“There,” Lucy says, pursing her lips at the walls. “Did you guys hear that?”
“Hear what?” says Phoebe. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“The house made a noise,” says Lucy. “It sounded like a word. ‘Disappointed.’”
“I heard ‘disappeared,’” Jane responds.
“The two of you are being weird,” says Kiran, walloping one of Jane’s bishops with her queen. “I said ‘disappeared,’ and then you said it back to me, Janie. Charlotte disappeared one night, about a month ago. She just . . . left. Octavian was the last to see her. She was sleeping on the divan in the library. As far as he could judge, she didn’t take anything with her, no change of clothes, not even her diary. She left a note behind that said, ‘Darling, there’s something I need to try. Please don’t worry. If it works, I’ll come back for you.’”
“What does that mean?” says Jane. “What did she need to try?”
“No clue.”
“‘If it works, I’ll come back for you,’” Jane repeats. “How did she leave? Seeing as it’s an island?”
“Someone must’ve come and picked her up,” Kiran says, “because no boats were missing. She must’ve arranged it beforehand, which I think really hurt Octavian—that she trusted someone else with her plan, but not him.”
“People were talking about it at breakfast,” says Jane. “Colin told me Octavian hired investigators and everything.”
“Yeah,” says Kiran. “They were real muckrakers; they dug some stuff up about Charlotte’s family, like that her mom had a criminal record, but Octavian said he already knew about that and it was irrelevant. I think he really believes she’s coming back for him. I think he’s put his life on hold until she does.”
Jane thinks of how her aunt died, all alone. Luckily, the people at the research station had known where she’d gone. Because people do disappear sometimes, and if there’s no one around to witness it, how can the people left behind, waiting, ever know?
“At the time she went away, she’d remodeled this entire wing,” Kiran says, sweeping a hand out. “Green parlor, blue sitting room, tearoom, this room, the bowling alley, the swimming pool, the gun room, and she was almost done with the library. Octavian was definitely worried, but he had no idea she was planning to take off. She wouldn’t talk about anything but the cataloging system.”
“The cataloging system?”
“Charlotte decided to catalog the library books by color,” Kiran says. “Completely impractical. Impossible to find anything.”
“What do you mean, by color?”
“Color of the spine,” Kiran says. “The library is at the back of the house and it’s two stories high. Charlotte started talking about how it was the house’s spine, the nerve center, the place of greatest power. Then she started assigning body parts to all the other rooms, like the Venetian courtyard was the heart of the house, and the kitchen was the stomach, and the receiving hall was the mouth, and the east spire where Mum lives was the brain, and the bowling alley was, like, the vagina. It got a little creepy. And it would’ve looked like the worst kind of Picasso if you’d painted it.”
“Well, the library sounds pretty amazing,” Jane says. “Organized by the colors of the spines. I’ve never heard of that before.”
“I don’t really go in there anymore,” Kiran says. “It’s Octavian’s haunt. It’s depressing.”
“Don’t you want to see it?” Jane says. “I kind of want to see it.”
“I’ve seen it,” Lucy says, raising the copy of The House of Mirth she holds in one hand. “I got my book from it. It’s really pretty in there, like waves of color. It’s almost like being underwater. It’s an ocean, and we’re the fish.”
A bead of sadness bursts open inside Jane.
“Let’s go to the library,” she says.
* * *
Someone has scrawled the word PRIVATE on a ratty piece of paper and hung it on a fat velvet rope that blocks the entrance to the library.
“That’s Octavian’s handwriting,” says Kiran. “Not to mention his level of craftsmanship. He must be trying to protect his precious haunt from the gala cleaners.”
“Does it mean we can’t go in?” asks Lucy St. George.
“Of course not,” says Kiran. “Only that he doesn’t want us to go in.”
“Hmm. But it is his house,” says Phoebe Okada.
