Essential Maps for the Lost

by Deb Caletti

  Her radio station comes on. That station hurts his stomach. He isn’t going to change it, though. He longs for more of anything she loved. He already knows all the lines of the Eagles songs, and the Doobie Brothers and Simon and Garfunkel ones, all the la’s and oh’s of crazy old nights and bridges and black water. He pictures her singing to the radio with the windows rolled down. He used to pretend it was bad singing, and plug his ears and make a face, but it secretly made him happy, seeing her just being herself like that. She’d say, I know, it’s too beautiful to stand, and sing louder.

  It’s a good memory. Still, he gets so mad, driving that car. Once, he pounded the steering wheel and screamed that one word, the only word, over and over. Why. But he feels close to her here. The her that was her real self. He slept in the car one night, but it worried Gran when she woke up and he wasn’t in his bed.

  Billy pulls out of the lot. He drives past the Fremont troll and goes up the hill, heads to his and his mom’s old neighborhood. There’s a FOR RENT sign on the house, he sees. Jesus! He barely just got their stuff out of it! His stomach clenches up again. He feels sick. It’s a cross between a throw-up feeling and a crushed-soul feeling. God, he hates that! Focus, he tells himself. He has a job to do. That asshole Mr. Woods always lets Lulu out right around then. It’s going to be easy, as long as Lulu doesn’t flinch and hide at his outstretched hand. That’s what happens to them after a while.

  He parks in his old driveway. If Mr. Woods spies the car, he’ll think Billy is just bawling his eyes out inside or something. He spots Lulu cowering in the corner of the garden. No problem.

  Billy gets out. And that’s when he sees her. Sees her again. That girl, parked on his street in that truck. The truck needs paint, bad. It has big bald spots of primer. Come on, get it fixed up! A truck like that deserves some respect. He knows shit about cars, but he knows that much.

  The girl—her hair is shiny. He noticed this before. She has very white teeth; he can see them even from that distance. She’s the kind of girl who smells good. She’s all scrunched down, pretending she’s doing something innocent, like checking her phone. What is she doing there? He’s seen her before, the day he moved his and his mom’s junk out of the house.

  Oh, yeah.

  Oh, yeah, of course. You know why she’s probably there? That guy, a few houses down. It’s got to be. Billy forgot all about him. Some senior; goes to one of the private schools. Blanchet? One of those Catholic ones. A real douchebag. Girls like that always have a thing for boys like him. He probably hurt her, just as she always suspected he might, and now, after proving her right about herself, she can’t let him go. This is how it plays. He knows that particular story too well.

  J.T., he suddenly recalls. J.T. Jones. What is it about assholes with initials instead of names?

  The girl is going to be a problem, though. Usually, the idea is, make it natural, do this in the broad daylight, but not when you have a witness. He’s going to have to act natural, is all. He’ll use an Ability Modifier from Night Worlds, probably Charisma. He’ll make her think this is the most regular thing ever. He’ll be calm, smooth, decisive.

  His heart is beating a hundred miles an hour, but ignore that. He could be in a movie, he thinks, ’cause he’s precise as a laser, cool as a blade. Lulu is one of those cute little white dogs, so she’s an easy one. He scoops her up in one clean arc. He sprints like a sharp breeze. He doesn’t even look at the girl. What girl? Here’s hoping she moves on to a better guy and forgets that douchebag once and for all.

  Lulu is excellent in the car. She turns a circle on the passenger seat and falls asleep, as if she can finally rest. Here’s hoping she moves on to a better guy and forgets that douchebag once and for all.

  Billy pulls into work. Heartland Rescue is noisy as hell and stinks a lot less than you’d think. He loves this fucking place with all his heart. He carries Lulu under his arm and then sets her on the counter.

  “Billy,” Jane Grace says, and runs her hand through her short hair. “Not again.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Billy says.

  “Where did you get this dog?”

  “Found it. Lost. Walking around lost.” Lulu’s tags are in the pocket of his jeans.

  “Lost.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Just walking around lost.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay.” She sighs. “Fine. What should we call her, do you think?”

  Heartland Rescue always names their animals, and never ever puts them to sleep.

