What Happens to Goodbye(98)

I moved closer, looking at the quilt closely. “I had no idea.”
She lifted up another square, running her fingers over it. “Oh, I loved this little denim piece! It was from the cutest overalls. You took your first steps when you were wearing them.”
“I can’t believe you saved all that stuff for so long,” I said.
“Oh, I couldn’t let it go.” She smiled, sighing. “But then you were going, and it seemed like a way to send some of me along with you.”
I thought of her sitting with all those squares, carefully quilting them together. The time it must have taken, especially with twin babies. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I said.
She looked up at me, surprised. “Sorry? For what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just ... not thanking you for it, I guess.”
“Oh goodness, Mclean,” she replied, shaking her head. “I’m sure that you did. I was a total emotional wreck that day left. I barely remember anything about it, other than you were leaving and I didn’t want you to.”
“Can you tell me about the rest?” I asked, picking up my own corner, where there was a pink cotton square.
“Really?” she said. I nodded. “Oh, well. Let’s see. That one there was from the leotard you wore for your first dance recital. I think you were five? You had fairy wings, and ...”
We stood there for a long time, with her moving from square to square, explaining the significance of each. All these little pieces of who I’d been once, with her to remember for me, stitched together into something real I could hold in my hands. There was a reason I’d found it, too, that night I’d run away. It was waiting for me. Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.

Now, in Lakeview, I looked back at the model, where Deb was busy adjusting a couple of buildings on the far corner, and realized that, like my mother with the quilt, I could see a history within it that someone else would miss. The sectors just left of center, a bit sloppy and uneven, that Jason, Tracey, Dave, and I had started on the day the councilwoman arrived all those weeks ago. The thickly settled neighborhoods I’d labored over endlessly, sticking one tiny house on at a time. Tracy’s old bank, next to the grocery store she’d been banned from, and that empty building, unmarked and unremarkable to anyone but me. And then, all around, the dragons, the parts not mapped, yet to be discovered.
If the quilt was my past, this model was my present. And looking at it, I saw not just myself in bits and pieces, but everyone and everything I’d come to know in the last few months. Mostly, though, I saw Dave.
He was in the rows of houses, so meticulous, in much straighter lines than the ones I’d done. In the buildings downtown he knew by heart, naming them easily without even having to look at the map. All over the complicated intersections he’d taken charge of, maintaining that only he, as a former maker of models, could handle such responsibility. He was on every piece he or I had added during our long afternoons together up here, talking and not talking, as we carefully assembled the world around us.
“So,” I said now to Deb, who’d moved over to the table, where she was sorting plastic bags of landscaping pieces, “the new deadline’s the second week of April. That’s, what? Four weeks or so?”
“Twenty-six days,” she replied. “Twenty-five and a half, if you count it to the minute.”
“But look how much you have done,” I said. “It’s almost finished.”
“I wish!” She sighed. “I mean, yes, most of the buildings are done, and we just have a couple of final sectors to do. But then there’s all the environmental and civic detail. Not to mention repair. Heather took out an entire apartment complex the other day with one of her boots.” She snapped her fingers. “It went down just like that.”
“So she really worked on this over break?” I said.
“Well, working is a broad term,” Deb replied. She thought for a second, then said, “Actually, I take that back. She’s very good with detail. She put in that entire forest line over there on the upper right-hand corner. It’s the bigger stuff she tends to mess up. Or, um, destroy.”
“I can late,” I said, more to myself than to her. Still, though, I felt her glance over, so I added, “Sorry. It’s been kind of a long week.”
“I know.” She picked up a bag of tiny plastic pieces, walking over to me. “Look, Mclean. About that whole Ume.com thing ...”
“Forget it,” I told her.
“I can’t,” she said softly. She looked up at me. “I just ... I want you to know I understand. I mean, why you might have done that. All the moves ... It couldn’t have been easy.”
“There were better ways I could have dealt with it,” I replied. “I get that now.”
She nodded, then tore open the bag. Looking closer, I saw that it was filled with tiny figures of people: walking, standing, running, sitting. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all jumbled up together. “So what’s the deal with those? Are we going to just put them anywhere, or is there a set system of arrangement?”
“Well, actually,” she said, taking out a handful and spreading them in her palm, “that’s been a big topic of discussion.”
“Really.”
“Yeah,” she said. “See, the manual doesn’t specify, I guess because the people are optional, really. Some towns chose to leave them off entirely and just have the buildings. Less cluttery.”
I looked back at the model. “I can see that. It would seem kind of empty, though.”