The Map of Moments (10 page)

“Just what you might expect,” he said, trying to make his face as unreadable as possible. “How much we loved her, how much we miss her. He told me about teaching her to cook, but not that story.”

Max had never been a good liar, so it amazed him how easily the falsehoods came.

“Actually, he got me ridiculously drunk. I had hardly any breakfast yesterday, so by the time lunch came around I was wrecked. I …well, I went over to the house in Lakeview. Kind of a farewell tour, I guess.”

“Seriously? Damn, Max, you've got to be careful, you know? You should have called me. I would've driven you over.”

He chuckled. “I would've been too embarrassed to call you, even if I could've. But I dropped my cell; shattered the thing. It's useless. I put it in the trash this morning.”

Corinne gave a sympathetic shake of her head. “Not your week. Look, I know you're in town another couple of days. I have to work tonight, but I'm off again tomorrow. If you need a chauffeur, I'd be happy to help.”

Max cocked his head. “Why?”

“I'm sorry?” She seemed irked.

“Why would you want to help?”

“You came down here. I didn't have to say good-bye to her alone. You shouldn't have to, either.”

He thought about that, tempted to backtrack, to dig out
from all the bullshit he'd just dumped on the table between them. But so many things were confusing him right then that he needed to hold on to the one thing he really did know for sure, which was that crazy Ray had given the map to him. Whatever he did with it, use it or burn it or just stick it in a hotel drawer, he wanted that to be his choice. Telling Corinne would bring her in on that decision, and he wasn't ready for that.

“Thanks, but I'm just going to visit some old colleagues from Tulane, have a couple of decent meals, and go home. Too many ghosts for me now.

Corinne picked up her coffee mug at last, raised it as if in a toast, and stared at him over the rim. “Too many ghosts for all of us. This whole city's haunted by what it used to be. But New Orleans is used to living with its ghosts, paying respects, and going on living. I guess we'll manage it this time, too. Eventually.”

She drank, and if the black coffee was bitter, her face didn't show it.

Their breakfast came and they tucked into their meals. For a while, Max just let himself enjoy the banana pancakes, which were even better than he remembered them being. Poppy came by the table to see how they were faring, and he heaped her with praise.

“Poppy didn't know she was dead,” he said when she left, breaking the silence of their meal.

Corinne looked up at him, eyes glistening. “Max,” she said slowly, as if savoring his name. Then she smiled. “Never seen her like when she was with you. In fact, I couldn't believe it when you two started up together. She usually kept
everyone at arm's length. Aside from me and Ray, there'd only ever been a couple of other people she let into her life.” Corinne's eyes were kind. “You were good for her, Max. I was sorry to see you go.”

His fork dangled from his fingers. Suddenly, his appetite had departed. He thought about the night he'd walked in on her screwing one of his students, and about the things he'd learned in the past day. Her family had cast her aside, and though she knew a lot of people, she must have been a lonely woman.

“What's wrong?” Corinne asked.

He shrugged. “It's just strange. The longer I stay here, the more I think the girl I came to say good-bye to never even existed.”

“That's just foolishness,” she chided him. “Gaby
loved
you.”

“For a while, maybe.”

She waved the words away, as though angry. “Think what you like. You and Coco were the only…” She looked away, lips pressed tightly together as if to hold back any more mistakes.

Max sighed. Nothing should surprise him by now. It seemed he hadn't known a damn thing about the girl he professed to love.

“Who's Coco?”

H
e felt like a fucking idiot. Corinne seemed to be
I I
playing him, feeding him information about Gabrielle piece by piece. Whenever he asked about Gaby's estrangement from her family, Corinne said,
It's fam-ily business.
And now there was Coco, the guy who'd been in Gabrielle's life before she met Max, and whom Corinne had refused to talk about.
Forget I mentioned his name,
she'd said, nervous and unsettled.
I never should have.

That pissed off Max. He already felt dislocated and alone, existing in a city that had lost itself and was still struggling to find its way again. And now the more he discovered about
Gabrielle, the more complex and distant her memory seemed to grow. The Gabrielle he remembered was quickly becoming a stranger.

