Essential Maps for the Lost (13 page)

She hates everyone.

Ryan Somebody, a twentysomething guy with religious newscaster hair, bends to help Otto Hermann. “The plug?” he says. “Your laptop battery is dead, Mr. Hermann. You need to plug it in.”

Linda slides her foot over and crashes it into Mads's. Her eyes gleam. Mads tries to give Linda a smile from 1985, even if Mads's mood says it's the end of the world.

•  •  •

Carl's home for lunch. He throws the loaf of bread on the counter, bangs the mayonnaise jar down. Suzanne is folding laundry in the family room, pretending that's what she actually does all day.

The silence is so loud Mads can barely stand it. In the strained hush of the Bellarose house, the
What happened?
of Billy grows louder. Mads feels pissed and restless. Over the week, her old, overwhelming despair has crept back in, too. The big ogre sits in a corner, casting his shadow, examining his fingernails and humming a tune. Mads has been waking in the night again, and not eating, and she's so anxious, she can't even read. When books can't comfort you, you know it's bad. Carl and Suzanne aren't helping anything. Fury plus despair is a bad combo. It makes you do crazy things just so you do
some
thing.

Outside, Ivy uses the chaise to pull herself up. She's so proud of standing. She lets go, and wobbles like a building in an earthquake before plopping down. Mads applauds. Suzanne joins them outside, like they're a team against Carl.

They are not a team. “See, Ivy? See the bird?” Suzanne says. Her voice is righteous as church bells.

Carl appears. He lets the screen door slam shut behind him. “Daddy has to go to work,” he says. “Daddy's got to go pay the bills.” Suzanne and Carl must have been crazy about each other once. They must have stared in each other's eyes and had passionate sex, and dreamed of forever, and now they can't stand to be in the same room. It's hard to understand.

Carl lifts Ivy, kisses her, sets her back down again. Ivy starts to wail. Mads hears the front door slam as he leaves.

“Ivy, come on! Jesus, stop it! Please!” Suzanne rises. The damp grass has soaked her shorts, proving once again that the world's against her. “Great. Terrific. Now I have to change.”

“I got her,” Mads says.

Mads wonders how one arranges a hit man so she can do in Suzanne and Carl. She needs to watch more
48 Hours
. Is Ivy ruined already? She's so perfect and so sweet, with her eyes the color of violets and her skin soft as tulip petals and a chortling laugh that makes you happy as a bluebell. But this is what Ivy sees and hears and takes in every day. This is the news she gets about love. No one is hitting her or sticking her in a closet, but no one is protecting her, either. She deserves better.

Ivy stops crying and studies Mads's face. That's what babies do. They look. And if they see anger or peril, or if no one really looks back, they've learned something about the world they live in, Mads knows. And so she smiles, sends messages of safety and love.

“You are one great baby, Ivy.”

“Bee you,” Ivy says. “Ibble be you.”

“Be you? Ives, you're right. You're so right. Let's make that rule number one. Be you, no matter what. Fight for yourself like a samurai. Be your own noble warrior. Take it from me.”

“I'm gone!” Suzanne calls.

Gone.
It sounds like an answer.

•  •  •

Carl left the mayonnaise jar out, and the TV is still blaring in the family room. Mads shuts off the screaming (un)reality housewives. According to her father, she has what she needs—her phone and a credit card. She adds
book
to that list, since, like a true reader, she never goes anywhere without one. Lucky she's still got
From the Mixed-up Files
in her backpack. She needs a map, too, even if she never hears from Billy again.

A phone and a credit card are not enough for Ivy, though. You should see all the stuff they bring to go to the park. And they aren't just going to the park.

The diaper bag already has the basics, but Mads stuffs a couple of grocery sacks full of extra diapers, changes of clothes, the chime ball, the frog, the toy telephone, the book with the talking bookworm in the center. Also: a box of cereal, and a few bananas, and graham crackers. Bottles of juice and milk.

She sets Ivy in her crib and runs outside to strap the car seat into Thomas's truck. Across the street, Claire and Thomas's garage door rises, and Harrison speeds out on his bike. Great. Terrific. This is all Mads needs. Harrison shoots right up to the Bellarose driveway and skids. The bike tires make a satisfying long black mark along the pavement, an expert, superhero arc.

