The Cartographers(65)

“Did she just run out to avoid toddler breakfast duty?” Daniel asked behind me as the sound of one of the engines shuddering to life rumbled in. I turned to see him holding you, his hair still standing straight up.

“She said it was your day,” I said, wagging a finger at him.

“What!” He pretended to be affronted, gasping dramatically, which made you laugh. “How about some eggs, Nelly?”

Daniel cooked you an egg and a little bit of bacon while I assembled your high chair, to be helpful. Overhead, we heard the others stir a few times, but still none of them had woken up by the time we got you settled at the table and Daniel had cut your food into a bunch of little bites.

“I hope they remembered to buy cream and sugar,” I said at the same moment that a sudden crunch of tires on pebbles made us all look to the door.

“Just in time,” Daniel started as the door clicked open. “Everyone’s still asleep!”

But we both fell silent as Tam and Wally lurched into the room.

“Daniel,” Tam gasped. “Francis.”

They came in at a dead run, the car engine still idling outside. Tam was in front of Wally, and he was just behind her, almost as if he were chasing her in. Their eyes were wild and huge, flashing with an emotion I couldn’t quite read. Awe, or disbelief, or exhilaration.

“What’s going on?” Daniel asked, half out of his seat, unsure of whether to be panicked or excited. “Are you okay?”

“We’re okay,” Tam managed. She crossed the kitchen in two steps and grabbed him by the arm. “Come on. You have to see this.”

“Tam,” Wally said, his voice tight. At the time, I thought it was because he was simply afraid. That he hadn’t wanted to tell us quite yet only because he didn’t fully understand what was going on. Not because he had wanted to keep it a secret, under his control.

Tam could not hear his feeble protests. She was electrified, like a live, leaping wire. “Come on.”

Daniel and I stumbled after her, Daniel carrying you, and Wally trailing all of us, your breakfast still half-finished at the table, the coffee still unmade. She shoved all of us into the back seat and forced Wally again behind the wheel before throwing herself into the front beside him.

“So, same road as always, right?” she was saying frantically as Wally turned south onto County Road 206, heading for Rockland again, and we began to pick up speed. The old station wagon rumbled over the asphalt, the grass turning from individual blades into a blur of green, as she talked. “Nothing but field.”

“Right,” Daniel agreed, humoring her, trying to figure out where this was going.

The sun grew brighter as Wally drove, casting everything pale pink instead of gray. Tam alternated between urging him to go faster and trying to explain to us what was going on.

“I had everything in my lap,” she was saying, pointing to the bundle of junk she’d grabbed from the counter before leaving the first time with Wally. Beside me, you were bouncing excitedly in your car seat at the prospect of a field trip. “The other set of car keys, receipts, and this.” She held up the gas station map.

“Tam,” Wally said again, even weaker this time.

She unfolded it and spread it across the steering wheel, so she and Wally were both looking at it. “On the way back from the store, as we were talking, I realized that we were passing right through the same area where we’d found that little phantom settlement on this map the night before. ‘Where had that place been, along this road?’ I asked Wally. ‘Which tree or patch of weeds had it accidentally marked as an entire town?’ We laughed about it, and before I knew it, I was holding the map out like this for both of us, so we could see where exactly this town was supposed to be, and what it really was instead. What if the spot was a huge bush of poison ivy? Or a cow standing in its corral? I thought being able to tell everyone what it was would make another funny story for tonight.”

Suddenly, the car began to slow. Wally, his lips pressed together and his eyes on the paper, flicked on the hazard lights. We edged toward the shoulder of the road.

“I know how this is going to sound—I know!” she cried, anticipating our wary stares. “But if you open this map, and you follow it instead of the road . . .”

She kept it splayed open and pointed out the window as the car finally stopped. Her expression was so full of amazement. So alive. I felt like I could see straight down into her soul through her eyes.

“Just look.”

We looked, expecting to see just pure, unbroken field.

But this time, somehow, just in front of our car—where I’m certain there had been nothing before, or we would have noticed it, it being the only thing we’d seen for miles—there was a tall, thick, wooden pole jutting straight out from the grass, with a big metal sign affixed to it. And just past it, a small turnoff that continued as a dirt road.

“Huh?” I murmured, before I could stop myself. “That wasn’t here before.”

Wally turned off the car, and everyone got out.

“Was it?” Daniel asked, looking at Wally, since they’d come up in the same car yesterday. He looked as baffled as I felt. “Did we just not see it because we were tired?”

Slowly, Wally shook his head.

I stepped forward and inspected the sign. The nails were long rusted, and there was a fine layer of grime on the face of the metal itself that clearly indicated it hadn’t somehow been put up in the single day we’d been at the house.