Essential Maps for the Lost

by Deb Caletti

  God, just like that, he’s sobbing like a baby. It comes out of nowhere, an invisible creature. He is felled, and he clutches his bony little gran and cries into her shirt, and it’s pathetic. You never know when these things will happen. One time, he was just brushing his teeth, looking at his frothy mouth in the mirror, when all of a sudden, bam. Grief clutched him in its fist, and he banged his head over and over and over into the bathroom wall. There’s a crater in the plaster still, like a meteor struck.

  “Buzz.” She sighs. “It’s okay. It is. You can be happy.” Now that she has what she wants from him, now that she’s dragged him down into feeling like shit, she changes her tune. Her voice is all soft and loving, yanking him back up again. He can see how Gran operates, but it doesn’t matter. You can understand a volcano, but it’ll still burn and bury you. You’ll still give it thanks if you’re not entirely destroyed.

  “I can’t.”

  “You need to.”

  “A few months is all it’s been.”

  “So much longer. Years. It’s been years.”

  Poor Ginger is losing it inside. She hates when people get upset. She’s scratching at the door and whining, and Gran lets her out. Ginger jumps around his legs. He feels her little toenails, trying to say It’s okay! I’m here! Dogs just give and give. No matter what’s happening in their own life, they look after you.

  He picks up Ginger. He gazes at her white shag rug face. “Stupid dog,” he says, but he means it with so much affection, his heart hurts. One thing he knows, he can love like you wouldn’t believe.

  Chapter Nine

  Mads is lost. She realized that already, but now she is actually, literally lost. She got on the wrong freeway entrance and has ended up here, in some industrial graveyard. There are big warehouses and chain-link fences. There are huge, mysterious metal parts, the knuckles and knees of iron giants. An airplane swoops low and there’s a shuddering roar. She should never have turned off on that exit. Everyone gets confused down here. Night will fall by the time she finds the freeway again.

  She’s late. So late. See what trouble that boy has caused already? He distracted her like crazy, and now look. She pulls over into the parking lot of a huge, blank building labeled CTC. Anything could be going on in there. Mads’s phone won’t connect to the Internet. She hunts in Thomas’s glove box for a regular old map, but only finds a pair of winter gloves and a stack of Burger King napkins. Mads calls Suzanne. She tells her she’s having car trouble (true), that the truck has stopped (true) and that she’ll be right there (mostly true). Suzanne is pissed. People who are always late are the least understanding about you being late.

  Mads ventures back into the vast dystopian land of cranes and bridges and manufacturing. She chooses a street. To her new eyes, the sign says EUROPEAN PAINTINGS and not 1ST AVENUE SOUTH. She drives through DUTCH AND FLEMISH 17TH CENTURY and decides to turn down AMERICAN PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE (S. SPOKANE STREET), which leads her neatly to the freeway. A person needs a map, is all.

  Thomas’s truck shudders over sixty-five. Mads arrives at the Bellaroses’, sweaty and out of breath. Suzanne basically shoves poor Ivy into her arms and then takes off, tires screaming. Suzanne always speaks through objects. Tires and doors and Ivy.

  “It’s good to see you. It is so, so good to see you.” Mads says this to Ivy, but in her mind’s eye, she is also saying it to Billy Youngwolf Floyd, the moment he runs up to Thomas’s truck, the moment he speaks four words she never knew were magic: Is it the battery?

  • • •

  “You can just go out with him and see what happens. Having a date doesn’t mean you’re marrying him. You can take it slow.” Mads sits on the edge of the bed in her room at Claire and Thomas’s house. It’s their former office/spare room, where they put in a twin bed for her. There’s a big oak desk, too, and on it, a picture of Claire, Thomas, and Harrison standing near a fountain. Also—Harrison’s first-grade school photo in a frame. In it, he looks serious and responsible, like he’s about to come fix the air-conditioning unit in the apartment complex.

  “He’s so short, he’s up to my eyebrows! His wife cheated on him. That’s why he’s divorced. He wanted to stay married. He’s not the type to just up and leave, like some people we know.”

