Page 29 of The Librarians
Tucked in among the books, Hazel finds a handful of personal touches. A tiny origami dragon in dark red paper, a glass jar of used tickets in faded green and ocher, a large, intricate ship in a bottle, so detailed it even has a sailor on deck about to throw a message in a bottle overboard.
She trails her fingertips over the smooth exterior of the ticket jar. After she’d torn up Conrad’s phone number—and after she’d come to her senses—she’d found the tickets for the botanical garden and the cable car ride. And those were all the souvenirs she had of their time together.
She turns around to find both Ryan and Jonathan watching her.
“You’re right,” she says to Ryan, “I do love this house.”
“Sometimes I get on the ladder, swing around, and pretend I’m Belle from Beauty and the Beast ,” says Ryan. “Except, you know, around here Conrad is Beauty.”
Everyone laughs.
“Let’s go to the kitchen. You’ll love it too.”
And he is right again because the kitchen too is book-lined, with one shelf of cookbooks, one shelf of food anthropology, and one shelf of food memoirs.
“Whose books are these?” Jonathan asks the question on Hazel’s mind.
“Conrad’s. He inherited most of them—he says people leave him their book collections for some reason.” Ryan slides the food and drink the guests brought into the fridge. “A lot of them are pretty old.”
Hazel has already noticed that. Many of the cookbooks have lost their jackets; some even have food stains. A random one she picks up is in Spanish, published in Chile in 1955, and has handwritten notes in the margins by at least two different people.
Ryan moves to the stove and puts a pot of water to boil. “Tell me how you guys became librarians.”
“I’m just a clerk,” Hazel says quickly. She can recognize when a query isn’t meant for her. “Jonathan is the only properly credentialed librarian here.”
Ryan stirs an adjacent pot of pasta sauce that is already simmering. “Color me amazed when I found out, Jonathan. I don’t remember you being particularly bookish back in high school.”
Jonathan seems surprised that Ryan knows this much about him. “Good memory. I didn’t really become a reader until I was in the military—it took very little bandwidth to download an electronic book, as opposed to an episode of television. I borrowed most of the books from the library—”
“From Austin Public Library?”
Jonathan nods. “I used my mom’s account. So when I started to plan my discharge, I thought, why not become a librarian? Can’t be a bad thing to go to work surrounded by books.”
Ryan, still standing at the stove, listens attentively. But he does not look at Jonathan the way Jonathan looks at him. If anything, he reminds Hazel of a less determined version of Conrad in that cupcake shop.
Jonathan, on the other hand, does not see that which is blindingly obvious to Hazel. He basks in Ryan’s presence, in their proximity. Hazel feels less like a third wheel now and more like guardrails at the edge of a precipice, there so that Jonathan won’t plunge to his annihilation.
Or maybe Jonathan exists on a higher plane. Maybe he’s like the man in the Zen story, hanging from a vine, a tiger on the cliff above, a tiger in the ravine below, a rat gnawing away at the vine, who still manages to savor a wild strawberry he finds growing in the fissures of the rock face.
“I always enjoy it when people like their work,” says Ryan. “Good for you, Jonathan.”
He takes them on a tour of the house. When they come back, Ryan puts pasta in to cook and serves salad in the adjacent dining room.
Hazel anticipated that the space would have books on entertaining and such. Instead its shelves are jam-packed with history and social sciences, including a boatload of titles on politics and religion.
Both Hazel and Jonathan chuckle.
“Okay, a bit difficult to avoid politics and religion at this table,” says Jonathan.
“It’s usually just Conrad and me, if there’s anyone at all, and we don’t avoid politics or religion.”
“How did you and Conrad meet?” Hazel finally gets to ask her question.
“My ex from medical school”—Ryan, distributing the salad, glances at Jonathan—“the one I told you about the other day—we’ve kept in touch over the years.
His colleague and Conrad are friends. One day he was out and ran into them so they got to talking.
Conrad was about to move to Austin and my ex said, hey, I know someone who’s an Austin native and I’m sure he’ll be happy to show you around. ”
“Conrad came. I showed him around. We got along pretty well. And when I was at the end of my lease he asked if I wanted to stay here—he travels a lot and didn’t want the house to be empty half the time. So that’s how I became the world’s happiest house sitter.”
He leans forward. “Hazel, after you move in, can I please stay on? I can decamp to the guesthouse and I promise you’ll barely know I’m here.”
If only. The ache in her heart threatens to erupt into outright pain. “Conrad and I are not rushing into anything, so no worries.”
“Not rushing into anything? But life is short, I can tell you that—I see all the short-lived ones.”
“Excellent point. We’re still not rushing into anything.”
But I would if it were up to me. I would rush in like it’s the opening minutes of Black Friday.
“Huh.” Ryan leans back in his chair. “Can I ask you how you and Conrad met?”
“Sure. We met when we were traveling, spent a very nice few hours together—” At the look of great interest on Ryan’s face, she adds, “Fully clothed and in public. And that’s the entire extent of our acquaintance.
He gave me his phone number. But I didn’t act on it right away, and when I decided I did want to keep in touch, I’d lost it. ”
The words cut a little upon her lips, the first she has ever spoken about her non-history with Conrad.
“Why didn’t you want to keep in touch? Oh my God, did he get his looks from plastic surgery? Was he an ugly kid when you met?”
Hazel laughs. “No. I mean, he didn’t look exactly like he does now, but all the building blocks were there.”
