“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.
Three
Raining again. Darkling though it is only early afternoon. After Pastor Jeff left this morning, Nora and I had only an hour of quiet before Mab and Monday arrived home red, breathless, muter than I am. We looked up alarmed when they slammed into the kitchen, hair untamed as tigers, cheeks the same color outside as in.
“Where have you been?” Nora toppled her chair when she stood. Mab shot us warning eyes, but Nora either didn’t see or didn’t care. “What happened?”
Monday kept her eyes on the ground and rushed past us to her shoeboxes of homemade card catalog. She wedged herself between them and the wall, a tiny space she fits in only by mashing knees to shoulders, thighs to breasts, and started flipping through the cards, but way too fast to read.
Mab looked tired and fed up and possibly scared. She met my eyes and shook her head. Then she went to our room and slammed the door.
Now Nora, who has learned again and again not to push these daughters, is baking bread, baking cake, baking tarts: sugary things, sweet things, any things to keep her hands busy, muttering under her breath, earbuds in deep as sunken treasure.
Someone paying less attention than I do, than I have to, might think Nora bakes to feed her fellow citizens. Her attempts to help run up against so many walls she’s like a mouse in a maze. She can’t keep Chris Wohl off drugs or give his wife Leandra her right side back, and she can’t give the guys she abets in the bar a reason not to drink too much, and she can’t give Bourne’s citizens fresh water or fresh history. But she can bring them all cookies. And that is also love.