A Map of the Known World (16 page)

My eyes have gone wide; they’re probably bugging out of my head like two brown dinner plates. There’s hardly space to walk through the clutter, and I look on as Damian twists and dodges, carving a path to a far corner where a snow shovel and a garden shovel are both propped against the wall. He takes both shovels then pulls a spade down from the tool board.

He finally makes his way back to me, shaking his head. “You’ve witnessed our dirty secret,” he says with a grin. “My mom is going to kill me. I keep promising her I’ll clean it out, that we’ll have a garage sale. It’s just that there’s always something else—something better to do,” he finishes ruefully.

“Maybe we could do it together?” I offer.

“My mom would clobber me if she knew I’d let you in here to see this mess, let alone allowed you to lift a finger to clean any of it.”

“I promise you, our basement is almost as bad as this,” I tell him, wrapping my arm around his neck. “
Almost,
” I add with a chuckle.

“Come on, let’s go,” Damian says, digging a finger into my side to tickle me and laughing at my answering shriek.

We climb back into his car. I still marvel at how he holds open the passenger door for me, watching to make sure my
fingers, legs, and coat are all safely stowed inside before carefully closing the door.

Once we arrive at the pond, Damian takes the shovels from the back of his truck and I follow him past the ice-skaters and the hot cocoa stand, to the edge of the frozen water at the far end of the pond, where the ice stays thin. He drops the garden shovel and hands me the spade, then, with snow shovel in hand, bends, tucks the trowel into the ground, and lifts up a load of fluffy snow. He drops it behind him then goes in for another shovelful. Once he has cleared a bare patch of soil, I kneel down and begin to scrape at the hard ground with the spade. It’s tough going, and, even with wool gloves on my hands, my fingers are turning as stiff as the dirt. I drop the spade and flex my fingers, then start again.

“Here, let me,” Damian says, nudging me over and taking the spade from my frozen fingers. I stay next to him and look up to see several ice-skaters eyeing us curiously.

“What a strange pair we must make,” I remark.

“What do you mean?” Damian stops digging and drops the spade, turning to look at me. There isn’t a glint of a smile in his eyes.

“I just mean that we must look pretty weird, crouched here, digging.”

“Oh,” he says woodenly, then turns back to work.

What did he think I meant?
I wonder.

All of our earlier cheerfulness seems to have been sucked
away, as though someone pulled the plug in a bathtub drain. What’s worse is I can’t even say what changed. But something happened to create a chill that now hangs in the air between us. The cold seems to pierce my heavy down coat, clawing its way through layers of feathers and wool sweater and cotton shirt, burrowing deep into my skin. And suddenly our hunt for clamshells by the side of an ice-skating pond in the dead of winter feels worse than absurd. It feels childish. Foolish.

Has Damian just been humoring me these past few weeks? Has he grown tired of it, tired of hanging around with a flat-chested fourteen-year-old? A ball, heavy and bitter, lodges in the back of my throat. I look over at Damian. He is scratching at the frozen soil with a strange ferocity. Does he want to break up with me? We aren’t even officially dating, so I’m not sure that he would have to.

“We must look ridiculous—” I start, but am cut off by a vicious glare.

“You think we look ridiculous? Are you worried about being seen with the freak of Lincoln Grove?” he snaps.

I feel like I am reeling. His words might as well have been a bat brought down on my head.

“What?” I gasp.

“Oh, come on. You don’t want to be seen out here with me. Maybe you’re embarrassed by me. I don’t know. But don’t worry. I’ll save you the trouble.”

“Have you gone crazy? What are you talking about?” My poor mind is trying so hard to understand, but it’s like he’s speaking a foreign language. I can’t seem to put his words together and make sense of them.

“Crazy?” he snaps. “Yeah, maybe. That would make a whole lot of sense to everyone, wouldn’t it? Although everybody might be wondering about you. I mean, what are you doing hanging around with the crazy dude who killed your brother?” He’s yelling, and his eyes have gone narrow and look as hard as the frostbitten earth. Some of the ice-skaters have stopped skating and gliding in their circles to watch us.

“Damian, I don’t understand!” I sound like I’m pleading with him, but I don’t know what I’m begging for. It’s as though I need forgiveness, but I haven’t done anything. Have I?

