Chapter 21
NOW: MAGGIE
“Mom, you sure you’re going to be okay with me leaving and going upstate for a little bit with Lily and Hanna?
” Maya’s voice cut through Maggie’s fog and she looked up at her daughter.
Her daughter had to come home during her winter break to take care of her over the holidays.
She deserved this time with her friends.
After all, wasn’t this what she’d hoped for when she’d brought Maya to Maplewood with her in the fall?
For her to meet other locals and have roots here as well.
The thing was, she hadn’t fully expected for Maya and Diana’s daughter, Lily, to grow so close.
Adding in Mary McAvoy’s daughter was another layer of complexity she hadn’t seen coming.
But alas, her daughter was so good and after everything, deserved this time.
“Yes, of course, Maya, seriously, I know I have been,” she paused trying to find the words, “out of sorts.” Maya looked back at her like that was an understatement.
“Look, I know, I’m just going through some stuff, and I know I haven’t said anything but I do have a therapist, and I’m working on it, you don’t need to worry.
” But of course, Maya would worry, and Maggie hated herself even more for doing this to her baby girl.
“You’ll call me if you need me?” her daughter asked, sliding on her coat, and Maggie’s heart broke at the look of hesitancy on her daughter’s face.
“I’ll call your father,” Maggie said, seeing the desired effect on her daughter’s face.
“Okay, I love you Mom,” Maya said, walking over and planting a quick kiss on Maggie's cheek.
“I love you too,” Maggie said after her, and then watched as Maya opened her door and left.
It had been three weeks since the incident in which Maggie had walked away from Diana.
She had gone to try, to lay everything out on the table before she lost her nerve.
But once she’d seen Jay, she’d left because she’d known she was about to eighty-six any chance Diana for whatever reason was still giving her.
She had been proud in the moment, because the old her would have just gone ahead and ruined everything, driven the encounter straight into the ground. She hoped Diana could see that.
She hoped it wasn’t too late.
She took a deep breath and then padded her way to her kitchen, opened the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of Blake apple cider. She poured some into an oversized mug and popped it into the microwave.
Once warmed, she made her way to her bedroom and got into bed.
Sipping on her cider, she found herself slipping back into the hole of all of the shit she’d done to get herself here.
As she began to slide into the hole she promised her daughter she wouldn’t slip back into, not after several days of Maya basically taking care of her to the point of making sure she ate, she sat up a little straighter and prepared for her upcoming call with Dr. Lauren Love.
“So, tell me about your holidays, how were they?” Lauren asked as soon as the Zoom link connected.
“They were shit, how were yours?”
To her credit, Lauren didn’t bat an eye. “Mine were fine, thank you for asking. Tell me about yours and why you consider them to be “shit”. I know we haven’t had a chance to connect these two weeks, so catch me up, what’s been going on?”
Maggie stared at her mug of hot Blake cider she was pretty sure she’d only made for comfort.
She tried to think of where they’d left off, considering emotionally she felt like she’d traveled lightyears in the last week, let alone two.
They’d been talking a lot about her mother, given the visit over Thanksgiving, and had begun discussing her relationship with both Damien and Maya.
Maggie warmed at the thought of talking about Maya, because while the conversations around her mother and now ex-husband had opened up old wounds she realized had definitely not healed properly, if at all, when she got to talk about Maya it had all mostly been pleasant.
God, what she wouldn’t do to be Maya’s mother in every lifetime.
“Well, I saw Diana, and fucked that up. Then I had to have Christmas again with just me and Maya, and had the guilt of her not being with Damien, of Damien not being with her, of dealing with the fact that my selfishness really knows no bounds.”
“Tell me more about that, how your selfishness knows no bounds, as you say.”
“I mean, I am the problem. Everyone has moved on, from the separation, divorce, all of it, except me. And because of that, because I can’t get my shit together, my daughter and my best friend, my now ex-husband, had to endure another holiday without one another.”
“Do you think that’s how they view things?” Lauren asked.
Maggie hadn’t much thought about that, which made her feel even worse. It was like she was a black hole of fuckery and no matter how cognizant she was of it, she couldn’t stop herself from sucking in and crushing everyone around her.
