Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [82]
Smoke detector needs batteries, she thought. Brain needs transplant.
She retrieved The New York Times from its spot on her doormat and slipped it out of its blue plastic wrapping. Maggie sat on the couch and glanced at the front page: the CIA had sent an innocent man to Morocco to be tortured; a thirteen-year-old girl in Brownsville had been killed the night before, the victim of a stray gang member’s bullet, while she was eating cake on the front stoop, celebrating her mother’s college graduation.
What right did Maggie have to feel like shit about her own life when people were being extradited by the government for no good reason, and a child innocently eating cake in a party dress could be killed only a few miles from here? But still, she felt sorry for herself. She had just (narrowly? No, not really) escaped death. She missed Gabe. Right now she should be waking up in his bed, going to the market on East Eighth Street for snacks they could take along on the ride. She should be walking through the rain in her vacation bubble, impervious to weather and gang violence and bad hair, umbrella be damned.
She knew it was wrong to think one’s own problems were the most dire in the world, but that didn’t stop her from feeling like it anyway. She was pregnant and alone. She wasn’t sure she could do this.
Her phone rang. She reached for it, but it was just her friend Allegra. Maggie let it ring through.
The last time she and Gabe had had a big fight, Allegra had told her to leave him.
“Come on,” she had said. “You can’t tell me that deep down this really feels right, can you? I went through the same shit with Mike. And believe me, now with Jeff, it’s like—when it’s right, it’s right.”
Maggie hated when people said that, as if ultimate rightness between two human beings were as easy to recognize as a plastic thermometer popping up from out of a turkey’s bottom: perfect temperature achieved, you have now completed your mission, go forth and live in bliss. She was slightly suspicious that such certainty happened only to fairly simple people, nonthinkers.
Allegra was the last person she wanted to speak to right now.
Her stomach felt as though it were expanding outward, moving up toward her chest. She went into the bathroom and threw up.
Between the hours of eight and ten, Maggie took a shower, paid her cell phone and cable bills online, and scrubbed her already clean kitchen cabinets, all in the interest of keeping her hands in constant motion so she wouldn’t call Gabe. There was only one thing she could say to get his attention now, before he had had a chance to cool off, and she needed to be sure of him before she broke the news, if they stood any chance at all.
She checked her e-mail. He should be on the way to his morning photo shoot by now. In fact, he probably hadn’t even gone. There was nothing from him, only a short note from her brother (Hey, isn’t Mother’s Day coming up? Are we doing something, or … Mother’s Day had been two weeks earlier. She had sent nice flowers with both their names on the card, and now she wrote Chris back to tell him so.) There was a message from her boss, Mindy, with the subject line ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS WEEK.
Maggie signed out. She wished she hadn’t cleaned her apartment so thoroughly in advance of the trip to Maine, so that she might have some dishes to wash, or a bathroom floor that needed scouring. She kept her place spotless. Her shrink had once asked whether she thought this was a reaction to her mother’s choices, and Maggie laughed, because what behavior on earth wasn’t a reaction to some mother’s choice?
Even after her parents’ divorce, after her mother got sober, Kathleen still could never manage to vacuum the carpets or take out the trash like all other mothers seemed to be able to do. Dishes lay grimy in the sink and on the countertop for days. A thick layer of dust and dog hair covered the bookshelves and tables and windowsills. Piles of magazines and cardboard boxes that Kathleen intended to recycle someday were stacked in