Innocence

Driven by fear that temporarily quelled my hunger, I walked for another two hours, until I found a place that seemed remote enough to be safe. I sat upon a fern-skirted outcropping of rocks to eat some of what I had acquired at the church, my table a broad flat stone, luncheon music provided by birds high in the surrounding pines.

As I ate, I wondered at the farrago of emotions that the very sight of me had stirred up in the churchman with the soft and kindly face. I expected to inspire terror. Likewise repulsion and disgust. But his reaction had been more complicated than that of the stabbed man who tried to stab me in turn, more nuanced than the homicidal loathing of the midwives as it had been recounted to me by Mother. Even in its brevity, the churchman’s reaction to me had been almost as complicated as the much longer relationship between me and my mother.

Mother and I had never discussed what I might be, as if it was burden enough to know that I was an abomination from which even she, having carried me within her, most often had to avert her eyes. My body, my hands, my face, my eyes, my impact on everyone who saw me: Any attempt to discuss those things, analyze them, and theorize about my nature only sharpened her aversion to me, sickened her until mere depression became despair.

A bird of some kind, small with a blue chest, dared to perch on the edge of the large flat stone that served as my table. I scattered biscuit crumbs toward it, and the bird hopped closer as it feasted. It had no fear of me, did not expect me to seize it in one fist and crush the life from it, knew that it was safe with me, and it was safe.

I thought then that perhaps I should spend my life in the deep woods, where I would be accepted. I could venture into areas of human habitation only at night, to get food wherever I could find it, and only until I might eventually learn to live off the bounty that the wildlands offered.

But even then, young and still unaware of my nature, I wanted more than peace and survival. I felt that I had a purpose that could be fulfilled only elsewhere, among the very people who were repelled by me. I felt I had a destiny, though I didn’t know that it would be in the city where soon thereafter I came to live.

Later that very Sunday, in the lengthening purple shadows of twilight, miles from the stone table on which I had lunch, I found the truck stop and the eighteen-wheeler flatbed carrying the tarp-covered machinery. Aboard, I was brought to the city, arriving after midnight.

In the dark early hours of that Monday morning, I first saw the disturbing marionette in the lighted display window of the antique-toy store, as it sat with its back against a hand-carved rocking horse of whimsical design, its tuxedo rumpled, legs bent awkwardly, arms limp, black eyes with red striations seeming to follow me as I walked past.

14

AS I WENT WHERE GWYNETH LED ME BY FLASHLIGHT, along the hallways of the less public areas of the library, I said, “Where are you from? I mean, before the city.”

“I was born here.”

She named a year and a day in early October, and I halted in surprise. “You’re eighteen.”

“As I told you before.”

“Yes, but you look so much younger that I just didn’t think…”

She cupped one hand over the lens of the flashlight, letting just enough shine between her fingers to hold back the dark while ensuring that she could face me without a risk of revelation. “You just didn’t think… what?”

“I’m twenty-six, you’re eighteen—and we’ve both been in the city eighteen years.”

“What’s so remarkable about that?”

I said, “The day you were born—it’s the day I came here as a stowaway on an eighteen-wheeler, in the first hour of that morning.”

“You say that as if it must be more than a coincidence.”

“I think it must be,” I confirmed.

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know. It’s something, though.”

“Don’t tell me it’s kismet. There’s not going to be anything like that between us.”

“Kismet doesn’t imply romance,” I said a bit defensively.

“Just don’t infer it.”

“I’ve no illusions about romance. Beauty and the Beast is a nice fairy tale, but fairy tales are for books.”

“You’re no beast, and I’m no beauty.”

“As for me,” I said, “my own mother seemed to feel that beast was an inadequate word for me. As for you… eye of the beholder.”

After a thoughtful silence, she said, “If a man is a beast, he’s a beast in his heart, and that’s not the kind of heart that beats in you.”

Her words touched me and left me speechless.

“Come on, Addison Goodheart. We’ve got some snooping to do.”

J. Ryan Telford, curator of the great library’s rare-book and art collections, had his name on a wall plaque beside his office door.