Brunonia Barry - The Map of True Places

Zee fell asleep to the sound of foghorns. She dreamed of the stars and of the Friendship, not the reproduction that was at the wharves today but the old one that Maureen had tried to write about. Then she dreamed about Bernini’s sculpture of Neptune and Triton as it had once been described to her by Maureen. Or maybe it was Lilly… No, it was Maureen.

THE DAY MAUREEN KILLED herself, Zee had borrowed Mickey’s dory and gone to Baker’s Island to get the Yeats book in an effort to cheer her mother.

Maureen’s mood seemed better that day. Certainly she was kinder to Zee, whom she had been ignoring ever since the visit to Arcana’s psychic studio. The last few months had reminded Zee of the Snow White fairy tale, not just because of Arcana and an image she kept having of her holding out a poisoned apple, but because her mother, who had once loved Zee so much, had grown cold ever since the pronouncement of the psychic, as if the very existence of Zee were keeping her from her fairy-tale ending.

That was the way it was between them for the rest of the summer. Maureen stopped writing “The Once”-in fact, she stopped writing altogether. Mostly she just stared out at the water or sat upstairs in her room. She hardly ate and rarely if ever slept.

So on her way to the island to get the book, Zee was encouraged. Her mother’s mood seemed lighter, and though Zee hadn’t been able to talk her into coming along, Maureen had sounded almost interested when Zee told her what she was planning to do.

“You’ve always loved that book,” Zee said hopefully.

“Thank you for doing this,” Maureen said, and actually got out of bed and came down to the kitchen to see Zee off.

“I love you,” Maureen said to her.

It seemed an odd thing to say, because of how bad things had been between them since the episode with the psychic. But Maureen was smiling when she said it, another encouraging sign, or so Zee thought at the time.

In retrospect, Zee knew that such behavior was a common occurrence in suicide cases. The victim would often feel much better once the decision to end things had finally been made. The uplift in spirits often left family members that much more shocked when the suicide happened. “She seemed so much better,” they would declare.

Though Lilly had been Zee’s first suicide since she’d become a psychologist, she had heard stories from other therapists, including Mattei. A vast and rapid improvement in a depressed mood can be cause for alarm. In bipolar patients it is often the signal of impending mania. In suicidal patients it often means that they’ve made that final decision and, upon making it, feel an almost exhilarating sense of relief. But Zee had no such knowledge when Maureen died. Though to most people who met her, she seemed older, Zee had only recently turned thirteen.

Baker’s Island wasn’t as close by as some of the other Salem islands were; it was actually closer to Manchester than to Salem. When Zee finally got there, it was after three. She tied up the dory and hurried up the ramp.

Zee walked past the spot where the residents parked their wheel-barrows, the only vehicles used to carry things to and from the old cottages, and then she headed toward the cottage, greeting people as she passed, grown-ups and children she’d known since she was little, whose families had summered here for generations. She wanted to stop and chat with them, but she couldn’t. Not today.

She let herself into the cottage with the key that Maureen always left in the window box. The front room was dark and shuttered. Maureen hadn’t been here once all summer, a clue that only in hindsight Zee realized should have been cause for alarm. Every summer since Zee was a baby, Maureen had used the cottage as her writing space.

This year the house had not been opened. As Zee entered the doorway, she watched a mouse dart and hide; she couldn’t see where it went. The cottage was tiny, only two rooms, the large front room with a small soapstone sink and hand pump and an old-fashioned icebox. A round table sat in the middle of the floor. If the house had been on the mainland, its decoration might have been right out of the Shabby Chic or Maine Cottage catalogs, but here one recognized it as the accumulation of hand-me-downs or discarded items from other places that had been collected over a number of summers: an old rubber bathing cap hanging on a hook, its chin piece cracked and splintered, a straw sun hat from the 1920s that had once had a silk flower on top but that now had only a small hole where that flower had once been attached.

Zee pulled open the four French windows over the sink, then pushed out the shutters beyond. Bright light flooded the room. A nursery web spider took shelter in a crack between the rafters.

Zee had always loved this place. When Maureen planned to stay overnight, she usually brought Zee along, her only requirement being that Zee learn to amuse herself, so that Maureen could write undisturbed. That was fine by Zee, who spent as much time outside as she could. On rainy days she would sit on the rug and draw pictures or play solitaire while her mother worked on her stories. Sometimes Zee read the old Nancy Drew mysteries that had been left there by her step-grandfather’s first wife when she was a child.

The rug was rolled up in a corner. It bulged slightly in the center, something she hadn’t noticed before. Either it had been improperly stored or something had been rolled up with it. Her cards, maybe? A box of crayons?

The door to the bedroom was closed. Zee hesitated before it. For as long as she could remember, she’d been forbidden to enter what had once been the bedroom. Though there was a double brass bed in the corner, they did not sleep in the room when they stayed here. Maureen slept instead on the couch and Zee in a sleeping bag on a huge canvas air mattress on the floor next to her mother.

Zee opened the door and stood looking at what had once been her parents’ marriage bed. The brass was greening where a leak in the roof had caused a slow drip. She could see the sheets on the bed, never changed, and she could make out the faded green chenille bedspread, which smelled musty from the leak.

On that last day of Maureen’s life, Zee stood again in the bedroom on Baker’s Island. But something was wrong with the picture. It wasn’t just that the roof was leaking or that the green chenille bedspread was mildewed from the moisture. It was something else. As she looked at the pillow, she realized that the Yeats book was not there. The one thing her mother wanted, the one thing she had come here to get, was missing.

Zee tore the house apart looking for the book. She looked behind and under the bed. She looked in the icebox and in all the drawers. She even looked outside, around the whole perimeter of the house. Finally she spotted the rug and again noted the bulge in the center of it.

She rolled out the rug, and with it something went tumbling. The force of the rolling threw whatever it was across the room. Hopeful, she took a step to retrieve it, and she saw the mouse. It was the same mouse that had scurried across the floor earlier, and with it was a tiny mouse, presumably its baby. Their eyes were wild. The mice were frozen in place. Zee realized that in rolling out the rug she had destroyed their home. Beside the baby mouse, as if in haute décor, was the silk flower the mice had gnawed from the old straw hat and the ball from her game of jacks that had rolled under the bed so long ago. Next to it was the book.

STRYCHNINE WAS THE POISON MAUREEN had researched for her story, the one she’d had the housekeeper use on the captain. It was also the poison Maureen ended up using on herself.

There were many easier poisons available, a few she had learned about from Ann and others as nearby as her garden. Maureen had considered and rejected them all. Strychnine is a poison that travels up the spinal cord and heightens the intensity of the convulsions it causes. It is a terrible way to die. Any emergency worker who has ever seen strychnine poisoning would be unlikely to forget it. The seizures are often brought on within ten minutes of ingestion and are triggered by stimulation of any kind-from fear of death to bright light to the sound of a distant car passing on the road. Theoretically, it is possible to survive strychnine poisoning, if one could keep the poisoning victim absolutely calm and quiet for twenty-four hours or so, until the poison clears out the system. But it almost never happens. A noise, or even the softest touch, will set off seizures that flex the back until the head and feet touch the floor, the body creating an almost perfect arch. After each seizure the victim will collapse in a heap, gathering the energy to seize again. After five or six seizures, the body’s energy is drained, and the victim dies of respiratory failure or exhaustion.