Maddy had seen Daddy at dinner, too, saying this was the last glass of wine but then seemingly unaware of his hand lifting the bottle to pour just a little more. Mom had it, too, in stores, and maybe in other ways. At times over the last months, Maddy had seen her mother sad and quiet, as if she’d decided something. But that evening or the next day, she would be happy again—and how could that be, unless she had decided against an earlier decision? How could you mean something and then not mean it? And one time Madison had come into the house to find her on the phone, and maybe it was just her imagination, but she thought her mom looked like she’d been caught cookie-handed, too. Madison wondered if maybe everybody’s life was like this. She hoped it wasn’t just her. And she hoped it wasn’t going to keep getting worse.
At least she wasn’t hungry or thirsty now. The man in the pickup let her have some of his coffee and gave her half his sandwich when he dropped her off. She had known while offering him the money that many people would decide to bash her over the head and see what else she had, but this man hadn’t been one of those. She’d known this before getting the money out. His eyes were pink, and he smiled a lot, and she knew he was a man who just wanted an easy life. Mom had often told her she was good at judging people. Her dad usually added “and getting them to do what you want,” but he’d be smiling, and he meant it as a good thing.
She spent several hours walking the city streets, going some other way when she heard footsteps or shouting. She tried calling home from a pay phone, using coins she knew she’d taken from her mother’s purse before leaving Cannon Beach, which she now felt very bad about. She was not someone who stole. But the phone had rung and rung at the house in Portland, then gone to the answering machine. It was the middle of the night, okay, but there was a phone right there on their bedside table. Why wasn’t Daddy at home? She tried calling Mommy’s cell, too, but for some reason kept getting the number wrong. She knew it, she knew that she did—she’d gone to a lot of trouble to learn it by heart a couple of months before—but now it seemed to have dropped out of her head. She tried a few numbers that sounded right and woke up a few angry people, but none of them was her mom.
So she kept walking. She felt sometimes like she was looking for something, and at one point she found herself walking up a long and really steep hill and into an area where there were nice, big houses. She stood opposite one of these for a while, in the darkness, but it just made her feel angry and sad. When it got really cold, she found an alleyway back toward downtown that had a deep doorway some distance along it, and she sat huddled up in her coat. The doorway smelled of old pee. She meant to stay awake, but she couldn’t. She was exhausted with all the walking. With pretending that she wasn’t really, really scared.
She fell asleep, but it was not a good sleep. Things kept coming into her head and going around and around. Some made her happy, like a dream full of glimpses of little girls, pretty and smiling, and another of her sitting in a chair in a nice house with a view over the bay. Some were sad or frightening, like one where she was running along a concrete path down near the water itself, out of breath. She liked dreams, normally. They could be funny and interesting. These were not. They were like she was channel-surfing and found some new batch of channels that hadn’t been there before. Some did seem a little familiar, from years back, from when she’d wake in the night to find that Mom or Dad had run in to see why she was making that noise. Other were dark and noisy and grown-up…not nice. She never quite saw anything that she shouldn’t see, but she believed that if she watched for long enough, she…would.
For most of the time Madison spent in the doorway, she wasn’t even really sure if she was asleep or awake. But after a while it seemed to her that she was, and that it had started to become light, and she left the alleyway and started walking once more.
As soon as the stores opened, it got easier. She followed where all the people were going and found herself in an open area in downtown. Across the street was a Barnes & Noble. She went inside and knew she’d be okay for a while. You could spend as much time as you liked in a bookstore, as long as you had a nice coat. She looked at books and then at the magazines. When someone with a name badge came over to ask if she was okay, she said yes and then waved over the man’s shoulder as if to someone on the other side of the store. The man smiled and left her alone after that. He was nice and reminded her of Uncle Brian.
There were some other girls about her age in the section, but they looked kind of weird to her now, after her dream. She felt that she was looking at them for a little too long. So she went up to the Starbucks and bought a water and a coffee and two things to eat. She did this without planning it, but when she got to the cash register, she realized that it had been clever. What a grown-up girl Maddy was, being allowed to go to the counter on her own, watched over by a mother sitting…just over there! She drank the coffee and ate the carrot cake and put the water and the granola bar in her pockets, which were now getting a bit overstuffed. Good to be prepared, though.
She had provisions. She was doing okay.
She went back up to the children’s section and found a seat, then got out the battered notebook and leafed through it, hiding it inside a Richard Scarry.
The more Madison read from the notebook, the more different she felt. She couldn’t understand why. The notebook was not laid out like a story. It wasn’t as if it started out at the beginning and went from there, and you could follow what was going on, and then it ended—which was the case with all the books she’d encountered so far. Except for the really baby books, which had always driven her father nuts: Molly the Mouse gets out of bed, Molly stands on a hill near some flowers, Molly goes and looks at the sea with her friend Neville the Narwhal…The End. Her dad used to rant and rave about these books, saying there was no actual story and where the hell had Neville suddenly come from anyway? The notebook was like that. Just a bunch of stuff, with no shape, no beginning, no end. The big difference was that the baby books went all out to make things as clear and simple as possible. The hill would be big, the flower would be obvious and super-bright, Neville the from-nowhere Narwhal would fill most of one page. The whole point of them was to teach you how to read, to find out which words meant what.
The notebook wasn’t like that. A lot of the time, it seemed that whoever had written it had put things in a way that you weren’t supposed to understand, unless you knew what it was talking about in the first place:
I have always lived here.
For a long time trees were the only story.
But then the invaders came: breaking down the door as if it never occurred to them other people already lived here and called it home. I will be brief, the detail left as an exercise for the not-so-gentle reader.
In 1792, Vancouver and crew first enter Puget Sound. In 1851, claims are laid by the members of the Denny party. The local Duwamish and Suquamish Indians provided food for the settlers at Alki Point during the hard winter of 1851/2. You might have thought they would have learned their lesson by then, but I guess they just weren’t very smart. Chief Seattle at least had the wisdom of many lives, and encouraged “Doc” Maynard to join the settlement in 1852, knowing his friend was conversant with local lore, and might help preserve the integrity of this special place. Maynard staked the mudflats which are now Pioneer Sq and the International District, a curious choice, one might think. Denny/Bell/Boren took the ridges around Elliott Bay (now Downtown, Denny Triangle, Belltown), and in October 1852 one Henry Yesler arrived with a sawmill, looking for a site. After this the town started to grow. King County was created Dec 22, 1852, and in 1853 came a visit by the Territory’s first governor, Colonel Isaac Stevens—his mission to remove the tribes from their lands. In 1854, Seattle gave the speech which comes as close to telling the truth as anyone ever has out loud. Paleface did not get the message, naturally. Paleface never fucking does.