“Don’t worry. I’ll spell it out for you. Really clear.” Damian springs to his feet, quick and fluid like a panther. Then he tosses the spade down to the ground, and it rings with a metallic hollowness and the sharpness of gunfire. He throws one leg over the wooden rails blocking access to this end of the pond. He kicks the rusty metal sign nailed to the post.
NO SKATING. THIN ICE.
He starts to walk toward the center of the ice, his trench coat billowing out behind him like a parachute. My heart has started beating a rapid staccato and I don’t think I’ll ever catch my breath again.
What is he doing?

“Damian, come back here! What are you doing?” I scream.

He doesn’t waver, continues moving in a straight line toward the center of the ice. I can hear his heavy black combat boots crunching over the frozen surface. My stomach is churning, my brain is churning. Before I am even aware of what I’m doing, I have started after him. All I know is I have to get him back.

The ice is mostly covered with a light dusting of snow, but before I am five steps from the shoreline, my foot suddenly slides out from under me, and the rest of my body follows. I hit the ice hard, and my breath escapes in a grunt.

I am sitting on my bottom when I hear it. The worst sound. A thunderous cracking, like the report of a starter pistol, shakes me to my senses. I look down and see a long seam in the milky ice threading out from under me, snaking toward Damian. The white ripple grows like an arm, reaching, reaching. And it is crossed by a second fissure.

“Cora!” Damian calls. He turns around gingerly and I can read in the horror splashed across his face that things do not look promising. I glance down. The ice has begun to splinter, jagged branches radiating out from under my butt. “Cora,” he says, “look at me.”

It’s impossible to tear my eyes from the doom I see scrawled across the ice. Another gasping, tearing sound clenches at the air. I look up and find Damian on his hands and knees, crawling achingly slowly toward me, weaving around the fissures and cracks.

He comes close to me and reaches for my hand. “Cora, can you slide toward me?”

I shake my head. I am frozen; I think my bottom may be frozen, fixed to the pond’s surface. A crowd has formed at the far end of the pond. People point and shout, but I can’t focus on what they’re saying. We’re really a spectacle now.

“Hey, Cora, you can do this. Just look at me, and push off with your hands and slide.” Damian is coaxing me in the soft, lulling tone he might use if he were trying to soothe a wild animal. A crease of worry pocks his forehead. He reaches out a hand to me, and slowly, so slowly, I lift my hand, too.

The booming of another gash opening up spurs me into action. I plant my back hand on the ice, feeling the rough unevenness of the fractured surface through my glove. I begin to crab walk, moving deliberately as though in slow motion, toward Damian. My heart is beating an angry, frightened tattoo. This must be how deer feel when the rumbling explosion of a hunter’s rifle pursues them. Must move quickly, smoothly.

“That’s it, Cor.” He is crawling closer, then I feel the steadying warmth of his hand closed around my wrist. Then Damian begins to inch toward the shoreline, towing me after him. As we reach the bank of the pond, another rupture in the smooth, frosty surface follows us to the very edge. Damian quickly shoves me forward, and then I am splayed out on my stomach on the snowy bank. I feel him beside me before I can turn my head to look for him. “I’m sorry,” he gasps. “I’m so sorry, Cor.”

That’s when I realize I am shuddering with great, heaving sobs. I am lying facedown in the snow, and the cold damp is filling my nostrils, and I cough and splutter, and sit up before I drown in snow.

“What were you doing, Damian?” I manage between sobs.

“I—I don’t know,” he admits, his voice low. I cannot bring my eyes to meet his.

“Were you trying to prove something?” I ask. “Because I don’t know what you possibly could have been thinking. Or what you were trying to prove.”

“I can’t even remember now,” Damian mumbles. “I was so upset, and now…I just can’t remember.”

I look hard at him, study the right angle his jawline makes, the teardrop shape of his cheekbones, the line of his nose, the square of his chin. He is handsome, but maybe he isn’t for me. Not anymore, not after this. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I say.

“Cora, I’m sorry. I thought—”

“What? What could you possibly have thought to make you believe that walking out onto that ice was okay?”

