Maine (43 page)

She had said it to make Kathleen smile, but her mother said flatly, “Sounds like a real catch.”

“Obviously I need to save my pennies,” Maggie said.

“Right. Unless you take me up on my offer and come to the farm.”

Maggie ignored the comment. “I think I’ll go next door to Grandma’s house, since it’s just sitting there empty.”

Kathleen didn’t answer. Instead she said, “You and I have always told each other everything.”

It was true. While Maggie knew that it wasn’t the healthiest way to be, it was the only way they had ever been, and she believed it came from a place of love.

“I know.”

“So how could you not tell me this?”

“I did tell you. You’re the first person I told, other than Gabe.”

Maggie decided to leave Rhiannon out of it.

“But how long have you known?”

“A month and a half.”

“Oh, Maggie. The thought of you having to keep it to yourself. I wish you had come out to California right away. I’d like to think that’s what you would have done in a situation like this. Not come here, to Maine, with all the family drama.”

Maggie felt a mix of frustration and pity. Before she could stop herself, she said, “Until yesterday, there really wasn’t much drama.”

“So it’s my fault.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“You know how proud I am of you, and how much I love you, no matter what,” Kathleen said. “Sometimes I wonder why you feel such a sense of loyalty to this family. None of these people give a crap about us. It makes me so sad to see you let down by them, over and over again. Just like I’ve always been. When I think of what Alice said to you yesterday—”

Maggie had forgotten her mother’s ability to turn every conversation about their extended family back to herself, and the ways in which she had been slighted by them. She had begun to make inroads with Alice and Ann Marie these past few weeks, and maybe it was stupid, but she felt happy about that. She knew her mother wanted the best for her. But she also knew this was one thing Kathleen could never let her have.

“No one’s letting me down,” Maggie said. She straightened up and lifted her computer bag off the table, carefully placing the strap on her shoulder. She muttered, “My boobs are killing me.”

Kathleen nodded. “Right on schedule. They’re getting bigger, too, you know.”

“They are?”

“Yeah. I thought you’d had implants for a second when I saw you yesterday.”

“Well, maybe that’s what I’ll tell people,” Maggie said. “I’ll be back.”

And with that, she carried her laptop next door.

Each time she had opened her e-mail for the past four days, she told herself not to read the message from Gabe. And each time, she read it anyway.

When it arrived in her in-box and she saw his name there, just reflexively she got goose bumps, as if they had been out on one magnificent date and she was waiting to see if he would call her again.

But by then, she was already certain about what was to come. She was going to raise this child on her own. It was scary and sometimes sad, but she could do it. Women did it all the time. In some vague way, she had always pictured herself as a single mother. Maybe just because she had grown up with one.

Mags, I’m sorry to have taken this long to reply. Ever since I read your e-mail, I’ve been thinking about you and the baby and what I should do. I even went out one afternoon and looked at engagement rings in a panic. I was literally sweating on the jewelry case. But if I’m being honest with us both, the simple fact is I can’t do this right now, at this point in my life. I don’t know what the future holds—maybe I’ll grow up one of these days. When you’re back in the city, let’s have coffee. I’m sorry. Love, Gabe

It was classic Gabe, exactly what she should have expected: Sorry I can’t be a man and a father to our child, but hey, let me buy you a latte.

Maggie understood why he couldn’t do it. Still, she felt like she was mourning the loss of something she had never had in the first place. In a different world, she might have been more trusting and he might have been trustworthy. She got that. But part of her missed him. She would never understand why logic couldn’t conquer something as simple and commonplace as love.

Maggie sat down in Alice’s kitchen now and decided not to turn on her computer just yet. She put in a call to the police department in a town called Tulip, Texas, where a bitter former prom queen had shot her cheating husband to death. It said a lot that this was a more soothing activity than going to breakfast with her mother.

“Can I speak to your press office please?” she said, fairly sure what the response would be.

“Our
what
?”

“Your press office. Public affairs?”

