Essential Maps for the Lost (2 page)

Two men carry a stretcher. The body is on it, covered in a deep-green plastic. There's the
slam-slam
of doors.

That's it
, Madison thinks.
This nightmare, my relationship with that woman, is over.

Of course, she is wrong. She is so wrong. Because traumatic events like this, acts like
that
, spread far and go deep. The water soaks delicate layers; the waves crash and crash again. So many people will break and change and stay changed.

Awful, yes?

Yes.

But don't misunderstand. While, true, this is a story about the horrible things people do (the way hurt people hurt people, if you want to get self-helpy about it), it is more importantly about what happens next.

This is what happens next as she rises from that grass with Claire's arm around her: Madison sees that dog. He is back up on the dock now. He shakes himself off on the woman with the coffee cup, who is watching all the commotion. He sits right down, as if hoping for a treat.

See? Life goes forward. More, much more, will happen after this. Things involving maps and books and true love and tragedy, tragedy like you wouldn't believe. But fine things, too. The best ones.

Even if it might not seem so at the time, even if there is something as horrible as a body and police and cold, life has some beautiful surprises up its sleeve, and don't you forget it.

Sometimes, Billy Youngwolf Floyd plays real life like it's the video game Night Worlds. For example, right then as he's leaving to go to work, Gran gives him a Gaze Attack, which can curse, charm, or even kill. His options? He can avert his eyes from the creature's face, watch her shadow, or track her in a reflective surface. The glass of the coffee table works. It's better than meeting Gran's breaking-and-entering eyes, which are searching around, rifling through his head, hunting for the sign that he'll be the next one to jump off a bridge.

“You okay?” Gran asks.

“Sure.”

In the reflection, he sees the old woman staring at him, but he also sees his own face. It surprises him, because it looks young. It
is
young—nineteen. After everything that's happened, though, he feels thirty at least, and some days, fifty-sixty.

“I don't have to send you to a bunch of doctors, too, now do I?” Gran says.

Billy shakes his head. That's one kind of magic he's lost belief in over the years. Doctors or no doctors, medicine or no medicine, his mom was sad and then okay, sad, okay, always coming back to sad.
Sad
sounds almost soft, but it wasn't soft. It was aggressive and mean. It was a gas leak that felt suffocating, when usually they were fine, great, making their way together. He feels bad thinking that:
suffocating.
He shoves the word away, imagines them watching the Hobbit movies together instead. He was still little, so she'd hide his eyes at the gory parts, but he'd peek through her fingers.

“Just as well, because look at all the good those shrinks did.” Gran gestures toward the urn on the fireplace.

“Jesus, Gran!”

“What? Do you know how much money I paid those people? She had to have the last word. She always did.”

“Gran, come on.” She's lucky she's old, or she'd be on her ass! He used to think his mom was too sensitive about things Gran said, and he didn't get why Mom just couldn't move past the stuff from her childhood, stuff she told him about, like how Gran would yank her head backward by her ponytail when she didn't listen, or practically rip her arm from her socket when she asked for something in a store, or how when she was six, she waited for Gran for hours after school, crying and scared, because Gran wanted to teach her a lesson about being late. But shit, his mom was right. Gran won't even give her a break now that she's dead.

“ ‘Come on'? Come on, what?”

“
You're
the crazy one. You should go.” He makes it sound like a joke, because Gran can't stand being criticized. No one fucks with her. Depression doesn't even fuck with her.
Stop sitting around feeling sorry for yourself
, was what she used to say, like Mom's sadness was some kind of moral failure. Can you imagine being depressed and then being judged for being depressed? Who's crazier, anyway: people who struggle honestly, or the people who act like they never do?

“I worry about you, is all, Buzz.”

His nickname plus Gran's small, tired eyes give him a weird stabbing in his heart. You know, a love stab. He instantly regrets his mean thoughts. She's about the only one he has left in the world. Gaze Attacks—they doubly affect ethereal creatures, even if that's a shitty, unfair rule. If Billy is anything lately, he's an ethereal creature. They can exist on the material plane, but everything there is gray and dim and ghostly. Only a magic missile can break through their walls. The most important thing about them, though, is that they do not fall.

