Pages We Leave Open · Book 1

Pages We Leave Open: A Novel

Chapter One: The Reader

The first time I fell into a book, I came back with sand in my bed. The last time, I came back without my aunt. Everything in between, every coin and every lie, I did with my own two hands, and I started it for a water heater.

The thing nobody tells you about getting everything you ever wanted is that you spend a startling amount of time hiding in the bathroom to finish a chapter.

I want to be clear that I was grateful. I am grateful. I had a four-bedroom house with a kitchen island the size of a small fishing boat, a husband who loved me and smelled like sawdust and Old Spice, and two children who were alive, mostly healthy, and only occasionally trying to kill each other. By every metric my own mother would have recognized, I had won. I had married up and out of the apartment over the laundromat where I grew up listening to the dryers thump like a second heartbeat, and I had landed somewhere with a three-car garage, a lawn that a man named Greg mowed on Thursdays, and a Nest thermostat I was frankly afraid of. My mother had cleaned houses like the one I now owned. She would have stood in my foyer and cried, and then she would have run a finger along the baseboard to check, because love and inspection were the same gesture in my family and always had been.

And still. There I was, eight forty on a Tuesday morning, locked in the downstairs bathroom with my back against the door, reading.

“Mom.” A small fist hit the wood about level with my shoulder blades. “Mom. Seba put a Lego in the toaster.”

I did not look up from the page. Lady Anaïs had just been cornered in the conservatory by the Duke, and the Duke had just said you will be the ruin of me, madam, in the way that men in these books always said the ruin thing, like ruin was a compliment, like ruin was a spa day, like ruin came with a robe and cucumber water.

“Is the toaster on?” I asked.

A pause. The pause of a nine-year-old performing risk assessment.

“No,” RJ admitted.

“Then we have time.”

“Mom, that’s not…” He stopped, recalibrated, came at me from a new angle, because RJ at nine already understood that the front door is rarely the way in. “Tía Carmen called the house phone. Three times.”

That got me. Not enough to put the book down, I am not an amateur, but enough to slide one finger between the pages to hold my place, which is the reading equivalent of keeping the car running. “Did she leave a message?”

“She said,” RJ recited, in the flat, careful voice he used when he was repeating grown-up words he didn’t have the shape of yet, “to tell you it’s starting. And that you’d know what that meant. And that you should stop pretending you don’t.”

I felt something move through me then. Not fear, exactly. More like the feeling when you’re sure you’ve left the stove on and you’re already three exits down the freeway. A cold little tug under the ribs.

I told myself it was Carmen being Carmen. Tía Carmen was eighty-one years old and had been predicting the end of various worlds since before I was born, the end of the family, the end of the neighborhood, the end of decency, the end of a particular brand of pan dulce that the panadería had stopped carrying in 2009 and which she still brought up at funerals, at the actual funeral, leaning into the casket-side line to inform the bereaved that things had really gone downhill since the conchas changed. It’s starting could mean anything. It could mean her stories, the telenovelas, which she watched as a general watches a border. It could mean her arthritis. It could mean the Rapture, which she expected personally and slightly resentfully, the way you expect a contractor who’s already three weeks late.

“Tell her I’ll call her back,” I said.

“You won’t.”

“RJ.”

“You always say you’ll call her back and then you read.”

This is the problem with raising someone smart. They use it on you. They field-test it on you, like you’re the dummy in the crash lab, and they take notes.

“I’ll call her back,” I said, “after I drop you at school,” and I heard him weigh this, heard the small administrative sigh of a child filing a complaint he knows won’t be read, and then his footsteps went back toward the kitchen and the Lego and his feral brother, and I had, by my count, four pages.

I read six.

Let me tell you about the reading, because if you’re going to understand any of what comes next, you have to understand that first, and you have to understand that it was not normal.

