deep inside me prayed he could come up with a way to do it, before it was too late.

Treade lurked in the background of our story, weighing me down and berating me as soon as I came back into it, even though I tried everything to keep it at bay. I kept shutting my entire self off to it, and eventually, after not returning their calls, I finally managed to shake Tabitha and Paul. The odd text message here and there reminded me that they still existed, but otherwise I was shedding the contemptible weight of their love, and I floated lighter through the world because of it. My defiance rose like a swell and cleansed me of them.

But my mother wore hardest on me. She was on me for not having packed, for moving day getting closer and leaving her with all the work to do. She was agitated and short with me, when I noticed her at all, and she threatened to have me followed if I didn't start taking responsibility for my constant absences. She was worried, she was concerned. Her coughing got worse and her ashtray overflowed. I became the tic at her mouth, the tremor in her hands, but I tried to convince myself everything was fine. She was an insistent blip on my sonar, just like Tabitha and Paul, and all three of them would never understand what I was clinging to so desperately.

I never fought with my mother in all the years we shared; we were too much alike, and when we had our moments, they were petty and silly. We always understood each other and shared equal ground, no matter what. But it felt almost natural to get into snarling matches with her now, since the frequency with which we fought was amplified with each passing day. Doors slamming, words thrown like bitter hatchets. We were getting too good at it.

“You're ignoring your friends, and now you're ignoring me,” she forced, frustration heavy from the other side of my closed door. Discouraged, her last assault would be a storm of coughing, but if I concentrated hard enough, I brought up the sound of water rippling around my ears, and I was safe from any guilt.

They couldn't understand. They've had me for so long, had all of my time and focus. Li had not been so fortunate. Without me he had nothing, that was plain enough. Couldn't they let me devote these last days to him?
It will all end so soon
. Last days, last moments. All of my lasts belonged to Li.

I had taken to staring dazedly at myself in the mirror. Dancing deep down in my pupils was something I recalled as reason, and she looked back at me with disappointment. The dark thing that had proliferated inside me, the thing that made me feel better about Treade's final injustices, scowled back at that disappointment and snuffed it into oblivion.

No one understood what was really going on. Not even me.

M
oving day was in two weeks, and today I had to tell him. Pretending that I wasn't leaving Treade for good was a lie, and I had used up most of them on my mother and my friends. I couldn't keep it up. It was tearing apart my insides to have to do it, and every cell in my body calcified against going through with the truth. Telling myself that the library would be torn down even if I stayed made it worse, because in the end, it was Li who would be trapped and alone. I wanted to take him with me, take him out into the world and save him like he had saved me. But I wanted it all. I wanted to save this world, too, and I knew they could not coexist.

I draped my paper wings over my shoulders like a cape, stretching and feeling them root into me like feathered tendons.
Feeling
them. They really were a part of me, spreading outwards and furling in, testing the air before I took off. It was a short flight; I scattered a few paper cranes from a chandelier, catching the chain in one hand as I landed. I let it sway beneath me as I surveyed the country the library had become. The walls were no longer distinct; they were just the idea of walls, stretching out infinite on every side into different places; Asgard there, Robert Service's Yukon there. Baker Street, Shangri-La. And the places flexed in the same way my wings did, shifting like an aurora shooting through a prism, warping into whatever we saw fit for it to be. The library was breathing; it had come alive in our care alone, and I could feel that it wouldn't let me go so easily.

I hoped that it wouldn't.

Whistle whistle.

I turned. Li waxed casual on another chandelier across the room. When he got my attention, he waggled his fingers in a greeting, flitting his own pair of dragonfly wings out as he grabbed hold of his chandelier's chain and rocked back and forth. He was turning his fixture into a swing.

“Hey!” I called, using every ounce of my will not to copy him. “I need to talk to you.”

The arc of his chandelier grew wider and wider. Once he got something like this into his head, there was no stopping him, so I might as well play along. I climbed up the chain, wrapping my feet and hands around it and leaning, plunging my body back and forth, using my wings to push until the heavy
whoosh
of our chandeliers matched. With every upswing they came closer together, foot by foot, but our eyes never left each other, daring, challenging. I felt a slight drop and, looking up, saw that both of our chains were working away from the ceiling. Li had noticed, too. This was going to go off with a bang for sure.
3 . . . 2 . . . 1
. . .

