Essential Maps for the Lost Page 14

  “You think so?”

  “You’re practically crying tears of joy now that you heard from me.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  That sits there between them for one beautiful second. One beautiful freckle-nose, tan-arm, leather-bracelet, goodhearted, bad-eyesighted second.

  “Hotshot,” she says.

  • • •

  He doesn’t mind being the one to call, are you kidding? He calls, and meets her and Ivy for a stroller walk around Green Lake. He calls, and they go to see Rio Rialto at the Grand Illusion. He calls, and they get dinner at Uneeda Burger. He calls, and they talk and talk and talk on the phone until it’s late. He calls, and on that Saturday, they meet in Fremont and drop her car off, because he has a surprise.

  He can’t wait—she’s going to love this. It’s a great idea because of the map. He drives them downtown in his mother’s truck. It’s strange, Mads being inside it. He’s with a person his mother never met, in a place where he still smells his mother’s hand lotion if he concentrates hard. He’s maybe in love with a person his mother never met and never will meet. It makes him sad for himself, but even sadder for his mom. Right now, Mads holds the little beaded doll that his mother kept in her ashtray. Mads doesn’t ask about it, and she doesn’t comment on the seventies music blaring from the radio, either. She just turns the doll in her palm and puts it back. The lotion smell, the doll, the music—it makes Billy feel like his mom and Mads are together in some way.

  He heads down the big hill by the waterfront, crosses the downtown streets full of tourists and shoppers. He makes her shut her eyes until they get there.

  “Open,” he says.

  She does. “Really?” She stares up at the tall glass building with its bold sign, SEATTLE ART MUSEUM, and at the iron man statue with his slowly swinging hammer.

  He just grins like crazy.

  “This is so sweet.”

  She gets it. She understands. It isn’t the museum, but it’s as close as he can get. He doesn’t know shit about art. He even shaved and dressed up a little, put on one of his good shirts and his good shoes, because he doesn’t know what people wear to places like this.

  The floors are really shiny. His dress shoes tap against the wood. He pulls at his cuffs, since this is the only nice shirt he has besides the funeral one, and he got it a few years ago for a holiday thing at school. People sit on benches and look at the paintings like they understand what they mean, though they’re probably faking it. Mads seems giddy. He catches her running her fingertips along a velvet rope. She jokes about where he could hide his violin case.

  “Perfect!” She points to a large sixteenth-century Chinese vase. “How about here?” Inside a Tlingit canoe.

  “I like this place, but we need the real thing,” Billy says.

  “Definitely,” Mads says.

  Mads doesn’t know it, but he’s leading her to Decorative Arts. He looked it up online. There are no giant beds in the museum, mostly just chairs and cabinets and settees, so he decided to bring her to the Italian Room instead. He’d never even heard the word settee before, but now he knows it’s just a fancy name for a little couch.

  “Wow,” she says.

  It’s all warm, glowing wood, ceiling to floor. They’re surrounded by it, just like in the picture. No one’s in there but them. The room is mostly empty—it’s just chiseled wood columns and swirled wood arches and an ornate wood ceiling. There’s a huge, carved mantel and frosted windows made of circles of glass that look like the bottoms of old Coke bottles.

  He has not touched her since he kissed her that day at Agua Verde. Except for a hug good-bye after the movie, they’re friends, and friends don’t kiss the way he wants to. But now, in the Italian Room, he takes her fingers in his. He pulls her toward him.

  “You know what?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “Don’t get that look.”

  “What look?”

  “That rolling eyes look. I’m being serious.”

  “Exactly. That’s why you’re getting the rolling eyes look.”

  “I think it’s time.” He yanks her hand. Sometimes you need to be serious. Especially when you’re going to kiss someone again.

  “Time for what?”

  “To stop being friends.”

  He leans in, and she turns her head. Their chins bump, and it gets awkward with his mouth suddenly next to her face. He goes to Plan B, hugs her instead. He can feel the warmth of her. It’s driving him crazy. Her heart beats against his chest. It’s enough, he thinks. Better than nothing.

