Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  While Maggie showered, Kathleen finished packing. She hadn’t brought much. She had worn the same faded T-shirt of Arlo’s for the past three days.

  Eventually, Maggie came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, a wall of steam floating around her.

  “Did you make the bed in your room?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Did you wash the sheets?”

  “No. What is it with you and the sheets? Do you think I was performing an animal sacrifice in my sleep or something?”

  Maggie sighed. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  Kathleen found Alice in the kitchen washing dishes, already dressed in a dark blue pantsuit, her makeup done to perfection, her black bob sleek and in place. She looked like she was going to a funeral.

  “We’re taking off,” Kathleen said.

  Alice frowned. “Oh? Where to?”

  “I’m driving Maggie back to New York.”

  “Is that right?”

  Kathleen opened the fridge and pulled out a pitcher of water. Beside it, dripping onto a saucer, was a tea bag.

  “Maybe you should start living a little and stop reusing the tea bags, Mom.”

  “Waste not, want not,” Alice said. “So, has Maggie come to her senses about Gabe? Are they getting back together?”

  “No, thank God.”

  “How can you say that?” Alice asked. “It’s always better for a child to have married parents. Do you know what children call other children who don’t have fathers?”

  “It’s not 1951, Mom.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that.” Alice paused. “If she’s not going to make up with Gabe, what’s the point of going back there?”

  “To start getting ready, I guess,” Kathleen said.

  Alice fiddled with the spray nozzle on the sink.

  “Now this thing’s acting funny, as well as the disposal. And Ann Marie has succeeded at scaring Father Donnelly away from the place for as long as she’s still here.”

  Neither of them mentioned the reason. Kathleen wasn’t sure whether she cared that her mother had given the property away, but she knew her siblings were upset. The whole situation was absolutely bizarre, Alice at her most Alice-like.

  “Speaking of Ann Marie, will you give her a message for me?” Kathleen asked.

  “That depends.” Alice’s tone was cautious, as if Kathleen were some traveling salesman asking her if she was in the market for an overpriced vacuum cleaner.

  “On what?”

  “The message! You can’t expect me to agree to say something before I even know what it is.”

  Kathleen shook her head. “Oh my God. Okay. Tell her I was finally ready to leave the beach and get out of her hair.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just tell her.”

  “Fine.”

  In the car, Kathleen told Maggie about the kiss. She had to. In fact, she was surprised she had been able to hold it in for that long.

  “You can’t tell Arlo,” Maggie said.

  “Why not? He’s not going to spill the beans.”

  “I know, but once you’ve told me, and then him, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump and you’re telling Aunt Clare, and then it’s out to the family. And that’s dangerous.”

  “Why are you such a Goody Two-shoes?” Kathleen asked, genuinely curious, though she knew Maggie was probably right.

  “Promise me,” Maggie said.

  “Okay, I promise. Sheesh.”

  “I still don’t really understand why we left so abruptly,” Maggie said.

  “It was time,” Kathleen said. “I’m not going to try to talk you into moving in with me anymore.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. You’ve done a great job of convincing me that my house is a shit hole and no self-respecting person would ever want to live there with us.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Kathleen smiled. “It’s okay. You’re an amazing young woman, Maggie. And if what you want is to stay in New York, then I support that.”

  Maggie stuck out her bottom lip. “Thank you.”

  They listened to the radio for a while until the station faded out of range.

  “Aren’t you even going to mention how virtuous I’m being about this Ann Marie situation?” Kathleen asked.

  Maggie didn’t respond.

  Kathleen turned to look at her. She was fast asleep. She brushed a dangling strand of hair behind Maggie’s ear and kept driving.

  When they arrived in Brooklyn, there was a huge box blocking the door to Maggie’s apartment. Kathleen’s first thought was that it was from Gabe. She looked at the address label.

  “It says it’s from Bugaboo,” she said. “What the hell is Bugaboo?”

  Maggie looked embarrassed, and Kathleen pictured a sex swing or something crazy like that.

  But Maggie responded, “It’s a gift from Aunt Ann Marie.”

  “Tell me she didn’t buy you a dollhouse.”

  “No! It’s a stroller.”

  “A stroller.”

  “Yeah, a really trendy one, I guess. It cost like six hundred bucks.”

  “Oh, well that sounds practical. Nice of her to let you know what it cost.”

  “She didn’t let me know. I saw it in the catalog.”

  Kathleen felt her goodwill toward Ann Marie slipping a bit. She would probably end up telling Clare about the kiss, but that was all. No one else. Clare wouldn’t tell anyone besides Joe.

  They heard footsteps on the staircase behind them then, and a moment later a gorgeous young thing with mile-long legs was saying hello.

  “Maggie!” she said. “You’re back!”

  Kathleen remembered the first time she had visited her daughter at college, how pleased and reassured she had felt to see that Maggie had built her own community there, full of friends Kathleen had never laid eyes on. Now Maggie had done the same here in New York. Her daughter was okay on her own. In fact, she thrived on independence, just like Kathleen herself.

