Relishing in the scent of his mother's perfume, Spencer opened the page to the place in the book Diana Reed had placed her bookmark.
"We are deeply afraid of the possibilities our minds open. Evolution has brought physical weakness and mental greatness; for the talent with which our hands spin grass into gold is accessed by our minds, and with this our minds sew the infinite galaxy together in ragged patches. Stars slip through the messy junctions and comets fly through rips in the cheap fabric," Spencer read.
His mother hummed at the words as Spencer's eyebrows furrowed. He flipped to the cover—simplistic and hardback, with the author's name written in small gold letters that reflected the light scattering across the room from Diana's bedside table lamp.
"Margery Brunham," Spencer read the author's names. The shift in the text opened Diana's eyes; her eyes met his.
"Hm?"
"Margery Brunham," Spencer repeated. "Who is that? Is she contemporary?"
"Yes…" Diana answered. Her pale lips then pursed with a twitch of a lie. "I believe so."
"These pages are gnarled, Mom. You know this author well—you read her quite often. You'd know."
"Alright," Diana quieted him. "She is contemporary."
"You rarely read contemporary literature," Spencer noted. "Why her?"
"She's a wonderful writer, don't you think?"
"Well, I haven't read much—"
Diana's crooked pointer finger pointed to her glass bookcase opposite the bed. "There's plenty to read. Borrow my copies."
Spencer stood and smoothed the wrinkles in his taupe corduroys. He quietly walked toward the bookcase and unlatched the two glass doors. Upon closer glance, nearly three quarters of a shelf was occupied by Ms. Brunham's works.
"You read quite a lot of her work," Spencer muttered—partly to himself and partly to his mother.
"I suppose. Why are you so shocked?"
Spencer paused before answering as he pulled several books from the shelf. His left thumb smoothed over their spines as his lips worked into a pink purse. "Fiction and nonfiction," he noted out loud. He noticed one taller book by Ms. Brunham—caught by the fraying edges of several leaves of paper kept between the book's pages. He fingered the pages, then opened to one of the papers kept between pages. It was clearly unrelated to the book, and had been placed there by Diana Reid herself.
"Spencer, would you stop rifling around over there? What is it you're so bewildered by?"
He opened the folded paper and was met by beautiful, scrawling script too loose and looping to be his mother's. The lines of words collided messily and jumbled. He had always admired his mother's pristine penmanship; she wrote with elegant measure and straightness. Whose writing was this?
"Spencer," his mother repeated with a sterner tone.
"What is this?" Spencer asked her, turning slightly. His eyes found the top of the letter and found the key: 'Dearest Diane.'
"Oh, just some old letter I forgot to throw away," she mumbled. "Come back and continue reading to me."
"Mom, it's dated June 2013. It was written just a few weeks ago."
"I loathe that you cannot keep to your own. It's that job of yours—all you do is invade privacy," she argued.
"It's signed Margery. Are you exchanging letters with this author? Why haven't you mentioned this before?"
"Fine," she sighed. "I greatly admire her work, is that so criminal? I wrote to her and she wrote back. She has read several of my essays back in the day—as it seems, she admires my work as well."
Spencer's eyes skimmed the content of the letter; it was clear they shared interests, and a match of jealousy sparked in his lungs. There were certain elements of their relationship that resembled kinship—Margery was like the daughter Diana never had.
Spencer didn't believe in the division of humanities and STEM subjects—he thought maths and histories, for instance, intertwined and were codependent entities. However, he was certainly more science and math-based than his mother, whose passions laid within the field of literature and arts. He knew secretly his mother wished she were more like him—a professor of literature, or the history of art. Instead she had a technological and fact-based son who often couldn't grasp measures of sentimentality and meaning that was not presented in text before him. Spencer preferred palpable equations, and his mother preferred abstract concepts. It was one of the many parts of him about which he was insecure; and here, before him on the paper, was a mind that mirrored that of his mother exactly.
"Mom, I don't know if this is good for you," he thought rather selfishly.
"I don't see your reasoning, nor do I think that's for you to decide."
"Why don't you just keep within—"
"Within the walls of this sanatarium? Is this a legitimate recommendation you dare to make?"
Spencer silenced himself, looking at the tiled floor. He didn't like the fact that his mother was in a place like this, and he hated himself for putting her there. He put the letter back in the book and put it in its place; he pushed the thoughts away and returned to his original purpose: to be with his mother. He wouldn't let this Margery Brunham impede their time with one another.
"I'm sorry, Mom. I didn't mean that," he returned to the chair he was sitting in. His mother's grey eyes relaxed into blue, and she held the book he had left on the side of her bed. She nodded as he took the book back, continuing to read.
