by Luanne Rice
“Now you stay put here,” he said. “I want to know where to, uh, find you, when we open. That’s about an hour from now, so you just make yourselves at home. Don’t go wandering around!”
I nodded, and Charlie left us. I looked at the long Shaker bench where I’d sat with my mom as she’d shown me her favorite books and told me the facts and discoveries she was making in her research. I looked at the narrow cupboard that held the library of volumes Peary had taken on his North Pole expedition.
“You better get what you need, fast,” Billy said, standing just inside the door, gazing out.
“Why?” I asked, suddenly wanting to stay for hours, sinking into the comfort of memory and the feel of my mother’s presence.
“Because ol’ Charlie is a good actor,” Billy said. “He’s on his cell phone right now, calling someone about us. Or maybe someone called him. Did you turn off the phone after you took the photo?”
I fumbled in my pocket—I hadn’t. “Oh, no,” I said.
“They’re tracking you,” Billy said. “Charlie’s still talking—okay, now he’s heading over here. He’s hurrying, Maia. He’s got his hand up like a stop sign.”
I barely thought. I went straight for the small green book with flaking gold leaf on the cover, jammed it into my waistband, and lurched after Billy out the door.
“You kids stay right there!” Charlie yelled. “Don’t move, Maia. I’ve got orders to keep you here.”
Billy grabbed my hand and we started running in the opposite direction from where we’d parked the truck. We zigzagged through backyards and side streets, staying as close as possible to buildings and hedges, finally reversing course and making our way along a seawall to the shipyard.
“More evasive measures?” I asked, out of breath.
“My father taught me at least one thing worth knowing,” Billy said.
By the time we climbed into the truck, we saw two police cars speeding past, toward the Seaport. I’d thought Charlie had been on the phone with my dad, but now it was even more serious. If they knew I’d stolen Beluga and Humpback Whales of Saguenay Fjord, the classic book written by Laurent Cartier in 1898, I’d be in even more trouble than for running away. The book was valuable—to me, it was priceless.
“They’ll be looking for the Volvo,” I said, giving Billy an admiring smile.
“Yeah,” he said. “Till they figure out you’re with me, we’ll have a good head start. Even then they might not know about the truck.”
I ducked down, and Billy drove the opposite way from where we wanted to go, avoiding the Seaport. We got stuck at the drawbridge for ten incredibly nerve-racking minutes, but then we rumbled through town and onto I-95.
“Which way now?” I asked. “Basically north, but we still need a map. You said that yourself.”
Billy shot me a stern glance across the seat. “Why did you have to take that book? Couldn’t you just have looked up what you needed?”
I turned my face away, feeling stung.
“There wasn’t time,” I said. I couldn’t tell him the truth: I wanted the book. My mother had held it in her hands. She had lovingly turned the pages, pointing out intricate line drawings of marine mammals, of the fjord’s soaring cliffs, and shown me the pages about the exact spot we’d build our cabin, for the Whale Mavens and Construction Crew. This was our own personal guide to life.
“My father was a thief,” Billy said. “He did a lot of other bad things, before he hurt my mother. He ripped people off, took what wasn’t his. I don’t like people who do that.”
“What about you, taking this truck?” I asked. “Are you so perfect?”
“The truck’s mine,” he said.
“No, you told me your grandparents were selling the houses, not giving you anything,” I said.
“Before all that happened,” Billy said, “my grandfather told me the truck belonged to me. He taught me to drive in it, when I was just thirteen, three years before I got my license. We’d catch lobsters together, take them to the market, and he’d let me drive home on back roads. He said it was mine, and he never got the chance to take it back.”
“Oh,” I said.
“My grandfather was more of a father to me than my dad. I don’t want to be anything like my dad, and I don’t want to be with someone who is.”
“I’m not like that,” I said. I wasn’t. I’d thought Billy understood the desperation I felt, the way I’d do almost anything to get to my mother.
“Yeah, whatever,” he said harshly.