I don’t mean I liked books. People who like books say things like oh I love to curl up with a good book and then read four of them a year, all in December, on a beach, with a drink that has a name and a little umbrella that constitutes the whole personality of the drink. I mean I read the way other people drink, or scroll, or pray. I mean I had read while breastfeeding, while driving (don’t), while in active early labor with RJ, timing contractions against the bottom of the page so I’d know how far I could get before the next one, three pages a contraction, then two, then please-God-let-me-finish-this-chapter, and the nurse took the book away from me at six centimeters like she was confiscating a weapon, which, fair. I had read at my own wedding reception while it happened in the next room. I’d slipped into the coat closet during the father-daughter dances, which I did not have to participate in because my father was a rumor and a name on a birth certificate and a child-support amount that had never once been paid, and I’d finished the last forty pages of a paperback I’d hidden in my clutch like a flask. Rego found me in there. He didn’t get mad. He sat down on the floor of the coat closet in his rented tux, took my heels off my feet because they were killing me, set them neatly side by side like he was going to ask them to dance, and said, “How’s it end?”

I married him for a lot of reasons. That was the big one. The rest were good. That was the one.

The reading had gotten worse since the kids, not better, which is the opposite of what everyone warns you about. They tell you you’ll lose yourself in motherhood. Nobody mentions you might go looking. That you might start treating the loss as a destination, might start to crave the specific silence of a story closing over your head like water. The books were the one room in my entire life where nobody needed anything from me, where I wasn’t Rego’s wife or the kids’ mom or “RJ-and-Seba’s mom” at pickup, which is a name and not a name, the way the help was a name and not a name when it was pinned to my mother. In a book I was Anaïs. In a book I was the duchess who ruined dukes. In a book I had a sword sometimes, and a horse, and a tragic backstory that was at least interesting, that wasn’t just the laundromat and the dryers and the dad who didn’t.

So yes. I hid in the bathroom. I read at red lights. I had three holds at the library, a Kindle, a Libby account I’d hit the maximum on, and a stack on my nightstand tall enough that Rego called it the Leaning Tower of Don’t and had started, gently, to suggest it might fall on one of us in the night and we’d be in the paper. Local Woman Killed By Own Hobby. He wasn’t entirely wrong. He was just wrong about which way the tower was going to fall.

And lately (this is the part I hadn’t told anyone, not even him) lately I had started to feel the books pull.

Not metaphorically. I want to be careful here, because the book pulled me in is a thing people say about a story they liked, a compliment, a blurb. That is not what I mean. I mean that for about three weeks, when I read, something low in my body had begun to lean. The way you lean at the top of a high dive without deciding to, the way the water reaches up for you before you’ve agreed to fall. I’d told myself it was a blood-sugar thing. I’d told myself it was perimenopause, which is the explanation my mother’s generation had for everything from divorce to comets. I’d told myself a great many things that spring.

By nine I’d extracted the Lego from the toaster (a 2x4 brick, partially melted, fused to the heating element in a way that suggested this was not, strictly, its first time in there), fed Seba a breakfast that was nutritionally a war crime, and gotten both kids into the car for the drop-offs. RJ to the elementary school, Seba to the church preschool where a saint named Sister Rosa kept five-year-olds alive through what I could only assume was actual, documented, Vatican-eligible divine intervention.

The drive was the usual eight-minute philosophy seminar, because something about a car seat turns my younger son into a tiny pre-Socratic.

“Mom.” Seba, from his car seat, holding court. “Mom. If a shark and a bear fighted, the bear would win, because the bear has hands.”

“That’s a strong point,” I said.

“But the shark has the whole ocean.”

“Also strong.”

“So it depends,” Seba concluded, with the satisfaction of a man who has solved a problem and would now like a plaque, “on where they fight.”

Out of the mouths of feral five-year-olds. I’d think about that line later, in a context Seba could not possibly have intended, somewhere much worse than a minivan, and it would help me stay alive. But that’s getting ahead.

