The woman’s face tightened when Lise plopped down on a chair and said, “This is ridiculous.” The woman took a flimsy, crudely drawn map of the reservoir from the stack before her and tossed it down in front of Wendy.
“Here. Dotted lines are the hiking trails. Solid lines are the roads. Gates are marked with these small numbers — you can leave your car at any of them. No swimming. No fires. No hunting.”
Lise sniffed and said, “Do we look like hunters?” which did not improve the situation. The woman’s growing disapproval of them hung in the air like an odor. The walls were lined with all the information they might need, but the woman didn’t offer any of it and Wendy was too worn out to ask. She realized, standing there, that they’d been crazy to come. Hurtling through the night in pursuit of their parents, hoping to find Grunkie on a bit of land along an enormous shoreline — Lise was right, it was ridiculous, and the way she’d acted with Roy was worse than that. The peculiar smile he’d given her when he’d opened his eyes had seemed so accepting, as if he believed that they’d both been lost in sleep and had committed only an unconscious bit of mischief, easily dismissed. The way he stood so coolly beside her now told her that he’d found a way to blame her for what they’d done.
She thanked the woman, folded the map, and left, with the others trailing behind her. In the parking lot she smoothed the map over the hood of Roy’s car and stared at it. The lines swam in front of her eyes, and she might have given up right then if Roy had not dropped a hand on her shoulder and said, “Calm down. It’s going to be all right.” When she turned to him, she read a distant kindness in his eyes.
“Let’s get focused here,” he said. “Let’s try and remember what we’re doing.”
Win was standing apart from the rest of them, with his eyes fixed on Roy’s hand. “I’d really like to find my mother,” he said quietly. Wendy stepped aside and let Roy’s hand fall from her shoulder. “Sometimes she gets a little … disoriented, or something,” Win said.
“That’s true,” Wendy said, relieved to think of her mother’s behavior, which was always worse than hers. In this way at least, her mother was reliable. “Especially when she’s around Uncle Henry.”
“You’re sure you want to interfere?” Roy asked.
She wasn’t sure, now, that she’d wanted anything more than to escape from Christine’s presence and sit next to Roy in the dark car, but she supposed that she and Win and Delia and Lise did want to interfere. They wanted to interfere with their parents’ strange behavior, which was galloping away with their lives. Their parents were careless with everything, with their own lives, with each other, with them. Lost in the little towns north of Troy, crossing and recrossing a narrow causeway suspended a few feet above a lake, it had come to her that Grunkie was really dying. Her mother and Christine could neither help nor hurt him much; her uncle, by keeping Grunkie out of their clutches, couldn’t save him from what counted. They were wasting what might be Grunkie’s last days, and as she thought of him tugged this way and that by his niece wanting to save his soul and his nephew wanting to save his land, her sense of purpose returned.
She said to Roy, “Sometimes we have to interfere. Sometimes we’re the only ones who know what’s going on.” Her mistake, she saw now, lay in calling her father. If she hadn’t been so lost in her own daydreams, and so jolted by the panic in her mother’s voice, she would have seen that she and Win could have driven their mother here themselves. No Lise, no Delia, no Roy. No mess.
Delia sided with her immediately. “We have to help however we can,” she said, and although her face was pale from all she’d drunk, her silliness had vanished and her words were serious.
“Okay,” Roy said. “So where are we going?”
Wendy drew Win to her, but he pulled his arm away. “I saw you, you know,” he said angrily, as if she hadn’t been aware of his eyes throughout their whole long night. He maneuvered Wendy away from the others and turned his back to them. “I saw you and Roy. And I saw that stuff in your bag, that you ripped off at the plaza. What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing,” she whispered. “I don’t know.” She could feel herself unraveling, the loose ends of her old lives sticking out in all directions. She smoothed the panic from her voice. “Let’s just do this, okay?”
Win still stared at her suspiciously, as if she were turning into their mother before his eyes.
“I’m all right,” she told him. “Really.”
“Really?” he said, and when she nodded they bent over the map together. The outlines of the reservoir were similar to what she remembered of the maps their father had shown them: an elongated mitten, with a narrow western branch stretching north like a thumb, a short lobe like a wrist in the south, and then a larger, wider, eastern branch. The spot their father had shown them lay, she thought, along the eastern branch and near the top. Either of the two points jutting into the water might be the point near Grunkie’s land.
“East Pomeroy,” Win said. “Isn’t that what Dad said the town was called?”
“I think,” Wendy said. “But those old names aren’t on here.”
“We’ll just have to wing it,” Win said. “We’ll hike in, take a look around. If they’re not at the first gate we try, we’ll try another.”
“I could go back inside and ask that woman,” Roy said. “She might know what we’re looking for.”
She might, thought Wendy. She might know exactly where East Pomeroy was, or used to be; she might even know the place where their father had once lived. But Wendy couldn’t bear to face her again. “No,” she said. “We can find it.”
And so they drove north to the gate Win picked, and they found it without any trouble and parked the car and started walking. But they hadn’t counted on the unmarked trails or the deer paths that crossed them or the exuberant undergrowth, and they hadn’t expected the hills and streams and ridges that weren’t on their useless map, and they hadn’t realized just how exhausted they really were. Within minutes, they were seriously lost.
Wendy’s shoulder ached from her bag, although she’d crammed the loot from the Thruway plaza beneath the seat. Win strode next to her, trying to look as if he knew where they were headed. She was sure they had strayed from the main path some time ago, and that the tiny overgrown trail they were following had been made by deer or dogs. Behind them, Delia was drooping and dragging her feet and sticking close to Roy. Lise trailed all of them and complained about her shoes, which were pinching.
“We ought to be heading to our left,” Win said. “The water has to be to the left of us.”
“I know,” Wendy said. But every time the path looped to the left it bent right again a few yards later. They seemed to be traveling along the outlines of a knot, and she was sure they’d crossed their own tracks several times. She was hot and tired and thirsty and had nothing useful in her bag. A huge bird, a hawk or a heron, rose from a tree with a whir that made Delia shriek.
“See?” Win said. “See how he’s heading left? He’s heading for the water.”
“So?” Wendy said. “What do you want me to do about it?”
Win gave her a disgusted look. “We should have gotten a better map. We should have asked that woman for some help.”
Wendy could see no point in telling him how that woman had frightened her. “You want to go back?”
“Too late now. But how about we break our own trail for a while? If we cut through here, I know we’ll hit the water.” Win plunged into the tangle of dogwood and witch hazel to their left.
Roy drew up to Wendy. “Where’s he going?” he asked. The hairs on his arms lay in smooth, soft lines.