The Book of Love, page 65
“Where are you going?” Carousel says.
“Where have you been?” Dakota asks. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Daniel says. So they don’t. “What are you up to, anyway?” he asks, and Lissy says, “We’re going out to do a spell. We want it to keep snowing a little while longer. And maybe ask for the lottery tickets back.”
“I want it to snow through Christmas,” Dakota says.
“Okay,” Daniel says. “Just don’t stay out too long. And keep your voices down. Don’t wake anybody else up. I’ll make hot chocolate. It’ll be ready when you’re done if you don’t take too long.”
Carousel says, “I think I’ll go to bed.” She doesn’t mention the pearl in her pocket, the one the statue lady put in Carousel’s hand when she left her on the shore. It’s the size of a chicken’s egg, lustrous and perfectly round. Who cares about lottery tickets? But she can show everyone the pearl tomorrow. Or save it for Christmas even.
She doesn’t bother to turn on the light in the bedroom. She leans the Harmony against her bed, looks out the window to where Lissy and Dakota stand in the yard, holding hands and chanting, looking up at the sky. “I’m not supposed to just go around doing magic,” Carousel says to the guitar. Her guitar. Her magic. “But we’ll see about that.” She calls the snow down.
The Book of My Two Hands Both Knowe You
For Christmas, Laura gives Daniel a replacement bass guitar—a Fender Mustang—and a Gallien-Krueger Combo amp. Susannah gives him a T-shirt that says jaco played 4. They both watch him unwrap his presents, but Susannah turns her back when he tells them thank you. It still makes her queasy, the push-pull yank that spins her round unless she turns first. Sometimes they sit back-to-back and talk. Sometimes they don’t talk at all. Sometimes she comes to him as a white cat or a wolfish black dog. A black beetle.
“Do you know,” Laura says, “I think there’s another door. Not here, though. On the moon. I’ve been hanging out up there some. Anyway, I don’t know what’s behind it or how to go through it. Not yet.”
“I can’t believe that you just said, casually, that you’ve been hanging out on the moon,” Susannah says.
“That wasn’t the interesting part of what I said,” Laura says. “But whatever. Merry Christmas, Daniel.”
They’re in room 12 down at the Seasick Blues. Laura is staying there while she makes plans for what she wants her future to look like. Is Laura still the same Laura? This is one of the things Daniel and Susannah talk about. Will she be like Malo Mogge? Does she seem hungry? As if she might be thinking about what people (well, people like Mo and Thomas and Carousel, Bogomil and Mr. Anabin, all of them ripe with magic) might taste like? Hard to tell. Like Daniel says, Laura’s always been hungry. But so far, Laura has used her new power sparingly. She could have put their house back, she could have restored everything the wave destroyed, but in the end she decided she didn’t want to. Let it go, let it all go. Susu and the pangolin and the sky-blue owl. The Glory and the Gretsch. Every Caitlynn Hightower paperback. The white couch and the china shepherdess and all of Ruth’s scrubs, Ruth’s mugs, Ruth’s self-help books, every piece of Ruth, every bit of Laura’s and Susannah’s life from before. Laura is determined to make a clean start. She’s writing a song about her mother. She doesn’t feel anything about Ruth’s death yet, but maybe if she gets the song right she will. And Susannah? Susannah doesn’t need couches now, or shoes, or anything much, really, not even the British Drum Company four-piece set Laura picked out for her. Susannah has her realm, and when she is out of it, she has Daniel and Laura.
Daniel’s working on college applications. Figuring out whether it’s better to stay home where he can keep an eye on Carousel and his family or whether he should get his own place. “The Fender’s gorgeous,” he says. “But I don’t know if music is my thing now.”
Susannah snorts. That’s Daniel for you. He doesn’t ever admit he wants something, not even when it’s right in front of him. You have to give him a lot of time and space to get there on his own.
“Okay,” Laura says. She sounds impatiently patient in the way only Laura can. “But in the meantime, while you’re figuring out what your thing is, maybe we could just play a little? I could take the Fender back to the store, return it, but that would be a shame. To take it back when you haven’t even tried it out?” Laura has a new guitar, too, another Gretsch.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this genre of super-annoying songs,” Susannah says. The first word she says, Daniel spins around, almost topples over, the Fender in his arms. Nice save. “The ones that just keep on repeating at the end, the ones that do the fade-out but it takes forever. I was thinking maybe we could do an ending like that? But just keep it going. Going and going and going and going and going and going and—”
“We get it,” Laura says. “Very funny. But do we always have to have a gimmick? Come on, Daniel. Just one song. See how it feels?”
“I guess,” Daniel says. “Sure. Why not. You’re the boss, right?” Then, “Susannah? You in?”
She is.
