The Glass Sentence (The Mapmakers Trilogy) by S. E. Grove Read Free Book Online

been born in the United Indies, and it seemed doubtful they would be able to stay in New Occident. Sophia wrote to express her worry and to say how hard Shadrack had fought to prevent the measure that might now send all of Dorothy’s family into exile.
    With a sigh, Sophia folded the letter, placed it in an envelope, and took out her drawing book. She always drew at the end of the day; it allowed her to record the hours that would otherwise, all too easily, slip away unnoticed. As images and words those hours became real, tangible, visible.
    Years earlier, she had taken a trip with Shadrack to Vermont, and, as they were happening, the days seem to evaporate before her eyes until they lasted no more than minutes.
    Upon their return home, Shadrack had given her a notebook with calendar pages as a way of helping her keep track of time. “Memory is a tricky thing, Sophia,” he had said to her. “It doesn’t just recall the past, it
makes
the past. If you remember our trip as a few minutes, it will
be
a few minutes. If you make it something else, it will be something else.” Sophia had found this idea strange, but the more she used the notebook, the more she realized that Shadrack was right. Since Sophia thought most clearly through pictures, she had placed images in the calendar squares to make careful records of her explorations through the year, whether they required leaving Boston or sitting quietly in her room. And incredibly, time became ordered, reliable, constant.
    Now she had no need for calendar pages; she had her own method for reining in those slippery hours, minutes, and seconds. She had even devised her own manner of binding the paper, so that her notebook unfolded like an accordion and she was able to see the continuous passage of time in a clear, notched line like a ruler along one side of the page. At the margin she dutifully marked the time and recorded the happenings of the day. She filled the center of the page with the day’s images, thoughts, and quotes from people and books. Often she dipped backward or forward to amend how things had happened or speculate how they might happen.
    Perhaps due to Shadrack’s influence or perhaps due to her own natural inclinations, she had realized that her sketches and recordings were actually maps: maps to guide her through the shapeless time that would otherwise stretch boundlessly into her past and future. Straight lines formed the borders of her observations, and dashed lines linked the borders to memories and wishes. Her thoughts connected to them with hatched lines, marking her mental travels, so that Sophia always knew not only what had happened when, but what she had been thinking at the time.
    Using a soft pencil and the tips of her fingers, she began drawing June fourteenth. She found herself sketching the absurd, detestable mustache of Rupert Middles and quickly drew a firm line around him, boxing him off in disgust.
Not that,
she said to herself, trying to put the whole dreadful morning out of her mind. She began again. Soon she realized she was drawing the boy from the circus. It was difficult to capture the expression on his face that had so impressed her: his dark, intent gaze; his careless smile. “He was almost laughing,” she murmured. She glanced down at her notebook.
That’s not what he looked like,
she thought.
    She turned the page to start over and then slowly began turning pages in the opposite direction, back to a drawing she had made on the last day of school.
    A woman of middle age with laugh lines and short, wavy hair gazed fondly out at Sophia; a tall man with an impish smile and a bit of a stoop stood protectively behind her. Sophia had drawn her parents many times. She tried to imagine them as they would be now, older and a little heavier; over time the drawings had grown more detailed and vivid.
But I will never really draw them if I never see them again,
she thought. She closed her notebook and put it in the drawer with a sigh of