When nobody is watching, my daughter steals books. She’s some kind of book stealing criminal actually, and she’s only five. She has shelves and shelves of them in her room, but she’s no longer interested in those books anymore. No, now she only wants the ones that don’t belong to her.
I should’ve seen this coming. Even as a baby, when I would read to her, she would grab at the corner of books and tug, pulling them beneath her blanket. At first, it was cute. Precious even. But if I tried to take a book away from her, she would get this crazed look in her eyes and start to cry, and not a normal cry, but one of those demonic Rosemary’s baby kind of cries, so loud and horrific that her face would turn different shades of blue. In order to make her stop, I would eventually give in, letting her keep the book with her in the crib, watching all night from a rocking chair in the corner to make sure she didn’t get a paper cut or poke out an eye or try to put it in her mouth. As it turns out, I was enabling her even then.
Today when I come home from work, she’s sitting on the floor in the living room, flipping through the pages of her latest heist. “Honey,” I ask her. “Don’t you want to play video games with your father?”
She shakes her head ‘no’ and goes on pretending to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which part of me thinks maybe she’s only doing to mock me because somehow she knows I only ever read the Cliffs Notes.
I used to think maybe all of this was just a stage that she would eventually grow out of it. But lately it’s gotten to the point where we can’t even walk by a book without her trying to run off with it like some kind of little literary junkie, and I’m not entirely sure what to do about it. Pretty early on, before I even had a chance to read them, she stole all of my parenting and childhood development books. I still haven’t found them. I’ve basically been going through this whole parenthood thing blind, and it’s quite likely that I’ve already managed to botch things up.
Later that evening, I ask my husband, “Where do you think she’s getting them all? Every time I turn around she has a new one in her hands.”
“The latest batch is from a garage sale next door. The neighbors called. Said she loaded up her toy wagon and took off before they could stop her.” He laughs. “I gave them five bucks, so they’re not pressing charges.”
I give him a look to let him know that this is not funny. But he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Well, do you know what your daughter was doing before that?” I ask my husband. “I got a call from her teacher today. Apparently, she snuck into the library at recess and stole Shakespeare’s Greatest Works.”
“Shakespeare, huh?” He smiles. “Isn’t that something?”
My husband is okay with the fact that our daughter steals books. He’s even a little proud of her. It’s a real point of contention between us, especially when he uses her criminal activity as a conversation starter, like our daughter is a future savant, a misunderstood kid genius forced by society to steal for her art. Sometimes I even overhear him bragging to people, often complete strangers, the UPS man maybe, saying things like: “She’s up to three books a day, our daughter. Can you believe it?” Or: “I think we’ve got the next Hemingway on our hands. You just wait and see.” And every now and then, he’ll say something really disturbing like: “She’s one step away from cutting her ear off, that one.”
I don’t like when he says these things. They keep me up at night. I toss and turn worrying that when no one is around my daughter will steal a book that is far too large for her. It will fall on top of her fragile body, tossing her backwards against the floorboards, pinning her beneath the binding, the weight crushing her little lungs until she cannot breathe. These are the kinds of thoughts that mothers have at 3AM when their child is a habitual book thief.
I come to realize that my daughter has several secret book stashes located around the house. I happen across them sometimes when I’m cleaning. There are books shoved in cupboards and under beds and inside closets and beneath piles of dirty laundry. I’ll be putting the groceries away in the pantry and positioned behind a couple cans of peas will be something like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. They’re everywhere.
I decide that I have no other choice than to hide nanny cams in various book stealing hot spots throughout the house. Then, in order to gauge the severity of her criminal instinct, I start creating little tests for her, which she usually fails miserably.
For today’s test, I place a twenty dollar bill, a box of chocolate bars, and a copy of The Odyssey on the floor in the living room. When my daughter walks through the front door, she grabs the book without hesitation and runs down the hallway to her bedroom, probably to examine her latest score. My husband swoops in behind her and pockets the money. I end up eating the entire box of chocolate bars by myself in the basement while reviewing some of the latest footage from the nanny cams. As it turns out, my daughter has been stealing a volume a day from the collection of Encyclopedia Britannica’s in the den. She’s already gotten away with 26 of the 32 volumes. We haven’t even finished paying for them yet. I eventually find them in her toy chest buried under some dolls and a sit and spin.
The next day at work, I get a call from the Elementary school. The principal needs to speak to me immediately. When I arrive, my daughter is sitting in a chair in the corner, her short legs dangling above the ground, swinging back and forth. She looks all innocent and angelic with her blonde pigtails and brown doe eyes. At first glance, she does not strike me as an underhanded criminal ready to pocket someone’s favorite novel as soon as they turn their back. But now I know better.
