Essential Maps for the Lost (31 page)

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.

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.

Her body is wracked. He realizes—why didn't he get this before?—that this place on the grass brings her different memories than his. He sees it now—he's also been an asshole. In this large lake, she and his mother found each other, and she held his mother and swam with her, and brought her to shore. Her heaving shoulders tell that story. They say she's been haunted by that.

They've both been haunted by that.

“I'm so sorry,” she says.

“I am,” he says.

“I can't believe we're here. I never wanted to come to this place again.”

“You for sure followed me today. This one is no coincidence.” Heh—she did.

“Okay, okay. Yes, I followed you. Sometimes you have to make your own coincidence.”

His arms are happy to hold her, even with all his tumbling emotions. His eyes are about the happiest they've been in a long, long time, just setting themselves on her. She looks like hell, like pretty much the most beautiful hell he's ever seen. Yet, still, there's this hole, the spot where the bomb dropped.

“Why did you do this?”

“I asked myself that a million times! I had no idea why. I didn't. And then last night . . . I don't know, I just realized. It's like in the book,” Mads says. “Claudia sees the angel, and she knows it holds the answer to a question. She doesn't even know what the question is exactly, but she's sure the answer is there. All she understands is that, no matter what, she has to find out what the angel means.”

He takes this in. This is different than the crying explanations Mads left in her messages. He
gets
this. And he sees something else: They were a team even before they met.

“I have something to show you,” she says next. Her eyes have deep raccoon circles and she finds a smashed Kleenex in her pocket and blows her nose.

“Okay,” he says.

“I forgot it in the truck.”

She races back over, and he watches her. If you could see how cute she is when she runs, you'd just die. She comes back, fast, with an envelope. She's out of breath.

“I am so out of shape,” she gasps. “I was scared you'd be gone before I got here.”

He hasn't moved, though. He takes the envelope from her and opens it.

“It's a copy,” she says. “I sent the real one.”

He reads.
To my lawyer, Saxonberg Knightley.

When he sees the first lines of The Book, he smiles. God, he does, the biggest smile you've ever seen. He hopes his mom is looking down like some sort of angel right now. Because, yeah, he wants to prove her wrong about hope and life and love because he's still so damn pissed at what she did, but he also just wants her to
see
. To be a part of this.

Billy just grins and grins at Mads. “Complications,” he says.

“There's going to be a lot of those.”

“Have you talked to your mom yet?”

“I just put this in the mail last night. I figure I have until tomorrow morning to call her. I mean, I don't want her to hear this from the lawyer.”

It's his turn now. He needs to give her something, too. It's how the exchange of forgiveness works. He reaches into his back pocket. He takes out the map. He opens it up. Her bracelet is inside. He repaired it with a piece of shoelace he'd cut from his pair of dress shoes. He holds the map in his teeth as he ties the bracelet back onto her wrist.

“There,” he says.
Err
, with the map in his mouth.

Now he takes the map, opens it, and points. “Here.”

Her face says he's crazy. She tilts her head and squinches her eyes. She makes a little
I wish
scoff in the back of her throat.

Scoff, nothing. This is one thing he's sure of. You've got to know that dreams are possible, like Jane Grace says. And, too, you've got to remember that people will be there for you, even when there are complications, even when there are big storms of dark and mess. She looks at him with her fucked-up red eyes, and he stares straight at her with his.

“This belonged to my mom.”

“I remember.”

“She kept this. It was her favorite book. It meant something to her.”

“It means a lot to me now, too.”

“We're going, Mads. All right?”

“Oh, Billy.”

“Better pack your violin case.”

It's a sweet summer morning when Mads opens her mouth and lets the whisper of her voice out. A garbage truck rattles down the street, and a bird tweets, and some blossom blooms on a tree.

“I can't,” she says aloud.

She can almost feel her mother's breath on the other end of the phone, fiery and spewing like a dragon.