One Night in Boston

by Allie Boniface

  Through the front window of her house, she could see Neve hunched over the keyboard, peering at the computer screen and downing ginger ale. What’s wrong with her? Maggie wondered, pressing her cheek to the phone. Is she getting sick? Now that she thought about it, Neve had been looking rather pale the last couple of days. God, she hoped her assistant wasn’t coming down with some sort of late-spring flu. She needed everyone in her corner right now, all the moral support she could muster.

  Maggie slid out of the car and glanced at the farmhouse across the street. There, the six-year-old Carvalho twins played in the yard, ponytails coming loose and blowing in the wind. She fluttered her fingers and the girls waved back, four baby starfish splayed in hello. The pain that stung Maggie every now and again spread through her chest. Children. How she would have loved to have them, someday, but—

  “Mrs. Doyle? How may I help you?” A deep, raspy voice broke into her thoughts. Thankfully.

  “It’s Miss,” she corrected, before she realized that she should probably be more respectful to the man who held her only chance at avoiding foreclosure. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I mean, I’m not married.” If I were, if I had a second income, do you think I’d be in this situation? “Anyway, the reason I called is that—”

  “Yes, I have your file in front of me.”

  Uh oh, Maggie thought. He sounds too cool. Too professional. Her heart dropped a notch.

  “And I have to say, you’re not a prime candidate for an extension. Not at this point. Not from what I can see.”

  Maggie took a deep breath. “Let me explain,” she began. “I can make the payments. I can. I just need a little time to get the money together. I’m a designer, see, and I have a lot of projects out right now, but…”

  “Miss Doyle.” His voice was firm. Quiet.

  She traced a spot of peeling paint on the door panel. She knew what he was about to say.

  “I’m sure your lawyer has explained your options to you. Looking at your tax records and your income statements for the last six months—”

  “It was a rough winter,” she interrupted. But she knew he didn’t care. His job was to run a bank. To collect mortgage payments. To take away homes and businesses, even dreams, if he had to.

  “Well, I can appreciate that,” the man said, sounding almost human for a moment. “But for our bank to work out an amended payment schedule, we need to have your last three months’ mortgage payments in full. Plus the current one, which is due…”

  She could hear him shuffling papers.

  “…ah, today, actually. If you were up to date, see, then we could make changes for the future.”

  The future. Maggie would have laughed if her heart hadn’t ached so. She could barely see through the next twenty-four hours, yet this man was talking about weeks, months, years of her life that he could change with a single signature in his sterile Boston office.

  “I understand.”

  He cleared his throat. “Your attorney has notified you of the full amount owed, I believe? Including late fees, it totals fifteen thousand, four hundred and eighty dollars. Do you…ah…have that money?”

  She wound two fingers into her hair and tugged at the curls. “Yes,” she said suddenly. “I mean, I will have. By this time tomorrow.” What are you doing? a bodiless voice screamed inside her head. Why are you telling lies? It will only get you into deeper trouble. Rain began spattering onto the back of her neck as if God himself were shaking a finger at her sin.

  “Really?” The bank manager’s voice brightened a little. “Well, in that case, we might be able to do something for you. If you can wire the money to the bank by tomorrow, I can put a stop on the foreclosure proceedings.”

  “You’re open on Saturday?” she asked in a tiny voice.

  “Our main branch is, yes. Until one,” he said again.

  “Okay,” Maggie answered. “Then that’s what I’ll do. I’ll have it to you by tomorrow. I promise.”

  He switched her over to a secretary who gave her a long list of numbers, including the precise amount she owed and directions for wiring the money up to Boston. Maggie jotted it all down on an envelope she’d grabbed from her glove box and said a swift goodbye.

  One o’clock, huh? She stared at her reflection in the car’s side mirror. A round, freckled face stared back at her, with too-thin lips and crazy red hair, the bane of her existence. She’d often wondered if her temperament followed the fiery color of her curls, if she hadn’t had any choice but to be stubborn and odd and independent from the moment she’d popped into the world almost thirty years ago.

