No Book but the World: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

was my father’s hair I envisioned. He was a few inches shorter and more than a few inches rounder than our mother, built, as one of his admirers had once written in a book about progressive education, like a Dutch oven. Our mother was a painter and dancer and musician. We never called them anything but Neel and June.
    They are dead now, both of them, Neel for more than seven years, June for less than two. Even so, it’s Neel I find myself addressing in my head this afternoon, Neel I wish I could call from Mrs. Tremblay’s heavy black phone out on the landing. Not because I care more about what he would think and say than June, but because I long for his certainties, his conviction.
    I set the book Kitty gave me on the rattan table and feel in my bag for a pen. The book is exactly the kind you picture when you think of a composition book: the classic black-and-white-marbled cover, the black tape binding, the blue-lined pages. I’ve encountered this exact species of notebook a hundred times over the past twenty years, yet it gave me a turn when Kitty put it in my hands Monday night.
    I used to love a new notebook. Kitty and me both. At the beginning of each school year, once I had joined her in attending Freyburg Primary, we’d sit on the braided rug in her bedroom and organize our newly purchased supplies with solemn relish. Virginal pencils and unsullied erasers; blocks of crisp index cards; stiff, unnicked rulers; colored pens whose felt tips were perfectly tight and saturated; mini-staplers, which we loaded with their heavy cartridges of metal teeth. The tools of ordering. The promise of that which could be ordered.
    Here in Mrs. Tremblay’s guest bedroom I open the book’s cover, breaking its binding. Kitty and I used to love that sound. Almost despite myself, I bring my nose to the crease, inhale the clean-laundry smell. Then I smooth the book flat on the table.
    “I thought it might help.” Kitty’d sounded diffident, dropping it off on Monday night, the eve of my departure.
    “Help what?”
    “Oh, Bird.” Her longtime nickname for me, ever since we’d looked ourselves up in the tattered book of baby names we found on a low shelf at the foot of her parents’ bed. The fact of its being stored there, bedside, lent it an illicit aura: Were her parents planning more children? Did they alternate between laboring at this effort and consulting the pages of the book? We learned that her given name—Katherine—meant pure, a discovery that sent us into raucous, uncertain laughter (we’d been bumping up against puberty at the time), and mine meant just that: bird. We found the discovery providential: we fit together. Kitty and Ava. Cat and bird.
    I stood on Monday night in the front hall of the house that still does not feel quite like home, blinking at Kitty. I had, until her arrival, been sitting in the kitchen, letting it grow dark without getting up from the table to turn on the light, letting the cup of tea Dennis had made me grow cold. The past three days had been long with phone calls, calls at first simply to try to get other phone numbers: numbers that would ring in the right buildings and the right offices, then numbers where a human would actually pick up at the opposite end, then numbers that would lead to someone authorized to talk, someone willing to dispense pieces of practical information such as where Fred was, whether he was all right, what was going to happen next, how I could get in to see him.
    So by Monday night, when Kitty drove up from Brooklyn unannounced to see me before I left, I’d been feeling little besides exhaustion. Dennis and I had eaten an early supper, a kind of post-apocalyptic menu—soup from a can, peas from a bag, toast spread with apple butter—after which he’d cleared the table while I sat in a weary stupor, and then he’d gone out while I continued to sit and the sky turned incrementally from purple to black.
    When the doorbell rang I went into the front hall to