The Upstairs Ocean

Juno told her class that she had spent the holiday on an island. She had meant to say she wished she had. But everyone else was describing journeys, and the island slipped out before she could stop it. By lunchtime it had a harbor, a lighthouse, and a boat with red sails.

The following week their teacher asked everyone to bring a map of somewhere they had been. Juno carried a blank sheet home to the top-floor flat where she had spent the whole holiday helping Grandfather sort buttons for his repair shop.

From their window she could see chimneys and a blue water tank. She drew the tank as an island. The chimneys became lighthouses. The harbor looked convincing until she tried to mark where she had slept. She put down her pencil.

Grandfather asked why the map had no people. Juno said she did not know how to draw them. He sat beside her and showed her a little harbor he remembered. He had carried crates there as a boy, before coming to the city. His harbor smelled of rope and oranges. She had never thought to ask him about it.

Mrs. Chen came upstairs to collect a repaired coat. Her remembered sea had fishing boats with lamps that made the water look full of stars. She added three tiny lights beside Grandfather's harbor. The lift engineer remembered a gray ferry disappearing into fog. Juno drew it a loud horn, which he said was exactly right.

By evening the map covered half the kitchen table. It held cliffs, piers, warm shallows, a broken arcade machine, and the place where a neighbor had lost a shoe. Juno liked the shoe best because it was something nobody would invent to impress a class.

On Monday she took the map to school. Before unfolding it, she told her teacher that she had not gone to an island. Saying it made her face hot. One child asked why she had lied.

“I wanted somewhere to have been,” she said.

The teacher asked about the map. Juno explained Grandfather's oranges, Mrs. Chen's fishing lights, and the shoe. Soon the other children were pointing to empty spaces and offering things their own families remembered. The boy who had asked about the lie wanted to draw a beach his mother missed.

They pinned the map beside the window. Juno wrote a title at the top: Places We Have Heard About. Beneath it she added the address of her flat.

That evening she asked Grandfather whether they could visit the sea one day. He said they could save for the train. Until then, she gave his harbor a road leading inland, all the way to their upstairs room.