Page 28 of The Paradox Club

“Do you mind if I move some of these things?” Tess asked Vivian.

“Get rid of the lot as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been meaning to clean off those shelves myself for years. Just never got around to it. Do you need any help? I don’t have any Monday classes.”

“I’ll be fine,” lied Tess.

“I’ll be downstairs in my study if you need anything.”

By midday Tess had emptied and dusted the shelves, sweeping their contents into a dozen heavy-duty garbage bags, which she stacked by the street for the next day’s collection. Every time she carried a bag downstairs, she carried a box of books upstairs. That still left thirty more boxes to lug up the steps, and by the tenth box she was beginning to resent the high ceilings in the house that meant the staircase felt endlessly long. The voices never stopped pestering her, but their volume dropped as she worked.

“Are you sure it’s okay to unpack them all?” asked Tess as she and Vivian shared lunch at the kitchen counter.

“Tess, Harry was special to me, too. I’m glad Marie has found someone and is finally moving on. She’s a woman who takes grief very seriously. So, I’m happy about David and Florida and all the rest of it. But I still miss Harry. Walking past his books every day, being able to pick one off the shelf and read it and look at his marginalia—that’s a great gift to me, a wonderful reminder of my old friend.”

An hour after lunch, Tess had emptied ten of the boxes and arranged the books in alphabetical order by author, leaving plenty of gaps for the rest. She had hoped that beginning this task of ordering would fully quiet the voices, but it did not. Maybe she hadn’t arranged them the right way. Maybe they should be in alphabetical order by title. Or arranged by height. Or color. Or page count. She could spend the rest of her life arranging and rearranging these books and still not protect Vivian. As puzzled as she was by the question of organization, she was equally nonplussed by some of the books themselves. Of course, her father had volumes by every physicist from Newton to Feynman. Naturally he had biographies of Tesla and Einstein and books about NASA and SETI and books on calculus and astronomy. It made sense to find works of fiction like Flatland and even His Dark Materials. But what about The Pantyhose Craft Book? Why did he have a Harlequin romance called Once Is Not Enough? What on earth did the great astrophysicist Harry Maxwell need with a book on the history of Lithuanian pastry making? In Lithuanian?

Tess found dozens of books that didn’t seem to belong and considered leaving them out—like bastard points in a scientific experiment. Surely, she thought, her mother had added these books in by accident or maybe they had been left in the house by visitors. But for now, she kept them on the shelves, not daring to guess which were Harry’s books and which were intruders. The strangest book was a copy of Darwin’s The Descent of Man—a one-volume edition from 1874. Nothing particularly odd about that title in the library of a scientist, even if Harry was an astrophysicist not an evolutionary biologist. But on both the title page and the spine the name Darwin was spelled with a double n. Darwinn. Tess had looked it up on her phone to be sure she wasn’t remembering it wrong, but there it was on Wikipedia: Charles Darwin. One n. A typographical error, perhaps? But how bizarre for the same error to be repeated in two places. Shaking her head, she slipped it onto the shelf between works by e. e. cummings and Humphry Davy.

From the top of the next box, she withdrew a tattered nineteenth-century copy of Beowulf. Harry had loaned her this very copy to read when she was eleven and school had been canceled due to a blizzard. He usually only gave Tess books to read in the summertime, when the long days stretched before her like the smooth surface of the lake. “But Beowulf isn’t for summer,” he had said. “This is a story for a dark winter day.”

“I like Grendel,” Tess said when she had finished the book.

“Why Grendel?” her father asked.

“Haven’t you ever been to a birthday party where everyone was laughing and having fun and you just wanted to sit quietly and think?”

“Have you?” Marie asked, looking up from her own book.

“Listen to this,” Tess said, turning to a page she had dog-eared. “‘The troop of nobles knew not sorrow, the wretchedness of men. They knew not aught of misfortune.’ That’s why Grendel attacked them. I mean, he probably shouldn’t have killed thirty of them, but still, I can understand why he felt upset.”

Later, Tess snuck out of bed to eavesdrop on her parents.

“What was that all about?” Marie asked. “Should we be worried about Tess? Is she depressed?”

“I think it was the boy who drove into the lake,” Harry said. “She’s been acting more serious ever since that happened.”

“Do you think we should get her some help?”

“She’ll be fine,” said Harry.

Too bad, the voices in Tess’s head said—voices she had not yet learned to consider as both friends and enemies. You could probably use a therapist.

Now, n + 1 therapists later, Tess looked at the volume of Beowulf, the page still dog-eared where she had turned down the corner over a decade ago. Where should she shelve it? The author was anonymous, but scholars referred to him as the Beowulf Poet, so she could file it under B. John Kemble had translated this edition, published in London in 1837, so she could place it next to Kepler’s Astronomia Nova. But as she stood before the shelves, hesitating between B and K, Tess felt neither was right. Suddenly the whole idea of alphabetical authors seemed misguided. Arrange them properly, the voices chimed, or something bad will happen to Vivian. But what did they mean by properly? Had Tess rushed into the task of organizing the books too quickly without giving full consideration to the scheme of organization?

She went downstairs, still clutching Beowulf, and borrowed a sheet of notebook paper and a pencil from Vivian. Standing at the kitchen counter, eating a handful of stale pretzels, she began a list:

Ways to Arrange Harry Maxwell’s Books

By author

By title

By year of publication

By place of publication

By height

By color