  “Rhiannon, hi. This is my mom. Mom, Rhiannon lives next door. She’s the one who drove me up to Maine.”

  “Oh,” Kathleen said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” the girl said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Kathleen wasn’t sure she liked her tone.

  “How’s everything been around here?” Maggie asked.

  “Same old, same old. I went to Governor’s Island for the first time yesterday.”

  “Cool,” Maggie said. “Listen, I should have called you sooner, but I’ve been kind of a mess, as you might imagine.”

  It was strange how easily these words came out of her mouth when she was talking to an acquaintance in the hallway. It was something she hadn’t yet said to Kathleen.

  “I’m sorry for how I reacted when you told me—”

  Rhiannon interrupted. “Oh no, I’m sorry. I never should have said that. I’d just had too much to drink. I didn’t think it through.”

  “You probably saved me from begging him to take me back with that piece of information,” Maggie said.

  What the hell were they talking about?

  The two of them hugged. Rhiannon put a hand on Maggie’s belly.

  “Hello there, teensy neighbor,” she said.

  So Maggie had told her first. Kathleen tried not to let this bother her.

  Inside the apartment, she asked, “What was that about?”

  Maggie sighed. “She works in this restaurant, and Gabe and I went one night for dinner. Apparently while I was in the bathroom, he grabbed her butt and tried to kiss her.”

  Kathleen nodded. In a way, she wished she still drank, because then she might have downed half a bottle of gin and driven over to that little shit’s apartment, and egged his car, or calmly asked him to come down to the street and then beaten the crap out of him with her purse. Ah, the good old days.

  “He pretty much sucks,” Maggie said.

  “Yeah,” Kathleen said.

  She was
somewhat relieved, realizing that Maggie was smart enough not to go back to him. But she felt sad for her daughter too. Through her child, she would be linked with Gabe for the rest of her life. They had so much to sort out, but most of the questions probably wouldn’t even be clear until they were in the midst of it, never mind the answers.

  “Can I ask one thing?” Kathleen didn’t wait for Maggie to say yes. “Was this an accident, or did you get pregnant on purpose?”

  “Something in between those two,” Maggie said. “I guess you could say I sort of tempted fate. I was stuck. I needed a push, one way or the other. That probably sounds insane.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” Kathleen said, maybe more to herself than to Maggie.

  Maggie nodded. “It has to be.”

  For lunch they ate tomato soup and peanut butter crackers, the closest thing to an actual meal that Maggie had in her cupboards. Maggie sorted through her mail and pulled the stroller from its box. They watched sitcom reruns on television, though Kathleen wasn’t paying attention. She was thinking instead about what came next.

  At three o’clock, Maggie had to get on a conference call for work, so Kathleen decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. Brooklyn Heights was beautiful, with its rows of perfectly preserved brownstones and federal houses. She walked to the Promenade, where the view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline never ceased to take her breath away. She almost felt jealous that she herself hadn’t discovered it as a twenty-something. She could see why Maggie didn’t want to leave.

  They were hungry again by six. They ordered Thai food. While Maggie went downstairs to pay the deliveryman, Kathleen took the chance to really look closely around her daughter’s apartment. She had thought the place was cute the first time she saw it—a jewel box, she had said. But that was years ago, when she was envisioning it as just a little hideaway for Maggie alone—a room of one’s own, where she might write two or three great novels before moving on to a sprawling country house out west with her stable and appropriately aged husband.

  Now Kathleen examined the tiny kitchen, with the window so drafty there was really no reason to close it. The refrigerator’s long orange power cord was strung up over a series of nails toward the ceiling and plugged in across the room. The bathroom door never closed properly—half an hour earlier, the doorknob had come off in Kathleen’s hand. The dust that streamed in from outside could never be controlled, not even by an anal-retentive neat freak like her daughter. And there was the issue of those five flights of stairs. Five!

  Maggie had said she could put a crib and a changing table in the living room, but that hideous yellow stroller Ann Marie had sent was already taking up a quarter of the space, so there went that idea.

  When Maggie came up the steps with a large paper bag in her arms, Kathleen said, “I think we need to find you a new apartment. Something bigger.”

  “I can barely afford this one,” Maggie said.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Kathleen said. “There’s something I want to say.”

  Her daughter looked nervous, but she set the bag of food on the coffee table and sat on the couch.

  “You haven’t changed your mind about trying to kidnap me, have you?”

  “No. You don’t have to come to California,” Kathleen said.

  “Oh God, are you planning to move here?”

  “No, but thank you for your excitement over the idea.”

  “Sorry,” Maggie said.

  “I do want to come back—with your permission—when the baby’s born, and help out until you get on your feet.”

  “I’d like that,” Maggie said.

  “You know your happiness is the most important thing in the world to me, right?” Kathleen asked. “Except sometimes I’m really selfish.”

  Maggie laughed, and Kathleen went on talking. “We both know that too. So. I’m kind of rambling here, but the point is, I should have done this right from the start.”