Within time, his mother's eyes drifted shut. Spencer found she had fallen asleep before he had stopped reading; he understood the merit his mother saw in Ms. Brunham's work. The author was indisputably wonderful. He kissed his mother's forehead before departing, leaving a note saying he'd come out again soon and visit her, and that he'd return with the books she suggested he read. Goodbyes were no longer necessary between the two, as Diana could hardly determine Spencer's comings and goings. The most lucid he had seen her in the past few months was when speaking of Margery Brunham's works.
Upon leaving, he took several more books and several letters he found between covers and pages. He put them all in his messenger bag and went on his way, looking at his mother once more before leaving to return home. While waiting for his flight at the airport terminal, he flattened several of the letters Margery had sent and read them quickly. He looked her up online and found hardly anything; he pictured her looking something like his mother, with greying hair and nimble fingers. She clearly abstained from technology and kept her life private from the public.
When he found his seat on the plane, he pulled out one of her books on the role of art in the Protestant Reformation. When he landed in Washington D.C., he put away one of her books on the significance of Simonetta Vespucci to Botticelli.
—
Spencer read and reread the letter on his desk as he waited for JJ to walk in with her hands full of new files. There was something so odd about the one he hunched over. It was disjointed… Too esoteric for his eyes.
Alberti's exploratory works are, in my opinion, his greatest. An encapsulation of the Renaissance man: artistically intrepid and shamelessly spirited. His novel De compondendis cifris is a favorite of mine. I recommend an anglicized model of this type: Dicon Hed. I find him to be one of the cleverest writers of the fifteenth century; he approaches the reader quantitatively and himself qualitatively. It is really quite an interesting perspective…
He shook his head to himself and smoothed the small jut in the bridge of his nose. To approach an outsider quantitatively and oneself qualitatively? Did his mother understand this? Was his mind too numerically organized to grasp the expression of her words?
He pulled out a pad of lined paper from a drawer of his desk and wrote at the top: Leon Battista Alberti. There was no stump here—Leon was a prolific author and, as Ms. Burnham put, the encapsulation of the Renaissance man. He copied this down. He then wrote the title of the novel Ms. Burnham had noted and translated from Latin: Of Understanding Cifris. Cifris? He asked himself. He resolved to move onward and return. He then wrote the name of Dicon Hed, an author Spencer had never before heard of. Beneath the name of the English writer, he noted the man's brilliance (according to Ms. Burnham) and attempted to break down the quantitative and qualitative content. He got nowhere.
Spencer poked his head upward and acknowledged the world around him. He looked for his linguistically apt companion. "Emily, do you know what 'cifris' in Latin is?"
"Something Doctor Reid doesn't know?" Morgan commented from a desk away. Spencer glared.
She paused in thought before response. "The dative and ablative plural of 'cifra,' which is cipher."
"Right—of course," Spencer yelled at himself for not knowing. He felt his brain was working unsuitably today. He retranslated the Latin: Of Understanding Ciphers. Ciphers? He questioned. He shook his head. It didn't make sense—why the mention of ciphers? Why would she call such a book a novel? It wasn't fictional.
With a rush of intellectual light, Spencer ripped open his laptop and typed in the name of 'Dicon Hed' into his search engine. After a period of waiting for his antiquated computer to load, his search came up empty. There was no Dicon Hed.
He had a cipher, a nonexistent fifteenth century writer, and a reader's quantitative assessment of the aforementioned's work. He was too numerically organized.
His brain took a tumble as Spencer ripped off the top paper in the pad and rewrote Dicon Hed's name another time. Numbers, quantities, and a cipher.
"It's that simple!" He exclaimed unintentionally, drawing the attention of most of the other agents. "Ignore me."
'D' is the fourth letter of the alphabet; 'i' the ninth, 'c' the third… He processed. And at the end he had ten numbers… a phone number.
Spencer jumped out of his seat with his cellphone in hand and made way for the men's restroom. Such a mystery could not wait. Truth be told, he had a flash of transient reservation before flipping open his cellphone, but the numbers scribbled in blue ink on the top of his hand were too enthralling to resist.
Spencer punched the ten digits into his keypad and waited as the line rang with Verdi's La Donna è Mobile. He knew at that sound he had been right all along—this was phone number of Margery Brunham.
After eighteen seconds exactly, Reid heard the automated voicemail: "You have reached the voicemail box of the number 493-151-4854. Please leave a message."
Spencer awkwardly cleared his throat. "Hi Ms. Brunham, my name is Spencer Reid and I'm the son of Diana Reid, with whom you've been in communication for several months. I was hoping I could get the chance to speak with you, as you've made quite the impression on my mother and I'm not sure… Well, I'd just like to talk if you get the chance. It's just that she's very fragile, and I don't know the extent of your relationship but—I just worry about her. You can call me back at this number—um, thank you. Goodbye… Please return my call."
Spencer closed his cellphone and sighed.
