Penpal

by Dathan Auerbach

  I know now that Mrs. Maggie had Alzheimer’s disease. Her husband Tom really had been a pilot. He flew a commercial jetliner all over the eastern United States, and this caused him to spend a great deal of time away from home. After he retired, he and Mrs. Maggie kept mostly to themselves, but every time my mom would run into one or both of them, the conversation would inevitably focus on the trips they wanted to take – if they could only find the time. Tom had discounts with the airline he had retired from, but as is so often the case, their plans were always for “someday,” and that day kept getting moved further down the line.

  On the evening of July 4, years before I was born, Tom came to my mom’s house. He was distressed, though he tried to conceal it as he casually asked my mother if she had seen Maggie. He said that she had gone out for some chicken so that he could grill it for the holiday, but that had been almost six hours ago. My mom hadn’t seen her, but said she would contact Tom immediately if she saw her or heard anything.

  The police brought Mrs. Maggie home about five hours after that. She had wandered from the grocery store and walked to an apartment that she and Tom had shared thirty years before when Tom was just starting his job at the airline. When the police arrived at the apartment, Mrs. Maggie insisted that she lived there with her husband, but when they read aloud the address that was printed on her driver’s license, she regained her clarity and covered her embarrassment with nervous laughter.

  She wasn’t hurt when the police brought her home, but Tom was destroyed. He would tell my mom some time later that he had known for a long while that something was wrong with Maggie, but he had hoped that she would just get better somehow.

  A few days after the police brought his wife home, Tom told my mother that he was planning on taking his wife to Rome – it had been a dream of hers since she was a young girl. Maggie had a collection of books about Rome and Italy at large that were all dog-eared on the pages with the places that she wanted to see. He said that pushing it back was simply not an option anymore; the doctors had told him that the windows of her lucidity would likely grow smaller as time pressed on. Tom began to cry and stammer as he touched his own head and said that he needed to take her now, while she was still here. He wanted her to be there, in the place of her dreams, while she still had a chance of knowing where she was.

  He wanted her to remember.

  They were old now, but he thought that they might still do some hiking, and to prepare, he began to exercise by walking around the neighborhood with Maggie. Physically, Maggie was in much better shape than Tom, so he had a lot of ground to cover if he wanted to keep up with her in Rome. He kept the trip a secret from her because he wanted to surprise her, and he justified the new exercise regimen by telling her that the fresh air and exercise would be good for them. They were getting on a plane in one month.

  Tom was worried that he wouldn’t be in good enough shape by the time they made it to Rome, so after Maggie went to bed, or before she woke up, he would leave the house and go on extra walks. My mom would see him almost every night when she sat outside on the porch. He would walk briskly through the cool night air, and as he passed our house, she would wave to him, and he would wave back and then bring the hand down to his lips with his index finger extended and pointing straight up, as if to say, “It’s our little secret.”

  One night, about two weeks before the trip, my mom was sitting outside on the porch and saw, for the first time, Tom jogging. His posture wasn’t professional, but he was really moving. She waved to him, but he either didn’t see her or was too tired to wave back, because he kept jogging right by the house. She went back inside and went to bed for the night.

  About an hour later, a knock on the front door jerked my mother out of sleep. She cracked the door enough to see through to the outside and saw a badge. It was a police officer. Behind him, the sky was filled with blue and red flashing lights that were so bright she had to shield her eyes as if the lights were the sun itself. Her first thought was that Maggie had gone missing again, and she was about to ask if that was the case when the officer spoke and then gestured toward her lawn. She squinted and let her eyes adjust just enough to break her heart.

  Tom had collapsed and died fifty yards from his home, right in front of ours.

  He had no identification, and so my mother pointed them toward Mrs. Maggie’s house and offered to go over there with them, but they declined. She explained Maggie’s condition, and they assured her that everything would be fine. My mom took one last look at Tom and went back inside.

  Mrs. Maggie never found out about the trip her husband was planning for her; she knew he had died because his heart failed him while he was running, but she never knew that he was running for her.

  Tom and Mrs. Maggie had had two sons: Chris and John. After Tom’s death, Mrs. Maggie’s condition continued to deteriorate. Her sons had apparently worked out payment plans with the utility companies and paid for Mrs. Maggie’s water and electricity, but they would never visit her. I don’t know if something happened between them, or if it was the illness, or if they just lived too far away, but they never came around. I have no idea what they looked like, but there were times when Mrs. Maggie must have thought that Josh and I looked like they did when they were children. Or maybe she just saw what some part of her mind so desperately wanted her to see, ignoring the images transmitted down her optic nerve, and just for a little while, showing her what used to be. I realize only now how lonely she must have been, and I find myself hoping that she understood why my friend and I never accepted her invitations.

  But Josh and I were always friendly with her – extending our stay in the lake sometimes to keep her company and talk with her. The day Josh and I had our second discussion with Mrs. Maggie about the Balloon Project – and she retold the same joke about Tom’s plane carrying our balloons away – just a few weeks before the year ended, an idea began to form between us after she mentioned that the lake might extend for hundreds of miles.

