By autumn’s end, I was more or less healed. Functionally, at least. As I’d told Fiona when we said our goodbyes, I would always be scarred, but thanks to her and the surgeon who salvaged much of my hand, my life had been given back to me. What I hadn’t anticipated in Kenmare, or even in New York, when the bandages were finally removed for good, was that missing my middle fingers and some of my pinkie would prove less physically than emotionally onerous. Getting through my days without feeling the embarrassment of being maimed was something I hadn’t worked on in physical therapy. It was hardly necessary, as my friends and even people I didn’t know personally in tight-knit Kenmare had heard about what happened, so there was nothing to explain or feel defensive about. In the big city, it took a while, but eventually I learned there was no need to keep hiding my hand in my pocket. Manhattan, home to its fair share of the mutilated, was forgiving that way. And if I did happen to notice some ignoramus staring at me, maybe finding sick amusement in my misfortune, I could always raise my phantom middle finger in their direction and they’d never be the wiser.
Meghan and I eventually took up more permanent residence in our old neighborhood, the East Village. Our fond plans of living off the grid in Ireland having been upended by the assault, we craved familiarity. These were the streets, shops, and restaurants we knew so well from our earliest days together. Not to mention that Meghan’s brainchild used-book shop, which she had sold to Mary and the other employees around Thanksgiving the year before our return, was nearby. Its doors were always open to us, and while the new owners had expanded to include first editions of literary gems housed in tall barrister bookcases, the place retained its same homey feel. Mary even kept Meghan’s favorite overstuffed chair in the office, with its whimsical upholstery depicting antique handwriting that was meant to look like the Declaration of Independence or some such. Ugly artifact, in my eyes, but like a pair of old shoes that have stood one in good stead over many miles and difficult terrain, it was comfortable, reliable.
What we sought was just like that, a known quantity, a safe refuge, an embracing asylum. So when the rental agent showed us a walk-up in a brownstone not far from Tompkins Square with lots of light and lots of room, we leapt at it. Squeaking hardwood floors, old-school kitchen with a commercial six-burner stove and cupboards that clung like foolhardy mountaineers to the walls, electric outlets partly shrouded by layers of paint from generations before us—what was there not to love? We shared a bottle of champagne to complement the Cantonese takeout that first night in our new flat, while the baby cooed in her crib, blessedly oblivious to her parents’ noiseless lovemaking after dinner.
Once Nicole had graduated from bassinet infancy, Meg was thrilled to be invited to take on a part-time role at the bookshop, which was doing well enough that it had opened a second floor with nicely worn Oriental rugs, built-in shelving for more stock, even a brick-walled gallery space for antiquarian maps and prints. As a result of her exposure to the wide-ranging interests of others on the staff, she began branching out beyond her earlier specialties in art and culinary books. I couldn’t have been happier for her. Mary Chandler, who’d been closest to my wife when Meghan had sold the shop, was the primary force behind the store’s growth and widened focus. A blessedly incurable book addict, Mary, who had tucked away a substantial nest egg while working in corporate law, had, after a few years, fled the mercenary grind of contracts and NDAs to devote herself to her true love, plowing her money and energy into expanding and deepening the quality of the shop’s inventory. Word was that she had also benefited from the help of a private backer, which had allowed her to buy out the other co-owners during a time when the going got rough with the business, but I never knew one way or the other. Mary had been the first person Meghan hired, a couple of years before my future wife and I met, and now, roles reversed, it was Mary who happily asked her friend and former supervisor to rejoin the family.
Things went well. Meg was back in her element. While she used to come home from work talking vintage cookbooks by Julia Child or Marcella Hazan, or works illustrated by Marc Chagall or William Blake, now it was an inscribed copy of an early Ernest Hemingway or Agatha Christie she’d tell me about, or the two-volume first edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge in its original cloth bindings, or The Pickwick Papers with its printed pale blue wrappers, published in weekly parts. Fortunately for us both, ours was a marriage of unabashed, unrepentant bibliophiles. I reveled in her newfound enthusiasms and did my best to stay out of her way and Mary’s, even though my own knowledge of rare books and manuscripts ran deeper than theirs. Despite my flawed background, I was invited to join the staff as an adviser, or cataloger, or in whatever capacity I might have liked, but I wisely kept my distance. If asked about a book, or the authenticity of an autograph, or any other bibliographic point, I was glad to oblige. But they were riding high on their own, I felt, and didn’t need me for ballast.
So, what then? For myself—while refurbishing the old Wolf stove, anchoring some better shelves to the kitchen walls I’d stripped and repainted, and generally sprucing up our new place—I proved to be a far better father than I might ever have expected. We had enough savings that I could devote myself to Nicole for the first passel of years back in the Village, and I loved nothing better than to help feed her, teach her vocabulary, join her with her coloring books and, early on, with her astonishing calligraphy. Just as I’d excelled at the latter under my mother’s tutelage, so did Nicole under my watchful guidance. Despite my mixed feelings, not to mention Meghan’s, about teaching her the very skills that had gotten me into such dire straits—though by then my path was straight and narrow—by the time the girl began elementary school, she was a precocious natural. Her ability to focus, tongue caught in the corner of her mouth, was a sight to behold. Tracing different alphabets in block and cursive letters, along with basic calligraphic patterns, gave her joy. No other word for it—joy. Nothing made me happier than to watch her mature, believing fully and not without reason that she would never use her instincts and gifts for anything nefarious.
With Nicole in school, it became clear I needed to leave behind the self-protective cocoon I’d spun for myself using my daughter to some degree as my excuse. I wished I could reach out to an old bookseller acquaintance up in Providence for advice, but that was out of the question. Where we’d left things two decades earlier was not unlike a happy marriage ending in acrimonious divorce. Atticus Moore and I hadn’t needed a restraining order to understand just how strange things might have become if one of us approached the other. An orchard’s worth of olive branches wouldn’t have sufficed to prevent some inevitable nastiness, unpredictable and damaging, from coming down on one or both of us. He had sent me a sizable cashier’s check with no accompanying letter nor any memo of explanation, and we both knew it represented a comprehensive apology and a warning not to question his role in the ugly things that had happened to me, or to ask him for explanations. If money talks, Atticus’s check shouted. It fairly howled.
Be that as it may, I found myself one morning, after Meg had left for work, looking him up on my wife’s laptop—that electronic anathema I’d always despised but finally capitulated to using—to see if he still had his store in Rhode Island. He did, and even boasted a website—seems Atticus too had merged Gutenberg with Gates—that offered some beautiful first editions of mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Scrolling through his online catalog, marveling at this offering and that, I was reminded again, as if I needed reminding, what impeccable taste the man had. After my father, a consummate rare book aficionado whose own tastes weren’t limited to books from the past two centuries but went all the way back to the Elizabethan era, Atticus was the only bibliophile who had truly ever been a soul mate to me. At a book fair in San Francisco once, over drinks at the Fairmont Hotel, he had even floated the idea that I become a partner in his rare book firm. Over the years, I sometimes found myself wondering if I’d made a mistake declining his offer. Water under the Golden Gate Bridge at this point. Still, whatever bad blood lay spilt between us, thanks in no small part to Slader, even now I missed our camaraderie. But that was where I supposed I needed to leave it.