  A guard wanders past. They step away from each other.

  “This is where I’d put that cool bed,” Billy says.

  “Yeah. It’s perfect.”

  “We need to see the real thing,” he says again.

  It’s like his mind has a plan. Like? Ha. He has a plan, and he knows it.

  • • •

  He’s got to tell her about his mom. The longer he waits, the weirder it’s getting. He’s been keeping this secret, and he doesn’t want it between them anymore. He doesn’t want anything between them. She should know who he really is.

  It could ruin everything. If he tells, if he doesn’t tell—either way he’s screwed. It’s a confession. The minute he says it, she’ll see the stain on him. You aren’t supposed to think like that, but you can’t help how it feels. She’ll hear the story, and she’ll feel sorry for him, but maybe she’ll want to step back, too. His own mother destroyed herself and he wasn’t able to stop it, and he wasn’t enough to stay for. What then? You just offer your broken self to someone else and say, Here?

  It’s a weight, and like all weights, you get tired of carrying it, if you’re lucky. Billy and Mads walk down by the waterfront. They pass the docks with the shops, and even the aquarium near the spot where the big cruise ships come in.

  “Why don’t we ever meet at your house?” he asks her.

  “Why don’t we ever meet at yours?”

  “My gran can’t mind her own business.”

  “Same with my aunt.”

  “I don’t want to be some secret.”

  “You’re not.”

  “No?”

  They stop talking, just walk and walk, and she looks out toward the sound like she has things on her mind, too. They’re all the way down at the sculpture garden. They collapse by the statue of the enormous typewriter eraser.

  “I can’t move,” she says. She’s flat out on the grass, her body an X. He wants to lie right down on top of her, kiss her, feel every bit of her, make babies and marry her and be with her forever. A kiss would be good to start. He looks down into her flushed face and she sits up.

  “Billy.”

  “I have something I have to tell you.”

  “Me too,” she says.

  “It’s about my mom.”

  “I know.”

  “You know?” Well, he’s been hinting. He tried a million times to tell her without telling her. “I didn’t want to say it. She’s only been gone for a few months. Jesus.”

  His throat gets all tight. He drops his head across his folded arms. He feels her small hand on his back.

  “I know she . . .”

  “Yeah, she . . .” He talks into his sleeve. In some ways, he hopes she can’t hear him, even though he doesn’t want to repeat this story ever again. He just keeps his head bent, lets the words sink toward the ground.

  “You can tell me. It’s okay.”

  “She . . . I was at work. A few months ago.” He could be sick, just remembering it. “I was in the dayroom with all the dogs, and they were running around, and I was tossing a ball, like nothing. And then Jane shows up, and she says, ‘Billy. Sweetheart.’ ”

  He’s not sure he can finish. His voice starts to wobble, just thinking of Jane standing there. You do what you can to keep it all away so that this very thing doesn’t happen, this rushing in, this tsunami wave. (First, the ocean appears to drain, then comes the hundred-foot swell, he saw it on a n
ature show.) Billy doesn’t realize—grief is every person’s natural disaster.

  “As soon as I saw Jane, I knew. I knew it was terrible. Only, I didn’t know how terrible.”

  “Oh, Billy.”

  Fuck. Fuck! He’s crying. He’s sobbing, and this is why he didn’t want to say anything. He’s all crushed wreckage now. “Jane says, ‘Sweetheart? It’s your mom.’ And we’d been through this so many times, but I could tell it was different. She, you know, she was depressed for years. Years, before me, even.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “She . . .” He’s blubbering. His voice is high, strangled, and he sounds like a big damn baby. “They just laid her off, and I guess we were having more money problems than she ever said, but I could’ve helped! I have a job. I just bought shit with that money.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “And I was . . .”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I was . . .”

  “Billy, it’s okay.”

  “Gonna move out. Gonna move out.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  His grief rips through and howls and lifts up the seawater and smashes down. “I was gonna leave her, and I don’t think she thought there was much left, you know?” He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. Fuck! People in the park are staring. “They’re looking at me.”

