Page 3

A funeral home does, eventually, get in touch, but a memorial service is out of the question. Instead, David’s stunned family schedules a virtual wake, everyone’s faces confined to little boxes on a screen as if we’ve all been cast in some twisted episode of Hollywood Squares. After twice extending spring break, the college where I work declares itself closed. The lucky students decamp with their families to the Hamptons. The unlucky ones hunker down in solitary dorm rooms on the deserted campus. My department chair, informed of David’s death, excuses me from making the sudden switch to online teaching. Freaked-out students are given the option to pass or fail; I promise mine I’ll pass them all and just like that, my semester is over, weeks ahead of schedule.

One day I notice the date on my phone and wonder how March became April. When I run out of food, I order groceries delivered through some app I never heard of before. When I consume all my alcohol, I venture to the liquor store wearing a painter’s mask I have on hand from when I refinished the coffee table David and I found at a flea market. Lockdown spares me from awkward hugs and stilted visits from the few friends I’ve made in the city. I let calls of concern from colleagues go to voicemail, toss sympathy cards from acquaintances in the trash.

Dealing with the demoralizing deluge of documents that follows a man’s death saps what little energy I’m able to muster. The memoir about my mother I’m supposed to be writing stagnates in an unopened Word document. Instead, I spend hours on the internet, numbing my brain with mindless scrolling. Friends’ feeds overflow with inspiring quotes from beloved books, but I can’t focus my mind long enough to put together so much as a sentence. I haven’t updated anything since Valentine’s Day, when I posted a selfie of me and David sipping drinks at Nobu, an extravagant dinner date I doubted he could afford but that my husband insisted I deserved. In February, the post got lots of red-hearted likes. Since March, the comments are full of broken ones.

One bleak morning, a post pops up in which a friend has shared a link to an article in an online literary magazine. There’s a gorgeous photograph of an old barn sporting a weathered sign that reads red barn books. Beneath it, my friend has commented: Can you believe this? A hundred acres upstate is cheaper than a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment!

I click on the article. “Have you ever wanted to own a bookshop in a barn?” the title reads. “Now’s your chance!” It tells the story of a woman named Evelyn Cabot who started a business selling used books out of a barn on the farm she bought back in the 1950s. The bookshop closed five years ago, it says, when Evelyn went into a nursing home. She passed away over the winter and the store is now for sale. The article has a link to a real estate listing. Desperate for a few more moments of distraction, I follow it.

I’m not taken to Zillow or Redfin or any of the other slick sites. Rather, I land on the clunky web page of a small-town real estate agency. The commercial listing for “Red Barn Bookshop on Ridgetop Road in Schuywich, New York” contains a series of photographs of a simple nineteenth-century Greek Revival farmhouse surrounded by fields and woodlands with a sunrise view of blue hills across a misty valley. There are dimly lit images of a big barn filled with shelves of books. Mesmerized, I scroll through the pictures on a loop—house, field, woods, hills, barn, books—until the images seem like photographic evidence of a fantasy world, as if a roll of film had been smuggled back from Narnia.

“Enough,” I say, shutting my laptop. Instead of catching virtual glimpses of the outside world, what I ought to do is get out of this tomb of an apartment. I lace up my sneakers and walk to Central Park, entering through the Artists’ Gate. It’s cooler today than it was on campus a month ago, the air fresh and the squirrels frisky. Picnickers are scattered across the Sheep Meadow, their blankets spaced six feet apart. Along the Mall, pedestrians give one another a wide berth as cherry blossoms swirl like out-of-season snowflakes. My stiff knees ache as I roam the looping paths of the Ramble. Crossing the Oak Bridge, I rest against the railing and gaze at the lake’s still waters. It’s a pretty scene, but Olmsted’s illusion of nature is shattered by downtown skyscrapers that serrate the horizon.

What the hell am I doing here? I wonder. Not here in the park but in this city. It seems like all the people I know have fled to Hudson Valley cabins or family farmsteads in Vermont. If my dad were still alive, he’d have welcomed me home to Kenosha, where I could sit on the bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan, miles of blue water melting into a distant horizon. But the house I grew up in belongs to someone else now, my inheritance nothing more than numbers in a bank account.

“What the hell am I doing here?” This time I say it out loud. I never intended to make Manhattan my home. The job that brought me here was temporary, at first, a lecturer position meant to last a year, two at most. The only reason I applied for the tenure-track position was to appease David. My husband had become a Dubliner, a New Yorker, a city boy through and through who couldn’t imagine living anywhere else in America. But I grew up under the prairie skies of Wisconsin, loved the years I spent among Iowa’s endless fields, missed hiking the Sierra Nevada’s wild canyons. I could have compromised on a fixer-upper in one of those artsy towns along the Hudson, but David flat-out refused to consider moving north of Inwood Hill Park. “If I wanted to live in the middle of nowhere,” he’d say, dramatically exaggerating the distance to Tarrytown or Irvington, “I’d have stayed home and taken over the sheep farm as my da wanted me to.”

