The Map of True Places

BRUNONIA BARRY

The Map of True Places

For my parents, June and Jack. I miss you every day.

And, as always, for Gary.

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

—HERMAN MELVILLE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Prologue

Part 1: May 2008

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part 2: June 2008

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part 3: July 2008

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Part 4: August 2008

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Part 5: September–October 2008

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Epilogue: May 2009, Memorial Day Weekend

Acknowledgments

Author’s Disclaimer

Also by Brunonia Barry

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

In the years when her middle name was Trouble, Zee had a habit of stealing boats. Her father never suspected her of any wrong-doing. He let her run free in those early days after her mother’s death. He was busy being a pirate reenactor, an odd leap for a man who’d been a literary scholar all his life. But those were desperate times, and they were both weary from constantly carrying their loss, unable to put it down except in those brief moments when they could throw themselves into something beyond the reach of their memories.

In her fantasy world, the one where she could forgive herself for what happened that year, Zee liked to think that her father, Finch, would have been proud of her skills as a thief. In her wildest dreams, she pictured him joining her adventure, a huge leap for the professor, but not for the pirate he was quickly becoming.

She had a preference for speedboats. Anything that could do over thirty knots was fair game. There was little security back then, and most of the keys (if there were any) were hidden somewhere on the boats themselves, usually in the most obvious place imaginable.

The game was simple. She would pick a boat that looked fast and sleek, give herself exactly five minutes to break in and get the engine started, and head out of the harbor toward the ocean. Once she passed the confines of Salem, she would open up the engine and point the bow straight out toward Baker’s Island. Later that night she would return the stolen boat.

There was only one rule. She could never return a boat to the same mooring from which she had stolen it. It was a good rule, not just because it presented an additional challenge but also because it was practical. If she put the boat back on the same mooring, she would be much more likely to get caught. Everyone knows that the last thing any good thief should do is revisit the scene of the crime.

Usually Zee would abandon the boat at one of the public wharves that lined Salem’s waterfront. Often it was the one at the Willows, the first wharf you came to when you entered the harbor. But when the cops started looking for her, she began to leave the boats in other, less obvious places. Sometimes she would jump someone else’s mooring. Or she would leave a boat in one of the slips at Derby Wharf, which made it easy to get away, since she lived so close.

Only one time did she mess up and misjudge the fuel level. She was all the way up by Singing Beach in Manchester when the engine died. At first she didn’t believe she had run out of gas. But when she checked the fuel again, her mistake was clear. Fighting the panic that was beginning to overtake her, she tried to come up with a plan. She could easily swim to shore, but if she did, the boat would either drift out to sea or smash against the rocks. For the first time, she was afraid of getting caught. In a strange way, she was grateful that there were no other boats around, no one she could signal for help. Not knowing what else to do, she let the boat drift.

She looked up at the moonless sky, the stars brighter than she had ever seen them, their reflections dissolving in the water around her like an effervescent medicine that seemed to dissolve her panic as well. Here, floating along with the current, staring up at the heavens, she knew that everything would be all right.

When she looked back down at the horizon to get her bearings, she found she had drifted toward shore. A dark outline of something appeared in her peripheral vision, and, when she turned to face it, a wharf came into focus and, on the hill beyond it, a darkened house. She grabbed an oar and began to steer the boat in toward shore, catching the onsweep of tide that propelled it broadside toward the wharf. She grabbed the bowline and jumped, slipping and twisting her ankle a little but keeping the boat from colliding with the wharf. She tied up, securing bow and stern, and scrambled over the rocks to the beach. Then she made her way up the road toward the train station, limping a bit from her aching ankle but not really too bad, all things considered.

Zee wanted to take the train back to Salem, but it was past midnight, and the trains had stopped running. She thought about sleeping on the beach. It was a warm night. It would have been safe. But she didn’t want to concern her father, who had enough to worry about these days. And she didn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity of Manchester when they found the stolen boat.