“This isn't the way to Tulane,” he said. The cabdriver turned in his seat, offering a grin that displayed no humor.

“You just come back?” he asked, reading Max like a book.
Been here before, but away when the storm came.

“Yeah,” Max said.

“A lot's changed. The New Orleans that's risin’ from the waters is a whole new woman. Still got the humps and bumps in all the right places, but the lay of the land has moved around, here an’ there.” He drove on, settling in his seat and tapping the steering wheel in time with some inaudible music.

“I don't want a tour.”

“I ain't giving you a fuckin’ tour.” The driver turned on the car stereo and gave his fingers something to tap to.

Max sighed and sat back, trying to make sense of things. Morning had shed no light on what he'd seen yesterday. He could still smell the swamp, taste the rain, and feel the cold waters against his legs, and he could hear the cries of the child as it was plucked from the water and given back to its mother. It had the quality of a memory from the past that might have been a dream, or might have been real.

Whatever Ray had given him to drink…

“Crazy bastard,” Max muttered. What he'd seen had appeared so detailed that he was not sure it could have just come from his imagination. He knew little about the history of this area, but one of his colleagues from his time at
Tulane taught the history of Louisiana.
The marsh, the Native Americans, the Frenchman…
Max closed his eyes and rested his head back against the seat.

Yesterday had been a bad day. It almost felt good having something else to pursue, for a while.

And then Coco,
he thought. But he was not sure he'd ever go that far.

“You walk from here,” the driver said, pulling up at the curb.

Max looked outside and recognized some of the dorm buildings. Windows were boarded up and trees were down, and façades were coated with the same sad dust.

“We're half a mile from the campus,” Max said.

“Yeah, and you walk from here.”

“Why?”

The driver turned around again, and this time his smile was genuine. “Walk, an’ see. The roads? Bad news. They're not washed away, but clearin’ the university hasn't been a priority, know what I mean?”

Max nodded and looked along the street ahead of them. There were very few vehicles, other than those parked haphazard along the curb. “Thanks,” he said.

“Yeah, well, take it easy,” the driver said. “And sorry if I was harsh, y'know?”

“No need to apologize.” Max gave the cabdriver a five-dollar tip and got out, watching the battered car turn around in the street and head back the way they'd come.

Half a mile wasn't so far to walk, but he remembered the gun-swinging gang he'd seen yesterday, and he could
still perceive the scent of decay on the air. It smelled as if the city was dying.

For some reason, he'd assumed that the university had escaped the worst of the flooding. He hadn't seen it on the TV coverage of Katrina, and though he'd been unable to contact any of his friends or ex-colleagues there during the storm, he'd put it down to the phone systems being down all across Louisiana. And after the storm, when the true extent of the devastation and horror was becoming clear, he'd felt reticent about calling. He'd rationalized it as a fear of being the outsider; he'd only taught there for six months, and he'd left almost four months before the hurricane.

As time went by, and it became too late to call with any pretense at concern, he'd realized he had been afraid. He didn't want to hear that any of those people he'd run away from had died.

But the university had not escaped.

The cabdriver had been right about the roads. As Max walked on, he found himself crossing a strange landscape of dried mud, piled debris, and abandoned cars. The destruction felt different from what he had witnessed in Lakeview, perhaps because he had not expected to see it here, or maybe because he knew this place so well. He could hear engines somewhere out of sight. A couple of rats dodged across the road ahead of him, fleeing one pile of debris to find shelter in another. He winced, expecting gunshots, but there was no roving gang here. Not yet.

He walked past a coffee shop where he'd gotten his caffeine fix many times before. The front window was smashed
and the insides were a mess, and on the huge menu blackboard the word “Looter” was scrawled in dried mud, with an arrow pointing down behind the counter. Max had no wish to see what the arrow was aiming at.