“Don't worry. I'm okay.”

Of course he's not okay. He's coping better, but the storm system still sits off the coast, waiting for the right temperature or unstable airflow. He watched that in a show about cyclones. It was more interesting than you'd think.

He gives Gran a hug good-bye. He can't stand to be an asshole. When he grabs his keys, Gran's old dog, Ginger, gets excited and hops around. “I gotta go. Sorry, Ging, you've got to stay and babysit the old woman.”

“Never mind, smart aleck. See you later.”

“See you.”

He's taking off a little early, because there's someone he's got to pick up before work. He leaves Gran's houseboat and walks up the ramp that connects the dock to the parking lot, and he gets in his mother's black truck. The SUV has seen better days, but it's still fast. It has
get-up-and-go,
as his mom used to say. She used to love that truck.
A car is your own little capsule of freedom
, she said. He wanted a car of his own, but he didn't want it this way. He'd been saving up, and now he just has a bunch of money. It isn't have-to money anymore. It could be dream-money. If he tells anybody his dream, they'll think he's nuts. They probably think he's nuts anyway, after what his mother did a couple of months ago, but dreams seem extra important when life as you know it can be gone in a second.

Her radio station comes on. That station hurts his stomach. He isn't going to change it, though. He longs for more of anything she loved. He already knows all the lines of the Eagles songs, and the Doobie Brothers and Simon and Garfunkel ones, all the la's and oh's of crazy old nights and bridges and black water. He pictures her singing to the radio with the windows rolled down. He used to pretend it was bad singing, and plug his ears and make a face, but it secretly made him happy, seeing her just being herself like that. She'd say,
I know, it's too beautiful to stand
, and sing louder.

It's a good memory. Still, he gets so mad, driving that car. Once, he pounded the steering wheel and screamed that one word, the only word, over and over.
Why.
But he feels close to her here. The her that was her real self. He slept in the car one night, but it worried Gran when she woke up and he wasn't in his bed.

Billy pulls out of the lot. He drives past the Fremont troll and goes up the hill, heads to his and his mom's old neighborhood. There's a
FOR RENT
sign on the house, he sees. Jesus! He barely just got their stuff out of it! His stomach clenches up again. He feels sick. It's a cross between a throw-up feeling and a crushed-soul feeling. God, he hates that!
Focus
, he tells himself. He has a job to do. That asshole Mr. Woods always lets Lulu out right around then. It's going to be easy, as long as Lulu doesn't flinch and hide at his outstretched hand. That's what happens to them after a while.

He parks in his old driveway. If Mr. Woods spies the car, he'll think Billy is just bawling his eyes out inside or something. He spots Lulu cowering in the corner of the garden. No problem.

Billy gets out. And that's when he sees her. Sees her again. That girl, parked on his street in that truck. The truck needs paint, bad. It has big bald spots of primer. Come on, get it fixed up! A truck like that deserves some respect. He knows shit about cars, but he knows that much.

The girl—her hair is shiny. He noticed this before. She has very white teeth; he can see them even from that distance. She's the kind of girl who smells good. She's all scrunched down, pretending she's doing something innocent, like checking her phone. What
is
she doing there? He's seen her before, the day he moved his and his mom's junk out of the house.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, of course. You know why she's probably there? That guy, a few houses down. It's got to be. Billy forgot all about him. Some senior; goes to one of the private schools. Blanchet? One of those Catholic ones. A real douchebag. Girls like that always have a thing for boys like him. He probably hurt her, just as she always suspected he might, and now, after proving her right about herself, she can't let him go. This is how it plays. He knows that particular story too well.

J.T., he suddenly recalls. J.T. Jones. What is it about assholes with initials instead of names?

