Chapter 8. Maggie
MAGGIE
“‘Strange’?” Maggie asked. “Strange, how?”
“You ignored me all night.” Isabel perched on the bed’s corner and pressed her hands to her knees. “And that’s when you were here—as opposed to when you left to get pizza without even telling me.”
Maggie leaned her hip against the dresser. She slipped off her bracelets and placed them on the delicate pale blue Wedgwood tray that once held her baby teeth for the tooth fairy.
Isabel was right. After Maggie answered Sarah’s text, she’d snuck into the cottage bathroom to call her, but Sarah didn’t answer.
She wanted to ask whether Sarah’s husband, Frank, had told Headmaster Cunningham about their affair.
More specifically: Was Maggie’s job at stake?
She’d sent Sarah another text that said, When can we talk?
Then she deleted the entire thread between them in a futile attempt to undo the past. A yearlong documentation of their doomed relationship from start to finish, gone with the press of a button. Sarah still hadn’t responded.
In the meantime, Maggie knew she was distracted and unsettled, even if it was hard to be called out by Isabel. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Isabel relaxed a little. “I appreciate that, but it doesn’t explain what’s going on with you.”
Maggie looked down. Over the past few months, they hadn’t had any arguments, nothing serious anyway, but Isabel was upset. And unlike Sarah, who would turn sulky and withdraw anytime Maggie annoyed her, it was clear that Isabel would not let her off the hook.
“It’s stressful introducing someone new to your family,” Isabel said. “I get that. And I know things are hard with your mom—” She stopped, then said, “You were just so chill about the whole thing when you invited me, I thought—I don’t know. Are we moving too fast here?”
“We’re not. That’s not what’s going on.”
“Then why don’t you try telling me what is going on.” Isabel watched her. “So I don’t have to guess.”
Maggie buried her face in her hands, then looked up. She had to offer something. “Maybe it is the stress of introducing you to my family,” she said, taking the easy option. “And now with Luke coming here tomorrow.” Not entirely untrue.
Isabel pulled her knees to her chest. “Why did you invite me?”
“Because I like you,” Maggie said. She couldn’t stop her legs from shaking, so she sat crisscross on the bed. “And I want us to be together.”
“Wanting that and living that are two different things.”
Maggie could hear people in the hallway, but she wasn’t sure if it was her sisters or her mother. “Can you lower your voice?” she asked Isabel.
Isabel raised her eyebrows and said, “I’m not even slightly elevating my voice.”
“Well, the walls are thin,” Maggie whispered, to make a point. “And I don’t want to share this conversation with my entire family.”
Isabel fell back onto a pillow and crossed her arms over her face. After a moment, she said, “Maybe I should go to my cousin’s tomorrow.”
“What?” Maggie’s heart pounded so fast it made her feel sick. “Why would you do that to me?”
Isabel sat up. “I don’t want to do anything to you, but it doesn’t seem like you even want me here. I feel like I’m in the way or—”
Maggie stood. “Fine. If you don’t want to be here—”
“I never said I don’t want to be here! And where are you going?”
“To take a bath.” Maggie closed the door behind her.
Inside the bathroom, she threw off her clothes and lowered herself into the tub, which she filled with water that went from ice cold to scalding hot within seconds. She watched the storm swirling outside the window. How had she gotten herself into this mess?
When Sarah had called her last Friday night in Boston to say Frank had taken the kids to the Cape and the house was all hers, Maggie told herself this would be a proper goodbye—she deserved at least that after the way Sarah had ended things so abruptly.
But she knew Sarah had other intentions as soon as she opened the door to her Beacon Hill brownstone.
She knew when she hugged Maggie and said, “You look gorgeous.” And she knew when Sarah held up a bottle of Riesling and said, “I saved it!” The bottle was from a vineyard they’d visited on the North Fork last summer, when Sarah snuck away from her family vacation for an afternoon.
Sarah hadn’t offered a tour of the brownstone, but as they sat in what she called the parlor, Maggie took in all the ways their lives could not be more different—from Sarah’s manicured nails to Frank’s golf clubs in the entryway to the kids’ boots lined up in size order at the foot of the stairs.
Halfway through the Riesling, Sarah pulled out a joint, loosening things up even more.
