THE CARTOGRAPHY OF VANISHING MOTHERS

The first map came four days after the funeral, into a house that had turned everything else away: the casseroles left on the step until the butter soured, the cards she pushed unopened to the back of a drawer, the neighbor who knocked and waited and finally went home. She found it on the kitchen table when she came in from the yard, squared to the table's edge as though someone had just set down the pencil and walked into the next room. It was the heavy paper her mother had always bought, cream, faintly ribbed, clean on three sides and torn along the fourth.

Across the top, in that small upright hand: MAP OF THE TOWN THAT FORGOT ITS CHILDREN.

When Daughter was six her mother had drawn her maps to things worth finding. A map to the creek. A map to the Petersons' apple tree, the good climbing one. A map of their own backyard with the loose board in the fence marked by a small star, so she would always know the way out and the way back. She had saved none of them. She spread this one flat and ran the side of her hand along the crease.

The streets bent where no streets bent. Houses leaned into each other at angles no roof would sit on. A lane ran to the edge of a field and stopped, and in the white of the field her mother had written: I stayed in this town years past the year I had anything left to give it.

She stood with both palms on the paper for a long time and did not move.

The second map was in her coat pocket the next morning, folded to a square the size of a playing card. MAP OF THE SELF I COULD NOT CHOOSE. Here her mother had drawn their house twice, one drawing over the other, ink beneath and pencil above, so the two rooflines crossed like a double exposure. The market square was drawn as it was in summer, stalls and awnings, and drawn again shuttered and gray, both at once, on the same streets. At the bottom, pressed so hard the pencil had almost torn through: There was a version of me you never met. I kept her behind a door I painted to match the wall.

Daughter sat down on the kitchen floor with the map in her lap and did not get up for a while.

They kept coming. Not in the mail. In a coat, a boot, the flour tin, the space behind the bathroom mirror. Each one titled in the same defiant capitals.

MAP OF THE NAME I NEVER USED.

MAP OF THE DOOR I CLOSED WHILE YOU SLEPT.

MAP OF THE ROOM WHERE I SET DOWN WHAT I HAD BEEN CARRYING.

MAP OF THE DAUGHTER I WAS AFRAID TO IMAGINE.

On the first of these, small along the border, so faint she had to tilt it to the window: I called you Daughter because it was the only name I trusted not to outlive you.

She began to pin them to the wall above the sideboard, the way her mother had once pinned recipes and school photographs, except these she did not arrange to be looked at. She arranged them to be read against each other. She stood in front of them at night in her mother's old cardigan, moving one map beside another, holding the creek up next to the shut market, trying to find where the roads met. They did not meet. Her mother had never once drawn a straight road.

Some mornings the maps had shifted. A street that had run east now ran toward the center. A border had gone soft and let two fields bleed together. She told herself she had misremembered. She stopped telling herself that the morning she watched a line finish drawing itself across MAP OF THE ROOM WHERE I SET DOWN WHAT I HAD BEEN CARRYING, slow, uneven, a hand behind it she could not see.

"What are you trying to tell me," she said to the wall. The house held its breath and gave her nothing back.

The journal was in the bread drawer, though she had opened the bread drawer that same morning and it had not been there. She did not startle anymore. The house had bent too many rules for her to argue with this one. She sat at the table where the first map had come and opened it.

I left long before you noticed I was gone. The body is patient. It will stand at a stove for years after the rest of you has walked out the back.

And later, the pen pressed harder:

A mother is three women. The one who lived through it. The one she performed at the school gate and the supper table. And the one she buried in the yard so the child would have somewhere soft to grow. You grew up on the grave. You thought it was a garden.

And near the end, the hand gone loose and low on the page:

Once I turned back. I stood outside your door and watched your shadow cross the curtain, and I could not lift my hand to knock. I told myself I was letting you sleep.

She held the journal against her chest with both arms, the way she had carried it home from the hospital, the way, she supposed, she had once been carried.

The last map was inside the lining of her mother's winter boot, worked in through a seam that had been opened and stitched shut again. It had no title. Only a black square in the center, inked over and over until the paper shone. On the back, two lines:

This is where I stepped out of my own life.

Come, if you want the truth instead of the story I left you.

The wall of maps moved. Not in a wind; there was no wind. The edges lifted and turned and the papers drew apart from the center like a curtain crossing a rail, and where the sideboard had been there was a low doorway into a room she had never stood in, though she had lived in that house her whole life. The room had the light of very early morning, before color. She went through.

Her mother sat at a small table, hands folded, in the plain posture Daughter had spent years mistaking for coldness. She looked no different. That was the hardest part. Daughter's hands rose on their own toward what could not be there.

Her mother did not rise to meet them.

"You came." The voice was quieter than she remembered, and less certain, a voice from before Daughter was born.

"You left." She meant to say more. The word used up all the breath she had.

"I got to the end of what I was," her mother said. "There wasn't any more floor."

Daughter crossed the room and reached for her hand, and her fingers went through it and closed on nothing, on cold table, on air.

"Not to be held," her mother said. "I'm sorry. I'm here to be read." She touched the map on the table between them, the one map still unfamiliar, a single narrow corridor drawn in a hand that shook. "I walked out of myself a long way back. It took me years more to walk toward you. You were the reason it took so long, and you were the reason I did it at all."

"Why didn't you tell me."

"Because you needed the one who could raise you." She paused, and for a moment she was not pronouncing anything, only remembering. "You had a fever the winter you were four. I sat up three nights. On the third I understood I would rather be the woman who sat up than the woman I actually was, and I decided, right there, to be her for as long as you needed her. I meant it to be a few years."

"I would have loved you anyway. Whatever you were."

"I know." Her edges had begun to give, the outline going uncertain against the gray. "You would have carried me. You were a child. I could not hand a child that weight and call it love."

"Don't go," Daughter said, and it came out the size it had been when she was small and had said it at doorways, on platforms, at the foot of the stairs.

"I have been going for years. You only get the truth once there's no one left to save." Her mother was less a shape now than a place where a shape had been. "Finish the map."

Then, so faint it might have been the room and not her: "Start it wherever your own feet are."

Daughter was on the floor of her own kitchen. The wall above the sideboard was bare, the pinholes still in the plaster. In her lap lay a sheet of the cream paper, torn on the fourth side, empty except for the title across the top in her mother's capitals.

MAP OF THE PLACE I BEGIN.

The rest of it was blank. On the table where the first map had come, her mother's pencil lay squared to the edge, sharpened, as if just set down. Daughter looked at the empty paper for a long time. Then she reached up, took the pencil, and set its point to the middle of the sheet, where there was not yet any road, and where she would have to draw the first one herself before she could know where it went.