Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [172]
Here in Cape Neddick, her life had quickly taken on a new rhythm—Gabe and Rhiannon and Allegra and her officemates had been replaced by Alice and Ann Marie and Connor.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