I shook my head. “It’s a coincidence. Books are like that.”
She plucked a random book out of the pile and handed it to me. “You try. Open it.”
I took the book from her hand. “What is it?”
“Shakespeare. Julius Caesar.”
I opened it, and began to read.
“‘Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’
“What does that have to do with me?”
Marian peered at me, over her glasses. “I’m just the librarian. I can only give you the books. I can’t give you the answers.” But she smiled, all the same. “The thing about fate is, are you the master of your fate, or are the stars?”
“Are you talking about Lena, or Julius Caesar? Because I hate to break it to you, but I never read the play.”
“You tell me.”
We spent the rest of the hour going through the pile, taking turns reading to each other. Finally, I knew why I had come. “Aunt Marian, I think I need to go back into the archive.”
“Today? Don’t you have things you need to be doing? Holiday shopping at least?”
“I don’t shop.”
“Spoken wisely. As for myself, ‘I do like Christmas on the whole…. In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.’”
“More Dickens?”
“E. M. Forster.”
I sighed. “I can’t explain it. I think I need to be with my mom.”
“I know. I miss her, too.” I hadn’t really thought about what I would say to Marian about how I was feeling. About the town, and how everything was wrong. Now the words seemed stuck in my throat, like another person was stumbling through them. “I just thought, if I could be around her books, maybe I could feel how it was before. Maybe I could talk to her. I tried to go to the graveyard once, but it didn’t make me feel like she was there, in the ground.” I stared at a random speck on the carpet.
“I know.”
“I still can’t think about her being there. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you stick someone you love down in a lonely old hole in the dirt? Where it’s cold, and dirty, and full of bugs? That can’t be how it ends, after everything, after everything she was.” I tried not to think about it, her body turning into bone and mud and dust down there. I hated the idea that she had to go through it alone, like I was going through everything alone now.
“How do you want it to end?” Marian laid her hand on my shoulder.
“I don’t know. I should, somebody should build her a monument or something.”
“Like the General? Your mom would have had a good laugh about that.” Marian pulled her arm around me. “I know what you mean. She’s not there, she’s here.”
She held out her hand, and I pulled her up. We held hands all the way back to the archive, as if I was still a kid she was babysitting while my mom was at work in the back. She pulled out a thick ring of keys and opened the door. She didn’t follow me inside.
Back in the archive, I sank into the chair in front of my mom’s desk. My mom’s chair. It was wooden, and bore the insignia of Duke University. I think they had given it to her for graduating with honors, or something like that. It wasn’t comfortable, but comforting, and familiar. I smelled the old varnish, the same varnish I’d probably chewed on as a baby, and right away I felt better than I had in months. I could breathe in the smell of the stacks of books wrapped in crackling plastic, the old crumbling parchment, the dust and the cheap file cabinets. I could breathe in the particular air of the particular atmosphere of my mother’s very particular planet. To me, it was the same as if I was seven years old, sitting in her lap, burying my face in her shoulder.
I wanted to go home. Without Lena, I had nowhere else to go.
I picked up a small, framed photograph on my mom’s desk, almost hidden among the books. It was her, and my father, in the study at our house. Someone had taken it in black and white, a long time ago. Probably for the back of a book jacket, on one of their early projects, when my dad was still a historian, and they had worked together. Back when they had funny hair, and ugly pants, and you could see the happiness on their faces. It was hard to look at, but harder to put down. When I went to return it to my mom’s desk, next to the dusty stacks of books, one book caught my eye. I pulled it out from under an encyclopedia of Civil War weapons and a catalog of native plants of South Carolina. I didn’t know what the book was. I only knew it was bookmarked with a long sprig of rosemary. I smiled. At least it wasn’t a sock, or a dirty pudding spoon.
The Gatlin County Junior League cookbook, Fried Chicken and Sass. It opened, by itself, to a single page. “Betty Burton’s Buttermilk Pan Fried Tomatoes,” my mom’s favorite. The scent of rosemary rose up from the pages. I looked at the rosemary more closely. It was fresh, as if it had been plucked from a garden yesterday. My mom couldn’t have put it there, but no one else would use rosemary as a bookmark. My mom’s favorite recipe was bookmarked with Lena’s familiar scent. Maybe the books really were trying to tell me something.
“Aunt Marian? Were you looking to fry up some tomatoes?”
She stuck her head in the doorway. “Do you think I would touch a tomato, let alone cook one?”
I stared at the rosemary in my hand. “That’s what I thought.”
“I think that was the one thing your mother and I disagreed on.”
“Can I borrow this book? Just for a few days?”
“Ethan, you don’t have to ask. Those are your mother’s things; there isn’t anything in this room she wouldn’t have wanted you to have.”
