The Map of True Places

by Brunonia Barry

  She unlocked the dead bolt and let him in.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call,” she said. “I meant to.”

  Hawk eased the door shut behind him, not wanting to let it slam and wake Finch.

  “My father is having trouble,” she said.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Severe depression.”

  Hawk could certainly understand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” she said. “But thanks for asking.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I’m glad you came by,” she said. “We need to talk.”

  She motioned him to the kitchen table, then took a seat across from him.

  He bumped the table as he sat, setting the lazy Susan in motion. He reached out and stilled it. “You look as if you haven’t been sleeping much,” he said.

  “I’m a mess,” she said, suddenly self-conscious about her appearance.

  “You look beautiful,” he said. “Just a little tired.”

  “Weary,” she said.

  “Good word.”

  They sat in silence for a minute.

  “I came back here to take care of my father,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m not doing a very good job.”

  “Because of me.” He already knew it was where the conversation was going.

  “No,” she said quickly. “Because I’ve been having far too much fun with you.”

  “We’ve only been on the one date,” he said, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Finch needs to be watched every minute,” she said. “Especially right now.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “This isn’t going to work out,” she said.

  “What isn’t going to work out?” he asked.

  “This…Us.”

  “Because of Finch?”

  “I’m afraid he might try to hurt himself.”

  Hawk understood only too well what that must be doing to her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I have to watch him every minute,” she said again.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “I just can’t do anything else right now.”

  “What about Jessina?”

  “Jessina is great, but she’s only here for five hours a day.”

  “I’m here, too,” he said. “I can help.”

  “That’s a really sweet offer,” she said. “But it’s too early in our relationship for you to take on that kind of responsibility.”

  “So instead you’re going to break us up?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “It doesn’t seem very logical to me,” he said.

  “It probably doesn’t,” she said.

  “Is it what you want?”

  “I don’t know what I want,” she said, her eyes filling up with tears. “I’m too tired to know what I want. All I want right now is sleep.”

  “You should go to bed,” he said, touching the side of her face.

  She looked toward the bedroom.

  “I’ll go,” he said, standing up, starting toward the door.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t.”

  43

  FINCH DREAMED OF THE python, the earth dragon of Delphi, which was tightening around his thighs and stomach. He was aware that he was sweating and hoped the sweat would make it easier for him to slide out of its death grip. Just as the pressure became unbearable, a sound from upstairs woke him, and he struggled to place himself. He was in his home, his bed. But even now, in his wakened state, the snake was tightening its hold, and it took him a moment to realize that this was not a snake at all, but his top sheet in which he had become tangled. His struggle to free himself from the twisted sheet had succeeded only in making its snakelike grip tighter.

  Panic seized him now, and it took everything he had to keep from crying out. His limited range of motion was no match for the monster who held him so tightly. With no Apollo to slay the beast, he had to rely on the logic that had once come so easily to him. He was trapped in a tourniquet that was cutting off his blood supply until he could no longer feel his right leg at all or catch the air to breathe. The more he pulled against it, the tighter it snaked around and gripped him.

  He fought for calm, forcing himself to think strategically, breaking down the steps he needed to take to save himself. “Surrender” was the word that came to mind. Surrender was counter to his body’s natural response, but it was what was needed here. With all his will, he stopped pulling away and moved toward the beast until, feeling his surrender, it loosened his grip on him and his sweat-covered body slipped free. As soon as he was out of its killing grip, he heaved the beast onto the floor, and in its flight it resumed the ghostly form of the top sheet it was and floated innocently to the floor as if it had no idea what it had been to him only moments before.

  He wanted to call out for his wife, for Maureen. He could hear that she was home, in the room upstairs. But they hardly spoke now. He could feel his heart slamming his chest wall, could feel it in his leg as the blood rushed back to the appendage. The bottom sheet was wet, and for a moment he wondered if he had wet the bed himself, as a helpless child might do, and he felt the shame of it, but no, it was his sweat that had pooled on the base sheet in an effort to cool his burning body. He had never been so hot. It was unbearable.

  The window was open. He could smell the sea air from the harbor. Across Turner Street he could see Chanticleer, the rooster, near the gates of the Gables, having escaped the enclosure that old Hepzibah had built to keep him inside. His eyes filled with tears, grateful that the rooster had been able to escape his shackles, so much did he identify with the wiry old bird of Hawthorne’s story that he failed to realize for a moment that it was not the fictional rooster of his imaginings at all but Dusty the cat.

  By the time the realization hit him, Finch had climbed out of his bed and was making his way down the hall toward the kitchen and his escape. Behind him the alarm began to sound. Not stopping for his walker, for the first time he used the railing that had so recently been installed. His shaky hands groped their way laboriously not to the front door—which was much closer to his room—for it wasn’t the street he sought, or even the Gables, but something else. Slowly, methodically, he moved down the long hall toward the kitchen with its back entrance that was so much closer to the cool ocean below.