“I thought you were ashamed of me, to be seen with me,” he replies, a deep blush staining his cheeks.

“What?” I splutter. “That is insane. Where could you possibly have gotten that idea from?”

“I don’t know. I guess…I guess I just don’t understand why you would ever want to be with me. I’m a total screwup,”
he says. “I mean, look at me. Look at what I just did. Seriously, if you never wanted to speak to me again, I’d understand,” he tells me, disgust filling his voice.

“Damian, we’re all screwups. Each in our own special, stupid way,” I tell him. As I say the words, I realize how true they are. And maybe that’s the trick to getting through it, through life: realizing that everybody, including ourselves, is lugging around some kind of screwed-up baggage. Maybe we are put here to help each other carry the loads.

“Do you hate me?” Damian asks, his voice cracking.

“Don’t be stupid. How could I hate you? You’re the only one who gets me,” I answer ruefully. He puts his head down in the snow with a relieved sigh. I do the same, then he turns over onto his back and begins waving his arms and legs back and forth. “A snow angel?” I have not made one for years. I flip over onto my back, too, and move my arms and my legs in and out like a scissor. And there we lie, side by side, two screwup angels in the snow.

When we are too wet and shivery to lie there any longer, we roll ourselves up and Damian helps me to my feet.

“Thank you,” he says softly, then plants a kiss, soft as a snowflake, on my cheek. And we walk back to his car, hand in hand.

I
am about to do something. Something bad. My whole body is trembling. Whether it’s with disgust or excitement or fear, I can’t tell. The permission forms for London are due soon, by March 15, but I can’t wait. I am sitting on my bed, the acceptance and registration papers balanced on my lap. Where I have the pen point pressed, the black ink bleeds deep into the fibers of the paper. I hold the pen there, willing my hand to steady itself. Then quickly I trace the swoops and swirls of my mother’s signature. There it is, Marie Bradley, outlined in heavy script, and I stare at the thick, familiar-looking letters. I can’t see anything else.

Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh. What did I just do?

I did it. My blood feels like it has frozen in my veins. I signed my mother’s name. I forged her signature. Now my hands won’t stop shaking. I have never done something like this before. I’ve never even imagined doing something like this before.

One part of me is horrified, the other part is exhilarated. I feel free, independent—grown up. She can’t tell me what to
do, nor can she stop me from doing what I want to do. When it’s time to buy my ticket, I will walk to the bank and get a cashier’s check, drawn from the savings account flush with the money my grandparents have sent me over the past fourteen birthdays.

Wow. I can get away with this. I am really going to London. I shiver with excitement. And nausea. This is a lie bigger, so much bigger, than any I’ve ever told before. I shake my head, as if to clear it of dust. I should feel glad that I did this. Empowered. But, I have to admit, it feels—I feel—kind of awful. My parents will be so sad when they discover I’ve left. Left without a word and without a warning.

Now, I just need a stamp.
How much is it to send an envelope to London?
I wonder. Silently, I wend my way to the door and into the dark hallway. I need a stamp, and there’s only one place to find stamps in this house. My dad’s study. I start off down the hall, pausing to listen for any noises, but I don’t hear a thing. Maybe they’ve gone to bed. When I’m in front of my dad’s study, I halt and press my ear to the door. Not a sound escapes. Slowly, I turn the knob and nudge the door open.

“Cora?” comes a weak voice.

My heart sinks into my stomach. “Dad?” I whisper hesitantly. What do I do? Should I turn around and return to my room? Do I make up a story for why I need the stamps?

“Come on in, Cor,” he says. His voice is so soft, so low, I can barely hear him.

“What’s up?” I ask warily, thinking maybe I can make him forget that I am the one breaking into his study.

“What are you up to?” he inquires gently.

“I just…I was just looking for a stamp. I wanted to send a letter to—uh—to Auntie Janie,” I lie. She’s the only sibling of either of my parents who moved out of state.

“Oh, well, stamps are in the top drawer,” he says, indicating the oak desk that fills up part of the room. “You know.”

“Yeah, um, thanks,” I say as I start toward the huge, old, hulking desk.

Quickly, surreptitiously, I peel off a stamp and stick it to the palm of my hand.

“I heard about your little project.”

