Chapter 2
Maggie
I rolled over in bed, and immediately knew something was different.
Not different in the way that usually greeted me in the morning.
The dull ache in my left knee from that skiing accident in my thirties, the persistent throb in my right shoulder that my doctor called “normal for your age” as if that made it acceptable.
Those familiar complaints were simply... gone.
I lay still, taking inventory. No stiffness in my lower back. No creak in my hip when I shifted. My body felt light, buoyant, like I’d shed thirty pounds overnight. Like I’d shed twenty years.
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling was different. This one had a popcorn texture with a water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like Florida. Wait a minute, I knew that water stain. I’d spent countless mornings lying in bed staring at it, avoiding my life.
Thirteen days.
The voice from the dream—was it a dream?—echoed through my mind. Low and warm, with an edge of something ancient underneath.
The forgetting will be gradual. And it will be complete.
There will be a cost. There is always a cost.
I sat up too fast, heart hammering, and looked around the room.
My room. My old room, in the Jamaica Plain apartment I’d shared with Diane, with the secondhand dresser, the typewriter on the desk, and that poster of The Smiths I’d thought was so sophisticated.
Books everywhere—stacked on the nightstand, piled in the corner, threatening to avalanche off the tiny bookshelf I’d rescued from a curb in Somerville.
This was impossible. This was—
What had I done?
The panic hit like a wave. I had a life. A good life. A huge promotion I’d just earned, a condo I loved, Emma was going to Harvard in the fall, Sarah’s laugh over wine on Friday nights. I had built something real and solid and mine, and now—
Now I was sitting in a twin bed in 1987, and the voice had said thirteen days, and I had apparently traded everything I’d spent decades building for a what if.
Who does that? Who gives up a perfectly good life for a question that can’t be answered?
Apparently, I did. At fifty years old, I’d finally lost my mind.
I pushed back the covers, a quilt my grandmother had made, I’d forgotten about this quilt, and swung my legs over the side of the bed. My feet hit the cold hardwood floor and I stood, expecting the usual symphony of protests from joints that complained.
Nothing. Not even a twinge.
The full-length mirror on the back of my closet door showed me what I already knew but couldn’t quite believe.
Twenty-three years old. Chestnut hair falling past my shoulders in the layered mess I’d thought was fashionable.
Green eyes without the reading glasses I’d needed since forty-two.
Skin smooth and unlined, the kind I’d have paid thousands for in 2014.
“Maggie!” Diane’s voice echoed down the hall, muffled by the bathroom door. “Hurry up! You know Valerie always hogs the mirror!”
Valerie. The aerobics instructor at the Y who spent twenty minutes after every class examining her pores. I’d forgotten about Valerie.
I’d forgotten so many things.
And the things I did remember were strange—blurred, approximate, like recalling a movie I’d watched half-asleep.
I remembered the shape of those twenty-seven years but not the details.
Outcomes without the middles that got me there.
I knew Jack had gotten a job at the New York Times—sometime, eventually—but I couldn’t have told you the year.
I knew I’d walked away from him, that our ending had been my fault, but the specific words, the rest of it?
Gone. Smoothed over by decades of not letting myself think about it.
Apparently my brain had decided to time-travel with the emotional highlights reel and leave the footnotes behind. Typical.
“Coming!” My voice sounded strange—younger, clearer, without the slight rasp that had crept in somewhere around age forty-five.
The bathroom was exactly as I remembered.
Cramped, perpetually damp, and absolutely saturated with the smell of Aqua Net and the cheap floral perfume Diane bought by the gallon.
Every surface held some beauty product or another.
Hot rollers on the counter, makeup scattered across the tiny shelf above the toilet, three different cans of mousse competing for space near the sink.
I turned on the shower, no tankless water heater here, just a temperamental beast that required precise negotiation, and waited for steam to fog the mirror before I stripped off my oversized t-shirt.
The shower felt different in this body. The hot water hit skin that wasn’t tired, muscles that weren’t sore, a frame that moved with the unconscious ease of youth. I’d forgotten what it felt like to simply exist without a constant background hum of minor discomforts.
Afterward, wrapped in a towel that had seen better days, I wiped the steam from the mirror and stared.
No crow’s feet. No laugh lines. No subtle loosening of the skin along my jaw that I’d pretended not to notice for the past five years. Just... a face. A young face. My face, before life had written its story all over it.
