The Cartographers(29)
The door banged as I pushed it open, and the room went quiet as everyone turned to me. I stared back at the sea of faces peeking out from beneath wool hats and thick down jackets, and shifted awkwardly in my thin windbreaker.
“Hi,” I managed to mumble. “I’m Ramona Wu.”
“Everyone, let’s welcome Fiona Chu!” a voice proclaimed, having misheard my mumbling, and a junior professor began to clap.
“Ramona,” I said, but I was drowned out by the applause. Mercifully, the room went back to ignoring me, swelling with laughs and chatter. I squeezed through the crowd toward the snack table, hoping for something warm to drink.
“Hot chocolate? Tea? Anything?” I asked desperately, and the overworked sophomore shook his head. The main door kept opening as more people came or left, each time throwing in another gust of arctic air that chilled me to my bones.
The whole plan seemed more foolish by the minute. My parents had wanted me to go to school in California, where I would be closer, but I’d insisted on Wisconsin, on this program. My great-grandfather had drawn tactical maps for the army in World War II, and his work had saved his fellow soldiers many times over. Before he died, he showed me the few he’d saved—these old, yellowing, tissue-thin things. There were so many stories bound up in them, so many lives. To me, nothing had sounded more thrilling than to follow in his footsteps. And it had taken so many arguments with my parents, and finally the solemn support of my ailing grandmother, to convince them to let me, that by the time I finally got to Wisconsin, I’d built the whole thing up to be impossibly perfect. In my head, it would not have been so bitterly cold, and I would not have been so sheltered and innocent, and would have known exactly what to do and say.
There was no way it could have lived up to the dream.
I was about to give up and go back to my dorm room—where I could pretend to be asleep before my new roommate came back, pushing off reality until the next morning—when someone tapped me on the shoulder.
I turned to see a short girl with a curly brown ponytail smiling at me, and a tall, thin boy with pale, grayish eyes and hair that was somewhere between blond and brown, so indecisive it almost seemed gray as well, behind her.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I started to say so, making excuses, but as we shook hands, she gasped at how cold mine was.
“You’re freezing!” she cried. In a flurry of motion, she’d ripped off her own coat and scarf. “Here, put these on. No, don’t worry! I’m from New Hampshire, I’ll be fine.”
My teeth were still chattering so much, I could barely muster a polite refusal before she’d wrapped me up in her clothes. “Thank you,” I finally managed, sinking into the comfort. “My name’s Ramona, but everyone calls me Romi.”
The girl’s eyes lit up. “Romi, I love it!” She reached over to her coat on me and pulled a paper out of the pocket—her dormitory check-in form. “Is your last name Wu, by any chance?” she asked. Her grin grew even larger when I nodded, and she put her hand out again, as if to redo the greeting. “I’m Tamara Jasper. I think I’m your roommate.” She turned and gestured to the boy behind her. “And this is Wally.”
He seemed to cower as I turned to him, as if not wanting to meet me, as if not returning my gaze or the greeting would mean it didn’t have to happen.
“Wally can be shy, but I guess all geniuses are,” Tam continued, and elbowed him playfully. “You’ll never meet a better geometer. He’s saved our group projects a million times.”
At that, Wally finally came out of his shell enough to shake my hand. “Hi,” he said quietly.
And just like that, we were three.
Tam’s coat was heavenly, warmer than anything I’d ever owned, and the thrill of having come under her wing so suddenly gave me a burst of friendly courage. We moved through the party as a unit, Tam’s arm looped through mine, and Wally clinging to her so as not to be swept away by the crowd. She smiled and introduced herself and Wally to everyone, and me too, as if she’d known me as long as she’d known him. We each had our strengths, and if Wally was our cautious one, our rule follower and detail checker for every research article and grant proposal we tackled thereafter, Tam was our engine. If she was ever in the room, no one could avoid her. She was like the sun. Students, professors, even strangers would gravitate to her, powerless to resist her excitement, her passion.
The three of us already made a strong team—Tam and I were both artists, my realistic style complementing her experimental, interpretive one, and Wally able to analyze both our works from his much more scientific perspective—but it was not enough for Tam. She was always hungry for more minds, more ideas.
Over the next two weeks, as we settled into our classes, we also found studious, solemn Francis, Tam luring him away from a dry conversation about the history of geography as an academic subject and instantly into an intense discussion with her about accuracy versus beauty in classical maps—and also your father.
Every one of us worked incredibly hard for every one of those years in Wisconsin, all through our undergrad, graduate, and doctoral programs. The dean used to say that he’d never seen even one such dedicated student, let alone a whole group of them. But if our circle did have a goof, it was your father.
Daniel was just so happy, all the time. So open and joyful, and utterly unguarded. So different from now.