“I’m not!”
“What people do matters way more than what they say,” he said.
“Why’d you run away with me if I’m so horrible?” I snapped.
He just drove, not answering me. I squirmed in my seat, clutching the book. I didn’t care what Billy said—I was glad I’d taken it. This was my mission, not his. He didn’t understand a thing.
“Give me your phone,” he said, after about ten silent minutes.
“Why?”
“Because your dad used it to find you once. You want to get to your mother, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I said. I pulled the phone from my pocket and stared at it.
Again, a long wait before he spoke.
“Everything matters,” he said. “Every detail. I didn’t pay attention before. I missed everything. If I’d been watching, really listening, I would have known something terrible was about to happen.”
“To your mother?”
“Yes.” He paused. “I can’t,” he said, an edge of ice in his voice. “I can’t let bad things happen. To anyone. When I see something bad I have to stop it. From now on, that’s how it has to be. You can’t steal again, Maia. It’s for your own good—you’re not going to feel right if you do it.”
“I won’t.”
“And if you don’t want your father to find you …”
My emotions felt like fire. I heard a dial click; he was trying to turn on the radio.
“I forgot,” he said. “It doesn’t work.”
I didn’t care. All I really wanted to hear was the sound of his voice. I wanted him to say more about protecting people. About protecting me.
I rolled down the truck window, and as we drove north through the countryside, past farms and low green hills, I threw my phone out the window. And even though Billy’s phone didn’t have GPS, he threw his out, too.
The time has come,” Billy said, about ten miles after we’d ditched our phones.
“For what?”
“The most key part of any road trip. I said it before.”
“Music? But the radio doesn’t work.”
“Food! Lunch and snacks!”
I smiled. There’s nothing like a quest for junk food to clear the air. We saw road signs for Providence and veered off, toward the east. From a distance I spotted a couple of downtown towers, some church steeples, and a hill covered with redbrick houses that looked rosy in the sunlight.
“Hey, the Superman Building!” Billy said, pointing. And he was right—the tallest building stepped upward into the sky, the stories diminishing in size, all the way to the two-story turret. It was straight out of a movie.
“Can you leap it in a single bound?” I asked.
“Just watch me,” he said, laughing.
But we angled up the hill, past Brown University’s stately wrought-iron gates, and parked on Thayer Street. We were in a very college-y-looking neighborhood. Students in denim jackets and sleek sneakers walked by in twos and threes and singly, backpacks over their shoulders.
Billy and I strolled down the street, jostling our way through the college kids. I wanted to go into every shop—the Brown Bookstore; a shop that sold gauzy white peasant shirts, tie-dye tees, and Indian print skirts; Urban Outfitters; a little boutique called Zuzu’s Petals. The old-fashioned-looking art deco Avon Cinema was showing a movie called Miles Ahead.
“Hey, a movie about Miles Davis!” I said, spotting the poster.
“No way,” Billy said.
“Should we see it?” I asked.
“No, have you forgotten? We have something way more important to do.”
“Drive to Canada?”
“Food, Maia,” he said, bumping me with his shoulder. “Stay focused!”
We had a little wrestling match right there on the sidewalk, shoving each other, and I laughed, my heart bubbling over as students circled around us.
We stopped into the Provvie Mart and loaded a basket with Cape Cod Chips, gummy bears, Hershey’s kisses, cheese doodles, and a six-pack of Sprite. At the last minute I asked the clerk for a disposable camera. Billy rolled his eyes, but he didn’t object.
That photo of us on my iPhone was haunting me. If I couldn’t have that one, I’d make sure we took others.
I saw Billy counting his money after we left the cash register.
“Are we doing okay?” I asked as I ripped the yellow foil wrapping off the camera.
“Yeah, as long as we’re careful, just buy necessities.” He lifted the bag of snacks. “Which these are.” I snapped a shot, caught his grin.