Briefly this strikes Jane as funny, that Phoebe is advocating respect for Octavian’s pathetic rope barrier when last night Phoebe was skulking through the servants’ quarters with her husband and a gun. But then she loses track of that thought, because it’s irrelevant, because she needs to go in and see the ocean of color. If she doesn’t go in with Kiran, Lucy, Phoebe, and Jasper now, she intends to sneak in later.
“Someday Octavian will croak. Then it’ll be my house,” says Kiran. “And it’s the freaking library. He can’t hold the books ransom. If you want to go in, go in.” This last part is directed at Jane, who’s craning her neck and gazing with moon eyes.
Jane unhooks one end of the velvet rope and steps into the room.
The color is singing.
The books of any library are colorful. But these books undulate and pulse with color. It’s not a straightforward matter of all the blues turning to all the purples turning to all the reds. There’s an earthy section, with oranges and greens turning to reds and browns. There’s a serene section with cool yellows turning to cool greens to cool blues, and an energetic section with bold, bright tones of every hue. The sections also blend into each other, bright books fading to more muted books, gradually infiltrated by glimmering metallics, and so on. The room feels alive; it’s like being inside a living thing. And each book, each colorful spine, is the container of a story. It reminds Jane of Aunt Magnolia’s underwater dream worlds, and of her own work too, or of what she wants her umbrellas to be. Yes, Jane thinks. If this house has a soul, its soul is here in this room.
She finds herself looking around for Octavian, expecting to find him in some corner, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Jane remembers Ravi calling him a creature of the night.
French doors look out onto a terrace and Jasper asks to be let out. When Jane opens the doors for him, she can hear the roar of the sea. He shoots outside and turns back to Jane, hopping eagerly, looking longingly into her face, but she’s only just arrived in the library. Nothing about the terrace excites her. “Have fun, Jasper-bear,” she says, closing the doors in his face and turning back to the room. Aunt Magnolia? Is this how you felt in your underwater universe? I wish you could see this.
“What if you don’t know the color of the book you’re looking for?” she asks.
“Card catalog,” Kiran says, pointing to the dark wooden cabinet with little drawers near the entrance. “Like in the days of yore.”
Jane goes to the catalog, pulls out the W drawer, and looks for the first book that comes to mind, Winnie-the-Pooh. “Milne, A.A.,” the card reads. “Glimmering Section. Crimson-ginger. Lettering: gold.”
“Glimmering Section,” Jane says, turning curiously to the room. Across from her is a crimson section that doesn’t seem quite mild enough. It’s bright and loud, not glimmering. Jane walks to the middle of the room again, turning in circles. A small section of books glows softly crimson, silver, and gold on the second level, above the French doors, on the north wall.
Jane climbs a spiral staircase to the library’s upper level. By the time she gets to that glowing patch of books, she’s imagining an umbrella that feels like this library. The pressure on her ears is still present, but she’s barely noticing it anymore.
It astonishes her how quickly she’s able to find the Milne. “Well done, Charlotte,” she says, reaching out to it. The book settles into her hand with a pleasurable shiver, like a satisfied cat arching its back against her palm. Once in her hands, it falls open to the story “In
Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets into a Tight Place.” Pooh visits Rabbit, then eats so much honey that he can’t fit through the round doorway. He gets stuck, like a plug, and can’t leave. On the outdoor side, Christopher Robin sits with Pooh’s head and reads him stories. On the indoor side, Rabbit makes the best of it, hanging his washing on Pooh’s stubby legs.
Something is strange, though, about this copy of the book. Jane knows, or she thought she knew, how this story is supposed to end. It’s one of her favorites, one she read repeatedly, wedged into the armchair with Aunt Magnolia: Pooh stops eating, Pooh grows thinner, and after a week has gone by, Christopher Robin, Rabbit, and Rabbit’s friends and relations take hold of him and pop him from the hole.
In this version, something different seems to be happening. As the week goes on, Pooh’s body starts to meld with the edge of the dirt hole. It hurts. Pooh is crying.
