37. Thursday
CHAPTER 37
THURSDAY
M aggie woke up with a crick in her neck because she was thirty-two and Parton hadn’t wanted to share his pillow. She dragged herself off the couch and over to the coffee pot. Even with the caffeine, Maggie felt like she’d been hit by a train. Her limbs were heavy and sore. She was hungry, but the idea of actually eating brought the nausea back. Her hands and feet were still weirdly cold. Going for a run wasn’t even on the table, but she forced herself to focus on paperwork until she knew that April would be back at the nurse’s cabin after breakfast.
April took her temperature, her pulse, her heart rate. She checked Maggie’s oxygen saturation and even gave her another pregnancy test, but the whole time, she had the air of someone humoring an over-anxious child.
“There’s nothing obviously wrong with you. I can give you some melatonin, see if that helps you sleep, but that’s about it.”
“I feel awful.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t feel awful. I just said I can’t find anything physically wrong with you.” April took a deep breath, like she was preparing to walk across hot coals. “Look, I know you’re a private person, and I respect that. But if you want to talk about it?—”
“Talk about what?” Maggie said sharply.
April looked at her for a long moment, like she was weighing several unappealing options, then turned away and moved to the bank of cabinets along the back wall. “Teddy said you sounded kind of off yesterday.”
“…Teddy said?”
April crouched and began to dig through one of the lower cabinets. “Good lord, I’m sure we just organized these.” She began to pull out a seemingly endless supply of bandages and gauze, leaning farther and farther into the depths of the cabinet. Her voice was muffled enough that Maggie had to strain to hear.
“And Chef Chuck mentioned that Becker passed by the Dining Hall yesterday morning earlier than usual, looking unhappy?—”
“Wait what?”
April extricated herself from the pile of bandages, stood, and set a plastic bottle triumphantly down on the counter. “You and Becker have been making eyes at each other for a month at least.” She opened a drawer and began to rummage around. “Everyone knows. We were just giving you the illusion of privacy.” She sounded almost bored.
“Everyone?” Maggie thought, vaguely, that she should be horrified by this revelation, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
“Everyone.” April extricated a Ziploc from the drawer and began to transfer some of whatever was in the plastic bottle over to the bag. When she was done, she pressed the bag shut and turned back to Maggie. “So. Do you want to talk about it?”
Maggie took a moment to genuinely consider. “…I do not.”
April seemed unflatteringly relieved. “Alright. But you should probably talk to someone. I mean this kindly, but you’re a mess.” She handed her the bag of what looked like purple gum drops. “Take two half an hour before bedtime.” She paused, before adding, “They’re berry flavor.”
Maggie managed to fend off the urge to call her brother for the entire interminable walk back to the cottage. She tapped his name on her phone the minute she got through the door.
“Heyyyy what’s up M&M?” He answered, sounding suspiciously fratty.
“How have you talked to April in the last two minutes?”
“I don’t know what you could possibly be?—”
“Theodore.”
There was a very guilty pause before he replied. “She texted to warn me.”
“Mmmhmm. And why are you in such remarkably close contact with my camp nurse?” Conducting an interrogation was, she found, oddly calming.
“Because I’m an excellent and extremely communicative boyfriend?”
Well. It had been easier to get that out of him than she’d anticipated. (A shame. She really had been enjoying the break from her own problems.) “How long have you been dating my nurse?” she demanded.
“It would make me more comfortable if we could refer to her as the Blue Harbor camp nurse? Or just April would be ok.”
“Theodore.”
“Fine. You remember when we cleaned out the cottage, and we needed more trash bags, and you sent me to get some from the camp nurse’s cabin?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, April was in the camp nurse’s cabin, and she was hot and terrifying. So, naturally, I slid into her DMs. And the rest, as they say, is history.”
“You slid into her DMs.”
“I shot my shot,” he said, sounding smug. “I don’t know how I landed her either, to be honest. But I really like her, and she agreed to date me, so I’m planning to stick around until she regains her good sense.”
“You kept visiting. I thought Mom maybe…And you’re moving here?—”
Teddy cut her off. “I’d been wanting to move to Asheville anyway. I may have…wanted to a little extra recently, but I’m not Single White Female-ing her. Please don’t scare her away.”
“I’m not trying to get in the middle of whatever this is.”
“It’s called ‘dating’? It’s a thing two people—or, well, not necessarily two I guess—but it’s a thing people do when they, you know, like like each other.”
Maggie, who hadn’t moved from where she’d been standing just inside the door when Teddy answered the phone, toed off her shoes and went to flop down on the couch.
“So,” Teddy said into the silence. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
And somehow, she kind of…did. So she began at the beginning. (Of the G-rated version, obviously.)
Tears were streaming silently down her cheeks by the time she’d finished recounting the debacle of the previous day’s no-holds-barred emotional WrestleMania. (Teddy’s term.) She wiped at them furiously, even though there was no one there to see them.
“You know,” Teddy said pensively, “it does feel good not being the fuck up, for once. I can see why you put in all the work over the years. It’s invigorating.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” she said dryly, but she smiled a little and took a shaky breath. “Why did I get all the emotional unavailability genes?”
“Well, you always have been a lot more like Mom. It’s why you two don’t get along sometimes.”
“I’m not like Mom,” Maggie said reflexively.
Teddy just waited. Like her father would, she realized.
Well, fuck.
“Ok, fine, we have some similarities.”
“There it is!” Teddy said, encouragingly. “Acknowledgement is the first step to recovery.”
“But why does everything hurt?” Maggie said in a tone that under no circumstances could be characterized as a whine.
“You’re having some big feelings, M&M.”
“No, like, things physically hurt.”
“Yeah, turns out heartache, not just a compelling metaphor. Bodies are wild.”
“Well, I hate it,” Maggie complained to the ceiling fan. It whirred sympathetically into the silence that followed.
“So,” Teddy prompted after a minute or so, sounding as serious as he ever managed to sound.
“Yes?”
“You’ve fucked up.”
“Thanks.”
“What do we do when we’ve fucked up?” He sounded like a character on a very inappropriate children’s television show, which was both embarrassing, and also exactly the level of instruction Maggie apparently needed.
“I don’t know,” she said, petulantly. “I avoid doing it.”
“Well, I think we’ve figured out how I ended up with all the life skills in the family. I knew my ne’er-do-well past would come in handy someday.”
“No need to brag.”
“I beg to differ. It’s important to celebrate small wins.”
Maggie rolled her eyes, hoping her brother could somehow hear it over the phone the way that you could tell when someone was smiling. He gave no indication that he had.
“Ok,” Teddy said, getting down to business. “First, you figure out what exactly you did wrong. Then, you figure out how to apologize. And you have to actually apologize. And make amends. None of that ‘sorry you felt that way’ crap. That gets an F-.”
“I don’t think you can actually get an F-,” Maggie interjected.
“Trust me, you can,” Teddy paused, before adding cryptically, “and you don’t want to.” Then his tone turned cheerful. “Ok, that’s the main part. Your extra credit option is to figure out how you feel about Daniel Becker and what you want from him, and—you should probably write this down— tell him . And then ask him how he feels about it. And he may need to think about it. And don’t tell him you want to be friends with benefits. You know not to do that, right?”
“Yes, that part was clear.”
“Good. Repeat it back to me.”
“Apologize, but not in a crappy way. And then, for extra credit, familiarize myself with the concept and practice of emotional vulnerability.”
“Wow,” Teddy said, sounding impressed. “I’m good. Should I become a life coach?”