Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

It was just as well she stole that book, because Peter never sent the books he’d promised. And why should he? Why should he remember her, small and slight and short-haired and breastless? She was almost nine, and then really nine — but Peter was nearly thirty, as old as her mother: a grown man with a complicated life. And girlfriends, as she was forced in the following years to understand.

When he left Hammondsport after that first visit in 1964, Rose pined for weeks: so obviously, so melodramatically, that her great-aunt Agnes shook her head at the sight of Rose pushing peas around her plate. “Puppy love,” Agnes said, which caused Bianca to snort into her milk and Rose to resent both of them. That night Suky sat on the edge of Rose’s bed and said, “You’re very fond of our friend Peter, aren’t you?”

Rose writhed and buried her head in her pillow.

“I’m fond of Peter too,” Suky said. “He’s an old friend; he was at our wedding. When I first started seeing your father, we did things with Peter all the time; and he was part of how your father and I fell in love with each other. He has this way of making everything and everyone around him seem more interesting.”

She stroked what she could reach of Rose’s hair.

“It’s the beetles I’m interested in,” Rose snapped. “The beetles.”

Suky bought her some Schmitt boxes and a lovely hand lens, and said nothing more about Peter. Rose pored over her stolen book and made her own first collection of beetles, a clumsy imitation of her mother’s neat array of dried mosses. Suky’s praise she found condescending; she couldn’t identify most of her specimens beyond the family level, and she waited impatiently all through the fall and winter for Peter to reappear. He’d taken a teaching job in North Carolina, she learned from her parents. And would visit again when the school year was done. She was crushed when Peter arrived that May with a young woman, and disgusted by the sleeping arrangements.

“I could stay in the living room,” Rose offered. “She could have my room.”

Suky said, “That’s sweet of you, but it isn’t necessary,” and put the couple together in the guest room. Two rooms down the hall from them, Rose lay rigid and sleepless, too young to know what she was listening for but sure that she must listen.

Rose forgot that young woman’s name, as she did the name of the one who showed up with Peter the following summer. During both visits she alternated between sulking alone in the vineyard and making furious efforts to pry Peter away from these usurpers. She spread her beetles out alluringly, piled heaps of books next to her forceps and vials, and bent to her work in a way that could not, she thought, fail to bring Peter to her side. When she succeeded and he drew a chair next to her, casually naming the beetles she had tried and failed to classify, her heart beat so violently that she plucked her shirt away from her chest lest the pounding show. But when he turned from her, when those women, identical in their despicable ripeness, walked by so casually and drew Peter away by raising their arms in their sleeveless shirts, revealing bristly shadows beneath their armpits, and bra straps, and the curves of their breasts: then Rose flew into furies that puzzled everyone except, perhaps, her mother.

Suky found her one afternoon, after Peter’s third visit, pulling beetles from her boxes and savagely stripping them and their labels from the pins. Rose was almost eleven then, and almost had breasts of her own. On the floor near her feet was a disheartening cone of dried bodies and small paper points. She had jabbed herself several times and her fingers were bleeding.

“Oh, Rose,” Suky said. She tried to pull Rose’s head to her shoulder but Rose would not be comforted. And by the following summer, there was no comfort anywhere.

A hundred times, a thousand times, Rose would try in the following years to reconstruct her mother’s life and mind, her mother’s death. What was science for, if not for this? In her mother’s closet she turned the same things over and over again. An old brown book, falling apart, filled with interesting drawings of fossils but stubbornly silent regarding the nature of its path to Suky. A slightly less decrepit green book, Mosses with a Hand-Lens, which Suky had consulted almost daily. The letters, those crumbling letters, among which a few leaves and lichens had been pressed. And, incongruous among all that paper, one ancient, tiny lady’s boot, black and moldy, balanced on a ledge as if the woman whose foot it had once sheltered had scaled the side of the closet, passed through the ceiling, and simply disappeared.

There was no understanding, Rose thought, why her mother had saved the odd things she’d saved. No knowing what had really happened on Suky’s last day.

On that day, Rose would think, her mother had been walking along the lakeshore road near Hammondsport. Happy, or not; thinking of her daughters, or not. Cars were speeding along the road, tourists, some of them driving too fast; Suky, wearing a red shirt, held something green in her hand. On the lake the sailboats sailed. On the hill a dog with a brindle coat was barking at Rose and Bianca, who were holding their arms above their heads, lengths of thread stretching tautly from their hands and sweeping out the shapes of invisible cones. The threads were tied to Japanese beetles, who in straining to escape only orbited the pair of girls; who were shrieking with happiness. Could Suky hear them?

She could, Rose would decide each time. She could hear her daughters and, listening to them, hardly noticed the cars moving too fast along the road. She was watching the starlings swoop over the telephone lines, the swallows flicking over the lake, the light on the trees, the light on her shoes, the light.

On the lake the sailboats were heading for shore; the wind had picked up and the sky had darkened; a few drops of rain were falling. In the vineyard gleaming above her the tractor was running again and the brindled dog still barked. Near him Theo worked happily, holding Suky in his mind; he was thinking they ought to buy shoes for the girls, he was thinking about the rain. As he turned he saw the dust spout up, greeting the drops splashing down. On the lake Suky saw a shining patch, the shape of a door, smooth on the rippling surface.

It was as if a door were floating there, opening into the depths below. The door between this world and the next, the door to the rest of her life. Years later, as Rose looks up from her microscope, she’ll see something like that door and will hear the sentence, always the same, which confines her mother’s death: Walking along a lakeshore road, she was struck by a speeding tourist and killed instantly.

Those are the words, always those words. Behind them lie all she’s forgotten. A noise Rose didn’t hear and then a moment she couldn’t name: the moment when Suky disappeared. Theo, stuck in his well of grief, was no help afterward, and although Peter showed up briefly, and alone, for Suky’s funeral, Rose was blind to him and clung to Bianca. Their differences mattered less then than their shared loss, and they drew together and closed out everyone else.

Into a trunk — a smaller version of Suky’s closet; even Rose could see that she closed the lid exactly as she’d sealed that door — went the hand lens, the stolen library book, and the mysterious stew of feelings she’d once had for her parents’ cherished friend.

When Rose and Peter met again, Rose was draped over a pair of chairs in the Detroit airport, looking over some notes for a talk and drinking coffee from a cardboard cup. She was waiting for her friend Signe to arrive from Oslo, so that they could share a rental car. This was a kindness on her part; they were both headed for the same enzymology meeting, and she knew Signe would be too exhausted to drive. Rose was in one of her airport trances. Her home near Boston left behind, the meeting and the prize she was to receive for her research still in the future; the air stale, the day still young, her thirty-first birthday a week away. Legs looped over the arms of one chair, feet braced against another, she was wondering if she’d reached the age when she could no longer sit like this, like a teenager, in public places. Then a hand touched her shoulder. She looked up and there was Peter Kotov.