The Map of True Places

by Brunonia Barry

  She wrote down the address. After she hung up, she went to the bedroom to check on Finch. He was sleeping soundly. She walked back to the kitchen and dialed Michael.

  It rang three times before it went to voice mail.

  ZEE TOOK OUT HER ANGER on the kitchen. She cleaned. She scrubbed down stove and counters. She polished the toaster until it shined. As she pulled the canisters away from the wall and began to clean behind them, she found several items meant for decorating cakes: red and blue sugar, some bottles of food coloring, and some spices, including an old amber bottle—all stuff obviously left over from some baking project of Melville’s. She opened the amber bottle and looked inside at the tiny silver balls, the kind you might find on a fancy cake or maybe Christmas cookies—dragées, she thought they were called. They were probably too old to keep, but she didn’t want to throw anything out without asking, so she put all the bottles back in the cabinet with the other baking things.

  Melville was a great cook, but he had never been great at cleaning or organizing. As she put the cake decorations away, she started reorganizing the cabinets, putting like with like, the canned goods in one cabinet, the spices in another. Her anger was fading, but the energy of adrenaline was not, and so she moved from cabinet to cabinet, wiping down the surfaces as she went, arranging the labels. She became aware that she was being a bit obsessive when she actually considered alphabetizing everything.

  When she got to the third cabinet, she was surprised. Hidden behind the boxes of cereal, she found all the wine that Michael had given Finch, every birthday and Christmas for the last four years, all second-growth vintages, really good wines from Michael’s own collection. They weren’t stored on their sides but stood upright, a sure way to ruin the corks. Horrified, she pulled them out and set them on the counter.

  Before his diagnosis of Parkinson’s, from his pirate days on, Finch’s alcohol consumption had been increasing steadily. He had developed a real fondness for wine. From a medical standpoint, this now made sense to Zee, though she’d never seen the phenomenon described in any of the medical journals she’d begun to read on a regular basis. Alcohol releases dopamine, the one chemical that Parkinson’s patients need.

  Finch hardly drank at all now, not since he was put on dopamine, and Melville didn’t drink much either. She had tried to tell Michael that, but Finch was always so effusive in his thanks that Michael wouldn’t listen to her.

  This was such a waste, though. She looked for the wine rack she had given them and found it under the sink. There was space enough for twelve bottles to be stored horizontally, but there were thirteen bottles here. She put the rack on the counter, moving the canisters down to make room. She had to look hard to find the corkscrew, which she finally located in the laundry room. She opened the thirteenth bottle and poured herself a glass. She was still angry with Michael for not answering his phone, but she was grateful, tonight, for his impeccable taste in wine.

  10

  SLEEPING IN A NEW place had always given Zee nightmares. Not that her childhood room was a new place. But it was certainly a strange place.

  “The Museum of the Perfect Childhood” was how Finch referred to the room that Maureen Finch had created for her daughter.

  Zee’s room was reminiscent of the fairy tales Maureen was so fond of writing: white canopy bed with pink roses hand-painted on the head-board, ballerinas in different poses on the wallpaper, a dressing table with mouth-blown perfume atomizer bottles, though Zee, who hated any kind of scent, had never filled them up. The silver brush-and-mirror set placed on the diagonal bore her initials in the classic signet H. F. T.

  Zee had never actually found out her middle name. During her teenage years, Finch and Melville had joked that the T. stood for “trouble.” Trouble is her middle name, Finch was fond of saying. Sometimes, if he was in a particularly playful mood, he would sing her the song “Trouble” from the soundtrack of The Music Man, but then he would catch himself, saying that a dignified man of his age and persuasion should never be caught singing a show tune, that it was just too much of a cliché.

  The fact was that even Finch had never had any idea what Zee’s middle name was. Hepzibah was the name he had chosen for his daughter, the derivation obvious to anyone who knew him as a Hawthorne scholar. Maureen was given the honor of choosing the middle name, and she had chosen T. Whenever anyone asked Maureen what the T. stood for, she always replied that it simply stood for the letter T. “It is what it is,” she was fond of saying.

