23. Sunday
CHAPTER 23
SUNDAY
M aggie was rudely awakened the next morning by the same alarm she had set to go off every day. Her head felt like it was full of cotton with scraps of thoughts like a jumble of old newspaper clippings. When she opened her eyes, everything was upside down. It took her a moment to register that she was (a) still dressed in her clothes from yesterday, (b) lying with her legs on the couch but her head on the floor, and (c) sharing what couch space she did have possession of with a somewhat miffed looking Parton. Seemed like they both preferred to sleep alone.
She reached an arm up to feel around on the coffee table for the source of the offensively cheerful jingle and accidentally swept her phone off the other side. It landed on the hardwood and skidded across the floor until it ran into something solid with an upsetting thud. Extricating her feet from under Parton's chin, she rolled to her side and slowly pulled herself up to a sitting position. She still had a headache, but, miracle of miracles, she wasn’t nauseated at all. In fact, she was ravenous. She stood cautiously, bracing herself on one arm of the couch, and waited for a spell of dizziness to subside before she went to retrieve her phone. When she reached it, she sank down to its level, tapped off the alarm, and took a seat on the cool wood. Pressing her back firmly against the cottage’s wall just beneath the wide front windows, she drew her legs up to her chest and perched the phone on her knees.
Among the notifications was an unanswered message from Daniel, sent the evening before.
Is everything ok?
So much for her brilliant text-smithing. She considered giving up entirely and just responding with Everything is totally fine! but she didn’t want the sirens to wake up the campers when the police arrived for a wellness check. Did she need to tell him that she wasn’t going for a run for the second day in a row? Or should she just go? She felt…not great, but she could probably suck it up for an hour.
Except she didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to talk about it. He would ask, and she’d have to lie, and she wasn’t a very good actress. Not to mention that the idea of lying to Daniel Becker didn’t sit very well in her chest.
Yeah, she was definitely going to have to bail. The question was, did she actually have to tell him or had she retained some amount of plausible deniability re: the expectation that they’d meet at the trailhead unless someone said otherwise? This is why she didn’t do…whatever this thing was that they were doing. The friends thing. It got complicated real quick.
She looked back over their brief exchange, hoping for a lighting strike of inspiration.
Maggie 6:32 a.m.: Raincheck on the race
Daniel 6:33 a.m.: Rocky training montage gif
Maggie 5:47 p.m.: Hey, sorry, have to miss Casino Night
Daniel 5:48 p.m.: Is everything ok?
Yeah, there was nothing for it. She had reached the limits of the English language. Words had failed her. It was going to have to be a gif. She searched “tired” on her gif keyboard and scrolled through the options. Tough call, but she went with the clip of Michael Cera’s character from Arrested Development dropping his backpack on the floor and then falling face first onto the carpet, exhausted. It had a certain je ne sais quois.
A minute later, as she was responding to a text from April checking in, a message from Becker popped up on the screen. It was a gif of a golden retriever tucking itself into bed. That had gone surprisingly well. Maybe humanity should take the opportunity to revert to fully symbolic communication.
Of course, she didn’t actually take Becker’s suggestion. Maggie instead hoisted herself off the ground and went to make herself a pot of coffee. Would it make her nauseous? Possibly. But she desperately needed the caffeine to clear the cotton out of her head and put all the newspaper brain clippings into some meaningful order. She had work to do.
An hour later, she was feeling about 60%, a D-, which was at least a passing grade. She’d managed to more or less figure out what was going on abortion-wise in North Carolina. Charming, how we assign a little legal research project as a prerequisite for accessing medical care. She’d decided to go with the only clinic in Asheville that she’d heard of, partly because name recognition was powerful, ask anyone in branding, and partly because April had starred it on the handwritten list she’d given Maggie the day before. It was closed on Sundays (they all were), but there was an automated chat function. O brave new world. She filled in a short form that, among other things, asked for her best estimate of the first day of her last period. She bestly estimated 9 weeks earlier, because she was pretty sure that was about when this slow-rolling disaster had begun and because 312 weeks was not an option on the drop down menu. An algorithm informed her that:
North Carolina law requires patients to schedule an initial phone call with our staff before scheduling an abortion procedure. Have you scheduled a phone call with us?
She clicked “No.” Almost immediately, the algorithm responded:
You are booking an appointment for the initial phone call ONLY, as required by law. The doctor will call you up to an hour before or an hour after the time selected for your appointment. You will have the opportunity to book the procedure online once the phone call is booked.
This was starting to feel like an appointment window with an internet service provider. She clicked “I agree,” booked the phone call for the following day, and from there, was directed to a scheduling calendar for the procedure itself. The next available appointment for a medication abortion was three weeks out. She wasn’t sure, but based on her best guess at what was going on, that seemed likely to put her outside the window during which a medication abortion was even possible. So, not ideal. Also, in three weeks she would be on her way back to London.
Three weeks. Her stomach clenched in a way that felt unrelated to her now-baseline nausea. She’d just gotten there.
But before Maggie had time to contemplate the unsolved riddle of the nature of time, a pop-up suggested that she could, instead, get an appointment as soon as Thursday in Winston-Salem. She had to pull up a map to double-check how far that was from Blue Harbor. 130 miles. Also not ideal, but, on balance, she would really like to get this over with. She booked it. (Thursday, of course, was the absolute soonest she could legally schedule the appointment thanks to the legislatively mandated 72-hour wait after the legislatively mandated initial phone call. Maggie wondered whether one of the legislators had any time to drive her to Winston-Salem. She had some thoughts she’d like to share. As a concerned constituent.)
That dealt with, she spent the rest of the day tunneling down a rabbit-hole of North Carolina glamping sites — Blue Harbor’s future competition — making notes of offerings that she could steal. And offerings that she absolutely would not. One place about an hour away touted its “glamorustic matrimonial experiganza.” She was genuinely surprised that phrase alone hadn’t brought the nausea back.