And here was the thing Maggie couldn’t deny: though she’d pulled away when Sarah finally kissed her, she did not do so immediately.
She froze. Was it a second? Several? It didn’t matter.
Maggie turned off the water and used her big toe to stop the faucet’s incessant leak.
She was still trying to calm down when she realized that she’d left her phone on the bedside table.
Sarah could be texting back at any moment with God knows what kind of response.
She pulled out the stopper, and the water gurgled down the drain as she dried off, shivering from the cold.
When she returned to the room, Isabel wasn’t there but had left a note on the desk: In the cottage.
Maggie imagined Isabel walking past her mother in the kitchen on her way to the cottage. Well, at least someone had gotten what they wanted tonight.
She checked her phone—nothing—and turned it off.
Standing in the middle of the room, her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she gazed out the window at the fresh white landscape and the collapsed fence leading to the beach.
Kyle and Finn helped out at the house as much as possible, but when would it all be too much for her parents and Alice to maintain the property?
She debated whether to go to the cottage. She wanted to say good night, at least, but she did not want to deal with her mother in the kitchen or, worse, Isabel grilling her more about why she was acting so strangely.
She was supposed to be rereading Wuthering Heights to prep for her class’s midterms next week, but instead, she grabbed the copy of Anna Karenina Isabel had left on the desk, flipped on the bedside lamp, and stayed awake for a long time reading.
This many years later, she could somehow keep track of all the names, and the story provided the distraction she craved until she eventually allowed herself to fall asleep, listening to the house do the same.
It was snowing harder when she woke to the honks and barks of the geese.
Dawn emerged, blushing the gray sky. The branches on the oak tree outside her bedroom window were suspended in white, and snow blew across the bay, where the geese hovered over the rolling, white-capped waves. The house was quiet.
Maggie turned her phone back on—still nothing from Sarah—then wrapped a throw blanket around her shoulders and snuck out of her room and down the back staircase leading to the cottage door.
She crawled into the bed next to Isabel and closed the terrible space between them.
Isabel turned and nestled into the crook of her shoulder, and Maggie breathed in all her mingling scents, endearingly sharpened from sleep.
They held each other, dozing on and off, until the sun broke through the only window in the cottage and Isabel placed her hand on Maggie’s chest and said something Maggie hadn’t expected.
“I wish you’d let me in,” she said. “I was looking forward to getting to know you more by being here, but it’s like the opposite is happening.”
Maggie felt so relieved to be back in Isabel’s arms. She wanted to stay there and not talk about any of it, but she had to repair some of the damage she’d done. “What do you want to know?” she asked.
Isabel draped her leg across Maggie’s. “What do you want to tell me?”
Oh, so much. The thought of it made Maggie lightheaded.
She wanted to tell Isabel about that stupid night in Boston.
How she wished it had never happened and yet, at the same time, how it had taught her something she’d needed to learn: she was done with Sarah, truly done.
She would have to explain it all eventually, but she did not want to do so here and now.
She did not. It would ruin everything. Maybe it already had.
Maggie looked around the room. When she and her siblings were teenagers, they’d used the cottage to hang out with friends or watch movies. Though Alice had turned it into a guest room, Maggie swore she could still smell hints of stale popcorn and cheap beer.
“Here’s something,” she said now to Isabel. “My mom discovered I was gay when she caught me on this bed with Julia Graham junior year of high school.”
“I thought you came out in college?”
“Well, before that, my mom walked into the cottage one day after school and found Julia and me making out while pretending to work on our zine.”
“That sounds both horrifying and kind of hot?”
“Hot, then horrifying.”
Her mother hadn’t actually caught them making out, but they were lying in bed with their arms wrapped around each other.
Moments earlier, they’d kissed for the first time, after months of what Maggie had been telling herself was just an exciting new friendship, but what she soon realized was a force beyond anything she’d ever known.
Unlike kissing Will and Matt, the only boys she’d ever dated, this kiss was perfect.
Finally, she understood the poems she’d read in her English classes, all those sappy love scenes in movies, and why her friends obsessed over guys.
For years, she’d only pretended to understand.
It was as revelatory as it was terrifying.
She was both sick to her stomach with shame and soaring from the discovery of her body and heart and all the beautiful things that had once eluded her.