  Zee had always believed that one day Maureen would tell her what her real middle name was, but now of course it was too late. When Maureen died, everything was frozen in place, from Zee’s middle initial to the childhood room her mother had spent so much time decorating for what she clearly hoped would be the most perfect of little girls, her little princess.

  That Zee was neither perfect nor a princess was evident elsewhere in the room. There were whole segments of wall where she had taken her Crayolas and colored in the ballerinas—head to toe to tutu. She’d had the measles at the time and therefore couldn’t be punished for her crime. Maureen, who didn’t believe in inoculation, had insisted that Zee stay in a dimly lit room for days with nothing to do. To entertain herself Zee moved systematically around the perimeter of her little world, decorating only as high as she could reach and choosing the colors she most preferred—Electric Lime and Fuzzy Wuzzy.

  The colorful ballerinas were creative enough but fatally flawed, Maureen always said, though when Zee asked what she meant, her mother could never articulate a response. Instead Maureen had waist-high wainscoting put up around the room covering the flawed dancers. She painted it white and had rosebuds stenciled along the chair rail to match the bed. Just a trace of Zee’s artwork remained now, the occasional wild scribble looping upward past the wainscoting, then disappearing back down again.

  There were other signs as well, through the years that followed, that Zee was not the princess type. Scuba gear dangled off the ballet bar, from a job she’d gotten untangling mooring and lobster lines from the propellers of the tourists’ boats that so often became caught in them. Those jobs paid forty dollars a pop, better than she could make waitressing, for a task that usually took less than twenty minutes. If she wore her bikini, she often got paid even more, but usually the men hung around and tried to help, which just made things take longer.

  Regarding the room now, Zee thought that it did seem she was sleeping in a strange place, or rather the place of a stranger. The room had so little connection to her now that she found herself imagining what the girl who lived here might have been like. What did she want? What were her dreams? In some faraway part of herself, Zee seemed to know. But she couldn’t get to the answer.

  ZEE HAD FINISHED TWO-THIRDS OF the bottle of wine before she crawled into bed. She was so tired that she didn’t even bother to change her clothes, just removed her jeans and slept in the T-shirt she’d been wearing. She had a lot on her mind: Finch, Lilly, Michael. She wasn’t angry at Michael anymore; she was simply exhausted, both emotionally and physically. She fell asleep in less than five minutes.

  SHE AWAKENED FROM A DEEP sleep to feel another presence in the room. She was not alone. She sat up quickly, her heart pounding.

  He was standing over her now, and the scent of him was familiar. And then a voice, one she recognized, barely above a whisper.

  “Please help me,” Finch said.

  As her eyes focused, Zee recognized her father. He stood still as marble, frozen in place, unable to break free.

  11

  FINCH HAD TWO MORE freezing episodes the following morning. It was Jessina, and not the neurologist, who finally taught them “Up and Over.”

  Jessina and her son, Danny, lived in the Point, an area of Salem just off Lafayette Street that had a large Dominican population. She’d been a nurse back in the Dominican Republic and was taking night classes at Salem State, trying to complete her RN certification. Days she worked part-time in a nursing home and
part-time as a private home health aide, initially for a woman who had died from complications of Parkinson’s six months before and now for Finch.

  Jessina was addicted to the Lifetime Channel and to Swedish Fish candies, both facts that for some reason Finch seemed to find hilariously funny. For such a tiny woman, she had a huge presence. Zee marveled at the way she took over a house simply by entering it, speaking to Finch in a poetic stream of consciousness that included her native Spanish, Dorchester English, and an affectionate baby talk that she had developed to soothe her patients.

  If Finch had minded the way the neurologist talked down to him, he didn’t seem to mind the baby talk from Jessina. It was clear that he genuinely liked her. They had developed a routine in the last few months. Breakfast cereal hand-fed, then a shower, then television—something that Finch had seldom, if ever, enjoyed.

