The Long Drive North

Nan was twenty-nine and she was early. That figured. Seven years of library work had trained her to be early for everything, even for a drive she didn't want to take.

She pulled her Corolla into the Shell station off Route 16 and cut the engine. Leaves were already turning at the edges of the lot. Early autumn in New Hampshire. Pretty, in a way that felt like an ending.

Stewart was supposed to meet her at ten. It was 9:41 and he wasn't there, and she sat with her hands on the wheel and wondered, not for the first time, why she'd said yes.

Because he'd sounded wrecked on the phone. That was why.

A gray pickup swung in at 9:52. Stewart got out and she got out and they stood there in the cold gas-station air like two people at a reunion neither had signed up for. He was thirty now, tall as ever, with the same crooked grin and a cardboard box hugged against his chest.

"That's him?" she asked. "In the box?"

"In the box." He set it on the tailgate, gentle, like it might complain. "Dad weighed about as much as a bag of dog food at the end. He'd have hated that. He'd have wanted to be weighed in tons."

"Hi to you too," Nan said.

He laughed and came around and hugged her, one arm, quick. He smelled like pine soap and coffee. "Hi, Nan. Thanks for doing this. Seriously. You didn't have to."

"Sure I did. You'd have driven up there weeping and driven into a ravine."

"Fair. I cry at map exhibits."

That was the old rhythm, right there. Ten seconds in and they were already rolling. They'd met in grad school in Vermont, both studying geography, seven years ago now. She'd married somebody else at twenty-six and divorced at twenty-eight, and Stewart had gone off to make maps for the park service and she'd gone off to shelve books, and now here they were at a Shell station with a dead man in a box.

"You want coffee before we go?" she asked.

"I want to get moving before I chicken out." He loaded the box into her back seat, belted it in, actually belted it in, and she almost cried right there in the parking lot.

---

They drove north. He navigated, obviously, because he was Stewart. He had a paper map on his lap, an actual paper map, folded into quarters like some kind of pilgrim.

"You know my phone has GPS," she said.

"Your phone has a picture of a map. This is a map." He held it up like evidence. "There's a difference."

"God, you're still insufferable!"

"And yet you're driving me to the mountains."

She was. That was the part she couldn't explain.

They talked the whole way, easy, the way they used to in the computer lab while their professors droned. Old professors, old field trips, the time she'd mislabeled an entire watershed on her final project and he'd covered for her. She'd forgotten that. She'd forgotten how easy it was.

At a rest stop near Twin Mountain she went to the bathroom and came back and he had the map spread across the hood of her car, weighting the corners with rocks like an explorer.

"Come look," he said. "I drew the route in red."

She leaned over the map. His handwriting hadn't changed. Small, precise, obsessive. The route ran up through the notch and ended at a ranger station with a little triangle beside it, and near the triangle he'd drawn a tiny X.

"What's the X?" she asked.

He went quiet. Then he tapped it. "Time capsule. Dad and Mom buried one up there. Before she got sick. Way before. I found the receipt for the box in his papers after he died, and a hand-drawn map of where they put it. He was a mapmaker's mapmaker, my dad. He drew the location so nobody could ever lose it."

"So the X is on the itinerary?"

"The X is on the itinerary." He looked at her, and his eyes were doing something complicated. "I figured I'd dig it up while I'm there. Then scatter the ashes. Then drive home and have a normal life again, theoretically."

She put her hand on the map, next to his. She didn't plan that. It just happened. "Okay," she said. "New plan. We do all of it."

The motel in Twin Mountain cost sixty-one dollars and had two rooms, which they'd agreed on in advance, and Nan lay on her bed at nine o'clock staring at a water stain on the ceiling that resembled Portugal.

They'd eaten at a diner down the road. Boiled dinners and terrible pie. Somewhere between the pie and the bill she'd told him about the dates. Three of them since the divorce. A dentist. A guy who sold kayaks. A man her sister swore was charming.

"None of them felt right," she'd said, and then immediately regretted saying it.

Stewart had nodded and not pried, which was so like him it hurt. Instead he'd told her about his father, who'd surveyed half of New Matheson and kept every field notebook he'd ever filled, forty years of them in the attic.

"He used to say a map is just love written down in numbers," Stewart said. "I thought that was sentimental garbage when I was twenty. Now I don't."

Now, on the motel bed, she thought about that line and didn't sleep.

At breakfast there was the jealousy thing. She hadn't expected it. He'd mentioned, casually, a woman he'd dated a couple years back. A ranger. Renee. She'd loved hiking, he said. She'd done the whole Presidential Range in a day once.

Nan felt it in her chest, this ugly hot little pinch, and hated herself for it.

"Sounds great," she said, way too bright. "Hiking. Love that."

Stewart looked at her over his eggs like he was doing math. Then he let it go. "She hated road trips, actually," he said. "Wouldn't drive more than an hour for anything."

"Huh," said Nan. "Weird."

"Right? Who does that?"

She smiled into her toast and felt like a fraud and didn't care.

---

The overlook was at the top of a gravel road he'd marked on his map, a pull-off above a valley full of turning trees. Red, orange, that one ridiculous yellow. The whole valley looked like it was on fire in the politest possible way.

"Okay," Stewart said. He got out and stretched and then, instead of admiring the view, he walked past it, into the trees, following his father's hand-drawn map like scripture. She followed him. Forty yards in, behind a split granite boulder, he stopped.

"Here," he said. "This is it."

He'd brought a folding camp shovel. He dug for ten minutes. Nan dug for ten more. Roots, rocks, swearing. Then the shovel clanged on metal and they both went still.

They pulled it up together. A metal ammo-style box, rusted at the corners, the latch fused with dirt and years. Nan got a car key from her purse and worked it into the seam and they pried and the lid shrieked open.

Inside: photographs. A roll of undeveloped film in a canister. A plastic biscuit from a restaurant neither of them could identify. And an envelope with writing on it, faded ballpoint, his father's handwriting, half legible.

Stewart held the letter without opening it for a long minute. His hands were shaking.

"Want me to give you a second?" Nan asked.

"No!" He swallowed. "Stay. Please!"

He opened it. He read it silently first, lips