The Bookshop Of Yesterdays

The first thing that hit me was the stench of the old wood, its musk. The desk was cluttered with receipts and tattered pieces of cream-colored stationery. I sorted through the crumpled heating bills and yellowed pages of the Los Angeles Times, inspecting each article for the next clue before deciding it was little more than an abandoned article. Beneath the forsaken artifacts of Billy’s daily life, I found a folder filled with the keepsakes he’d concealed for me.

Billy had photographs, a playbill from my middle-school play, flyers from my debate competitions. I laid the artifacts in chronological order and saw the framework of my childhood unfold before me. The timeline began with a photograph of Billy holding me, swaddled in lavender-colored cotton, his expression somewhere between amazed and terrified. Two years later, a snapshot from a dark restaurant, Billy and me eating the same string of spaghetti like in Lady and the Tramp. An action shot from 1991, me running in a sequined bikini. The next January, 1993. My seventh birthday party. The only party I remembered Billy attending. In the photograph, Billy and I posed with a goat. I’d begged Mom to turn our backyard into a petting zoo. I don’t know, Miranda. It sounds unsanitary, she’d said. I’d enlisted Billy, and together we’d prepared a pitch for Mom, filled with facts about the Nigerian dwarf goat—it bred year-round and had a lifespan of fifteen years. About the zedonk—also known as the zonkey, zebrula, zebrinny, zebronkey, zebonkey or zebadonk—which despite its many names was incredibly rare. We outlined the precautions we’d take to ensure cleanliness—a washing station and lots of hand sanitizer—and scientific studies proving how unlikely it was anyone would catch a disease from the Nigerian dwarf goats of Southern California. In the photograph, Billy held the goat like a trophy.

The next picture was from my sixth-grade play, Billy’s arms around Joanie and me dressed in Puritan costumes. Identical bonnets and blue dresses, yet in our postures you could tell who was Abigail Williams and who was a forgettable woman she’d accused of witchery.

In the final photograph, the pet shop looked exactly as I remembered. Speckled linoleum floor, metal cages confining colorful birds. Billy held me close to him as I lifted the puppy toward the camera. We both wore exhilarated smiles. We both seemed happy. How quickly thereafter everything had changed.

I rummaged through the desk, searching for anything else that pertained to me. Amid the credit card advertisements and gas station receipts, I found a folded sheet of lined paper. My handwriting looked pretty much the same, but the words were unfamiliar.

Hi, Uncle Billy!

I bet you’re surprised to hear from me. I know it’s been forever! I graduated high school yesterday. Can you believe it? At graduation, everyone else had tons of family with them. All I had were my parents. That made me think of you, how at one point you might have been there, too.

Do you ever think about me anymore? Sometimes I think about how much fun we used to have together. Anyway, I just wanted to say hi. If you wanted to write back that would be cool. Don’t worry, I won’t tell Mom. Ha, ha!

Love,

Miranda

I reread the letter, trying to imagine how Billy must have felt receiving it. He never wrote back. I would have remembered that. I would have written to him again, letters back and forth until they amounted to a correspondence, possibly more. He must have wanted to write back. Why else would he have kept the letter? He must have known, for reasons still unclear to me, that he couldn’t.

I slowly refolded the letter. Was this it? Had Billy led me to this desk simply to show me that he’d never forgotten me? What an underwhelming end to our last great hunt together.

As I dropped the letter into the desk, I noticed something written along one of its edges in tiny, precise script: Down. I didn’t make anything of it until I returned the photographs to the desk and saw the word repeated on their backs: down, down, down, down, down. And on the photograph from the pet shop, a phrase: down went Alice. The next clue.

I raced around the room, looking for a bookshelf or a stack of hardbacks, any battered old copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There wasn’t a single book in the living room.

I took a deep breath before returning to the bedroom. I had no choice; I had to go in there again. The spines of the hardbacks on the bookshelf were so muted their titles dissolved into the faded canvas. Little Women, Death on the Nile, The Color Purple, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues—novels I couldn’t imagine Billy reading. Between Sylvia Plath and Colette, a thin crimson spine all but disappeared. In peeling gold leaf, Lewis Carroll.

