Beach Day

18: Priscilla Cain's Diary

They round the end of the next aisle; she shelves the final book, close to the ground. When she pops up, trying to bring herself back to something bright and optimistic (she doesn't want to let him down), she struggles to maintain her sense of balance. She does it, though; and she remembers what Mr. Mathew said in the Dream World version of Mr. Iotrescu's mansion.

That's the version of her that people prefer, right? They want perky Tiff. They want overexcitement and blind burning curiosity. They want the version of her that exists between bookshelves and baked goods. She can't be the bomb; nobody wants to be around someone who is always about to explode. Isn't that a role she knows how to fill? Isn't it a story she knows as well as the ones Mr. Hillam told her? That of a girl who turned the other cheek every time and never let it get to her?

Smiling, he thanks her. "I'm not as spry as I used to be, I will admit. I'm glad for your help."

"With the way I've been getting knocked around recently, I'm starting to fear I won't be be particularly spry for much longer."

"You were always so unaware of your body," he recalls. "Tripping over your own feet, hitting your head on nearly everything..."

"Yeah, it really hasn't gotten better. You could—" She laughs. "You could ask Dr. Deseret, at the morgue, how many times I've tripped and smacked my face on the counter. It earned me a nickname in school and everything."

She cuts herself off. He might think it's a bummer, to know that she took the name "Beefany" as on the chin as the stairs she kept falling down. She doesn't want to bring the mood down more than she already has.

He grins. She knows what he's thinking— that she reminds him of his little brother, who is probably still in Ohio, probably still tripping and spilling milk all over himself like he did when they were kids.

Good-naturedly, she shakes her head. She puts her hands on the cart and steers it toward where she knows it goes, in the small room behind the drop box for book returns. There are already returns waiting for them— Eric Carle and L. Ron Hubbard, side by side, laying in wait. If only the Very Hungry Caterpillar knew how to eat sin.

That is, if sin exists. For all her guilt, she doesn't think it does.

Ignoring the work that is not hers (Mr. Hillam would prefer she asks, she knows), she returns to the main part of the library. Now that the work is done, she knows she can get down to the reason she came here.

"So," she asks, leaning against the reference desk, "what can you tell me about Priscilla Cain?"

"I don't have much. But I do have some records, which your cousin is already looking through. And I have... Hmm." He adjusts his glasses, looking down at a binder on the desk. "Yes, I do have that item. Odd. Odd, indeed."

"What's odd?" she pries, wanting to crane her neck to see what he's looking at. She decides not to.

"She submitted a journal of hers to be included in a donation to a local history museum effort— one that notably never took off. It was for wartime notes taken while many of our town's young men, including your grandfather, were then at war. You understand. But the project was never completed and, as I recall, she never came back to collect it. Like the rest of the items in that collection, it was moved to an area in the basement."

"Ah," she recalls, "the place I was never allowed to go."

"I reckon you're old enough now." With a warm, reassuring smile, he draws a key from his desk. "Come with me, my dear Tiffany May."

"But of course!" It's a struggle to keep her voice down in the sudden excitement, but she manages.

As the two of them walk, they fall into old patterns of hushed conversation made new by time and space, by two years and thousands of miles between them. Somewhere between all the formalities and the questions about what's new in either of their lives that the other has not borne witness to, there comes the question she should have known to expect— if there is anyone new in her life.