He patted down his messy hair in the mirror before leaving, and stumbled on his shoelace on his way out. Morgan saw and laughed before gesturing to JJ, who—as always—stood with files in her hands.
—
On his way from work, Spencer eyed the bicycle rack he had crashed into several weeks earlier in his attempt to try and work some greater athletic purpose into his daily routine. It had been a mistake.
"Reid, we're going for a drink. Want to come?" JJ asked as she and Morgan approached him from behind.
Spencer looked at the watch around his right wrist. He'd just been working a case for three days and the last time he'd slept was on the two hour flight home. He had several books waiting at home, and the author had yet to return his message. He'd been thinking about the call since they landed; perhaps an evening out would clear his mind.
"Come on, kid. That last case necessitates a drink—wouldn't you say?" Morgan urged.
"Is Spencey coming along? Oh, how fun! My confused ray of sunshine! Oh, how sweet you are," Garcia jogged up to them with a fuchsia smile. The corner of Spencer's mouth twitched upward into a smile and he began to shrug in agreement when he phone began to ring in his pocket.
"Is that a yes to a drink from Doctor Reid?" JJ confirmed with incredulity.
However, when Spencer looked down to see an unknown caller on the small screen on the front of his cellphone, he changed his mind.
"I actually have to take this. Maybe I'll catch up with you guys later," he answered and Penelope outwardly revealed her sorrow.
"Oh, come on Spence!"
"I'm sorry—it's about my mom," Spencer partly lied. The excuse seemed to placate his three unit members.
"Alright, we get it Spence. Have a good night," JJ waved goodbye; Garcia and Morgan both bid their goodbyes as well.
When Spencer began walking home in opposite direction as them, he opened his phone.
"Hello, is this Margery Brunham?" Spencer immediately asked.
"Yes," the voice answered with a hint of hesitance. With her one word, Spencer realized the writer was much younger than he'd imagined.
"Hi, I'm sorry to bother you like this, but—"
"How did you get this number?" She asked. Her voice was not agitated, but it was laced with something unexpected.
"I, um… Last week I was visiting my mother and we were reading your books aloud. I found several of your letters to her. And—well, I found your phone number in the letter dated July ninth of this year."
"How did you find it?"
"Well, it was simple substitution cipher surrounded by inaccurate information, which I knew my mother would have caught. I assume you figured only my mother could solve it based on her knowledge, but I know a bit here and there."
Ms. Brunham breathed on the other side of the line—her pronounced breath sounded like one of relief to Spencer. A new light entered her voice when she answered: "A bit here and there? Your mother tells me you have three PhDs," she said with amused lilt.
"Well," Spencer cleared his voice while allowing her amusement to touch him too. "Anyway, I'm sorry to bother you. I just wanted to know who you were as you're in communication with my mom. I'm just very—"
"Protective over her. I understand."
"Yes, and I want to make sure this is good for her."
Margery hesitated before responding. "You know, when I was in graduate school your mother's work singlehandedly guided me through one of my dissertations on literature of the High Renaissance. When she first wrote me, I was dumbfounded. I promise our communication is solely academic… Just two minds akin."
Spencer sighed. "I didn't assume malfeasance—"
"But your mother is in a fragile state, and I understand this. You're the only one she really has left; I recognize your concern."
"Thank you for understanding."
"But do you worry about all communication, even that begotten from academic interest?"
Spencer shook his head to himself. Why would he bar the warmth knowledge gave his mother? What would he do if someone did that to him? "No… Of course not. I wouldn't take that from her. Learning is the unbending of the mind, after all," he quipped.
"A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must unbend his mind," she filled in the empty lines. Spencer slowed his walk at her words.
"That was an artful leap."
"I'm sorry," she said with a laugh folded beneath her tongue.
"No, it was impressive. I can see why my mother likes you."
"Thank you," she laughed before a hesitance coated the line in momentary silence.
"Um," Spencer decided to be brave. "Do you know how my mother discovered you?"
"Fascinating story, actually," she said. "Well… It's not a story, but more of a coincidence. Brunham is the maiden name of Margery Kempe, her—"
"My mother's favorite author," Spencer finished. "So you write under a pseudonym? I assume my mother knows this, even though you sign Margery. Does she call you this? What should I call you?"
Spencer nearly hit himself in the head for being so bothersome. He heard her breath hitch on the other end of the line. "I'm sorry, it's just—"
"You can call me Lucy."
Spencer nodded to himself slowly.
"Lucy," he repeated to himself.
"I have to go now, Doctor Reid. Thank you for calling," she hurried.
"Well thank you for responding, Lucy."
"Call again if you have any more questions. I want to make sure you know you're mother is fine."
And then she hung up.
Spencer stopped and pulled his cellphone from his ear, looking at the screen with confusion. He formed a contact with the number under only the name Lucy; after all, she had never given him a real last name.
"Lucy," he repeated to himself.