Chapter 11. Maggie #2
Poppy bit her lower lip and studied her picture the same way she’d done her bagel, but this time, she said, “I don’t color things properly.”
“That’s impossible,” Isabel said. “It’s art! There’s no ‘proper’ way to do it.”
Poppy slapped her hands onto the counter and closed her book. “I’m going to tell my mummy that!” she said, and tucked the book under her arm as she stomped off.
“What about your breakfast?” Maggie asked.
“I’m not hungry anymore.”
Maggie grabbed the empty stool next to Isabel and kissed her, her breath a mixture of minty toothpaste, coffee, and garlic from the bagel.
“That’s better,” Isabel said. She cupped the side of Maggie’s face the way she did when she wanted her to pay attention. “I’m glad we talked this morning.”
“I am, too,” Maggie said. She was glad. But when she kissed the inside of Isabel’s palm, she didn’t taste the vetiver perfume on her skin that she loved so much—she tasted Sarah’s lips, and her whole body flushed with the fear that this one mistake would cost her Isabel.
Isabel took a bite of her bagel and smiled as she chewed. “This is delicious.”
“It’s all in the water,” Maggie said.
She tried to imagine what it would have been like to bring Sarah home to meet her family.
She’d introduced her to Alice once in Vermont, but it wasn’t until they broke up that Alice admitted she’d found Sarah standoffish, and Cait said, “My God, finally. Even from here, I could see it was a mistake.” It was almost impossible to imagine Sarah sitting there now eating a bagel, as easy and affectionate as Isabel taking the extra slice of tomato off Maggie’s plate and leaning in to kiss her again.
She would have insisted on staying at a hotel, and Maggie would have obliged.
“Did you talk to your mom?” Isabel asked.
Maggie pushed her plate away. “I think I just have to accept that she tolerates it—or me, I don’t know. She’s never going to change. She’s never going to—”
Alice strode in from the dining room, trailing the vacuum behind her.
“There you are!” Maggie said. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Sure you have,” Alice said. “I need you to tackle the basement den.”
Maggie jumped off the stool. “Aye, aye,” she said, and blew Isabel a kiss.
In the basement, she found her father straddling the same worn leather stool he’d sat on throughout her childhood. Augustus and James stood next to him, looking at something in a tin box.
She plugged in the vacuum and walked to the table, which was covered in tracks, mountains, and clay villages with tiny figures she used to secretly play with when her father wasn’t home.
When they were younger, Topher attended the Train Collectors Association’s national convention every year with their father, but he stopped after Daniel died.
He was headed to college anyway—not that he stayed for even a whole year—but Maggie felt bad when her father left for the convention alone.
The following year, she said she’d like to join him, and they traveled to Pittsburgh together by train.
Once there, Maggie got food poisoning at a private collection tour and spent the rest of the weekend holed up in their hotel room.
Though her father still volunteered for the association, she wasn’t sure when he last went to a conference.
Her parents’ world shrank after Topher died.
Her mother retreated to the church and Irish charities, and aside from work, her father spent most of his free time alone with his trains and on short backpacking trips.
Neither had agreed to therapy, though Maggie and her sisters had tried to insist, but she supposed there were worse ways to grieve.
It was nice to see him at the table with Augustus and James.
“Papa’s giving us his Lionel Standard trains!” Augustus said.
Maggie turned to her father. “The ones you store behind the glass in the—” She gestured toward the cabinet, now empty. “Why are you doing that?”
Her father shrugged. “They asked me,” he said.
Sitting on the floor, James smashed his tank car into Augustus’s.
“Hey,” Augustus said. He cradled his train in the palm of his hand like a baby bird, then kissed its nose.
“Dad,” Maggie said, “those are probably covered with lead.”
“You kids played with them and never had a problem.”
“You wouldn’t let us touch them!”
“No kissing the trains,” her father said to the boys. “Got it?” He turned back to Maggie. “Better?”
Now she felt like the odd one. “Those are valuable antiques. Maybe give them to Cait and Alice to hold on to? So they don’t lose or scratch them?”
He laughed away her concern. Maggie was incredulous.
When she was a kid and would sneak into the basement to play with the figurines on the table, she’d make painstaking efforts to remember precisely where to return each one before her father came home from work.
He would notice every detail. Once, she put a milking cow on the wrong side of the red barn, and that evening he went around the table and asked each of the kids if they’d moved her—and though they all knew that it was Maggie, each one gave an emphatic no.
“Maybe there’s a ghost in the house,” Topher had said, then mooed like a haunted cow, and everyone laughed, and their father huffed and gave up on the interrogation.
Maggie grabbed the vacuum, but instead of turning it on, she watched her father, his hand shaking slightly as he adjusted something on his new Ferris wheel in the center of the carnival.
She thought of Topher again. She was in college, and he was handing her the keys to his Jeep and telling her it was all hers in what she mistook as the greatest gift she’d ever received, but which she would come to know was just her brother preparing to die.
She gripped the table and lowered herself onto the floor, where James and Augustus used lines on the carpet as imaginary train tracks.
“You’re lucky,” she said, and they both nodded indifferently. She grabbed the green caboose, which had always been her favorite. “This one’s mine.”
“Hey—” James said, but then seemed to think better of it and stopped.
Maggie stuffed the caboose into her pocket and stood. “Okay,” she said. “Skedaddle. I have to vacuum.”
No one acknowledged her except when she needed to get around the table. Even then, the three just patiently waited for her to finish, which she did hastily, because when her phone buzzed in her back pocket, she knew before checking that it must be Sarah.