We left Providence and drove an hour before stopping for fuel. Filling the tank was a huge wake-up call. The gauge didn’t work, and we’d been lucky we hadn’t run out. It cost fifty-three dollars, a chunk of Billy’s money, to fill it with diesel. He checked the oil, added a quart, and bought a Road Atlas for the United States and Canada, for a grand total of seventy dollars and thirty-six cents.
“That’s sobering,” I said.
“This thing eats fuel,” he said, patting the dashboard. “But it will get us there.”
I opened the atlas. Everyone I knew relied on GPS and had trouble reading an actual map. Not me. Thanks to my mother obsessively teaching me navigation, I knew how.
Billy and I drove on. We avoided I-95 and aimed for the back roads that would take us in a big circle around Boston, along the New Hampshire coast into Maine, and up to the Canadian border.
“Since they know about Mystic,” Billy said, “they probably figure you’re on the way to see your mother. They’ll call her, right?”
“My parents aren’t exactly on speaking terms,” I said.
“But if you’re involved, they’ll make an exception. To take care of you,” he said.
“My mother is hard to find,” I said. “She’s on boats a lot. And she lives so far up the fjord, in the boondocks, there’s no reception. She doesn’t even have a cell phone. We write each other letters.”
“But she has email, right? To stay in touch with other researchers or whatever?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She does.” It was a sore point, but I wasn’t about to say anything. I used to email her all the time, and she never answered.
“The mavens write on stationery and use stamps and sealing wax,” Mom had said. And that’s how it was: She’d sent me a brass seal imprinted with a spouting whale and sticks of special wax made in Paris from ground limestone, pine resin, lacquer, and carmine-colored dye made from cochineal—the bright red shells and wings from a certain insect in Peru.
“So your father will email her,” Billy said. “To tell her to expect you. And they’ll be watching for you along the way.”
“She’ll be glad to see me when I get there,” I said. “She’ll understand how I can’t go back to my father’s.” And I thought of what she’d written in the last letter I’d received before leaving: Someday you will visit and hear it, too. Ahh, the elusive it. I couldn’t wait.
“Why can’t you go back?” he asked. “Your parents obviously take care of you.”
“They’re not my parents,” I said. “They’re my father and stepmother.”
Thinking about it gave me a basketball-size lump in my chest. My father had been lost and numb after my mother had left. We both had been, like survivors who’d fallen from a sinking ship into icy, arctic waters.
While Billy drove, I pulled my mother’s last letter from my backpack and started to read.
I’ve been out in the boat, listening on hydrophones, and as much as I love humpbacks, I find our local beluga song to be the most beautiful sound in the world. Do you know they are endangered, fewer than nine hundred of these beautiful, rare, snow-white whales? We have to hope for babies this year. The species could disappear. When I hear their song I feel hope.
Someday you will visit and hear it, too …
I wanted that. I wanted to hear it, too.
When Mom was young—just a little older than me—she’d gone to Connecticut College in the old whaling port of New London. My dad had been at the Coast Guard Academy, and they got married right after graduation. For a while they’d shared a dream maritime life. She was at grad school in Woods Hole, he was stationed in Menemsha, and they lived on Martha’s Vineyard. She was so cool—she commuted to classes in her own boat, no matter what weather. It must have been so romantic.
Eventually they had me. I’d thought we were happy. For a long time, I guess we were. Then my dad inherited his father’s boring insurance business in Crawford, and Mom got the job in Mystic. She spent time commuting and working and researching when Dad thought she should be with us, and life was all downhill from there.
She’d left a note on my pillow the day she left. I could recite it if Billy had asked. I could tell him about how she’d said she was dying inside, that she’d stop breathing if she couldn’t escape suburbia and go live with the whales, how leaving me would leave a hole in her heart until she saw me again.
Someday you will visit and hear it, too.
“You’ll always be pure magic to her,” my dad said after she left, trying to reassure me of her love. “Why do you think she named you Maia?”
