The atlas glowed under the lamplight. Samuel was seated at the small table, his arms crossed, his head resting on his hands, his eyes traveling between Boston and West Cornwall. The lamp sprayed soft orange light over the white pages, causing them to flare and shimmer like sand dunes in the desert. The pages were curved just a little at the spine and the blue of the water between England and America seemed to swell with dark promise. Was his mother on a ship right now sailing that ocean back home to him? He’d had such hopes before and been left feeling foolish—wasn’t the tiny wooden tugboat sitting statically in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean proof of his stupidity? He looked at the red yarn tethered to the boat and followed its tail, snaking back to the web of pins marking all the places his mother had visited. Wanting a thing had no power to summon it.
The boy’s throat hurt a great deal but the bleeding had nearly stopped. His mouth still tasted bitter and sickly but the worst of the headache had passed. He’d taken a bath just like Ruth told him to. She came in with the tea and took up a sponge, scrubbing the bile from his face and neck. She talked the whole time, which wasn’t usually her way, about every little thing—how much shortbread and cake she hoped to sell at the market on Saturday, about the exorbitant cost of good cheese and what William should do in the garden next (the hedge along the front fence). Every now and then she would stop and ask Samuel if he was all right and he would always tell her that he was.
“You’re not saying much of anything,” Ruth had said.
Samuel would just shrug. “I’m tired.”
“Well, that’s to be expected.”
After the bath, Samuel had gone down to the kitchen to get himself a glass of milk. Ruth claimed that, second only to her honey tea, it was just the thing for his throat. So the boy had taken her advice. Well, that was his story, anyway. Really, he wanted to make sure Ruth was occupied cooking the pork pie for dinner so he could steal away. By then the sun had all but fallen, and when he’d walked into his mother’s study, the bay window practically sang to him. So that’s where he went, standing there, watching the dusk light up behind the trees in the back garden, a mottled wound of red and purple. It was hard not to miss her the most then.
They would think you were a very sick boy, because a healthy mind wouldn’t harbor such dark thoughts. Ruth’s words nested inside of him. You would be taken from this house and put in a hospital and you might never come back. Was his mind troubled? He’d never considered the possibility. He didn’t always think terrible thoughts, but lately, Samuel couldn’t pretend he hadn’t imagined the very worst things.
He wanted to have a healthy mind; he wanted to be like any other boy. What would his mother think if she came home and he was in a hospital for children who had gone mad? He knew she would find that a great burden. She would think he was disordered, afflicted in the worst way, and she might never want him near her again. The risk was very real and he couldn’t pretend otherwise.
Samuel felt the pull of the atlas and what was hidden there. He had sat down at the desk, his eyes level with the map, and gazed longingly at the pins marking his mother’s travels. Had he gone mad? And if he had, how could a madman know for certain?
Ruth said he had horrible thoughts about ghastly things. True enough. When he caught her going through his mother’s drawer, he hadn’t wanted to believe that she was really looking for her lost clover pin. He’d thought it was proof she had done something awful. His mind wanted him to think that. And, just that afternoon, hadn’t he had dark thoughts about that piece of glass? Didn’t it occur to him, right after Ruth said the jug had broken, that perhaps she’d put the piece of glass in the cake on purpose? His mind wanted him to doubt her, to recall how angry she was when he mentioned her pa and after what Mrs. Collins had said about the dead bodies piled up in the cellar. To wonder if this was her way of punishing him. Or even killing him. And to remember that moment when Ruth had hesitated, just for a second, after she saw him choking.
These were all terrible thoughts, hinting at something tangled and rotten. Dr. Wolfe would know there was something wrong with him just by looking at him, that’s what Ruth said. Samuel knew he had to stop thinking bad things. His mother was in America, but just like Ruth said, she would soon be home. Nothing was wrong. He had her postcards, the ones where she said how much she was missing him. Wasn’t that proof enough?
Though she might be hundreds of miles away, Samuel warmed to the idea that in a way she was closer than that. For a part of her was hidden in the pages of the atlas. He hadn’t wanted to finish her letter because she had written that she didn’t want Samuel to visit her while she was resting up in Bath. Samuel’s sickly mind wanted him to think that this meant something awful, that it meant she didn’t want him near her. But if he could summon the courage to revisit the letter he was sure it would show that his mother loved him very much, and if she hadn’t wanted him to visit her, well, there must have been a very good reason. So the boy peeled back the pages of the atlas, careful not to disturb the pins and yarn, and pulled out the envelope wedged between a map of the Antarctic.
He held the envelope and listened for any sound of footsteps. All was silent. Samuel pulled out the letter and went straight to the second page, his eyes swimming across the opulent scrawl until he found what he was looking for.
When you write and tell me how much Samuel misses me and how he cries for me, it only makes things worse. If you only knew how wretched I feel when he is clinging to me and calling for me over and over. I feel as if I cannot breathe, my darling. I feel as if I am being pulled under the waves and that I am so far down not even you can reach me.
Samuel stopped and his eyes flew back to where he had started. He read the sentences again, trying his best to understand them. He wasn’t sure what the waves had to do with anything but he felt confident the rest of it was well within his grasp. His mother wanted so much to be there for him that sometimes it took the breath right from out of her. Yes, that’s what it was. Her love for him was so great it sometimes made her feel as if she were sinking.
That was why she did not want Samuel to visit her. Because she knew that seeing him would excite her so and wear her out, which is not smart when you are supposed to be resting. With a faint smile, Samuel turned the page and read on.
There are days when it is all I can do not to run away. Please don’t think me a monster but sometimes I actually plan it out in my head—where I would go and what my life would be like. It’s not that I don’t love our life together; it is just that all around us are problems.
Married life is not all bliss. Please don’t think that I expect it to be.
All I ask is that you allow me to be a part of things. I know you wish to keep our financial strife to yourself—you are trying to protect me from our troubles—but have you ever thought that I might be able to help?
It seems that the only role you have in mind for me is the one I am not suited for. You have a better way with him than I ever could—it seems so natural and so easy between the two of you that I sometimes resent you both for it. Can you understand, my darling? I do so want to love
Samuel pinched his fingers to turn the page. But page three didn’t give way to the next, for there was no next page. He went through the letter again. Page one, page two, page three. He felt each page carefully—perhaps page four was stuck behind one of the other sheets. It wasn’t. The boy reread the last paragraph, a frown carved like a scar between his eyes, and after a while the words became a blur and it was hard to make any sense of them.
He didn’t understand, not in any way that felt good; he just knew that his mother was unhappy. And that the next page of that letter was very important. What was she trying to say? Was she writing about him? Samuel’s wicked mind began to play with him again but he did his best to chase the thoughts away.
She loved him. She loved him best of all and he could prove it, too. All he needed was the rest of that letter. That would clear everything up, because she was certain to have written something special about him in closing—wasn’t that usually when the most tender feelings are put down on paper? The missing page was probably mixed up with the other letters in his mother’s bedroom. Samuel folded the letter and returned it to the Antarctic. Then he went to the desk drawer and pulled out the key.
“Samuel!” Ruth’s voice was like a bark in the night. “Where have you gotten to?”
“I’m in here,” Samuel called back. He listened for footsteps but heard none.
“Where’s here?”
“Mother’s study.”
“Whatever for?”
“Just looking at the atlas.”
“Well, your dinner’s ready, so hurry along.”
Samuel closed the drawer, slipped the key into his pocket and set off toward the kitchen.