The principal explains to me that my daughter was caught again with a cubby full of stolen books. This is her third offense this month. He spreads the books out across his desk. Grapes of Wrath. Ulysses. Scarlet Letter. To Kill a Mockingbird. He informs me that she is now at a behavior alert level red. I don’t know what this means exactly, but I figure it can’t be good.
In a moment of conviction, I decide to defend my precious daughter. I stand and say, “Well, what kind of operation are you running over here anyway? Most of the books she steals are from the library here. Isn’t anyone paying attention to my daughter?”
He wrinkles his brow and leans forward. “Ma’am, I hate to say this, but maybe we’re not the problem,” he says, pointing behind me, where my daughter just so happens to be shoving a copy of Huckleberry Finn into her Dora the Explorer book bag.
When I get home, my husband and I have a meeting in the driveway to discuss our daughter’s behavior without her listening. “Maybe we should stage an intervention,” I say, pacing back and forth. “We could call in the grandparents. We could set up some tables in the backyard. Maybe my sister could cater.”
“Yeah, I guess.” My husband shrugs. “Whatever you think is best.”
“Or we could plan a stakeout,” I say. “Catch her in the act.”
My husband exhales loudly. “It’s just that, well, don’t you think maybe you’re overreacting a little about all of this?”
I shake my head. “Overreacting? If we don’t do something quick, the next thing we know she’ll be sneaking out of her bedroom window late at night, heading to some dirty, back alley, used book store looking to get a quick fix. Is that what you want for our daughter?”
He pulls at the hair on the back of his head. “Fine, I don’t know. I guess if we go the stakeout route, I could hide behind the bookcase. Jump out, you know. Try and scare her straight. I could rent a costume or something. Like a gorilla suit, maybe.”
“A gorilla suit? This is your big idea to save our thieving toddler?”
He throws his hands up in the air. “What do you want me to do? Rough her up a little bit. She’s just a kid.”
“She’s not just a kid,” I say. “She’s five. She reads at an advanced level. She knows things.”
“They’re only books,” he says.
“Only books? Ha! Those things are dangerous.”
I glance back towards the house and notice that my daughter is peering out the blinds in our bedroom. It’s hard to know how long she’s been watching us. Long enough, I decide. She’s probably in there reading our lips. She’s onto us. She grins and moves backwards from the window. It occurs to me then that I accidentally left out the John Grisham book I’ve been reading on the nightstand. At this very moment, she’s probably in there stealing it, taking it to some undisclosed location in the house. Now I’ll never know how it ends.
When we finally go back inside, I find her in the basement. Her toys all appear untouched. She is sitting cross-legged on the floor, flipping through the pages of The Bell Jar.
“How’s the book?” I ask her, my hands resting on my hips, my foot tapping. “Are you enjoying Sylvia Plath?”
Without taking her eyes off the page, she shrugs and says, “I don’t know. It’s kind of sad.”
Her Easy-Bake Oven is on the floor next to her. “I’m taking this,” I tell her, unplugging it and carrying it from the room. Before I walk back up the stairs, I turn and say, “Don’t get any ideas.”
I decide to attend a meeting in the cafeteria with some other concerned parents looking to ban books in the library. I lean over to the woman next to me and ask, “Is your daughter stealing books, too?” But she just gives me a dirty look and moves down a couple seats.
The woman leading the session motions in my direction and asks, “You there, what books do you think should be banned.”
I stand, leaning forward as though there is some kind of pretend microphone. “All of them,” I say. “Every last one of them.”
“Surely, you can’t have a problem with all of the books.”
“Well, I do, yes. They have all been a terrible influence on my daughter. I need for them to be stopped. The sooner the better actually.”
There are a few cheers behind me. A couple of fist pumps. One woman says, “Amen, sister.” Then, everyone starts calling out book titles. The Catcher in the Rye. Of Mice and Men. Lord of the Flies.
I slink back into my chair, looking down at my feet, knowing full well that my daughter has already stolen most of the books they’re listing. And it’s pretty clear that she has no intention of giving them back anytime soon.
I come home to find my husband burning leaves in the backyard. My daughter is on the swing set pretending to read Don Quixote. I don’t know what comes over me but I walk straight over to her and grab the book from her hands, tossing it into the burning pile of foliage. The book repels the flames at first, but then the pages start to catch, glowing orange at the edges, burning much slower than I would’ve imagined.
I look over at my daughter and lean forward. “There! Ha! What do you think of that?” I ask her.
She stares at me for a moment, her eyes wide and blinking quickly like she’s trying not to cry. Then, before walking back inside, probably to steal another book, she turns to me and says, “I think you would’ve really liked that one.”
Noelle Aleksandra Hufnagel received a BA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and is currently enrolled in the Fiction Writing MFA program at Columbia College Chicago. Her writing has appeared in the Allegheny Review, Story Week Reader, Zine Columbia, Hair Trigger and Fictionary.
