Mapmaker (7 page)

Beth wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She cleared her throat before speaking. “Okay. Have fun. When will you be back?”

Normally she would have asked which friends. Then again, I rarely went out at all anymore. For all I knew, she was just relieved to have time alone to herself.

“Not late, because I’ll be with Rebs,” I lied. “You remember Rebs, right?”

Beth nodded.

Of course, Rebs was already off in the wilds of Vermont. Last summer, before Dad died, Rebs and I had both sworn
we’d return to Norwich. But here’s the funny thing: at the time, I’d been lying to Rebs; I was already gunning for a more college-oriented job. I’d told Dad as much. But I knew that Beth wouldn’t have known about my plans unless Dad told her. I hadn’t mentioned Rebs to Beth since I’d fallen off the earth after Dad’s death.

So why did I lie just now? Was I hoping Beth would burst out with what she knew about me … some confidence Dad had shared about me, about my summer plans, and my lie to my friend? Was I hoping to prove that he trusted Beth with my confidences, to prove that he wouldn’t have cheated on her? To pre-empt meeting Connor at all?

I hesitated in the doorway before taking a few steps into the dim room. Maybe because of the darkness, because we were both only silhouettes in this light, it was easier to lose the annoyed tone I always took with her. “Beth,” I began.

“Midnight?” she asked.

“Yeah, around then. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me. I cleaned the kitchen.”

She drew in a breath. “Thank you.”

“And I have money. Just my cash and my bank card ‘on my person.’”

At that, she almost smiled. It was the closest we had to a private joke: Beth always advised to keep some cash and my bank card separate from my wallet and purse, “on your person,” just in case I lost them. And I always rolled my eyes.

“I’m sorry I got so upset,” she said. “It’s just so much change, dealing with Michael’s death. And you’ll be leaving for college soon. I feel …” She didn’t finish.

“How do you feel?” I breathed.

She mustered a sad smile, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. “Unhinged,” she said. “That was the word I was going to use.”

Unhinged
. I knew exactly what she meant. My word was
adrift
. Dad was our anchor and now we were floating, lost. I realized for the first time that Beth might be upset I was leaving for college. Would she miss me? Even after how bratty and ungrateful I’d been? I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. She’d be alone in this house. I’d lived every second of my life since Dad’s death thinking that’s what she wanted. Solitude. I was about to leave the room when I stopped myself.

“Beth,” I said, turning back to her. “I know it’s been weird between us, but I just want you to know …” My voice sped up so much all the words ran together. I was afraid if I didn’t say it really quickly I would never have the courage to say it again. “I’m glad you didn’t run off after Dad died.”

I closed the door behind me and hurried down the stairs. I glanced at my phone: 8:47. I grabbed my canvas shoulder bag and ran through the kitchen. All that was left on the table was the pale pink peony in the vase.

A crowd of high school kids and college students hung out on the steps in front of Amherst Cinema. I recognized a group of sophomores at my school and waved to them as I scanned the crowd for Connor. I hoped I wouldn’t run into anyone else I knew tonight.

There
.

Connor stood alone near the parking lot, half hidden in the shadows. He was talking on the phone, one hand pressed to his ear so he could block the noise. I could tell by the way he moved his hands that he was in the middle of a serious conversation. I assumed he was talking to his girlfriend, so I hung back, waiting. I put my earbuds in but didn’t play anything. I admit it: I was trying to eavesdrop. But he was too far away and I couldn’t hear anything.

I sat on a railing. It wasn’t a dark night and the faint stars didn’t really sparkle; they glowed behind the clouds. I had a strange kind of feeling I couldn’t place. I was proud of myself
for finally being at least sort of nice to Beth. She wasn’t a terrible stepmom. She cared. It wasn’t just a show for my dad. It made me feel less teenagery and more adult. What was the word I was looking for? The only thing that popped into my head at that moment was one that made me cringe—a totally Amhersty-hippie-New-Age-Wicca-type word that you see on bumper stickers all around here:
EMPOWERED
.