“That’s not a real question, though,” said RJ, nine years old, from the way-back, not looking up from the book he was already too into for the length of the drive. RJ read in the car the way I read in the car, which I’d noticed and filed under of course he does, he’s mine, without yet understanding what that meant, without yet understanding that he’s mine was not a comfort but a verdict, a thing handed down. “Sharks and bears don’t have the same… they’re not in the same place. You’d have to drag one of them somewhere it can’t breathe or it can’t swim, so whoever picks the place already won. The fight’s just for show. The place is the whole thing.”

“That’s what I said,” Seba said, wounded. “I said it depends where.”

“You said the bear has hands.”

“It DOES have hands.”

“That’s not strategy, that’s just a fact about bears,” said RJ, and turned a page, and I drove my two sons to school with the entire central thesis of the next three months of my life being worked out in the back seat over whether bear hands constitute a battle plan. And I had no idea, none, not the faintest, change-the-radio-station amount of idea, that I was listening to the two people who would one day stand in the worst place ever written and win precisely because one of them knew the fight was about the place and the other one refused, on principle, to ever stop bringing his hands.

I dropped Seba at Sister Rosa’s. He hugged my leg, told me he loved me “more than tacos, but less than two tacos,” which is the most accurate measurement of love I have ever received and which I have never once been able to top, and ran inside to go be feral in a supervised setting, where I genuinely believe Sister Rosa logged it as a quiet day.

I dropped RJ at the elementary school, where he got out, hitched his too-big backpack (we bought big, in my family; you grew into things, things did not get bought to fit), and then leaned back into the car for a second, the way he did, the small serious face.

“You okay, Mom?” he asked. “You did the thing this morning. Where you’re here but you’re reading.”

“I’m always reading, baby. That’s just Mom.”

He looked at me a second longer than a nine-year-old should be able to. He had Rego’s eyes and my mother’s stare, which was an unfair amount of seeing to give to one child. “Yeah,” he said. “But lately it’s like you’re reading even when there’s no book.”

And he shut the door and walked into school, backpack swallowing him, and I sat at the curb behind a line of minivans and told myself it was nothing. That my strange perceptive son said strange perceptive things. That there was no book that read you back.

The minivan behind me honked. The drop-off lane has a theology all its own, and I was committing heresy by sitting still in it, so I pulled forward into the slow procession of mothers in athleisure piloting vehicles the size of my first apartment, and I drove home, and I told myself it was nothing the entire way, which is how I know, looking back, that some part of me already knew it was something.

I drove home through the part of town where the houses had gotten big and new in the last ten years, riding on the same construction boom that paid for ours. Half of these places, Rego had poured the foundations for. He could drive through this neighborhood and narrate it. That one fought me on the retaining wall. That one’s got a crack they don’t know about yet, southeast corner, give it four winters. That one, the lady cried when we finished, said it was the house she’d dreamed about her whole life. He loved that. Building people the inside of their own dreams. It’s a romantic job if you don’t look at his hands, which were a map of every place a thing had bitten him, a thumbnail that grew in wrong since a nail gun in 2014, a scar across two knuckles he’d gotten the week before RJ was born and refused to get stitched because we didn’t have the co-pay and he wasn’t going to start our son’s life in debt over a hand that would heal ugly either way. It healed ugly. He was right. We didn’t have the co-pay. I think about that hand a lot now, what it would do in a gray country at the end of the world, but I’m getting ahead again.

I got home to a silent house, which after eleven years of marriage and nine years of children is a sound so rare and so holy that I stopped in the doorway to listen to it. The dishwasher ticking. The fridge. The particular hum of a house with nobody in it but you and the things you own, which in a quiet house seem to be very faintly appraising you.

The house phone was blinking. Four messages now. The little red number sat there in the dim of the kitchen and glowed at me.

I should have called Carmen.