  We had seen much of the woods surrounding my house, and we had explored the woods surrounding his; although we had never confirmed it ourselves, Josh had found out from his dad that the patches of trees that we played in near our houses were actually connected. When we learned of this, we were extremely excited – not for any particular reason – but knowing that we had been playing in the same woods the whole time, despite whether we were at my house or his, seemed to bring our houses even closer together. But there was still the matter of the lake and its tributary.

  Mrs. Maggie had said that the lake’s appendage might stretch on for hundreds of miles.

  Since the woods were connected, Josh and I thought, despite Mrs. Maggie’s speculation, the lake near my house might somehow connect to the creek around his, so we resolved ourselves to find out. For the last few weekends of kindergarten, our explorations intensified. When our summer vacation started, we would scout during the week and sell snow cones on the weekend. But it quickly became difficult to answer our own question. We needed a way to chart our progress. We needed a way to determine where we had been and where we were going. But we didn’t have anything like that, so we had to make it ourselves.

  We were going to make maps.

  The plan was to make two separate maps and then combine them. We would make one map exploring the area around the creek near Josh’s house, and make another following the outflow from my lake. Originally, we were going to make one map, but we realized that wasn’t possible since I had started drawing the map of my area so huge that the route from his house wouldn’t have fit. We didn’t know anything about map-making, but we knew from our lessons with the map in the Community group that it was important to use the same scale consistently. This didn’t involve any math – following our teacher’s explanation of how maps were made, we would just put a little dot on the map for every few steps that we’d take.

  We kept the map from the lake at my house and the map from the creek at Josh’s house, and we would add to each when we
stayed the night with each other. Josh was left-handed, and so he would often smudge the lines that he was drawing if he didn’t have a flat surface to write on. Because of this, and since my penmanship was better anyway, I did most of the markings on both maps.

  For the first couple of weeks, it went really well. We would walk through the woods along the water and pause here and there to add to the map. Our pace was slow, and we took breaks on the weekends while we operated the snow cone stand, but despite all this, it seemed like the two maps would come together any day. In reality, I am quite sure that the map was incredibly inaccurate, but we did our best. Our procedure was as complex as we could manage – when the bank curved, the line curved. On the upper left corner of each map, we drew a compass rose, but we didn’t have a compass, nor did we know how to use one. We weren’t even sure which direction north was, but it was on the wall map in our classroom, so we put it on our maps. We were the world’s worst cartographers, but we were making progress.

  The project seemed to be going so well that one afternoon I rerouted our usual path to the woods and took us to a nearby construction site in the neighborhood. From the cinderblocks, I guessed that they were going to place a house like mine on the plot, and the perimeter that was marked with pink-flagged wooden spikes seemed to say that it would be about the same size. I glanced around, and when I saw that no one but Josh and me was around, I jerked one of the spikes out of the ground; we ran back the way we had come and into the woods.

  We were feeling optimistic and had decided that we must be getting close to finishing our project. In preparation, we thought to impale the earth with a stick each time we reached the end of the day’s expedition; if we came upon the stick from the other direction, we would know we had joined the maps. This new strategy also sped up the process because it meant that rather than attempting to use our map to find the point at which we had last stopped – which was nearly impossible, though we ignored this fact – we could simply run through the woods until we saw our stake and extend the map from there.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before the woods became too thick near the lake’s long arm, and we were unable to proceed further. We debated trying to circumvent the barricade, but this idea forced us to accept that without the constant guidance of the water, our navigation skills were obliterated. Having reached a dead end, our interest in the maps stagnated, and we reduced our explorations significantly while we focused on how to make the snow cone stand more successful. I used the time to make a better, albeit deceptive, sign.

  Just a few weeks later, however, the entire dynamic at my house changed. The weekend my “FOR STAMPS” dollar made its way back to me, my house descended into chaos. Police officers came to our door and talked to my mother and me for hours. One policeman with a thick, black mustache and a striking burn scar on his left forearm and hand had asked for my collection of Polaroids the day the dollar came back. My mother told me to always listen to the police, and so I did what he asked, but I think he could tell I was reluctant. Although he could have easily said nothing at all, the officer told me that he just wanted to borrow them so he could look at them too, and this made me feel better in a way.

  After they left, I found myself suffocated with new restrictions on what I could do and where I could go, though I didn’t understand why this was. My mother told me that the policeman might need to speak with me again, so I had to stay inside, but none of the police who ever came back over the next several weeks seemed to need or want to talk to me.

  With the snow cone stand gone, Josh and I turned our attention back to the maps with revitalized interest, though our discussions were based on the telephone now. Every day we would call each other to talk about how we would move forward. We were still at the same impasse that caused us to largely abandon the mission almost a month before. Josh struck out on his own and attempted to expand his part of the map from his house, but he wasn’t making headway alone. The project seemed to be dead in the water.

