Chapter 10
The airport in Fort Myers was busier than Maggie had expected for a Thursday morning.
Families with children hauled oversized suitcases toward security lines, business travelers typed furiously on laptops in the gate areas, and a group of college students sprawled across the floor near a charging station, looking like they had been traveling for days.
In equal measure, she was excited about the birth of the twins and terrified to revisit old feelings about the Andover house and her memories with Daniel. She did her best to push away anything negative, but she couldn’t control the butterflies in her stomach.
Shaking her head as if to loosen tension, she focused on what she could control.
Today was not about the past. Today was about the future, about two babies who would arrive any day now.
More importantly, it was about holding her daughter's hand through one of the most transformative experiences of her life.
“You're doing that thing,” Chelsea said, appearing at her elbow with two cups of coffee.
“What thing?”
“The staring-into-the-distance thing. The deep-thoughts thing.” Chelsea handed her one of the cups. “It's too early for deep thoughts. Drink your coffee.”
Maggie accepted the cup and took a sip. It was stronger than she usually liked, but the warmth was welcome. The airport air conditioning had been set to arctic, and she had already pulled a cardigan from her carry-on bag.
“I'm just thinking about Beth,” she said. “Wondering how she's holding up.”
“She's holding up the way all women hold up at the end of pregnancy. Barely, and with a lot of complaining.” Chelsea smiled.
“I remember the last few weeks before my nephew was born. Carl’s sister called me every day to list all the ways her body was betraying her.
Swollen ankles, heartburn, the inability to see her own feet. It's not a glamorous time.”
“No, it isn't.” Maggie thought about her own pregnancies, all five of them.
Each one had been different, but the final weeks had always been the hardest. The waiting, the discomfort, the strange combination of desperate impatience and paralyzing fear.
She had wanted each baby out and simultaneously wanted them to stay inside forever, where they were safe, where nothing could hurt them.
Paolo returned from the newsstand with a magazine tucked under his arm and a bag of trail mix in his hand.
He had dressed comfortably for the flight, khaki pants and a soft blue shirt.
He looked relaxed, but Maggie knew him well enough to see the slight tension around his eyes.
His mind was on Sanibellia, his plant nursery business.
It was his baby, and being away from it for this long didn't come naturally to him.
“The flight's on time,” he said, checking the departure board. “We should start boarding in about twenty minutes.”
“Good.” Maggie leaned into him slightly, drawing comfort from his solid presence. “I want to get there. I hate this in-between feeling.”
“The waiting is always the hardest part.” Paolo wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “But soon we'll be on the ground, and then we'll be at the farm, and before you know it, you’ll be holding those babies.”
“Not too soon, I hope. Beth needs at least another few days. The doctor said thirty-eight weeks would be ideal.”
“Babies come when they want to come. They don't care about ideal.”
This was true. Maggie had learned that lesson with Michael, who had arrived two weeks early in the middle of a snowstorm, and again with Beth, who had stubbornly refused to budge until she was nearly two weeks late.
Children started asserting their independence before they even took their first breath.
The boarding announcement crackled over the intercom, and they gathered their things and joined the line. Chelsea chattered about the book she planned to read on the flight, a mystery novel that their book club had chosen for the month.
“Linda St. James isn’t too pleased with me these days. I never have time to read, and every time she talks about our failed book club, I get a tinge of guilt.”
Chelsea laughed. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Linda isn’t Linda if she’s not complaining about something.”
Maggie had made this trip so many times over the years.
Florida to Massachusetts, Massachusetts to Florida.
The geography of her life stretched between these two points, the place where she had raised her children and the place where she had rebuilt herself.
For a long time, Massachusetts had felt like home and Florida like an escape.
Now the balance had shifted. Captiva was home. Massachusetts was memory.
But memory had a pull of its own.
They boarded the plane and found their seats, Maggie by the window, Paolo in the middle, Chelsea on the aisle.
