The Borrowed Notes

Oliver Brice landed in Reykjavik on a Friday in late October, thirty-four years old and feeling every single one of them. His colleague Gunnar had offered him the house-sit over email, all caps and exclamation points, the way Gunnar wrote everything. "A MONTH IN ICELAND! JUST FEED THE CAT!" Oliver had said yes before he even thought about it, which was new for him. His divorce had been final two years ago, back when he was thirty-two, and since then his life had been mostly work and takeout and a couch that had a dent shaped exactly like him.

So here he was, in a cozy suburban house on the edge of Reykjavik, feeding a cat named Mjolnir who hated him slightly more each day.

"You're a terrible cat," he told Mjolnir on day three. "I hope you know that."

The cat blinked at him and knocked a coaster off the table. Fair enough.

Gunnar had also handed him a key to the Reykjavik Curling Club, of all things. "I'm a member!" Gunnar had explained. "Go use the lounge! Watch the curling! It's very relaxing." Oliver had never seen a curling match in his life, but he figured a month of new things was sort of the point of the whole trip.

He went on the Thursday. The club sat on a quiet street, all wood and windows, warm light spilling out onto the pavement. Inside it smelled like coffee and cold air, which sounded impossible but there it was. The rink stretched out under white lights, and four people were sweeping furiously at a sliding stone while someone yelled "SWEEP! SWEEP!" like their life depended on it.

Oliver stood there in his jacket, feeling like a tourist at a church service.

"You must be Gunnar's friend," a voice said.

A woman was walking toward him from the lounge door. She was thirty-five or so, tall, with short red hair and the kind of energy that made you feel like you'd already been friends for a year. "I'm Elly Devlin, I teach the curling classes. Gunnar said you'd come."

"That's me. Oliver Brice." He shook her hand. "I've never seen curling in my life, just so you know."

"Oh, that's the best way to start." Elly laughed. "No bad habits. Come on, I'll show you around. Then you can sit in the lounge and pretend to understand what's happening on the ice. Everybody does it."

The lounge turned out to be the best room Oliver had been in for years. Wood paneled, cluttered with trophies, a big leaky sofa by the window, a kettle that looked older than the building. There was something about it that made him want to stay for hours. He hadn't wanted to stay anywhere for hours in a long time.

"Make yourself at home," Elly said, pointing him at the sofa. "I've got a lesson in twenty minutes, but the coffee's decent and the company improves after five."

And that's when he mentioned the locker, because it seemed polite to ask.

"So Gunnar said I could poke around a bit. There's a locker in the back hallway with my name on a tag."

"Oh, that's the guest locker." Elly waved a hand. "Half the stuff in there belongs to nobody. Take whatever's useful."

Well. That was the sentence that started the whole trouble, though Oliver didn't know it yet.

He found the locker open, and inside, shoved behind a stack of old winter hats, was an accordion. A real one, dusty, red, with mother-of-pearl buttons that caught the light. It had a paper tag tied to the handle that said, in faded handwriting, "FOR THE LIBRARY SALE?"

Oliver stared at it. He knew nothing about accordions. This one looked heavy and sad and possibly broken, and he thought, with the logic of a man who hadn't had an adventure in a decade, that it would be fun to have a weird old instrument in the house for a month. Something to laugh at. Something to poke at on boring evenings.

He took it home. He genuinely thought it was junk.

That night he watched YouTube videos about accordions until one in the morning and made sounds out of it that sent Mjolnir under the bed permanently. It was the most fun he'd had in years, and he was terrible at it, which somehow made it better.

Two days later he was back at the club, and that's when everything got complicated in the best way.

He walked into the lounge and Elly was there, but she wasn't alone. There was a woman at the big table by the window, dark hair in a loose bun, writing on a clipboard with the fierce concentration of someone doing math they didn't like. She looked up when Oliver came in.

"Oliver," Elly said, in a tone he would later describe as suspiciously cheerful. "Perfect timing. Oliver, this is Keri Danner. She runs the planetarium at the science museum. Keri, this is Gunnar's friend from Canada, the house-sitter."

"Hello," Keri said, and something lingered in her voice, a sort of tired brightness. "Are you musical, by any chance?"

