The Map of True Places

by Brunonia Barry

  That the young woman, Zylphia Browne, had escaped her home and her abusive husband was a matter of public record. Whether or not she had poisoned her husband was speculation. The captain, who was known for his brutality, had many enemies. It was well documented that he had been poisoned with a substance that was most likely brought back on one of his own ships and that his death was as painful as the beatings he’d been known to inflict not only on his crew but on his servants and his wife.

  Even Maureen had to admit that there’d been little real evidence about Zylphia Browne’s escape. There was some documentation by an eyewitness who had seen someone rowing the stolen dory in the direction of the Miseries. The witness knew it to be Zylphia, he said, only by the red hair that escaped from under the brim of a boy’s cap. The dory was later discovered on the Miseries, oarlocks worn down to bare wood. But no sign of the young lovers was ever found.

  Maureen never questioned the idea that the lovers escaped. Her belief in The Great Love would allow for no other possibility. But try as she might, she could never find the happily-ever-after ending that she so needed to complete the story. Though most of her stories were fictional, and though her original intention was to create the happily-ever-after, she found herself obsessed by her search for the truth. In the writing of the story, she had developed a strong bond with Zylphia Browne. She knew the woman well, she said. She told Zee that it almost felt as if she were walking around in Zylphia’s skin.

  Zee had known for a while that her mother had begun to believe that the story was her own. And so when Maureen announced one day that she was certain she’d been Zylphia Browne in a prior lifetime, Zee wasn’t as alarmed as she should have been.

  Looking back on a tragedy, there is often a moment one can point to when everything changes and begins to move more quickly toward its inevitable climax. As Zee looked back, she realized that the moment for Maureen had been the day she began to talk about reincarnation. For while she had initially believed that Maureen was talking about who she had convinced herself she’d been in her last life, Zee realized only later that she was also talking about who she was most certain to become in her next.

  “People reincarnate in groups,” she told Zee in those last days. “So do not despair, for we will most certainly see each other again in another place and time.”

  16

  ON TUESDAY MORNING THE occupational therapist showed up. Jessina was there, hand-feeding Finch. Oatmeal spilled down the front of his shirt.

  “Can’t he feed himself?” the OT asked.

  “He can,” Jessina said.

  “Then he should be doing it.”

  “He likes it when I feed him this way, don’t you, Papi?”

  Finch managed a weak smile.

  The OT addressed Finch directly. “It’s important that you do this yourself. You have to keep up your skills.”

  She walked through the house taking notes, more like a Realtor than a medical professional. She pointed out two more spots in the bathroom that needed grab bars, one more in the shower next to the one that Melville had put in earlier and another one next to the toilet. “You should raise the seat in here,” she said. “Try Hutchinson’s on Highland Ave.” She also suggested a hospital bed. “They can be rented,” she said. “His insurance will probably cover it.” Zee followed her back to the hall. “You’ll need a railing in this hallway,” she said. She looked at the tilt of the floor, the slope of old pine.

  “Do you know of anybody who can install one?” Zee asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t. But a local carpenter can probably do it for you.

  “And get rid of these newspapers,” she said. “Falls are inevitable with Parkinson’s, but this is an accident waiting to happen.”

  The OT wrote out her report, leaving a copy for Zee. She said good-bye to Finch, who ignored her. Zee walked her down the long hallway to the front door.

  “He really should be in a nursing home,” the OT said.

  It shocked Zee to hear it. “I was thinking maybe assisted living of some sort.” There was a nice place in Back Bay not far at all from where she lived. But even that was only in case of emergency, meaning if Melville didn’t come back and she couldn’t figure out anything else.

  “He wouldn’t qualify for assisted living,” the OT said matter-of-factly. “He’s incontinent, and he needs to have his meds administered. A few years ago, maybe, but not now.”

  Zee barely heard the rest of the instructions. All she wanted was for the OT to leave.