Jane slams the book shut, alarmed, then angry, actually, at whatever writer thought it would be funny to rewrite it that way. And she’s left with the most surreal sensation of being stuck in a hole in a wall, with Mrs. Vanders hanging washing on her legs, oblivious to anything strange about her new drying rack. “Tut-tut,” Mrs. Vanders sings. “It looks like rain.”
Jane shakes herself. She is not a part of the wall. She’s a person, standing on the library’s mezzanine. Her ears feel unlike anything she’s ever felt before, and she’s beginning to realize how wrong this is.
“Charlotte reached a whole new level of obsession with the library,” Kiran says, from below. “Octavian practically had to move in here in order to spend any time with her. Seems like he still hasn’t moved out.”
Looking over the banister, Jane finds Kiran in a darkish corner across the room, behind one of the metal spiral staircases. The books in that section are blacks, browns, and deepest purples. In a room of moving color it’s easy to miss the divan there, which is piled with blankets, books, ashtrays containing the detritus of the pipe tobacco Jane now realizes she’s been smelling since she came into the room. An ancient-looking record player sits on a low table at the head of the divan.
Jane doesn’t care. She wants to leave.
“This must be his nighttime haunt,” Kiran says, wrinkling her nose in distaste, then moving an overflowing ashtray from its perch on a rumpled blanket to the edge of the table. “What a way to spend all your waking hours. Ugh. Do you ever feel like there’s an inevitability to every version of your life?”
“What does that mean?” asks Phoebe.
“In this version of his life,” Kiran says, “was Octavian always going to be depressed? Does it matter what any of us do?”
“I’m not following,” says Phoebe. “Of course it matters.”
“I don’t want to talk about Charlotte anymore,” says Jane.
“I’m not talking about Charlotte,” says Kiran. “I’m talking about Octavian. Do your ears hurt?”
Jane’s head feels like a balloon. “But Octavian haunts this room because he’s depressed about Charlotte,” she says stubbornly, “right? It’s all about Charlotte.”
Lucy St. George, still carrying The House of Mirth, has crossed to the other side of the room and is gently stroking the burnished wood of the bookcases. Jane finds herself synchronously rubbing the railing of the mezzanine banister. It’s an odd compulsion. Snatching her hand away, she says, “Yes, my ears hurt. I have work to do. I’m going back to my rooms.”
“What work do you do?” Lucy asks.
“I make umbrellas.”
“Really?” Lucy says. “Do you repair them? I’ve got one that doesn’t open right.”
“Bring it to me,” Jane says impatiently, heading for the spiral staircase, “east wing, third floor, at the end. Come right in. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks,” Lucy says, then cries out and yanks her hand away from the bookcases.
“What’s wrong?” asks Phoebe.
“Nothing,” says Lucy, inspecting her palm. “Just a splinter, or some kind of—electrical short, or something.”
“How could a bookcase have an electrical short?” asks Phoebe.
All the hairs of Jane’s body are standing on end. Get out, she’s telling herself as she moves down the stairs; Get out. Jasper presses his nose to the glass of the terrace door, anxiously whining. Jane lets him in, then crosses the room with him as quickly as possible. She’s rude. As she passes through the doorway into the Venetian courtyard, she doesn’t say good-bye to the others.
“Jasper,” Jane says, stopping in the courtyard to take a breath of the sunlit air. “It was weird in there.”
Jasper leans his head against the back of her ankles and pushes, whining softly.
“You didn’t like it either?” she says. “Let’s go.”
She’s almost to her rooms before she realizes she’s still holding tight to Winnie-the-Pooh.
* * *
Back in her rooms, the light is bright and warm and Jane thinks maybe work will help clear her mind.
Last time she worked, it was on the self-defense umbrella in brown and gold. She still likes this idea. In fact, she has the nebulous sense of something she’d like to defend herself against, some feeling in the air that’s trying to fuzz her brain. Silly, she chides herself. I probably just need some coffee. I’ll get some, right after I lie on the floor so I can think about my umbrella. She uses Winnie-the-Pooh as a pillow. The morning sun pours in; the shag rug is soft; Jasper tucks himself lengthwise beside her.
