by Deb Caletti
“You don’t exactly go around telling people you found a dead person in a lake.”
On the phone with her mother, Mads feels the bump and soft give of the body all over again. That day is bigger and more present to her than ever. It’s like a whining child, getting louder and louder the more it’s ignored.
“Have you heard from Billy yet?”
“No.”
“That’s awful. That’s the worst.” This is another thing people will never understand. The way her mom can be there for her, too. In Mads’s worst times, she’s there with an almost eager loyalty. “I know you really like this guy, even if the way you met was . . .” She stops there. “Well, if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”
“Right.”
“Either way, Knightley says he’s got the notary ready for Monday.”
One of the ogres squeezes her throat so no sound at all comes out, not even a squeak. It’s so easy for the beast; he taps a foot at the same time, gazes out at the twittering summer day. She could thrash and bite, scratch and flail, but this seems like more energy than she has. The pulse of her own desire is faint. It has only the tiniest throb, like the heart of a mouse.
• • •
Thomas is barbecuing. Big columns of smoke roll across the yard and make a run for it over the fence. Harrison fills up his squirt gun with the garden hose, and Mads and Claire sit on those precarious outdoor chairs with woven plastic seats. Mads feels like her butt is hanging low. She probably couldn’t get up if she wanted to, not without help anyway—it’s a lawn chair message.
“Three more days.” Claire sighs.
Mads has no answer for this. How do you answer a fact? “You know we’re the first ones he’s going to shoot after he fills that up,” she says.
“Harrison, I’m warning you,” Claire shouts.
“I’m getting Dad,” he says, but Thomas doesn’t hear. He’s got some old transistor on and is busy wiping the tears from his eyes, caused by smoke and burning turkey dogs.
“Are you tired of having big talks?” Claire asks.
“Kind of.”
“Same here.”
Claire is so nice. They are all so nice. Mads, too, in spite of what she’s done, and in spite of the fact that nice is the last thing she’d call herself. Try selfish. Try cowardly.
“I’m so sorry again.” Lately, there is an abundance of regret. Mads has been handing out apologies right and left. No one even wants them. She’s the woman in the grocery store, trying to get people to take her tiny biscuit-wrapped sausages.
“Enough sorrys! We’re just sad, is all. We’re going to miss you so much. If you can’t tell, Thomas and I are pretty much crazy about you.”
“Even though I lied my head off.”
“Even though you lied your head off.”
“How can that be?” Mads just doesn’t get this. It’s like all the things that don’t even seem possibly possible: supernovas and winged dinosaurs and our own thin highways of nerves and vessels.
“Mads, that’s love. It just is. We can love you even if you disappointed us. Plus, you’re not exactly a terrible, scheming psychopath. You’re one of the sweetest people I know.”
“You’re too understanding, Claire.” Mads could cry again. She hates to cry, but there it is once more, that squeezing in her rib cage. “Someone’s going to steal your life savings.”
“Not at all. The thing is, I get it. Thomas does, too. Speaking your own truth—sometimes it’s one of the hardest things we have to do. It seems easy. Open your mouth, let the words come out. . . . But it can look so huge, even lying seems like a party in comparison.”
“Lying isn’t a party. I can tell you that much.”
“Honestly? I’m kind of glad it wasn’t that Ryan guy. That whole rich family on the East Coast thing—he sounded like a snob. I mean, that wedding was over the top. There were doves, Mads.” Harrison squirts Thomas’s knees, and Thomas lunges for a handful of his shirt. “Careful, Hare! Hot barbecue!” Claire shouts again.
“Too far with the doves?”
“I was starting to hate those people. I’m sure I’d like Billy much better.”
The squeeze in Mads’s chest turns to a horrible crushing. She presses her palms to her eyes. A tear escapes anyway, a single drop bent on survival; it rolls down her nose, heads out of there.
“Oh, honey. Now I’m the one who’s sorry.” Claire reaches in the pocket of her jeans but only finds a crumply old Kleenex. “Oh, this is gross. Never mind.”
Stupid crying, there’s nothing she can do. Mads is a wreck. “He’s really an amazing person,” she manages to say.
