The Map of True Places

Zee wanted to take the train back to Salem, but it was past midnight, and the trains had stopped running. She thought about sleeping on the beach. It was a warm night. It would have been safe. But she didn’t want to concern her father, who had enough to worry about these days. And she didn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity of Manchester when they found the stolen boat.

So she ended up hitchhiking back to Salem. Not a smart thing to do, she thought as she walked to the Chevy Nova that had stopped about fifty feet ahead of her and was frantically backing up.

It was a woman who picked her up, probably mid-forties, slightly overweight, with long hair and blue eyes that glowed with the light of passing cars. At first the woman said she was only going as far as Beverly. But then she changed her mind and decided to take Zee all the way home, because if she didn’t she was afraid that Zee would start hitchhiking again and might be picked up by a murderer or a rapist.

As they rode down Route 127, the woman told Zee every horror story she had ever heard about hitchhiking and then made Zee give her word never to do it again. Zee promised, just to shut her up.

“That’s what all the kids say, but they do it anyway,” the woman said.

Zee wanted to tell her that she never hitched, that she wasn’t the victim type, and that she had only thumbed a ride tonight to cover a crime she’d committed—grand theft boato. But she didn’t know what other cautionary tales such a confession might unleash, so she kept her mouth shut.

As she was getting out of the car, Zee turned back to the woman. Instead of saying thank you, she said, in a voice that was straight out of a Saturday-morning cartoon show she’d watched when she was a little girl, “Will you be my mommy?”

She had meant it as a joke. But the woman broke down. She just started crying and wouldn’t stop.

Zee told the woman that she was kidding. She had her own mother, she said, even though it wasn’t true, not anymore.

Nothing she could say would stop the woman’s tears, and so finally she said what she should have said all along: “Thank you for the ride.”

Of course Zee hadn’t given the woman her real address—she didn’t want her getting any ideas, like maybe going into the house and having a word with Finch. She had planned to hide in the shadows until the woman drove away and then cut through the neighboring yards to get home. But in the end she just walked straight down the road. The woman was crying too hard to notice where Zee went or how she got there.

Ten years later, as Zee was training to become a psychotherapist (having outgrown the middle name Trouble), she saw the woman again in one of the panic groups run by her mentor, Dr. Liz Mattei. The woman didn’t remember her, but Zee would have known her anywhere—those same translucent blue eyes, still teary. The woman had lost a child, a teenager and a runaway, she said. Her daughter had been diagnosed as bipolar, like Zee’s mother, Maureen, but had refused to keep taking lithium because it made her fat. She’d been last seen hitchhiking on Route 95, heading south, holding a hand-lettered sign that read new york.

It was the winter of 2001 and ten years since the woman had lost her daughter. The Twin Towers had recently come down. The panic group had grown in size, but its original members had become oddly more calm and helpful to each other, as if their free-floating anxiety had finally taken form, and the rest of the country had begun to feel the kind of terror they’d felt every day for years. For the first time Zee could remember, people in the group actually looked at each other. And when the woman talked about her daughter, as she had every week they’d been meeting, the group finally heard her.

The world can change, just like that! the woman said.

In the blink of an eye, someone answered.

Tissues were passed. And the group cried together for the first time, crying for the girl and for her inevitable loss of innocence and, of course, for their own.

Bipolar disorder had recently become a catchall diagnosis. While it had once been believed that the condition occurred after the onset of puberty (as it had with this woman’s daughter), now children were being diagnosed as early as three years of age. Zee didn’t know what she thought about that. As with many things lately, she was of two minds about it. She hadn’t realized her joke until Mattei pointed it out, thinking it was intentional. No, Zee had told her. She was serious. Certainly it was a disease that needed treatment. Untreated bipolar disorder seldom led to anything but devastation. But medicating too early seemed wrong, something more in line with insurance and drug-company agendas than with the kind of help Zee had trained for years to provide.

The world-famous Dr. Mattei had long since abandoned her panic group, leaving them for Zee or one of the other psychologists to oversee. Mattei had moved on to her latest bestselling-book idea, which proposed the theory that the daughter will always live out the unfulfilled dreams of the mother. Even if she doesn’t know what those dreams are, even if those dreams have never been expressed, this will happen, according to Mattei, with alarming regularity. It wasn’t a new idea. But it was Mattei’s theory that this was more likely to happen if those dreams were never expressed, in much the same way that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Zee had often wondered about the woman with the translucent eyes who came back to the panic group only once after that evening. She wondered about her unfulfilled dreams, expressed or unexpressed, and she wondered if there was something that the daughter was acting out for her mother as she herself had stood on Route 95 and accepted a ride from a stranger heading south.

Zee was glad that the woman had left the group before Mattei had brought up her latest theory. The mother blamed herself enough for her daughter’s disappearance, wondering every day if she might have changed the course of events if only she’d given her daughter that one elusive thing she’d failed to provide—something tangible and even ordinary, perhaps, like that red dress in Filene’s window. Or the week away at Girl Scout camp that her daughter had begged for years ago.

No one understood the concept of “if only” better than Zee. She lived it every day, though she didn’t have to search to find the elusive thing. She thought she knew what her mother had wanted that day so many years ago, what might have helped lift her out of her depression. It was a book of Yeats’s poetry given to Maureen by Finch on their wedding day, and it was one of her mother’s treasures. Zee’s “if only” had worked in reverse. If only she hadn’t gotten her mother what she wanted that day, if only she hadn’t left her alone, Zee might have been able to save her.

Part 1: May 2008 (#ulink_6c3d87f7-f4c7-593f-8da7-f2919df5a26f)

Method of Keeping a Ship’s Reckoning . . .

A ship’s reckoning is that account, by which it can be known at any time where the ship is, and on what course or courses she must steer to gain her port.

