Maps of Canada
One cool-but-not-cold day in October, a man and a woman open a practice in a brownstone on Olny Street in Ghent. A place where tired people can tell their stories, and others only listen. After months of planning and decorating they finally prop the doors, and the smell of warm bread tumbles onto the sidewalk.
A tall woman in a long batik skirt and especially-high espadrilles enters. Tentatively, at first. But after tearing off a chunk of a baguette and spreading it thick with butter, she sits and tells her story. The one about her younger sister who died in a skating accident on a lake in Canada when she was only nine. How her sister’s aging ghost stands just outside of her window at night but nobody else can see it. She knows her sister’s ghost only wants to tell her something, but the ghost terrifies her. The woman hasn’t slept in years.
So the friends lead her to the guest bedroom. They promise her that the ghost cannot find her there, and they are right. She falls asleep the very moment they turn off the bedside lamp.
A mousy woman walks into the practice, also in a batik skirt, but she cannot eat bread. They offer her freshly cut mangos, a gluten-free cookie the size of your head, and the purple velvet chair beside the big stone fireplace, where a hard-wood fire crackles when it feels forgotten. They bring her warm cocoa with cinnamon and ask her to tell her story.
But the damage is already done. She traces the scar on her neck, then leaves. In a huff. There is nothing I can tell you, she says on her way out. You could not hear it.
So the friends close their doors and declare the whole thing a terrible mistake.
The very next year, on the first cold morning in November, two friends open a store in downtown Norfolk. It never closes, and carries just the necessities.
They had been planning for a long time, but delayed opening two full weeks — until the maps of Canada arrived. The first shipment had been lost or something, but the postal service could not explain it. So after a week, they just ordered replacements. Had them shipped UPS.
When the maps finally arrive, the friends unpack them, place nine in a little rack next to the cash register, then put the extras in the back, next to the superglue and windproof matches and Dr. Pepper and linen sacks of brown sugar and the catch-and-release mouse traps.
In the window, they hang a sign that they drew themselves on white butcher paper with blue and green Sharpies. It reads:
Maps of Canada
The woman adds a maple leaf with the blue pen, but the man thinks it’s overkill, and tells her she’s terrible at drawing things. She does not mind. They trust one another.
They open the door for the first time just as a boy in worn-out Doc Martins — who came from from Toronto as a baby — walks past the shop. The man recognizes him from the Presbyterian church they all attend, where the boy sits quietly with his older sister every Sunday.
The man asks the boy to come in. Points at the sign. We have maps, he says. The ones you’re looking for.
But the boy is wearing headphones. He cannot hear the man, and he never looks up from the sidewalk. He just keeps walking.
Well, damn, the friends say in unison, but so quietly that neither hears the other.
Once before the snow came to New York, two friends talked in an outdoor stairwell with Leonard Cohen playing on the woman’s bluetooth speaker. Anthem. Aside from Leonard Cohen, they were alone and drank whiskey from crystal glasses until the street lights were eclipsed by the morning sun. The woman finally went to sleep, but the man stayed awake, writing down the dreams she painted.
The woman painted in broad strokes, in the colors of the desert and the city. But also in oceans and forests. She was terrible with the details, but he was not terrible.
There was the dream about Banff. She had always wanted to go, and he promised her they would go one year. Before it got too cold to sleep outside. He carefully filled in her dream-gaps, describing how they would divide the gear between their backpacks. In his, the tent and the down
quilts and the pads and the stove. In hers, just the necessities; the water filter and dehydrated food and windproof matches.
He wrote about the clean-shaven park ranger who would issue them the backcountry permit, but not until he finished his story.
The ranger paused when he got to the moment his brother was taken from him, but finally pushed through to the December morning when he sat alone in his living room, watching The Price is Right. The ranger’s eyes moistened as he described the tiny mouse that told him it was time to make a change, then ran across the wooden floor and into a tiny crack where the dirty baseboard had begun to pull away from the blue-green wall. The very next month, the ranger told them, he left his teaching job and moved here. To the mountains.
Only then did the ranger sign their permit with a fountain pen, and hand them a trail map.
He warned them not to get lost in the wilderness.
The next night it snowed, and the stairwell was so cold. But they had whiskey. And Leonard Cohen. And the man read aloud to the woman. She watched him twirl his hair around his pinky when he got to the part about the park ranger.
When he finished she asked softly, What, specifically, did the mouse tell him? I think you already know, he replied.
That very night, she began to paint the practice. In Norfolk, maybe. Where tired people can tell their stories, and others only listen.
