Maine (20 page)

Alice wiped them on a pink bath towel hanging from the doorknob.

“Be quiet and close your eyes,” she said harshly.

She thought of how she had never really liked children, though her friends always said positively everyone fell in love with their own once they had them. She felt as though her body was full of something bigger than itself, pushing against every inch of her, trying to get out. She wanted to say that she was here by some strange accident, that in reality she should be in a Paris apartment right now, painting in solitude.

She wanted to scream, but instead she inhaled deeply and said a quick prayer.

She tried to lighten her voice: “That’s it, darling. You don’t want the soap to get in, now do you?”

Maggie

Maggie got out of bed and went to the cupboard. It was almost ten thirty at night. She’d probably be up until dawn now.

She looked at her cell phone and checked her e-mail, but Gabe had made no contact. It had been eight hours since she left his door. Maggie wished he were here.

She also wished that she had been born the sort of person who lost her appetite when in crisis. She pulled a box of macaroni and cheese from the top shelf and set a pot of water on the stove to boil.

You’re eating for two
, she thought, to make herself feel better, though this made her want to start crying all over again. She went and sat down on the couch, turned on the television.
Grease
was on. It seemed like
Grease
was always on. Did
Grease
have its own channel?

Maggie realized that it might really be over. Preposterous how many times she had said that to herself, a sign that it
should
be over, probably. But the thought of that made her feel ill; each of them going on, living a full life without the other. Or staying together, but without this child. What if that was his final answer: Work on the relationship, but no baby? She couldn’t imagine what she’d do.

In college, she had taken the bus to Toledo with a roommate who needed an abortion. Monica Randolph was only nineteen and she had gotten pregnant after an ill-advised drunken hookup with a friend.

She told Maggie this in a whisper after they had turned out the lights one night. In the darkness, Maggie couldn’t make out the girl’s face, and she was reminded of confession—stepping into the booth, telling your deepest sins to a priest who was usually a stranger to you.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned
. The act of it had frightened her as a young girl.

At her first penance at age seven, Maggie had grown so terrified that she blanked on her prepared list of sins (she stole some of Chris’s Halloween candy, she talked back to her mother). And so she defaulted to reciting the Ten Commandments, assuming she must have violated most of those: “I coveted my neighbor’s possessions,” she said slowly to the priest, who was no doubt bored out of his skull at hearing the deepest sins of fifty second-graders in one night. “I didn’t honor my mother and father. I committed adultery.”

On the other side of the screen, Father Nick jumped up in his seat. “You
what
?”

Now in her dorm room, which seemed a million miles from there, Maggie switched on the light and said, “Oh, Monica, I’m so sorry. What do you want to do?”

Monica was lying under a floral bedspread in a
She-Ra: Princess of Power
T-shirt and a pair of cotton underpants. She looked about ten years old.

“Well, I can’t keep it,” she said.

“No,” Maggie agreed.

“I made an appointment at a clinic in Toledo for Saturday,” Monica said. “I was wondering if you would come with me.”

Maggie said she would.

“And please don’t mention it to anyone,” Monica said.

“Of course.”

She didn’t think much about the thing itself, only that she and Monica weren’t really all that close. Monica was on the soccer team and had plenty of friends. But maybe, Maggie reasoned, she had asked her precisely because they weren’t so invested in each other.

On the ride to Toledo, they ate fast food. They talked about the latest gossip from their dorm, and about their families back home. It was at this point that Monica said, “I hope you don’t think I’m going to Hell or something.”

Maggie was confused. “For what?”

Monica pointed awkwardly at her stomach, then gestured around to the rest of the bus. “You’re Catholic, right?”

Non-Catholics Maggie had met at Kenyon seemed to think that all Catholics spent 90 percent of their time decrying abortion, when in fact no one in her family had ever so much as mentioned the word. She assumed her grandparents and Aunt Ann Marie and Uncle Pat were staunchly pro-life. She wondered then what her mother thought of it—Kathleen was progressive for a Kelleher, but even she had retained some of her childhood beliefs, and it sometimes surprised Maggie to find out which ones lingered on.

“I think you’re doing the best thing,” Maggie said.

“Maybe I should wait and think it over some more,” Monica said. Then, “Well, no. It’s not going to be that bad, right?”

