It wasn’t until much, much later—the day of the Junk Box Incident, to be exact—that I finally did.
I was the next to leave. It was only Francis, Eve, and Bear left at that point—the only one I really wanted to say goodbye to was Bear, but I didn’t want to run into the other two. Luckily, Bear was already waiting in the lobby, huddled in one of the dirty old armchairs.
“Weekend bus,” he said sadly, when he saw me.
“If only I’d taken it earlier,” I replied. “Before you’d ever asked me, before we’d had the idea . . .”
Bear wrapped me in a huge, heartbreaking hug. “I know,” he whispered, his voice muffled by my hair. “I know.”
It didn’t make any sense—I couldn’t have taken the bus unless I’d known about Francis and Eve’s affair, and if I’d known about their affair, I couldn’t have left without striking back, trying to wound like I’d been wounded—but it didn’t matter. We were both so destroyed inside, we had gone far past needing things to make sense. We just wanted none of it to have happened. We just wanted Tam back. It wasn’t fair that the town wasn’t real, but her death was.
Bear helped me carry my suitcase. We waited in silence, blinking at the early sun, until the bus shuddered into the little depot with a groaning wheeze.
“Do you want me to tell Francis anything?” he asked as the driver opened the door, gave us a wave, and looked back to his clipboard.
I shook my head. Then I changed my mind.
“Tell him it doesn’t matter,” I said. Because it didn’t.
I had thought that I could never feel anything but rage ever again, the moment I found out he’d betrayed me—but now after what we’d lost, I could hardly even remember what it felt like to be that angry. I couldn’t feel anything at all but the void Tam had left in my heart. What he had done seemed like hardly anything at all, now.
“You mean . . . you forgive him?” Bear asked.
I could not even muster the will to try to explain. “Sure,” I finally said.
Bear studied me for a moment and then looked back at the bus, his eyes darting to the waiting open door, as if what I’d said might mean that there was a chance, the slenderest sliver of a hope of a chance, that I could repair things with Francis. Even amid our agony, he was still Bear. Still desperate to keep as many of us together as he could.
But I shook my head again.
Even if I wasn’t angry at Francis anymore, I could never go back to him—for the same reason I couldn’t be near any of them again.
Because the only thing any of us would be able to think about would be what we’d all done to Tam.
The bus dropped me off in Manhattan, at Port Authority Bus Terminal.
After so many months in quiet, peaceful Rockland, and most of them spent hiding within an even quieter, more deserted town, the city was overwhelming. Lights and horns and clattering subway tracks everywhere, a crush of pedestrians and cars. I scrambled away from the streets as fast as I could. I wasn’t ready to face the real world yet. I’d spent too much time in the unreal one.
I had promised myself I wouldn’t work in maps anymore—but eventually, that’s where I found myself again. It was what I’d studied for, what I’d trained for. I didn’t have any other skills. I rented a room in some giant, faceless building where I never saw any of my neighbors and set up as a freelance graphic artist. I drew simple line maps of local neighborhoods for restaurants to print on their paper menus, to show their delivery radiuses.
It was not art. But I no longer wanted that anyway. I just wanted enough to pay for groceries and rent, and to disappear.
And I did, for years. The only reason I finally returned to our cloistered industry and became a private dealer was because I found the Lawrence Street map.