  “Make sure he showers every day. And gets dressed. I forgot to ask you about skin breakdown.”

  “I haven’t noticed any,” Zee said.

  “Pay attention to his skin,” she said. “There’s always a danger of skin breakdown with incontinence. And skin breakdown can kill them. That and falls.” She gestured toward the newspapers again.

  “I’ll take care of those,” Zee said.

  SHE WORKED ALL AFTERNOON ON the piles of papers. When Jessina was making dinner, Zee decided to walk down to the wharf to pick up some more recycling bags.

  “Can you stay a little longer tonight?”

  “Sure,” Jessina answered. “What else do I have to do?”

  “I can’t tell if you’re serious or if you’re being sarcastic,” Zee said.

  “I am never sarcastic,” Jessina said.

  “Again,” Zee said, “I can’t tell.”

  Jessina laughed. “Go. Take your time. I can give him his pills and get him to bed if you like.”

  Technically, Jessina wasn’t supposed to give Finch his pills. But with her nurse’s training, she was certainly capable. Zee left the seven-o’clock dose on the table.

  “Thanks,” she said, then added, “don’t let him have milk with them.”

  ZEE WALKED DOWN DERBY STREET toward the wharf. This was a street of American firsts: first candy shop, first brick house. The street was named after America’s first millionaire, Elias Hasket Derby, a man known locally as “King Derby,” who had been made famous by the lucrative shipping trade that came into this port. Zee remembered her Uncle Mickey telling her something about the first elephant in America as well. It had come in on one of the Salem ships. For some reason she thought the elephant had a drinking problem and laughed to herself, dismissing the thought as a trick of memory. But then she remembered the story. Running low on water, the crew had fed porter to the elephant. By the time the ship arrived in Salem, the elephant had developed a strong taste for the stuff. That much of the story was true. Uncle Mickey’s embellished version included 1800s AA meetings and elephant detox.

  She thought about Mickey and decided to stop by. There was no love lost between Mickey and Finch, not since Maureen had died and Melville had come into Finch’s life. But Zee hadn’t yet said hello to her uncle. She knew she should tell him what was going on, and she figured he might know someone who could install the rails and grab bars Finch needed. If anyone was connected in the city of Salem, it was Mickey Doherty.

  Zee ducked into Ye Olde Pepper Companie to buy Finch some Gibralters. The Salem confection was the first commercial candy in America and might have been responsible for some of the success of the Salem ships, which stocked the candy as ballast on their outbound voyages. They were hard candies with a shelf life longer than the life span of any human, and it is said that the captains bribed the customs officials in the far ports with Gibralters to get more favorable trading rights. “The original strangers with candy,” is what Finch called the Salem ships.

  Finch loved Gibralters, and he loved Black Jacks as well, so she bought both for him. She helped herself to one of the Black Jacks, smelling the sweet molasses as she opened the bag.

  She walked past the Custom House with its gold roof, where Nathaniel Hawthorne had worked his day job before his writing made him famous. Then she crossed the street to Derby and Pickering wharves.

  There were only a few wharves left in Salem now. In the shipping days, there had been almost a hundred, along w
ith all the businesses that went along with the shipping trade: coopers, boatwrights, stables with wagons for transportation, and shipyards.

  In those days there were many rivers that emptied into the sea here. New Derby Street, where it connected to Lafayette and Salem’s Route 114, would have been mostly underwater, with the North River running down the other side of town. It was possible back then to get around Salem almost completely by boat. Even the Point, where Jessina and many of the Dominican and Haitian population lived now, had once been bordered on three sides by water. The street noise from the wharves and the resulting trade eventually became loud enough to send the shipping millionaires uptown, either to the Common or to Chestnut Street, depending on their politics.

  Now there were only a few of the old wharves left down here—Derby Wharf, where the Friendship was docked, and Pickering, where Mickey’s store and Ann Chase’s witch shop were.