The aircraft was smaller than Maggie had expected, the rows cramped and the overhead bins already overflowing with luggage.
She tucked her purse beneath the seat in front of her and settled in for the flight.
The plane taxied, accelerated, lifted. Maggie watched through the window as Florida fell away beneath them, the coastline giving way to clouds, the familiar landscape shrinking until it was just a patchwork of green and blue and brown.
She had never loved flying, but she had made her peace with it.
The discomfort was temporary. The destination was what mattered.
Chelsea fell asleep within twenty minutes, her head tipped back against the seat, the mystery novel forgotten in her lap.
Paolo read his magazine, occasionally pointing out an interesting technique or a piece of furniture he admired.
Maggie tried to watch a movie on the screen in front of her, but her mind kept drifting north, to a farmhouse in Massachusetts, to a daughter who was waiting.
She thought about the last time she had seen Beth, at Christmas, when the whole family had gathered on Captiva for the holidays.
Beth had been visibly pregnant then, her belly round beneath the festive sweater she wore, but she had still seemed like herself.
Energetic, capable, slightly exasperated by Gabriel's hovering.
Now she was thirty-seven weeks along, carrying twins, and Maggie could only imagine how different she must look and feel.
Motherhood changed a woman. Not just the physical changes, though those were significant. But the internal shifts, the reordering of priorities, the way the self-expanded to make room for someone new, in this case two new someones.
Maggie remembered the first time she had held Michael, the overwhelming surge of love and terror that had flooded through her. She had looked at that tiny face and understood, in a way she never had before, that she would do anything to protect him. Anything at all.
Beth would feel that too. Would hold her babies and understand the weight and the wonder of it. Would join the long line of mothers who had come before her, stretching back through generations, each one passing something essential to the next.
The flight passed slowly, the hours marked by the drink cart and the captain's occasional announcements about altitude and weather. They hit a patch of turbulence somewhere over the Carolinas, the plane shuddering and dropping in a way that made Chelsea wake with a gasp and grab the armrest.
“I hate flying,” she muttered. “Have I mentioned that I hate flying?”
“Several times,” Paolo said mildly.
“Good. I want it on the record.”
The turbulence passed, and Chelsea returned to her nap, and eventually the captain announced their descent into Boston.
Maggie pressed her face to the window and watched the landscape emerge from the clouds.
The sprawl of the city, the curve of the harbor, the patchwork of suburbs spreading outward in every direction.
Massachusetts in March, still brown and bare, waiting for spring to arrive.
They landed smoothly and taxied to the gate.
The process of deplaning was slow, passengers jostling for position in the aisle, overhead bins opening and closing, the general chaos of arrival.
Maggie waited patiently, her carry-on clutched in her hands, until finally they were moving, shuffling down the jetway and into the terminal.
Boston's Logan Airport was larger and louder than Fort Myers, the halls crowded with travelers from a dozen different flights. They made their way to the rental car counter.
Paolo handled the paperwork while Maggie and Chelsea stood to the side, stretching muscles that had stiffened during the flight.
The air here was different, Maggie noticed.
Colder, drier, carrying the particular smell of a northern city in late winter.
She had forgotten how different it felt, how the climate of a place could shift your entire sense of being.
“You okay?” Chelsea asked.
“Fine. Just readjusting.” Maggie smiled. “It's strange, being back. I've been away long enough that it feels foreign. But also familiar. Like a language I used to speak fluently and now have to work to remember.”
“That's poetic.”
“I've had a lot of time to think about it.”
Paolo returned with the keys to a midsize SUV, something practical that could handle the New England roads and any late-season weather that might appear. They loaded the luggage into the trunk and climbed in, Maggie in the passenger seat, Chelsea in the back.
“GPS says about forty-five minutes to Boxford,” Paolo said, programming the address into his phone. “Assuming traffic cooperates.”
“Traffic never cooperates in Boston,” Maggie said. “That's one thing that hasn't changed.”