The Map of True Places

by Brunonia Barry

  “Doesn’t it occur to you that maybe I didn’t choose, that I was just acting out my mother’s story?” Zee said, frustrated.

  “I don’t think so,” Mattei said.

  “It matches.”

  “It seems to match by coincidence. You didn’t ask Hawk to climb up the side of the building, or to let you into a house you’d locked yourself out of.”

  “I knew he could climb.”

  “You didn’t go to the Friendship that first time looking for him. You went to Mickey looking for a carpenter. Again coincidence.”

  “On some level I must be playing out the story. The one my mother wrote and that the psychic told her belonged to me,” Zee said.

  “Is that how you feel?” Mattei asked.

  “It’s what I sometimes think.”

  “I’m not talking about thinking, I’m talking about feeling,” Mattei said.

  “I don’t know what I feel,” Zee said.

  “Sure you do.”

  “I feel that there’s something wrong with this whole scenario, but I don’t know what it is,” Zee said.

  “Stick with that.”

  “My Aunt Ann told me to watch out for Hawk, that he’s not who I think he is,” Zee said.

  “Ann the witch?” Mattei made a face. “Psychics, witches…”

  “Good point.”

  Zee went back to her original statement. “I feel that there’s something wrong here, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “It’s uncomfortable for you,” Mattei said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think it’s uncomfortable?” Mattei asked.

  “Because I can’t figure out who he is,” Zee said.

  “What do you mean by who he is?”

  “I can’t figure out what he wants. I mean, besides the obvious,” Zee said.

  “And can you usually figure out what people want?”

  “Probably not,” Zee said. “I’m not sure anymore.”

  Mattei nodded. She paused for a moment before continuing. “I think what’s uncomfortable for you is not this guy. Let’s set him aside for a minute. I think what’s getting to you is not that you can’t figure out Hawk’s motivation, but that you can’t figure out your own. You just broke off an engagement. You’re faced with caring for an ailing father. You started something up with someone new. In every scenario you have to think about what you want, and it makes you very uncomfortable. Because you don’t know what you want. How could you? For a long time you’ve been doing what other people wanted. So when you actually wanted Hawk, it was a first. It doesn’t really matter how authentic the relationship is, or where it goes. What matters is that you went after something that you wanted, and then you couldn’t handle it.”

  Zee sat for a very long time. “You’re right. ‘Simple, simple, case closed,’” she said, quoting Mattei.

  “You, my friend, are far from simple.” Mattei smiled.

  Zee tried to smile.

  “Of course there’s another possibility we’ve neglected to talk about,” Mattei said.

  Zee was surprised. Mattei had so clearly nailed it that there didn’t seem to be any other possibility. “What’s that?”

  “There’s the possibility that the psychic your mother dragged you to was right, that the story Maureen wrote was really your destiny. That you and Hawk were the young lovers in the story.”

  Zee stared at her. Never in all her time with Mattei had she heard anything so out of character. “You don’t believe that for a minute,” Zee said.

  Mattei threw her a “gotcha” smile. “Of course I don’t.”

  47

  ZEE DIDN’T KNOW HOW she felt about her lunch with Mattei.

  She was tense and confused. Still, she knew that something had changed. She felt the way people often feel immediately after a breakthrough in treatment, more at odds and more vulnerable than ever.

  And, if the truth were known, all she could think about was Hawk.

  It took several days before she decided to do something about it. She was hoping the urge to see him would go away. Or that he would call. When neither of those things happened, she decided she had go to him.

  She was nervous boarding his boat. What was she going to say to him? That she’d made a mistake? She wasn’t altogether sure that she had. But the fact was, she wanted to see him again.

  She let herself onto the boat and started down the steps when she came face-to-face with Hawk’s friend Josh. She recognized him from the Friendship.

  “Is Hawk here?” she asked.

  “No,” Josh said. “He quit. He rented me his boat for the rest of the season.”

  “Do you have any idea where he is?”

  “I know,” Josh said. “But I’m not so sure he wants me to tell you.”

  “Please,” she said. “I really need to talk to him.” She took a breath and tried to compose herself. “I made a mistake.”

  He thought about it. He looked around and found the address. Still skeptical, he copied it down and handed it to her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  AS SHE DROVE TO MARBLEHEAD, she tried to figure out what to say. He had every right to hate her, but she hoped he didn’t. Maybe she would say that, she thought. She tried to figure out what she wanted from the relationship, but it was too early to know. If he asked her, she’d have to admit she had no idea. All she knew was that she couldn’t stand the prospect of never seeing him again.

  His apartment was on a busy part of Pleasant Street. She couldn’t find a parking space on the right side of the street, so she turned around in the bank’s parking lot and parked in front of the Spirit of ’76 Bookstore. She waited for the light, then crossed in front of the Rip Tide and walked down a few houses until she found the number Josh had written on the paper. There was a seamstress shop on the first floor of the building and an outside staircase leading to an apartment on the second floor. Hawk’s van was in the driveway. The upstairs windows were open. He was home.