  “Who cares?” Mads says. “I don’t care about those people.”

  “I guess she just left the house early that morning and started walking. I was still asleep! Can you believe I was asleep? I got up and she wasn’t there, but I didn’t think anything of it. Why would I? I just ate some breakfast and went to work. There was no note, no nothing.” No good-bye. Not even a fucking good-bye or a reason. A written-down reason, or an apology, how about that?

  He doesn’t know if he can say what comes next. “She went over . . .” That’s all he can get out. It’s enough. He looks at Mads. He almost forgot for a minute that she was there. He forgot they’re sitting in a park in the summer and that he’s with a girl he might love. What his mom did—it feels like years and also five minutes ago. It feels like always.

  “This bridge. That big bridge, Aurora? I mean, how could no one see her? It was the fucking morning, but still! No one saw her? Someone saw her! Someone had to, or else, she waited in the bushes like an animal until no one was around. Jesus. Someone should have stopped her! Someone should have saved her.”

  He’s flattened and empty. But his body shakes with aftershocks. He’s what’s left after the tragedy. He’s a toppled building with half a wall and no roof and his insides exposed.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mads says. “That’s so awful.”

  “I can’t believe it, you know? She was here, and now she isn’t here. The night before, I was going out, meeting Alex. I just said, ‘See ya,’ and she said, ‘Come here.’ And I said, ‘Mom, I gotta go.’ And she said, ‘Love ya, Billy.’ And I said, ‘Love ya, Mom.’ And that was it. That was the last thing she said and the last thing I said, and I never would have left if I saw any sign! I actually thought she was doing better! She seemed real cheerful, even with the job thing. . . . I know she had a disease. I know why it happened. But I don’t know why. I don’t know how could she.”

  Mads’s arms are around him. She’s rocking him back and forth like the big, stupid, public crying baby he is. She must be crying, too; his T-shirt is damp where her cheek rests. It’s weird, but the rocking and her arms quiet him after a while. They just sit there like that, until it gets too hot to be stuck together.

  Billy clears his throat. It’s tight from so much upset, and his eyes are all puffy. He probably looks like an opossum. Like a creature who lives underground. He can barely get his voice out. “Do you know how far we have to walk now to get back to the car?”

  “I don’t care,” Mads says. “We can walk to New York, for all it matters.”

  He leans his face right next to hers. She looks at him the way she looked at Rocko, as if pouring every bit of love right into him. Her eyes have gone a little punk rock from smudged mascara, but they are beautiful. Her breath is warm on his face. Her mouth is so close to his.

  “This is a weird time to do this,” he whispers.

  “A really weird time.”

  “I don’t give a fuck,” he says.

  And then his mouth is on hers, and he’s kissing her so hard and she’s kissing back, and they’re down on the grass, and he pulls her head toward him, and her hands are all over his shirt, and—honestly, he could rip her clothes off right there, he could. God, he wants to. It’s pent-up emotion, and being so close to her without touching for so long, and just some need to feel life and a person’s breath and a person’s beating heart, her breath and her beating heart, her desire and his desire right there on green grass on a summer day.

  This, he thinks. This is why his mom should have kept fighting, no matter how desperate she felt. Because a moment like this is always possible, and you never know when it might arrive. You aren’t supposed to think that kind of thing, because you can’t truly know a person’s struggle, but he does think it. Here, he says to her. See? See this? This is beautiful enough to fight for, see?

  Right here. Love, passion, breath and breath, and a heart so full it could burst. A heart that’s remarkably, and against all odds, grateful.

  • • •

  “What is that?” Gran says.

  What’s new? It’s a Gaze Attack of the highest order. The funny thing is, he’s barely played Night Worlds in weeks. He’s barely even thought about Night Worlds in weeks. The controllers sit in a forgotten heap in front of the TV, the cords in a tangle, former lifelines, the yanked IV of a patient allowed to go home. In spite of missing his mom like hell, in spite of Casper and all the cruel assholes in the world, in spite of Gran looking at him like she is right then, this is the world he wants to be in.

