Chapter 18 Maggie
Maggie
The T was crowded, even for a Thursday morning.
Commuters in wool coats and puffy jackets, breath fogging in the cold, everyone clutching coffee cups and folded copies of the Globe.
A man near me was reading the sports section, something about the Celtics’ chances this season, and a woman in a power suit with shoulder pads sharp enough to cut glass was marking up a legal brief with a red pen.
I found a spot near the door and held onto the pole, watching the city blur past the windows. No headphones, no phones, no way to disappear into a screen, just the rattling of the train and the murmur of conversation and the particular intimacy of strangers sharing space.
My reflection stared back at me from the dark glass between stations. Messy hair. Yesterday’s clothes. The look of a woman who’d spent the night somewhere she hadn’t planned to spend it.
I looked happy.
It startled me, that realization. I’d spent so long looking tired, or worried, or carefully neutral, the face of someone who’d learned to hide what she was feeling so no one could use it against her. But this morning, there was something different in my eyes. Something that looked almost like hope.
The train pulled into my stop. I climbed the stairs to the street, squinting against the gray morning light.
Jamaica Plain looked the same as it always did, triple-deckers lining the street, the corner bodega with its hand-lettered signs, Mrs. Kowalski’s cat watching me from the window of the first-floor apartment.
But I felt different. Lighter. Like I’d set down a weight I’d been carrying so long I’d forgotten it was there.
Diane was in the kitchen when I let myself in, standing at the stove in her bathrobe, making what appeared to be pancakes.
The radio was on—WZLX, the classic rock station—and “Take My Breath Away” was playing, which felt almost comically appropriate for Valentine’s Day.
She looked up when I walked in, took in my yesterday’s clothes and my walk-of-shame hair, and grinned.
“Well, well, well.”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting anything. I’m just making an observation.” She flipped a pancake with entirely too much satisfaction. “You look like someone who spent the night at Jack Cavanaugh’s apartment.”
“I look like someone who needs coffee and a shower.”
“Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.” She poured me a cup from the Mr. Coffee on the counter—the one we’d bought at Filene’s Basement last year, the one that made coffee that was always slightly too weak no matter how many scoops you used. “So? How was it?”
“We talked.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We had dinner.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then we—” I took a sip of coffee to buy myself time. “We figured some things out.”
Diane turned off the burner and faced me fully, arms crossed, spatula still in hand.
“Margaret Elizabeth Shaw. I have been your best friend since sophomore year of college. I have watched you sabotage every relationship you’ve ever been in, including this one.
I have listened to you rationalize and deflect and make excuses for why you couldn’t just admit that you were in love with him. ”
She pointed the spatula at me. “So you are going to sit down at this table and tell me everything, or I am going to eat all these pancakes myself and feel zero guilt about it.”
I sat down at the table and told her everything.
Not everything everything—not the time travel, not the fifty-year-old consciousness in a twenty-three-year-old body, not the Polaroid that had faded to nothing in my purse.
But I told her about the letter. About finding it in Jack’s trash, about the goodbye he’d written and never sent, about standing in his apartment holding the proof that we’d both been running from each other in opposite directions.
I told her about the conversation that followed. About the way he’d looked at me when I said I’d come to New York. About the fear in his eyes and the hope underneath it.
I told her about saying I love you and meaning it. About staying the night and waking up next to him and realizing that this—this ordinary, terrifying, wonderful thing—was what I wanted. What I’d always wanted, even when I’d been too scared to admit it.
When I finished, Diane was quiet for a long moment. The pancakes sat cooling between us, forgotten.
“So you’re moving to New York,” she said finally.
“Eventually. Not right away. But... yes.”
“And you’re sure about this?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “For the first time in my life, I’m completely sure.”
Diane reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
“Then I’m happy for you.” She smiled, and her eyes were suspiciously bright. “Genuinely, stupidly happy.”
But she held onto my hand, and after a moment her expression shifted, something quieter moving underneath the brightness.
“Can I say something?” she asked.
“Since when do you ask permission?”
“Since it’s something I’ve been thinking about and I don’t want to ruin your perfect morning with my emotional baggage.” She took a breath.
“I’ve known this was coming. Not the New York part specifically, but the.