“Where did your mind just go, let me in on the thought,” Lauren said, her voice calm and encouraging.
“I was just thinking that it sucks being aware of how you affect everyone around you, but still not really being able to do anything to stop.”
“You think you can’t stop?”
“I don’t seem to be able to these days,” Maggie said.
“Then what are you doing here?”
Maggie’s eyes flicked to the still full mug of Blake cider. She then took a deep and staved off the knee-jerk reaction to roll her eyes. Looking back at the screen she said, “I am trying.”
“That’s right, no matter what you are trying, and you wouldn’t be here and trying if you didn’t think there was some hope, even a teeny tiny bit, and I can work with that.”
Maggie smiled at Lauren, knowing she was so lucky to have found them.
“So, let’s get back to my question, do you think Maya and Damien see things as you do?”
Maggie gave it a thought. “No, I bet Damien is giving me time, and Maya is giving me time.”
“What do you think they want for you?”
“To be okay, to be happy.”
“And you’re, what?”
“Trying,” Maggie said, cracking a smile.
“You said that you were down over the holidays? What brought that on, was it tied to something?”
“Diana, of course, always Diana. She and I well, after one of our sessions I knew I needed to talk to her, I wanted to tell her that I was in therapy and that I am trying. But when I got to her house, well…” Maggie sighed.
She hadn’t gotten into the Diana-Jay dynamic yet with Lauren, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to get into it now.
She opted instead to take a sip of her lukewarm cider and then decided she could continue.
“Her ex-girlfriend, her first girlfriend, Jay, was there. She opened the door in a sweatshirt, and I thought no pants, but later I realized she had shorts on.”
“Tell me more Maggie, what am I missing here? What did that vision do for you?”
“It made me irate. Jay always has had that effect on me because well, Jay was Diana’s first love. They kept in touch, even while we were dating, and all of these years later. She was like the woman I could never measure up to.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know? Like she had a piece of Diana that I would never be able to have. And maybe because she left Diana, Diana didn’t leave her. A part of me always thought Diana held on to Jay because she never really stopped loving her.”
“And what did Diana used to say about it?”
“That Jay was special to her.”
“How so?”
“Like, Jay was her first relationship, how she explored being what she now knows is pansexual. How she knew what love was because of Jay. They’ve been in each other’s lives openly and lovingly for over thirty years.
Their bond is deep. I don’t think they sleep together anymore or anything, but they are still somewhat romantic with each other?
Apparently Jay’s wife, Michaela, is understanding and doesn’t care. ”
“So, Jay and Diana have always been able to acknowledge and experience their relationship with others?” Lauren asked and Maggie could feel the root she was tugging on because it was going to hurt when she pulled it.
“Yeah. They never really had to hide? I mean, there were aspects when they were in high school that sure, they hid. But they never had to hide after. Jay has always been out about how she is and so has Diana. Even now they get to share each other in ways that we never did.”
“Sounds painful, no wonder why Jay is so triggering for you.”
“Yeah and the whole dynamic is bizarre to me, like I said they don’t sleep together or anything and Jay is happily married with kids. But her wife doesn’t seem to mind?”
Lauren nodded her head and then let silence fall between them. Diana knew Lauren well enough by now to know she was thinking.
“Are you familiar with polyamorous relationships?” Lauren said finally.
“You mean like polygamy?” Diana said. She had kinda heard of poly but also linked it with men and multiple wives or swingers in sex dungeons.
Lauren chuckled. “Ah no, I mean people who may have multiple concurrent types of romantic relationships of varying levels of intensity. What you’ve described sounds like Diana may have one of those types of relationships with Jay.”
Maggie nodded but she didn’t understand really, she was trying to wrap her brain around it.
“So,” Lauren continued, “we are at a time where we understand that gender is more complex than a binary, as well as sexuality. The final frontier, if you will, is how people experience relationships and express romance.”
“You mean like aromatic and ace?” Maggie said, trying to remember all the pins on a Pride bulletin board her daughter had made one year for her apartment at school.