  Well, no turning back now. I’ll find Dillon between now and then if it’s the last thing I do. She smoothed the tangles at her temples and straightened. She’d call up whatever businesses Neve had found so far. She’d scour the Internet, she’d call Information in all fifty states, she’d do whatever she had to do to locate her stepbrother and get herself out of this mess.

  Maggie marched back into the house, rain slicking the backs of her legs. She headed into the front office with a litany of questions circling her brain. I need that list. I need a map of Boston. I need you to find out if anyone named Dillon Murphy is listed in the phone book up there. But the words died on her lips. She barely had time to say hello to Andrew Weatherby, barely had a moment to register that his truck had been parked outside and she hadn’t even noticed, when a white-faced Neve collapsed on the loveseat in front of them.

  *

  Neve saw Maggie pull into the driveway like a wild woman, same as always, and made a mental note to remind her boss that suicide probably wasn’t the best way to escape foreclosure.

  “Will she be able to get the money?” Andrew’s voice, smooth as dark honey, warm and homey and all hers, slid over her as he walked into the office. He ducked his lanky frame under the top of the doorframe.

  She rose and went to him, winding her fingers through his and breathing in his scent, Ivory and Old Spice and sawdust from the jobsite. “I don’t know. I hope so.” She leaned into his chest and tried to find comfort there.

  “Here’s that salami on rye,” Andrew said after a minute, fishing the cellophane-wrapped sandwich from the inside pocket of his coat. He chuckled. “Don’t know how you can stand that stuff.”

  Neve grinned. “I told you, I just had a craving last night. I can’t remember the last time I ate salami either, but—“

  The door flew open then, with Maggie on the other side. Neve was just about to point to the list of nearly one hundred landscaping businesses on her desk when a sudden head rush left her woozy. She reached for the arm of the loveseat to steady herself. Not again, she thought. Not now. Her breath came in short gasps, and pinwheels of light spun on the walls as she fought for composure. Andrew wrapped his arms around her, catching her as she fell, and Neve let herself cave into the safety of him.

  *

  Shadows moved against the back of her eyelids. A hum rose and fell in the distance, a rushing of waves, a foreign sound she couldn’t identify. A moment later, she realized that it came from somewhere inside her own ears. Neve rolled her head from side to side.

  “She’ll be fine,” she heard Andrew say as she opened her eyes. He sat beside her on the loveseat with one arm looped around her.

  Maggie stared at the two of them, shadows settling into the faint lines around her eyes. “You’re sick, aren’t you?” she said. “That’s why you’ve been drinking ginger ale and looking like you were going to pass out all morning. Well, you should go home, then. Andrew can take you. Get some rest, and—”

  “She’s not sick,” Andrew interrupted. He patted his wife on one leg and moved to the sink in the corner, where he ran cold water over a fistful of paper towels. He handed them to Neve, who took the cool compress with relief and laid it over her eyes.

  “She’s pregnant.”

  Neve choked, a small sound in the suddenly-silent room, and she thought her breakfast might come up. You weren’t supposed to say anything. S
he slid a glance toward her boss. I told you we needed to wait. But she couldn’t really blame him. Andrew was thrilled, almost giddy, at the thought of becoming a parent. So was she. You couldn’t hide joy like that, Neve thought. It spilled out and colored the world when you least expected it to.

  “What?” Maggie broke the silence. “You’re—” Her eyes widened until the moon could have slipped inside them. “Are you really?”

  With shaking fingers, Neve patted her cheeks with the paper towels and nodded. “I just—I didn’t want to tell you. Not quite yet. Until I was a little further along.” She burst out in tears. “Sorry. I’ve been doing that a lot lately.”

  Maggie leapt across the room and hugged her, spewing congratulations. She wound her arms around Neve’s neck and patted the still-flat belly. For just a minute, she looked like her regular old self, without bills or an ailing mother or her own loneliness to think about. Neve thought maybe it would be all right, after all. Then she saw the look, the one she had feared: a quick, subtle darkening deep inside Maggie’s pupils, a twitching at the corners of her mouth, the rapid blinking of pale eyelashes. She’d wanted to avoid that look at all costs. It was the reason she hadn’t told her boss in the first place, nearly one month ago when she and Andrew found out for sure.

