Chapter 11. Maggie
MAGGIE
While Isabel showered, Maggie returned to her room, eager to check her phone to see if Sarah had responded.
Still nothing. This was so typical of Sarah that Maggie felt at once relieved to be out of the clutches of the relationship—how many holidays had she spent waiting for Sarah to sneak away from Frank to call her for a quick “I love you”?
—and full of renewed regret that she’d put herself in this position in the first place.
As she made her bed, her thoughts turned to Isabel’s question from earlier that morning about whether her mother had changed.
Maggie was sure she hadn’t. For years she’d had to work hard to keep her expectations low.
It was the only way she’d managed to have a relationship with her mother at all. Why open old wounds?
And yet, with Isabel there, at the house, how could she not wonder what it would be like if things were different? How could she not want that?
In the kitchen, she found her father dressing Poppy in James’s old winter clothes.
“Kyle got bagels.” He pointed to the spread on the island. He finished tying Poppy’s boots and ushered her out the side door. “Snowman time!”
“Have fun,” Maggie said. She thought of snow days when they’d wake up and discover that school was canceled, and their father would take them snowshoeing along the beach. She wished Cait lived closer so her parents could spend more time with the twins.
As soon as her father closed the door, Cait peeked into the kitchen. “They’re gone?”
“You’re safe.”
Cait poured a cup of coffee and took a sip. “I hate playing.”
Maggie looked out the window at Kyle making the kids snow cones with maple syrup. “Isn’t that the fun part of being a parent?” she asked. “Playing in the snow and stuff?”
“Only someone without children would think that,” Cait said. “No offense.” “None taken.”
Suddenly Cait regarded her with narrowed eyes. “You don’t have anything to tell me, do you? You mentioned work last night.”
Maggie froze. She had wanted to talk to Cait last night about everything with Sarah but had dropped it when Poppy joined them to pick up the pizza, and there was no way she was going to get into it all now with everyone running around the house.
“I’ll tell you later.” Then, to change the subject, she said, “And we need to talk about Luke—”
Cait grabbed the newspaper by the sink. “Not now we don’t. I’ve been up with the twins since the crack of dawn, and I just want to drink my coffee and read the paper in silence.”
“Understood.” Maggie was still dismayed by Cait’s invitation to Luke, but her sister was in no mood to get into it, and she knew that pushing would only annoy her more.
Maggie threw on her father’s decades-old Barbour coat and headed outside, where she found her mother on the front porch, wrapped in a wool blanket and watching the kids play.
“Morning, love,” she said when Maggie opened the door. Despite any anxiety her mother might have had about Luke joining them for dinner or unease around Isabel being there, Maggie knew she relished having the whole family together.
“It’s cold out here.” Maggie buried her hands inside the jacket pockets and was alarmed to find two shotgun shells.
Nora tightened the blanket around her shoulders. “It is cold,” she agreed. Then she said, “Alice was looking for you earlier. She has a to-do list she needs help with.”
“I’m sure she’ll find me,” Maggie said.
Poppy handed Nora a snow cone, then collapsed onto the driveway with Augustus to make snow angels.
Watching her mother laugh with the twins stirred an unexpected tenderness. “They must bring up a lot of memories from when we were kids,” Maggie said.
Her mother turned to her and half smiled. “It snowed so hard the winter after you were born, we couldn’t get the station wagon out of the driveway for a week. You had colic, poor thing, and your brother would spend hours playing in the snow just to get away from all your hollering.”
Maggie remembered a home video of that winter. Topher, Cait, and Alice outside playing, her screams echoing in the background.
“He’d come back inside,” her mother continued, “teeth all chattering.” She laughed. “Ah, but we get on with it. Don’t we?”
“I guess we do,” Maggie said. It wasn’t like her mother to evoke a memory of Topher so casually, and she wondered if it had anything to do with Luke coming for dinner. “How are you feeling about today?”
Maggie didn’t know Luke that well. Like her brother, he was nine years older than her, and he and Topher had pretty much stopped being friends after Daniel died.
She’d always liked the alliteration in his name—Luke Larkin—and had foggy memories of him from the beach club, but that was about it.
He and Cait had had some sort of fling back in high school, though she wasn’t sure what her sister meant when she said they’d been back in touch over the past few months.
Cait had conspicuously omitted that detail when talking to the family last night.
