Carefully Bird lifts up the latch and slides the panel open, revealing a gap that would be tight for a five-year-old. He flops down on the closet floor, wedges his head and one shoulder inside. He can’t see anything, but he feels around the cubby with his hands, sweeping his palms over everything he can. In his memory it’s a vast space, a huge cave, but the truth is, it’s just a nook. If he could squeeze through the opening now, it wouldn’t even hold him crouching down.
Inside he finds an old flashlight, flips the switch: the battery, of course, is long dead. A threadbare pillow. A crinkle of cellophane that, when examined, proves to be an empty Twinkie wrapper, caked with dust. Nothing else. He feels foolish now, for ever thinking she might have been here.
Bird wriggles himself backward, hooks his hands in the opening to lever himself out, and then he feels it. A little card, wedged in the backside of the cubby door’s frame. No, not a card: a scrap of paper. Dusty, like everything else, as if it has been there a long time. A single word printed in black pen—DUCHESS—and beneath it an address in New York City, on Park Avenue. The handwriting is his mother’s.
The next day after school he goes back to the library, the public one, the librarian’s words drifting back to him as he nears the entrance: If there’s anything I can help with. He’s not sure if she can, but if there’s one thing he remembers from stories, it’s that people who offer help along your way—whether directing you to treasure or warning you of danger—should not be ignored.
Today, to Bird’s consternation, the library is not quite deserted. There’s another visitor: an older Black man in the how-to section, not far from the front desk. Tall and trim, a gray beard, long gray locs neatly tied back at the nape of his neck. Bird dawdles by the cookbooks, out of sight, watching the man flip books open and shut them again, replacing them with no apparent interest in what’s inside. He’ll simply wait for the man to go away, he decides, and then he can speak to the librarian without being overheard.
But after nearly ten minutes of idle browsing, the man is still loitering there. What was taking him so long? Sometimes people came in off the street, Bird knows, just looking for a place to get warm. It’s October; each day the weather gets colder, and a full decade after the Crisis there are still plenty of people living rough—lingering on street corners, hunched on park benches, dodging police and the neighborhood-watch groups. But this man doesn’t look like he lives on the street. He wears dark jeans and a tailored tan blazer, shoes of polished leather; there’s an ease to his bearing, a comfort in this place—despite his apparent aimlessness—that Bird himself doesn’t share. Yet there’s a tension, too: as if he’s readying himself for a difficult task.
Then the man pulls a small slip of paper from his blazer pocket, inserts it carefully between the pages of a washing machine repair manual, and shuts it again. A bookmark, Bird thinks. Still, something about it catches his attention: the slightly furtive glance the man casts over his shoulder, the way he nudges the neighboring books back into place, lining the spines up so precisely you can’t tell that one has disappeared. Suddenly Bird remembers the librarian searching the books at her desk last time, the note she’d retrieved. On his side of the shelf, the man straightens, as if he’s made a decision, tucks the book under his arm, and heads for the circulation desk with a new air of purpose.
Excuse me, he says to the librarian. I found this book lying around. I’m not sure but I think—I think it might have been taken out of its place.
Bird can see him more clearly now. The black-brown of his eyes, the clean white collar of his shirt. The precisely trimmed edges of his beard.
The librarian looks up, and when she speaks there’s a tightly tethered eagerness in her voice. Thank you, she says. I’ll take a look.
The man sets the book on the counter. I’m not sure, you understand, he says. But I think someone might be looking for it.
He slides the book toward her, but his hand is still pressed to the cover. As if he can’t bear to let it go.
They’re probably very, very worried, he says. The words come out thick and sticky, as if he’s trying not to cry.
I’ll do my best to find out where it belongs, the librarian says.
Bird, peering out from behind the shelf of cookbooks, understands that something is being said that he can’t hear. He senses it more than registers it: a faint thrumming felt deep in the bone. No one would cry over a misplaced book.
I won’t speak of this to anyone, the librarian is saying. Her voice is so low that Bird has to strain to make out the words. Thank you. For bringing this in.