Dad’s voice, scratchy, as if from disuse, catches me off guard, makes me catch my breath. Does he suspect that I’ve forged Mom’s signature on the permission form? Does he know what I’m doing? In more than ten months, he hasn’t shown an iota of interest or concern for what I’m doing. What is with the questions all of a sudden?

I stare at him. I am sure my mouth is hanging open. “Huh?” I gurgle ungracefully.

“You’re having an art show of some sort?”

My heart stops racing, but now my head is spinning. A father who pays attention…foreign concept. And how did he find out?

“It’s no big deal,” I tell him.

“Your mother seemed to think it was,” he says. “She told me you had found some artwork by Nate and were going to show it.” From the dark recess of his chair in the corner, his eyes seem to gleam in the lamplight as the rest of his face is eaten by shadow.

“Yeah, I guess,” I reply tersely. How did my mom learn about it? Did Mrs. Brown call her? Traitor.

Maybe Dad is exasperated with my short answers, but a rumbling sigh comes from his direction, and he doesn’t say anything more. I watch as my father brings his hands together as if in prayer, and he rests his chin on the steeple of his fingers. “When?” he asks simply.

“What do you care?” I shoot back at him, then spin around and stagger out the door.

“Cora!” he calls. Loudly. In that
I’m your father, don’t get fresh with
me kind of tone that I haven’t heard in almost a year. “Come back here.”

It isn’t a quavering question or a whisper. It’s a command, and it has taken me by surprise, so that my feet seem to turn of their own accord and march me back into the study. I stand in the doorway with my hands behind my back, fingers twisting and knotting and kneading themselves anxiously. I cock my head and brace myself, as if waiting for some kind of blow.

“I know I left you alone. I know that I haven’t been there, since…” His voice trails off. Then he leans forward and clears
his throat with a sharp cough that seems to cut through the charged air. “Since Nate died,” he continues, “and I’m sorry for that.” It is as if he has used up the last of his strength saying this to me, and he falls back into the cushions of his armchair and is enveloped by the evening gloom once more.

I’m reeling, stunned. I had never expected this. An admission. An apology. I don’t know what to say to him. One “I’m sorry” is not enough. Will never be enough to make up for all those months of silence. My mouth opens and closes once like a fish, then I leave, closing the door with a quiet click.

Between my mother not speaking to me and my father’s renewed interest, I feel like I’m trapped in an insane asylum. Or a fun house, where everything known is suddenly the unknown or the unusual. I wonder what they talk about, Mom and Dad, when they’re by themselves. Clearly they do talk. More important, they know about the art show. Will Mom try to stop me?
Ha,
well, she can try.

I never managed to get those clamshells for my map, and there is still a gaping hole in the center. Now this house, this real house, feels even more fractured and foreign. Then I realize, smacking my forehead with a great “Aha!”, how to build this.

In Nate’s bedroom, there is a tiny mirror with a seashell frame around it that my grandparents had brought back from a trip to Florida many years ago. That’s it. I move back up the
hall to Nate’s room. I open the door; there is no need for hesitation anymore. I know what lies inside, now.

Yet, when I enter the room, a rush of cold air seems to wrap itself around my very bones and marrow; a chill envelopes me.

“Nate?” I whisper. “Are you here?”

I wait.

Nothing.

Wait some more.

Still nothing.

I move over to his bed and perch myself at the edge of the mattress. Another freezing draft slinks into the room like a cat, wrapping itself around my arms and shoulders. I swing my head wildly about, and then I spot, just behind the bed where I’m sitting, a small crack in the window. I reach out my hand and graze the triangular shard with my fingertips. It wiggles. Gently, I prod the loose piece out of the pane. Now there is a hole in the glass, roughly the shape of Michigan. Cold air whistles into the room. I heave a sigh—no ghosts here. The splinter of glass rests heavily on my palm. Carefully, so as not to cut myself, I bring the glass up to my eye and look through it. A cloud of frosty crystals prevents me from seeing clearly, but as I peer through the sparkling haziness of the glass, it’s like looking into a dream.

I wonder what my dad is thinking about right now, if he’s feeling sorry for himself or sorry for the way he messed up everything. Sorry for me. I wonder if he knows about
London, if my mother told him she’d forbidden me to go. Probably not.