“Right,” Maggie said. “I’ll be with you. Don’t worry.”

“It’s not like we’re going to put a crib in our dorm room,” Monica said.

“Only maybe as a place to store beer bottles,” Maggie said, trying to sound light.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Monica said. “You’re really good at taking care of people; I’ve noticed that about you.”

“Thanks,” Maggie said.

They lived together for another six months, but they never discussed Monica’s abortion except once, during a weeklong pro-choice demonstration, when people hung hundreds of coat hangers from the trees in the freshman quad, with personal stories attached.

“I can’t bear to look at them,” Monica said. “I know what they’re trying to say, but it’s just too raw.”

The following year she moved off campus. They never really talked again.

   A few minutes earlier, Maggie had feared that she’d be up all night. Now she sat on the couch while John Travolta sang “Grease Lighting” in the background, and felt as though she hadn’t slept in days. She got back into bed. Was this a pregnancy thing or a depression thing? Possibly both.

Before she drifted off to sleep, she thought of how, if life had turned out differently, Monica would have a thirteen-year-old child today, instead of living with her boyfriend and four cocker spaniels in San Francisco, performing in a bluegrass band, as Maggie had read about her in the alumni magazine.

She wondered if she had given the girl the right advice, but back then at Kenyon, an abortion had seemed like a reasonable step for dealing with an unfortunate situation.

Now that she herself was in the same position, it seemed less obvious. She was older, that was part of it. She wasn’t some college kid who couldn’t afford a child, couldn’t somehow figure it out. But she also wasn’t ready, the way she thought a mother ought to be: married, stable, living in more than two rooms.

You’re Catholic, right?
Monica had asked all those years ago, and Maggie had shrugged the comment off. But maybe that was part of it too. She wasn’t religious in any formal way, but she still felt Catholicism coming through her pores so many years later. She still wanted terribly to be good, even if no one was watching. Out of habit, she prayed to Saint Anthony when she lost something, or said a Hail Mary whenever she heard an ambulance siren outside her apartment window. She didn’t go to church on Ash Wednesday anymore, but when she saw ashes on the foreheads of strangers in the street, she would realize with a start that Lent was coming and decide to give something up, just for the heck of it. No sugar, gossip, or snooping for forty days.

Maggie had been baptized as an infant, and she had made her First Communion. There were presents, mostly of a religious nature, and a few checks and twenty-dollar bills as well. There was a chocolate cake with rich buttercream frosting and pink sugar flowers in the shape of a cross. It was one of those nights when all the adults—her parents, Aunt Clare (not yet married then), Uncle Patrick and Aunt Ann Marie, and all the neighbors—got drunk and sang Irish songs, almost forgetting that the children existed, so that she and her cousin Patty got to stay up until midnight eating cake and honeyed ham with their fingers, playing Barbies on the sunporch.

As a kid, Maggie had been forced to go to church most Sundays, but after the divorce, after AA and an all-out war on tradition on her mother’s part, they never went anymore, except maybe on Christmas and Easter with her grandparents. The Catholic Church, like the family itself, was a strange blend of resentments and confusion and contradictions and love and comfort to her, even now. She was an atheist, and yet the one or two times a year she went to Mass, a familiar song would begin to play and she would find herself singing, caught up in its beauty:
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, Have mercy on us, grant us peace
.

The previous Christmas, her cousin Patty’s kids had brought the gifts up to the altar, the crystal goblet of wine shaking in poor Foster’s hands. Maggie had a vague memory of being in that exact position at her great-grandmother’s funeral, the feeling of all eyes on you, and what sort of terrible fate might befall you if you spilled Jesus’ blood on your good white shoes.

When the priest blessed the bread and wine, half the congregants genuflected, including Kathleen and Maggie and the other Kellehers. The rest of them stood, and Alice whispered in a superior tone, “Those people don’t go to church.”

The family knew her to be lapsed, but that night Maggie had felt moved to take Communion, and so she followed her cousins to the altar, remembering precisely how to cup her hands, removing the host from the palm of the right with the fingers of the left, instinctively performing the sign of the cross before she headed back to her seat, and then feeling a bit silly about it. She could only imagine what Ann Marie must be thinking.

