I know now that Mrs. Maggie had Alzheimer’s disease. Her husband Tom really had been a pilot. He flew a commercial jetliner all over the eastern United States, and this caused him to spend a great deal of time away from home. After he retired, he and Mrs. Maggie kept mostly to themselves, but every time my mom would run into one or both of them, the conversation would inevitably focus on the trips they wanted to take — if they could only find the time. Tom had discounts with the airline he had retired from, but as is so often the case, their plans were always for “someday,” and that day kept getting moved further down the line.
On the evening of July 4, years before I was born, Tom came to my mom’s house. He was distressed, though he tried to conceal it as he casually asked my mother if she had seen Maggie. He said that she had gone out for some chicken so that he could grill it for the holiday, but that had been almost six hours ago. My mom hadn’t seen her, but said she would contact Tom immediately if she saw her or heard anything.
The police brought Mrs. Maggie home about five hours after that. She had wandered from the grocery store and walked to an apartment that she and Tom had shared thirty years before when Tom was just starting his job at the airline. When the police arrived at the apartment, Mrs. Maggie insisted that she lived there with her husband, but when they read aloud the address that was printed on her driver’s license, she regained her clarity and covered her embarrassment with nervous laughter.
She wasn’t hurt when the police brought her home, but Tom was destroyed. He would tell my mom some time later that he had known for a long while that something was wrong with Maggie, but he had hoped that she would just get better somehow.
A few days after the police brought his wife home, Tom told my mother that he was planning on taking his wife to Rome — it had been a dream of hers since she was a young girl. Maggie had a collection of books about Rome and Italy at large that were all dog-eared on the pages with the places that she wanted to see. He said that pushing it back was simply not an option anymore; the doctors had told him that the windows of her lucidity would likely grow smaller as time pressed on. Tom began to cry and stammer as he touched his own head and said that he needed to take her now, while she was still here. He wanted her to be there, in the place of her dreams, while she still had a chance of knowing where she was.
He wanted her to remember.
They were old now, but he thought that they might still do some hiking, and to prepare, he began to exercise by walking around the neighborhood with Maggie. Physically, Maggie was in much better shape than Tom, so he had a lot of ground to cover if he wanted to keep up with her in Rome. He kept the trip a secret from her because he wanted to surprise her, and he justified the new exercise regimen by telling her that the fresh air and exercise would be good for them. They were getting on a plane in one month.
Tom was worried that he wouldn’t be in good enough shape by the time they made it to Rome, so after Maggie went to bed, or before she woke up, he would leave the house and go on extra walks. My mom would see him almost every night when she sat outside on the porch. He would walk briskly through the cool night air, and as he passed our house, she would wave to him, and he would wave back and then bring the hand down to his lips with his index finger extended and pointing straight up, as if to say, “It’s our little secret.”
One night, about two weeks before the trip, my mom was sitting outside on the porch and saw, for the first time, Tom jogging. His posture wasn’t professional, but he was really moving. She waved to him, but he either didn’t see her or was too tired to wave back, because he kept jogging right by the house. She went back inside and went to bed for the night.
About an hour later, a knock on the front door jerked my mother out of sleep. She cracked the door enough to see through to the outside and saw a badge. It was a police officer. Behind him, the sky was filled with blue and red flashing lights that were so bright she had to shield her eyes as if the lights were the sun itself. Her first thought was that Maggie had gone missing again, and she was about to ask if that was the case when the officer spoke and then gestured toward her lawn. She squinted and let her eyes adjust just enough to break her heart.
Tom had collapsed and died fifty yards from his home, right in front of ours.
He had no identification, and so my mother pointed them toward Mrs. Maggie’s house and offered to go over there with them, but they declined. She explained Maggie’s condition, and they assured her that everything would be fine. My mom took one last look at Tom and went back inside.
Mrs. Maggie never found out about the trip her husband was planning for her; she knew he had died because his heart failed him while he was running, but she never knew that he was running for her.
Tom and Mrs. Maggie had had two sons: Chris and John. After Tom’s death, Mrs. Maggie’s condition continued to deteriorate. Her sons had apparently worked out payment plans with the utility companies and paid for Mrs. Maggie’s water and electricity, but they would never visit her. I don’t know if something happened between them, or if it was the illness, or if they just lived too far away, but they never came around. I have no idea what they looked like, but there were times when Mrs. Maggie must have thought that Josh and I looked like they did when they were children. Or maybe she just saw what some part of her mind so desperately wanted her to see, ignoring the images transmitted down her optic nerve, and just for a little while, showing her what used to be. I realize only now how lonely she must have been, and I find myself hoping that she understood why my friend and I never accepted her invitations.
But Josh and I were always friendly with her — extending our stay in the lake sometimes to keep her company and talk with her. The day Josh and I had our second discussion with Mrs. Maggie about the Balloon Project — and she retold the same joke about Tom’s plane carrying our balloons away — just a few weeks before the year ended, an idea began to form between us after she mentioned that the lake might extend for hundreds of miles.
We had seen much of the woods surrounding my house, and we had explored the woods surrounding his; although we had never confirmed it ourselves, Josh had found out from his dad that the patches of trees that we played in near our houses were actually connected. When we learned of this, we were extremely excited — not for any particular reason — but knowing that we had been playing in the same woods the whole time, despite whether we were at my house or his, seemed to bring our houses even closer together. But there was still the matter of the lake and its tributary.
Mrs. Maggie had said that the lake’s appendage might stretch on for hundreds of miles.
Since the woods were connected, Josh and I thought, despite Mrs. Maggie’s speculation, the lake near my house might somehow connect to the creek around his, so we resolved ourselves to find out. For the last few weekends of kindergarten, our explorations intensified. When our summer vacation started, we would scout during the week and sell snow cones on the weekend. But it quickly became difficult to answer our own question. We needed a way to chart our progress. We needed a way to determine where we had been and where we were going. But we didn’t have anything like that, so we had to make it ourselves.
We were going to make maps.
The plan was to make two separate maps and then combine them. We would make one map exploring the area around the creek near Josh’s house, and make another following the outflow from my lake. Originally, we were going to make one map, but we realized that wasn’t possible since I had started drawing the map of my area so huge that the route from his house wouldn’t have fit. We didn’t know anything about map-making, but we knew from our lessons with the map in the Community group that it was important to use the same scale consistently. This didn’t involve any math — following our teacher’s explanation of how maps were made, we would just put a little dot on the map for every few steps that we’d take.