The Cartographers(105)

And the whole time, Wally was barely there.

Sometimes late at night, I thought I could hear the creak of his door at the end of the walkway, but he was never inside his room when any of us went to knock. Because he was out there, trying to find a way back to Agloe.

The only time I saw him was the day they closed the case. It was late and dark, and I was sitting on a plastic chair by the motel’s dirty, silent pool, staring at nothing. I heard the gate open, and then he came around the corner, on his way to his room.

He looked terrible. He was barely more than a skeleton.

“They closed the case” was all I could say.

“I don’t care,” he answered.

His voice was toneless, like it wasn’t even coming from him, or rather, like he was very far away. He was, in a way. He was still in Agloe, even though his body was here.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” Wally murmured. When I looked up, his eyes were fixed on the dark, still water.

“The fire? Weren’t you trying to destroy them all anyway?”

“No,” he said. He raised his hands and then let them drop.

I didn’t understand at first—until I did.

“You were trying to destroy all of them—but one,” I said.

Wally nodded. “The town was safe from outsiders, but it wasn’t safe from us. There were still thousands of chances for me to be betrayed again, no matter how carefully I tried to guard them all. I had to fix that.”

He could not possibly keep track of thousands of copies. But he could keep track of just one.

“I was going to take them out and burn them safely. All of them but the original. The one Tam and I found together. But then everyone started fighting, and Nell . . . and Tam had to save her . . . and . . .”

For a moment I thought he might cry. But there was nothing left inside of him.

“I just wanted one thing,” he finally said. “Daniel and Nell could have her love, all of you could have her friendship, the whole world could have her brilliance. I just wanted one thing that could be ours. That’s all.”

I looked down because I couldn’t bear to keep looking at him.

“I’ll finish it,” he pronounced.

“What?”

“Our Dreamer’s Atlas,” he said. “I’ll finish it for her. No matter how long it takes.”

He stared at me in the dark. Determined, helpless. Alive, dead. I could see it, then. That our cursed project was the only thing sustaining him. The only thing keeping his guilt from completely consuming him. I knew he would never stop looking until he found the town again. And I knew that he would never manage to do it. Because if there was no map, there was no town.

“You don’t have to do this to yourself,” I whispered.

“I’m not doing this for me,” he replied.

“Tam’s gone, Wally.” I swallowed. “Even if you could find a way back into Agloe, it doesn’t matter. She’s gone.”

Wally turned away from me slowly, moving as if in a dream.

“Goodbye, Romi. I hope it works out for you and Francis.”

Then he disappeared up the stairs and down the walkway. By the time we’d woken up the next morning, he was already gone. The desk clerk said he’d checked out at dawn.

That same morning, Daniel rented a car from the local depot. He told us he was also leaving. He would go to New York City and find a job, and never come back. He didn’t care about Agloe anymore and wanted nothing to do with it.

I knew how he felt. I wanted nothing to do with it, either. None of us did, except for Wally. We had only been staying there, waiting, for you and Daniel. Once he’d gone, it took the rest of us no more than a few days to disappear as well.

Even though none of us could bear to be near each other for more than a few minutes, Daniel still knocked on each of our doors to tell us it was time, when he’d finished packing the car.

“Room for one more box?” I asked him.

“What is it?” he asked as his eyes fell on it, and he recognized Tam’s handwriting. It was another of the boxes we’d originally used to move our things to the house in Rockland, and that I’d then grabbed to get my stuff out of that same house in a hurry, the night I found out about Francis and Eve. Tam had jokingly written junk on the side of it, because we’d packed it with all of the group’s more scientific texts and tools, as opposed to her and my artistic ones. Inside, I’d put my share of the maps from our original version of the Dreamer’s Atlas that I’d taken from the house before we burned it. The Franklin, the Calisteri, the Visscher.

“No,” he said.

“They’re all that’s left,” I said.

“I don’t want them.”

“Not for you,” I said. “For Nell, someday. She might.”

Finally, Daniel took the box and put it in the trunk. I thought the maps were probably as good as gone—that he’d throw them out as soon as he drove away—but I figured it was his choice. No university would hold unreturned loans against us after finding out about the fire and Tam’s death.

“I’ll miss you,” he said to me.

We all hugged, and he let us say goodbye to you, but you were already dozing in your car seat. You seemed so peaceful, almost happy, for the first time in a long time. Not caught in a nightmare—just dreaming. We didn’t want to wake you from it.