He walked on, and the sound of engines grew in the distance. He passed a man wearing a gun holster around his waist, three women carrying trash bags slung over their shoulders, and a teenaged boy on a bike who seemed to be making a challenge of leaping fallen trees and cars resting on flat tires. A police car cruised by, and even though Max offered a smile, the cop in the passenger seat stared at him until the car had drifted from view.

Turning a corner into one of the grassy squares, he saw where the engine sound came from. A heavy wagon sat in the center, and a front-end loader was shoveling up mud, broken glass, and snapped branches, slowly clearing the square from north to south. Half the job was done, and Max wondered how long it had taken. It seemed like an endless task.

He walked through the chaos of places he knew, surprised and disturbed at the relative silence of somewhere so used to bustle, noise, and life. When he reached the history building where he'd once taught, the front door was open, and he walked up the steps and entered. It was silent inside. He flicked the light switch but nothing happened, and he could hardly believe that the power was still off. The floor was smeared with dried mud all along the corridor, and ten yards along a door had been smashed, glass speckling the floor. Surely someone should have cleaned that up? Where was the lecturer whose office had been vandalized? Where were the staff?

“Hello?” Max called, because the silence was starting to spook him.

But he'd come this far, and the lecturer he'd come to meet was not one to accept defeat. If anyone would be here, Charlie Baker was the man.

He headed upstairs by habit. As he walked along the second-floor corridor, he began to hear a steady
chink, chink, chink
of something deeper inside the building—metal against glass, too rhythmic to be accidental.
What the hell was I thinking, coming here?

Chink …chink …chink…

The whole place was shut down. The front door stood open, but no one seemed to be inside, and if that wasn't asking for trouble, what was?

Chink …chink…

He didn't shout again. Instead he walked on, trying not to give away his presence. His old office was at the end of the corridor, and it felt as though he'd been away for six years, not six months. Everything had changed so much.

Chink…

The sound stopped. Something creaked.

“Who's there!” a voice boomed, and a figure leapt into the corridor a few steps in front of Max.

“Shit!” Max stumbled back and almost fell, grabbing on to the windowsill to hold himself upright. “Charlie!”

Charlie Baker, the man he'd come hoping to see, stood before him, leaning back against the doorjamb and tapping the crystal glass in his left hand with his wedding ring.

Max stood up straight and tried to smile. It didn't feel right. “Charlie, it's Max.”

“I know,” Charlie said. His expression did not change, his tapping continued. Max smelled whiskey. It was barely midday.

“Good to see you,” Max said, reaching for something deeper.

“What the hell you doing here?”

“I …er…” Charlie's manner and tone had thrown him, and now Max was beginning to think he'd done the wrong thing, assumed too much and understood far too little. The storm had changed the landscape of the city, and it could just as easily change the geography of people's minds. “I came here to find you.”

“Me?” Charlie had been a garrulous man with a big personality, but now he seemed a shade of his former self.

Max looked around and sighed. “I didn't know the campus had been hit so bad. So you're …what, here alone?”

Charlie smiled sadly and shook his head. “Few others in the building. We come in, go through the motions, go home. Same most days. But all the students are gone. There's nothing to do here.” He shrugged, and stopped tapping his glass long enough to take a drink.

“I'm sorry,” Max said, and he meant it. “How are Lucy and the kids?”

“Living with my folks in Houston.” Charlie said no more, as if that were answer enough. The silence went on for so long that Max wondered whether he should say
I'm sorry
again.

“I came back for a funeral.”

Charlie nodded. “Has it happened yet?”

“Yeah. Yesterday.”

He nodded again. Then he held up his glass. “Drink?”

“No, I—”

“Said you came looking for me. You want to talk to me, we drink. That's my new rule now. Charlie's rule, I call it. You wanna talk, you drink.”

“Right,” Max said. “Well, okay, just a little one.”

“Just a little one,” Charlie mimicked, turning back into his office.

Max followed him in. He expected a mess—the exact opposite of what Charlie had been—but the room was pristine. No book was out of place, no files strewn across the desk, and for a beat Max was glad. Then he realized it was because Charlie was not working anymore. In one corner stood a couple of cardboard boxes filled with empty bottles.