Mapmaker (2 page)

I stood, brushing the snow off. I couldn’t go inside the house; I couldn’t be alone. I’d waited all this time only to see a shadow. I reached for my backpack, soaked from the snow, and walked quickly down Lincoln Road toward the center of town.

As I paused for the streetlight to change, I thought about the way the figure had put his hands in his coat pockets, the way he’d turned to our house. There was something so familiar about his attitude, the tilt of his head, his gait. I stared at the blinking streetlight, with a strange, haunted feeling inside.

I was sure I knew him. But at the same time I had no clue who he was.

From the corner of my eye I saw Beth’s shadow cross the floor.

Really?
I groaned to myself.

She had promised she would sleep in. School was out for summer; she wouldn’t be back in the kindergarten classroom until after Labor Day. The last thing I wanted this morning was a conversation with Beth. I searched my pockets for my phone. I’d already put it in my backpack. Besides, it was too early to fake-text like I normally did.

Outside the kitchen window everything was green and gold, except for the river, which ran a glittering dark blue. The birds flitted from the porch roof to the small wooden birdhouse. Back and forth, back and forth, again and again. They were so nervous. Maybe they thought that they were stealing Beth’s stash of seeds. Beth’s stash wouldn’t run out if every bird in New England showed up.

The kitchen floor felt cold against my bare feet, and I stared at the teakettle. The flame under it burned blue and
red. I placed two Earl Grey tea bags in a tall mug and waited for the water to boil.

“Good morning,” Beth called from the doorway.

How could she move so quietly through this old house? Like a ghost, never creaking. So many times I’d think I was alone, and there she’d appear in a doorway, watching me. And then the questions would come …

“Morning,” I muttered.

She walked into the kitchen, looking as though she had just stepped out of a 1985 L.L. Bean catalogue, a pink oxford shirt tucked into her high-waisted, baggy blue jeans. Her belt had a pattern of whales printed on it. I guess it was the type of clothing toddlers might think was cute. Her thick brown hair was pulled back into a high ponytail. She even had a rope bracelet—a gift from one of her kindergarten students.

I forced a smile, which felt more like a grimace. I knew she only had good intentions. She wanted to be here for me on my first day of “work,” like a mother or father would have been, like mine should have been. After all, “work” was a paid internship at my dad’s company, MapOut, the company he’d devoted the last part of his short life to founding. But it was her summer vacation. Her worry was only irritating.

The kettle whistled. I reached for the handle without thinking, burning the palm of my hand.

“Shit,” I snapped, flinching away.

Before I even had a chance to look up, Beth was beside me with an ice pack wrapped in a cloth.

“It’s okay,” I said, pulling my stinging hand against my chest. I fought back tears of pain and frustration. I glanced
up at the clock—7:15—and decided to leave. I’d be an hour and a half early, but that was fine.

“Let me help you,” Beth said, laying a hand on my shoulder.

Reluctantly I took the ice and held it against my palm. I sat down in the kitchen chair and stared down at nothing. Through the window the birds carried on. They were busy, flying back and forth and back and forth from one bird feeder to the next, feeding their young.

The ice numbed the throbbing. Beth made me my tea with milk and a little honey. She buttered my toast, spread blueberry jam she had canned last summer over it, cut it in half, and placed it all on the table in front of me—complete with a folded cloth napkin.

“Thanks.”

She sat down with her cup of coffee. “Hand any better?”

“A little.”

“Are you nervous?”

With my unburned hand, I took a sip of tea and shrugged. “Not really.”

I’d spent plenty of time at MapOut, so I felt pretty comfortable there. Besides, Harrison Worth, Dad’s best friend and MapOut’s cofounder, would take care of me. He’d arranged the entire thing. It was all an effort on his part to make up for the fact my grades had plummeted in the six months since Dad had died.

While I resented him for it, I also loved him for it.

I knew I could make more money pouring lattes and cappuccinos at Rao’s Coffee. I could have spent the summer with my best friend, Rebs, as a counselor at Camp Norwich. I could have even been a nanny to seven-year-old twin girls in
Provincetown and spent the next few months on the beach. But this would look a lot better on my college applications. That was Harrison’s argument, and I couldn’t argue back. Dad could never argue with Harrison, either. The man was shrewd and suave and convincing, everything Dad wasn’t. It’s also why he and my dad made such a great team.

Beth’s smile tightened. “You know, you can borrow my car.”

“I want to bike,” I said, maybe a bit too quickly.

“Your dad would have given anything to be able to take you to work today,” Beth said, not even looking at me.

Was she trying to make me cry? I held my breath, forcing myself not to say,
Don’t talk about him anymore
. I knew from experience that one way to stop thinking about someone was to stop talking about them. To push forward, to pretend you didn’t feel anything. How much longing or regret could someone stand? How many mornings or evenings could I say I wish my mom were here? I wish my dad were here? How much sadness could you let yourself feel? It could swallow you like the sea.

“Tanya …” she started to add.

“I better go,” I mumbled. I stood up, leaving the tea almost full and the toast untouched. The burn on my hand was still there, pulsing in my palm like a heartbeat. My voice fell onto the ring-stained and scratched wooden tabletop.

Beth nodded, glued to her coffee. “Have a good day,” she whispered.

My last image of her that day was her hands wrapped around the mug. Frozen alone at the kitchen table, shoulders hunched forward, brown eyes full of loneliness, shadows of the birds outside playing across her face.

How would Beth spend
the rest of the day? Alone, gardening, cleaning the house? Would she wonder what it was she had said to me that had gone so wrong? Would she remember all the times our conversations had ended up with me slamming my bedroom door? With me reminding her again and again that she was NOT my mother and NEVER would be? When would she give up trying with me? I guess that’s what I wanted, and that’s what I was trying to make her do:
give up on me
.