  *

  “It’s called HPV,” the doctor said across the desk. A nineteen-year old Maggie sat in the chilly, fourth-floor office clutching a worn leather purse as her roommate waited downstairs. They had a study session back on campus in fifteen minutes, and this follow-up to the gynecologist was just routine after some abnormal test results. She thought.

  “What?” She leaned forward, glancing at the clock on the wall behind the middle-aged woman. “What’s that?”

  The doctor removed the half-glasses that perched on her nose and folded her fingers together, lining them up like that old game of church-and-steeple that Maggie remembered from childhood.

  “It’s a virus, a sexually transmitted disease,” she explained. “A fairly common one. It affects approximately sixty percent of people who are sexually active. Recently, some research has been done on developing a vaccine to prevent it, but…”

  Maggie’s mind filled in the blanks. No vaccine existed. Not yet, anyway. She was out of luck on that one.

  “In any case,” the woman went on, “most people’s immune systems take care of the virus and they’ll never know they had it. Occasionally, people contract a strain that’s tougher to get rid of. Young women, especially, seem vulnerable to those.”

  “Is that what I have? One of the—” Maggie stumbled, not sure of the right words. “One of the tougher ones?”

  The doctor opened Maggie’s folder. It was marked in various places with orange and yellow circles, stickers placed next to scribbles. Her finger rested on a typewritten lab result with letters and numbers Maggie tried in vain to read upside down. “Yes. That is what you have. One of the two strains that can cause cervical cancer, as a matter of fact.”

  “Cancer? I have cancer?” All the air left the room. Saying the word seemed to stretch Maggie’s mouth to distortion. She felt a terrible ache inside the pit of her stomach. Her fingers closed into fists of panic, creating tiny half moons as her nails dug into soft flesh.

  I’m nineteen, she wanted to say. I don’t have cancer. I can’t. I don’t have time, first of all. Why, she had finals in another week, a weekend at the Jersey shore planned with her girlfriends, and a brand-new boyfriend who’d invited her to a party that night. She didn’t have cancer. It had to be some kind of mistake. They’d mixed up the results at the lab. Or she was dreaming, back in her dorm room, and she’d wake in another minute to a day void of doctors and exam rooms and tests.

  The doctor shook her head. “We don’t know if it’s cancer right now. The chances are low, especially for someone as young and healthy as yourself. We’ll do a biopsy and go from there.”

  Maggie closed her eyes and tears slipped down her cheeks. The doctor pushed a wad of tissues into her hand and she pressed them to her face.

  “As I said, we don’t know anything at this point. The good thing about this kind of cancer is that, in most cases, the cells grow fairly slowly.”

  But Maggie wasn’t most cases, as it turned out, and she didn’t do anything slowly, especially develop cancer. Which is why six weeks after staring at the doctor in disbelief, and three weeks before her twentieth birthday, she found herself lying on a stretcher, doped up for surgery. As she lay there, staring at the ceiling, she turned over a word in her mind that she’d barely heard, let alone considered, a year earlier.

  Hysterectomy…

  The O.R. nurse wheeled her down the hallway.

  Hysterectomy. Hysterical. Switch a few letters, and they’d be the same word, she thought. That’s why doctors used to cut women open a hundred years ago, to take out the thing that drove them mad.

  Yet the only thing Maggie could think of, before the surgeon with the kind eyes did the same to her, was how she couldn’t imagine that removing her womb would make her feel less mad or less angry at Dillon. He was part of the reason she lay there, after all. She’d never forget what had happened that night four years earlier, even if they removed all the cancer and she lived to be a hundred and ten. She’d always see him in the center of her memory, walking down the hallway and closing his door.

  He was sleeping, her stepbrother, he was Goddamn-fucking sleeping, when the monsters came to life and she had no one else to save her from them.