“A resilient one, for sure.”
“He’s not just the stuff that’s happened to him.” She says this into her hands. It deserves volume, but it’s also just another thing she’s lost.
“Of course not, Mads.”
“He isn’t.”
“You really care about him.”
Care? So much more than that. The truth of it shakes her shoulders with grief. Claire struggles out of her chair—Mads hears it tip. Claire’s arms are around her. Thomas is no doubt watching nervously and burning more hot dogs, but Mads can’t stop herself. All that’s gone catches up, and she just misses Billy, too. She misses him bad, and now she’ll have to miss him her whole life. She cries into Claire’s soft shirt.
“I think I lmm hmm.”
“What’s that, sweetie? What’s that?”
“I think I lumm hmm.”
“Love him?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, honey.”
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go.”
“Who does, huh? Whoever does? It’s okay, sweetheart. Everyone gets lost. Every single person. It’d be nice to have a map, or something, wouldn’t it? How about a map, huh?”
• • •
A map.
Mads thinks about maps that night as she sits in her bed, knees up, book propped on top. Yellowed maps with dark ink letters, old maps, wrong maps, the maps before anyone even really knew where we were, when they thought the poles were seas they could sail to, or the earth was a land one might drop from. Wouldn’t it be terrifying, Mads thinks, to not even know what was beyond where you stood, or what was over that mountain range? Except, little nomad, we do it every day.
The essential maps for the lost would say, Out, this way. They’d say, Don’t turn back, go only forward. They’d say, Courage, traveler.
It’s dark, and she reads by the small lamp near the bed. Claudia has just retrieved her violin case from the carved marble sarcophagus. Again. She retrieves it again, the third time for Mads, the zillionth time or more for Claudia. Who could even guess how many times, since E. L. Konigsburg first typed those words.
Mads opens to the middle of the book, her own purchased copy, since Harrison snitched the one from the library. She wonders how many kids are reading it right along with her—how many shiny bookmarks or bent-down pages are between its covers, how many hungry eyes pause on the thrilling word sarcophagus. Mads and Anna Youngwolf Floyd and millions of others might be entirely different people, but they all hid in that museum together.
Maps for the lost would have corridors like this, and rooms leading to rooms. They would spread large, because life has those places where old, old stuff is tucked away, and where arms and armor are collected after battle. Routes would wind around buried things and unearthed objects charred and damaged by war and floods and hard history. There would be twists and turns to exits. Dead ends. In the terrain of those maps, tragedy would be everywhere you looked, but so, too, would be the huge halls of treasure to be discovered.
Mads is not wearing her glasses, and the print on the page is tiny. It’s hard to concentrate. She sets down her book. The window is open and it smells like night and cut grass and August, all of which are the scent of something finishing or finished. The moon is a crescent, a lunar hammock. It gives off a yellow glow, the world’s night-light, same as the on
e in Ivy’s room.
Fate can trump the ogres if you let it. Trouble wrecks stuff so a person has a shot at a second chance. Elsewhere, there’s a swirl of heat and change rising. Right then, as Mads rests the book on her knees, Amy has Billy Youngwolf Floyd backed up against that tree. There he feels the lift of true love. It can’t save or rescue all by itself, but it can stand by and urge you to save yourself.
So strange, but Mads hears a small voice: Courage, traveler. Weird. It’s coming from inside her. Hold your little map and shout to the darkness, it says. Shout this: You are nothing, darkness, against something as old as love. Shout: I walk right through you, darkness, because I am, and I will be. This boldness—she’s felt it before. In the truck, when she first saw Billy. No, before that, when she was brave, so brave, and brought Anna to shore. This is how you save yourself? This is what can defeat the ogres? This small voice inside? This microscopic cell of belief, allowed to divide?
Yep. Uh-huh. The voice is your own personal sword and shield—remember that. Remember that every hard day.
Mads sticks her head out the window, gazes at the tilt of the moon, takes a long inhale of her approaching future. Hear that? Future. It’s a decision. It’s a vow. Across the street, she sees that the lamp in Ivy’s room is on. She hopes—no, she prays—that Suzanne is holding Ivy close. Trying to rescue everyone else is so much easier than rescuing yourself.
