The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

  “Your symptoms were masked by your seizures, Mr. Fikry. And the scans show that this tumor is quite far advanced. I wouldn’t wait if I were you.”

  The surgery will cost nearly as much as the down payment on their house. It is unclear how much A.J.’s meager small-businessperson insurance will cover. “If I have the surgery, how much time does it buy me?” A.J. asks.

  “Depends on how much we’re able to get out. Ten years, if we manage clean margins. Two years, maybe, if not. The kind of tumor you have has the annoying tendency to grow back.”

  “And if you’re successful removing the thing, am I left a vegetable?”

  “We don’t like to use terms like vegetable, Mr. Fikry. But it’s in your left frontal lobe. You’ll likely experience the occasional verbal deficit. Increased aphasia, et cetera. But we won’t take out so much that you aren’t left mostly yourself. Of course, if left untreated, the tumor will grow until the language center of your brain is pretty much gone. Whether we treat or not, this will, in all likelihood, happen eventually anyway.”

  Weirdly, A.J. thinks of Proust. Though he pretends to have read the whole thing, A.J. has only ever read the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. It had been a struggle to read that much, and now what he thinks is, At least I will never have to read the rest. “I have to discuss this with my wife and my daughter,” he says.

  “Yes, of course,” the oncologist says, “but don’t delay too long.”

  ON THE TRAIN then the ferry back to Alice, he thinks about Maya’s college and Amelia’s ability to pay the mortgage on the house they bought less than a year ago. By the time he is walking down Captain Wiggins Street, he decides that he cannot undertake such a surgery if it means leaving his nearest and dearest broke.

  A.J. does not yet want to face his family at home so he calls Lambiase, and the two of them meet at the bar.

  “Tell me a good cop story,” A.J. says.

  “Like a story about a good cop or a story that is interesting involving police officers?”

  “Either one. It’s up to you. I want to hear something amusing that will distract me from my problems.”

  “What problems do you have? Perfect wife. Perfect kid. Good business.”

  “I’ll tell you after.”

  Lambiase nods. “Okay. Let me think. Maybe fifteen years ago, there was this kid, goes to Alicetown. He hasn’t been to school for a month. Every day, he tells his parents he’ll go and every day, he doesn’t show up. Even if they leave him there, he sneaks out and goes somewhere else.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “Right. The parents think he must be in some serious trouble. He’s a tough kid, hangs with a tough crowd. They all get bad grades and wear low pants. His parents run a food stand at the beach, so there isn’t much money. Anyhow, the parents are at their wit’s end, so I decide to follow the kid the whole day. The kid goes to school, and then between period one and two, he just leaves. I’m trailing behind him, and finally we get to a building I’ve never been into before. I’m on Main and Parker. You know where I am?”

  “That’s the library.”

  “Bingo. You know I never read much back then. So I follow him up the stairs and into a library carrel in the back and I’m thinking, he’s probably going to do drugs or something there. Perfect place, right? Isolated. But you know what he’s got?”

  “Books, I’d imagine. That’s the obvious thing, right?”

  “He’s got one thick book. He’s in the middle of Infinite Jest. You ever heard of it?”

  “Now you’re making this up.”

  “The boy is reading Infinite Jest. He says he can’t do it at home because he has five siblings to babysit and he can’t do it at school because his buddies will make fun of him. So he skips school to go read in peace. The book takes a lot of concentration. ‘Listen, hombre,’ he says, ‘there’s nothing for me at school. Everything’s in this book.’ ”

  “I take it, he’s Latino, by your use of the word hombre. A lot of Hispanic people on Alice Island?”

  “A few.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I haul his ass back to school. The principal asks me how the kid should be punished. I ask the kid how long he thinks it’ll take him to finish the book. He says, ’About two weeks.’ And so I recommend they give him a two-week suspension for delinquency.”

  “You’re definitely making this up,” A.J. says. “Admit it. The troubled youth was not skipping school to read Infinite Jest.”

  “He was, A.J. I swear to God.” But then Lambiase bursts out laughing. “You seemed depressed. I wanted to tell you a story with a little uplift.”