"Absolutely not," Oliver said honestly.

"Good answer, actually. Nobody musical ever donates anything." She sighed and looked at her clipboard. "I'm collecting instruments for the library. The one on the east side, the one they're going to close in March if the council doesn't change its mind. We're doing a fundraiser, a concert night, and we auction off donated instruments and everybody performs something. It's going brilliantly badly."

"Oh no, the library," Oliver said, sitting down uninvited, because the sofa was right there and his legs had made the decision. "What happened?"

"What always happens. Budgets." Keri shrugged, but her eyes stayed serious. "The city says the building costs too much. So we have a town hall meeting in three weeks and we need to make so much noise that they can't pretend nobody cares. Hence the concert. Hence the instruments. Hence the clipboard."

"The accordion," Elly said suddenly, from the kitchen doorway, with the timing of a woman who had been waiting all day for this. "Keri, didn't you say you were short one accordion?"

Keri looked up. "I did say that, yes. Someone donated a banjo and a tuba but nobody's seen an accordion in weeks." Then she looked at Oliver, and Oliver felt his face do something guilty, because it absolutely was doing something guilty.

"Ah," Keri said slowly. "Oliver. Why did your face just do that?"

"What? Nothing. My face is fine."

"Oliver." Elly was grinning now, leaning on the doorframe, absolutely delighted. "You've gone the color of the rink. What do you know about an accordion?"

And the truth was, Oliver could have lied. He really could have. But Keri was looking at him with one eyebrow up and the corner of her mouth twitching, and something about her made lying feel like a waste of a perfectly good moment.

"Okay, so," he said. "Two days ago I opened the guest locker, and there was this old red accordion in there, and it had a tag on it that said 'for the library sale?' with a question mark, and I thought it was abandoned junk, and I took it home."

There was a silence.

"You took it," Keri said.

"I took it."

"From the club."

"From the locker. Which Elly said I could empty."

"I said take whatever's useful," Elly protested, and then ruined it by starting to laugh. "I meant like a spare scarf. Not our mysterious mystery accordion."

"It has a question mark on the tag," Oliver said. "The question mark made it ambiguous."

Keri put down her clipboard and pressed both hands over her face, but Oliver could see her shoulders shaking, and when she lowered her hands she was laughing too, a real laugh, the kind that made the two men playing cards at the far table look over.

"You are the worst burglar in Reykjavik," she said. "You stole an accordion and then walked back into the building you stole it from and told on yourself."

"In my defense, I didn't know it was stolen until about ninety seconds ago."

"So it's a good thing," Elly said, wiping her eyes, "that the burglar is here now. Keri, this solves your problem. The accordion comes back, it goes in the concert, and Oliver plays it."

"Oh no," Oliver said immediately. "No no no. I've had it two days. I sound like a walrus falling down stairs."

"Perfect," Keri said, and she was smiling at him in a way that made his chest do something unfamiliar. "The whole night is amateurs. That's the point. It's charming when it's terrible. Oliver, listen, please, come back, the accordion I mean, and honestly, stay. We need all the help we can get before the town hall meeting. Posters, phone calls, whatever you're good at."

"I write software," Oliver said.

"Even better. You can make us a website that four people will visit."

"Six," Elly said. "Be generous."

Oliver looked at Keri, at the clipboard covered in her cramped writing, at the leaky window and the old kettle and the whole warm ridiculous room, and felt something he hadn't felt since he was twenty-six and the world was still full of doors.

"Okay," he said. "The accordion comes back. And I'll help. But if I play that thing in public, I want it on the record that I warned everyone."

Keri grinned and stuck out her hand across the clipboard. "Deal, terrible burglar."

He shook it. Her hand was warm and her grip was firm, and Elly, watching them both, made a small satisfied noise into her coffee that Oliver chose, generously, to ignore.

Keri Danner was thirty-four years old and she ran the planetarium at the science museum, which she announced to Oliver on the walk back across the parking lot like it was a confession.

"It's the smallest planetarium in the country," she said. "Which is fitting, because the library we're fighting for is the smallest library in the country. We collect small things, apparently."