Maia was a star in the Taurus cluster. The name came from Greek mythology. So did those of the other sisters in the Pleiades, my mother’s favorite constellation. She used to remind me that Maia was a spectral blue giant, the fourth brightest star in all of Taurus. She said she’d known my name as soon as she’d seen my deep-blue eyes.
“Where are we on the map?” Billy asked, rousing me from my thoughts.
“Here,” I said, leaning into him and pointing at a road slightly northeast of Boston. We jounced over a pothole, and he put his arm around me to steady me. It took me by surprise, and I bit my lip. He held on for a minute. Then he reached into the bag for a handful of gummy bears. He popped one into my mouth, and we both laughed.
We drove through an old industrial river town filled with abandoned factory buildings, with smokestacks, broken windows, and weed-choked asphalt parking lots. It reminded me of Crawford. My grandfather had had a booming insurance business; by the time my dad stepped in, half the customers had moved away. My mother had said the city was stultifying. Maybe those customers thought so, too.
Suddenly I looked at Billy. He’d lived at the beach, right on the salt water of Long Island Sound.
“What was it like when you moved to Crawford?” I asked. “Was it stultifying?”
He laughed. “That sounds weird,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s kind of a guidance counselor word.”
“Well, tell me anyway. Was it?”
“The Home was,” he said. “So many rules, and sharing a room with a bunch of guys. No running on the beach, no sailing. I missed all that.”
“What about Crawford itself?”
“I didn’t belong there. I knew I never would.” His eyes looked hard again, the way they had last night, when we’d stopped in front of that cottage with the blue TV light inside.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Go for it.”
“Whose house was that?”
He glanced over quickly, surprise in his face. He frowned, as if I were way out-of-bounds. I noticed how his brown hair slanted across his green eyes, and I couldn’t help myself—I reached over to brush it back.
“How can you even see the road with your hair in your eyes?” I asked, to cover my embarrassment.
“What hous
e?” he asked as if he hadn’t felt my hand on his forehead.
“The one you stopped in front of, when we were leaving Hubbard’s Point.”
“Huh,” he said. “The question most people want to ask is, ‘Why did your father kill your mother?’ And, ‘Do you hate his guts?’ ”
His voice sounded flat but charged, cold as a sheet of metal. I heard freezing rage just beneath the surface. I was afraid the anger would break through his control, flow toward me.
“I wasn’t going to ask that,” I said.
“Because you don’t want to know?” he asked.
“Only if you want to tell me,” I said.
“I don’t hate his guts,” Billy said.
“Okay,” I said.
“You know why my grandfather hates me, though?” he asked. “Do you wonder how I know so much about back roads and avoiding the police?”
“How?” I asked, my mouth suddenly so dry I could barely speak. A chill ran down my spine.
“Because I helped my dad get away,” Billy said.
There had been stories in the paper. I knew he had been detained, questioned after his father’s capture. But hearing him say the words, admit what he’d done, shocked me to the core.
I turned to look out the side window, anywhere but at him, as he drove us north on roads where my father would never think to look, in a rusty old truck no police would be watching for. I saw a sign for the route that went by Turner Institute, but I didn’t say anything. I wondered if I really knew anything about the boy I’d fallen madly in love with.
And I couldn’t help noticing he still hadn’t told me whose house it had been.
That night we slept in the truck again, but this time Billy’s head didn’t wind up on my shoulder. There was tension in the air from our conversation and the ensuing silence, so we stayed as far across the cab from each other as possible.
We’d pulled over behind a shed, in a junkyard in a small Massachusetts town near the New Hampshire border. We blended right in with the other rusty trucks and cars.
I couldn’t sleep. The air was cold and knifed through my hoodie. Neon lights from a nearby shopping center glared. There were lots of spooky sounds, rattletraps creaking and settling, a crane’s magnet swinging on a cable. I imagined criminals creeping around. A dog barked all night from inside the office, and I swore I heard his fangs clicking. Turner Institute was fewer than twenty miles away. And I couldn’t stop hearing Billy say he’d helped his father escape.