  “Thanks. Thanks very much.”

  A.J. orders another beer.

  “What did you want to tell me?”

  “It’s funny that you should mention Infinite Jest. Why did you choose that particular title, by the way?” A.J. says.

  “I always see it in the store. It takes up a lot of space on the shelf.”

  A.J. nods. “I once had this huge argument with a friend of mine about it. He loved it. I hated it. But the funniest thing about this dispute, the thing I will confess to you now is . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “That I never finished reading it.” A.J. laughs. “That and Proust can both go on my list of unfinished works, thank God. My brain is broken, by the way.” He takes out the slip of paper and reads, “Glioblastoma multiforme. It turns you into a vegetable and then you die. But at least it’s quick.”

  Lambiase sets down his beer. “There must be a surgery or something,” he says.

  “There is, but it costs a billion dollars. And it only delays things anyway. I won’t leave Amy and Maya broke just to prolong my life by a couple of months.”

  Lambiase finishes his beer. He signals the bartender for another one. “I think you should let them decide for themselves,” Lambiase says.

  “They’ll be sentimental,” A.J. says.

  “Let them be.”

  “The right thing for me to do is blow my stupid brains out, I’d say.”

  Lambiase shakes his head. “You’d do that to Maya?”

  “How is it better for her to have a brain-dead father and no money for college?”

  THAT NIGHT IN bed, after the lights are off, Lambiase pulls Ismay close to him. “I love you,” he tells her. “And I want you to know that I don’t judge you for anything you might have done in the past.”

  “Okay,” Ismay says. “I’m half asleep and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know about the bag in the closet,” Lambiase whispers. “I know that the book’s in there. I don’t know how it got there and I don’t need to know either. But it’s only right that it be returned to its rightful owner.”

  After a long pause, Ismay says, “The book’s ruined.”

  “But even a damaged Tamerlane might still be worth something,” Lambiase says. “I searched the Christie’s website and the last copy on the market sold for five hundred sixty thousand dollars. So I figure maybe a damaged one is worth fifty thousand or something. And A.J. and Amy need the money.”

  “Why do they need the money?”

  He tells her about A.J.’s cancer, and Ismay covers her face with her hands.

  “The way I see it,” Lambiase says, “we wipe the book down of fingerprints, put it in an envelope, and return it. No one has to know where or who it came from.”

  Ismay turns on the bedside lamp. “How long have you known about this?”

  “Since the first night I spent at your house.”

  “And you didn’t care? Why didn’t you turn me in?” Ismay’s eyes are sharp.

  “Because it wasn’t my business, Izzie. I wasn’t invited in your home as an officer of the law. And I didn’t have a right to be looking through your stuff. And I figured there must be a story. You’re a good woman, Ismay, and you haven’t had it easy.”

  Ismay sits up. Her hands are shaking. She walks over to the closet and pulls down the bag
. “I want you to know what happened,” she says.

  “I don’t need to,” Lambiase says.

  “Please, I want to tell you. And don’t interrupt. If you interrupt me, I won’t be able to get it all out.”

  “Okay, Izzie,” he says.

  “The first time Marian Wallace came to see me, I was five months pregnant. She had Maya with her, and the baby was about two. Marian Wallace was very young, very pretty, very tall with tired, golden-brown eyes. She said, ‘Maya is Daniel’s daughter.’ And I said—and I’m not proud of this—‘How do I know you aren’t lying?’ I could see perfectly well that she wasn’t lying. I knew my husband after all. I knew his type. He had cheated on me from the day we were married and probably before that, too. But I loved his books or at least that first one. And I felt like somewhere down deep inside him the person who wrote it must be there. That you couldn’t write such beautiful things and have such an ugly heart. But that is the truth. He was a beautiful writer and a terrible person.

  “I can’t blame Daniel for all of this, though. I can’t blame him for my part in it. I screamed at Marian Wallace. She was twenty-two, but she looked like a kid. ‘Do you think you’re the first slut to show up here, claiming to have had Daniel’s baby?’