  These days Derby Street was an endless array of tourist traps. Costumed pirates and monsters handed out flyers for haunted houses and wax-museum tours. Though the main attraction was still the witches, any unrelated but marginally frightening side business was fair game. The real witches, who didn’t exist at all in Salem back in 1692, thrived here in great numbers now.

  A number of shops and tours belonged to Uncle Mickey, whom the locals referred to as the “Pirate King.” Mickey had seen the tide turning in Salem way back in the seventies and was entrepreneurial enough to take great advantage of it. For the most part, the witches kept a lower profile, selling their wares for cash but practicing their religion quietly, as if they were never quite certain that their new elevated status would last in a city that sported images of witches riding broomsticks on the doors of their police cars while at the same time it launched a campaign to “Ditch the Witch” in favor of Salem’s less famous but in many’s opinion more significant maritime history.

  But for now that campaign had not taken hold, nor had the ordinance that someone had proposed to limit the number of haunted houses per city block, a proposal that Mickey had vehemently opposed, owning so many of them himself.

  Zee started her search for Mickey in one of his many haunted houses. Summer hires from Salem State College worked the counter as they munched on Wendy’s takeout. Their fake scars looked disturbingly real alongside their piercings and tattoos from the Purple Scorpion down the street. Screams echoed from behind the hanging curtain, followed by demonic laughter that Zee recognized as Mickey’s recorded voice. Cackling and trying to frighten one another, a group of tourists exited through the gift shop.

  “Oh, my good God, what was that!” A woman in her sixties giggled nervously and tried to catch her breath.

  A man with a crying child was less impressed. “That is extremely frightening,” the man said. The kid, who wouldn’t let go of his father’s hand, seemed equally frightened by the teenagers behind the counter. “You ought to have an age limit. Post a sign or something,” the father said. As he stepped down into the brighter lobby, the kid tripped, the father dangling him by the arm until he righted himself.

  “Wimps,” the tattooed girl said under her breath.

  “It says right on the door.” A kid sporting a Frankenstein half-head extension with bolts glued to his neck pointed to a sign: THE SCARIEST HAUNTED HOUSE IN SALEM. Frankenstein reached for one of the girl’s french fries, and she slapped his hand.

  “Is Mickey here?” Zee asked. She didn’t know any of these kids. Mickey had a new crop every summer.

  “He’s at the other store,” Frankenstein said.

  “No he isn’t. He said he was going to the Friendship,” the girl said.

  “One or the other,” Frankenstein said.

  Zee thanked them and exited as a large group of tourists crowded through the door. They all wore red T-shirts saying DON’T MAKE ME CALL MY FLYING MONKEYS! Zee navigated her way through the crowd, crossing the street in front of their silver tour bus, heading for Pickering Wharf.

  She could see the masts of the Friendship in the distance, but she figured she’d stop at Mickey’s shop first. Then she saw her Auntie Ann.

  Ann Chase stood in the doorway of her store, the Shop of Shadows. Its name was a reference to the Book of Shadows, a well-known journal used by real witches to record spells, rituals, and philosophy, plus recipes for herbal potions and teas. Ann was in costume today, her black robes rustling in the early-evening breeze. “Hello, Hepzibah,” she called when she spotted Zee. “I heard you were home.”

  “Hi, Auntie.” Zee smiled and walked over. Ann was not Zee’s real aunt, but she’d been Maureen’s best friend. Zee had called her Auntie for as long as she could remember.

  They hugged each other.

  “So great to see you,” Ann said, looking at her. “It’s been a while.”

  Zee thought back. It had been over a year. When she came home to visit, she always stopped by the shop to see Ann, but the last time she’d been here, Ann’s shop had been closed, and there was a sign on it saying that Ann had flown south for the winter along with the other snowbirds.

  “How was Florida?” Zee asked.

  “Warmer than here,” Ann answered, laughing. Then, more seriously, she asked, “How’s Finch doing?”