The Book of Endings
Here’s the thing about endings. Caitlynn Hightower knew this. Mo knows it, too. Even after you finish a book, things go on happening, no matter whether or not you plan to write them down. But romance novels have to end while everyone is happy enough with only the prospect of more happiness and only minor disappointments ahead. Poor Lavender Glass! Every time Maryanne Gorch sat down to write another chapter, another book, it meant more trouble for her heroine. More kidnappings, more misunderstandings, more sea voyages, more wickedness, bad luck, and suffering. Is a handsome man with an impressive dick and a good heart really worth all of the attendant misery? Lavender Glass appeared to think so, but who knows exactly what Maryanne Gorch thought. Natalie’s boyfriend was cheating on her, it turns out. But the next guy she goes out with is actually perfect. He really is. And not now, but in a couple of years, Theo is going to discover polyamory. Sure, it’s a lot of work, but when has Theo ever been afraid of work? Why not have your cake and share it, too? Mo says to Thomas, “What was in the fortune cookie you gave me?” “What?” Thomas says. “In the restaurant, when Malo Mogge was tormenting us. You gave me a fortune cookie.” “You didn’t open it?” Thomas asks. Mo says, “I didn’t feel like it at the time. So I left it at my grandmother’s grave. But you could just tell me. What was in it?” “Come here,” Thomas says. “I’ll whisper it in your ear.” Everything we do is music. There are many kinds of love, and not all of them are built to last past the span of one romance novel, let alone a thousand years. But let’s imagine a rose garden, winter, the sky clear and bright. Snow can’t keep falling forever. In the garden, two men. “What happens now?” one man says to the other. Sometimes two lovers meet in a movie theater after the lights have gone down. Imagine them right in front of you. They’re tall enough it’s annoying, but the theater is mostly empty and you could always move. They never talk, never turn to look at each other, but they are holding hands. There are always workarounds. You can text or write down a message while the other person watches. I love you, you asshole. Oh, I love you still. Can you bear it? I can bear it still. Oh, the world is a terrible place and getting worse. Laura would like to fix things. She may yet fix things, once she’s sure the best way to proceed. Not every act of Malo Mogge can be undone. Three of the karaoke singers from the night of the benefit at the Cliff Hangar are never seen again. Hannah Santos remains a tiger for the rest of her life. She’s happy enough in the sanctuary where a photo of her splendid stripy self ends up on a souvenir postcard. Some of the citizens of Lovesend still dream some nights of being a statue. Standing on a plinth, strange and still and silent as snow falls and others walk past them, gaze up at them in wonder. Some of them want to know what this dream might portend. Will they be famous? Do some notable deed? Be remembered long after they’re dead and gone? There are no statues of Malo Mogge in Lovesend. Some nights, when Rosamel Walker is asleep in her cinder-block dorm room, on her narrow bed, the moon comes and sits in her window. The moon comes to Ohio on certain nights. This is what the moon says: “Wake up, wake up! Come with me. Oh, come with me and I’ll show you marvelous things. I’ll give you whatever you want. We could be together and never grow old. Oh, won’t you come with me?” And Rosamel, asleep and dreaming, always says the same thing. “Maybe someday,” she tells the moon. “Not today. There are things I need to do! But someday, oh someday, maybe I will.” In the rose garden one man is humming a song, a very old song. Carousel is teaching herself to play the Harmony. There is so much magic in her! What she will do, who she will be—all of that lies ahead, in a room so big it contains the whole world and other worlds besides. Every door will open for her. “I figured out how they got out of Bogomil’s realm,” Carousel says to her guitar. “You let them out, didn’t you?” Her guitar doesn’t say anything back, but it doesn’t have to. It and Carousel have something like a perfect understanding. “Play me something you wrote,” Thomas says. He is lying across Mo’s bed. And because Mo loves him, and because eventually if you keep on writing music you’ll have to play it for someone, Mo does. He plays Thomas a song on his keyboard, gathers up his courage and sings what he has on paper. Before he’s finished, he stops. He says, “That was terrible.” Thomas says, “It wasn’t ever going to be perfect the first time, Mo. Try it again.” One day there will be an opera called The Book of Love. It will be about Maryanne Gorch, Caitlynn Hightower, Lavender Glass, the two Jenny Pings. On opening night you might recognize some members of the audience if you’re lucky enough to be in attendance. Genevieve Cabral, for one, who recently was performing sold-out shows at Bar Thalia. Mo and Thomas don’t live in Maryanne Gorch’s house beside the sea, but they visit now and then. Thomas is suspicious of the children of Lovesend, the ones of a certain age. Avelot may yet make herself or himself or themselves known one day, and what would he do then? He doesn’t know. But the house isn’t empty. Occupants come