“You know about Mrs. Larkin passing,” her mother said. “Cait’s right. It’s the kind thing to do.”
“I guess,” Maggie said. She kept her questions about why Luke would want to come to dinner with them in the first place to herself.
Nora took a bite from her snow cone, then met Maggie’s eyes. “I just wish—” She stopped.
“What?” Maggie asked, with a flicker of hope that her mother might say something about Isabel or maybe about wanting to repair their relationship.
But then her mother said, “Has Cait mentioned seeing anyone new lately?”
Of course.
“I don’t think so,” Maggie said flatly. She was not only disappointed but wasn’t sure if her mother was asking something about Cait and Luke.
“Well, it’ll be nice for her to meet Mukesh, then.”
“Is Kyle trying to set them up?”
“Mukesh is moving to London,” Nora said, as if that answered the question.
“Does Cait know that’s Kyle’s intention?”
“No, no.”
Does anyone in this family talk to one another?
Her mother continued. “I still don’t know what was so awful about Bram.”
Maggie had been more upset when Cait said she was marrying Bram and moving to London than when she announced her divorce a decade later.
Before Cait’s wedding, Maggie had met Bram only once, on a visit to Brighton.
Over curry and beers, Bram spent the night talking about himself, scolded the server for forgetting the biryani, and, at the end of the meal, quietly slid the check across the table to Cait while he pontificated about his prized sneaker collection.
Maggie had tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but that first impression turned out to be generous.
After the divorce, Bram returned to Amsterdam and settled for quarterly visits with the twins and a month in the summer.
“She didn’t love him,” Maggie said. “I don’t think she ever did.” She wasn’t sure why she said the last part and if it was even true.
Her mother watched the kids make a snowman in the garden. “Yes,” she said.
The small concession impressed Maggie. Her mother had been understandably upset by the divorce, but she’d mostly blamed it on the stress of the twins and Cait working such long hours.
Returning now to Isabel’s advice, Maggie found herself saying, “So, do you like her?”
Her mother turned.
“Isabel,” Maggie said impatiently. “Here we are talking about Cait, but you haven’t mentioned anything about Isabel. What do you think of her?”
“Well, I’m getting to know her as such…”
Nora turned back to the kids, and Maggie waited to see if she might finish her sentence. Was that seriously all she had to say? When several moments passed, and her mother didn’t offer more, a swell of familiar loneliness engulfed Maggie. She shouldn’t have tried.
Nora held her hand over her forehead and squinted as she pointed to a pair of blue jays in the cherry tree at the center of the circular driveway. “Did you know they’re not actually blue?” she said. “Their feathers don’t contain any blue pigment. It’s the way they reflect the light. They’re brown.”
Maggie watched the birds.
“It’s some trick of nature or perspective,” her mother continued, then closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sky. Snowflakes landed on her silver hair and dissolved.
Maggie marveled at the power of such a tiny woman to make her so frustrated and full of longing for acceptance that she could scream.
She turned to the birds. Bright blue against the white snow, they fluttered from branch to bare branch.
“‘We don’t see things as they are,’” she said. “‘We see them as we are.’”
Her mother blinked.
“Ana?s Nin,” Maggie said, and headed back inside where it was warm.
Maggie and Isabel made more coffee as Poppy marched into the kitchen, tracking snow and complaining that it was cold and the boys were playing too roughly.
She kicked off her boots and wiggled out of the snowsuit, all of which were too big for her and, once removed, revealed plaid pajamas.
She hopped onto a stool by the island and announced that she was “very starving.”
Isabel pulled up a stool next to Poppy. “I’m very starving, too,” she said. “What’s for breakfast?”
Maggie prepared a plain buttered bagel for Poppy and everything bagels with vegetable cream cheese for herself and Isabel.
“Sliced tomato?”
Isabel shook her head no.
“You say that funny,” Poppy said. She brushed her curly locks away from her face.
“Say what?”
“To-may-to,” Poppy said.
Maggie planted her elbows on the island. “Do I?” she said in a mock British accent.
Poppy looked up, confused.
“Just kidding,” Maggie said, and kissed the back of her hand.
Poppy inspected the bagel with a frown. “Can you cut it up for me?”
“Girl, you don’t cut up a bagel!” Maggie said. “You eat it with your hands like this.”
Poppy watched her but then tossed her bagel back onto the plate and grabbed her red crayon again.
“You’re a good artist,” Isabel said.