"Small things and stolen accordions," Oliver said.

"Stolen accordions," she agreed. "Come by the house tomorrow? The one you're haunting? I want to see where the crime scene is."

So the next evening, which was a Sunday, Keri knocked on the door of Gunnar's suburban house at seven sharp, and Mjolnir the cat bolted under the couch, and Oliver let her in feeling like a man about to be audited.

"It's cozy," she said, looking around at Gunnar's enormous wool blankets and the shelf of mystery novels nobody had ever sorted. "Gunnar always had terrible taste in lamps and excellent taste in houses. Where's the prisoner?"

Oliver fetched the red accordion from the spare room, and Keri took it from him and turned it over in her hands like it was a rescued animal.

"Oh, it's a beauty. Mother-of-pearl buttons and everything. Hello, you." She looked up. "Can I make coffee? I need coffee. Icelandic coffee, the kind that strips paint."

"It's Gunnar's kitchen. He told me to use anything."

She made coffee that could genuinely have been classified as a chemical, and they sat at the kitchen table with the accordion between them like a guest of honor, and she told him the whole thing.

"Okay, so. The east side library. It's been there since before I was born, my mother took me, whatever. And the council says the building costs too much to keep open past March. So we have three weeks to make the whole city look at them and say, hey, what are you doing?" She wrapped both hands around her mug. "We've got a petition, we've got the concert night, we've got old Mr. Halldor writing angry letters to the paper every single week, God bless him. What we don't have is anything that looks modern. The council members are going to sit there and see a bunch of people with paper flyers, and they're going to nod, and then they're going to close the library anyway."

Oliver put down his mug. "What do you mean by modern?"

"Like, slides? Pictures? Numbers? Something that shows how many people use the place and what it would actually cost to keep it versus what we'd lose. I have all the information, it's just sitting in a folder on my laptop looking like homework."

"I could build you a presentation," Oliver said. "That's genuinely most of my job. Making numbers look like they mean something."

Keri stared at him. "You're telling me the burglar is also useful?"

"Don't oversell it."

"No, seriously. Oliver. That could actually matter. That's the difference between the council sighing and the council actually listening." She was leaning forward now, both elbows on the table, and the look on her face made Oliver feel about eight feet tall. "Will you really?"

"I said I'd help. I meant it."

"Okay. Okay. Come by the museum Monday, after close. I'll have the dome to myself and I'll have all the files and I make very good coffee." She stood, gathered her coat, and paused at the door with the accordion hugged to her chest. "The accordion stays with me tonight. It's evidence."

"It's evidence of what?"

"Of you being a good person who did a dumb thing and fixed it. That's rare. Night, burglar."

And then she was gone, and Mjolnir came out from under the couch, and Oliver sat there for a while with paint-stripper coffee in his cup, grinning at nothing like he was a complete fool.

Monday night the museum was empty and echoing, and Keri met him at the side door with two coffees and a laptop bag. She led him down a hallway and up a short stair and then through a heavy dark door, and then the ceiling opened up.

"Whoa," Oliver said, which was not a word he used often.

"Yeah," Keri said. "That's the general reaction."

The dome rose above them, pale and huge, and the floor was scattered with the kind of folding chairs that exist in every school in the world. Keri set her coffee down on the control desk, woke up the projector, and the ceiling filled with stars.

"So this is my office," she said. "Literally. I sit in that chair and press buttons and occasionally explain to school children that no, the stars are not holes."

"That's the best office I've ever seen and I'm furious."

"Right? I know." She flopped into the operator's chair and spun it toward him. "Okay, files. I warn you, my organization system is three folders named New Folder, New Folder 2, and Final."

"Final is never final," Oliver said solemnly. "Nobody's Final is ever final."

They worked for two hours, and it was strange how easy it was. She talked fast and he built fast, and they argued about charts, and she won two of the arguments on pure volume. Somewhere past ten Oliver realized his neck hurt and they'd been leaning into each other over the keyboard for twenty minutes without either of them noticing.

"Okay, look at this," Keri said, and hit a key, and the whole presentation collapsed into the dome instead of the little preview window. Their slides floated over the ceiling, charts and photos of the library glowing among the stars, and