Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [135]
“Did Grandma join AA too?” Maggie asked.
“No, sweetie,” her mother said. “That’s not exactly her style.”
“Did not drinking anymore make her stop being nasty?” Maggie asked.
“What do you think?” her mother said with a wink.
Two weeks went by without any word from Gabe. She had told him not to reach out, but maybe she hadn’t meant it. Ironic that this was the first request of hers he had ever actually honored.
She passed the time reading and writing and eating the occasional meal with Alice and Father Donnelly—Connor, as he wanted to be called. She went to the beach, though it was still too cold to swim. She called Kathleen and her friend Allegra often from Alice’s phone, just to hear their voices.
Every day, Maggie walked for hours to ensure that she would be exhausted by nightfall. One afternoon, she had traveled along Shore Road, past the Cape Neddick Lobster Pound and Connor’s church, and fishermen casting their lines over the side of a bridge. She walked and walked until she found herself in the middle of York Beach, five miles away, a slightly seedy town bustling with color, full of T-shirts and movie posters and seafood places with red-and-white-checkered plastic on every table. She walked past the tattoo parlors and the chocolate shops and the tarot room, past the coin laundry and the Goldenrod, where a man was making saltwater taffy inside the window. And because it was what the Kellehers always did in York Beach, she made her way, zombielike, into the arcade, and played four rounds of skee-ball. She left the tickets she earned hanging from the machine like a long jagged tongue, for some lucky young kid to come across. She walked home without saying a word to anyone.
Usually the ocean air worked better than the strongest sleeping pill. But now, just like during those months after her parents’ separation, she was up nights, worrying.
She tried to lose herself in work at night—she wrote a few dating profiles; she took on a freelance magazine assignment about how to lose your love handles in ten easy steps; and she had begun to look at the national news online for atrocious murders she could pitch to her boss at Till Death Do Us Part. But at some point, she had become obsessed with reading baby websites. She knew too much already and she was only two months along. By the third trimester, her baby was supposedly going to move once every other minute. She would feel punches and kicks from within. Her boobs would swell up and she would have stretch marks traversing her pale belly. Her body would never look the same again. When she gave birth, she should expect at least twelve to fourteen hours of excruciating labor.
And that was all while the child was inside her. One night, watching the evening news with Alice, she saw a segment about two million cribs being recalled because they were crushing babies to death. If cribs weren’t even safe, how would she ever manage to go a day without panicking about this child’s well-being?
There were so many questions to be answered once she returned to New York, but Maggie couldn’t face them yet. Maine never changed—the same faces, the same homes, the same blue sea. Here, she felt that she could float, as if in amber. Just stay still.
The next step was telling Kathleen. As the days passed, Maggie composed the letter in her head. She even sat down and started writing it, about seven different times. Finally, one rainy night as she watched a storm far out on the ocean, she sat down and typed.
Dear Mom,
When was the last time I wrote you a letter? Not just a birthday card or a silly note on the fridge, but an actual letter. I think it was that one summer you sent me to sleepaway camp, and I was absolutely miserable without you. I wrote you every day, and you wrote me just as often. I told you I was lonely, no one liked me. You responded that it was scientifically impossible for me to ever be alone, because I had you.
I’ve been thinking of writing you a letter lately, but I’m pretty sure I’d chicken out and never actually put it in a mailbox. E-mail