  Mads likes that room, but right then, listening to her mother on the phone, she feels as if she’s somewhere else. In a lake, where water-words are drowning her. In a desert, where her mother’s voice rolls over her like waves of heat as she slowly melts.

  “Good, then,” Mads says.

  “Well, I’m in no hurry to be with a man. I like things the way they are, with you and me. Us girls. Boys just bring complications.”

  I like complications, Mads thinks.

  There’s a rap on the door, and Claire pokes her head in. “Dinner,” she mouths.

  “Gotta go, Mom.”

  “We barely got to talk.”

  “Dinner’s ready.”

  “You hardly have five minutes for me anymore.”

  Mads’s chest squeezes with the bad/ungrateful/guilty feeling. She can be so selfish, she thinks. Selfish = bad person. She should be more generous. Even this guy, Jim Beam, will be gone soon enough. She knows this. Her mom will pick at him; she will jab and belittle. One day, he’ll strike back, because he doesn’t understand the rules, how you’re supposed to keep the waters calm, and then it will be over. Everyone leaves Catherine Jaynes Murray, which means Mads never can.

  On the other end of the phone, their home sounds empty and abandoned. Of course, Mads worries about abandoned. She’s seen what it’s done before. It turns her mom into all of the fairy-tale characters at once—the small, scared Gretel lost in the woods, and the angry, consuming witch with the oven and the house of candy. She’s a grown woman, Mads’s father would say, Claire would say, Thomas would say. But she isn’t really. Mads understands that even the witch is just having a very large tantrum, even if it’s hard to say what’s worse, the small and scared or the angry and consuming.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “I wanted to tell you about a new listing I got.”

  “Claire’s calling.”

  “I think it can go for over four hundred. It’s got a view. The seller’s a bitch, though. You know what she said?”

  “Mom, I’ve got to go.”

  Mads’s mom sighs. The wind whistles through the desert. “Well, I’m off. I have work to do.”

  “Love you.”

  “I love you. I miss you so much. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  • • •

  “Mads, you barely ate anything,” Claire says. She slides the casserole dish of vegetarian lasagna toward her. “Thomas, give her another scoop.”

  “I’m fine, Claire. It was delicious, thanks.”

  “She’s fine, Claire,” Thomas says. “A person gets to say whether they’re hungry or not.” Thomas and Claire catch eyes, like television parents. Mads likes that.

  “I’m just worried about you, sweetie. Not worry-worry—I know you can handle yourself. Just, you’ve gotten a little thin.”

  “Lean and mean,” Thomas says.

  “Bean and green,” Harrison says. “Weenie and peenie. Weenus and penis.”

  “Harrison.”

  “I just want to get to the library so I have enough time before it closes.” Mads pushes her chair back. She stacks Thomas’s empty plate onto hers, gathers the utensils.

  “I’m going, too,” Harrison says.

  Claire shakes her head. “No, buddy. You and me, spelling words.”

  “C-O-N-C-E-R-N. Extra-credit word. I don’t need to practice. Mads said I’m the copilot.”

  “Not everywhere,” Claire says.

  “I take a really long time in the library,” Mads warns from the kitchen as she lines up the dishes in the dishwasher.

  “I’ll stay in the kids’ section,” Harrison says. “You won’t even have to watch me. I’ll make sure no one kidnaps me. Someone tries to snatch me—”

&nbs
p; “Put that down,” Claire says.

  Mads hears the Ha-hoo that is Harrison getting the bad guy with his samurai sword/butter knife.

  “You can’t follow me around,” Mads calls.

  “I wooon’t!”

  It’s still light out. As they drive, Harrison announces every license plate from another state until Mads tells him to shut up. He rides with his wallet on his lap. He loves that wallet, but there’s not much in it, Mads knows. A couple of dollars, and his library card, and an old movie ticket to Space Fighters.

  Mads strolls around the kids’ section with Harrison for a while. “You don’t have to stay,” he says. “Who’s following who?”

  “All right.” She’s already found what she came for anyway. “Be free, big man.”