The cover was understated. Red with a small portrait of Alice in gold at the center. I ran my hands along Alice’s embossed hair, her frilly dress, an approximation of which I wore for three Halloweens until I could no longer zip the polyester costume. Did Billy see me in that blue dress? Did he remember that I wanted a pet rabbit to dress in a waistcoat? I flipped the cover to look inside.

Alice fell down, down, down, upon sticks and leaves, unharmed and curious. She tried several doors. They were all locked. She found a golden key, too big for some locks, too small for others until she peeked behind the curtain. The key fit but the passageway was too small, and Alice couldn’t reach the garden. There, Carroll’s words were highlighted in crisp yellow.

[S]o many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

So Alice got pragmatic or as pragmatic as one could get after she’d followed a talking rabbit down a long and dark tunnel. She looked for a book of rules; instead, she found a bottle. DRINK ME, it said. I flipped through the book and found an envelope tucked into the back. READ ME, it said.

Inside the envelope was a thick stack of papers. On the cover page, beneath Cedars-Sinai’s emblem, a Dr. Nazario had written to Billy: This letter is to inform you of your results. Our office will be in contact to schedule a follow-up visit. Dr. Nazario’s name was circled in red. The following pages detailed the tests Billy had undergone, the clinical indication of shortness of breath and tightness in chest, the impression of aortic stenosis. The tests were dated March, two years ago.

I read the highlighted passage again. Very few things indeed were really impossible. I could picture the illustrated copy of the novel I had as a child. Alice in a blue dress. Hearts and spades and diamonds and clubs floating around her. I’d like to remember Billy giving it to me, that it was from Prospero Books, but Mom had purchased it at a children’s bookstore on the Westside. Billy and I never read the novel on those nights when he tucked me in and made me feel indeed that nothing was impossible. Still, he knew, like Alice, I would follow him down, down, down until there was nowhere left to fall.

CHAPTER SIX (#u8e862242-afa9-564a-953f-cf2e379b0485)

In addition to its main campus, Cedars-Sinai had offices across the city. When I looked up Dr. Nazario, he worked in three different locations and didn’t have an open appointment for another six weeks. I tried to explain to the receptionist who answered my call that I wasn’t trying to schedule a consultation—I merely wanted to talk to the doctor about my uncle—and she started in on a long explanation of HIPAA privacy requirements.

“Is there any way I can get in touch with Dr. Nazario?” I asked.

“You can always email him,” she said.

“Does he check his email?”

“I’m not his secretary. You want his email or not?”

I jotted a quick note to Dr. Nazario and sent it into the internet void, hoping somewhat futilely that he might read it, let alone respond.

In morning rush hour, the drive from my parents’ house to Prospero Books took over an hour. The 10 to the 110 to the 101, through downtown where somehow the 5 also got involved and the cars piled up in the congestion that made Los Angeles’s freeways famous. When I arrived at the store, I wanted to see Billy’s San Andreas Fault mug beside the computer, his beaten-up leather satchel on the floor beside the desk chair. I wanted to see Lee racing to answer the phone, reminding all callers that, in Prospero Books, books were prized above all else. Instead, I saw Malcolm behind the front desk, reading. When he heard the back door open, he looked up expectantly until he saw me, sighing when he realized I was back again.

Morning was quieter than the afternoon. At nine, a handful of committed writers worked in the café. A modest crowd waited for their morning coffee as Charlie, the third member of the Prospero clan, frothed milk and ground beans.

Charlie was in his early twenties and had the Big Friendly Giant tattooed on his left forearm, a Wild Thing on his right deltoid. He sat in the chair beside me and rolled up his pant leg, exposing the freckled skin of his pale calf.

“I’m thinking of getting Willy Wonka here. Or maybe the giving tree, I’m not sure,” he said.

“Billy gave me The Giving Tree when I started kindergarten,” I remembered. The week before school, Billy had to go to Northern California, where a small earthquake had rattled the Santa Cruz Mountains. Billy knew I was nervous. A new school. New kids whom I imagined were already friends. He was sorry he couldn’t be there. He’d bought me The Giving Tree perhaps to teach me about friendship or to assure me that whatever happened at school, he would be my giving tree.