“Hold, please.”

The hold music began. A country singer belted out that if given the chance, she hoped someone (her child?) would dance. It was some smarmy shit, but even so, Maggie felt a tickle in her throat. She sighed. She could not stand herself when she got like this, too cozy with her sorrow.

For the last several weeks she had thought about the horrors of giving birth, and all the terrible things that could happen to a baby, and how she could ever afford this, and whether maybe Gabe might show up in the final act and rescue her, having become another man entirely. But now she feared something else. It was about the way Alice and Kathleen and Ann Marie had all fussed over her and what she would do next. Maggie was still a blank slate—childless, unmarried, and therefore yet to begin it. After this baby was born, she would never be that way again. She would cross to the other half of life, in which you yourself are no longer watched over, not in the same way. She couldn’t take to her bed whenever she felt like it or allow herself to completely self-destruct.

That’s what her own mother had done from time to time, and Alice as well, but Maggie couldn’t; she wouldn’t.

Sometimes she thought she would have been better off procreating at twenty-two than thirty-two. Back then, she had thought she wanted four or five kids someday. She was still young and dumb enough to think it possible. Maybe that’s how mothers like Ann Marie were made—they plunged headlong into the whole endeavor before they knew any better. They weren’t selfish or greedy with their time because as adults they had never spent several Saturdays in a row lying in bed watching Meg Ryan movies on cable. They had never passed an entire weekend indoors, just because they felt like it.

From everything she read online, Maggie had gathered that it was sort of in vogue for mothers to complain about their kids—there were entire websites devoted to mourning the objects and body parts their children had destroyed; there were Mommies Who Drink groups that met weekly in Brooklyn bars; there were forums where women could record every last grievance—every drop of apple juice spilled on the carpet, every time the nanny showed up five minutes late, every hideous temper tantrum that made them consider running away. They claimed they were miserable, and seemed pleased with themselves for admitting it. But then why have children at all? Maybe this sort of oversharing was healthy set against generations of repressed American housewives, brightly smiling through the slog. But Maggie wondered if in some ways all the complaining only made matters worse.

She was still on hold. Now the country singer was telling her that living might mean taking chances but they’re worth takin’. Lovin’ might be a mistake but it’s worth makin’.

She hung up the phone and put her head down on her grandmother’s kitchen table. After a short while, she thought she heard footsteps out on the gravel path that led from the cottage. She felt certain it was Kathleen, so she picked up the phone again and held it to her ear, pretending to be mid-conversation.

Good Lord, had it come to this?

No one entered the house. When Maggie peeked out the window, she saw only two rabbits eating the grass.

“Thank you. Good-bye,” she said to the imaginary person at the other end of the line, just in case someone was watching.

Maggie breathed in the mix of pine trees and salty air through the screen. June was almost over. Soon she would have to leave.

She could hardly picture going back to Brooklyn, to that same old apartment on Cranberry Street. She imagined that in some ways her life would be exactly as it had been—each morning she would sit by the window, watching the early commuters hustle down into the subway with their paper cups of steaming coffee. She’d admire the buff and energetic woman in spandex who always did her push-ups and step-ups on the bench across the road while she waited for the bus. But in other ways, everything would be different, unimaginably so.

Here in Cape Neddick, her life had quickly taken on a new rhythm—Gabe and Rhiannon and Allegra and her officemates had been replaced by Alice and Ann Marie and Connor. Less than a month had passed since she left, and already she felt like her city muscles were gone. In Maine, there was enough space to spread out. But in New York, you were surrounded by strangers all the time, living right on top of them. On the subway, the odors of their perfume and their sweat and their piss and their lunch all mingled together. They read over your shoulder, and while you might find this annoying, you couldn’t say much, because the truth was you were likely to do the same to them—you were all curious creatures.