When Lucy St. George pushes through the doorway with a navy umbrella, Jane has just dozed off.
“Wow,” Lucy says, surveying the roomful of colorful umbrellas.
“Mrph,” Jane says, sitting up, trying to focus. She’s lost in a peculiar dream she can’t grasp; she’s already forgetting it. Jasper is snorting beside her. “Sorry. Patch of sun.”
“I’m embarrassed to show you my umbrella now that I’ve seen yours,” Lucy says. “It’s positively dull.”
Jane has forgotten all about repairing Lucy’s umbrella.
“Ow,” Lucy says, shaking out her free hand as if it hurts.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, my hand still stings from that splinter or whatever. Here.” She passes her umbrella to Jane. “See, it opens funny.”
Lucy’s umbrella does indeed open funny, but Jane can see that it’s just because a metal rib is bent and needs reshaping and reinforcing. “It’s a simple fix,” she says. “Listen, I don’t have the right paints just now, but you can do cute things on this type of nylon with the right kind of glue and the right kind of glitter.”
Lucy St. George is pinching her lips together to stop a grin. “Are you saying you want to make my dull umbrella sparkly? Go ahead.”
“Really?” Jane says. “It might not be subtle.”
“Do your worst,” Lucy says. “I’m curious.”
“Hey,” Jane says, surprised and smiling. “Thanks.”
“Do you think this house has moods?” Lucy says.
“Huh?”
“Moods,” Lucy says. “You know. Does it have emotions, and intentions, and objectives?”
“The house?”
“Yes.”
“Um,” Jane says. “Isn’t that a little bit fantastical?”
“So, that’s a no?” Lucy says with a weak smile.
“Yes. It’s a no,” Jane says, surprised by her own passion. “I mean, I think that’s what Charlotte thought, but it sounds like she was kind of . . . an oddball. Have you been talking to Kiran about Charlotte?”
“No, it’s just a feeling I get,” says Lucy. “Tell me if you change your mind. It’s a lonely point of view.”
As Lucy leaves, Jane sees the self-defense umbrella, suddenly, that she needs to make. When it’s closed, it’ll feel like a blade in her hand, good for slicing through bloated air. Then it’ll open with a
loud crack, good for shoving bad things away. Yes, she thinks. I’ll just stay here on the rug and contemplate it, but when she lies back, her mind keeps picturing Octavian’s sad little crumpled corner in the library. What kind of umbrella would that make?
She gets up once to let Jasper out, then lies down again. Air and water push distantly through pipes in an uneven concert of noises like melancholy sighing. Jane finds herself stroking the rug, as if to soothe herself, or someone else.
* * *
The house’s soft sounds fit themselves as harmonies around Jane’s lathe, her drill, her rotary saw, her sewing machine, her own absentminded humming. The glass wall captures heat and light and channels it into Jane as fuel for her focus. The energy of the room strips everything else away; the umbrella she’s building is the entire world.
In fact, it has ribs like Jane. It has one long leg on which its other parts balance; it has moving and bending joints, like Jane, and it has a skin that stretches across its bones. Jane will paint on that skin, just as the tattoo artist marked Jane’s skin. How nice, to have a weather-resistant skin and a body that can vibrate with tension or be at rest. How satisfying to have working parts, lovingly crafted. Rain is a musical patter against Jane’s imagination. Every umbrella is born knowing that sound, its soul straining for that sound, waiting patiently through rainless day after rainless day for the day when raindrops will thrum against its skin.
Jane shakes herself, confused. She wonders, are those really her thoughts? Why does it feel like she’s thinking someone else’s thoughts? She’s too warm, and, when she tries to remember, she’s not certain what she’s been doing for the past however-long. She vaguely recalls . . . an intense connection with the umbrella she’s making. Her ears still hurt and she becomes aware of her own repetitive humming. It’s a Beatles tune, “Eleanor Rigby,” about loneliness.