  “Not great.”

  “I heard he broke up with Melville.”

  “Word travels fast,” Zee said. Salem was more small city than small town, but people still had a way of knowing one another’s business. “Does Mickey know?” Zee asked.

  “He’s the one who told me.”

  On some level Mickey would be glad. It was no secret that Mickey blamed Melville for his sister’s death. Though Ann had loved Maureen, she held no such grudges. Everyone who knew Zee’s mother well also knew how sick she was. Mickey had always been in denial about her illness, and finding someone to blame was easier for him than looking at the whole truth.

  Zee believed that her Uncle Mickey had always been in love with Ann Chase. For Ann’s part, she seemed uninterested and barely tolerated his constant flirting. Every once in a while, she would get annoyed, especially when his rival but bogus witch shop advertised something that she found personally offensive, like the time his aura machine broke and he made coupons sending a bus full of tourists from Cleveland over to Ann’s shop advertising that Ann Chase, one of Salem’s most famous witches, would tell their fortunes by reading the bumps on their heads for half her normal price.

  “Group rates!” he said when she yelled at him. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about—I sent you forty-five brand-new customers.”

  Mostly, though, Ann and Mickey got along well. To their credit, most of the witch and horror shops in Salem got along. The only exception had been a recent issue about a psychic street fair that came to Salem every October. Almost everyone agreed it was a good thing, but some of the witches, particularly those who paid rent all year long down on Essex Street, where the fair was held, resented the itinerant psychics who came in to make a quick buck during the peak tourist season, then left town. The witches said they were afraid some of the traveling psychics might bilk tourists out of too much money or give them bad advice, thereby sullying the reputation of the year-round fortune-telling community.

  For this reason the town had recently begun to require all practicing psychics to be licensed if they wanted to tell fortunes in Salem. Though Zee had wondered exactly how one goes about licensing a psychic (Salem, in the end, had adopted San Francisco’s policies, which included a fee of twenty-five to fifty dollars and a record of permanent address along with a valid Social Security number), she nevertheless thought it was a good idea. She remembered a horrible incident that she and her mother had had with a psychic named Arcana not long before Maureen committed suicide.

  AS SHE WAS WRITING “THE ONCE,” Maureen had become convinced that she was not only the writer of one of the great love stories in history but that she was its heroine as well. She began to believe she was the reincarnation of its main character, Zylphia Browne. So absorbed
was she in the story that she’d started searching for someone who could confirm her belief.

  First Maureen went to her friend Ann, asking for a past-life reading. But Ann, whose New Age belief systems had only recently led her to Wicca and not yet to reincarnation, said she didn’t do such things. The only things Ann read in those days were the bumps on your head and a few astrological charts, and even those were a recent addition to her repertoire of New Age razzle-dazzle.

  “Why do you want a reading?” Ann asked. She had of late begun to worry about Maureen, whose behavior had been growing more and more erratic in recent months, causing her to neglect both her home and her child in favor of this fairy tale she couldn’t finish. Though it was based on a true story, like many true stories it was left uncompleted, and Maureen had taken it upon herself to supply the happily-ever-after ending the story needed. But she’d been agonizing over the tale for several years, and it had become Ann’s opinion that not only was Maureen never going to finish the story but that in all probability the story might just finish Maureen.

  “I think I was Zylphia,” she told Ann one day when they were at the shop. Zee had been busy flipping through the pages of the book entitled 100 Easy Spells for the Young Witch.

  “Excuse me?” Ann said.

  “I think I was the main character in my story,” Maureen said. “In another life, I mean.”

  At this point Zee looked up. Her eyes met Ann’s.

  “What makes you think that?” Ann asked as calmly as she could.

  “Don’t patronize me,” Maureen said.

  “I’m not.”

  “And don’t be careful with me either. I hate it when people are careful with me.”

  “I’m not being careful with you. I just asked you where you got this rather unusual idea,” Ann said.