Chapter 12 Maggie
Maggie
The dream came again that night. Different this time.
“You could still come back,” someone said.
I turned, but there was no one there. Just my apartment, immaculate and silent, every surface dusted and every book shelved and no evidence anywhere that a human being had ever laughed or cried or made a mess in it.
“You could still come back,” the voice said again. It sounded like me. Like a version of me that had never learned how to want.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I can.”
The elevator doors closed. The numbers started climbing again—4, 5, 6—but I knew they would never stop, that I would ride this box forever between the life I’d left and the life I’d chosen—
I woke up with my heart pounding and the taste of old coffee in my mouth.
The phone was ringing in the other room. Diane’s voice, muffled through the wall, answering it.
“Maggie! It’s for you! It’s Jack!”
I was out of bed before I finished processing the sentence, stumbling through the apartment in my nightgown, cold floor under my feet, grabbing the receiver from Diane’s outstretched hand.
“Hello?”
“Hey.” Jack’s voice, warm and close despite the thousand miles between us. “Did I wake you?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t tell him about the dream. Some things you have to carry alone. “But I’m glad you did.”
“I couldn’t sleep. Kept thinking about the interview. Thought maybe hearing your voice would help.”
I leaned against the wall, the cord of the phone stretching across the kitchen. Diane was making elaborate gestures about giving me privacy, pointing at her bedroom, raising her eyebrows suggestively. I waved her off.
“How are you feeling about it?” I asked.
“Terrified. Excited. Both at once.” A pause. “What if they don’t like me?”
“They’ll like you. You’re likable.”
“You have to say that.”
“I don’t, actually. I’m very comfortable being honest about your flaws.” I smiled despite myself, despite the lingering weight of the dream. “You’re going to be great. You’re the best journalist I know.”
“You don’t know that many journalists.”
“I know enough.”
“Name three.”
“You. That guy Ed at the Globe who’s always yelling. And…” I paused. “Barbara Walters.”
“Barbara Walters isn’t a journalist, she’s a force of nature. That’s a different category.”
“Fine. You, Ed, and Dan Rather.”
“You don’t know Dan Rather.”
“I’ve seen him on TV. That counts.”
“That absolutely does not count.”
“It counts if I say it counts. I’m the one giving the compliment, I get to set the parameters.”
He laughed, really laughed, the kind that I could hear through the phone line, warm and unguarded, and the sound of it loosened something in my chest that had been tight since the dream.
We talked for another twenty minutes, about nothing, about everything. The way his hotel room smelled like industrial carpet cleaner. The small, stupid intimacies that made long distance feel shorter.
By the time I hung up, the sun was fully up and Diane was dressed for work, watching me from the kitchen doorway with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
“You’re really serious about him this time,” she said.
“Is that a question?”
“An observation.” She handed me a cup of coffee. “You look different when you talk to him. Less… armored.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Jury’s still out.” But she was smiling. “Go get ready. You’ll be late.”
I was working through the slush pile when I found it.
Most days, the slush pile was an exercise in endurance.
A hundred variations on the same tired stories, written by people who thought they had something to say but hadn’t yet figured out how to say it.
Thrillers with predictable twists. Romances where the love interest had no personality beyond “handsome.” Literary novels that mistook obscurity for depth.
You developed a sixth sense for it after a while, a way of reading ten pages and knowing whether the next two hundred would be worth your time.
This one was different.
The manuscript was thick, unbound, held together with a rubber band and a prayer. The cover page was typewritten—no agent, no cover letter, just a title and a name.
The List of Nine (and Louie) by Hazel Winterbrook
I almost set it aside. First novels from unknown authors without agent representation were the longest of long shots, the publishing equivalent of buying a lottery ticket.
But something about the title caught me—the parenthetical and Louie, like an afterthought, like whoever Louie was had wandered into the story uninvited and refused to leave.
I pulled off the rubber band and read the first page.
The opening line stopped me cold. It was the cat talking.
Not literally—the cat didn’t speak in words.
But the narration was from the cat’s perspective, watching a man from behind a dumpster at a place called Martinelli’s Deli.