We leapt off in unison, flashing into the air just as the chandeliers broke free of their moorings and slammed into one another, exploding in a supernova of glass and light. Li caught me perfectly in his arms inside the firework wake of our beautiful explosion, the glass turning into shooting stars around us. Just another day, another miracle. But today his eyes, the ones I always so easily fell into, held me like a butterfly in a bell jar. It was the way I always dreamed someone might look at me; not only look, but see. I let them trap me under glass. It was where I wanted to be.

He brought us down onto the carved banister of one of the landings. The usual dark now flickered with tiny globes of light that had beaded off our chandeliers to float around us like fireflies.

Li dusted me off perfunctorily before hurrying me through the stacks and towards our secret place.

“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to pry my hand out of his and get down to business as he bustled me through the door. The room was still filled with the artificial sunlight of the poems we had been sharing that morning, the ground as soft and spongy as a spring meadow. I called it our Terrarium Room, and it was only growing thicker with paper flowers the more time we spent there. Li sat me down on our sofa and shook himself like an overwrought dog, his wings exploding into a hundred swallows that shot off into the fireplace. I simply folded mine tight to my back, watching him rock back and forth on his heels, impatient with himself. He went through the motions of shrugging his coat off, of fiddling with his hands, of trying to find a comfortable place to stand. He had something on his mind, too.

“Oh, sit down,” I teased, feigning the casual air as questions and mostly apologies tumbled in my stomach like a rinse cycle.

He came and sat carefully next to me, and even just feeling the weight of him beside me made my throat constrict. I was nervous. How could I do this? I had to focus; we could work this out together. I looked down at my hands, searching them for the words to tell him that this was all going to be over soon. And that I wanted to be with him. That this went beyond friendship. That I—

I felt his shoulder press against me as he reached up and tapped my nose affectionately, disarming my anxiety with that trademark smile. His mouth was so close to mine, and his eyes would not let go. This time, I didn't push him away. I would have pulled him closer if my hands weren't clenching each other in my lap.

He took them in his, lifting them up, and in parting them he produced one of my Polaroids. Then he reached out and popped one from behind my ear, from out of my nose. He was trying to cheer me up, but it only made it worse.

“This is serious,” I finally said, stopping the magic show as the pictures scattered to the floor. “Listen. Li, I . . .” I winced my eyes shut, trying to concentrate. “This can't last.”

When I opened my eyes again, all I could see was his Adam's apple rise and fall at his throat, his smile turning down faster than I could let the words spill out. He let go of my hands.

“No!” I tried to recover. “Li, it's not you. It's not me, either. Please hear me out. I would . . . give
anything
to stay here with you. But the summer is nearly over and I . . . and . . .”

Despite the colour draining from him, he let his eyebrows shoot up, demanding that I just say it.

“I'm leaving.”

The rustling of paper wings. From the corner of my eye I saw the slow shower of crumpled pages floating to the ground in the shadows of the fireplace, a paper bird dying with every heartbeat. Li's eyes went elsewhere, and our terrarium started fading.

I couldn't do it. Not to him. Not for the world. I caved in, my head dropping to his chest to find reassurance there. Our world was going to break apart. I couldn't be the cause of it.

“But I don't want to,” I whimpered, body shaking. I felt the ghost of his hands hovering over me, too stunned to hold me. I instantly got to my feet, trying to hide my face in my hands and keep him at my back, pacing and holding my head steady as I clenched the sobs back with my teeth.

“It's all going to end,” I said, partway frantic. “And where will we be when it does? They're tearing this place down, they're taking me away . . . but I can't, I can't. This is my home. Whatever it is, wherever it is. My home is with
you
.”

It blurted out of me and I felt relief, felt like I was releasing something that had been nurtured in the dark. And he was behind me, encircling my body with his arms and pulling me close. I could smell musty pages, the spice of his skin, and almost the tangibility of his heart. Almost.