She knows what she has to do.
Two things.
Number one: She sets her laptop on the desk and turns it on. She opens a new document. She begins to type.
To my lawyer, Saxonberg Knightley:
I can’t say that I enjoyed your last visit. It was obvious that you had too much on your mind to pay any attention to what I was trying to say. . . .
When she’s finished, she jogs the envelope out to the mailbox before she can change her mind. She’s in bare feet, and she’s wearing the Grateful Dead T-shirt, Summer Tour 1987. The mailbox door clangs shut. She’s exhausted and exhilarated, totally terrified. Number one: done. Tomorrow, number two. Out in the driveway, she pats the hood of Thomas’s truck, which shines like a gem under the lamppost.
“Be ready, pal,” she says.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The doctor in his head thinks it’s morbid, but fuck him. Sometimes lately, Billy just likes to take a little tour. It makes him feel closer to his mother. He misses her so much, he feels brittle as a dropped leaf. He could be crushed like that, right underneath the sole of a passing shoe.
He needs his mom. How much he needs her—it makes the gut-socking feeling come. His broken heart (broken and broken and broken heart) would be something that mattered to her. She’d be great about it, too. He knows her suicide makes her sound all pathetic all the time, but it wasn’t like that! She wasn’t, and their life together wasn’t. Not at all. Sometimes, occasionally, but not always, okay? He even knows what she’d do now. She’d make him some apple cobbler and she’d put it in a bowl with a blop of melty vanilla ice cream on top. She’d tell him, Some girl will love you like mad, a girl who deserves you.
Do you see this? See the whole picture, he wants to scream, not some single word like pathetic or tragic. He doesn’t know who he’s talking to, or even why he wants it understood that his mother was more than what she did. What does it even matter? But it does. Yeah, on some days she might have stayed in bed, and the house would be so dark and dim he’d want to run away (he hopes she can’t hear him think that). But, too, she once put together a wood swing set for him when he was a kid (he can still remember her squinting at the directions), and she treated every gift he ever gave her like treasure—calendars with pictures of garden gates, and fluffy pink socks, and even that huge eye shadow set with colors he now knows she wouldn’t wear in a million years. She was a human being who loved him and he loved her, and now he’s all nuclear ash and flatness, radioactive shit sinking into his earth.
He’s lost, is what he is. He needs a map. Since he doesn’t have one, he drives the known route that punishes and comforts. Seventies songs play on the radio. He thinks about the new dog they got at Heartland that morning. Harv. Harv’s a rescue from a landslide in the north part of the state. Billy hopes—no, he prays—that Harv’s owners are still alive and that they’ll see his picture on the website, because Harv is beautiful and sweet and a true gentleman. It kills Billy to think Harv is wondering where his family went and why. What does a dog understand about tragedy? What if he thinks they left him on purpose?
His heart splits, and a sob escapes at that thought. He grips his steering wheel.
First stop: their old house. He passes the Fremont troll and heads down their street. Mr. Woods needs to mow his lawn, and J.T. Jones is actually in his driveway, messing around with his car, which is jacked up. He can only see J.T. Jones’s Vans, sticking out from underneath, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. He shoots a zap of hatred to the Vans but then realizes he doesn’t have to defend Mads against J.T. Jones anymore. She didn’t even know the guy, he realizes. Still, those self-important shoes, and the thumping hate-cops music that J.T. Jones apparently thinks the whole neighborhood needs to hear . . . He’s still an asshole even if he didn’t break Mads’s heart.
The FOR RENT sign’s long gone, but now there’s a big RV parked in their driveway. Its license plate reads CAP’N ED, and it has a bumper sticker on the back that says HOME OF THE REDWOODS. The front door of their house is open, and Billy can see the big sheets of plastic that mean someone’s painting inside. He rolls down his window to smell. Yeah. New paint. The clean, plasticky odor makes him want to cry. There’s a large clay pot on the porch, planted with those red old-lady flowers that look like Afros.