  “She apologized, kept apologizing. She said, ‘The baby doesn’t have to be in Daniel Parish’s life’—she kept calling him by his first and last name. She was a fan, you see. She respected him. ‘The baby doesn’t have to be in Daniel Parish’s life. We won’t bother you ever again, I swear to God. We just need a little money to get started. To move on. He said he would help, and now I can’t find him anywhere.’ This made sense to me. Daniel was always traveling a lot—visiting writer at a school in Switzerland, trips to Los Angeles that never resulted in anything.

  “ ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll try to get in touch with him and see what I can do. If he acknowledges that your story is true—’ But I already knew that it was, Lambiase! ‘If he acknowledges that your story is true, maybe we can do something.’ The girl wanted to know how she could best contact me. I told her I’d be in touch.

  “I talked to Daniel that night on the phone. It was a good talk, and I didn’t bring up Marian Wallace. He was solicitous of me, started making plans for our own baby’s arrival. ‘Ismay,’ he said, ‘once the baby’s here, I’m going to be a changed man.’ I had heard that before. ‘No, I’m serious,’ he insisted, ‘I’m definitely going to travel less. I’m going to stay at home, write more, take care of you and the potato.’ He was always a good talker and I wanted to believe that this was the night everything was going to change in my marriage. I decided right then and there that I would take care of the problem with Marian Wallace. I would find a way to buy her off.

  “People in this town have always thought my family had more money than we actually did. Nic and I did have small trust funds, but it wasn’t a ton. She used hers to buy the store, and I used mine to buy this house. What was left over from my side, my husband spent quickly. His first book sold well, but the ones after less so, and he always had champagne tastes and an inconsistent income. I’m only a schoolteacher. Daniel and I always looked rich, but we were poor.

  “Down the hill, my sister had been dead for over a year, and her husband was steadily drinking himself to death. Out of obligation to her, I would check on A.J. some nights. I’d let myself in, wipe the vomit off his face, and drag him to bed. One night, I go in. A.J. is passed out as usual. And Tamerlane is sitting on the table. I should say here that I was with him the day he found Tamerlane. Not that he ever offered to split the money with me, which probably would have been the decent thing to do. Cheap bastard never would have been at that estate sale if not for me. So I put A.J. to bed, and I go out to the living room to clean up the mess, and I wipe everything down, and the last thing I do, without even really thinking about it, is I slip the book into my bag.

  “The next day, everyone is looking for Tamerlane, but I’m out of town. I’ve gone into Cambridge for the day. I go to Marian Wallace’s dorm room, and I throw the book on her bed. I tell her, ‘Look, you can sell this. It’s worth a lot of money.’ And she looks at the book dubiously, and she says, ‘Is it hot?’ And I say, ‘No, it belongs to Daniel, and he wants you to have it, but you can never say where it came from. Bring it to an auction house or a rare-books dealer. Claim you found it in a used-books bin somewhere.’ I don’t hear from Marian Wallace again for a while, and I think maybe that’s the end of it.” Ismay’s voice trails off.

  “But it isn’t?” Lambiase asks.

  “No. She shows up at the house with Maya and the book just before Christmas. She says she’s gone to every auction house and dealer in the Boston area, and none of them want to deal with the book because it doesn’t have a provenance, and the cops have been calling about a stolen copy of Tamerlane. She takes the book from her bag and hands it to me. I throw it back at her. ‘What am I going to do with this?’ Marian Wallace just shakes her head. The book lands on the floor, and the little girl picks it up and starts flipping through it, but no one’s paying any attention to her. Marian Wallace’s huge amber eyes fill with tears, and she says, ‘Have you read “Tamerlane,” Mrs. Parish? It’s so sad.’ I shake my head. ‘It’s a poem about this Turkish conqueror who trades the love of his life, this poor peasant girl, for power.’ I roll my eyes at her, and I say, ‘Is that what you think is happening here? Do you fancy yourself some poor peasant girl, and I’m the mean wife who is keeping you from the love of your life?’