So she ended up hitchhiking back to Salem. Not a smart thing to do, she thought as she walked to the Chevy Nova that had stopped about fifty feet ahead of her and was frantically backing up.

It was a woman who picked her up, probably mid-forties, slightly overweight, with long hair and blue eyes that glowed with the light of passing cars. At first the woman said she was only going as far as Beverly. But then she changed her mind and decided to take Zee all the way home, because if she didn’t she was afraid that Zee would start hitchhiking again and might be picked up by a murderer or a rapist.

As they rode down Route 127, the woman told Zee every horror story she had ever heard about hitchhiking and then made Zee give her word never to do it again. Zee promised, just to shut her up.

“That’s what all the kids say, but they do it anyway,” the woman said.

Zee wanted to tell her that she never hitched, that she wasn’t the victim type, and that she had only thumbed a ride tonight to cover a crime she’d committed—grand theft boato. But she didn’t know what other cautionary tales such a confession might unleash, so she kept her mouth shut.

As she was getting out of the car, Zee turned back to the woman. Instead of saying thank you, she said, in a voice that was straight out of a Saturday-morning cartoon show she’d watched when she was a little girl, “Will you be my mommy?”

She had meant it as a joke. But the woman broke down. She just started crying and wouldn’t stop.

Zee told the woman that she was kidding. She had her own mother, she said, even though it wasn’t true, not anymore.

Nothing she could say would stop the woman’s tears, and so finally she said what she should have said all along: “Thank you for the ride.”

Of course Zee hadn’t given the woman her real address—she didn’t want her getting any ideas, like maybe going into the house and having a word with Finch. She had planned to hide in the shadows until the woman drove away and then cut through the neighboring yards to get home. But in the end she just walked straight down the road. The woman was crying too hard to notice where Zee went or how she got there.

Ten years later, as Zee was training to become a psychotherapist (having outgrown the middle name Trouble), she saw the woman again in one of the panic groups run by her mentor, Dr. Liz Mattei. The woman didn’t remember her, but Zee would have known her anywhere—those same translucent blue eyes, still teary. The woman had lost a child, a teenager and a runaway, she said. Her daughter had been diagnosed as bipolar, like Zee’s mother, Maureen, but had refused to keep taking lithium because it made her fat. She’d been last seen hitchhiking on Route 95, heading south, holding a hand-lettered sign that read new york.

It was the winter of 2001 and ten years since the woman had lost her daughter. The Twin Towers had recently come down. The panic group had grown in size, but its original members had become oddly more calm and helpful to each other, as if their free-floating anxiety had finally taken form, and the rest of the country had begun to feel the kind of terror they’d felt every day for years. For the first time Zee could remember, people in the group actually looked at each other. And when the woman talked about her daughter, as she had every week they’d been meeting, the group finally heard her.

The world can change, just like that! the woman said.

In the blink of an eye, someone answered.

Tissues were passed. And the group cried together for the first time, crying for the girl and for her inevitable loss of innocence and, of course, for their own.

Bipolar disorder had recently become a catchall diagnosis. While it had once been believed that the condition occurred after the onset of puberty (as it had with this woman’s daughter), now children were being diagnosed as early as three years of age. Zee didn’t know what she thought about that. As with many things lately, she was of two minds about it. She hadn’t realized her joke until Mattei pointed it out, thinking it was intentional. No, Zee had told her. She was serious. Certainly it was a disease that needed treatment. Untreated bipolar disorder seldom led to anything but devastation. But medicating too early seemed wrong, something more in line with insurance and drug-company agendas than with the kind of help Zee had trained for years to provide.

