When no one answers, I move past the familiar case and head deeper into the store, the nineteenth-century authors. The books are old and some have ancient looking library labels taped to the bottom of their binding. I reach out and touch the binding of a Jane Austen novel sitting alphabetically next to Charlotte Bronte. The smell of the old books wafts up with my touch, bringing a flood of memories—that aren’t even memories—I’ve never been here before.
I gulp in a breath as my déjà vu swallows me whole. I touch the next book and the next until my fingers reach Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. My hand trembles on her spine and my eyes begin to water as I stare relentlessly at the book. I haven’t looked to the end of this row and now I don’t want to. Could it really be waiting there?
The logical part of my brain reminds me it was a dream, a stupid, crazy, reoccurring dream. It’s not real. I’ve never been a coward and yet I feel like one right now.
My mouth is dry and rough with my swallow. My brain tells my head to turn, and, finally, I swivel slowly around to peer at the end of the aisle of books.
The mother stands more glorious and eminent, in her stone form, than she ever did in my dreams. She feeds one child, while clutching to the other, an open book laying on the portion of her lap the baby doesn’t take up. I glide toward her—not because my brain is telling me to, no, my brain warns me. But I can’t stay away. I want to see her eyes and what she’s reading to them.
She’s so much bigger than I realized. Her head is even with the top of the bookcases, her child a little larger than life-size. I peer up into her eyes and I’m struck with the love and intensity the artist has carved there. The book doesn’t have a title, but I’m able to read the first line: Once upon a time there were four little rabbits…and then the ground starts to move.
4
How had I forgotten? How had the statue marveled me to get so close, to forget what came next? My heart flutters in my chest, faster than a butterfly’s wings. I can’t swallow with my mouth so dry. The room is shaking and I turn a little to see the books falling from the shelves, they spill out, the tops of the cases they once sat in rocking.
A quiet scrape of stone on stone brings my full attention back to the statue again. The base of the mother has moved on its pedestal. She’s closer to me than she was a moment ago. I inch back, but my heal slips on a thick book, making me stumble. I catch myself before I can fall completely to the ground, but when I peer up, the mother is staring down at me—leaning. I scramble, but I don’t seem to get anywhere as the woman tips my direction. I stare at her face—my dream come to life. And just when I am certain she will crush me, and I’ll join my parents and brother in the afterlife, a strong grip seizes me under the arms, like a child. I am pulled over the piling books, just as the mother crashes down into the spot where I once sat.
I fall back, onto another human being—this one flesh and blood, instead of stone. The shaking room has calmed, though my body quakes.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I squeak, hating how unconvincing I sound. The experience is frightening enough, but I’m reeling. I have dreamt of this exact moment for more than a month—since the day Smitty handed me the letter from Rodrick, telling me I’d be moving to Jackson at the end of May.
I tip my gaze upward and face the person who pulled me out of the way of the statue, the boy who saved me. The beany hat on his head is pulled so low I can’t quite see his hair. He is breathless and I feel the heart in his chest at my back—like it’s running the Kentucky Derby and winning. I’m not sure my heart has ever thumped so wildly. His eyes are a crystal blue with flecks of silver throughout. With his lips in a flat line, he stares at me. He smells like grass that’s just been mowed and dirt—from a garden. I lay against him, my head screaming at me to get up. But I don’t move until he shifts beneath my weight, struggling to regain his breath. I’m not that big—but apparently I’m crushing his lungs or something.
“Sorry,” I murmur and clumsily get to my feet.
He must be close to my age, but he leans on the bookcase to his right to find his bearing before standing. I lay a hand to my flat stomach, unsure if I should have offered to help him. He rests an elbow on an empty shelf, where books used to sit, and flattens his palm over top of his head. “Crap,” he mutters, before swiping off the navy beany. His sandy hair curls in a sweaty mess by his ears, the top shoots out in chaotic waves that are an inch or two longer than the sides. He’s cute. Like really cute. Cytha would be drooling. “This place is a disaster.”
The ground has stopped shaking, but my nerves are still a wreck. “Um, it’s okay,” I say, trying to ease his worry. “I work here. I’ll clean it up.” Cytha is going to freak when I tell her what happened—my dream made real.
“You work here?” He eyes me with a questionable smirk on his face.
“Yeah, I do. So—” I pause and lift my head a little to meet his gaze. “Oh, wait. Finn?” I point at him. The guy who is supposed to train me. I bite my lip, feeling like an idiot. “So…” I rock my head to the side and back, “you work here, too.”
“Too?”
“Yes,” my tone is defensive when I want it to be confident. “Didn’t Marley tell you? She hired me today,” I say before he can answer. “She told me to come back at four, so you could train me.”
“Argh.” He throws his beany to the ground, turns his back to me, and starts tiptoeing his way through the sea of books on the ground. “We don’t need any more help.”
Rude. What does he care if Marley and Danny want more help? We make our way through several aisles with books spilt onto the ground, all the way up to the register. “Um, you kind of do,” I say, motioning to the chaos in the room.
The register is still atop the table—amazingly enough—the piles of books and cups of pens around it have all crashed down, though. Finn begins to right everything, checking to make sure the register still works, too. The power hasn’t gone out, so it doesn’t surprise me when the register door opens with a ping.
“Does Jackson get many earthquakes?” I pick up the stack of fallen books next to the door, the one I caught earlier today.
He scoffs and doesn’t look at me. “No.”
“But that was—”
“I don’t know what that was.” Finn slams the register closed and walks out from behind the table to look at the store as a whole. He sighs at the mess, though nothing seems to be unfixable.
The old corded landline that Finn just reattached the receiver to rings, loud and shrill. I probably wouldn’t even know what one was if it weren’t for Smitty refusing to get a cell phone.
Finn snatches the phone from it’s vessel and growls into the mouthpiece. “Hello?”
I can hear Marley on the other end. Something about a mine and an explosion. A little frantic she asks Finn if he’s okay.
“I’m fine,” he grumbles. “Thanks for the heads up about the new girl.”
“Oh, Esther!” I hear my name plain as day in Marley’s voice. “Is she okay?”
“The Reading Mother tried to murder her, but she’s still in one piece.”