and go. In the house there are marks on the floors where heavy feet have trod. Sometimes in summer, voices can be heard in the overgrown rose garden. Someone tends the rose garden. Imagine it was possible, under cover of night, to climb the cliff face from the rocks beside the shore up to the wall where Maryanne Gorch’s roses trail over. Imagine you made a house, too, with many rooms on the floor of the ocean from the tumbled green stones of Malo Mogge’s temple. Imagine no one on land or sea ever bothered you or kept you from where you wanted to be or what you wanted to do. Imagine once you stood still as stone but now you move as you please and do only as you please. There are no statues of Malo Mogge in Lovesend, or anywhere else for that matter, but eventually, in the end, there are three statues of Maryanne Gorch in Lovesend because Mo can’t choose among the finalists when he and the Committee for the Beautification of Lovesend must make their choice. And, after all, Mo is supplying the funds. He can put up as many statues of Maryanne Gorch as he wants. I Don’t Want You to Worship Me I Just Want You to See What I Can Do. That’s the name of Laura Hand’s first EP. By the time her first full-length album comes out, she’s playing concert halls. Sometimes she comes back to Lovesend and plays the Cliff Hangar. The band gets back together. Susannah sings with Laura, Daniel turns his back. The audience doesn’t particularly care. It doesn’t affect the sound. And so on. We may not know every ending, but let us imagine Maryanne Gorch has a hand in it, and every love, though there may be ups and downs to keep our interest, is true and living. Every ending happy when the time must come at last for endings. Two men are kissing in a garden; the snow begins to fall again. Open the door, a voice says, and let them come in!
To Gavin
Acknowledgments
This novel took a long time to write, and I had a great deal of support from various people while I worked on it. One of them is my agent, Renée Zuckerbrot, who signed me on as a client knowing that I was a short story writer. Thank you for your extraordinary patience, and for reading this book so many times. Thanks to Holly Black, who suggested that I write a novel on purpose, rather than by accident, and to Cassandra Clare, who has provided many beautiful houses in which to work, as well as much sound advice. Thanks to all of the early readers who provided encouragement and asked helpful questions: Craig Laurence Gidney, Sofia Samatar, Steve Berman, Jedediah Berry, Emily Houk, Joshua Lewis, Robin Wasserman, Maureen Johnson, Sarah Rees Brennan, Barb Gilly, and Leigh Bardugo. Thanks to Sarah Pinsker for providing much-needed feedback from a musician’s point of view and for pointing me at various guitars. Thanks to Steve Ammidown for looking at this novel from the point of view of an archival librarian and fellow fan of the romance genre.
I’m so very grateful to my editor, Caitlin McKenna, for her enthusiasm, her painstaking care with edits, and her patience. This is a much better book because of your attention, and I promise the next one will be shorter.
Thank you to the MacArthur Foundation for a life-changing level of support. Thank you to the creative, solutions-minded, and hilarious staff who have kept Book Moon alive through three very interesting years: Laura, Kate, Jess, Beth, Diya, Jed, Andy, Ruth, Caroline, Franchie, Amanda, and Joey. It isn’t the smartest idea to take over a bookstore while you’re working on your first novel, but that’s what happened. Thanks to Mary Ruefle for a reading of John Cage that made me think about Cage as a magician. Thank you to Amanda Morrell (again) for tracking down permissions. Many thanks to Noah Eaker for acquiring this novel before I’d even figured out what I wanted it to be.
Love always to Gavin, always my first reader. I wouldn’t write books if I didn’t write them for you. All my love and gratitude to Jade and Annabel Link, for their good humor and for keeping the chickens and the dog (and me) happy.
There is a whole team of people at Random House that I’m so very glad I have on my side. Among them are the extraordinary Noa Shapiro, Andy Ward, Rachel Rokicki, Erica Gonzalez, Windy Dorrestyn, Maria Braeckel, Erin Richards, Madison Dettlinger, Caroline Cunningham, Benjamin Dreyer, Rebecca Berlant, Richard Elman, Michael Morris, Loren Noveck, Diana D’Abruzzo, Barb Jatkola, and Allison Merrill. Some of you I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in person, and some of you I’ve seen on Zoom. Every single one of you is a star in my book.
By Kelly Link
The Book of Love
White Cat, Black Dog
Get in Trouble
Pretty Monsters
Magic for Beginners
Stranger Things Happen
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (editor)
Trampoline (editor)
About the Author
Kelly Link is the author of White Cat, Black Dog; Get in Trouble, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; Magic for Beginners; Stranger Things Happen; and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have been published in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is also the co-owner of Book Moon, an independent bookstore in Easthampton, Massachusetts.
kellylink.net
BlueSky: @kellylink.bsky.social
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Kelly Link, The Book of Love