The world-famous Dr. Mattei had long since abandoned her panic group, leaving them for Zee or one of the other psychologists to oversee. Mattei had moved on to her latest bestselling-book idea, which proposed the theory that the daughter will always live out the unfulfilled dreams of the mother. Even if she doesn’t know what those dreams are, even if those dreams have never been expressed, this will happen, according to Mattei, with alarming regularity. It wasn’t a new idea. But it was Mattei’s theory that this was more likely to happen if those dreams were never expressed, in much the same way that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Zee had often wondered about the woman with the translucent eyes who came back to the panic group only once after that evening. She wondered about her unfulfilled dreams, expressed or unexpressed, and she wondered if there was something that the daughter was acting out for her mother as she herself had stood on Route 95 and accepted a ride from a stranger heading south.

Zee was glad that the woman had left the group before Mattei had brought up her latest theory. The mother blamed herself enough for her daughter’s disappearance, wondering every day if she might have changed the course of events if only she’d given her daughter that one elusive thing she’d failed to provide—something tangible and even ordinary, perhaps, like that red dress in Filene’s window. Or the week away at Girl Scout camp that her daughter had begged for years ago.

No one understood the concept of “if only” better than Zee. She lived it every day, though she didn’t have to search to find the elusive thing. She thought she knew what her mother had wanted that day so many years ago, what might have helped lift her out of her depression. It was a book of Yeats’s poetry given to Maureen by Finch on their wedding day, and it was one of her mother’s treasures. Zee’s “if only” had worked in reverse. If only she hadn’t gotten her mother what she wanted that day, if only she hadn’t left her alone, Zee might have been able to save her.

Part 1: May 2008

Method of Keeping a Ship’s Reckoning . . .

A ship’s reckoning is that account, by which it can be known at any time where the ship is, and on what course or courses she must steer to gain her port.

NATHANIEL BOWDITCH: The American Practical Navigator

Chapter 1

Lilly Braedon was late.

Mattei poked her head through Zee’s door. “It’s so damned hot out there,” she said. “Oh, God, you’re not in session, are you?”

“I’m supposed to be,” Zee said, looking at the clock. It was three-fifteen.

Mattei was re-dressing as she spoke, kicking off running shoes and pulling on her suit jacket. She walked five miles along the Charles River every afternoon, weather notwithstanding. When she was overbooked, which was a good deal of the time, she had been known to conduct her sessions while strolling along the river, calling it a walking meditation, telling patients it would be easier to open up if they didn’t feel her prying eyes on them. A week after she started conducting sessions that way, every shrink in Boston was out walking with patients.

“God, not that agoraphobic again.” It was another of Mattei’s jokes. Fifty percent of their patients had some degree of agoraphobia, a phenomenon that made attendance poor at best and had lately prompted Mattei to start charging time and a half for missed appointments, though Zee seldom required her patients to comply with this new rule.

Mattei was trying harder than usual to make her laugh today, meaning that Zee must be frowning again. Zee’s natural expression seemed to be the type of frown that inspired joke telling, often from total strangers, who always felt compelled to make her feel better somehow. Just this morning an older gentleman who had neglected to pick up his dog’s poop in Louisburg Square had walked over to her and ordered her to smile.

She stared at him.

“Things can’t be all that bad,” he said.

If he hadn’t been older than her father, Zee would have told him to get lost, that this was her natural expression, and that a man who didn’t pick up his dog’s excrement shouldn’t be allowed to roam free. But instead she managed a vague smirk.

“So seriously, which patient?” Mattei was waiting for an answer.

“Lilly Braedon.”

“Mrs. Perfect,” she said. “Oh, no, I forgot, that’s you.”

“Not yet,” Zee said a little too quickly.

“Aha!” Mattei said. “Simple, simple. Case closed. That will be three hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Funny,” Zee said as Mattei gathered up her running shoes and left the room.

It was Lilly Braedon’s husband who had originally sought help at Dr. Mattei’s clinic. People came from all over the world to be treated by her. Harvard trained, with a stint at Johns Hopkins, Mattei was a psychiatrist who had great credentials. She’d written the definitive article on bipolar disorder with panic for the American Journal of Psychiatry. She had also worked closely with a team of genetic researchers who had uncovered a correlation between the disease and the eighteenth chromosome, a substantial and groundbreaking discovery.