A stray cat, battle-scarred, with a torn ear, observing the man on the third floor of an apartment building with the careful attention of a creature who has nothing but time and instinct.
The man was dying. The cat didn’t know this in any medical sense, but he knew it the way animals know things—by watching.
The man set two places at dinner every night and only ate from one.
He kept a shrine to absence, a whole life organized around someone who wasn’t there anymore.
His name, the cat learned from the mail carrier, was Chester Finch.
He had been a keeper of books. A librarian.
I turned the pages faster.
The cat—not yet named, not yet claimed—watched Chester through windows and from fire escapes.
Watched him read a piece of paper and smile the kind of smile that had nothing to do with happiness.
Watched him move through his rooms with the careful precision of a man who had replaced living with routine.
Then the rain came, and the cat climbed the fire escape and yowled at Chester’s window, and Chester let him in with the reluctant hospitality of a man who knew better: One night. Just to dry off. And then you are leaving.
The cat, of course, had other plans.
The second chapter shifted to Chester’s voice, and that’s where the book broke me open.
Chester woke with the cat on his chest and the unpleasant sensation of being watched.
He was seventy-four. He’d spent forty-two years as a public librarian.
He had a terminal diagnosis and a rent-controlled apartment and a carefully constructed schedule that kept the days from collapsing in on themselves.
The cat’s torn ear, he observed, looked like it had lost an argument with a paper shredder.
Its eyes were amber and unsettlingly direct, as if it were conducting an inventory of his soul and finding the organizational system wanting.
His wife, Eleanor, had died three years, two months, and seventeen days earlier.
He knew the count. He kept the count. He cataloged his grief with the same precision he’d once used to catalog books—except grief, he noted, did not care about his systems. It did not file itself neatly on a shelf.
Eleanor’s reading chair still held the depression of her body.
Her teacup sat in the cabinet where she’d left it.
And then the cat found the list. Chester’s list—nine things a man should do before the diagnosis catches up with him—and sat on it with the polite incredulity of a creature who could not fathom why a perfectly good piece of paper was being wasted on words instead of serving as a seat.
“Off,” Chester said.
The cat washed his paw.
I set the manuscript down.
My hands were shaking.
This was it. This was the thing you spend years in publishing hoping to find, a voice so particular, so precise, so unexpectedly moving that it reaches through the page and grabs you by the throat.
The dual narration, the cat watching from outside with animal patience, Chester cataloging his loss from within with a librarian’s futile precision, it was funny and devastating and unlike anything I’d read in months.
Eleanor’s teacup. The two place settings.
The cat who refused to leave. It all worked together like music.
I knew, in the way you know things that matter, that this was real. This was the kind of book that changes a career. Not just the author’s. Mine.
Right before lunch, Patricia’s assistant appeared at my desk.
“She wants to see you.”
Patricia’s office smelled like cigarettes and Charlie perfume.
I’d been summoned which was never a good sign, and now I stood in front of her desk while she flipped through the manuscript I’d flagged half an hour ago. Her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, her mouth a thin line of disapproval.
“You think this is publishable,” she said. Not a question.
“I think it’s extraordinary, yes.”
“It’s a first novel. From a woman no one’s heard of. About—” She checked the cover page. “A dying man and a stray cat.”
“It’s about grief and love and what it means to keep living when the person who made life worth living is gone. It’s about a man who makes a list of nine things he needs to do before he dies, and a cat who won’t let him do any of them alone. It’s funny and it’s heartbreaking and her prose is—”
“I don’t need the pitch.” Patricia set the manuscript down and looked at me the way she always looked at me, like I was a promising but ultimately disappointing experiment.
“I need you to log submissions and fetch coffee. Not scout projects.”
This was the moment.
In my first life, the first 1987, the one I’d lived before, I remembered backing down.
Mumbled an apology, returned to my desk, and watched that manuscript sit in slush pile limbo until the author gave up and moved on.
I’d learned years later, through industry gossip and my own research, that she’d eventually published with a small press.
That the book had won awards. That it had become the kind of quiet, enduring classic that people pressed into each other’s hands and said you have to read this.