  The sound of the alarm faded behind him with every step down the tilted hallway until he could no longer hear it, the rhythmical sound of the gentle harbor waves, real or imagined, muting its incessant whine. He didn’t think of the pain in his legs or of his skin that burned with every brush against rail or wall, but only of the seawater that had the properties to cool and heal, water as salty as blood, a replacement perhaps for his own blood, which betrayed him with every searing step.

  He crossed the high threshold to the kitchen. Seven more steps and his hand was on the door. With all the strength he had, he turned the handle, expecting to have to pop the dead bolt, knowing the difficulty of the task. He had tried before, but his fingers worked their own will and not his these days, and he had failed. Tonight, to his good fortune, he realized that the dead bolt was not set, that the only lock was the flimsy one on the door handle. The door opened easily. In one freeing step his bare foot found the deck.

  With no rail to grip for support, he crossed the deck painstakingly, finding first a chair, then a table on which to lean, moving from one piece of furniture to another, a zigzag path of navigation to the three stairs that held him above the earth and sea. It might as easily have been a hundred. For a moment he almost turned back, but the sea, which had never called him before, was calling to him now. The harbor spread its cool darkness beyond the small patch of earth below. He could see the jeweled lights around its perimeter. With his last reserve of strength, he gripped the handrail and lowered himself ever so slowly to the earth below.

  The beach reeds burned his bare legs. The rocks cut his feet.
He could feel their sting, but he could also feel the cool of the sand, and he moved deeper into its coolness until the water found his ankles, his calves. With each step he took, the phosphorescence sparkled and glimmered its healing miracle around him, creating a Masaccio-like halo around him as he moved.

  He could feel the water, the cold release of it, as the silt from the mudflats surrounded his feet, holding him steady while the gentle ocean swell moved higher on his bare legs, first to his thighs and then upward to his waist. He sighed at the blessed coolness of its caress.

  44

  THE SOUND OF FINCH’S alarm woke Hawk first, then Zee. She grabbed her robe and ran downstairs to Finch’s bedroom, but he was not there, nor was he in the den, or even in Zee’s childhood room. She glanced immediately at the front door, which was very close to his room, but it was secure. She told herself to relax, that she’d find him. Then she felt the cross breeze blowing up from the harbor at the rear of the house. Dread filling her, she turned and ran down the hall toward the kitchen. The back door was open.

  “He’s outside!” Zee yelled at Hawk.

  “What?”

  “Finch is outside!” She motioned to the kitchen door.

  THEY LOOKED FOR HIM ON the street. Then, because Zee determined it would be the first place Finch would go, Hawk scaled the fence to the House of the Seven Gables and looked around the grounds.

  When he wasn’t at the Gables, Hawk ran down Derby Street, looking in every doorway and alley, though he doubted that Finch could make it very far, being so unsteady on his feet. Hawk was dialing the Salem police on his cell when he heard Zee yelling to him.

  He found her at the water’s edge, wading in to where Finch was stuck, his feet planted in the mudflats, the harbor water soaking his thin pajama top.

  They pulled him out together, bundled him in blankets, and drove him to the emergency room at Salem hospital. He wasn’t hurt, not even slightly hypothermic—he hadn’t been in the water that long. But the hospital wanted to keep him overnight, just to make sure.

  HOURS PAST MIDNIGHT HAWK DROVE Zee back to the house. When they pulled into the driveway, she started to cry. Her sobs were huge and wrenching, and he held her for a long time, telling her over and over that everything was going to be all right.

  He said it once more after she was calm enough to speak. “It’s going to be all right,” he said.

  She turned to him, her face puffy and red from crying.

  “That’s just it,” she said. “It isn’t.”

  They sat in silence for a long time.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she finally said.

  For a brief moment, he thought she meant taking care of Finch. He hoped that was what she meant, both for her sake and for his own. But he knew from the way she looked at him that he was kidding himself. It was over. She had told him just tonight that she wasn’t ready, that this wasn’t the right time for any kind of relationship between them. As much as it hurt him, he knew he was going to have to let her go.

  45

  WITHOUT ZEE IT WAS too hard for Hawk to be in Salem. He gave his notice to the Park Service. He had committed to one more sail with the Friendship, on Labor Day weekend, and they couldn’t find a replacement. He had paid for his boat slip for the whole season, so he told his friend Josh that he could stay there for the next few weeks. Hawk would go back to his apartment in Marblehead. He didn’t want to run into Zee.

  It all happened so quickly, and though he had known it was a bad idea (rebound relationships were never a good idea, were they?) he had fallen hard. He couldn’t explain it; nothing like this had ever happened to him before. It wasn’t just the sex. It was something else. The moment he met her, it seemed as if they’d always known each other.

  He’d tried several times to tell her about Lilly, but she blocked him at every turn. She couldn’t even talk about the case with Lilly’s own family, she’d said.

  He didn’t know Lilly’s husband, though he had met her children when he’d done carpentry work at their house. They were great kids. Lilly had talked about them all the time, and about her fears that she was a bad mother. Pretty much the same stuff she’d talked about in therapy, if Lilly was to be believed.

