then pulled out a lumpy parcel enclosed within a trash bag. This he handed to me.
“Open it,” he said.
I took the parcel from him; untied the bag. Inside, individually wrapped in bubble wrap and carefully taped, were four books.
“Take one out,” Ben coaxed, almost seductively, almost as if he were instructing me to undress him, one item of clothing at a time.
Because I keep my nails cut short, I had trouble catching the end of the tape. Finally, though, I got it going. The bubble wrap unfurled, revealing a familiar coffee-colored leather
cover that still gave off a scent of cloves.
“Is this the first one?”
“Look and see.”
I opened it; the pages had not even yellowed. To make love in a balloon, I read—and then I dropped the notebook onto the grass, my hands were shaking so, the coughs were rising so suddenly and so violently in my throat.
Twelve
HYSTERICAL ASTHMA, OR a reaction to breathing in too much soot: Call it what you will. Ben helped me back into the house, this time the living room, where he sat me on the black sofa. My hands were still shaking. After I had dropped the notebook, he had taken all four of them away from me and put them somewhere: I wasn’t sure where. Now he stood near the fireplace, glaring, his face pallid with anxiety and surprise, as if my reaction to touching the notebooks—which was akin to what one might feel upon accidentally touching a corpse—had taken him totally off guard. Yet how could this be? Was it possible that he was recognizing only now, for the first time, the gravity of the crime in which he was implicated?
Very possible.
He watched me. He did not appear in the least to be in a state of denial. On the contrary, his eyes were hugely open. His lower lip drooped. He leaned against the mantel as if he required its support, as if otherwise he might fall. And then he almost did fall. I stood to catch him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been feeling well lately. Headaches.”
We returned to the kitchen, to the tulip table. I was better now, and told him so.
While he sat with his head in his hands, I made coffee. I found some bread in the refrigerator and toasted it. I found some margarine and some jam. We ate a vespertine breakfast, then, as the sun set outside the kitchen window. It was close to five-thirty, and still he had more to tell.
Here is the rest of it.
You’re probably wondering what happened during the weeks and months after the Boyds left. Well, as I said, after a few days, I took the notebooks out of the chest with the stuffed animals in it and moved them to the place I just showed you, that little wood or charcoal store out in the barbecue pit. Having the notebooks in my room just made me too nervous. Not that my mother habitually went into that chest, or even opened it; and yet every now and then a sort of euphoria of cleaning would claim her, and when that happened, nothing was off-limits; there were no more hiding places; the house was forced to yield up all its secrets to her exhaustive vacuum. The barbecue pit was safer, I decided, both because it was outdoors and because my mother hated it so much she never went near it. She was the one who told everyone that the chimney didn’t draw, yet so far as I’m aware, we never once lit a fire in order to test it, so how could she know? In any case, I was fully prepared to take advantage of her irrational dislike of the pit, for it meant that there was at least one place on the grounds of that house where I could count on her never to venture.
Of course, I was very careful with the notebooks. First I wrapped them in tissue paper, then in aluminum foil, then in plastic wrap. Almost archival. I was determined that nothing should happen to them, that when or if Jonah Boyd got them back, he should find them as pristine as the day he had lost them. Not that I was entirely sure that I would give them back, once Anne asked me to; for as I said, I was starting to make a cult of the notebooks, to look upon them as talismans possessed of a power by means of which I might get certain things that