  “If you step up and over, you can break the freeze.” Jessina demonstrated the exaggerated step the next time Finch froze in place.

  He looked at her strangely.

  “Come on, you know this!” she encouraged. She turned to Zee. “It’s a different part of the brain that is used to climb.”

  She helped Finch to lift his leg in an exaggerated fashion, Zee reached out to steady him. And it worked. The step freed him, and Finch continued his shuffle toward the bathroom.

  “Thank you,” Zee said to Jessina.

  She shrugged. “I taught him that trick a while back. He just forgot. Can you pick up some Depends while you’re out?” Jessina asked her.

  Zee was shocked. “He wears Depends?”

  “If you want to get the store brand without the elastic, it will save you money. I can just put them on inside his underpants.”

  Finch grimaced. He didn’t mind the baby talk, but he clearly didn’t like this discussion.

  “I’m sorry, Papi,” Jessina said, and squeezed his hand.

  Zee could hear her singing a song to Finch through the closed bathroom door:

  Los pollitos dicen pío, pío, pío

  Cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.

  La gallina busca el maíz y el trigo.

  Les da la comida y les presta abrigo.

  Bajo sus dos alas acurrucaditos

  Hasta el otro día duermen los pollitos.

  She wondered how Jessina would have reacted—did react, perhaps—when she heard Finch as Hawthorne. The thought of the Hawthorne monologues being answered in this lilting baby talk seemed surreal. Perhaps Jessina hadn’t even noticed the difference in Finch’s speech pattern. Perhaps she thought he’d simply been more talkative than usual.

  ZEE COULDN’T FIND A SUITCASE, just a canvas bag from L.L. Bean that was on Melville’s boat. She went through the things she had rescued from the cent shop, packing the items she thought would be most important to Melville: two pairs of jeans, several dress shirts, a collection of ship’s bells. It was odd being on the boat again, and even odder that it hadn’t been in the water for so many years. When she was a teenager, Melville had allowed her to use this boat as a refuge when thoughts of Maureen had come back to her, and she couldn’t sleep. Melville’s mooring was directly off the Gables, and many nights she had walked down in her nightshirt and bare feet and rowed out in the skiff, sleeping on the deck and looking up at the stars, the movement of water the only thing that could lull her into a dreamless sleep.

  Melville had always loved the boat even more than she did, and she wondered that he hadn’t put it in the water for so long. But Finch hated boats, and caring for Finch had taken so much time that she thought Melville probably had to let it go.

  MELVILLE WAS LIVING OVER NEAR Federal Street in a condo he’d been taking care of for someone at the Athenaeum, the historic membership library where he’d been working for the last several years. His official job title was sexton, though Zee had for years called him “the sextant,” not in an attempt to be clever and name him after a navigational instrument but because she kept getting the words mixed up. Still, the job description had little to do with either sexton or sextant. A sexton was a caretaker, a position for which there had been budget approval at the time Melville was hired. What Melville actually did these days at the Athenaeum was more archivist than caretaker. Day to day he researched and documented the donated and acquired collections that included such historically significant items as the original Massachusetts Bay Charter.

  Melville’s new place was on the second floor of one of the converted Federal mansions in the McIntyre District. The doorways had the traditional carved-wood friezes. The stairway wound three floors skyward in a hanging spiral. Though Zee thought it was a shame to chop up any of these old houses, this conversion had been done well.

  Melville opened the door and hugged her. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

  She handed the bag to him. “You’re lucky,” she said. “He hadn’t gotten around to selling this stuff yet.”

  Melville looked terrible. His sandy hair hadn’t been washed, and he hadn’t shaved for days. He wore a dirty lime green Salem tee with a logo that read LIFE’S A WITCH AND THEN YOU FLY. He was a big man, muscular from working the boats and from years spent in the merchant marine before he became a writer and an archivist. “I know,” he said when he noticed the way she was looking at him. “I avoid mirrors.”

