“Watch that mouth, young man.” A hand is being extended, and now I’m shaking that hand, and it belongs to a short, round woman with bleached yellow hair, warm eyes, and a crinkled-up face. “Faye Carnes.”
“Theodore Finch. Are you the mastermind behind this?” I nod at the line of bookmobiles.
“I am.” She walks, and I follow. “The county discontinued bookmobile service in the eighties, and I told my husband, ‘Now, that’s a shame. I mean, a true-blue shame. What’s going to happen to those trailers? Someone ought to buy them and keep them going.’ So we did. At first we drove them around town ourselves, but my husband, Franklin, he’s got a bad back, so we decided to plant them, just like corn, and let folks come to us.”
Mrs. Carnes leads me from trailer to trailer, and at each one I go up and in and explore. I pick through stacks of hardcovers and paperbacks, all of them well used and well read. I’m looking for something in particular, but so far I don’t see it.
Mrs. Carnes follows along, straightening the books, dusting off the shelves, and tells me about husband Franklin and daughter Sara, and son Franklin Jr., who made the mistake of marrying a girl from Kentucky, which means they never see him except at Christmas. She’s a talker, but I like her.
Violet finds us in trailer six (children’s), her arms full of classics. She says hello to Mrs. Carnes and asks, “How does this work? Do I need my library card?”
“You got the choice of buying or borrowing, but either way you don’t need a card. If you borrow, we trust you to bring them back. If you buy, we only take cash.”
“I’d like to buy.” Violet nods at me. “Can you reach the money in my bag?”
Instead, I pull out my wallet and hand Mrs. Carnes a twenty, which is the smallest I have, and she counts off the books. “That’s a dollar a book, times ten. I’m going to have to go up to the house to get change.” She’s gone before I can tell her to keep the money.
Violet sets the books down, and now I go with her to explore each trailer. We add a few more books to the pile, and at some point I catch her eye and she’s smiling at me. It’s the kind of smile you smile when you’re thinking someone over and trying to decide how you feel about them. I smile at her and she looks away.
Then Mrs. Carnes is back, and we argue about the change—I want her to keep it, she wants me to keep it, and finally I do because she absolutely won’t take no. I jog the books to the car while she talks to Violet. In my wallet I find one more twenty, and when I get back to the trailers, I duck into the first one and drop the twenty and the change into the old register that sits on a kind of makeshift counter.
A group of kids arrives, and we tell Mrs. Carnes good-bye. As we walk away, Violet says, “That was awesome.”
“It was, but it doesn’t count as a wandering.”
“It’s technically one more place, and that’s all we needed.”
“Sorry. Awesome as it is, it’s practically in our backyard, in the middle of your three-to-four-mile safe zone. Besides, it’s not about crossing things off a list.”
She is now walking several feet ahead, pretending I don’t exist, but that’s okay, I’m used to it, and what she doesn’t know is that it doesn’t faze me. People either see me or they don’t. I wonder what it’s like to walk down the street, safe and easy in your skin, and just blend right in. No one turning away, no one staring, no one waiting and expecting, wondering what stupid, crazy thing you’ll do next.
Then I can’t hold back anymore, and I take off running, and it feels good to break free from the slow, regular pace of everyone else. I break free from my mind, which is, for some reason, picturing myself as dead as the authors of the books Violet collected, asleep for good this time, buried deep in the ground under layers and layers of dirt and cornfields. I can almost feel the earth closing in, the air going stale and damp, the dark pressing down on top of me, and I have to open my mouth to breathe.
In a blur, Violet passes me, hair sailing behind her like a kite, the sun catching it and turning it gold at the ends. I’m so deep in my own head, accepting the thoughts, letting them come, that at first I’m not sure it’s her, and then I sprint to catch up, and run along beside her, matching my pace to hers. She’s off again, and we push ourselves so hard and fast, I expect to go flying off the earth. This is my secret—that any moment I might fly away. Everyone on earth but me—and now Violet—moves in slow motion, like they’re filled with mud. We are faster than all of them.
And then we’re at the car, and Violet is giving me a “so there, take that” look. I tell myself I let her win, but she’s beat me fair and square.
After we’re in and the engine is running, I toss her our notebook, the one we’re using to record our wanderings, and say, “Write it all down before we forget anything.”
“I thought this one didn’t count.” But she’s flipping through the pages.
“Humor me. Oh, and we’re hitting one more place on the way home.”
We’ve left the gravel and are cruising along on pavement again when she looks up from the notebook she’s now writing in. “I was so busy with the books, I forgot to leave something behind.”
“It’s okay. I did.”
VIOLET
145 days till liberation
He misses the turnoff, goes right over the grassy center to the other side, and climbs back onto the interstate, heading in the opposite direction. At some point, we exit onto a quiet country road.
We take this for a mile or so, and Finch has turned up the music and is singing along. He drums the beat on the steering wheel, and then we turn into this little town that is just a couple blocks long. Finch hunches over the dash and slows down to a crawl. “Do you see any street signs?”
“That one says ‘Church.’ ”
“Good. Brilliant.” He turns and, just a block later, pulls over to the curb and parks. “We’re here.” He’s out of the car and at my door, opening it, offering his hand. We’re walking toward this big old factory building that looks abandoned. I can see something along the wall, stretching for the entire length of it. Finch keeps going and comes to a sudden stop at the far end.
Before I die … it says on what looks like a giant chalkboard. And there below these giant white letters are column after column, line after line, that say Before I die I want to __________. And the blanks have been filled in with different colors of chalk, smudged and half melted from the rain and snow, in all different handwriting.