  Mads collects a few other books. This time, they’re camouflage, the way guys in teen movies buy Red Vines and car magazines along with their condoms.

  “God, Hare,” Mads says. “How can you even carry all those? Do you need help?”

  “I’m done. Let’s get outta here.” He sounds like a gangster after the holdup. The library always makes Mads feel like she’s just pulled off a big score, too.

  At home, Harrison lays his stash out around him, same as Mads used to when trick-or-treating was through. Thomas pats a spot on the couch and Mads sits with him and Claire as they watch some show. She’s being polite. She laughs when they laugh and grimaces when they groan, but she’s not paying a bit of attention to that TV. The book is calling to her, as books do. As stories do. As Billy Youngwolf Floyd’s story does, especially.

  She makes her escape as soon as she can. Now that she’s finally alone with the book in her room, she takes her time. Anticipation is a warm bath to soak in. She tucks her knees in just so. She reads the back of the book, then the front pages where the reviews are. Finally, the first lines. To my lawyer, Saxonberg: 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. . . .

  Then: Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. Mads loves how it’s written with a God voice, a voice with all-knowing wisdom. In this case, God is Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but still. These are E. L. Konigsburg’s words (and what is she like? The book says she lives in Port Chester, which sounds like a perfect town with perfect green lawns and definitely, most definitely, television parents), but they’re not just her words anymore. They belong to Mads now, and to Billy, and to a million other people. It’s strange, because the story seems to have stayed exactly the same since Mads read it last, but it has changed, too. It’s new again, read with older eyes. It’s strange how a book is both steady and mutable.

  Mads stops reading, looks at the black, chicken-scratch pictures. And, then, finally, she opens the book to the middle. She squinches—her glasses are here somewhere, but whatever—and makes out the tiny words. French Impressionists. Where is Billy’s own map right now? she wonders. Back in his pocket? Set on a nightstand? In his own hands? Could they be gazing at Far Eastern Art at the same time, like distant lovers with the moon? He said the map had belonged to someone, and Mads can guess who. She is certain it was his mother’s. She studies it for what it might have meant to them. Greek and Roman Art. Great Hall. Arms and Armor.

  Mads can almost hear the tap of her own heels on the floor. American Wing. Art of India. She feels the cool hush of history, the secret tales of jeweled swords and necklaces in the shape of tigers and oil paint so real that you’re sure a king’s eyes follow you. She’s filled with a longing to be there. A map can make you want things, and a book can open a door—a door to the main staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which leads to a long hallway with a velvet rope, heading to an angel statue that might transform you. Like Anna Youngwolf Floyd, like Billy himself, Mads wants to stay there for a while. In that place, there are no parents and no guilt. No ogres are allowed in. There is only a boy and a girl who become a team, whose ordinary lives fall away because one day they decide that it will be so.

  Oh, Billy Youngwolf Floyd and his mother have gotten inside her, settled right in to disturb her soul and rustle her heart. They are there to cause some trouble, big trouble. Map or no map, fate or no fate, trouble has a job to do.

  Wreck stuff. And wreck it good.

  Chapter Ten

  He should have picked her up. Just because he didn’t want to meet some father in a tie, it was chickenshit not to do it. Billy’s not a tie-type person, and he doesn’t know tie-type people, so the whole neckwear idea makes him nervous. His dad wore one only once, in that box, which is a pretty bad place to finally try to straighten up, in Billy’s opinion. Billy’s glad he didn’t have to see his mom all waxy and gone like that. Better to remember her the way she was, at least, the way she was when she was doing okay. Like that day she got the job at the rental car place and she brought home burgers and shakes from Dick’s and said, Life is funny, in a way that meant it was good. Like when she’d hug him hard and he’d say, Mom, stop, even though he didn’t really want her to. Or when she’d do something silly like sock him with a pillow or pat his head or tell him, You’re the best, that’s what you are, and he knew, no doubt, how much she loved him.