  Gradually, however, my leash grew longer. One weekend, to my surprise, my mom didn’t say no when I asked her if Josh could come over, and it wasn’t too long after that when we were allowed to play outside again – though now I had to check in frequently. My mom bought me what was the nicest watch I had ever owned, and set about two dozen alarms on it – one every thirty minutes from sunrise to dusk. She told me that if I wasn’t back between each alarm, then she would take the watch away. She said that I wouldn’t need it anymore since I’d be confined to the house from that point on. I couldn’t quite understand the need for such a policy, but I was only six years old, so of course I assented.

  If Josh and I were just looking for recreation, this would have presented no challenge, but we had work to do. My mom’s new policy meant that we couldn’t stay in the woods for hours and continue to look for a new path; and every time we seemed to make some headway, my watch would beep, and we would have to run back to the house. We thought that we could just swim when we got to the cutoff in the woods, but that clearly wouldn’t work since the map would get wet. Even if we could keep it dry, the pacing would be ruined, and the accuracy of the map (though there was surely little to begin with) would be compromised. We tried going faster when we were coming from Josh’s house, hoping to see the pink-tasseled spike in the ground that would signify that the project was over, but we eventually ran into the same problem of the blockading forest. Then we had a brilliant idea.

  We’d build a raft.

  To keep debris off the road and off site, the construction company began throwing their scrap building material in The Ditch, since they no longer needed it for building. We originally conceived of a formidable ship complete with a mast and an anchor, but this quickly diminished into something more manageable. We set aside the wood and took several large and heavy pieces of Styrofoam that were backed with thick foam board. After several failed attempts to pilot these individual pieces of debris, we tied them together with rope and kite string in hopes that they wouldn’t tip over in the water quite so easily. This project had to be a secret one, because we both knew that my mom wouldn’t let us take a raft down the tributary, so we lugged the raft out of the ditch and hid it behind the biggest bushes we could find.

  We launched our vessel a little down-water from Mrs. Maggie and waved a farewell to her as she motioned for us to come back her way. But there was no stopping us; we had less than half an hour before my watch beeped.

  The raft worked very well, and while we both behaved and spoke as if the functionality of the raft was a given, I know I was a little surprised. We each had a fairly long tree branch to use as a paddle, but we found it was easier to simply push against the land under the water than it was to actually use them as intended.

  When the water became too deep, we’d simply lie on our stomachs and use our hands to paddle the water, which still worked, albeit less well. The first time we had to resort to that method of propulsion, I can remember thinking that from far above it must have looked like a colossally fat man with tiny arms was out for a swim.

  Because our charting had accelerated once we had begun running to the flagged stake, we hadn’t realized that the impasse was actually quite a ways away. With each venture, we would be confident in our imminent arrival at the blockade, but the raft moved so slowly that it was taking much longer than expected. So we would sail for as long as we could and then dock the raft.

  Each time we pulled it onto the shore, Josh would ask me how much farther it was, and I would take the map out of my pocket and count the dots from where I thought we were to where the map ended. “We are, I think, twenty-six dots from the end,” I’d say. And Josh would nod thoughtfully. The next trip, we’d run through the woods directly to the raft, climb aboard, and go a little farther, and there would hopefully, but not always, be fewer dots.

  We continued this well into first grade. Josh and I were assigned to different Groups that year, so since we didn’t really see one another during the school day, our parents
were more willing to let us play together all weekend each week. Because Josh’s dad had taken on a lengthy construction job that required him to work over the weekends while his wife was on-call, staying at Josh’s house would have been difficult. However, the fact that the telephone at my house had been shut off due to delinquent payments made staying at Josh’s house impossible since my mom would have been unable to check on me. For Josh and me, my house became the nexus of our time together, and as much of that time as was possible was spent on the raft.

  The intensity of the exploration had died down, but it was still fun, so we kept at it. The farther we made it into the woods, the shorter each trip had to be so that we could make it back to my house on time, but this made it more of a game to us. Our movement toward our destination was slow, but finally, at the very beginning of winter, the game became more serious once again.

  We had made it to the impasse.

  We wanted to proceed past it right away, but it was nearly time to be back to my house, so we dragged the raft onto the shore and rested it right next to the wooden marker, which we hadn’t seen in weeks. We ran back to my house.

  The next day, we hustled through the woods and made it back to the raft. It was so far into the woods that we had very little time to make adjustments to our plan on-scene, so we quickly pushed the vessel into the water and climbed aboard, oars in hand. As we negotiated our way past the woodland obstacle, we found that there was a bend in the water’s trajectory that we hadn’t been able to perceive before.

  Scanning our eyes over the edge of the forest, we saw how vast and dense the woods really were in this spot. We realized that we wouldn’t be able to overtake this stretch of woods after all, and so we simply stopped paddling. While we sat there on our raft, gently rocking on the calm water, I carefully looked ahead and slowly added to the map, stopping only when I had no more points to plot because the rest lay out of sight, obscured by the curving of the tributary. This felt like cheating, since we hadn’t actually traveled to the dots that I was making, but we had waited so long to reach this point that I felt that I had to take advantage of it.