Every day the city broke her heart: each morning she saw homelessness, illness, cruelty, right there in front of her. The brutality would sometimes spring forth from nowhere. Standing on the platform at Grand Central Terminal, waiting for the 6 train to arrive, she had once watched a young black man punch an old white man in the face, knocking him to the ground. The old man had said a hateful word that Maggie herself had never uttered, never would, but she still saw the young one as the coward.

She had watched mothers yank their children hard by the arm and yell at them to quit dropping crumbs or to hurry up. On other mornings, she watched the same mothers play twelve rounds of pat-a-cake with real delight in their eyes.

When she found herself crying on an East Village street after midnight, several people she had never met stopped to ask, “Are you okay?” as concerned as if they were her blood. When a guy grabbed her purse uptown one cloudy afternoon, she screamed for help, but no one turned and looked.

Everything, good and bad, was so much more predictable here. She wished she could stay. She imagined scenarios: Perhaps she could get a job cleaning at St. Michael’s, picking up the rice in the church after a wedding, Eleanor Rigby style. Or she could write a best seller and become one of those novelists whose bio makes you swell with jealousy—
The author splits her time between Maine and Bruges
.

She wished she could stay until the baby came, at least.

It was impossible to believe that soon the house would be gone too. Maggie wondered if it was really going to happen. Had Alice actually signed away their rights to the place they all loved most? She had envisioned bringing her baby here, coming here until she herself was an old woman.

Kathleen had often said that Ann Marie and Pat made it clear that they wanted Alice dead sooner rather than later, so the house could be theirs. Was it possible she had done this on purpose so they would all have to want her to live forever instead? Maggie couldn’t think of any other reason.

Ann Marie believed that Connor had somehow conned Alice, but Maggie knew to her core that that was impossible. He was a good man, an honest priest. (Leave it to her to develop a crush on someone who was already taken by Jesus Christ, but there you had it.) A recently dumped pregnant woman could spot a truly decent man from a hundred miles away.

A while later, Maggie decided to take a break from her research and walk up Briarwood Road. She tried to absorb the stillness, to focus on the sunlight coming through the pine trees and the birds chirping overhead. At the end, she looked back to see the cottage and the house in the distance, with the ocean glittering right behind.

She turned onto Shore Road, and a Jeep whizzed by, a surfboard standing straight up in the passenger seat. Eventually, she came to Ruby’s Market, and she went inside to get a bottle of juice.

The place reeked of bleach.

“How are you today?” Ruby asked politely.

“Good, thank you, and you?”

“Fine.”

Maggie walked toward the cooler in the back as Mort came down the aisle in near-limbo posture, struggling under the weight of a crate full of glass milk bottles. She felt like she ought to help him, but she wasn’t sure if that would offend him, so she stayed still.

A woman came through the front door, and Ruby said, “Evangeline! How’s the cold?”

They were always chatty with the locals, and with Alice. Maggie liked listening in on their conversations and wished she could earn entry into their club, though they never gave her more than a courtesy hello and good-bye. To them, she was just another summer person.

“We had a group of tourists in here this morning from Worcester,” Ruby said to the woman. “They were taking one another’s pictures out in front of the store like this was Green Acres, and then they came inside and wanted a picture with us.”

“Oh my,” the woman said.

“They said they were going to the beach in York and then they wanted to go berry picking. Back in our day you got paid to pick berries and then a month later it was string beans, and then corn after that, until you were begging for mercy. Why, the thought of paying someone else for the pleasure of bending over all day in the hot sun—”

“I hear you!” the woman said.

“Bunch of Massholes, if you ask me,” Mort said, setting the heavy crate down.

Maggie laughed, putting a hand over her mouth.

Ruby shook her head, but she smiled, a look that said she loved this man, loved the life they had made together. They seemed utterly comfortable with one another, like they knew each other all the way through. Maggie wondered if she would ever feel that way about another person. She walked the half mile home to the cottage, wondering still.

When she arrived, Maggie found her mother and hugged her and invited her to lunch, despite the lecture she knew was coming. Because maybe Kathleen was as close as she was ever going to get.