  If you’re having trouble reconciling your feelings about her death, and you need someone to talk to, Zee had said, I can give you some names. It just can’t be me.

  Well, he was having trouble reconciling his feelings, more trouble really than he wanted to admit. He’d been depressed about it, actually. Before he met Zee, he’d been really down. Mostly he was upset that he hadn’t been able to save Lilly. He imagined that it was pretty much the same thing Zee must be feeling, so it was too bad they couldn’t talk about it together. At least that was how he felt on one level. On another he was relieved that she hadn’t allowed him to speak about Lilly. Though he was a pretty honest guy, he realized that one more broaching of the subject of Lilly might drive Zee away, and more than anything he hadn’t wanted that to happen. Ironic that he’d lost her anyway. By all signs, including how horrible he felt right now, he figured he was pretty much in love with Hepzibah T. Finch. For all the good it was going to do him.

  He cursed himself for getting involved in the first place. He should have seen this coming.

  Hawk grabbed the rest of his clothes and some other things he would need from his boat. Then he scribbled his Marblehead address on a piece of paper and left it for Josh, who had promised to forward his paycheck the minute it arrived.

  46

  MATTEI CALLED AND ASKED Zee to meet her for lunch at Kelly’s in Revere.

  “I can come in to Boston,” Zee said.

  “I’ll meet you halfway,” Mattei said.

  THEY SAT IN THE PAVILION and looked out at the ocean.

  “Want some?” Mattei asked, offering a bite of her roast-beef sandwich. Zee had ordered fried clams and was waiting for the order to be called.

  “I know you love Kelly’s, but what’s the real reason you wanted to meet me here?” Zee asked.

  “We had a visit from Adam the other day,” Mattei said.

  Zee stared at her. “Adam was at the office?”

  “He didn’t come in when I was there, but he evidently gave our new receptionist a scare, saying you’d have to answer for what you’d done to Lilly. I’ve alerted both the Marblehead and the Boston police.”

  Zee stared at her.

  “I don’t think he’ll bother us again,” Mattei said. “But I think it would be better if you stayed away from the office for a while.”

  “And here I was afraid you were about to fire me for being away for so long.” Zee was trying to keep her tone light, but she was having a hard time of it.

  “No such luck,” Mattei said. “So how’s Finch doing on the new meds?” she asked.

  “Besides trying to drown himself in the harbor, you mean?” Zee replied.

  “How’s he doing now that he’s been on them for two full weeks?” Mattei asked.

  “Actually, he seems a little bit better,” Zee said.

  “And what about you, my friend?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah,” Mattei said. “You look fine.”

  Zee tried to smile.

  “Are you going to tell me what else is bothering you, or do I have to ask you pointed questions? You know I’ll get it out of you eventually. I’m even more pushy as a friend than as a therapist.”

  Mattei listened while Zee told her the story of Hawk, the whole story: from the dream to her walk to the Friendship, to the night on the island, to pulling Finch out of Salem Harbor and their breakup.

  “Interesting,” Mattei said.

  “Textbook,” Zee said.

  “In what way?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Enlighten me,” Mattei said.

  “The unfulfilled dreams of the mother. I’m acting out my mother’s story,” Zee said.

  “Her story, maybe. I don’t know if it was her unfulfilled dream.”


  “Of course it was,” Zee said.

  “It’s a pretty dark story,” Mattei said. “Not the part you’ve been acting out, but the rest of it.” Mattei thought about it for a minute. “I would have thought that your mother’s unfulfilled dream was rescue. First by a man, and later, when it was clear that it wasn’t going to work out, by you.”

  Zee just stared at her.

  “Any chance you just really like this guy?”

  Zee sat silent.

  “It’s okay if you do,” she said. “I never thought you were right for Michael.”

  “You were the one who fixed me up with Michael,” Zee said.

  “That was before I knew you very well.”

  Zee was frustrated. “Were you ever going to tell me that?”

  “Of course not. And remember, you and Michael were speeding down the track to marital bliss. I wasn’t going to derail that based on a vague hunch. But now that you’ve split up, I’d urge you to consider the opposite.”

  “What are you saying?” Zee asked.

  “I’m asking you to consider what you want for a change. You have a pattern of doing what is expected of you, what other people want you to do. It’s not an unusual pattern for women, but it’s more extreme in your case, first with your parents, then Michael, and even with me, with this job. You go along and go along, but then you begin to act out. Stealing boats, sabotaging your wedding plans, not telling me everything about Lilly Braedon. All little acts of rebellion that lead to big consequences you blame yourself for. But I would argue that the acting-out part might just be a natural aspect of you that needs expression. You were a pretty willful kid, from the stories you told me. You did what you wanted until events in the family changed the situation. Then you stopped choosing things for yourself and just did what you thought other people wanted you to do. Until now. This time you mutually initiated the relationship. That might not mean it’s the right relationship for you, but it does indicate a change.”