“Yes, so aromantic is certainly a way in which people express or experience romantic love. It’s a spectrum of course, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s say they are folks who rarely, if ever, experience deep romantic connection.
Polyamorous folks are people who experience romantic feelings for multiple people at the same time.
In the case of Diana and Jay, it sounds like they have a poly relationship, something akin to comets—or people who are rarely together but maintain a deep connection and bond. ”
Maggie stared at Lauren from where she sat at her kitchen table.
Her mind was a little blown, and while she wasn’t sure she understood what Lauren was telling her, it did make the situation with Jay feel less about comparing her to Jay, and more like Diana’s love encompassed both of them, which was oddly comforting.
“I can send you some resources to look into?” Lauren said.
“Please,” Maggie said.
“I do want to point out that you have stated that Jay is happily married to another, while Diana seems to be intent on working on things with you.”
Maggie’s face flushed. There was Lauren, pulling on another root as she continued to weed the garden that was Maggie’s mind.
“Okay so now that that’s out of the way and we can revisit it once you’ve had some time to digest, it sounds like you and Maya got to spend the holidays together?”
Maggie nodded. “Yes we did, I wasn’t the best company though, she ended up taking care of me, like she was the parent. And it just made me feel worse and like I needed to avoid her.”
“That’s tough. But she knows you’re going through something, right?”
“She doesn’t know all of it. She thinks it’s the divorce. Damien and I never told her why we divorced and she doesn’t have the full picture.”
“Is there a reason for that?”
“Like I’ve mentioned, it’s complicated.”
“You mean that your ex-husband is gay but needed to appease his family in order to get his inheritance, and you both created a partnership built on mutual love and respect, eventually welcoming Maya. Yes, you’ve shared. Is Maya aware of her father’s sexual orientation?”
“Not yet.”
“And is that all you are keeping from her?”
“No. I’m, I’m gay, a lesbian.” The words fell out of Maggie’s lips before she could squash them.
She’d never said the words out loud to any one other than Damien.
Even with Diana and Julia it had all been implied.
No labels. But of course, back then, labels had been so narrow and largely unknown to them.
As if hearing Lauren’s ‘let me in on the thought’ line in her head she said, “I have never said that out loud to anyone outside of Damien before.”
“So you both are homosexual and decided to get married?”
“Yes, he did it for his family’s money, and I did it because, I thought…” Maggie took a deep breath and felt her eyes burn with familiar tears. This was it, she was going to have to say the hard part out loud. “I thought it was what I needed to do to be happy, to live a normal life.”
“And?”
“And I was wrong, okay? I was so fucking wrong and I can’t stand it.
I can’t stand that I was wrong. I can’t stand that I fell in love at fucking seventeen years old.
Some people go their whole lives never finding what I found and I picked the wrong fucking option.
” Maggie took in a deep breath as a sob tore through her.
“I chose wrong, and Damien chose wrong, and by the time we realized it, we had Maya and a life. We were in it, and then he just—” She cut herself off as she continued to sob.
Each confession felt like she was ripping a fresh wound into her heart.
“And he what?” Lauren said patiently.
“He bailed! He fucking left, he left to go be happy. He just left, when we’re supposed to be in this together.” Maggie’s chest heaved as she sobbed.
“Do you need to take a break?” she heard Lauren ask, because she could no longer truly see the screen between the tears and her eyes shutting, trying to slow them. Maggie shook her head.
“And is this why you’re angry with Damien, why you didn’t want to see him for Thanksgiving and for Christmas?”
“Yes. I couldn’t do it. I want to be happy for him but I’m so mad at him, which makes me feel like shit and that’s why I can’t look at him.
And then I can’t look at him in the presence of Maya, who I feel like we failed.
What am I even supposed to say to her? ‘Hey we uprooted our marriage because it was fake to begin with?’ I don’t even know what to say to her, my brave girl, who doesn’t even hesitate to share that she’s pan or whatever. ”
“Maya is pansexual?”
“Came out to us when she was just a teenager.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
Maggie took another steadying breath, and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She grabbed her oversized mug full of now cold Blake’s cider, and took a sip, fortifying her strength.
“Like a fool,” she said.