But then Mattei’s career took a turn. She became fascinated by a more popular approach to psychiatry. The book she wrote during her tenth year in practice, a folksy self-help book entitled Safe at Home, lifted her to celebrity status. The book was inspired by a Red Sox second-stringer she had successfully treated for panic. Her practical solutions to his terror were based on biofeedback, desensitization, and sense memory.

“The world is a terrifying place,” Mattei explained first to a local newscaster and later to Oprah. “And here is what you can do to stop being afraid.” The book was filled with sensory tricks, tips almost too simple to inspire much credibility: carry a worry stone, smell lavender, breathe deeply. The companion CD featured guided meditations, some with music, some including nature sounds or poetry. It even quoted the old Irish prayer (the one that basically tells you not to worry about a damned thing because the worst thing that can happen is that you’ll go to hell, but that’s where all your friends will be anyway, so it’s pointless to fret). Though Mattei herself was a loose fusion of French, Italian, and Japanese ancestry, with not a bit of Irish blood, for some reason she loved everything about the Irish. It might have been a Boston thing. She loved James Joyce and even swore she had read and understood Finnegans Wake, which Zee seriously doubted. That Mattei loved Guinness and U2, Zee did not doubt. Zee and her fiancé, Michael, had spent last St. Paddy’s Day at a bar in Southie with Mattei and her partner, Rhonda, and Mattei had held her own, drinking with the best of Boston’s Irish. And just a month ago, Mattei had come back from one of her therapy walks sporting a pair of pink Armani sunglasses that looked very similar to a pair Zee had once seen Bono wear.

Mattei had done the usual book-tour circuit. But it was when she landed on Oprah that things went wild. There was a growing sense of panic in this country, Mattei explained to Oprah. It was everywhere. Since 9/11, certainly. And the economy? Terrifying. “Do you know the number one fear of women?” she had asked. “Becoming homeless,” she said. She went on to explain that the number one fear of the general population is public speaking. Many people say they’d rather die than get up in front of a group to give a presentation. After she reeled off such statistics, Mattei turned and spoke directly to the camera. “What are you really afraid of?” she asked America. It became a challenge that echoed through the popular culture. She closed the show with a paraphrased quote from Albert Einstein. The only real question you have to ask yourself is whether or not the universe is a friendly place, she explained, then went on to translate into terms anyone could understand. Once you’ve decided that, Mattei said, you can pretty much determine what your future will hold.

Her book hit the top of the New York Times Best Seller list and stayed there for sixty-two weeks. As Mattei’s fame grew, her patient list expanded exponentially, and she brought in interns to mentor, though her real work was still with bipolars.

“Did you know that eighty percent of poets are bipolar?” Mattei asked Zee one morning.

“My mother wasn’t a poet. She wrote children’s books,” Zee said.

“Nevertheless . . .” Mattei replied.

“Nevertheless” was probably the best thing Zee had ever learned from Mattei. It was a word, certainly, but much more than a word, it was a concept. “Nevertheless” was what you said when you were not going to budge, whether expressing an opinion or an intention. It was a statement, not a question, and the only word in the English language to which it was pointless to respond. If you wanted to end a conversation or an argument, “nevertheless” was your word.

Zee often thought that what had happened with her mother was another reason Mattei had hired her. Maureen’s case history might well be considered good material for a new book. But Mattei had never approached her about it. When Zee mentioned her theory one day, Mattei told her that she was mistaken, that she had actually hired Zee because of her red hair.

Theory and research were still Mattei’s passion, and though she had a thriving practice, she also had that elusive second book to write and her new mother-daughter theory to document. So most of Zee’s patients were Mattei’s overflow. Her “sloppy seconds” is what Michael called them, though he was clearly unaware of the perverse meaning of his slang. He’d meant it to be amusing rather than pornographic. The truth was, anything Mattei did was okay with Michael. They had been friends since med school. When Mattei suggested that Michael meet Zee, telling him she thought she’d found the perfect girl for him, he was only too happy to oblige.