I wanted to ask Marian about the rosemary in the cookbook, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to show it to anyone else, or to part with it. Even though I had never and probably would never fry a tomato in my entire life. I stuck the book under my arm as Marian walked me to the door.
“If you need me, I’m here for you. You and Lena. You know that. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.” She pushed the hair out of my eyes and gave me a smile. It wasn’t my mother’s smile, but it was one of my mother’s favorite smiles.
Marian hugged me, and wrinkled her nose. “Do you smell rosemary?”
I shrugged and slipped out the door, into the gray day. Maybe Julius Caesar was right. Maybe it was time to confront my fate, and Lena’s fate. Whether it was up to us or the stars, I couldn’t just sit around and wait to find out.
When I walked outside, it was snowing. I couldn’t believe it. I looked up into the sky and let snow fall on my freezing face. The thick, white powdery flakes were drifting down with no particular purpose. It wasn’t a storm, not at all. It was a gift, maybe even a miracle: a white Christmas, just like the song.
When I walked up to my front porch, there she was, sitting bareheaded on my front steps with her hood down. The moment I saw her, I recognized the snow for what it really was. A peace offering.
Lena smiled at me. In that second, the pieces of my life that had been falling apart fell back in place. Everything that was wrong just righted itself; maybe not everything, but enough.
I sat down next to her on the step. “Thanks, L.”
She leaned against me. “I just wanted to make you feel better. I’m so confused, Ethan. I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you.”
I ran my hand through her damp hair. “Don’t push me away, please. I can’t stand to lose anyone else I care about.” I unzipped her parka, slipping my arm around her waist, inside her jacket, and pulled her toward me. I kissed her as she pressed into me, until I felt like we would melt the whole front yard if we didn’t stop.
“What was that?” she asked, catching her breath. I kissed her again, until I couldn’t take it any longer, and pulled back.
“I think that’s called fate. I’ve been waiting to do that since the winter formal, and I’m not going to wait any longer.”
“You’re not?”
“Nope.”
“Well, you’ll have to wait a little longer. I’m still grounded. Uncle M thinks I’m at the library.”
“I don’t care if you’re grounded. I’m not. I’ll move into your house if I have to, and sleep with Boo in his dog bed.”
“He has a bedroom. He sleeps in a four-poster bed.”
“Even better.”
She smiled and held onto my hand. The snowflakes melted as they landed on our warm skin.
“I’ve missed you, Ethan Wate.” She kissed me back. The snow fell harder, dripping off us. We were practically radioactive. “Maybe you were right. We should spend as much time together as we can before—” she stopped, but I knew what she was thinking.
“We’re gonna figure something out, L. I promise.”
She nodded half-heartedly, and snuggled inside my arms. I could feel the calm beginning to spread between us. “I don’t want to think about that today.” She pushed me away, playfully, back among the living.
“Yeah? What do you want to think about, then?”
“Snow angels. I’ve never made one.”
“Really? You guys don’t do angels?”
“It’s not the angels. We only moved to Virginia for a few months, so I’ve never lived anywhere it snows.”
An hour later, we were soggy and wet and sitting around the kitchen table. Amma had gone to the Stop & Steal, and we were drinking the sorry hot chocolate I had attempted to make myself.
“I’m not sure this is the way you make hot chocolate,” Lena teased me as I scraped a microwaved bowl of chocolate chips into hot milk. The result was brown and white and lumpy. It looked great to me.
“Yeah? How would you know? ‘Kitchen, hot chocolate, please.’” I mimicked her high voice with my low one and the result was a strange cracking falsetto. She smiled. I had missed that smile, even though it had only been days; I missed it even when it had only been minutes.
“Speaking of Kitchen, I have to go. I told my uncle I was at the library, and it’s closed by now.”
I pulled her onto my lap, sitting at the kitchen table. I was having trouble not touching her every second, now that I could again. I found myself making excuses to tickle her, anything to touch her hair, her hands, her knees. The pull between us was like a magnet. She leaned against my chest and we just sat there until I heard feet padding across the floor upstairs. She bolted out of my lap like a frightened cat.
“Don’t worry, that’s my dad. He’s just taking a shower. It’s the only time he comes out of his study anymore.”
“He’s getting worse, isn’t he?” She took my hand. We both knew it wasn’t really a question.
“My dad wasn’t like this until my mom died. He just flipped out after that.” I didn’t have to say the rest; she’d heard me think it enough times. About how my mom died, and we stopped cooking fried tomatoes, and we lost the little pieces of the Christmas town, and she wasn’t there to stand up to Mrs. Lincoln, and nothing was ever the same again.