  The second-floor condo was windowed, sunny, and historically perfect, with the same green-over-gray shade of verdigris that had been used in the sitting room of the House of the Seven Gables. She recognized antiques from the 1850s China Trade. The one suitcase Melville had brought with him sat opened by the door, the unfolded pile of grab-and-go that he’d hastily stuffed into it spilling out onto the floor in contrast to the perfect room. The chairs had the light, spindly legs of expensive antiques, and Zee couldn’t imagine Melville daring to actually sit on them.

  “Nice place,” she said. She looked around for a place to sit, but this was more museum than living room, with feminine touches but altogether too perfect in its execution. It was definitely a gay man’s house, Zee concluded, probably someone who dealt in antiques. Her mind jumped to the reasons for the split with Finch.

  “I’m just taking care of the place,” Melville said, reading her. He’d always been able to read her.

  “You want coffee?” he asked, pointing toward the kitchen.

  “Please,” she said.

  The kitchen was obviously where Melville was spending most of his time. He gathered up the copies of the Boston Globe and the Salem papers and old National Geographics that covered the farm table. Several coffee cups in various stages of abandonment sat on the table and on countertops, one with a fuzzy white-and-green skin growing across the top.

  “I’ve got to wash some of these,” he said, taking them to the sink.

  “Nice light,” she said. The kitchen windows looked out on the North River. It was perfect New England painter’s light. Zee caught a glimpse of the dog park that ran alongside the river below. At least ten dogs were off leash, barking and chasing a tennis ball some kid had thrown.

  Melville rinsed the cups and the old enameled cowboy coffeepot, a twin to the one she had in Boston, which Melville had given her the year she went away to college because he knew she wouldn’t make it a day without his coffee.

  The Starbucks bag was empty. He rifled through the cabinets and found some Bustelo. “Pretty strong stuff,” he said.

  “I can take it if you can,” she said.

  He opened the fridge and reached inside, pulling out an egg, holding it up to her as a magician might, then making it disappear. It was a trick he’d developed to amuse her after her mother died. He presented the egg to her once more, from behind her head this time, and she took it, smiling.

  He smiled back, then the misery overtook him again.

  “Are you okay?” she couldn’t help asking.

  “Do I look okay?”

  It was the saddest she’d ever seen him.

  “How is Finch today?” he asked.

  “I don’
t know,” she said. “Pretty much the same, I guess.”

  Like Zee, Melville was hoping it was the medication that had made Finch behave so irrationally after so many years. “This is awful,” he said.

  He brought the old enameled pot to the table, along with a wooden spoon. He watched while Zee threw the egg into the pot, shell and all, heaving it as hard as she could, smashing it against the bottom of the pot. It was part of their ritual. When she was finished, he handed her the wooden spoon, and she stirred the egg, shell, and grounds into a paste.

  She smiled, remembering the many times she’d made Melville’s cowboy coffee for people, first at school and later for Michael’s friends. Part of the shock value of making the coffee was the looks of disgust it brought to her friends’ faces to see her make it, then their looks of delight if she could get them to actually taste the stuff, which they all admitted was some of the best coffee they’d ever had.

  The first time he made it for her, Zee accused him of teasing her. She was eleven and already had a caffeine habit from years of drinking it with Finch’s pirate friends.

  “You shouldn’t be drinking coffee at your age,” Melville had said to her. “But if you insist on continuing such an unhealthy habit, you should at least have some protein along with it.” She watched as he threw a whole egg, shell and all, into the grounds, then added water and told her to mix it into a paste. She still thought he was kidding when he put the coffee on the stove and waited for it to boil, then dumped a cup of very cold water into the mix. He strained it into a cup and presented it to her.

  “Gross,” she said, looking at the mixture in the strainer.

  “Try it,” he said, and waited.

  “No way.”

  He shrugged. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said, pouring himself a cup and sitting down across from her at the table. He sipped his coffee as he read the paper.