Soon after that, Zee had found herself out on a blind date with Michael.

Upon Mattei’s recommendation, he had taken her to Radius. He had ordered for both of them, some Kurobuta pork and a two-hundred-dollar Barolo. By the time they finished the bottle, Zee found herself saying yes to a weekend with him on the Vineyard. They had moved in together shortly afterward. Not unlike the job Mattei had given her, the relationship just sort of happened.

What followed still seemed to Zee more like posthypnotic suggestion than real life. Not only had Michael easily agreed that Zee was the perfect girl for him, he’d never even seemed to question it. And exactly one year after their first date, a period of time most probably deemed respectable by Mattei, Michael had proposed.

Zee had been grateful when Mattei chose to hire her. She had just received her master’s and was working on her Ph.D. when Mattei invited her to join her practice, giving her some group sessions to moderate and mentoring her as she went. By the time she’d earned the title of doctor, Zee had ended up in a corner office with a view of the Charles and a patient list that would have taken her years to develop on her own.

The phrase “case closed” was one of Mattei’s biggest jokes. Though patients almost always got better under her care, they were never cured. There was no such thing as case closed. Not in modern American society anyway, Mattei insisted. Not in a country that planted the most fertile ground for both mania and the resultant depressive episodes, the country that had invented the corporate marketing machine that left people never feeling good enough unless they were overextending their credit, buying that next big fix. Not that Mattei minded the corporate marketing machine. That machine had made her rich. But there was definitely no such thing as case closed. Case closed was decidedly un-American.

When Lilly Braedon came along, Mattei quickly handed her off to Zee.

In the past year, Lilly had developed the most crippling case of panic disorder. She’d been to local doctors, who had ruled out all probable physical explanations: thyroid, anemia, lupus, et cetera. Then, after watching an episode of The View, something he swore he’d never done before, her husband, who in his own words “loved Lilly more than life itself” (a quote that resonated on a very problematic level with both Zee and Mattei), went to the Spirit of ’76 Bookstore in Marblehead to purchase Mattei’s book, only to find that they were sold out. He immediately ordered two copies, one for himself and another for his ailing wife.

But Lilly was too troubled to read. The only time she left the house in those days was in the late afternoon, when the shadows were longer and the bright summer light (another irrational fear) was dimmer. In the late afternoon, her husband said, Lilly often took long walks through the twisted streets of Marblehead and up through the graves of Old Burial Hill, to a precipice high above Marblehead Harbor, where she sometimes stayed until after sunset.

“So technically she isn’t agoraphobic,” Mattei said to the husband when she finished her initial patient analysis of Lilly. “She does leave the house.”

“Only for her walks,” her husband said. “She says she does it to calm herself down.”

“Interesting,” Mattei said.

But Zee could tell she didn’t mean it. The reason Zee was in attendance at Lilly’s session was that Mattei had already decided she was handing her off. Mattei wasn’t interested in Lilly Braedon.

But Zee was very interested. From the first time she met her new patient, Zee suspected that there was much more to the story than Lilly was telling.

Every Tuesday, Zee had her own therapy session with Mattei. Mostly they talked about her patients, or at least the ones who required meds, which was most of them. If patients with panic attacks weren’t on meds these days, you could be pretty sure there was a reason. Perhaps they were in some kind of twelve-step program, usually for alcohol or drugs, or else they had the kind of paranoia that kept them from taking any medication at all.

This morning Zee had gone through “the usual suspects,” as Mattei called her list of patients. This one had improved, that one was self-medicating with bourbon and sleeping pills. Another one had taken herself off all meds and was beginning to show signs of a manic episode. When they got to Lilly, Zee told Mattei she had nothing to report.

“Unsatisfactory,” Mattei said. Normally Mattei didn’t seem to care one bit about Lilly Braedon. But something Zee had said at their last meeting had piqued her interest for a change and prompted a question. When Zee reported that nothing had changed, Mattei wasn’t having any of it.

