“I’ll finish it,” he pronounced.
“What?”
“Our Dreamer’s Atlas,” he said. “I’ll finish it for her. No matter how long it takes.”
He stared at me in the dark. Determined, helpless. Alive, dead. I could see it, then. That our cursed project was the only thing sustaining him. The only thing keeping his guilt from completely consuming him. I knew he would never stop looking until he found the town again. And I knew that he would never manage to do it. Because if there was no map, there was no town.
“You don’t have to do this to yourself,” I whispered.
“I’m not doing this for me,” he replied.
“Tam’s gone, Wally.” I swallowed. “Even if you could find a way back into Agloe, it doesn’t matter. She’s gone.”
Wally turned away from me slowly, moving as if in a dream.
“Goodbye, Romi. I hope it works out for you and Francis.”
Then he disappeared up the stairs and down the walkway. By the time we’d woken up the next morning, he was already gone. The desk clerk said he’d checked out at dawn.
That same morning, Daniel rented a car from the local depot. He told us he was also leaving. He would go to New York City and find a job, and never come back. He didn’t care about Agloe anymore and wanted nothing to do with it.
I knew how he felt. I wanted nothing to do with it, either. None of us did, except for Wally. We had only been staying there, waiting, for you and Daniel. Once he’d gone, it took the rest of us no more than a few days to disappear as well.
Even though none of us could bear to be near each other for more than a few minutes, Daniel still knocked on each of our doors to tell us it was time, when he’d finished packing the car.
“Room for one more box?” I asked him.
“What is it?” he asked as his eyes fell on it, and he recognized Tam’s handwriting. It was another of the boxes we’d originally used to move our things to the house in Rockland, and that I’d then grabbed to get my stuff out of that same house in a hurry, the night I found out about Francis and Eve. Tam had jokingly written junk on the side of it, because we’d packed it with all of the group’s more scientific texts and tools, as opposed to her and my artistic ones. Inside, I’d put my share of the maps from our original version of the Dreamer’s Atlas that I’d taken from the house before we burned it. The Franklin, the Calisteri, the Visscher.
“No,” he said.
“They’re all that’s left,” I said.
“I don’t want them.”
“Not for you,” I said. “For Nell, someday. She might.”
Finally, Daniel took the box and put it in the trunk. I thought the maps were probably as good as gone—that he’d throw them out as soon as he drove away—but I figured it was his choice. No university would hold unreturned loans against us after finding out about the fire and Tam’s death.
“I’ll miss you,” he said to me.
We all hugged, and he let us say goodbye to you, but you were already dozing in your car seat. You seemed so peaceful, almost happy, for the first time in a long time. Not caught in a nightmare—just dreaming. We didn’t want to wake you from it.
He drove away, and that was it. The end of the Cartographers.
That was supposed to be the last time any of us saw each other. Not because of the pain, but because we were trying to protect you, Nell.
Your father never stopped loving your mother, but he had you to take care of. I didn’t know at the time why he was so afraid Wally might come after him someday—why he was so adamant about severing ties with the rest of us and all memories and research of Agloe in the hope of convincing him not to. If anything, I thought that if Wally ever resurfaced, it would be to Daniel least of all, for all the pain he’d caused him. I couldn’t understand why Daniel was so sure it would be exactly the opposite.