“So, where're you going?” he asks.

“Where's your helmet?”

“I'm just coming here!”

“You still need your helmet.”

“You didn't say where you're going.”

“None of your business.”

“What's in that bag?” He drops his bike. Now he tries to snoop through the open door of the truck.

“Don't you have anything better to do?”

“That's a lot of stuff.”

“Yeah? So? Hey, Harrison, I think Claire is calling.”

“I'm too old for that trick.”

“Ugh!” This is not meant for Harrison, but for the stupid car seat. It's like wrestling a stubborn toddler.

“You're buckling it in the wrong one,” Harrison says. “That's for the middle person.”

He's right. She finds the right buckle shoved down in the seat. There. The satisfying
click
.

“Hey, Hare, I gotta go. You be good.”

“You better not be meeting some boy in secret.”

This stops Mads. It stops her cold. She feels a thud of dread. She's right to worry. This is all it takes to send a person's whole life into a hurtling catastrophe—one weird kid, one wrong move, the butterfly effect, where the flap of far-off wings causes a hurricane across the globe. Harrison's owl eyes stare at Mads from behind his glasses. They are large enough to make you believe he knows things.

“What are you talking about?”

“Hmm, I wonder.” Now he has one knee up, picking at a scab. He hops around to keep his balance. His shins are bruised and bumped as an old peach.

“Harrison.”

He stops hopping, examines the scab as if it's a new specimen for the books.

“God, you're gross.”

“You wouldn't be nervous if you didn't have anything to feel guilty about.”

“Who says I'm nervous?”

“You're practically pooping your pants.”

“What are you even saying? Maybe I have friends you don't know about.”

“You don't have friends.”

“I have friends, all right?”

“What do you think I am, stupid?”

“You just better mind your own business, mister.”

“This
is
my business.” He reaches into a pocket of his cargo shorts. Pulls out one of those small spiral notepads. He waves it at Mads.

“What is that?”

“Wouldn't you like to know.” She tries to snatch it. She lunges, but he's too fast. He takes off, sprints a loop around the Bellaroses' front lawn. “Can't get me.”

God, he's infuriating! And, whatever! It's not like she's ever going to see Billy again anyway. “Hey, this has been fun, but I'm at work. And I have somewhere I need to be.”

Inside the Bellarose house, her phone is buzzing. She does not want to even
think
it might be him. Yeah, well, no worries, because it isn't. It's her mother. Three texts, one phone message, which is what she does when Mads doesn't answer right away.
Made appt. with attny. Knightley the week you return to sign papers! So exciting! Tell me you got my text about signing papers when you get back!

Fury is some weird, out-of-control engine. She squeezes the phone, jams it down into her purse. Now she's back outside with Ivy on her hip. Harrison is still on the front lawn. The Bellaroses' cat lies across his shoes. Harrison's hunched over the spiral notebook like he's calculating the formula that proves the big bang.

He spots her, checks his watch. It's nearly as big as a hubcap, with lots of circles and dials that do various things he's tried a million times to tell her about. You could scuba dive with it on, he's said. Which is very handy, since Thomas and Claire barely let him take a bath without supervision.

“Two thirty-eight,” he reports aloud. “Eleven thirty-eight p.m. in Cairo. Nine thirty-eight p.m. in the Reykjavik, Iceland.”

“Watch your head, Ives.” Mads pulls the car seat harness over the baby's head and buckles her in.

“Two forty-one,” Harrison says.

Mads starts the truck. She sticks her head out the window. Harrison's glasses are skewed, as if he's had another unfortunate run-in with the Nerf darts. She better be nice to him. Someday he'll discover how to live on Mars in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. “Two forty-three, suspect leaves the premises,” she calls. “You're wasting your time, anyway.”

She takes off. Her general rage and despair do not fade, but her nerves about Harrison do. She stops worrying about him.

She shouldn't.

She's not nearly worried enough. The weird kid has a mission and a camera phone. He's trying to protect her, and the urge to protect can cause plenty of trouble. Plenty. Some clueless butterfly flaps in Panama. The hurricane begins to swirl right there on the Bellaroses' front lawn.