  “Done what?”

  “I have some money saved for the farm.”

  “I can’t take your savings,” Maggie said.

  “Yes, you can,” Kathleen said. “It’s twenty thousand dollars. And it would be my great pleasure to give it to you.”

  Even as she said it, she felt a deep sense of loss. Her father had made selflessness look so easy. But Kathleen would never be as good a person as he was, and she could not sit here and offer up her savings without thinking about how long she had planned on buying the worm gin, how diligent she had been in setting the money aside, month after month. The farm was doing fine, but now it would likely be years before any kind of meaningful growth could happen.

  She felt sorry for Arlo. He had no idea how much she had socked away, but she’d have to tell him now. Her father had often bailed her out, and she had been grateful. But she had never once asked him what he would have done with the money if he hadn’t given it to her. For the first time, she wondered how Alice had felt about all that.

  “I couldn’t take it,” Maggie said. “Could I? Oh God. I’d pay you back, Mom.”

  Kathleen shook her head. “No, it’s a gift. I wish I had more to give you.”

  And with that, she actually did feel somewhat selfless. Maggie needed her, and she had answered the call. Her father would be proud.

  “You can use the money to take out a hit on Gabe,” Kathleen said. “Or buy diapers. Whatever you want.”

  “That’s a lot of diapers,” Maggie said.

  “You’ll be surprised.”

  She stayed for a week. Just long enough to help Maggie find a bigger place—two bedrooms, right on the edge of a park, further into Brooklyn, Dominican kids running this way and that, an ice cream truck playing its tinny tune, ambling up the block. The rent turned out to be cheaper than her current apartment’s. If Alice ever came here, she would probably say that the neighborhood wasn’t safe, but Alice would never come. Maggie would have to bring the baby to her if she wanted her grandmother and her child to meet. No doubt, Maggie would do this, having inherited Daniel’s belief in the importance of generations, of one person understanding life through the experiences of all the people who came before.

  They packed boxes and listened to Beatles CDs. They ate a lot of takeout, and Kathleen began to feel her pants grow tighter. They shopped online for maternity clothes, which she was pleasantly surprised to find resembled real clothes—gone were the ridiculous muumuus and sailor dresses pregnant women had been forced to wear back when she was having kids.

  She accompanied Maggie to her doctor’s appointment and had to excuse herself for a minute so she could cry in the ladies’ room. Kathleen wished Maggie had some handsome sweetheart standing by her side, holding her hand. That was what she deserved. When they walked out into the waiting room, crowded full of pregnant ladies wearing enormous diamond rings, Maggie looked like she might lose it—but a moment later she shrugged, as if to say that that was just life.

  “What will you do when I’m not here to come with you?” Kathleen asked. “Come alone?”

  “I can ask Allegra to bring me,” Maggie said. “Maybe I should have a dinner party and break the news to all my friends at once.”

  “That might be a good idea,” Kathleen said, and her heart swelled to think that this fearless young woman was her daughter.

  At night, they slept side by side in Maggie’s bed. Kathleen felt afraid to leave, though she missed Arlo. She missed her dogs. She missed working the farm and eating dinners made from ingredients they had grown right there in their garden.

  She missed yoga. You couldn’t throw a rock in Brooklyn without hitting three yoga studios, but her kind of yoga had nothing to do with svelte twenty-six-year-olds in trendy workout gear. Her kind of yoga included Arlo and her in the backyard, wearing sweatpants, gazing at the mountains in the distance, rather than looking out at a sea of taxicabs through a dirty window.

  They both cried when she had to leave for the airport.

  “I’m scared,” Maggie
said.

  “That’s just part of it. And you can change your mind anytime about coming to stay with us. Okay?”

  “Thanks,” Maggie said. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, kiddo.”

  Several hours later, Kathleen sat barefoot at the kitchen table with Arlo, drinking ginger tea, telling him everything that had happened since they had kissed good-bye two weeks earlier. He had arranged white tulips in a vase on the counter, and made a pumpkin cake with the words WELCOME HOME etched unevenly across the top in white icing. Kathleen felt at peace.

  The dogs sat at either side of her chair, as if they were guarding her, as if to say You’re right where you belong.

  Alice

  Alice had been watching him all afternoon. He had reddish hair, unlike most of the others. He paused for a moment and looked her way to make sure that she was still sitting there on the screen porch, observing his work.

  She gave him a wave and took a sip of her wine. He went back to eating the grass.

  A few days earlier, she had decided to make peace with the family of rabbits who had been hanging around all summer. They had withstood every challenge she had given them since May. You had to admire the sort of gumption it took to break through a fence and stomach an entire bottle of liquefied cayenne pepper just to get a bite of good lettuce.

  When she gave it some thought, she realized she was their type exactly: someone who seemed to bug everyone around her, when all she was trying to do was survive.

  In recent days she had even gone so far as to put a few carrots out on the grass by the car, but the bunnies hadn’t touched them, probably because they could smell the human scent she’d left behind.