The Red Maple
When Maggie’s brother Chip got sick at eighteen, he disappeared for most of a summer.
He left a note that said Don’t worry, but he didn’t take his car.
Their mother sat each day on the tree swing Chip used to love; their father went for long car rides, his arm out the window, calling out to Chip’s friends on the baseball field or standing in front of the roller-skating rink to ask if they’d heard anything.
They called his best friend, Vicky, over and over, but she said he must have just been laying low.
And then one day in August, Chip walked back through the front door, a duffel bag over his shoulder, looking refreshed. Stronger, as if that were possible.
“Where the hell have you been?” their dad said, grabbing him and pulling him close.
Maggie noticed her dad’s eyes were red, and her mother stared at Chip in disbelief, twisting the dish towel she was holding.
Their dog, Birdy Girl, came in from outside and wagged her tail and stood by Chip as if she too was waiting for his response.
But Chip never told them. That day he just shrugged. A “not now” other times, and then, finally, they gave up asking.
After he died, Maggie spent most of her afternoons in his bedroom.
It made her feel close to him again. She took her time looking through his things.
In his closet, she came across a tan suit she’d never seen him wear.
In his top dresser drawer, she found pay stubs that showed him working at a place called the Red Maple Inn and Cottages.
Then she found a nametag: black plastic with his name in gold letters, a tree logo above it.
She had seen TV commercials for this resort in the Poconos, about forty-five minutes from their home in Easton, Pennsylvania.
She remembered couples on horseback and a bartender in a red vest smiling and holding a cocktail out to the camera.
She held the nametag and traced the four letters of her brother’s name.
She tried not to think of him in the hospital bed, asking her if she minded holding the cup of ginger ale so he could sip from it, her hand on his bony shoulder as he drank.
She couldn’t look at the book he had wanted her to read to him all the time, now sitting silent on his bookshelf.
She thought of the moment toward the end when she sat next to his bed and asked, “But where were you all summer?” and he finally replied, “It was just mine, Tiger,” and stared out the window.
In his bedroom, she turned the nametag around and clipped and unclipped the pin.
All through her senior year she couldn’t do anything, think of anything.
Not while her boyfriend Tommy held her hand as they sat together at the school’s winter choral concert; not while she took watercolor classes in the spring and washed blue and yellow over her paper; not while she and her parents watched Jimmy Carter campaigning on TV and wondered if he could ever be president; not while she worked at Millman’s Market, stocking the shelves and bagging cans of peaches and Ovaltine and loaves of bread. Nothing seemed real.
Something was missing, and of course she knew it was the boy one year older than her who always had something funny to say; who could do pull-ups from the bar their dad hung from the laundry room door; and who once bought her a necklace from Caruso’s Gifts with her name on it even though it wasn’t her birthday—he just thought she’d like it.
Frick and Frack, their mom called the two of them.
The loss of him was giant, like not seeing the moon anymore. So Red Maple was where he’d gone that summer? Why? Maggie found herself wondering nonstop what he’d done there.
She had tried to imagine him back to normal and happy in heaven, if there was a heaven, but the picture was fuzzy.
Somehow, she could actually see him at Red Maple, sunburned and smiling and friends with everyone—he could always make friends, unlike her.
Did he work outside and fold pool towels, or was he in charge of arranging boat rentals or serving Sunday brunch?
She imagined him as everything at that place, imagined the sadness he must have felt when he decided it was time to head back home, probably feeling more tired from having missed his treatments, more faded, knowing his hourglass was almost out of sand.
And so Red Maple became a place she needed to see.
Red Maple with its mountains and giant trees and sprawling lodge she imagined like a fortress.
The day after she graduated from high school, she packed a bag and studied the bus schedule.
Maybe the people there could tell her about who, in his last good moments, her brother had been.