Chapter 13. Maggie
MAGGIE
Maggie snuck into the butler’s pantry, closed the door behind her, and pulled out her phone to read Sarah’s text.
Can’t talk—at Frank’s parents’. Will call you on Sunday. xx
Throughout the affair, Sarah had always claimed she was the one who had “everything to lose” if they were caught, but they both knew that wasn’t true.
That had never been true. And now it was Maggie’s job and relationship on the line.
What was she doing, hiding away and texting Sarah?
Even if she found out that Cunningham knew about the affair and he called her into his office on Monday to fire her, there was nothing she could do about it here.
She leaned against the copper sink and typed furiously into her phone.
Don’t call me on Sunday.
Adrenaline shot through her body. She doubled down.
Don’t call me ever again.
Enjoy the rest of your life.
I don’t want any part of it.
She reread her texts, hands shaking. Part of her worried Frank was on the other end taking screenshots to send to Cunningham as evidence, and part of her was so enraged by it all that she didn’t care. She needed to pull herself together for Thanksgiving dinner. She needed to talk to Isabel.
No , she thought.
Don’t do that.
She stared at the sacred heart of Jesus plate hanging on the wall by the window.
Later , she promised him. I’ll tell her everything.
Maggie had just pulled away from the kiss when they heard Frank walk into the house. Sarah bolted up, stunned, then leapt off the couch. Frank was supposed to be on his way to the Cape with the kids to visit his parents.
“Bunny?” he called from the foyer.
Sarah hid the half shell holding the nub of their joint under the marble coffee table, and Maggie frantically straightened her shirt.
All the while, she thought, Bunny. Huh. That’s what he calls her.
Maggie had spent the year of their affair obsessing over Sarah and Frank’s marriage.
Sarah claimed they were no longer in love or slept together, and as much as Maggie wanted to believe this, wanted to believe Frank was as awful and controlling as Sarah made him out to be, she knew otherwise.
Oliver’s essays about his father-and-son fishing trips were sweet, and Sarah’s anecdotes, which Maggie sometimes suspected were used to make her jealous—“Frank’s pestering me for a date night” or “I’ll buy it!
Frank said I should treat myself”—were charming.
Maggie used to feel sick to her stomach after Sarah left her and returned to him at the end of their weekends away, imagining the small, domestic details of their life.
Reading in bed together before falling asleep.
Cooking dinner. Date nights. These were the things she wanted—to entwine her life with another.
Or she would imagine the opposite. Their fights.
The tension. Sarah wishing she was falling asleep with Maggie instead of Frank.
Either way, it was all an illusion. Here was their life.
Their actual life. He called her Bunny .
She could hear the casual affection and ease in Frank’s voice. This is my home. I’m greeting my wife.
Maybe Sarah doesn’t love him , Maggie thought, but he loves her.
Before Maggie turned around, she understood that one of the children must have been with Frank from the syrupy voice Sarah used when she said “Hi!” When Maggie turned, she recognized a three-year-old version of Sarah—blond hair and brown eyes and pouty lips—her arm wrapped around her father’s leg as she sucked on the ear of a pink stuffed dog.
“What’s going on?” Frank asked.
Maggie looked up at Frank and was surprised to find that he was not the refined, handsome, sophisticated surgeon she remembered from the first and only time she’d met him in person at a school fundraiser.
Instead, he was slightly shorter than Maggie and a bit chubby, with a face that looked like it was probably kind when he wasn’t standing in the living room with an unexpected guest smoking a joint with his wife and disheveled from—what?
“This is Maggie Ryan,” Sarah crooned. Maggie recognized the cloying voice from when Sarah would call home on their weekends away—weekends when Sarah pretended to be at a yoga retreat or visiting a friend.
It used to unsettle Maggie, but now it made her cringe.
“Oh, you remember her! Oliver’s English teacher from last year? His favorite teacher!”
Was I? Maggie’s head was foggy from the joint, and her heart thundered in her ears.
Sarah turned to Maggie, and this—more than the kiss or Frank’s unexpected arrival—took Maggie by surprise.
Her calm. Whatever fear she’d expressed in that first moment of panic was replaced by a cool and unwavering confidence that made Maggie wonder with horror if she’d set this whole thing up on purpose.
She watched as Sarah walked to the little girl—Hope was her name.
“The baby that was supposed to save our marriage,” Sarah once quipped, which Maggie had found egregious for many reasons.
Sarah scooped Hope into her arms and gave her a loud, dramatic kiss on the cheek.
Frank regarded Maggie. “I’m not sure we’ve met.” He walked across the room and held out his hand. “Frank Thompson.”
“Nice to meet you.” Maggie reached out her hand, and he gave it two hard pumps. She needed to get out of there as quickly as possible, but she wasn’t sure how to do that inconspicuously, so she heard herself say, “I’ve read about your fishing trips.” Your fishing trips?!
Frank gave her a confused look.
“I mean—” Maggie stuttered. “In Oliver’s essays. For class.”
Frank turned to Sarah. “I didn’t know you were having company?”
“Maggie’s in town to see Anne Carson read at the MFA.” Sarah was talking to Frank but looking at Hope. “She just popped over for a quick hello.”
That’s right , Maggie thought. That is what I’m supposed to be doing.
“It smells yucky in here,” Hope said.
“Oh,” Sarah said. “That’s Mommy’s new candle!”
Hope held her nose. “I don’t like it.”
Frank observed the half-drunk bottle of wine on the coffee table and the makeshift ashtray beneath it with the joint, then turned back to Sarah, who smiled and swayed with Hope on her hip as though nothing was amiss.
“What are you doing back here?” Sarah asked. Again, speaking to Frank but looking at Hope. Again, that voice.
