Essential Maps for the Lost by Deb Caletti Page B

help you?” It’s the very first thing she says to William Youngwolf Floyd, which is funny when she thinks about it later.
    Well, it’s funny to him right then. His face twists up, and Mads wrongly thinks he’s about to cry. Anna Youngwolf Floyd’s son stands near the bridge where she jumped, and he is now going to burst into tears. It’s what Mads expects, to see the way he’s wrecked. But then he starts to laugh. He’s laughing so hard. He shakes his head as if he can’t believe himself and tears roll down his face, all right, the kind from the shock of the ridiculous. He wipes them away with the back of the hand still clutching the leashes. The biggest dog flops down and causes earth tremors in Central America as the boy gasps and tries to speak.
    Mads doesn’t know what’s right in front of her. He is a laughing mess of tears, and she is a stunned mess of confusion. Two strangers gaze upon each other’s real and fucked-up selves. Somewhere in the universe, a couple of stars collide. They aren’t fancy stars, or even ones with names. Just regular old stars. Two of millions. Still, just like that, some of the best things begin.

Chapter Six
    â€œI thought . . . ,” he sputters. Jesus, he needs water, bad. His stomach hurts from laughing so hard, and from twisting something on that last step. Shit, maybe it’s his back.
    He doesn’t know the last time he’s laughed like that. Maybe the day Alex went with him to Gran’s to pick up her old TV. Alex misjudged the corner of the houseboat dock and fell right in the water. It was hilarious, and Alex was pissed . He was dripping wet, but Billy just stood there pointing at him and cracking up. That was, what, last year?
    But, wow, talk about a first impression. Way to go. Great job. He’s even holding a plastic bag of dog shit, which he attempts to hide behind his leg.
    â€œYou thought . . .” She’s trying to help him. Her eyes are kind, though when he ran toward her, they were squinched and her nose was squinched, too, like she was trying to see better. But, yeah, it’s the same girl, all right. He’d recognize that shiny hair anywhere.
    â€œForget it,” he says.
    â€œForget it?” She shifts the baby to her other hip. Wait. Baby? He takes in the baby for the first time. She—it’s a she, he can tell from the pink shirt with the cat face on it, the ears in quilted yellow—hides her face in the girl’s shoulder and then peeks at him. She holds a clump of the girl’s hair and then brings it to her mouth and sucks on the ends.
    â€œI thought you were someone I knew.” The lie comes right up, nice and handy and fully formed. Probably thanks to that coffee he had back at the Rescue Center. Maybe that’s all this was. A java-fueled hallucination.
    â€œOh.”
    â€œIs that your baby?” he asks, as if he has a right to know. He hopes J.T. Jones hasn’t spawned a kid.
    â€œWe were just going for a ride! I was bringing her right back.”
    â€œHey, I’m not the baby police. I was just wondering.”
    â€œOkay, sure. Of course,” she says. “I babysit her. I thought we’d get out of the house for a while, you know? It’s a beautiful day, we were cooped up. . . .” She has brown eyes, but not just brown. Oh, man. He loves soulful eyes like that. “It’s complicated.”
    â€œI like complications.”
    It’s a line from The Book. Jamie says it to Claudia before they run away to New York to stay in the museum. Billy pictures this going differently—tossing off the phrase like they do in the movies, quoting some line from a classic film, or a famous poem. It’d be kind of smooth. But of course, she doesn’t know The Book! Probably no one in the world knows it like he does! She turns her eyebrows down. Not in a scowl, exactly, but confused. Shit, it sounds