.. leaving part. I could feel it. The way you’ve been different these past couple weeks.
Braver, more open, more like the Maggie I always knew was in there somewhere.
And I kept thinking, she’s going to go. Wherever she’s going, she’s going to go, and I’m going to be the one who stays. ”
My throat tightened. “Diane—”
“Let me finish.” She held up a hand. “I’m not saying this to make you feel guilty. I’m saying it because I want you to hear something, and I want you to remember it when you’re in New York and you’re busy and it’s been three weeks since you called.”
She looked at me with an intensity that reminded me, absurdly, of Patricia.
“Distance doesn’t scare me,” she said. “Not with you. You can move to New York or London or the moon, and I will still be your person. I will still be the one you call when you’re scared or sad or when Jack does something stupid that you need to complain about.
I will show up. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done. ”
She pointed the fork at me. “But you have to show up too. You have to call me back. You have to tell me when things are hard, not just when they’re good. You have to let me be your friend, Maggie, not just someone you used to live with.”
I couldn’t speak. My eyes were burning.
In my first life, this was exactly what had happened.
I’d gotten the career, the apartment, the carefully constructed success, and I’d let Diane fade into the background like wallpaper.
Hadn’t called. Hadn’t visited. Hadn’t done any of the small, essential things that keep a friendship alive.
By the time I was forty, she was a Christmas card. By fifty, she was a memory.
And now she was sitting across from me in a bathrobe, telling me the exact thing I needed to hear—the thing that might save us from the slow erosion I’d already lived through once.
“I promise,” I said. My voice was rough. “I promise I won’t disappear on you.”
“Pinky swear?”
“Are we twelve?”
“Pinky swear. This is legally binding in the state of Massachusetts.”
I hooked my pinky around hers. “I, Maggie Shaw, do solemnly swear to call my best friend at least once a week, visit at least once a month—”
“Once a month is ambitious.”
“—once every two months, and never, under any circumstances, let distance turn us into people who say we should really catch up sometime and then never do.”
“Acceptable.” She squeezed my pinky hard enough to hurt. “And if you break this oath, I’m coming to New York and I’m moving into your apartment and I’m never leaving.”
“Promise?”
“Threat.”
“Same thing.”
She laughed—a real laugh, the kind that crinkled her whole face—and then she was crying, and then I was crying, and we sat there at the kitchen table with cold pancakes between us, two best friends who were about to be separated by two hundred miles and absolutely nothing else.
I ate my breakfast. And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I didn’t feel like I was running from anything.
I felt like I was finally running toward it.
“We’re going out tonight,” Diane announced, emerging from the bathroom in a towel with her hair wrapped in a second towel, looking like a terry-cloth sculpture. “The four of us.”
“The four of us?”
“You, Jack, me, Robbie.” She said it like she was reading a grocery list. “It’s Valentine’s Day. I refuse to let you spend it eating burnt chicken in a studio apartment.”
“The chicken was only slightly burnt.”
“You told me it had the texture of a legal brief.”
“That was last time. He’s improving.”
“Maggie.” She put both hands on my shoulders.
“It’s Valentine’s Day. Your first real Valentine’s Day with the man you love.
You’re going out. You’re eating food that was prepared by someone with a working knowledge of heat.
And you’re doing it with your best friend and her incredibly attractive boyfriend, because I want to meet Jack properly and Robbie’s been dying to meet the guy I never shut up about. ”
“You never shut up about Jack?”
“Or you. It’s a problem.”
She disappeared back into the bathroom.
“Robbie knows a place in Chinatown. Little family spot on Beach Street. His office is around the corner and he swears by their dumplings.”
“Dumplings on Valentine’s Day.”
“Better than overcooked poultry on Valentine’s Day.” Her voice echoed off the tile. “Wear something nice. Not fancy nice. Just... nice. Like you didn’t roll out of your boyfriend’s bed four hours ago.”
“I didn’t roll. I walked. With dignity.”
“You had pillow creases on your face.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I showered, put on jeans and the green sweater Diane said made my eyes look like a person who had feelings, and let her clip her mother’s gold earrings onto my ears.
“There,” she said, stepping back to assess. “You look like a woman who has her life together.”
“Appearances can be deceiving.”