Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [133]
When they got back into the car, for the first time in three days, Maggie didn’t bother to look at her phone.
• • •
After sunset, she walked the beach in front of the cottage alone. In the city, Maggie almost forgot about stars; you could hardly see them against the glow of the streetlights. But here there seemed to be millions, sparkling everywhere she looked. Her grandfather had made a big show of pointing out constellations to them when they were kids—the Three Sisters, the Four Leaf Clover, the Big Dipper, Maggie’s Pigtail, and Fiona’s Big Toe. She couldn’t recall when she had realized that half the names were made up.
The night air was chilly. Maggie pulled her sweatshirt tight around her shoulders.
She was really going to do this, and do it alone. It felt exhilarating and terrifying. She walked faster. Soon she had passed a dilapidated jetty. The jetty was a mile and a half from the cottage. Had she really walked that far? The Kelleher children rarely went to the public beach on the other side, but Maggie kept walking now. It was low tide, and all around her feet were nests of seaweed full of tiny shells. She picked one up, rubbed it between her fingers.
Up ahead there was a lifeguard’s chair. At the height of the season, two tanned and toned teenage locals (always a guy and a girl, who you could only assume were sleeping together) sat there in the afternoons in their red bathing suits, occasionally looking up from their conversation to blow their whistles at some kid who had swum out too far. As adolescents, Maggie and Patty had worshipped the lifeguards from a distance, and sometimes after dinner they would climb up into the chair and look out over the ocean, silently pretending to be two gorgeous beach creatures with perfect thighs.
Maggie walked toward the chair. At its splintering bottom, she climbed the ladder slowly, one rung at a time, until she had reached the top. The wind whipped against her face, blowing her hair back. She listened to the waves, feeling like nothing could ever get to her as long as she had this to come home to.
After a while, she felt sleepy and knew she ought to return to the cottage. But she decided to wait a bit, remembering how creepily quiet the house was at night. It was funny how a place could represent both your best and worst memories. The cottage was where she had been happiest as a child, happiest with Gabe. But it also reminded her of the painful months that had led up to her parents’ divorce, spent here between those four walls, praying to the Virgin Mary to keep them all safe.
They lived in the cottage for the entire spring and summer before the divorce, because they’d had to sell their house.
For three months, Maggie and Chris didn’t go to school. They hardly ever took baths or brushed their teeth. Kathleen didn’t seem to notice. Uncle Patrick and Aunt Ann Marie had offered to take Maggie and Chris in through the end of the school year, but Maggie knew her mother wasn’t speaking to them, and she had thrown such a hysterical fit at the prospect of staying with them that Ann Marie seemed terrified she might burn their house down. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to: Maggie loved the thought of sleeping in her cousin Patty’s bunk bed, under flowered sheets that Ann Marie had just pulled from the dryer, and the possibility of waking up to waffles and Hi-C, which her aunt served every morning of the week.
Maggie liked the way Ann Marie kept house and praised normal behavior, rather than constantly trying to stir things up. Kathleen always told her, “Don’t be a sheep.” Maggie hated that phrase. She wanted to be like everyone else.
But Maggie knew, even at ten years old, that her mother couldn’t be alone. And so they went to Maine.
She still vividly recalled that spring, chasing her brother through the rooms of the cottage, which made a perfect circle, a sort of track for them to scuttle through.