Normally, he agreed with whatever Tam suggested, no matter how busy he already was. I think the Dreamer’s Atlas idea was just too experimental, too strange, for him to understand. None of us thought about maps the way Tam did, but Wally especially so.
Luckily, though, they were also the closest to each other, and had known each other the longest. If anyone could convince him, it was Tam.
“Just think about it,” I remember her saying to him as we all shuffled out into the nighttime snow, tipsy and a little sleepy. “We can’t do it without you.”
A few days later, Wally showed up to our study group carrying his usual back-breaking stack of reference texts—and one more, much smaller book.
It was a science fiction novel from the 1970s, by one of the same authors we already had on our list. I don’t remember the title—something about heaven or a lathe—but Tam seemed to recognize it.
“Hey, I gave you that book,” she said when he set the stack down on the table and she saw it. “In high school.”
Wally picked it up and studied the cover. “I thought maybe we could draw some of the descriptions of future Portland,” he said hesitantly, as if still unsure he understood it all correctly. “Some of the differences are pretty stark if you compare it to a real city map.”
Tam grinned. “It’s perfect,” she said. “Perfect for our Dreamer’s Atlas.”
“Our Dreamer’s Atlas,” Wally repeated, finally smiling, too.
“He’s in!” Tam cried, and the rest of us cheered.
Everything was ahead of us, and we were going to do it together. We were going to stun our colleagues, amaze the public. We were going to breathe passion and life back into cartography and make it something no one had ever seen before.
The day we graduated, all seven of us together in our caps and gowns, holding our diplomas, was one of the happiest days of my life.
I thought we were going to be friends forever. I thought nothing could tear us apart.
VIII
The room seemed quieter once Ramona finished her story. Smaller, colder. The dealer looked even more nervous than she had when Nell had entered, if it was possible.
“All this time,” Nell murmured. The shop echoed softly, stealing the words. “You knew my parents—my mother—and he never told me.”
“We drifted apart. Your father and I haven’t spoken in decades,” Ramona replied. “None of us have, until now.”
“What happened?”
But Ramona just shook her head. “Please, Nell. Leave the past in the past, where it belongs. That’s what your father would have wanted.”
“Maybe not. He told me about the gas station map, after all.”
Nell tried not to let her lie make her uncomfortable. But was it a lie? She and her father hadn’t spoken in seven years, but he had put the map in the one place he knew she would recognize, hadn’t he? Or had he merely been trying to hide it from everyone else?
“Well, he shouldn’t have.”
“And he had your card,” she pressed. “So, why did he get back in contact with you again, after all these years?”
Ramona opened her mouth, but before she could speak, the thunderous crawl of a semitruck passing on the road outside startled her badly. She snapped upright, completely lost for a moment, as if she had forgotten there was traffic outside. As if she had forgotten anything at all was outside, beyond her dark, secretive little shop.
“You really have to go,” she finally said, spinning back toward Nell with such a tense, panicked look in her eyes that Nell faltered.
“Okay, okay,” she agreed, hands up in a gesture of surrender to mollify the older woman. She wanted to keep pushing for answers about the gas station map, but if she said any more, she worried she’d give herself away for sure. Ramona would know that it in fact hadn’t been destroyed, and that she had it. “Just tell me what he wanted you to find for him, and I’ll go.”