  “She looks like a Lulu to me,” Billy Youngwolf Floyd says, and then Lulu winks at him, the way dogs do sometimes. He swears it wasn’t an accident. He knows a real wink when he sees one.

  Chapter Three

  Mads wants to strangle the kid. “Harrison, for God’s sake. Stop following me. Find something to do. Don’t you have school?”

  “Half-day conference schedule till we’re done.”

  “Well, go build a fort or something. Make a rocket with, I don’t know, sticks.”

  “Mom said to keep an eye on you.”

  Harrison’s mouth is still purple from a Popsicle he ate yesterday. He’s a weird boy. Sweet, but weird. His eyes are too big for his face behind those glasses. His best friend, Avery, has the same ones. When Avery comes over and they sit on the couch watching TV, they look like a pair of owls on a tree branch. Harrison is the kind of kid you have to try to like until you do. Now Madison sometimes feels a surprising gust of love for him that makes her heart nearly burst.

  “She just meant it casually. It’s something people say. She didn’t mean it was your job.”

  “Can I come?”

  “Harrison, since when do they let ten-year-olds go to community college?”

  She gets in and slams the door of Uncle Thomas’s truck, and then feels bad. Mads can’t stand to be unkind. She rolls down the window. “Hey, Smurf. Rematch later? Yahtzee champions don’t stay Yahtzee champions for long. Not with this lethal weapon.” She blows a puff of luck onto her clenched fist, shakes a pair of imaginary dice. “Yeah, man! Five sixes.”

  He grins, and Mads heads out. Thomas’s truck sounds like a jet plane. No one is even supposed to be driving the thing yet. It’s Thomas’s project, and only the unexpected appearance of his niece changed that plan. The truck still has big splotches of silver-gray primer, from where he sanded off the paint, prepping it for a new coat. You wouldn’t exactly call that truck incognito. Which’ll be a problem when she steals the Bellarose baby. The law will spot her and Ivy in a flat second in that thing.

  She drives across the 520 Bridge and takes the turnoff for Bellevue Community College. Otto Hermann will be there already, his white hair sticking out from his head in curled springs of who-cares. Good for it! Wouldn’t it be fantastic, not to care? Otto Hermann probably even slurps his coffee with that accent, too. Ve vill now dizcuss zuh vine art of zuh contrakt. If you don’t understand him, that’s your problem. Otto Hermann is who he is. How about a few lectures on that?

  She knows what she’ll see when she arrives on campus. People her age, finishing up spring quarter in all those enticing classrooms. Many people do not put the words enticing and classroom together, but she does. Dream of her dreams (don’t judge; you don’t judge a person’s dream) is to be taking English classes, studying books, stories, poems, the stuff of life, maybe one day teaching that same stuff to others, like passing on the secrets of the universe.

  But this will not happen. She is destined (doomed) to be in Otto Hermann’s tired room, where the fluorescent lights twitch, and where the students are mostly older women who aren’t wearing wedding rings anymore. There are a few men. One’s name is Arthur. He still wears a watch. There’s a young guy who reads books with titles like Selling Your Way to Your First Million. This is not college-college, but Continuing Education. Continuing Education is a good name for life in general, Mads thinks.

  Here are the necessary details: After she fi
nishes both Washington Real Estate Fundamentals and Real Estate Practices, Mads will take her licensing exam. She is in Seattle for this one purpose, to take this particular course, which is packed into two quarters and completed by summer’s end. This is where they promise a “convenient and expedient” experience, and where 97.5 percent of graduates pass the licensing exam on the first try.

  They are, after all, in a hurry. Speed is of the essence. Her mother forgets to return client calls, and important inspection deadlines are getting overlooked, and there was even that near miss with the Huntingtons’ lawsuit, when the couple almost lost their fat wad of earnest money, thanks to Catherine Murray’s lack of attention. Her mother needs her. Needs her now. Or, as she’s told Mads more than once, It’ll probably all go under without your help, not that it matters.

