Essential Maps for the Lost (19 page)

“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.

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.

She almost told him her secret right there in the Italian Room and then again on the lawn. But she didn't. Now she's soaring so high, she almost forgets how much it's going to hurt to crash.

“Mads? Dinner!”

“Be right down!”

She tosses on a sundress. The backs of her elbows are green. They feel raw. They throb a rug-burned beat. She lathers them with a pump of hand soap, hurries to dry off the evidence.

“Look at you,” Claire says. “You look beautiful. You look so . . .”

“You look happy, Mads,” Thomas says, setting plates on the table, silverware politely beside. “What's up with the happy? I love it.”

“It's a suck-face face,” Harrison says.

“Harrison.” Claire narrows her eyes.

“Your lips are big.”

Thomas hands him the napkins to pass around. “Hare, sucking face is a great thing. One day you'll see.”

“Don't make me barf.”

“Well, you've got to invite Ryan over for dinner,” Claire says. “We're dying to meet him.”

“Who's Ryan?” Harrison says.

“You guys want soy milk, or just water?”

“Chocolate milk,” Harrison says. “Ryan who?”

“A friend of mine?” Mads should lock the kid in his room.

“Ryan Plug, the young man Mads has been seeing.”

Harrison snorts. “Pppplug.” He makes his lips flubber. “Yeah, right.”

Mads wants to squeeze the flesh on the underside of his arm, where it would really hurt. Everyone sits down, the way Claudia and Jamie's family would in The Book. They're having spaghetti and meatballs, made from lean turkey. Back home, people still ate Cheetos, and even that bean dip that comes in a can. Right now, Mads could eat every bit of that spaghetti and finish it off with apple pie. She's starving. She's so hungry, it turns to a big metaphor. She wants so much, all, everything. Her face feels sunburned from where Billy's chin rubbed against her face.

Mads's phone buzzes in her pocket, and she thinks,
Billy
. Thomas scowls at the sound. He doesn't like phones at the dinner table, so Mads ignores it. Harder to ignore is her own warm buzz at the thought of him. Oh, she's in deep. She is way, way over her head.

“Dog boy,” Harrison says. Mads kicks him under the table.

“We showed the Wilkens couple the plans today, and—”

Her phone interrupts Thomas again. “Mads,” he says. “Can you turn that off?”

“I'll just . . .” She takes it out of her pocket. Maybe she can shoot him a quick text, Thomas be damned.

“Please. How much uninterrupted time do we get in our lives, huh?”

She looks down. Mads is almost shocked—not at who's calling, but that she's practically forgotten all about her.

“It's Mom.”

“She can wait,” Thomas says.

The phone buzzes and buzzes in her hand.

“I've got to get it.”

“She can
wait
.”

“What if it's an emergency?”

“She's a grown woman. She can handle her own emergency.”

Claire tries a softer approach. “This just happens too much, Mads, you know?” Harrison balances his spaghetti on his fork with the fixed gaze of a scientist formulating the laws of gravitation.

Buzz. Buzz, buzz. Mads can feel the urgency screaming through the phone. It vibrates, angry and ignored. Maybe Thomas has a great invisible shield against people who need him, but she doesn't. Maybe Claire can coolly remove herself from someone's disappointment and fury and need, but not Mads. The membrane between Mads and what people expect of her is thin as the translucent wall of a soap bubble.

“Excuse me.” Mads shoves her chair back.

She interrupts the ring as she's halfway up the stairs. “Maddie? Thank God I got you.” There's the half-sob exhale. Mads shuts the door of Thomas's office/her room.

“What's wrong, Mom?” She hopes they can't hear. If they do, she'll only prove them right about herself and her mom. This is what's called
being caught between a rock and a hard place.
She's so used to the rock and the hard place that calluses have practically formed on her elbows and knees, but not on the places she could really use them.