A father, a daughter and the curious case of the secret library

When I was a little, I came across a secret library in our home.

Before we get to that, maybe I should tell you a little bit about my family. I am an only child who grew up in the rural countryside along with my mother. I say mother because my father never came home when I was around five. He often went away for long periods of time, but he always came back…until one day he didn’t.

On the occasions he returned, he would tell me that it was because he was an explorer and he had to go off on a magical quest. Mum was never happy about it, but these quests were usually the tales he would tell as he tucked me into bed at night, allowing me to drift off in a world of magic, wonder and impossible things.

The stories disappeared when he did, and mum said that this was around the time I began creating my own worlds. That’s when I found the library underneath our staircase.

It was just like any old library; nothing about it seemed wicked or enchanted, not like they are in the fairy tales. Although, there was one thing that made it different. In the middle of the room, sat in a plush looking armchair…was my father. Despite knowing in my small heart that this couldn’t be, I did what all small children did when they missed a parent.

I ran straight into his arms and asked him just one question.

“Daddy, could you tell me a story?”

I wondered if he would tell me about his latest quest that kept him for so long this time. Did he have to find a magical item? Did he have to sail the seas and battle a Kraken? Did he get stuck behind some magic veil?

He never told me. Instead, he pulled out a book that I had never read before; The Hobbit, written by J.R.R Tolkien.

Before I could ask for one of his own tales, my father’s reading did what it had always been able to do. It transported me into a completely new world, and I learned about how a hobbit chose to go on an adventure to help a group of dwarves take back their home from a fire-breathing dragon. It was filled with bravery, danger, and everything I had come to expect from my father’s stories.

When he finished reading, he just said, “My father read this book to me as a young boy. Now the adventure is yours”.

“But dad, why did you not tell me one of your own adventures this time?”, was all I could ask.

My father just smiled, tapped me on the forehead and said: “Some things are better left to your imagination”.

And with that, I knew the story was over. I wanted to ask him if he would tuck me into bed again, but he was gone by the time I looked back. When I told everyone about the hidden library underneath the staircase, it had vanished. Naturally, my mother brushed it off as child’s play. Sometimes adults struggle to believe in the whims of magic and the truth of children.

Everyone played the library off as a fantastical dream by a child missing their father and, over the years, I often thought so to. Except, I remember standing in the hallway, right next to the cupboard underneath the stairs with a perfectly bound copy of The Hobbit tucked underneath my arm.

~~

Eventually, as what happens to all small children, I grew up.

Despite growing taller, I never did manage to outgrow my love for books and adventure. Which is why, like my father before me, I became an explorer. While I have encountered no real dragons, sorcerers or even hobbits on my exploits, I have created my own tales.

But it’s in ‘hidden’ and ‘abandoned’ locations that I have a knack for. There’s something about discovering the unknown that has always appealed to the child in me. Mum always said it was because I was looking for my father in my own way, but she never witnessed the wonder of a secret library appearing to her. To her, it was just a dusty old cupboard that was used by her imaginative, if slightly odd, daughter.

Maybe that’s why I was returning home…because I wanted to see that damned library.

When people dream up magic libraries or hidden places, it’s always because of they are looking for an escape from reality. Mines always seemed a lot more wondrous and real at the same time. It’s funny, we spend most of our lives looking for adventure, only to find that there is always something back home to be worth exploring.

That’s why I now find myself sitting in mum’s kitchen. With its familiar buttermilk yellow walls and high wooden beams, the cottage is a familiar setting for my wandering heart that is always pulled between leaving and staying. As I stare out the window, I am met with the familiar dark abyss off the forest that was once said to be the home of a child-snatching witch.

“You know the story about the witch was never real?”

It was as though my mother could see into my mind and understand exactly what thoughts pooled in my head as only a parent could. “You have always loved to daydream. You’re just like your father that way”.

Dad might not have lived in this home for years but the memory of him still haunts these walls. I see parts of him reflected in me and I know my mother must see it too, as she just kisses me on the forehead with a sad smile as she says, “don’t stay up too late”.

Maybe it was the poignant look my mother gave me when she talked about dad, or maybe it was being back in a reality where his absence cast a large shadow. Whatever it was, I made my way to the cupboard under the stairs, opened the door and was met with the hidden library once again.

What should be a rickety old cupboard filled with knick-knacks of a time gone-by are shelves laden with books that are packed with so many stories I have yet to read. I know I should question how it was all possible, but all sense and reason abandon me when I see my father sitting in that same armchair in the middle of the room.

Years may have passed, but it is as though time stands still in whatever pocket of the universe the library is nestled in. He still looks exactly as he did, with those same warm eyes that crinkled slightly at the sides. Meanwhile, I had grown taller and a little older, but I would always continue to feel small in the eyes of a parent.

“Why are you here, dad?”, I ask softly. I may believe in all things impossible, but this time I know that magic cannot be all there is too it. “Where have you been?”

My father observes me as though I am still a small child who curled up next to him while he read his stories. Maybe here, in our shared universe, I am still the same child he left behind all those years ago.

“Let me tell you a story”, is all he says.