  It matters. The business is her mother’s livelihood. What would happen if she lost it? Disaster, that’s what. Here is the ticking clock: The partnership papers were drawn up sometime in Madison’s junior year, ready to be signed the minute she passed the licensing exam. The cap is off the pen. Feet are impatiently tapping; fingertips are drumming on tabletops. Mads graduated early for this. She ditched her friends in what felt like the middle of the party. Last year at the attorney’s office, the lawyer, Mr. Knightley, didn’t listen to Mads’s (admittedly muted) protests. He said things to Mads like You can make a real difference here and What would your mom do without you, and thus sealed Mads’s fate.

  The problem is—and Mads would never confess this to anyone, even now consider this a whisper, consider it something you can barely hear—the classes, the papers, the signature . . . They fill her with a despair she senses she is no match for. Ever since she and her mother sat across from Mr. Knightley at his desk, a long shadow of sorrow has slipped over her like an eclipse. When people notice the half-moons under her eyes (sorrow keeps you awake), or the slow weightiness in her step (sorrow grabs your ankles), they say things like Cheer up! And Look on the bright side! These words are only sweet flowers that the dark ogre of depression eats in one bite.

  She tries the “pep talk” (awful, awful, utterly useless phrase) on herself, too. Who, after all, is handed a business right out of high school? A mostly-paying-the-bills business! She could be set up for life! And she and her mom get along great, they do! Maybe later, she could try something different. Even her father, who is pissed she’s not going to college, has occasionally said It’s not the worst thing, I guess and It will give you work experience, anyway. Mads is not ungrateful. (She hates that word. Even saying ungrateful makes her feel ungrateful.) It’s just that the idea of it all is like being in one of those horrible stories where people are buried alive. There’s the crush of earth and the last squeak of oxygen. Still. She can’t say no. You might not understand this, but she can’t say no. Her mother would be furious. And she can’t let her down. The guilt would kill Mads. She’s the kind of person guilt could kill. It’d barely have to try.

  Either way, her own self will be swallowed up, gone. Already, she is slowly disappearing.

  As she drives to school, her required textbook, Mastering Real Estate Principles, 7th Edition, sits on the seat beside her in Thomas’s truck. She has her completed homework assignment on valuation, too, which is tucked inside.

  But something strange happens as they crest the hill where the school sits. It’s as if Thomas’s truck has a mind of its own. It speeds right on past the campus. The campus shoots by like Harrison on his bike, when he pedals so fast the wheels blur. Thomas’s truck screeches a loop. It goes straight back over 520, into Seattle. Mads attempts to talk some sense into it, but that truck is having none of it. She may be confused and despairing, but that truck isn’t. It knows exactly where it wants to go.

  • • •

  The night of that horrible swim a few months ago, the woman was oh-so-briefly on the news. There was a small article in the Seattle Times the next day, as well, with a picture of the park. Half of Mads was in it—her arm, her leg, the right side of her face—in the distance. And then, after that, there was nothing. Nothing! The story was over. How could that be? Shouldn’t there have been more? Shouldn’t there have been why? Shouldn’t everyone know the woman’s past and what happened to the people in her life after? How could people just go on as if nothing monumental had occurred? Mads realized then how often she herself had gone on, after hearing news like that. How she’d just got up and made some popcorn, or changed the channel, or went back to her biology assignment.

  But something important was revealed, even in the brevity. From KING 5 news at five, Madison learned this: Her name was (is?) Anna Youngwolf Floyd. And she jumped off the Aurora Bridge.

  Since then—the body, the name, the jump—Mads sees Anna Youngwolf Floyd every time she shuts her eyes. No, wrong. She doesn’t even need to shut them to see her. Anna is just with Mads all the time now. She is not a ghost who bangs doors and flutters curtains. She is just a thought that won’t leave. She is a gnawing question. This is the most insistent kind of ghost of all.

  “What is that, Mads?” Claire asked late one night, not long after the swim. Well, sure, she’d want to know, especially after Mads slammed the lid of her laptop down so she wouldn’t see.

  “I’m sorry. Am I keeping you awake?”

  “It’s late, honey,” Claire said. She leaned against the doorjamb of Mads’s room. “Really late. It’s, what, past one?”

  “I’m done now. Homework,” she lied. She’s a terrible liar.