He hopes the guy paints Billy’s mom’s room, too. And the ceilings. They have yellow splotches from water leaks. They deserve better.
He is so choked up about the way things go forward. Also, about the way things go forward in a way that might be nicer, only his mom will never see that. The plants look good.
He starts up his mom’s SUV. Earth, Wind & Fire is blasting; it’s the song about a shining star, with trumpets and one of the heaviest bass lines ever, and so he’s not sure at first, but he thinks he hears something. The sound of a jet plane, the familiar deep rumble of Mads’s truck. He looks around. His heart starts to beat hard. Is that Mads reversing out of there like the police are after her?
Probably not. He can’t be sure. Just the thought of seeing Mads—there’s a stampede of feeling, throbbing and thumping inside to the beat of the hate-cop music and “Shining Star” and some old love and fury song his body is making up right then. It’s August. And while he’s seen Mads in August, he’s never seen her in September. He’s never seen her in October or November. Even though he’s so pissed at her, he wonders what her hands would feel like in mittens. He wonders how she’d look in a hat with a pom-pom on it, or with snowflakes falling in her hair.
If it was her truck, it’s gone anyway.
The Tragedy Tour continues. Next up: the bridge. Dark, you think? Gruesome? Keep your opinions to yourself. This is between Billy and his mom, and anyone else should just shut up about it, because your grief belongs to you and you alone. Driving across, he smells exhaust, and fries from some restaurant, and cancer-smoke from a cigarette tipped out a car window. Note the important words here: driving across. Across. Bridges are not meant to be jumped from. Bridges are meant to get you to the other side. This is what he does now. He can. He’s able. He’s strong enough, and the bamp of his tires off the ramp proves it.
Finally, he drives around to the other side of Lake Union. It’s a new piece of the ritual, added on after he saw that article again. The park is small, too small for a parking lot even, so he finds a spot on the street and gets out. This is weirdly the most peaceful stop on this circuit. Trees rustle like book pages, and the lake burbles like a lyric. See, he has nowhere to visit her. Mom is in that urn in his grandmother’s living room, but that big blue-gray vase is all Gran and
more Gran, and their endless struggle. Billy needs a place to think clear thoughts about his mom, commune, sort of, excuse the fake-Seattle-hippie-with-Pantene-washed-hair bullshit word. Before now, he never understood why people put flowers and creepy dead girl photos at the edge of a road, at the scene of an accident. Why not decorate where they lived? But now he gets it. It’s about that person, but it’s also about what happened. The before and the after. Where the two intersected.
There’s a small, sloping lawn. This is where Mads sat in the photo, her head in her hand. The lawn leads to a dock, surrounded by weedy reeds and cattails. He walks to the end of that dock, sits on the edge of it with his legs hanging over. The soles of his Converse tap the surface. The water is smooth and still, and it’s the same bright blue color of the sky, except for the patches of deep green where the fish probably hang out.
He tells his mom, you know, private stuff. It’s mostly about love, and it fills his chest the way smoke fills a room, and he’s about to start coughing and blubbering because of it, and that’s when he swears he hears it again. That rocket rumble.
He looks over his shoulder. Oh no, oh yes, oh shit, there’s that chrome smile, those patches of primer. He’s so happy to see her, he wants to run and grab her and bite her and eat her right up—that’s gross, but so what. And he’s so upset at seeing her, he could jump in that water to get away (there’s nowhere else to go), into the water where his mother floated; he’d slap and flail and look like a moron, because he’s a terrible swimmer, but he’d escape Mads.
His eyes prick with tears. His hands start to shake like a big baby. He can sit there and pretend to be as furious as he in many ways still is, or he can be the man he wants to be, a man like Jane Grace’s husband, Dave, or like his uncle even, and go to her.
So he goes to her. Her shiny hair is in a red barrette, and she is stepping across that park like it’s a dark house with ghosts hiding behind the curtains. Her arms are crossed over her body, as if to protect against the spirit-cold. It’s taking everything she has to get to him, he can tell. And so he closes the distance, and he takes her in his arms and she starts to sob and he starts to sob and anyone watching is getting a big damn eyeful.