“I don’t want a story, I want answers. I need answers”, I respond, slowly making my way into the library to sit in the sumptuous armchair across from him.

“You see this library here”, he gestures to the entire room and the pages of books filled with worlds around us. “They contain all the answers all you need. Stories always do”.

I want to sigh, I want to huff, I want to stamp my feet. I want to be a child who never got to rage at her father for abandoning her.

Then I remembered The Hobbit and its tale of a seemingly ordinary man who went on a very unordinary journey. This story was apparently told by my grandfather, and, for a moment, I wonder if this was his way of giving me a piece of him.

“Alright then”, I sigh. “Tell me a story, dad".

His eyes lighten up then, the same way they used to when he would tell his bedtime stories to a young girl who he once tucked safety into bed.

This time, set on his lap was a different book; Peter Pan by J.M Barrie.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had read this book numerous times well into my teen years. The spine on my edition cracked and worn with use, while the one in his hands looked like a brand-new edition. Instead, I let myself immerse myself in Neverland and let my father read a few chapters. Afterward, I found myself asking him.

“Did you go to Neverland, dad?”

I spent my life exploring impossible things and I wonder if dad discovered this impossible place, with its pixie dust, pirates, and Lost Boys. As I look at him, he looks like the same man in some of our old family photos, and I want to ask if he has been stuck in eternity since he left.

“My parents used to fight all the time when I was a boy”. I never met my grandparents from his side, which was just another mystery about him. “When I was little, I ran away. So far, far away and I wanted to keep running”.

And as I looked at my father, I wondered if this man who loved books, adventures and childish things ever really grew up, like the way I was.

All I could do, was just ask him one more question. “Did you ever want to stay here?”

At that, he just smiles and kisses me on the forehead. Once again, I know that the story is over for another time.

~~

That’s how it goes for the next few years. I go off on my adventures, yet I always come home to my father.

I realize that being faced with a secret library that only one can see would be a cause for concern for many. When it disappeared, everyone including the doctors said it was my ‘active imagination’. I just said that magic could be found in any corner of the world if we just went looking for it and accepted it.  

It began to take a toll on my mum, though. I could tell she was worried about me every time I returned, because she never did find the same library as me, nor our father. I always thought it was because, in some weird way, I felt closer with my father and our shared love of stories.

“You remind me so much of your father”, she said once and, this time, I could see the sadness. The worry. I knew, in her heart, she meant, “when you are home, it’s like you’re not really here. You’re just another ghost chasing a shadow of someone else".

Maybe she thought I would leave her as well. Would I became another ghost in the walls?

I didn’t know how I could explain to her that the library was my way of beginning to understand a man who had long been part of my childhood. How he had went off on a curious adventure like Bilbo Baggins and that he struggled to grow up, much like me.

When we read about Alice in Wonderland, I figure out that my dad was a man who looked at the world through a curious, childlike gaze. The Railway Children made me realize that his father left him when he was younger, leaving him to be raised by his mother. As it turned out, me and him had more in common than we thought.

Eventually, my mum began to query further about the hidden library and my work as an explorer: “Do you think you are looking for your father in places because you never got over him leaving as a child?”

Then it hit me that, despite all the books we had shared in the secret library between the two of us, my father hadn’t shared much beyond children’s stories. In the end, I had become homesick for a man I barely knew beyond being a five-year old with a wild imagination.

So, when the library made one more appearance that night when my mum was once again tucked in bed, I knew that something would be different this time. I could sense something in the way the magic wavered.

Once again, there was my father in that plush looking armchair. He still looked the same. He always did in my eyes. The last image of a man through the eyes of a five-year-old who never saw him again.  

“Why do you only appear to me”, I cried out.

“Because you’re like me. You have always relied on your imagination to get away from the grown-up world”, he answered truthfully, and it was like he was finally really looking at me.

“I don’t understand”, I said. “Why are you only ever appearing here and nowhere else?”

At that, when my father gazed at me, I choked back a sob, as I realized that he still saw me as that five-year-old who waiting for him to come home. That’s why we always read children’s books, because he does not see me as the adult women I have become. He never did and never will.

A sliver of regret begins to show in his eyes. “I had one last adventure in me. I needed to see my daughter one last time. To share with her everything about me in the only way I can”.

Like all the times before, I knew that the story was over…and I wanted to hug my dad one last time. I wanted to ask him to stay. I wanted the library to stay. But, something told me that I could finally breathe now he had said goodbye.  

When I checked the next morning, the library under the staircase was gone. There were no shelves filled with books, nor was there my father. He was gone, as he always was. This time, I knew he wasn’t coming back.

Like many people when they are presented with a piece of magic, they want to dissect it, understand it, and bring some meaning to it. It’s hard in an adult world to just let something exist for what it is.

Maybe my father is still out there, and he found some way to bridge space and time to come to me one last time. Maybe it was a source of real magic that only came to those who really needed it. Or just maybe it was all in my head, and my inner child needed to heal from the abandonment.

I could sum it up to so many things. So could the doctors and my mum. However, like my father once told me in a secret library under the stairs, “some things are better left to the imagination".