Maybe she would go upstairs and lie on my father’s side of the bed and sob into the covers. She was forty-four, childless, and now a widow. Beth had wanted a child with my father so badly. They’d spent their marriage trying. They’d visited specialists in Boston. I imagined them climbing up a ladder, a baby waiting at the top. Once it had even worked: Beth had gotten pregnant, and those two months were the happiest I’d ever seen her. Then the heartbeat stopped.

I imagined myself having the courage to go back inside, to give her a hug goodbye. I imagined myself as a different type of girl: someone kinder, less angry. In my mind, when I hugged Beth, I even looked different. In that vision, I smiled. I knew something as simple as that would change her day. It would also change mine.

But the screen door had already slammed.

Halfway across the lawn
, I pictured myself from above. I was a speck moving across the grass, a bright point near the river and forest. I rose, and the land below moved outward and outward in my mind until I could see the whole town of Amherst … the highest church steeples, the grid of streets,
the darker threadlike line of the roads, the thick lane of highway in the distance, the uneven hills surrounding the entire valley.

In my map, I was a pinprick the color of dust, making a wrong turn.

It’s so hard to make the easiest change. As I moved farther and farther away from the house, I could see myself, lost on the map, ignoring the voice that insisted,
Turn back, turn back. Go back inside the house. Don’t go that way, don’t go there
.

I squeezed my eyes shut. The edges of the town disintegrated and I sank. My focus became closer, shorter, then back to real life. I opened my eyes to the present. The garage. My bike.

My father thought I had a natural talent, a “gift” he called it, which embarrassed me, like I was in one of those movies where kids see dead people or predict the future or whatever. It was part knack for gauging distances, part photographic memory of geospatial imagery.

Sometimes it felt like a curse. Sometimes I got lost in it. Sometimes I could see less clearly what was right in front of me than I could see a landscape, miles away. It would start with one fixed point, like the garage—then, as if I were floating straight up, the surrounding area would grow and grow. The grid of roads, the borders of the towns. The colors of states, the dark blue oceans, the countries, the continents. I could measure the distances between that first point and everything surrounding it, no matter how high I climbed or how far the borders spread.

Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t land. And sometimes I didn’t want to.

I’d first discovered how
good I was at mapping distances when my cat went missing. I was ten. I’d had Bootsy since she was a kitten, and she slept on my pillow at night, and sometimes (well, a lot of the time) I gave her canned tuna fish as a special treat. She had a good life, so I couldn’t understand why she would leave me, leave
us
.

In truth, she was probably run over by a car or eaten by a coyote. Or worse, caught in a rabbit trap. But at the time Dad didn’t have the heart to tell me the likely possibilities, so he accompanied me as I went around the town, taping up
LOST CAT
posters wherever I could. I cried a lot. When I closed my eyes, I would see Bootsy in the woods, scared and cold and alone.

“She’ll find her way home one day,” Dad would say, trying to soothe me at night.

He would stroke my hair back from my forehead as I lay in bed, crying into the pillow. He told me that cats had an inner compass. When lost, cats would lie down and feel a tug inside them, like a fish on a line, toward home.

While I was still
looking for Bootsy, MapOut was starting up. My dad had decided to document all the footpaths in the Amherst woods—long abandoned—to demonstrate the company’s capabilities to potential clients. He brought me along when he could. I spent my time calling for Bootsy while he marked the trees with red or blue or yellow paint. Sometimes I would hold his compass in my hand, close my eyes, and spin myself around until I got so dizzy that I had to collapse on the damp forest floor. Then, like a cat, I would try to feel the pull of each direction.

I assigned them colors in my head. South was orange, north
was green, west was pale blue, and east was purple. With my eyes closed, I laid the compass beside me and saw everything. The colors became indistinguishable from the different pulls I felt. When I opened my eyes and checked the compass, everything matched up. I never missed.

I told my dad. He kind of smiled and said, “You’re lucky, sweetheart.”

But I knew it was more than that. When I began to tell him that he’d gotten the distances wrong between the paint markings—it wasn’t thirty yards; it was actually thirty yards and eight inches—he sat me down and looked at me. “Tanya,” he whispered. “I’m telling you this for your own good. I am so sorry, but I really think that Bootsy is dead.”

I burst into tears and ran straight home.

After that, I never told anyone else about my ability, not even Beth. I guess it did seem kind of strange. The feeling and certainty I had about direction and distances couldn’t be summed up with words, anyway. It was all a map in my head, an invisible feline tug. And Dad knew that. He knew I shared with Piri Reis whatever trait had allowed him to map the earth as if staring down from thousands of miles up in space.

But only later did I realize that Dad had told me the awful truth about Bootsy for a simple reason: to protect me.

I gripped my bike’s
handlebars, ignoring the pain in my hand as I sped down the road into town. I drew a series of deep, shaky breaths. “Pull yourself together, Tanya,” I said to myself. But I couldn’t. I slammed on the brakes, jolting forward.

A bicyclist behind swerved around me. “Watch what you’re doing!” she screamed over her shoulder. Her voice reminded
me of Rebs. I knew it wasn’t her, though. If it had been Rebs, she would have leapt off the bike and swept me into a hug. Or slapped me. Or pleaded with me to crawl out of my shell. Anyway, Rebs was off at Camp Norwich.

“Sorry,” I stammered. I unfastened my helmet. Once I’d stopped trembling, I threw it down on the concrete, reveling in the crack of the plastic against the road.
I should have stayed with Beth. I should have never taken this internship in the first place
.