No Two Persons

by Erica Bauermeister

she looked for a moment into his eyes. Too much in there, Alice thought. “Peter,” their father yelled from downstairs, and Peter startled. He looked at Alice and shook his head. “You get the world they give you, Alice,” he said, reaching for his backpack. “I’m sorry.” But he was wrong, Alice told herself. He had to be. Books, by their very existence, proved that.

When she had to go out in the real world, she watched for what people didn’t know they were telling you. She noted a hand playing with a necklace. An eyebrow, as an interrogative or a dismissal. The way little kids’ shoulders would turtle up near their ears when a bully was near. She listened, as well. To the pauses. The falters. The emotional floods of surprise or warmth or anger. She collected the stories she witnessed and wrote them in notebooks that she kept under her mattress.

Wandering is a gift given only to the lost.

How long had she and her mother been doing this? Miranda wondered. Since her father left? Her whole life? Their communication like neon signs with most of the letters burnt out. What got filled in was only what made sense to you. What fit the story you already knew, the story you needed, whether or not it was any good for you.

Guilt is easier to drown in than any ocean. In the margin she’d written a W. It was a small thing, but wasn’t that what marriages were, in the end? The ability to hear love in an exhalation, to see frustration in the twitch of a finger, forgiveness in a single letter of the alphabet. Oh, Abigail, he thought.

A child could make you love bone-deep, make you try to see further into another person than you ever thought possible, to understand who they were, what they needed, wanted. But with that astonishing depth of love came the realization that no one was doing the same for you. And that could make you lonely.

Books spoke to specific people for specific reasons, and it had everything to do with where they were in their lives.