  “Christ Almighty. Is that what I think it is?”

  There’s a pot of beans on the table, and some tortillas, and some red, spicy chicken, shredded in a pile. He’s starving. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

  She points. “Right there.”

  He puts his hand up to his neck.

  “Other side.”

  Oh, no. He shoves his chair back. He loves Gran, he does. It’s DNA love, irrevocable, but she can make you feel so small and guilty. And furious. It’s crazy, but you know what it seems like? His mom is gone, and so he’s the one getting Gran’s shit now. He’s not her good, perfect grandson anymore, just someone being a burden, causing her trouble. He cranes his neck in the mirror hanging by the front door.

  “This?” he says. “Is this what you’re talking about?” He stomps back into the kitchen, flings himself into his chair. “It’s not what you think.”

  “That girl. Who appeared out of nowhere on your street.”

  “No!”

  “A different girl?”

  “No girl!”

  You know how he got that bruise? It happened late one night, when a memory shook him awake. That memory. I’m thinking about getting my own place, he said, and his mother looked up from her old computer, the blue glow turning her skin ghostly. Oh, she said. But there were a thousand words behind the Oh. They marched across her face. She didn’t say anything more, but he saw the words and the waves of feeling—disappointment, loss. He wanted to take it right back, but what, was he supposed to live with her forever? Quentin found us a house, he said. His voice was flip. The Oh had ticked him off. Come on! For God’s sake.

  Lying awake in bed that night at Gran’s, the memory drilled, filling him with shame, filling him with hatred. Quentin found us a house. Oh. Quentin found us a house. Oh. He hated her! He hated himself more. He was a loser; he was ungrateful, a lowlife, a bad son. He took the side of his neck between his thumb and forefinger and pinched and pinched as hard as he could.

  “You better be careful, is all I have to say,” Gran says. “You better know who a person is, and where they come from
. I told your mother that a hundred times. Not that she listened.”

  Billy pushes his plate away. There are always so many words behind words. “Yeah, I know you did. More than a hundred, probably.” He’s never taken this tone with her before. You don’t criticize her, that’s the rule. She looks shocked. She can be a bully and bullies are always shocked when someone fights back. They’re shocked for a second, anyway, before the lid of their true rage is lifted off.

  “What are you saying to me?” She stares at him with dark steel eyes. He’s never taken that tone with her, and she’s never given him those eyes.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you blaming me?”

  “I’m out of here.”

  “That’s what you’re doing. You’re blaming me.”

  He isn’t hungry anymore. He knocks over his chair as he gets the hell away from there—he hears the slip and bang. He snatches up his keys and his wallet and his phone, and he slams the front door of the houseboat so hard that the house rocks.

  He screeches out of the parking lot. Flies down Westlake. You should see how fast that truck can go. By the time he’s around the lake, he’s calmed down some. He parks over by the Fremont Bridge, right at the spot where he first talked to Mads. He gets out, stands at the bank with his arms shoved in his pockets. Cars whoosh across the bridge. A sailboat passes underneath.

  He’s between the bridges, large and small, new and old. The old calls to him and tugs and fills him with longing. Old is deep and powerful. Sometimes it’s a good powerful, and sometimes it’s the thing you’ll have to fight your whole life long. The way it pulls and presses will make it an epic battle. For a long time, Billy just stands there, thinking about the ways people destroy the best things, waging their virtual wars.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When she gets home after the park, Mads runs upstairs before Harrison can take a picture or something. She has grass stains on the back of her shorts and shirt. Her cheeks still blaze hot.

  She wants to call Billy Youngwolf Floyd right then. She wants to spill everything; she wants to let him see her, the real her. She should phone him twenty times or more, for all the times he’s called her. He deserves that, and God, his mouth felt so good, and she wanted him so bad, and his narrow shoulders were so much stronger than she’d have ever guessed. He was so much stronger, that’s for sure, that boy with his wrinkled white shirt and defiant hair.