I couldn’t even say “empowered” with any kind of straight face. But at that moment, I definitely felt a little more grownup. Or like I was starting to grow up. Was I “in transition”? That’s the New Age shrink with the amber necklace’s favorite catch phrase. Maybe I was. If I could treat Beth like an actual human being, maybe I was breaking out of the teenage body-snatcher pod that hijacked me when I was thirteen and a half.
FEELING GOOD ABOUT DOING GOOD
, as the framed poster in her office proclaimed.

I glanced back toward Connor. He was still on the phone, leaning against the brick wall. I got up and walked toward him.

“Hey,” I said quietly.

He looked up at me, covering the phone with his hand and mouthed, “Two minutes.”

I nodded. As I watched, he turned his back on me and paced away so I would be out of earshot. I crossed my arms and leaned back against the wall. Now I was annoyed. He had told me to be here at 9:00. It was 9:20. If he’d known he’d be wrapped up in some kind of intense romantic drama with his tall, pretty, thin, smart, white-toothed girlfriend … Not that I was jealous. Irritated? He
was
doing me a favor after all.

Of course, I’d just assumed he’d help me break into Dad’s old office to put my fears about philandering to rest. Connor hadn’t said a thing other than to meet him. Maybe I was wrong.

I looked at my watch: 9:21. I’d give him five—no seven—more minutes before I … before I what? Got on my bike and went home? I liked to make dramatic threats I knew I wouldn’t keep.

“Sorry,” he called, hurrying over. “I’m really sorry. I know that was rude.”

So now I would act like I barely even noticed.

“I was in the middle of …” He let his words trail off. He ran his fingers through his hair and winced as if he had a headache. He hadn’t changed clothes; he’d just thrown on a dark grey zip-up hoodie sweatshirt, unzipped, so the world could see the braggy Stanford University logo.

But all at once he smiled.

I forgot how annoyed I was. I almost smiled back.

“So, um, I thought you wanted to try your hand at hacking,” he said. He reached into his sweatshirt pocket, pulling out a ring of multi-lock copy-proof keys.

Now I did smile. “How’d you get those?”

“My dad’s meeting ran late in Boston and he has another meeting in the morning so he’s spending the night there. He left these keys in the car.”

“Okay.” I suddenly felt incredibly nervous. “Are we really going to do this?”

“Like I said before, I doubt you’ll be able to get into your dad’s emails. I mean …” Once again, he broke off in midsentence.

“What?” I pressed.

“Are you sure you want to know if he was having an affair?”

I shoved my hands in my pockets. I looked up at the sky. Good question. I was frightened. The idea of being caught by Harrison was frightening. But more frightening was the reason why neither Beth nor I had heard from him. If it wasn’t an affair … what? But no, that was impossible—there had to be another explanation.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I heard myself answer.

At night the bike
path is lit by solar-powered lamps; they give off a milky glow, a row of small moons. I’d hardly ever ridden this late at night. I didn’t want to pedal too fast, for fear of running into a deer or snake that might be walking along or crossing the path, even a bear. Yes, there were bears in these woods. Connor didn’t seem to have the same worry. I struggled to keep up with him, the cool night air whipping across my face.

We passed only one other cyclist, exercising two black-and-white huskies who sped after him. The white of the dogs flashed by like ghosts: blurs of claws and fur and mirror-like eyes. I shivered as we pulled up toward the back entrance, where we’d snuck out.

The parking lot was empty, the windows dark. The only sounds were the purr from the highway in the distance and the drone of crickets all around us.

I saw then how we were going to get into the building—the fire escape. He must have returned to let the ladder down. I hoped no one had noticed; it was hidden beneath all the scaffolding.

“Can’t we just go in the front door since you have the keys?” I whispered. I didn’t want to climb up the four rusted, rickety flights again—especially not in the dark. For some reason I was more nervous about the fire escape collapsing than trespassing, which was an actual crime.

“Security cameras,” he whispered back.

