Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [79]
“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