The girl is going to be a problem, though. Usually, the idea is, make it natural, do this in the broad daylight, but not when you have a witness. He's going to have to act natural, is all. He'll use an Ability Modifier from Night Worlds, probably Charisma. He'll make her think this is the most regular thing ever. He'll be calm, smooth, decisive.

His heart is beating a hundred miles an hour, but ignore that. He could be in a movie, he thinks, 'cause he's precise as a laser, cool as a blade. Lulu is one of those cute little white dogs, so she's an easy one. He scoops her up in one clean arc. He sprints like a sharp breeze. He doesn't even look at the girl. What girl? Here's hoping she moves on to a better guy and forgets that douchebag once and for all.

Lulu is excellent in the car. She turns a circle on the passenger seat and falls asleep, as if she can finally rest. Here's hoping she moves on to a better guy and forgets that douchebag once and for all.

Billy pulls into work. Heartland Rescue is noisy as hell and stinks a lot less than you'd think. He loves this fucking place with all his heart. He carries Lulu under his arm and then sets her on the counter.

“Billy,” Jane Grace says, and runs her hand through her short hair. “Not again.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Billy says.

“Where did you get this dog?”

“Found it. Lost. Walking around lost.” Lulu's tags are in the pocket of his jeans.

“Lost.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just walking around lost.”

“That's right.”

“Okay.” She sighs. “Fine. What should we call her, do you think?”

Heartland Rescue always names their animals, and never ever puts them to sleep.

“She looks like a Lulu to me,” Billy Youngwolf Floyd says, and then Lulu winks at him, the way dogs do sometimes. He swears it wasn't an accident. He knows a real wink when he sees one.

Mads wants to strangle the kid. “Harrison, for God's sake. Stop following me. Find something to do. Don't you have school?”

“Half-day conference schedule till we're done.”

“Well, go build a fort or something. Make a rocket with, I don't know, sticks.”

“Mom said to keep an eye on you.”

Harrison's mouth is still purple from a Popsicle he ate yesterday. He's a weird boy. Sweet, but weird. His eyes are too big for his face behind those glasses. His best friend, Avery, has the same ones. When Avery comes over and they sit on the couch watching TV, they look like a pair of owls on a tree branch. Harrison is the kind of kid you have to try to like until you do. Now Madison sometimes feels a surprising gust of love for him that makes her heart nearly burst.

“She just meant it casually. It's something people say. She didn't mean it was your
job
.”

“Can I come?”

“Harrison, since when do they let ten-year-olds go to community college?”

She gets in and slams the door of Uncle Thomas's truck, and then feels bad. Mads can't stand to be unkind. She rolls down the window. “Hey, Smurf. Rematch later? Yahtzee champions don't stay Yahtzee champions for long. Not with this lethal weapon.” She blows a puff of luck onto her clenched fist, shakes a pair of imaginary dice. “Yeah, man! Five sixes.”

He grins, and Mads heads out. Thomas's truck sounds like a jet plane. No one is even supposed to be driving the thing yet. It's Thomas's project, and only the unexpected appearance of his niece changed that plan. The truck still has big splotches of silver-gray primer, from where he sanded off the paint, prepping it for a new coat. You wouldn't exactly call that truck incognito. Which'll be a problem when she steals the Bellarose baby. The law will spot her and Ivy in a flat second in that thing.

She drives across the 520 Bridge and takes the turnoff for Bellevue Community College. Otto Hermann will be there already, his white hair sticking out from his head in curled springs of who-cares. Good for it! Wouldn't it be fantastic, not to care? Otto Hermann probably even slurps his coffee with that accent, too.
Ve vill now dizcuss zuh vine art of zuh contrakt
. If you don't understand him, that's your problem. Otto Hermann is who he is. How about a few lectures on
that
?

She knows what she'll see when she arrives on campus. People her age, finishing up spring quarter in all those enticing classrooms. Many people do not put the words
enticing
and
classroom
together, but she does. Dream of her dreams (don't judge; you don't judge a person's dream) is to be taking English classes, studying books, stories, poems, the stuff of life, maybe one day teaching that same stuff to others, like passing on the secrets of the universe.