The Echo of Old Books(2)

It was a thing she had, a gift, like perfect pitch or a perfumer’s nose. The ability to read the echoes that attached themselves to certain inanimate objects—books, to be precise. She had no idea how it worked. She only knew it had started when she was twelve.

Her parents had been having one of their knock-down-drag-outs and she’d slipped out the back door and hopped on her bike, pedaling furiously until she reached the cramped little bookshop on Market Street. Her safe place, as she’d come to think of it—and still thought of it.

Frank Atwater, the store’s owner, had greeted her with one of his taciturn nods. He knew what it was like for her at home—everyone in town knew—but he never once broached the subject, opting instead to offer a refuge when things between her parents became unbearable. It was a kindness she’d never forgotten.

On that fateful day, she had made a beeline for her favorite corner, where the children’s books were stocked. She knew every title and author by heart, as well as the precise order in which they were shelved. She’d read them all at least once. But that day, three new books had appeared. She ran her fingers along the unfamiliar spines. The Story of Doctor Dolittle, The Mystery of the Ivory Charm, and The Water-Babies. She pulled The Water-Babies from the shelf.

That’s when it happened. A zingy little shock running along her arms and into her chest. And so much sadness, she suddenly couldn’t breathe. She dropped the book. It landed at her feet, splayed open on the carpet like a felled bird.

Had she imagined it?

No. She’d felt it. Physically. A pain so real, so raw, that for an instant, tears had sprung to her eyes. But how?

Wary, she retrieved the book from the floor. This time, she let the feelings come. A throat scorched with tears. Shoulders racked with loss. The kind that showed no mercy and had no bottom. Back then, she’d had no frame of reference for that kind of anguish, the kind that imprinted itself on the body, etched itself into the soul. She simply sat there, trying to make sense of it—whatever it was.

Eventually, the anguish ebbed, losing some of its sharpness. Either she’d grown used to the sensation or the emotions had simply bled themselves out. She wasn’t sure which. All these years later, she still wasn’t sure. Could a book change its echoes, or were the emotions she registered of a more indelible nature, forever fixed in time?

The next day, she asked Frank where the new books had come from. He told her they’d been brought in by the sister of a woman whose son had been killed in a car crash. Finally, she understood. The suffocating sadness, the crushing sensation beneath her ribs, was grief. A mother’s grief. But the how still eluded her. Was it really possible to register the emotions of another person simply by touching an object that had belonged to them?

Over the next few weeks, she attempted to re-create the sensation, plucking titles from the shelves at random, waiting expectantly for another peculiar jolt of emotion. Day after day, nothing came. Then one afternoon, she picked up a battered copy of Charlotte Bront?’s Villette and a fierce surge of joy rippled through her fingers, like the rush of cool water, light and bubbly but startling in its intensity.

Then came a third book. A volume of poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox called The Kingdom of Love. But the book’s stale masculine energy felt strangely at odds with its romantic title, proof that a book’s echoes had little to do with genre or subject matter. Rather, a book’s energy seemed to be a reflection of its owner.

Eventually, she got up the nerve to tell Frank about the echoes. She was afraid he’d tell her she’d been reading too many fairy tales. Instead, he listened intently as she poured it all out, and then he surprised her with his response.

“Books are like people, Ashlyn. They absorb what’s in the air around them. Smoke. Grease. Mold spores. Why not feelings? They’re as real as all those other things. There’s nothing more personal than a book, especially one that’s become an important part of someone’s life.”

Her eyes had gone wide. “Books have feelings?”

“Books are feelings,” he replied simply. “They exist to make us feel. To connect us to what’s inside, sometimes to things we don’t even know are there. It only makes sense that some of what we feel when we’re reading would . . . rub off.”

“Can you do it? Feel what’s rubbed off, I mean?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean others can’t. I doubt very much that you’re the first. Or that you’ll be the last.”

“So I shouldn’t be scared when it happens?”

“I don’t think so, no.” He scrubbed at his chin a moment. “What you’re describing is a kind of gift. And gifts are meant to be used. Otherwise, why have ’em? If I were you, I’d figure out how to get better at it, practice at it, so you know how it works. That way, you won’t be scared when it happens.”

And so she had practiced. She’d also done a bit of sleuthing. With Frank’s help, she had discovered that there was an actual name for what she’d experienced. Psychometry. The term had been coined in 1842 by physician Joseph Rodes Buchanan, and in 1863 a geologist named Denton had published a book entitled The Soul of Things. In short, she was a kind of empath, but for books.

Frank had been right. Books were like people. Each carried its own unique energy, like a signature or fingerprint, and sometimes that energy rubbed off. Ashlyn scrubbed her palms along the thighs of her jeans now, trying to erase the sadness that had leached into her fingers from the box of discarded cookbooks. It was the downside of her so-called gift. Not all echoes were happy. Like humans, books experienced their share of heartache—and like humans, they remembered.