“Just ask me,” I said.
“No, it’s okay. I’ll stop. I’m sorry.” He blushed, busying himself with Peter’s computer for a moment before jerking up again. “It’s just—I’ve been around babies. I can’t even imagine how you could have been an infant, and then raised with this . . . condition. Let alone how your mother could have carried out the pregnancy.”
“She didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“She didn’t carry out the pregnancy. She died.” I scrubbed my voice of all inflection, but felt a surge of frustration toward Matthew for having been the first to make me say the words aloud. I’d always known that my gestation killed my mother, but speaking it gave the fact a new, tangible weight.
Matthew blinked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That must still be very hard for you.”
I shrugged. He watched me, waiting for me to say more. When I was silent, he busied himself at Peter’s desk, trying to hack my father’s files.
“Could the passcode be a birth date?” he asked, face lit by the computer monitor’s unnatural glow. I remained in the doorway of the study, my hands folded under my armpits, embarrassed and afraid. Each false start of Matthew’s had made me feel more like an artifact, alone in a forgotten museum, abandoned by my caretakers. Each stifled question made it clear that I was nothing like the other girls that Matthew had encountered. I’d known that I was different, but with his curiosity thus piqued, I fully felt it.
My father had rarely followed through, but I’d lived always under threat of his punishment. Who would tell me, without Mrs. Blott or Peter, when to brush my hair, to tidy, how to behave around others? Who would comfort me when I awoke, sheets sweated through from nightmares? Who would fend off nosy Mr. Pepper, bring our mail in from the village, start the fire in the library in the evenings, quiz me on my reading, tell me not to play with Marlowe in the hall? Equally important, who would make sure that Peter had eaten enough dinner, remembered to bathe, to take some time away from books? Who would make him laugh when he was mad at a rude colleague or upset he’d been passed over for a departmental award?
Who else out there would love him? Who here would love me?
If my world had been a painting hung flat across a wall, its frame had fallen and its canvas now curled inward, rolling and distorting the image I had known.
“When was your father born?” Matthew asked.
I shrugged, pressing myself into a corner, where the edge of my ear struck a bookshelf. The wood shivered. I felt sick. The trouble with bookshelves, with assembled wood in general, was the paneling—if two unrelated pieces had been grafted together postmortem, once revived they would express immense dislike. Peter had once described such craftsmanship as comparable to a postcolonial nation, borders drawn without regard to indigenous rule. This particular shelf wrenched itself from its wooden backing, sending stacks of books and papers to the ground. I touched it again, and turned to find Matthew looking from the files spilled across the carpet to the lowermost shelf, to the upmost, to the hand I had used to correct my mistake. He seemed thoughtful.
“Are you afraid of me?” I asked him.
He smiled and shook his head, pushing back from Peter’s desk to kneel beside me as I straightened up the mess. To tidy was a feat of engineering, transfiguring my skirt into a mitten, shimmying to straighten the stacks.
“What, then?” I kept my eyes down on a set of plans, drawn to scale, of a medieval jailhouse, feigning interest in Peter’s handwritten aside about the improbability of its size.
“I know my questions are the last thing you need right now. I’m sorry for prying. It’s just that from a biological perspective, you’re phenomenal,” he told me. I felt my chest expand, though I could not tell if I could claim the compliment, or if he’d meant it toward some higher, unknown force. “I’d love to study you.” He stared at me intently, then flushed. The color suited him, warming the few freckles on his cheeks. “I mean the things you can do,” he corrected. “From a scientific perspective, of course.”
It was his turn, now, to fuss with Peter’s papers. He flipped through a dog-eared pamphlet, a schedule for an academic conference, a few pages that were dated like a diary, a handwritten recipe. I struggled to make sense of the ache in my chest.
“Wait,” Matthew said. “What’s this?”
He had come across a map, creased and fat from having been folded incorrectly, and pushed aside a file cart to spread it across the carpet, unveiling a full, miniaturized depiction of our region. A mug stain made a waxing crescent moon over a row of squares that stood for Coeurs Crossing. To the west was labeled Matthew’s university, to the south the city, surrounded by suburbs, fading out into moorland and small farms. Peter had drawn a star to represent Urizon, his wide hand designating it and the surrounding forest as home.
Peter’s handwriting was everywhere—crammed into corners, covering geographic landmarks, crawling all around the compass rose. It was largely indecipherable, but I could make out a few mathematical formulas, a proper noun or two. A select list of Blakely women’s names with birth and death dates scribbled next to them had been erased and rewritten so often that the paper had ripped and been patched at the back with clean scraps and tape. I didn’t recognize them all, though Lucy, born in 1867, had to be that great-grandaunt whose picture hung in our hallway, Helen, born in 1650, the pale subject of the painting nearby. The final name and birth date was my own. This last was written in the rich blue ballpoint pen Peter had received as a gift from a colleague just a week before, and the writing made him seem both far away and still close by. The diffusion of him frightened me.
Still, what gave me greatest pause were the three spiraling circles that my father had drawn across the full length of the map, all connected by a single, careful pen stroke. Three twisting snail shells. Six snakes, each pair entwined, converging in the center of the wood beside Urizon. Looking at them made me dizzy, like those hypnotic mazes that would hide inside my eyes if I stared too long at their patterns without blinking, imposing their ghosts onto the next plain space I’d see.
Matthew ran a finger along the uppermost circle, whose middle curled to a peak south and west of Urizon and then spun out to encompass Mr. Abbott’s land, along the west edge of the wood. There were, I realized, two ways of looking at each spiral, impossible to catch concurrently except for at their centers, where, if I squinted, the curls looked like small clasped hands. Another optical illusion, the lumpy vase that hid between the lovers, forcing distinction between shadow and light. One path in toward the center, Matthew’s index finger turning, and the opposite path out.
“Two ways of moving about your death,” I whispered to myself, quoting a poet whose name, just then, escaped me.
The second spiral lay across the unlabeled moors to the south and the east of Urizon—Peter had jotted some coordinates in red pen over a smear of poorly erased pencil. The third spiral was drawn directly south, over the city.
The spirals were so like the path I’d walked in the strange forest—Peter must have known it waited for me. He must think me still wandering in the wood. Of course he would have gone off to find me.
“This is it,” I announced, excitement mounting. “We’ve found him! I’ll just follow all these lines, and there he’ll be.”
Matthew opened his mouth as if to say something, but before any sound escaped, he frowned instead, twirling his hair.
“What is it?” I said. “What were you about to say?”
He waited, debating with himself, then finally answered. “No offense, but that’s ridiculous . . . You aren’t a kid spy in some novel. This isn’t some treasure hunt. And if your father left the map, that means he didn’t bring it with him, so he can’t be following it.”
“It’s our best and only clue,” I said.