  The only guy he knows who wears a tie is Uncle Nate, his dad’s half brother. At least, he wore one in that newspaper article about him and the software company he started. Billy doesn’t really know him. Couple times he’s called to see if Billy needs anything, like a job. He seemed like a really nice guy. But Billy never called “Uncle Nate” back because it feels disloyal. His mom could get almost jealous about his dad’s side of the family, and Gran doesn’t trust his uncle, says he’s up to something. She says, Blood may be thicker than water, but what do you want when you’re thirsty?

  These particular thoughts make Billy more nervous than he is already. He pretends to study the menu in the plastic box outside Agua Verde. He tries to look casual. He used some of that cologne in the bottle with the horse-head cap that Gran got him one Christmas, but now it’s all he can smell. He tastes it, even. It’s going to give Madison Murray a headache. He tried to splash it on his cheeks, but it got all over the front of his shirt. The cap always makes him think of the Godfather movie, with the horse head in the bed. First time he watched that, he cried his eyes out, like some big-ass baby. He was eight, okay? The babysitter let him watch it, and his mom was pissed.

  Tonight, no matter what, he’s going to tell Madison about seeing her stalking J.T. Jones. It feels like a lie otherwise. It’s funny, but he’s got this weird thought: He wants to do everything right with her. He doesn’t even know her. Maybe she’s lazy or thinks she’s hot shit or maybe she’s a cat person. He doesn’t think so, though. It’s dangerous to hope like this. Already, there’s a little flame of it, and he wants to cup his hands around it so it doesn’t blow out.

  She’s coming. He hears that truck two blocks away. He acts like he doesn’t notice. He’s calm and casual, just looking at that menu. He puts his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels, like some young Hollywood mogul. He feels Hollywood; things are going his way. His hair turned out good. He’s all Charm Spell.

  Billy’s been looking at that menu so long, he can tell you that you can add chicken, steak, or pork to the taco ensalada for four bucks, and shrimp for five. She’s walking across the parking lot now. Even if he didn’t see her coming, he bets he could feel it. She’s the one with a Spell-Like Ability. She probably doesn’t even know it. She should know it. If you can use a Spell-Like Ability at will, it’s limitless.

  She’s hurrying, breathing funny, in and out, in and out, like Mom did after she signed up for that mindfulness course they gave at the hospital. He hated that class, because his mom would chew her food real slow, and gaze out at some cloud like she’d never seen one before. Jesus, it was annoying. Thankfully that lasted about two weeks. It would have been great if it w
as some amazing cure, but staring too long and chewing too slow didn’t look all that different from her bad days, only with the fake-ass smile of fake woo-woo bliss.

  Stop! No more of these thoughts. This is his night. A person who jumps from a bridge goes out making sure you know how unhappy they are, and you’ll never forget it. They have the final say, and you’ll always remember how you let them down and weren’t enough to stay for. But what they did shouldn’t wreck everything even if it wrecked everything.

  “Hey,” Madison Murray says. “I’m sorry I’m late. I hate being late. It’s so rude.”

  “Hey, no worries.”

  She wears a blue skirt and a flowered top and sandals and that bracelet. He really likes that bracelet. Maybe it’s his favorite piece of jewelry a girl ever wore, if you can even call it jewelry. It’s just leather strands woven in a braid. It makes him think of tree branches and nests.

  Madison takes a pinch of her shirt and waves it in and out. “Whew. That was crazy. The people I babysit . . . Man, sometimes . . .”

  “Yeah?” Wow, she smells good. Even over all his own cologne, he can smell it. Tangerines, or something else that’s summer.

  “Big fight. I didn’t think I’d get out of there.”

  “Other people fighting is the worst.”

  “Really.”

  “I’d rather be fighting myself than not fighting and hearing other people fight.” Ugh! Mouthful of moron.

  She laughs. “Exactly.”

  The restaurant is packed. It’s a casual place, stuck out over the water. You order at a counter, then bring your own drinks to your table. He starts to worry. Plastic cups, someone’s napkin on the floor . . . He hopes she can see past how regular it is. He’s a plastic cup guy, not some thin-stemmed wineglass guy. Is it possible she doesn’t want a thin-stemmed wineglass guy? Maybe he’ll be that when he’s forty, but probably not. The food is great, that’s the point.