How strange that he would turn out more spectacular than she remembered, when she had already elevated him beyond perfection.
“Then why?”
“He was three days short of nineteen. I was almost twenty-three.”
“That’s it? But you seem like a much cooler person than that.”
Hazel shrugs. “That’s always been my problem. I’m not cool; I just have resting enigmatic face.”
She is only an heiress raised not to rock the boat. Yet ever since she was a teenager, people have wanted to ascribe to her a life—and a soul—far more compelling than her own.
Jonathan coughs into his napkin.
Ryan laughs—and jumps up because his timer has beeped on the spaghetti. Jonathan goes with him to the kitchen to help.
The pasta they bring back is delicious. The sauce clings thickly and is so savory and satisfying that it takes Hazel two servings to realize what it is.
Spaghetti Bolognese, so different from the insipid, gloopy mess that resulted from her own attempts to learn something Conrad knows how to do during the month she waited for his boat to sail into Miami.
Did Conrad make this?
She does not ask.
After dinner they move back to the living room. Inspired by a coffee-table book about Austin set on the actual coffee table, the two native-born Austinites and Jonathan, who has lived here some thirty-odd years, reminisce about all the changes that have swept over their city.
Remember when the Children’s Museum used to be right downtown?
Remember when the airport used to be just about downtown?
Remember when breakfast tacos weren’t everywhere?
Actually, no need to remember that.
Hazel does not go near the ticket jar again, but she feels Conrad’s absence all the same. He is not the elephant in the room. He is the room. He is the house. He is the price she has paid for the generational belief that it was better never to begin than to end badly.
“Come during the day next time,” says Ryan toward the end of the evening. “This room is even more beautiful in daylight, when you can see the lake.”
She probably will return to this house, even though she shouldn’t. It’s only in Pride and Prejudice that stalking one’s not-quite-ex pays off. For mortals it’s but an exercise in futility and mortification, the death of impulse control.
Ryan walks them out. Jonathan, possibly in an attempt to prolong the goodbyes, points to a car in the parking pad behind theirs and asks Ryan, “Is that yours?”
“Yup. Want to have a look?”
Hazel didn’t pay attention to the car earlier—upon their arrival her eyes had been riveted to the house. But now the car begins to look familiar.
There are two large stickers on the rear bumper of the black Audi. It’s okay to decay. The dead know how to speak, if you know how to listen.
Hazel stares. Has she been caught in a time vortex and transported back to Game Night? She walked by this car on the way to her own and even stopped for a minute to reread the rather creepy declarations.
At the time she considered them Halloween-themed, but they are in fact—
“A bit of occupational humor,” says Ryan.
A gong goes off inside Hazel’s head, a loud clang followed by maddening reverberations. She glances at Jonathan, who seems to find nothing amiss. The two men launch into a conversation about the car’s specs.
“Excuse me, gentlemen, I don’t mean to interrupt,” she hears herself say. “Ryan, I just realized that I left my dessert container in your fridge. You’re welcome to have all the rest of the trifle, but my grandmother is a bit paranoid about losing her favorite containers.”
Ryan, ever the gracious host, says immediately, “Oh, I know what you mean—except more in a work context. Well, come on.”
“I’ll be right back,” she says to Jonathan, to prevent him from returning inside with them.
“I feel like I’ve seen your car before,” she says. Did their footsteps echo so loudly across the entry hall earlier? “Those stickers are distinctive.”
Ryan laughs. “Have you been visiting the medical examiner’s office?”
Mirthful, this man. Does that make it easier for him to laugh off uncomfortable inquiries?
“I have no idea where that’s even located,” she answers.
Ryan makes a turn toward the dining room and holds open one of its double doors for her to pass. “You must like gay bars, then.”
“I’ve been to a couple in Singapore, but never in the United States.”
They are now in the kitchen. He opens the fridge, takes out her container, and spoons the few remaining mouthfuls of Italian trifle inside into a Pyrex dish of his own.
“Come to think of it, it’s been a busy couple of weeks at work.
The only time I drove somewhere else was after Halloween, when I met with Jonathan. ”
Hazel grits her teeth and gets more specific. “I feel like I saw this car before Halloween.”
Ryan frowns, then snaps his fingers. “Now I remember. The day before Halloween I borrowed Conrad’s car to have dinner with my family—my dad wants to try a non-Tesla electric car and Conrad has a Taycan.
I didn’t think anything of it because he was supposed to be away the entire week.
But he came back that evening and took my car somewhere.
I almost had a heart attack when I got home and my car wasn’t there—and only then did I see his message on my phone. ”
A few days after she gave up Conrad’s number, Hazel misjudged the last step on a flight of stairs and took a hard spill. The impact was such that she couldn’t move for half a minute, convinced she’d broken everything inside.
She feels like that now, so jolted she can’t even react.
“Let me give your container a quick wash,” says Ryan, turning to the sink.
The sound of water splashing pulls her back into the fabric of space-time.
So…when she last saw the car, it had been driven by Conrad ?
What in the world was he doing at the library, which is what, twelve, fifteen miles from his house?
At that time of the night, in that part of the town, only grocery stores, fast-food restaurants, and bars are still open, and frankly he can find better selections of any of those much closer to home.
Come to think of it, what was he doing hanging out near the library today?
She feels a breath of ice at her nape.
Taking the now-spotless container from Ryan, she says, “Thank you again for dinner. When Conrad comes back, tell him I said hi.”
And then she flees.