“Does that mean that Lilly is in a normal phase?” Mattei was referring to Lilly’s bipolar disorder, which had been their diagnosis. Bipolar disorder was something Zee understood only too well. It was what her mother had been diagnosed with years ago, except that in those days it had been called manic depression, which Zee had always thought a better description. In most cases the disorder was characterized by severe mood swings followed by periods of relative normalcy.

“I wouldn’t say normal,” Zee said.

“Any more trouble with the Marblehead police?”

“Not lately,” Zee said.

“Well, that’s something.”

At 3:35, Lilly still hadn’t arrived. Zee walked to the window. Across Storrow Drive a homeless woman sat on one of the benches, but there was no one walking along the Charles River. It was too hot and humid for movement of any kind. Traffic was snarled, the drivers honking and agitated, trying to get onto roads heading north. The “cardboard bridge,” as Zee called the Craigie, looked like a bad fourth-grade art project. Years of soot had collected in the wrong areas for shading, and today’s haze made it look even flatter and more one-dimensional and fake than it had ever looked before.

At 3:45, Zee dialed Lilly’s number. It was a 631 exchange, Marblehead. It used to be NE 1, Lilly had told her when she’d scribbled down her phone number for the records. “NE for Neptune—you know, Neptune, the Roman god of the sea?”

Zee thought back to her school days. Neptune—or Poseidon, his Greek equivalent, god of the sea and consort of Amphitrite, which had been Zee’s mother’s middle name. Though Maureen Doherty was a decidedly Irish name, Zee’s grandmother had given all three of her children the middle names of Greek gods and goddesses. Thus Zee’s mother was Maureen Amphitrite Doherty. Uncle Mickey’s middle name was Zeus, and Uncle Liam, who had died back in Ireland before Zee was born, was Antaeus, a clear foreshadowing of the mythmaking violence in his future. Zee remembered Maureen teasing Uncle Mickey about his middle name. “Well, what mother doesn’t think her son is a god?” Mickey had answered. Indeed, Zee thought.

Zee willed herself back to the present. Lately her mind had been wandering. Not just with Lilly, but with all of her patients. They seemed to tell the same stories over and over until her job became more like detective work than therapy. The key wasn’t in the stories themselves, at least not the ones they told and retold. Rather it was in the variations of their stories, the small details that changed with each telling. Those details were often the keys to whatever deeper issues lay hidden beneath the surface. What wasn’t the patient telling the truth about?

“Everybody lies,” was another of Mattei’s favorite expressions.

And so as the weeks passed, Zee listened to Lilly, to the variations in the stories she told over and over. But on the day that Lilly had mentioned Neptune, the story she told was one that Zee had never before heard.

“Back in the day,” Lilly was saying, “before the phones in Marblehead had dials, way back when the operators used to ask ‘Number, please’ in a nasal four syllables, you would have to say ‘Neptune 1’ for the Marblehead exchange.” Lilly was far too young ever to have remembered phones without dials and operators who connected you, but for some reason she seemed to find this bit of trivia very significant.

“Does Neptune have a special meaning for you?” Zee asked.

Lilly’s face contorted. “I’ve always been afraid of Neptune,” she said. “Neptune is a vengeful god.”

At 5:20, Zee dialed her wedding planner. “I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to cancel again, my five-o’clock is late,” she said, relieved that she’d gotten the machine instead of the person—who, she had to admit, scared the hell out of her.

Zee felt a bit giddy, the way she’d felt as a kid when there was a snow day. Michael wouldn’t be home from Washington until the last shuttle. Having come up with the winter image, Zee decided to treat this unanticipated block of freedom as a snow day. Never mind that it was ninety-six degrees outside. The evening stretched ahead of her. She could do anything she wanted with it. Zee couldn’t remember the last time she’d had an open evening. Between her work schedule and the wedding plans, there’d been little time for anything else lately. She hadn’t even seen her father in the last few months, and she felt guilty about it, though she knew he understood.