A year ago, he’d have looked at this broken window and roared about how the heat he was paying for was escaping from the house, and how did this window break,
blah blah blah.
Now, I bet he’d just shrug his shoulders and shuffle back to his chair.

I can use this piece of glass. I pocket it and then, rustling through the drawer of Nate’s bedside table, I find the mirror with the seashell frame, and slip out of the room.

When I’m back in the safety of my own bedroom, I take a long piece of cardboard out from under my bed—my dad gave it to me once to use as a hard surface when I used to draw on loose sheets of construction paper. Gently, I place the shard of glass and the mirror on the cardboard. Then I set about fiddling with the mirror, trying to pry it loose from its frame. It seems to have been glued together. I grab a palette knife from my desk and wedge it between the mirror and the frame and begin to pull it apart. In the wiggling process, seashells start dropping off the frame, because the glue is old and dried out, I guess, onto the cardboard.
Maybe,
I think,
I can just pull off all the shells instead.
They come off easily, and soon I have a pile of tiny shells. Then, I bring my tennis racket out of my closet and rest the butt of the handle on the mirror and press. The mirror pops and shatters into a dozen jagged pieces. I shift the racket over to the piece of glass from the window and do the same.

Using tweezers to pick them up, I begin to glue the pieces of glass and slivers of mirror and seashells to each other, until I have cobbled together what looks like a miniscule house. There is a peaked roof and even a little chimney. The base of the house is glued to the cardboard, and so I cut away the excess cardboard, leaving a small square beneath the house as a base. I can mount this onto my map. The final, missing piece.

I clean up, taking care to pick up any extraneous shards of glass, then wipe my hands on my jeans and grab the now-stamped envelope with the permission form off my desk, and head out to the mailbox. As I pass through the garage and slowly weave my way between my parents’ cars, I remember Damian telling me, all those weeks ago, when the acceptance letter first arrived, not to do this, not to do something stupid that I would regret. To talk to him about it first. But I know that if I don’t mail this letter right now, I’ll lose my courage. I’ll wimp out. Besides, it’s Friday night, and I can’t even see my boyfriend (if that’s what he is), which just goes to show that I’m a prisoner, and this is the only course of action open to me.

So, I suck in a deep breath and jog down the length of the driveway to the mailbox. It’s Friday night, so Joe, the mailman, should pick this up early tomorrow afternoon. I open the mailbox, pop the envelope inside, and lift the red flag. That’s it. Done is done.

When morning comes, I feel like I am going to bounce off the walls of my bedroom. I jump out of bed and look out my window to the mailbox. The flag is still up. I check my clock. It’s only 8:30; Joe won’t get here for at least another four or five hours. I sigh and flop back down on my bed. Then a terrible thought occurs to me. What if my parents have to mail something—a letter or a bill?

I dig out my slippers from underneath the disheveled piles of drawings and books and discarded clothing, and run downstairs. There are no envelopes in the
BILLS AND LETTERS AND THINGS
pouch in the kitchen. I think I’m safe.

“Are you looking for something, Cora?” My mother’s deadened voice startles me.

“Oh, Mom, hi.” I fumble for something to say. “Um, no, just wanted a glass of juice,” I tell her.

“Okay,” she replies, “help yourself.”

I pull a glass down from the cupboard and pour myself some orange juice. Before, we used to have fresh-squeezed juice on the weekends. My dad would pick up oranges from the grocery store on his way home from work Friday evenings, then my mom would squeeze the juice when she got up. It was the first thing she’d do, after switching on the coffee machine. But that tradition went out with The Accident, too.

I bring my glass over to the table and study my mom, sitting there in her ratty pink terry-cloth bathrobe. She looks
exhausted. There are dark circles under her eyes, and her hair hangs in strings around her face. She is clutching her coffee mug as though it were a lifeline.

“Are you—are you okay, Mom?” I ask.

“No, Cor,” she says, looking at me earnestly, “I don’t think I am.” She picks up her mug and pushes out her chair, then gets up and wanders into her sewing room.

I feel a tug in my chest, a tiny burning pull. I am doing something bad by lying to her. I just don’t see any other way.