“We forgot Hope’s scooter,” Frank said, but it was clear he was distracted and trying to figure out what he’d walked into. “Oliver is in the car—” He stopped. Then slowly, brutally, Maggie watched his face turn as the knowledge, the recognition, entered him. He whipped his head around.
“I’m going to leave,” Maggie said.
“I think that’s best,” Frank said.
Hope looked up from Sarah’s shoulder and turned to Frank, then Maggie. Her bottom lip trembled. And if there was a moment when Maggie realized what a mistake she’d made, how selfish she’d been in this whole thing, it was here, as Hope, sensing the anger in her father’s voice, burst into tears.
Maggie avoided all their eyes as she grabbed her bag and jacket and quickly decided to leave her scarf on the kitchen counter.
“I’m sorry—” she began, but Frank placed his hand on her shoulder and gently but firmly guided her past Sarah, who was trying to comfort Hope and doing everything possible to avert her eyes, to the foyer.
Maggie didn’t say anything to Frank as he opened the door and released her into the crisp fall evening.
The city was alive with the hustle of rush hour.
She listened to the door close behind her and held the wrought-iron railing as she hurried down the steps.
She stood at the bottom of the stoop, high and dazed, her heart slamming into her chest, and tried to gather herself.
If she never saw Sarah again, that would be fine.
Preferable. But the damage was done—to their lives, and to her own.
She wanted to call Isabel, but that would be a mistake.
Any capacity she’d had to deny what she’d been doing with Sarah—from the first kiss to now the last—had been punctured.
As Maggie made her way down the block toward the Commons, someone called her name.
When she turned, she spotted Oliver, his head sticking out of the back-seat window of an Audi SUV, a big smile on his face.
He waved, cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled, “What are you doing here?” Maggie waved back, then turned and continued walking.
The drive back to Vermont the next day was long. Maggie was sick with regret. All she wanted was to get home, melt into Isabel’s arms, and beg for her forgiveness.
That night, Isabel made them bean tacos for dinner, and Maggie sat at the two-top table nursing a beer as she half listened to Isabel talk about a scene she’d struggled to write over the weekend.
“So,” Isabel said. She popped a black olive into her mouth, took a sip of her beer, and then straddled Maggie rather than sitting in her own chair. “Your turn.” She kissed Maggie’s neck. “Tell me about your weekend.”
Do it now , Maggie thought. Do it now, do it now, do it now.
“It was terrible,” she said.
Isabel pulled away. “Was it? Why?”
Maggie pressed her head to Isabel’s chest. “I just like it better here with you.” She told herself that was as true an answer as anything. The other truth she would bury deep within and pray that’s where it stayed.
Maggie nearly gave the caterers a heart attack when she darted out of the pantry and into the kitchen, but she was able to sprint up the back stairs and sneak into the shower before anyone in the family spotted her.
She was working conditioner through her hair when someone opened the bathroom door, and, assuming it was one of her sisters, she yelled, “Get out!” The door closed, but after a moment, she realized that whoever had opened it was now in the bathroom with her.
“Why does Sarah want to talk to you on Sunday?” Isabel asked.
Maggie went numb. The conditioner ran into her eyes, blurring her vision, but she snapped to and ripped open the curtain.
Isabel sat on the toilet, legs crossed, Maggie’s phone in her hand. “And why did you tell her to go have a nice life?”
Maggie kept the water running to drown out their voices but stepped out of the shower.
“Let me just—” She wrapped a guest towel, the ones her mother never let them use, around her body and lowered herself onto her knees to face Isabel.
The room fogged with steam. “This past weekend in Boston—” She stopped to wipe the conditioner and now tears off her face.
“What happened in Boston?”
“I ran into Sarah and—”
Before she could finish, Isabel cut her off. “You ran into her , or you made plans to see her? Is that why you went to Boston?”
“No,” Maggie said. She felt dizzy. The towel kept slipping off her bare chest. “That’s not why I went at all. But once I got into town, she sent me a text and invited me to her house.”
“That’s not ‘running into her.’ And she just happened to know you were in Boston?”
“Please. Let me finish.” She placed her hands on Isabel’s knees, but Isabel brushed them off. “Don’t touch me,” she said. “Finish!”
Maggie turned off the faucet in the shower. “Okay, Sarah is—Well, I never told you this part, but Sarah is Oliver Thompson’s mom.”
“What the hell?” Isabel shook her head. “I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone . Your ex is the mother of my student? Of your student? How could you have not told me that?”
She hadn’t told Isabel before because it all felt so icky, so scandalous, but now she regretted withholding that context. “I was going to but—”
There was a knock at the door.
“Just a sec,” Maggie yelled.
“Hurry up,” Cait said. “I need to shower, and Mom and Dad’s is slow as piss.”
Maggie turned back to Isabel. “Can we talk in my room?” she asked. This could not get any worse. There was no way she could make this better before all the guests started to arrive for dinner.
Cait pounded on the door again. “Maggie,” she said. “Get your skinny ass out of there, or I’ll break down the door.”
“Give me a goddamn second,” Maggie said. She started to turn on the faucet for more privacy, but Isabel snapped, “Leave it!”
Maggie stood. She held out her hand to help Isabel up, but Isabel stood on her own. She tucked Maggie’s phone into her back pocket, wiped the tears off her face, and reached for the doorknob.
The door opened to reveal Cait, hands on her hips.
“Seriously?” Cait said. “Now’s the time?”
Isabel strode past her, and when Maggie shot Cait a look, Cait raised her arms in defense. “Jesus,” she said. “Take a joke.” Then she said, “Sluts,” and walked into the bathroom.