  “Homework, huh? You’re on that thing all hours lately. Mads, was that her picture? That woman?”

  Mads said nothing. Aunt Claire didn’t deserve to be deceived, anyway. She’s a nice person, same as Mads. She does yoga. She’s the nice sort of yoga person, not the superior kind of yoga person. She wears yoga person skirts, and yoga person woven things, and she has longish, rust-colored hair. She tries to feed Harrison organic stuff, which is thankfully, what a relief, balanced out when Thomas sneaks him Doritos. Mads feels bad that Claire has gotten stuck with her all spring and summer. Thomas probably felt obliged, given that his brother, Mads’s father, ditched them to work in Amsterdam, fleeing Mads’s mother like she was the wreckage of a burning plane.

  Aunt Claire sighed. She shook her head. “This isn’t healthy,” she said finally. “I know what you’ve been doing all these hours on the computer, Mads. Trying to look her up . . . And you’re not sleeping. Not eating . . . This whole thing . . . The other day, when you heard the water running—that’s a flashback, Mads.”

  “I’m going to go brush my teeth,” Mads said.

  “She was just a woman. Probably mentally ill, you know that, right? There aren’t always real explanations when people do stuff like that. Except that one.”

  “I know.”

  “If mental illness made sense . . .”

  Mads waited. She hoped and hoped Claire would finish, because it might give her some sort of an answer. Oh, please, she thought. Come on, Claire! But Claire just waved her arms a little, luckless branches riding a sudden wind.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go see someone? A therapist? I don’t want to keep bugging you about it, but I really think it might be helpful. I mean, you were already struggling, you know, um . . . depressed? And now this. Not to put a label on you, or anything! I mean, after something like that, it might all just be . . . too much, right? An expert seems important.”

  Mads snorted. She’d lost belief in that kind of thing a long time ago. Still, Claire and Thomas had been asking her this daily, watching her endlessly, looking for signs that she might be the one to jump off a bridge next. Even her mom was suggesting that Mads come home for support.

  “Do you know how many psychologists and psychiatrists and other ists Mom has been to?”

  “You’re not her.”

  God. She hoped not. It sounded unkind, and she didn’t even want to think unkind, but wow. That idea could make a person nervous. She loves her mother. Her mom is sometimes her b
est friend, the way they talk and hang out and joke; the way she’s there for Mads like no one else. But Mads also has certain permanent images that knock-knock-knock. The constant, cruel jabs at her father when he still lived with them. The rages that cause Mads to flee to her room. The inability to manage, which Mads must manage. “I know.”

  “And you don’t have to become her.” Aunt Claire seemed angry. She shoved her hands down into her robe pockets. She’s seen years of stuff she thinks is wrong, and she’s had it with her sister-in-law. Mads should live her own life, Claire has told her. Mads shouldn’t be the nurse or the mother or the best friend.

  “Okay.”

  “All this time on the computer . . .”

  “I’m just curious,” Mads said.

  Aunt Claire tipped her head and scrunched her nose, an all-purpose face that covered a lot of territory. If you’re just curious, the face said, you shouldn’t be. But you’re not just curious.

  And it’s true. Mads is beyond curiosity. She is in need. Dire, downright need. She needs to understand just how sad a person has to be to do something like that. Not able to even eat scrambled eggs sad? Ex-husband in Amsterdam sad? Running off in the middle of an open house sad?

  Or worse. Returning to Apple Valley forever sad? A signature that decides your whole life sad? Murray & Murray Realtors, the business cards already printed up and waiting sad? Hearing Suzanne and Carl Bellarose fight in the driveway as baby Ivy looks on with worried eyes sad? Because she is clearly this sad, this sad and more, and she has been for what already feels like a long, long time.

  Every night since the body in the water (no, that, too, is a lie—more than that, every day and every night, many times a day), Mads has looked at the satellite image of the bridge. She zooms in, click, click, click. Anna Youngwolf Floyd would have had to walk up those stairs, right there. She would have stepped onto that narrow grating. There is the cement wall she would have put one leg over. What was she thinking, just before she lifted her second leg? On the satellite image, Mads sees the view she had. Worse, she sees the view she herself might have.