My husband is no longer here to help me see the magic in Manhattan. The city where we met is the epicenter of the pandemic that killed him. The four walls of the apartment we called home have become a solitary confinement. Trapped within them, all I see are the empty places where David ought to be, constant reminders that I’ll never again feel his touch or smell his scent or hear the scrape of his key in the lock. Instead, I’m left to dread the day when a box containing his ashes will be delivered to my door.

Looking down at the stream burbling below the bridge, I wonder if it’s deep enough for drowning. When my mother took her own life, she left behind a ten-year-old daughter and a devoted husband. Her choice was a betrayal that broke my heart into pieces that still haven’t healed. I never understood how she could have been so cruel to the ones she claimed to love. Even on my darkest days, it made the notion of following in her footsteps unfathomable to me. But now? There’s no one left in this wide world who’d miss me if I died.

Terrified by these intrusive thoughts, I jolt back from the railing just as a bicyclist whizzes over the bridge. Cursing, he weaves to avoid me. I watch him wobble downhill, unable to regain his balance. His shoes are still clipped in when his bike goes down, dumping him onto the asphalt path. He lies there, unmoving. I’m scared he’s concussed, or worse. Neither of us is masked, so instead of running over to help I settle for lamely calling out, “Are you okay?”

“Fuck you, lady!” he yells from flat on his back. With that, he disentangles himself, picks up the bike, and limps away.

My heart is beating so fast I can barely breathe. I tell myself to calm down, that I didn’t kill the guy. It is my fault he fell, though, isn’t it? In fact, isn’t it all my fault? I may not have driven my mom to suicide, or given my dad cancer, or purposefully abandoned David on that sidewalk, but lack of intention doesn’t change the fact that everyone who’s ever loved me is dead. Now I’ve nearly killed some random stranger. Clearly, my zone of catastrophe reaches well beyond six feet of social distance. The best thing I can do, my irrational brain announces with biblical authority, is hide myself away someplace where I can’t hurt anyone else.

I begin the long walk home, eschewing the false idyll of the park in favor of a straight shot down Tenth Avenue. With each passing block, the idea of isolation tightens its grip on my imagination. For the first time in my life, I empathize with the religious fervor that drove medieval anchorites to brick themselves into squalid cubbyholes. After being stuck in the city during lockdown, though, what I want isn’t less space but more. Much more.

Back on my couch with a glass of gin, I pull up the property listing for Red Barn Books. I envision myself walking across that wide lawn between the house and the barn, strides longer and arms spread wider than is possible in my tiny, tragic apartment. I hear the rusty squeal of the barn door rolling open. I smell the intoxicating scent of foxed paper. I feel my fingers brush dust from embossed leather covers. I imagine the hoard of words amassed like the treasure of a slumbering dragon, waiting for my sad eyes to bring them back to life. Or maybe it’s the other way round, I think. Maybe there’s a story in that barn full of books that will teach me how to live again.

I call the agent’s number the way a kid waves a wand and says “abracadabra”—secretly hopeful but fully expecting nothing to happen. I’m actually surprised to hear a human voice bluntly say, “Tate Realty, this is Rhonda Tate.”

“Yes, hi, my name is Audrey Beacon. I’m calling about Red Barn Books?”

“I figured,” Rhonda says, sighing. “I’ve been fielding calls all day since that article came out. I’ll tell you what I’ve been telling everyone else. The property is being held in trust. There’s a stipulation it only be sold to someone who plans to revive the business, not just renovate the house, which is why the listing is commercial, not residential.”

“That makes sense,” I say, amazed to be having this surreal conversation.

“It’d be a waste of my time and yours to show you the place if you can’t meet the terms of the trust.” Sounding impatient to get off the phone if my answer is no, Rhonda asks, “Tell me, Audrey, are you seriously interested in owning a bookshop?”

Spurred by the question, my mind gallops along neural pathways, chasing connections. My life is dedicated to books: reading them and teaching them and writing them, too. I’ve found refuge in bookstores and given readings in bookstores and pulled beloved volumes from shelves in bookstores and scribbled in my journal while sitting cross-legged on the floor of bookstores, so yes, I think, gathering all these loose threads into a neat bundle. Yes, I am. At least, I could be.

“It’s been my dream since childhood,” I lie.

“In that case,” Rhonda says, papers shuffling in the background, “I’ve got time tomorrow. Does ten o’clock work for you?”

“Tomorrow?” I should try waving a wand more often, I think as I check the maps on my phone to see how long it takes to drive to Schuywich. “How about ten thirty?”

“Okay, Audrey, I’ll see you then. Oh, and bring a checkbook. Like I said, I have a lot of interest in this listing. If you like what you see, you’ll want to be ready to make an offer.”

As I search through drawers for the starter checks I got when I opened a local bank account, I’m dimly aware that the decision-making synapses in my brain have probably short-circuited. The last thing I should be doing so soon after losing David is making impulsive, life-changing choices. But staying in Manhattan without my husband feels like a death sentence. Maybe a bookshop in a barn in a small village in upstate New York is the perfect place to hide out from a world I don’t recognize anymore.

Chapter 3

“A Woman’s Place” by Evelyn Cabot

Mademoiselle, September 1956