I’d like to be able to tell you why I didn’t, and the truth is small and ugly and human: I didn’t call because I knew that if I called, she would tell me a thing, and I would have to know it. Not-calling is a way of not-knowing, and I had gotten very, very good at not-knowing that spring. It’s a skill. It’s the family skill, honestly. We can not-know a thing standing right in front of us with such conviction that the thing eventually gets embarrassed and looks away.

I made coffee instead, and I took it to the big chair by the window. The chair was the one thing in the house that was mine, that I had picked, a deep ugly green wingback I’d bought at an estate sale before we had money, back when buying a forty-dollar chair was a decision you discussed in the car first, and again that night, and possibly returned. Rego had wanted to throw it out when we moved up. I’d looked at him in a way I had never looked at him before or since, and the chair came with us. It did not match a single thing in the new house. That was the point. It was the only thing in four thousand square feet that knew me from before.

I opened the book.

The Duke was still ruined. Lady Anaïs had escaped the conservatory but left her glove behind, which in 1813 was apparently the equivalent of leaving your phone unlocked on the table with the messages open. There was a ball coming. There’s always a ball coming. I sank into it the way you sink into a hot bath, that full-body oh of relief, and the kitchen went away, and the dishwasher went away, and the blinking red coal of Carmen went away, and.

The pull.

I felt it as you feel a wave catch you when you’ve waded out too far and turned your back on the ocean. A grab at the center of me, low and certain, like a hand closing around something behind my navel. The page in front of me (I want to describe this right, because it matters, because everything that comes after lives or dies on whether you believe this one thing happened), the page deepened. That’s the only word. The flat black words on the flat white paper got far away, the way the bottom of a pool gets far away when you’re floating face-down looking at it, and the white between the lines went bright, too bright, the white of a window you’re being pulled toward, and Lady Anaïs’s ballroom came up through the page like heat off a road.

I could smell it. Candle smoke and crushed roses and too many bodies in too much silk.

I want to tell you I fought it. I want to tell you I thought of my children, of the pickup line at 3:15, of Sister Rosa standing in the church doorway holding the hand of the last kid whose mom forgot.

I thought: just one more chapter.

And the green chair, and the coffee, and the ticking dishwasher, and the whole beautiful expensive life I had won and did not know how to live in, tilted sideways and poured me through the page like water down a drain, and I went under, and the music came up, and somewhere very far behind me, in a kitchen I could no longer feel, the house phone began, again, to ring.

*

Here is what nobody warns you about falling into a book: you arrive with a body, and the body is not entirely yours.

I came up out of the page as you surface in a dream you didn’t know you were having, no transition, no falling, just suddenly standing, mid-step, in a ballroom the size of my children’s entire school, with a glass of something cold in my hand and the absolute certainty that I had been here for hours. That’s the first rule, though I didn’t know to call it a rule yet, didn’t know there were rules, didn’t know I was about to spend the worst and most alive spring of my life learning them one cut at a time. The story doesn’t drop you in cold. It folds you in, the way bread folds in an egg, until you’re part of the batter. I had a history in that room. I could feel it sitting in me, already digested: I had danced twice, I had refused a third, I had said something cutting to a baroness near the punch and I did not regret it. I had, apparently, opinions about a man named Lord Pemberton. The opinions arrived fully formed, like luggage I hadn’t packed.

I was Lady Anaïs.

I was also Sonya Garcia of 4418 Calle Verde with a mortgage, a Costco membership, and a 1:30 dentist appointment for the kids that I was going to miss, and both of these were true at once, and the seam between them was the strangest feeling I have ever had, like wearing someone else’s coat that fits perfectly and smells like you.

I looked down. The dress was the green of the wingback chair. I want to be honest that this is the detail that nearly undid me, because the dream had reached into my actual living room and pulled my actual favorite color and that meant the dream knew me, had read me back the way I’d read it, and that is not a thing dreams are supposed to do. Dreams take. They don’t quote.