•  •  •

Mads
will not
get on the southbound freeway again. She'll head north. It'll be an entirely new beginning!

Ha. New beginnings are nearly impossible with the exact old you. Mads thinks:
a ferry, islands, Canada.
She feels the city fall behind her. Now she passes the towns of the north suburbs. Just as she sees the first sign for the ferry terminals, she notices the thin, small arm of the gas gauge. It's flicking back and forth, shaking as bad as Derek Carson's hands whenever he had to give a speech in their ninth-grade public speaking class.

Honestly, Thomas's truck?
Mads thinks.
You would be this cruel?

She takes the first turnoff, winds down a narrow, treed road. There's a Bartells pharmacy and a Starbucks (of course), some yoga place and a chiropractic clinic, but no gas station. The road leads to the water and the ferry terminal. The signs say so, but she also can just tell. It's beginning to smell salt-watery, and the sky is getting larger. She's silently praying that she makes it to the town below, where there's sure to be a gas station. Where is Cole when she needs him? He knows everything about cars. He'd know why the half tank of gas she's sure was there has basically disappeared.

It smells like the sea out there, all right. You could bite right into that smell. Ivy's fallen asleep. Mads sees the ferry terminal a few blocks away, sitting at the quaint end of a quaint town.

What are you doing?
Mads thinks.
What, what, what? You are stupid. This is pointless. You are a loser, and forgettable besides.

Of course, despair isn't just one big ogre sitting in a corner; it's an army of ogres. They've been gathering, hiding behind every tree, and now they swarm, smack into her and take her down. All at once, she's too defeated to move. She's so sad, she can't even cry. The ogres drop a blanket of sad over her. She's at a stop sign with the engine idling. She wants to lie right down on the seat, and the only thing that stops her is Ivy. Of course Mads won't be getting on that ferry. Of course every single toy and jar of food will be returned to its usual place. Kidnapping Ivy is only a dream that keeps her feeling like something can be done and someone can be saved, she tells her loser self. But it can't and no one can be; at least, this is what the mind-sick ogres chant. Their job is to keep you in place with their force and the tethers around your wrists and ankles. Your job is to do the impossible and fight the bastards.

She can't fight right then, because you need weapons and tools and spells to be a warrior—potions are good, and so is an outstretched hand, a narrow window of escape, and, most of all, the shout of your own voice, yelling for help. The voice, saying
me, I, mine
. But that's so hard, because the voice is rusty from lack of use, and now the ogres have their big ham-slice hands around the vocal cords.

She's stopped at a railroad crossing. Crossroads, really? Please! Still, obvious is good, in her condition. Subtlety would surely fly right past. A Shell station is just on the other side of the tracks. Solutions, okay, maybe not
solutions
, but first steps toward solutions, are just
beyond
, if she would
just
 . . . These are the words other people say and the ones she tells herself:
just
, and
knock it off
, and
you think you have it so bad?
One person against all those ogres is impossible. As far as weapons go, she's got a smile shield and a guilt umbrella, and even her anger is still just a burp she covers behind her hand.

She wonders if trains even come through here anymore. She feels bad thinking about this with Ivy in the car. But later, alone, a train might work. It might do the trick. It's not that she imagines exactly what would happen if she stepped out in front of one—the horrible details, the trauma to the driver of the train, to everyone she knows and doesn't. She just imagines the burden that she has and the burden that she
is
being lifted. The mind-sick stuff that the ogres gleefully toss in the air makes her believe that there is only one story possible for her life. What a lie that is. You must never forget how ogres love a lie.

Only a single element needs to shift: carbon, nitrogen, a violin case, a museum ticket, the loud and frantic
beep-beep!
of a car horn. The loud and frantic beeping of a car horn? What? What is that? Jesus! Mads jolts out of her own head. There is some kind of screaming emergency. She looks around in panic—is a train coming? Is she on the tracks after all, putting Ivy in worse danger than she's ever been in at home? But no, she's just sitting at that stop sign, and there's no train, and the tracks only disappear off into the quiet distance.