Waldo touched her elbow with his hand. “How old were you?”
“Five,” she said. “Maybe six. Something like that.” His fingers sent sharp jets of warmth up her arms and she moved her elbow away.
“Is that a place your uncle would know?”
“I don’t think so. I remember Da telling me how they were just beginning to build the dam when Uncle Brendan left for China. He was gone for five or six years before they began to fill the reservoir. And then — I don’t know, this is so hard to piece together. We left after the accident, and then Uncle Brendan came back from China a few years later, but he didn’t come home — he went to Canada, to some other abbey there. I think that’s what he told us. I don’t think he ever saw the water.”
Waldo unrolled one of his maps. “Where are you talking about?”
Wiloma studied the long, mulberry-leaf shape of the reservoir, and then she brought her finger down on a point on the northeast shore. “Somewhere around here,” she said. “This point — you see how they have the old dirt roads still marked, and the gates leading into the state land? We used to go through one of them, maybe this one.” She traced a tentative path with her finger around a knob that dented the water’s boundary. “Here?” She hesitated and looked at the map again. The edges of the reservoir were so pocked with points and coves that she wasn’t sure she could tell one from another.
Waldo unrolled another map, slick and shiny and gray: some kind of photocopy. It was dated 1940, two years before her birth. “Does this help?” he said.
She looked at it and then looked again; a map from a dream. There was no reservoir on this map, no water at all but a few small ponds and the branches of the Paradise River, winding through Winsor and Nipmuck and Stillwater and Pomeroy, East Pomeroy and Lizzie Springs. Her father, and then her grandfather, had drilled those lost names into her head.
Waldo stared blandly back at her. She wondered where he had gotten that map, and she found it unpleasant that he should know more than she did about the place of her birth. She reminded herself that her dealings with him had always required a caution foreign to her. “I can’t tell,” she said, although she thought she recognized the point on this older map.
“But if you saw it, wouldn’t you recognize it? And don’t you think Henry might remember it?”
“He might,” she agreed. “Better than I do — he was older. He might bring Uncle Brendan there.”
He might; he might do anything. And the more she thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed. He’d bring Brendan right to that spit of land, and there — her imagination failed her, but she didn’t care. Henry had stolen Brendan and she was off to rescue him, and with these maps she knew she could track them down.
“Can I take these?” she said. “I’ll bring them back.”
“I have a better idea. Why don’t you let me come with you? I could help with the driving — we could take my Saab, instead of your old clunker. And if Henry gives you a hard time, I’d be there to help.”
Waldo’s face was smooth as a hazelnut. She knew he was interested in her uncle’s land, not in her uncle, not in her, but despite that she felt a great surge of exhilaration and hope. Overnight, she thought. Just me and Waldo; no Sarah, no kids. He might think he was joining her for one reason but that reason might change into another: if they were alone together all day and all night, and if she thought clearly and didn’t nag about money or harp about her church, and if he left just a crack in his mind open, a channel through which she might seep — anything might happen. Anything. And even if nothing changed, even if he was only civil, only kind, he was good with maps and directions and he had a nose like a bloodhound’s. He thought like Henry; he’d be able to shadow Henry’s trail and that would lead her to Brendan.
“That would be lovely,” she said. “If you wouldn’t mind.” He smiled and she smiled back, letting him think he had tricked her.
15
THE NOTE WAS STUCK TO THE REFRIGERATOR WITH A MAGNET shaped like a butterfly.
“Your father and I,” Wendy read—your father and I? When was the last time her parents had linked themselves like that? — ”have gone to Massachusetts. We think that’s where Henry took Uncle Brendan. We’ll be home sometime tomorrow. Make sure Win takes a shower when he gets back from soccer. There’s broccoli casserole in the fridge for your dinner. I want you both to stay in tonight — I know I said Win could go to that party, but I don’t want him out while I’m away. You take care of him and be a good girl. I’ll call.”
Wendy looked at her watch. Five-thirty — they couldn’t have been gone for more than an hour. How could they have gone without calling her first? She kicked the corner of the refrigerator and swore under her breath, cursing not only her parents but herself. If she hadn’t called her father, if she’d kept her worries to herself and gritted her teeth and told her mother not to worry, this never would have happened.
Her mother’s car was still in the driveway, which must mean they’d gone off in her father’s fancy Saab. The two of them trapped in there for hours, sniping at each other — it was ridiculous, it was bizarre. They couldn’t have coffee together without fighting. They were still in and out of court all the time: Wiloma wanted the deed to the house and Waldo refused, claiming she’d only donate it to the Church. Wiloma wanted more child support and money for college tuition; Waldo said she’d give away whatever he sent. Which was true, Wendy knew: her mother gave half of whatever she had to the Church, and the family-court judge always ended up agreeing with her father. He paid the mortgage and their medical bills, bought them clothes and books and bikes, but he never sent money and they had to ask him, item by item, for the things they needed. He never said no, but Wendy found the process humiliating. Why should her mother have to ask for gutters, or Win ask for running shoes? Why should she have to ask for a pin or a purse? The best thing about her job was the privacy it bought; she had fifty dollars in her pocket right now, which no one knew about.
Somewhere along the Thruway, she knew, her mother would be accusing her father of being stingy, as if she’d never given him reason to think she did odd things with his money. Her father would be accusing her mother of being obsessed with the Church, as if he’d never abandoned her and driven her to it. They’d be arguing as if all the years they’d spent together had never existed, and there was nothing she could do about any of it except wonder why her father had bought into her mother’s delusions, and why Sarah had let him go, and why none of them could seem to see that whatever Grunkie was up to was his own business. She picked up the phone and called her cousin Delia.
She didn’t call Delia at her dorm in Syracuse, where Delia was supposed to be; she knew that, although Delia was enrolled in summer school there, she secretly took the bus back to Rochester almost every weekend. Delia had a boyfriend named Roy, whom she’d been seeing since her senior year in high school and whom her family hated. Roy worked in a furniture warehouse, loading delivery trucks; he’d been on his own since he was seventeen. He had a beat-up car and a ponytail, an Irish setter and a worn mattress tossed on a floor littered with cans and clothes. Delia had told her family that she and Roy split up when she left for college.
Only Wendy, who had bumped into the two of them at the lake one Sunday afternoon, knew that Delia had managed to keep seeing Roy these past two years. In the cottage Roy shared with his friends, on a street behind the row of shops and bars that fronted on the beach, Delia and Roy had taken Wendy into their confidence. Their secret affair seemed romantic to her, and sometimes, when her own life seemed particularly empty, she visited them just to remind herself of what might be possible if she ever escaped.