But that wasn’t even the part that stopped my heart. The part that stopped my heart was the hands holding the green skirt. They were my hands, I knew them, the shape of my own fingers, but they were younger. No, not younger. Young. Smooth across the knuckles, no little scar on the left thumb from the time Seba bit me at fourteen months in a Target, no Rego’s ring worn thin, the skin tight and unmarked, the hands of a woman who has not yet spent nine years in dish soap and diaper cream and the particular corrosive grief of wiping down the same counter four thousand times. I put one of those impossible young hands to my own waist and found it where my waist used to be, before two C-sections rearranged me, before my body became a thing that got me through the day instead of a thing anyone looked at, flat, and high, and twenty-three. I caught my reflection in the dark glass of a window between candle sconces and I did not recognize the woman in it, and then I did, with a lurch that was worse than not recognizing her: she was me. She was me at twenty-three, the year before I met Rego, the body I’d had and squandered and never once appreciated because you never do, you’re always too busy being ashamed of it to enjoy it, and then it’s gone and you’d give a kidney, a good kidney, the better of the two, for one more afternoon inside it. I had it. I was inside it. The story had handed it back to me like it was nothing, like it was just part of the costume, and standing in that ballroom in a body I’d grieved without ever knowing I was grieving it, I understood, the way you understand a thing in the back of your neck before your brain catches up, that the gold was never going to be the dangerous part of this.

The dangerous part was that I felt good. For the first time in a long time I felt entirely, expensively, twenty-three-years-old good, and there was no part of me on fire-watch, no part of me listening for a child, no part of me doing the math on the milk in the fridge, and the relief of it was so total it was nearly grief.

“You’ve gone pale, dearest,” said a voice at my elbow, and I turned, and it was the Duke.

I’d built him in my head over four hundred pages and the book had built him too and we had not built the same man. Mine had been sharper, crueler, more interesting, frankly. The book’s Duke was softer in the jaw, kinder in the eyes, and looked at me, at Anaïs, at me, like I was the only lit thing in the room. My whole body responded before my brain could file a complaint. Eleven years of marriage and two C-sections and a husband who fell asleep during the exact part of the movie I’d waited the whole movie for, fell asleep with the remote in his hand and his glasses on, snoring softly while the music swelled for the moment I’d hung the entire evening on, and here was a fictional man looking at me like ruin was a spa day. Like ruin came with the robe.

“I’m quite well,” I heard myself say, in an accent I did not own. “Only warm.”

“Then walk with me.” He offered his arm. “The gardens are cooler. And I find I cannot bear another minute of this music without saying things I’ll be made to answer for.”

Reader, I took the arm.

In my defense, I want it on the record that I knew it wasn’t real. I am not a woman who confuses her books with her life. That’s the whole point of books, that they are the place you go because it isn’t your life, the country you visit precisely because you don’t have to live under its laws. But knowing a thing isn’t real and feeling it aren’t filed in the same drawer of the body. My heart was real. The cool of the garden air was real. The crushed-shell path under thin slippers was real, and the way he stopped under an arbor heavy with roses and turned to me and looked at my mouth like it was a sentence he wanted to finish, that was real enough that something low in me that had been asleep for a long time, something that predated the kids and the mortgage and even Rego, rolled over and opened one eye.

“Anaïs,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, which was not an answer to anything, which was just yes, the yes of a woman who has been one fork away from belonging her entire life and will say yes to a garden that smells like roses and a man who isn’t, will say yes to a body she got to keep for one night, will say yes, frankly, to almost anything offered with two hands and her own favorite color.

He lifted his hand to my face.

And a thorn from the arbor, an actual rose thorn the length of my thumbnail, dragged across the back of my wrist as I reached up to meet him.

It hurt.

That’s the second rule, and it’s the one that saved my life more than once before this was over: pain is the door back. The garden didn’t fade. It snapped, the whole ballroom and the Duke and the roses and the borrowed twenty-three-year-old body yanked off me like a sheet pulled fast off a bed, and I was.