I nodded, feeling stupid. Of course there would be security cameras now, protecting the new computers and equipment. I checked my phone: 10:03. I turned the ringer off and shoved it back in my shoulder bag.

I stared up at the old brick building. Under the hazy pale moon, I could see the name of the paper mill,
FORT RIVER MILL
, peeling in faded red and yellow flakes. The windows on the top floor of the building were completely black, nothing reflecting in them, as though they’d been covered with dark paper.

Connor climbed first and I followed. We moved quickly and didn’t speak. My knees felt wobbly and my palms moist against the cold iron railing. When we reached the third floor, he crawled through the window that had been left ajar. If there were cameras here, too, I couldn’t see them among the jungle gym–like bars of the scaffolding. I stepped onto the window ledge. He held out his arms to me. I hesitated and our eyes caught. It may have only been for one or two seconds, but at the time it felt almost impossible to look away from him. The distance from the windowsill to the floor of the old factory building was maybe five feet. I could jump it, but he wasn’t going to let me. I felt his hand on my waist as he lowered me down to the floor.

Connor pointed his flashlight on the creaky wooden floor
as we made our way down the hall toward my dad’s office. Suddenly a bright white light glared in our eyes. We froze, statue-still. My heart raced and at the same time I felt freezing cold.
The alarm is going to sound
. I held my breath. Connor pointed to a corner of the ceiling where a rectangular, beige-colored box flashed a red light.

“It’s just a light sensor,” he said. I could hear the fear in his voice, like an echo. “It’ll turn off in a few seconds.”

We came to my dad’s office door. Even mildly panicked, the poster of the Piri Reis map tacked to the wood once again gave me a painful stir. That map
was
Michael Barrett. It was everything he loved; it was the way he viewed the world. It was a funny thing; I don’t remember anyone else even
mentioning
Piri Reis—not my mom, not Beth, not Harrison, not my teachers at school, though to hear Dad tell it, Piri Reis deserved to be as famous as Einstein or da Vinci. I could hear his voice, delighting in the wild rumors throughout the centuries:
“Some crackpots still believe Piri Reis was abducted by aliens and flown up in a spaceship. As if that’s the only plausible explanation for the map’s accuracy. How else could he have drawn the contours of the Americas? No cartographer back then could have possibly accounted for the curvature of the Earth, right? It’s so ridiculous! But that’s the thing about people. They’d rather believe in UFOs than the truth. He had a natural eye for space, for distances … just like you, Tanya.”

“Are you okay?” Connor whispered.

I blinked. “Yeah.” I nodded, trying to shut out the memory. “But, hey, Connor, did you ever find out if your dad came by our house this winter?”

His eyes softened. “Dad’s in Boston, Tanya,” he gently reminded me. “I haven’t talked to him all day. Why do you ask?”

I jerked my head at the map. “My dad kept the actual lithograph of that map in the shed. It’s this old—”

“The Piri Reis map,” Connor interrupted. A concerned, puzzled smile played on his lips. “I know, Tanya. Remember? I probably spent more time total listening to your dad lecture me about that map than I spent in any class at Stanford this year.” He began to tick off facts. “It was drawn in 1513, but how could it have been drawn in 1513? Nobody knew about the curvature of the Earth—”

“Enough,” I interrupted, but I had to laugh. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Connor slid the key into the lock. It was one of those specially made nonduplicate-able keys, and for a moment I wondered if it would work. But there was a click, and the door swung open easily. We slipped out of the floodlit hallway, closing and locking the office behind us. The floodlights remained on outside. I kept staring at the line of light under my dad’s office door, waiting for it to disappear.

We worked in the dark. Connor shined the flashlight on the computer keyboard. I turned it on and waited for the screen to appear. A black-and-white picture appeared as the screen saver: a young woman holding a newborn baby in a hospital bed. My mother and me. Connor stared over my shoulder. My eyes felt heavy just looking at the photo. I let out a sigh—I wasn’t expecting this. Sometimes the reality of their deaths seemed so removed, and other times the weight of it fell on me, making it impossible to move.