I reached for a pencil from the cup by the sink—Diane and I used them to test our cosmetic readiness for the world, a habit we’d picked up from some magazine—and tucked it under my right butt cheek.
It fell to the floor immediately.
I picked it up, grinning now despite myself, and tucked it under my left breast.
It fell again.
I pumped my fist in the air like I’d just won something, which I suppose I had.
The pencil test. Twenty-three-year-old me had been so insecure about her body, always thinking she needed to lose ten pounds, always comparing herself to the women in magazines.
Fifty-year-old me wanted to reach back through time and shake her—shake myself—and say you have no idea what you’ve got, you idiot.
Well. Now I had it again. For the next thirteen days, at least.
I got dressed in the neon green leotard I found in my drawer, dear God, the eighties, and pulled gray sweatpants and an oversized sweatshirt over it.
My hair dried into the thick, full waves I’d completely taken for granted at this age, the kind of volume I’d spent hundreds on products trying to recreate in 2014.
The kitchen was tiny with barely room for two people to stand without bumping elbows, but Diane had made it feel like home with mismatched mugs and a cheerful yellow curtain over the window.
A rotary phone hung on the wall next to a cat clock with eyes that moved back and forth with each tick of its tail.
The radio on the counter was playing something I half-recognized—
Lips like sugar, sugar kisses...
Echo and the Bunnymen. I’d forgotten this song. I’d forgotten about a lot of music from this year, the way it had formed the soundtrack to everything I was trying not to feel.
Diane stood at the counter pouring coffee, and for a moment I just stared at her.
Twenty-four years old, bleached blonde hair teased to impressive heights, wearing a hot pink leotard with leg warmers bunched around her ankles.
She smelled exactly as I remembered—Virginia Slims, Aqua Net, and Love’s Baby Soft, a combination that should have been terrible but somehow just smelled like Diane.
She hadn’t changed. Of course she hadn’t—from her perspective, she’d seen me yesterday. It was only from mine that she’d been gone for all those years.
“You look weird,” Diane said, handing me a mug. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Fine.” I wrapped my hands around the coffee, grounding myself in its warmth. “Just... strange dreams.”
“Tell me about it. I dreamed I was being chased by a giant banana. Very Freudian.”
She grabbed the newspaper from the table, the Boston Globe, I noticed, and my heart did something complicated as she flipped it open. “Oh, did I tell you about Robbie?”
“Robbie?”
“The guy from last night? At that hole in the wall on Comm Ave?” She grinned, settling into the chair across from me. “He’s so cute. Like, Patrick Swayze cute, but with better arms. We’re going out again tonight. You should come! He’s bringing friends.”
The newspaper’s date caught my eye. Saturday, February 2, 1987.
Thirteen days, the voice had said. So really, counting today, I had thirteen days to... what? Win back a man I’d walked away from? Change the course of my entire life?
“Maggie?” Diane was watching me with narrowed eyes. “You’re doing that thing where you stare into space and look existentially haunted. I thought you were over him.”
“Over who?”
She rolled her eyes, standing to clear her coffee cup. “Jack. Come on, it’s been three months.”
Three months. But had been a lifetime for me, years of wondering what would have happened if I’d made different choices. And now here I was, with the chance to find out, and all I felt was terror.
Diane crossed to the door that led to our tiny fire escape, propping it open with her hip as she fished a pack of Virginia Slims from her sweatshirt pocket. Cold air rushed in, carrying the smell of the city, exhaust, snow, and something cooking in the apartment below.
“You always do this, you know.” She lit a cigarette, exhaling a plume of smoke that drifted toward the street.
“Get close to someone, then push them away before they can hurt you. Jack was nice. He was good. And you—”
“I know.” The words came out sharper than I intended. “I know what I did.”
Diane studied me for a moment, cigarette halfway to her lips. “Okay, that was weird. Usually you argue with me for at least ten minutes before you admit anything.”
I almost laughed. All those years of therapy and self-reflection, and it showed.
“Come out tonight,” she said, her voice softening. “Meet Robbie’s friends. Get your mind off everything. You can’t just sit around moping forever.”
“I don’t mope.”
“You absolutely mope. You mope like it’s an Olympic sport and you’re going for gold.”