Chapter One

An old woman has read the same book aloud, every night, for sixty-one years, and has never once turned to the last page. Tonight she does.

Nobody remembers the book that ruined me. That's why I'm telling you.

There's no name on it. No title, no author, no date. I've checked twice a year since I was nineteen, holding it up to every lamp I've ever owned, and the cover gives you nothing but cover. The spine has gone soft as a lip. If you picked it up you'd think it was nothing.

That's what it wants.

I put the kettle on when the nine-forty goes past. It shakes the glass at nine-forty and the kettle goes on and the water is ready before the tea is, which is how I know the evening has started. It has gone past at nine-forty every night of my life and it has never once been late.

I read it aloud now, every night, to a room with nobody in it. A book nobody reads is a book that isn't. I know how that sounds. I've had sixty-one years to get used to how it sounds.

I'm going to read you the last page tonight. I've never read it aloud. I've never read it at all. Sixty-one years of every other page, and I have never once turned to the end. You want to know why. So do I.

Here is the book, in the order I got it.

It came out of a dead woman's house. I was nineteen and hired to clear it, which meant I was nineteen and allowed to carry things out the door. She'd died with her mouth open and her hand out, and the book sat six inches past her fingers, and nobody in the family wanted it, because it's nothing. I took it because I wanted one thing in that house that was mine. I took the pen off the floor beside her hand because I wanted to know what a hand reaches for at the end. It's in the drawer of the table now. It has never written anything.

I read it aloud the first night. I don't know why. There was no one there to hear it. Maybe I wanted to hear whether the sentences would hold up out of my own mouth. They held. That was the trouble.

The trouble was it answered. Not out loud. It answered the way weather answers. I'd read a page and my mouth would know the next one before my eyes got there, and I'd feel things I hadn't earned: grief for a woman I'd never met, relief at a door I'd never walked through. I was nineteen. I thought that was what reading was.

I never left that town. I could have. The nine-forty went to the city and came back at six. There was a man on it, once, who asked me twice. The same bus I had timed my kettle by for a year by then. That is the whole of my romance, and it happened on a bus I had stopped looking at. But the book has to be read aloud every night or it stops being, and you can't read aloud on a bus without people looking, so I stayed, and the man went, and I have not thought about him in years, except now, which is the book's doing, not mine.

There are things I remember that never happened to me. A woman on a bridge. A dog that wouldn't come back. A name I've never said to anyone and it fits my mouth like a tooth. Some of that is the book. Some of it might be mine. I stopped sorting them out around the time I stopped sleeping. I've decided that's the book's answer too.

It didn't take my life in one bite. It traded with me, one night at a time, until I couldn't tell which of us had been in the room first.

So. Tonight. The lamp is on, the window is black, the book is open on my knees to the last page, and I have not looked at it yet. I'm going to look in a minute. I want you to understand what it costs to look.

Sixty-one years I've kept this thing alive by saying it. I say it, it exists. I stop, it's nothing again, a brick with a soft spine. That's the whole arrangement. I am the only one holding up my end of it.

And now you're here.

I don't know what you are. A chair. A draft. A habit of mine. It doesn't matter. You're the first thing in sixty-one years that's been on the other side of the page, and I've decided that's close enough to a person to tell the truth to.

Sit down. There's a chair. There's always been a chair. It's the one thing I kept.

And when I get to the end, I want one thing from you. It isn't hard. You'll do it before you decide to.

Answer me.

Next: Chapter Two