Begin Waking Maya

Maya would look back on the morning she buried Livingston as the day the invisible world first reached out and touched her.

She stood in the backyard, her gaze drawn to the Doc Martens shoebox resting on the grass. How could this have happened? But such things did happen. They happened to restless, adventurous cats who bounded out of homes built too close to busy streets.

Only hours earlier, Maya had spotted him on the road’s shoulder, just as she was settling into the front porch rocker with her morning coffee in hand. She had approached him with dread, squinting her eyes to slits, hoping to blur beyond recognition what was clearly, undeniably in front of her. When she fully understood, she ran into the house and returned with a towel. Still averting her gaze, she wrapped his body and carried him inside.

She set him down on the kitchen floor and sat beside him. A fragment of a memory drifted into her mind, something she’d once read: Don't rush the grieving process. Open fully to it.

She rested her hand on Livingston’s still form and let the sadness envelop her. She wept. A minute, an hour, an eternity passed. Finally, the flow of tears slowed and then stopped.

It was only after she carried the shoebox out to the backyard that the strange thing happened. It began with the way she decided to bury him, which was very un-Maya-like. She would not choose a spot. She would not try to figure it out. She would ask. She would request guidance—from the universe. The out-there. The mystery. The whatever it was.

“Please,” she said aloud. It was her first prayer.

She walked the grounds slowly and deliberately, listening within, hoping to sense a direction, an inspiration. Do this.

Then it happened. When she reached the far end of the yard where the grass met the woods, she felt a small tug at her shoulder. She turned, but no one was there. Then came another tug. Unnerved as she was, she sensed a distinct urge. Her attention was being pulled to a patch of lawn near the big oak tree.

Now, the hole was almost deep enough. Looking into it, Maya was surprised to feel a mild sense of excitement, of all things. Why? It was wrong. It made no sense. It had to be simple biology: the endorphin rush of physical exertion, a phenomenon she knew well.

But in truth, it was a welcome, if momentary, break from the free-floating stress she had been feeling, a spiraling anxiety and depression that had subsumed her for weeks.

It had started four months ago, when she moved back into her mother’s house after graduating from Towson. She still remembered the group text that had come in from Dani—a photo of six of them on a rooftop in Lisbon, wine glasses raised, the Tagus glittering behind them. Wish you were here! Maya had typed back a heart, set down the phone, and sat for a long time in the dark of her childhood bedroom, listening to Muriel laugh at something downstairs. Everyone was somewhere. She was here. Drifting. Languishing. She had earned a degree alright. But a piece of paper didn’t do anything.

She struck the blade down hard and proceeded to thrust it in again and again, lifting out one mound of dirt after another, which she tossed onto the growing pile. At one point, she glanced warily out toward the street. It was unavoidable, the hypervigilance. It happened all on its own. If her mother’s Lexus pulled into the driveway now, well, things could get interesting. Maya could practically hear Muriel’s voice as she would rage at the awful gash in her precious lawn. Do you know how much I pay the gardener? Unbelievable! What do you think you’re doing?

That would be tough to take right now. But Muriel probably wouldn’t be home this early. She was working again at her real estate job, gracing home buyers with her phony enthusiasm and over-the-top spiels, which went on almost every day right up until Happy Hour. After that, it was often a different, darker story.

Maya wiped her brow. It was sopping wet. She sighed, feeling the heat of the sun warming her face. She tied her hair into a ponytail with the scrunchie on her wrist. The autumn day was actually pleasant, and despite everything, she had to admit that.

She took up the shovel again and stomped her boot down on the blade, sinking its tip into the hole.

Clink.

What was this? She tapped around with the tip, probing.

Clink.

She crouched down, seeing a glimmer sparkling at the bottom. She brushed the loose dirt away with her hand to reveal a flat metal surface. Using her fingers, she scraped a trench around it, reached down, and lifted a metal box out of the ground.

Maya stared at it, dumbstruck. Treasure? She set the box on the grass in front of her. It was about the size of one of Grandpa Burke’s cigar boxes, with engraved images spread over its lid: the sun, the moon, and many small stars. Without wasting another moment, she took hold of the clasp and lifted it.

A leather journal lay inside. She ran her fingers over it. Its cover felt cold, and yet there was a strange warmth to it. She took a deep inhale, and holding her breath, prepared herself for discovery.

“Oh, my god,” she said, staring at the first page. “This is impossible.”

There it was—the answer to a riddle that had plagued Maya for most of her life. Written on the worn, yellowed page was a single sentence that reached forward from the past as if to grab her and shake her violently.

At the bottom, he’d written “Ben Ambrose.” Maya stared long and hard at these words. His name, in his writing. Tenuously, she began to turn pages, realizing that she was holding in her hands his story, starting from around the time of her birth. What had happened, why he left.

Memories flooded in, unwelcome and unbidden, and as had happened so often, she was pulled into the current. The old unfulfilled desires surged: the hoping, the yearning, the wanting, and ultimately, the disappointment. Her mother would not speak of him. Not a word, not ever.

As a little girl, Maya had searched the house for clues many times: a page with his name on it, a wallet, a baseball glove, anything. But she had found nothing. Until one fateful day.

It was a photograph pressed into the pages of an old map book stored in the crawl space under the first-floor stairs. A man’s eyes beckoned. Maya rushed to show the prize to her mother. Muriel stared at it, her face wracked. And without uttering a single word, she slid the photo into her purse, stood up and walked away.