  She told herself to calm down as she climbed the stairs and rang the bell. The name on the mailbox read MOHAWK.

  She couldn’t tell if the doorbell had rung—she couldn’t hear it. She waited. When no one came to the door, she decided to knock. Her heart was pounding.

  Hawk opened the door and stared at her. “What are you doing here?”

  “May I come in?”

  He held the door open, and she walked into the room.

  “I went to your boat…. You weren’t there.” It was probably the stupidest thing she had ever said.

  He looked at her. He said nothing.

  “I’ll go, if you want.”

  “No,” he said. “Just give me a minute.” He walked to the other room and finished a phone call. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to a plush green couch against the back wall.

  She took a seat. The couch was more comfortable than it looked. She sank into it. She sat there, looking around the room, surprised by how familiar it seemed to her, how it made her feel. Though she was nervous about what she was going to say to him, she felt something different here. Safe, she thought.

  A few minutes later, he came back and took a seat across from her in a straight chair that looked anything but comfortable.

  “I wanted to apologize,” she said.

  “You don’t need to,” he said, shrugging it off.

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  He looked at her.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  She had no idea what to say next. She looked around the room. “I feel as if I’ve been here before,” she said. Then she searched for something else to say. “I thought you lived on the Salem Harbor side of town.”

  “I grew up there. My mother lives there now.”

  She nodded. “I have the weirdest feeling I’ve been here before.”

  “So you came all the way over here just to tell me you’ve been here before?”

  “I came to apologize.”


  “No need,” he said again.

  “You want me to leave?”

  “I don’t know what I want,” he said.

  “I don’t know what I want either,” she said.

  They sat for a long time. “I’m lying,” she said. “I do know.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I want to see you again.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I’m not sure about anything,” she said. “I’m just trying to go with my feelings here. Forgive me, it’s all rather new.”

  A sound from outside interrupted the conversation: something slamming, metal on metal followed by the sound of breaking glass. Hawk rushed to the window. “Damn,” he said, running to the door. “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled down the stairs.

  “Stay here!” he yelled back at Zee as he rushed down the front stairs.

  By the time Zee got to the doorway, Hawk had someone pinned against the van. His passenger-side window was smashed, and his tools were scattered in the driveway. A crowd from the Rip Tide was gathering to watch.

  Her heart began to pound, and she had to hold on to the doorframe to fight the dizzy feeling that was overtaking her.

  The soothing music from the ballet school across the street was the wrong sound track for what was happening in the driveway.

  Hawk released the man he had pinned against the car.

  The man cursed. “You owe me a fucking hammer,” he said, swiping one out of Hawk’s tool kit and starting down the driveway.

  “Nice,” Hawk said. “Very civilized.”

  As the man left the driveway, he paused and looked up at Zee.

  It was Adam.

  He spotted her before she had a chance to step back into the shadows. He stared up at her, then looked at Hawk. Then he started to laugh. “That fucking figures,” he said, slamming the hammer against the side of Hawk’s van as hard as he could, leaving a huge dent in the door. He looked up at Zee one more time and pointed the hammer at her to make sure she had understood the threat. Before Hawk had a chance to get to him again, he was out of the driveway.

  Hawk rushed up the stairs. “Are you okay?”

  Zee nodded, stunned.

  “He knows you,” he said.

  “He came to my office and made some threats,” she said.

  “His name is Adam.”

  Hawk looked at her strangely. “His name is Roy,” he said.

  She looked at him. “What?”

  “My name is Adam.”

  THE GREEN COUCH. THE SIGN in the window. The music from the ballet school across the street. The safe feeling she’d had a few minutes ago, the one she realized now had been the feeling of safety that Lilly had described when she talked about this room, had completely disappeared. Safe was the last thing she was feeling now.

  48

  THAT AFTERNOON THEY HAD closed the job site early. It was the Thursday before the long weekend, and Roy was leaving for Weirs Beach the next day and needed to cash his paycheck. He had asked Lilly to go with him, but she couldn’t get away. He couldn’t get over the feeling that she was messing with him, trying to fuck him up. She was clearly trying to end things—she had told him that—but there was no way. If anyone was going to end things it would be him, and he would be the one to say how and when. Not that it was such a bad thing. Lately she’d been crying a lot. And guilty about what she’d been doing to her kids and to the man she had started to call “Sweet William,” which bugged the shit out of Roy. Sweet William was just some rich fuck who’d been lucky enough to snag one of the prettiest girls in town and now couldn’t keep her in his bed.

  Roy’s construction crew had done some work at her house. Well, not his crew, really—it was owned by a general contractor, another rich fuck, but a working guy, so he wasn’t so bad. And he let Roy run the show, stopping by only to do the bids and pick up the checks. When they worked on the Braedon house, they never saw the husband. They just dealt with Lilly, and she did things like make lemonade for the crew if it was a really hot day, or maybe some cookies, even. All the crew got a little crazy when she walked through the house, though Hawk hadn’t been part of the crew then, but the other guys just went wild for her. When Roy had finally nailed her, they’d made him talk about it for a week, and they were coming in their pants just hearing him tell how wild she got the first time out, taking her clothes off in his truck in broad daylight down by the Marblehead Lobster Company and doing him right there.