Later, she remembered why she had stopped taking Communion in the first place—when she was twelve, she had asked her mother why she didn’t rise for Communion like everyone else, and Kathleen had explained that divorcées were forbidden from doing so. After that, Maggie had stayed seated next to her mother in the pew on holidays, in a defiant show of solidarity.

   It was pouring when she woke up around seven the next morning. Rain came through the window screens and puddled under the radiators. Somewhere outside, something was burning—tires, maybe. The smell made her stomach turn.

“Great,” Maggie said out loud.

She looked instinctively at her cell phone. He still hadn’t called. But there was a missed call from the house in Maine. Her grandmother hadn’t left a message, never did. When Alice and Daniel had gotten their first answering machine, sometime in the eighties, Daniel recorded the outgoing message, saying, “You’ve reached the Kellehers. Please leave your name, address, and phone number at the tone.”

Everyone made fun of him, and he changed it to a simpler greeting, which was even funnier, because after he said, in his most professional voice, “You’ve reached Daniel and Alice; please leave a message,” there was the fainter sound of him saying nervously, “Was that good? Okay,” before the beep sounded. Alice had never changed the message, and it was sad and somewhat sweet to hear his voice whenever Maggie called her grandmother all these years after his death.

She closed the windows. Outside, people in suits rushed toward the High Street subway stop, a sea of black umbrellas. It was a Monday, and all of New York was heading into work, everyone but her.

Maggie went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She felt dried out, husklike, from all the crying. And then, like a shove from behind, she saw it: the burner she had lit the night before for her macaroni, still on. The pot of water she had set there was now empty and burning all along the bottom. Black metal flakes dusted the stovetop. That smell, the tires.

Childishly, she let herself imagine him receiving the news:
“She died in a fire a few hours after leaving your place, Gabe. She was carrying your baby.” He’d crumble to the ground, screaming, “No, no!” He’d never love again
.

She took a pot holder from a hook on the wall and put the pan in the sink to cool off. She pushed the just-closed windows open and let the rain come in.

Smoke detector needs batteries
, she thought.
Brain needs transplant
.

She retrieved
The New York Times
from its spot on her doormat and slipped it out of its blue plastic wrapping. Maggie sat on the couch and glanced at the front page: the CIA had sent an innocent man to Morocco to be tortured; a thirteen-year-old girl in Brownsville had been killed the night before, the victim of a stray gang member’s bullet, while she was eating cake on the front stoop, celebrating her mother’s college graduation.

What right did Maggie have to feel like shit about her own life when people were being extradited by the government for no good reason, and a child innocently eating cake in a party dress could be killed only a few miles from here? But still, she felt sorry for herself. She had just (
narrowly? No, not really
) escaped death. She missed Gabe. Right now she should be waking up in his bed, going to the market on East Eighth Street for snacks they could take along on the ride. She should be walking through the rain in her vacation bubble, impervious to weather and gang violence and bad hair, umbrella be damned.

She knew it was wrong to think one’s own problems were the most dire in the world, but that didn’t stop her from feeling like it anyway. She was pregnant and alone. She wasn’t sure she could do this.

Her phone rang. She reached for it, but it was just her friend Allegra. Maggie let it ring through.

The last time she and Gabe had had a big fight, Allegra had told her to leave him.

“Come on,” she had said. “You can’t tell me that deep down this really feels right, can you? I went through the same shit with Mike. And believe me, now with Jeff, it’s like—when it’s right, it’s right.”

Maggie hated when people said that, as if ultimate rightness between two human beings were as easy to recognize as a plastic thermometer popping up from out of a turkey’s bottom: perfect temperature achieved, you have now completed your mission, go forth and live in bliss. She was slightly suspicious that such certainty happened only to fairly simple people, nonthinkers.

Allegra was the last person she wanted to speak to right now.

Her stomach felt as though it were expanding outward, moving up toward her chest. She went into the bathroom and threw up.

Between the hours of eight and ten, Maggie took a shower, paid her cell phone and cable bills online, and scrubbed her already clean kitchen cabinets, all in the interest of keeping her hands in constant motion so she wouldn’t call Gabe. There was only one thing she could say to get his attention now, before he had had a chance to cool off, and she needed to be sure of him before she broke the news, if they stood any chance at all.