Maya would never see that photograph again. And yet, the memory lived on in her: Muriel and, yes, Ben, sitting on a bench, the tall buildings of a city rising up behind them.

Maya fell back into the grass, hugging the slender volume tightly. She would consume it. She would revel in it. She would read each line ten times. She would read between the lines.

She sat up and glanced over at the bench-style swing on the far lawn, feeling drawn to it. She loved that old swing. She would sit on it and read her father’s journal and learn the answers she so desperately wanted.

But not quite yet. There was another matter to confront first. A sad, terrible one. She picked up the shoebox that held Livingston and was jolted back to reality by the weight—nine pounds that had never been so still—and again, her tears flowed. Maya was no stranger to overwhelm. It was in her nature. But at least at this moment she knew the reason why, which was not always the case. Livingston had been eleven, exactly half her age.

She placed the box down at the bottom of the grave, then glanced over at the other box on the grass. One out of the earth, one into it. Was life like that—an even exchange through a revolving door?

“Goodbye, my love,” she said, as she picked up the shovel and began to return the soil to the earth, listening as it slapped onto the box and covered it over.

Maya settled in on the swing and pushed off, as the rusted iron frame creaked in gentle protest. She opened the journal, immediately struck by the handwriting, which resembled her own: a wandering, unwieldy blend of cursive and printed letters melded into somewhat horizontal lines. Had Ben Ambrose had as difficult a history around penmanship as Maya Burke? If so, that was interesting.

As a child, Maya could not write a single sentence from start to finish without all sorts of interference creeping in, as if her brain and hand weren’t synced up. There were times she pressed the pen so hard into the page that it punched right through it. Her fourth-grade teacher, the prune-faced Mrs. Booth, once said, “Maya, your papers look like relief maps.” Maya had to look that up. She had been doing her best, and with little help from anyone.

Now, for the first time, she viewed her labored penmanship not as a liability, but an inevitability. An inheritance—from a father. Her father. She began to read.

Maya stopped there, her heart racing. His words, to me. She grabbed hold of one of the swing’s support poles, seeking comfort in its solidity.

He was right, of course. This place had once been a farm. Maya remembered those years well: summer afternoons spent ranging over the fields in search of Indian arrowheads; dashing through the tall grasses with the neighborhood kids, playing Capture the Flag; or simply walking quietly and feeling at peace. At dusk, she would sit at her bedroom window and watch the sun set over the hills as the day started to go dim and then dark.

After Grandpa Burke passed away, ownership of the property went to her mother, who promptly sold most of the land to a housing developer. So what if the farm had been in the family for generations? Muriel couldn’t care less. It was prime real estate in the beautiful woodlands of northern Baltimore County, highly valuable.

In time, all the neighboring farms were sold, and Plainfield gradually became a suburb, its rural origins sliding into the forgotten past. Muriel had the farmhouse demolished and a modern home built in its place. It was “upscale.” It was a “bulletproof investment.” To Maya, it was a soulless tract mansion, cold and efficient, the thief of a beloved past—of little value in the way that she saw value, which had more to do with the essence of things.

One artifact remained from the old days: a small section of picket fence that stood near the woods, weathered like old driftwood. Maya had once asked Muriel about it but all she received was a frosty stare. Maya imagined her father looking at it from this very swing as he considered what to write in his journal.

She read a few passages in which he expressed his guilt about leaving her. She had feelings about that, feelings she would set aside for the moment. Then his tone changed.

Maya stopped reading and closed the journal. She was breathing hard. Once again, the anxiety switch in her had been flipped. She reached her leg out and touched her boot to the ground to stop the swing.

She considered what he’d written. He was wrong. No great change had occurred in the years since he penned those words. No “storm” had struck. One could say the world was ever-changing and dizzily in flux, but it was pretty much the same world from day to day.

Why would he write such things? Who was this man? Was this how he wanted to introduce himself to his daughter? As, well, a little crazy?

But her curiosity had been piqued. She wanted to make sense of what he’d written. It was him, after all. She pushed off and started up the swing again, hoping for an idea.

Soon, one came. She smiled. He was right! Some of what he’d written was real, for hadn’t one of his predictions just been proven correct? I found your journal. He had buried it in that spot expecting her to do just that.

But how could that be?

She sat for a moment with the journal open in her lap, aware—dimly, the way you sense weather changing before you see it—that something had shifted. The ground under her ordinary, disappointing life had cracked, and through the crack came a thin light. She didn’t have words for it yet. She only knew that the girl who had walked into the backyard that morning to bury her cat was not quite the same person sitting here now.

She was startled from her reverie by the honk of a car horn. The journal almost fell from her hands. Josh’s Mustang was idling in the driveway. He waved to her from the front seat.

Maya looked down at the journal and then over at Josh, desperately wanting to tell him to go away so she could take in more of this miracle, this record not only of her father’s life but probably hers, too. But then she recalled how insistent Josh had been about going out.

She set the journal back in its box, took hold of it, and jumped down from the swing.

“Be right back!” she called out, heading for the house.

In her room, she slid the metal box under her bed, sending the dust balls down there skittering like tiny tumbleweeds across the hardwood floor.

Standing at the bathroom sink, Maya scrubbed the dirt smudges and tear stains from her cheeks. She brushed her long auburn hair, pleased to be looking at a reflection of a young woman who had kept her tan through the Indian summer, a woman who was about to make sense of her life.

She put on her jean jacket and started for the door but stopped, bent down, and peered under the bed.

“Later, Dad,” she said, noting the strange feel of that word on her lips.