  “Psycho Pussy” was the best. He’d heard someone say that once. They were right, too, at least at first. For a while he thought she was the best time he’d ever had. It wasn’t so good lately, though. And it definitely wasn’t good since she’d started to give her husband the name Sweet William and talk about her kids all the time. Talk about losing wood.

  All year he’d been seeing a new woman in New Hampshire. Lilly didn’t know it, and nobody had better tell her either. It wasn’t serious, just some biker chick he’d met last June. A bleached blonde with stand-up tits bought for her by the guy on the bike she rode in on. She’d had a catfight right there on the boardwalk with some girl who’d been flirting with the biker. Roy hadn’t seen it, but everyone was talking. From what he heard, she left the other girl with four stitches across her right cheek, and he didn’t mean her face cheek either. She walked out on the biker after that, and when Roy met her, she was in the bar at the end of the boardwalk, and she was looking to make the guy jealous, so she took up with him. Left the guy there, too, taking off in Roy’s truck—or really the company truck, a good one, though, top of the line, a Ford F-350 with four-wheel drive and an extended cab.

  The next time he came up, she told him to make sure he brought drugs with him, the good kind that came in on the boats, not the kind that left you with a headache and a bloody nose, which was pretty much all you could get around here, especially now that she’d left her biker, who was her only good connection. She was class in that department, didn’t do crank the way he’d heard some of the biker chicks did. She didn’t want to rot her teeth, she said. And she didn’t smoke crack either, just liked the good stuff the old-fashioned way. Anything smooth, that you can snort through a straw, was what she told him when he asked what she liked. She wore a twenty-four-karat cross around her neck that hung low into her best assets and had a straw built into its stem. When he told her how clever he thought it was, disguising the coke straw that way, she got mad and told him she was a Christian, too, and never to assume otherwise. Then she sat on his lap and undid his fly and hopped onto him right there in the truck, which was a little too much like what had happened with Lilly, though he wasn’t complaining, not at all. He just hoped he hadn’t picked another psycho.

  It made him really angry when he thought about Lilly, even angrier when he heard about Lilly and Hawk.

  It had happened the afternoon he’d gone to get the check cashed. She’d come into the Rip Tide, looking for Roy. She’d been wearing a T-shirt, one of the guys on the crew got some great pleasure telling him, and it was wet because of the rain, and you could see everything. And she didn’t even seem to notice. But the rest of the crew noticed. Especially Hawk.

  Hawk bought her steak tips. He didn’t know why the guy told him that part, except to lead to the next. That Lilly had left with him. The guy had gone out to have a smoke, and he saw her go into Hawk’s apartment with him. Stupid shit.

  He already had an issue with the guy. Adam Mohawk. What kind of name was that? That he called himself “Hawk” pissed Roy off. He hated these college types who worked construction. They weren’t good at it, and they were always complaining.

  They’d had a lot of trouble that summer with crews. Hawk was hired by Roy’s boss and sent over to do some finish carpentry at the Braedons’. Roy hated him on sight. Not because of anything he did—his work was good enough—but because Lilly had taken a liking to him. She wouldn’t admit it to Roy, but everyone could see it. Roy had recently had to fire a couple of people and was dangero
usly close to being understaffed, or he would have found a way to get rid of Hawk. When Roy’s hammer disappeared on the job site, he had accused Hawk of stealing it. Actually, it wasn’t Hawk, it was another guy, someone Roy had already let go, but he needed someone to blame. As payback, Roy took Hawk’s hammer, which was a twin to his.

  “You should write your name on your tools,” he heard one of the other guys say to Hawk.

  “This isn’t the first time,” another said.

  The next day the hammer was gone from Roy’s box. He went over and grabbed it from Hawk, who pointed to his name and phone number scratched on the side.

  Stupid shit.

  ROY HAD BEEN WAITING FOR Hawk that Sunday night after he heard about Lilly. Sitting in the alleyway in the truck, lights off, just waiting. Hit him in the side of the head with one of those hammer staplers he’d stolen from the job site. College boy deserved what he got. Hawk never even saw it coming. Wasn’t back on the job site for almost a week. And when he came back, he had a line of stitches down his right cheek, and this time it was the face cheek he was talking about.

  49

  HAWK HAD DRIVEN ZEE’S Volvo the back way out of town, heading up Elm Street and cutting down Green Street to West Shore Drive. Even if Roy was following them, Hawk had managed to lose him.

  “I don’t mean to scare you,” he said. “But Roy is a pretty dangerous guy.”

  “I’m aware of that,” she said.

  “Plus, one of my buddies told me they’re laying off some of the crews. After the job he’s working on is finished, Roy will be out of work. So his anger level is pretty high.”

  “He doesn’t know that I’m in Salem,” she said.

  “Who does know?”

  “Just Mattei. And Michael.”

  “You need to call them. I’d tell you to get a restraining order, but then he’d find out where you are. Not to mention that they don’t always work.”