A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [57]
That evening, after adding a few more sentences to the sheet of paper on the desk, Sylvia worked on the map of the route to the lighthouse, an occupation that she hoped would both soothe her and permit her partly to overlook the fact that Andrew’s journals—his thoughts, his memories, his imaginings—were no longer close at hand. Jerome might even now be reading the words, the way she had read them night after night while Malcolm slept and rain or snow fell through the ochre path cast into the yard by the kitchen light. When she returned to bed those early mornings just before dawn, she would close her eyes and envision a world made up of islands, a world dependent on flotation. Andrew had written that on each island there had been a spot called Signal Point and that when significant messages needed to be sent quickly down the lake or up the river a fire would be lit on the shore of one island after another, a sort of telegraph of flame. Marriages and deaths were often announced this way, particularly during late fall and early spring, times when the ice was too dangerous for navigation yet not strong enough to support a horse.
There had been no such fires lit for her. The answer to the final question, the source of her grief, had been presented to her in an impersonal way on a flimsy sheet of newsprint destined for the recycling box.
“It presents in a very odd way,” Malcolm had often said, referring to some disease or another, and she remembered thinking that diseases were almost always in the present, in the now, unless they were cured, or unless they were in remission waiting to recur. Her own incurable love had been like that; it had shocked her with its insistence on the present, and with its persistence, how it had presented itself, and continued—along with the grief—to present itself to her each morning when she woke. It had always been and continued to be one of her few connections to the present tense.
When she was busy with a map, however, she fully entered the landscape she was translating to touch, was able to see in her mind the rough edges of the road, the grass growing in the centre, potholes here and there, sumac bending just beyond the verge. She cut a piece of pine veneer, now, into three octagonal shapes, each slightly smaller than the last, and pasted them one atop the other in a spot near the lake where the lighthouse would be situated, then knowing that Julia would want to walk beside the water, she decided that she must find some way to let her friend know that the beach was filled with small, smooth stones.
Landscapes are unreliable, Sylvia thought, as she rummaged through her fabric bag, looking for something to define stoniness. Landscapes are subject to change. But shorelines are even less stable, shorelines are constantly changing.
When designing a map, there was always the problem of the periphery. A person blind from birth is one dependent on intimacy, Sylvia had thought, the reach of one arm defining for them the extent of the known world. When she spoke about this to Julia, however, her friend had disagreed, had reminded Sylvia that she could identify and name distant sounds and could smell things—animals, various crops, a wind that has passed over the Great Lake, the approach of a storm—from very far away. Sitting in a kitchen she knew when the apples were ripe in an orchard that would not have been visible from that kitchen. So what does a location mean to you, Sylvia had asked, how much of a place do you want to know?
“More than you,” Julia had replied, “I want to know it all. I want much, much more than you can possibly fit on a map. Just give me the centre and I will move out from there, in the spirit if not in the flesh. Soon I’ll know all of the County by heart.”
Thinking of this, Sylvia put on her