  “ ‘No,’ she says. At this point, the baby is crying. Marian says that the worst of it is that she knew what she was doing. Daniel had come to her college for a reading. She had loved that book, and when she slept with him she had read his author biography a million times and she knew perfectly well that he was married. ‘I’ve made so many mistakes,’ she says. ‘I can’t help you,’ I say. She shakes her head and picks up the baby. ‘We’ll be out of your way now,’ she says. ‘Merry Christmas.’

  “And they leave. I’m pretty shaken up, so I go into the kitchen to make myself some tea. When I get back out to the living room, I notice that the little girl has left her backpack and Tamerlane is on the floor next to it. I pick up the book. I’m thinking I’ll just slip into A.J.’s apartment tomorrow or the next night and return it. That’s when I notice it is covered in crayon drawings. The little girl has ruined it! I zip it into the bag and put it in my closet. I don’t take pains to hide it very much. I think maybe Daniel will find it and ask me about it, but he never does. He never cares. That night, A.J. calls me about the proper things to feed a baby. He’s got Maya at his apartment, and I agree to go over.”

  “The day after that, Marian Wallace washes up by the lighthouse,” Lambiase says.

  “Yes, I wait to see if Daniel will say anything, to see if he will recognize the girl and claim the baby, but he doesn’t. And I, coward that I am, never bring it up.”

  Lambiase takes her in his arms. “None of this matters,” he says after a while. “If there was a crime—”

  “There was a crime,” she insists.

  “If there was a crime,” he repeats, “everyone who knows about any of it is dead.”

  “Except Maya.”

  “Maya’s life has turned out beautifully,” Lambiase says.

  Ismay shakes her head. “It has, hasn’t it?”

  “The way I see it,” Lambiase says, “you saved A. J. Fikry’s life when you stole that manuscript. That’s the way I see it.”

  “What kind of cop are you?” Ismay asks.

  “The old kind,” he says.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, like every third Wednesday of every month for the last ten years, is Chief’s Choice at Island Books. At first, the police officers felt obligated to join, but the group has grown in genuine popularity over the years. Now it’s the largest book meetup that Island has. Police officers still make up the bulk of the membership, but their wives and even some of their children, when they get old enough, attend. Years ago, L
ambiase had had to institute a “leave your weapons” policy after a young cop had pulled a gun on another cop during a particularly heated discussion of The House of Sand and Fog. (Lambiase would later reflect to A.J. that the selection had been a mistake. “Had an interesting cop character but too much moral ambiguity in that one. I’m going to stick to easier genre stuff from now on.”) Other than this incident, the group has been free of violence. Aside from the content of the books, of course.

  As is his tradition, Lambiase arrives at the store early to set up for Chief’s Choice and talk to A.J. “I saw this resting on the door,” Lambiase says when he comes inside. He hands a padded manila envelope with A.J.’s name on it to his friend.

  “Probably another galley,” A.J. says.

  “Don’t say that,” Lambiase jokes. “Could be the next big thing in there.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. It’s probably the Great American Novel. I’ll add it to my stack: Things to Read before My Brain Stops Working.”

  A.J. sets the package on the countertop, and Lambiase watches it. “You never know,” Lambiase says.

  “I’m like a girl who has been on the dating scene too long. I’ve had too many disappointments, too many promises of ‘the one,’ and they never are. As a cop, don’t you get that way?”

  “What way?”

  “Cynical, I guess,” A.J. says. “Don’t you ever get to the point where you expect the worst from people all the time?”

  Lambiase shakes his head. “No. I see good people just as much as I see bad ones.”

  “Yeah, name me some.”

  “People like you, my friend.” Lambiase clears his throat, and A.J. can think of no reply. “What’s good in crime that I haven’t read? I need some new picks for Chief’s Choice.”

  A.J. walks over to the crime section. He looks across the spines, which are, for the most part, black and red with all capitalized fonts in silvers and whites. An occasional burst of fluorescence breaks up the monotony. A.J. thinks how similar everything in the crime genre looks. Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.