In the green chair, in my living room, with cold coffee soaking into my lap and a sound coming out of me like a swimmer who’s been under too long and broken the surface a half-second before her body would have made the decision for her.

The house phone had stopped ringing. The clock on the cable box said 2:47.

I had opened the book a few minutes after nine.

I sat in the chair for a long time. Long enough that the light moved across the floor and the cold coffee in my lap went from a discomfort to a fact about my life I was choosing to ignore. I want to describe my mental state accurately because I think it’s important you understand I did not handle this well or wisely, that I am not the kind of heroine who handles things. A reasonable woman experiencing a six-hour gap in her memory and a dissociative episode in which she’d been a duchess would have called a doctor. A spiritual woman would have called a priest. I am from a family that does both at once and trusts neither, that lights the candle and asks for the referral, that prays the novena in the waiting room of the specialist, so I did what we do.

I decided not to think about it.

I cleaned the kitchen. I was very thorough about the kitchen. I wiped down the inside of the toaster, Lego notwithstanding, scraping at the fused brick with a butter knife until I’d made the situation meaningfully worse. I told myself a story (I’m good at stories; it’s the one thing I’ve always been good at, telling myself the version I can live in) about how I’d been tired, how the kids had had me up since five-thirty, how I’d dozed off in the chair and had a vivid dream and lost track of time, which happens, which is normal, which is fine. I had said just one more chapter and I had fallen asleep. That was all. That was a thing that happened to mothers. There were probably forums.

I almost made it stick. I really almost did. I had myself nearly all the way convinced, standing at my own sink in the gold of the late afternoon, that nothing had happened, that I was a tired woman who’d had a nap and ruined a toaster.

Then I went up to make the bed, because making the bed was a thing in my control and I needed a thing in my control, and I pulled back the duvet on my side to straighten the sheet, and there, in the white cotton folds where my body went every night, was sand.

Not a lot. A scatter. A cupped palmful, maybe, fine and pale and warm-colored, the kind of sand that does not exist within two hundred miles of my house, the kind of sand I had felt under thin silk slippers six hours and two centuries ago when the Duke walked me out of a ballroom and into a garden where the paths were laid with crushed white shell and imported sand because the book had told me, in a paragraph I’d read three nights ago and not thought about since, that the Duke spared no expense on his gardens, that he’d had the sand brought up from the coast at ruinous cost to please a woman who would leave him anyway.

I had not been to the garden in my bed.

I had been to the garden in the chair, downstairs, in a body that was sitting in a different room than the one I now stood in.

But the sand was in the bed. In the creases of the side where I slept. Where the part of me that goes under at night goes under. As if some piece of me had come home a different way than the rest of me, had taken a back stair, had walked across that garden and then climbed into my bed and brushed off her slippers in the dark, a teenager sneaking in at thirty-six.

I stood over my own bed holding a fistful of sand from a place that had never existed, and I felt the cold tug under my ribs again, the one from the morning, the one I’d told myself was Carmen being Carmen, and this time it didn’t feel like a warning.

It felt like an invitation.

I should have been terrified. Some part of me was. That part was screaming, in fact, in the back room where I keep the screaming, where the laundromat is and the dad who didn’t and the milk-math and all the other things I do not look at directly. But I am telling you the truth in this book or there’s no point telling it at all, so here is the truth, the one I have never said out loud, the one I am only saying now because everyone who’d be hurt by it already knows: standing there with the impossible sand warm in my hand, I could finally hear the loudest thing in me, louder than the fear, louder than the good sense my mother died trying to install in me like a smoke detector I kept taking the batteries out of.

It was a small, traitorous, wide-awake voice that had been quiet my whole life and had just, for the first time, been given a reason to speak.

It said: do it again.

I closed my fist around the sand. I did not call Carmen.

I went downstairs, and I picked up the book.