Pages We Leave Open · Book 3

The Books We Read When We're Small: A Novel

Chapter One: The Youngest

The thing nobody tells you about surviving the end of the world is that afterward you have to go and be a grandmother. It is harder. I would not trade it for any calmer life ever offered to a woman of my line. I am older now, and I want that on the record at the top: I got old. That is the victory. Three hundred years of women in my family did not get to, and I did. I got to go gray and ache in the mornings and lose my glasses for the ordinary mortal reasons, and I have not met a sunrise since without being grateful for it, because I remember how close we came to none of us getting old at all.

My sons are grown men with their own kitchens. RJ is an archivist for the county, of course he is, the keeper grown into the only job that ever fit him, still reading a ledger to his own kids at night, three girls and Quino, the way I read one to him. He married a sensible woman named Priya who does not entirely believe the stories and entirely believes us, which is the correct ratio for anyone marrying into this family. Seba, my fearless one, my walker, is a father now: the boy who walked into a dead friar’s confession at nine, reduced to jelly by a daughter who will not eat anything green. He still walks when the rare thing comes, but the rare things mostly stopped coming.

And Rego is still the kitchen, grayer and slower, still making up a good ending for me at three in the morning when the old fear comes. You know all that already. What you need to know now is that we had years. Years of ordinary Tuesdays. Remember that we were happy, because of what came next.

* * *

We watched for the gift in all the grandchildren, like you watch weather. You cannot help it; once you know the door runs in the blood you spend every bedtime half-listening for the particular silence of a child who has gone somewhere a parent cannot follow. RJ’s two older girls never showed it. Seba’s older two never showed it, not when it usually comes: not Sol, the scornful one, and not Rego-the-younger, thirteen, named for his grandfather and already in firm denial that the family is anything but loud. I had begun to let myself hope, a traitor hope, a shameful selfish grandmother’s hope, that it had finally run thin. I hoped the long chain of walking women had reached its gentle end in a generation that would only ever read books the safe way, from the outside, as the lucky do.

And then there was Lela.

Aurelia, her name is, all the way out: my granddaughter, Seba’s youngest, named for the first mother of our whole line, a name we had kept alive by telling our daughters about her. Because Seba said when she was born, holding her, that she felt like someone who had come a very long way to get here. He wanted her to carry the oldest name we had. We call her Lela because she is eight and Aurelia is a lot of name for a person who still cannot reliably tie her shoes. And Lela has the gift. I knew it before anyone, as I always know, as the women of my family have always known the worst and most wonderful things first. But Lela’s gift, when it came, was not like mine, and was not like Seba’s, and was not like anything in centuries of our written-down history, and the difference is the entire reason there is a third book, and the entire reason any of us are still here to have it written.

* * *

I found her gone for the first time on an ordinary afternoon, in the reading corner of Seba’s house, and my heart did what it has done since I was a girl. The cold drop, the old dread: a child is in a book and the dark can use any door. I crossed the room already reaching for the rope, already braced for a forest, a fog, a gray country, the smell of someplace that wanted to keep her. But Lela was sitting cross-legged with a fat board book open in her lap, gone, nobody home behind her eyes, and she was smiling. And she did not smell of any forest. She smelled, faintly, impossibly, of crayons and warm milk and that particular sunlit dust that lives in the pages of a book that has been read to a child a thousand times with love. I held her small hand and I did not have to read her back hard as I read Seba back; I barely had to tug. She came up easy and laughing, like you surface from a nap, not like you claw up from the deep.

“Gramma,” she said, delighted, “there’s a whole place in there. It’s where the bunny and the duck live and everything is soft and nobody’s ever scared and when it gets dark somebody always comes and turns on the light and the worst thing that ever happens is somebody loses their hat and then they find it. I go in the soft places. Do you go in the gentle books too?” And I sat down on the floor of my son’s house with my youngest granddaughter and understood, slowly, with a feeling I have no better word for than holy, that the gift had come back one more time, as it always comes back. But it had come back gentled, come back innocent, come back wearing the shape of the only reader in centuries who walks not into the dark places but into the soft ones. Lela does not go into the books that frighten. She cannot. She has tried, since, and the dark books will not open for her, any more than a wolf will come to a child who has never once thought to be afraid of it. Into the bunny-and-the-duck. Into goodnight-moon. Into the soft books, where nobody is ever scared, and where the worst thing that can happen is a lost hat, found.

I did not understand yet what that meant. I thought, that first afternoon, that it meant she was safe: that the long curse had finally softened into something harmless, a little girl visiting kind worlds, the gentlest possible end to the family’s hard inheritance. I let myself be glad. Write my gladness down too, because I am about to tell you how wrong I was, and I do not want you to think I saw it coming. I sat on the floor and held Lela’s hand and was grateful that the dark had run out at last, that my youngest granddaughter had been given the safest gift our line had ever produced. I did not yet know that the universe does not hand a family the safest possible weapon in centuries for no reason. I did not yet know that you are only given a key that small and that pure when something is coming that can be locked by nothing else.

* * *

The wrongness started the same week. It always starts the same week; the dark has a sense of timing that I have stopped finding coincidental and started finding personal. It started, this last time, on the highest shelf in my house, where I had put a thing I did not like to look at: a cracked leather book we had found on my shelf years before, five years after we closed the second story, a book that had felt, from the first, like a place someone was trying to get out of. We had meant to go in for her. I have to confess that to you now, because it is the rot at the center of this whole book and I will not start it with a lie. We had meant, all those years ago, to go back to the very beginning and bring our first mother home, Aurelia, the first Lectora, erased to a blank page and a single surviving syllable, sealed in the oldest book of all. We had said we would. And then there were birthdays, and there were Tuesdays, and there were grandchildren, and there was the bottomless ordinary mercy of a peaceful life. The cracked book sat on the high shelf, year after year, and I let it, because I was tired, because I had earned tired, because the woman inside it had waited for centuries and surely, I told myself, she could wait while my family had its turn at being happy.

That is the sin this book is going to make me pay for. The first time it was a door left open; this time it was a door I refused to walk through. A mother of mine, the first of all of us, was left knocking on the inside of a book on my own high shelf while I attended birthday parties, and a thing that has been left waiting long enough stops, eventually, knocking to be let out, and starts looking for another way. I felt it the night Lela first walked. I came home and stood in my kitchen and felt the old cold come up through the floor, the cold I had prayed for years I would never feel again, and I went to the high shelf, and the cracked book was warm. It was not the warmth of the friar’s confession. It was the warmth of something that had finally, after centuries, found a door small enough and soft enough and innocent enough to fit through, and had started, very slowly, to move toward it.

“Gramma,” Lela had said to me that night, at bedtime, sleepy, offhand, as the biggest and most terrible things always arrive in this family, sideways and at the end of the day. “There was a new lady in my soft place today. She wasn’t there before. She’s little, like me, and she can’t remember her name, and she’s been lost a really really long time. She followed me out of the dark part into the bunny place because she said mine was the first door in centuries that wasn’t too scary to walk through.” Lela yawned, and closed her eyes, and said the thing that ended the peace and started the last of it, the sentence I have known my whole life was coming and still was not ready for. “She wants to come home, Gramma. The little lost lady. She said you’d know her name. She said to tell you… she said to tell you Aurelia’s awake, and she’s not the only thing my soft places let out.”