NATHANIEL BOWDITCH: The American Practical Navigator

Chapter 1 (#ulink_b01904f5-6c64-5734-864d-2120b2779344)

Lilly Braedon was late.

Mattei poked her head through Zee’s door. “It’s so damned hot out there,” she said. “Oh, God, you’re not in session, are you?”

“I’m supposed to be,” Zee said, looking at the clock. It was three-fifteen.

Mattei was re-dressing as she spoke, kicking off running shoes and pulling on her suit jacket. She walked five miles along the Charles River every afternoon, weather notwithstanding. When she was overbooked, which was a good deal of the time, she had been known to conduct her sessions while strolling along the river, calling it a walking meditation, telling patients it would be easier to open up if they didn’t feel her prying eyes on them. A week after she started conducting sessions that way, every shrink in Boston was out walking with patients.

“God, not that agoraphobic again.” It was another of Mattei’s jokes. Fifty percent of their patients had some degree of agoraphobia, a phenomenon that made attendance poor at best and had lately prompted Mattei to start charging time and a half for missed appointments, though Zee seldom required her patients to comply with this new rule.

Mattei was trying harder than usual to make her laugh today, meaning that Zee must be frowning again. Zee’s natural expression seemed to be the type of frown that inspired joke telling, often from total strangers, who always felt compelled to make her feel better somehow. Just this morning an older gentleman who had neglected to pick up his dog’s poop in Louisburg Square had walked over to her and ordered her to smile.

She stared at him.

“Things can’t be all that bad,” he said.

If he hadn’t been older than her father, Zee would have told him to get lost, that this was her natural expression, and that a man who didn’t pick up his dog’s excrement shouldn’t be allowed to roam free. But instead she managed a vague smirk.

“So seriously, which patient?” Mattei was waiting for an answer.

“Lilly Braedon.”

“Mrs. Perfect,” she said. “Oh, no, I forgot, that’s you.”

“Not yet,” Zee said a little too quickly.

“Aha!” Mattei said. “Simple, simple. Case closed. That will be three hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Funny,” Zee said as Mattei gathered up her running shoes and left the room.

It was Lilly Braedon’s husband who had originally sought help at Dr. Mattei’s clinic. People came from all over the world to be treated by her. Harvard trained, with a stint at Johns Hopkins, Mattei was a psychiatrist who had great credentials. She’d written the definitive article on bipolar disorder with panic for the American Journal of Psychiatry. She had also worked closely with a team of genetic researchers who had uncovered a correlation between the disease and the eighteenth chromosome, a substantial and groundbreaking discovery.

But then Mattei’s career took a turn. She became fascinated by a more popular approach to psychiatry. The book she wrote during her tenth year in practice, a folksy self-help book entitled Safe at Home, lifted her to celebrity status. The book was inspired by a Red Sox second-stringer she had successfully treated for panic. Her practical solutions to his terror were based on biofeedback, desensitization, and sense memory.

“The world is a terrifying place,” Mattei explained first to a local newscaster and later to Oprah. “And here is what you can do to stop being afraid.” The book was filled with sensory tricks, tips almost too simple to inspire much credibility: carry a worry stone, smell lavender, breathe deeply. The companion CD featured guided meditations, some with music, some including nature sounds or poetry. It even quoted the old Irish prayer (the one that basically tells you not to worry about a damned thing because the worst thing that can happen is that you’ll go to hell, but that’s where all your friends will be anyway, so it’s pointless to fret). Though Mattei herself was a loose fusion of French, Italian, and Japanese ancestry, with not a bit of Irish blood, for some reason she loved everything about the Irish. It might have been a Boston thing. She loved James Joyce and even swore she had read and understood Finnegans Wake, which Zee seriously doubted. That Mattei loved Guinness and U2, Zee did not doubt. Zee and her fiancé, Michael, had spent last St. Paddy’s Day at a bar in Southie with Mattei and her partner, Rhonda, and Mattei had held her own, drinking with the best of Boston’s Irish. And just a month ago, Mattei had come back from one of her therapy walks sporting a pair of pink Armani sunglasses that looked very similar to a pair Zee had once seen Bono wear.

Mattei had done the usual book-tour circuit. But it was when she landed on Oprah that things went wild. There was a growing sense of panic in this country, Mattei explained to Oprah. It was everywhere. Since 9/11, certainly. And the economy? Terrifying. “Do you know the number one fear of women?” she had asked. “Becoming homeless,” she said. She went on to explain that the number one fear of the general population is public speaking. Many people say they’d rather die than get up in front of a group to give a presentation. After she reeled off such statistics, Mattei turned and spoke directly to the camera. “What are you really afraid of?” she asked America. It became a challenge that echoed through the popular culture. She closed the show with a paraphrased quote from Albert Einstein. The only real question you have to ask yourself is whether or not the universe is a friendly place, she explained, then went on to translate into terms anyone could understand. Once you’ve decided that, Mattei said, you can pretty much determine what your future will hold.

Her book hit the top of the New York Times Best Seller list and stayed there for sixty-two weeks. As Mattei’s fame grew, her patient list expanded exponentially, and she brought in interns to mentor, though her real work was still with bipolars.

“Did you know that eighty percent of poets are bipolar?” Mattei asked Zee one morning.

“My mother wasn’t a poet. She wrote children’s books,” Zee said.

“Nevertheless . . .” Mattei replied.

“Nevertheless” was probably the best thing Zee had ever learned from Mattei. It was a word, certainly, but much more than a word, it was a concept. “Nevertheless” was what you said when you were not going to budge, whether expressing an opinion or an intention. It was a statement, not a question, and the only word in the English language to which it was pointless to respond. If you wanted to end a conversation or an argument, “nevertheless” was your word.