“I don't want to leave,” I whispered again, wanting to fall into him.

He put his head on my shoulder and turned me so I was looking up at him, so he could bend down to my cheeks and kiss the tears away.
You don't have to
, I swore I heard as his lips grazed near mine.

And then our mouths touched fully, like two palms praying together. Praying for the miracle we needed. Warmth rushed up and through me like a comet. He held me tight.

And my phone went off.

I had made a point this morning of turning it off, but Mum must have nabbed it and made sure it was at high volume before I left. I pulled away from Li and yanked it out of my pocket, hanging it up with the smash of a button. It sprang to life again, no matter what I did, and though tempted to pitch it across the room, I stopped myself. I looked at Li and stretched my wings once, letting them coalesce into a swirling storm of moths at my back.

“I have to tell her,” I said, the words that might have once been alien now entirely my own. “I have to end this. I'll be back soon, I promise.”

I went for the door, but he made a sudden grab for my hand. This time there was no worry that I wouldn't return. We were bound by a golden thread that not even Fate could cut.

“I promise,” I repeated.

Promises, promises. They were all I had left to give, and as I left the library for the last time before returning to it forever, I promised that Treade would get no more from me.

It was dark. How could it have gotten so dark, so quickly? I didn't remember being in the library that long, and hadn't I left with the morning sun at my back? Everything was getting away from me, especially the fight; I was already losing it as I crept into the kitchen, the burning tip of Mum's lit cigarette the only light on in the house.

“Do you know what time it is?” There was no jagged joke behind the question, snappish and irate. Only the venom that she'd been shooting at me for weeks now. As my eyes rolled into my head to find the answer, she was more than willing to speak for me. “It's nearly
midnight
, Ashleigh!”

I somehow found this hard to believe, despite how dark it was out, or how the digital clock on the microwave gave stark evidence to her cause. I shook my head to retaliate. “So? It's the summer. I'm a teenager. Maybe if you went out sometime and got a life of your own, you'd stop thinking about me.” I darted out of the kitchen and up the stairs to my room. I had to get out of here.

“I'm talking to you, Ashleigh!” she shouted, chasing after me. “What are you doing?”

I was shoving clothes and essentials into my bag, primed for flight, even with my wings left behind at the library. “I'm doing what you've been hounding me to do for the last month. I'm packing.”

“Ashleigh, if you'd just tell me what this was about— Where are you
going
?”

“Away. I'm going away.”
Come away, O human child!/To the waters and the wild
/
With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand
. I could hear the water rising, a great wave recoiling like a boa constrictor. I had to hurry. I rushed past her but she grabbed me by the sleeve and held tight.

“Ashleigh, this has to stop. What's going on? Are you in some kind of trouble? Please, just talk to me. This isn't like you.”

I yanked free, seeing right through her. “No.” A voice came out of the water and took mine over. “This is exactly me. I have to get away from all of you. From this place. It's been stifling me all along. But I found someplace better, somewhere I can be free. Where I can do anything.”

I felt the medallion that Li had given me start to turn hot against my neck, almost burning, alive. These words weren't mine. At the library I had been clear-headed, had known that I was going to tell my mother everything, to make her understand. But now I was consumed, transformed into someone else who would protect this secret at any cost. My mother looked like a stranger to me, and I could see the feeling was mutual as she backed up a step and let me pass. I caught the glint in my eye in the hall mirror. There was absolutely nothing left of that guilt or disapproval in them. It had all been replaced with a determined fury, an angry resolution I barely knew. I was suddenly aware of my skin, of every hair standing on edge, and I knew that I would not be consumed by the wave coming for me. I would ride it out of here instead.

They have been holding me back all along
. But I could do great things now. I could make the world and unmake it. And here and now, I could shed it.

I felt my mother's hand on my shoulder. “Ashleigh, please. Just talk to me.”

I felt myself whirl around, felt my hands lunge out and push her away, but it wasn't me. It was the wave. Caught unaware, she sidestepped and tripped halfway down the stairs. She landed and choked, wind knocked out of her. Then she started coughing.