  1:00 p.m.

  Jack dashed off the last sentence of his email. There. Now the board of directors had a heads-up about the situation in Hart’s Falls. If Carl couldn’t manage to get a verbal agreement from the home owner today, and the papers signed by early next week, Jack would drive down there himself to close the deal.

  He ran a hand over his head, mussing the curls and knowing Paige would finger them back into place. With a glance at the clock, he cursed.

  One o’clock.

  He grabbed his jacket, mumbled to his secretary that he’d be back in an hour, and dashed past the elevator doors. He took the stairs two at a time all the way to the ground floor. The wind caught his breath, stole it from his throat the minute he stepped onto the sidewalk, but he barely noticed.

  Paige hated to be kept waiting.

  Hands shoved deep into his pockets, eyes slit against the unusual early summer gale, Jack crossed against the light and turned left. One look at the bank clock on the corner told him all he needed to know. Almost ten minutes late. He hurried on, regretting the whole idea of meeting Paige for lunch in the first place. Neither of them could afford time away from the office; he should have simply agreed to meet her at the engraver’s and been done with it. Distracted, he stepped off the curb and nearly lost a foot to a cab speeding through a yellow light. A horn blared and a woman beside him squawked a warning. He jumped back just in time.

  “Dammit!”

  Thirty seconds later, the light turned red, and Jack hurried across the street and into Jacque’s Café, a cozy bistro and the newest place for Boston’s upscale crowd to lunch. He looked around.

  “Sir?” The hostess, a young woman with thick fake eyelashes, stepped from behind the kiosk. Buttons strained across her chest and stretched the pink fabric of her blouse into dangerous puckers. “May I help you?”

  “Table for Major. I’m meeting someone.” Jack kept his eyes away from the pink puckers and pretended to study the specials board.

  “A woman—tall, blonde?”

  He nodded.

  “Right this way.”

  He shrugged off his jacket and followed her, letting his eyes adjust to the half-light of the café. They passed a collection of small round tables, a few booths, and the hallway leading to the restrooms. In the very back corner of the restaurant sat Paige. His heart gave a little flip.

  Even unsmiling, with lines of tension etched around her mouth, Jack’s fiancée lit up the room. With blonde hair styled neatly around her face, pa
le blue eyes, and a figure that still fit into the cheerleading skirts she’d worn in high school, the city’s star criminal attorney was one of the most attractive women he had ever known. That she was brilliant, successful, and a tigress in the bedroom didn’t hurt their relationship any. From the moment they’d met through a mutual friend, Jack had thought Paige Webster a perfect match for him. She turned heads in a crowd. She knew the stats of every Red Sox pitcher in recent history. She could make grown men cry on the witness stand. And she made a mean veal piccata.

  As Jack bent down and kissed her, he reminded himself again of his luck in finding such a suitable woman to marry. He slid into his chair and picked up a menu. In fact, the only thing he wished for sometimes was that she’d crack. Show a tender side. Reveal her vulnerability. Sometimes—most times, if Jack was really honest with himself—he felt as though Paige would do just fine in life with or without him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Once in a while, he liked to be needed.

  “Sorry I’m late. Lost track of time.”

  “Hope that doesn’t happen on our wedding day.” She smiled, as though to make it a joke. Jack wondered if it really was.

  “I already ordered for you,” she continued. “Clam chowder and whatever the sandwich special is today. Hope that’s okay.”

  Jack didn’t say anything. He didn’t mind the chowder, though he wasn’t really a sandwich guy. “It’s fine.” Cracking his knuckles, he bumped one knee against the table as he tried to get comfortable.

  “Here,” Paige said and reached into the large leather purse at her feet. Out came a thick binder, decorated with flowers and lace. She passed it to him.

  “What’s this?”

  “I’m thinking about calla lilies instead of roses.” She sipped at her seltzer and gestured at the half-dozen yellow notes stuck inside. “I marked some pages for you to look at.” Reaching over, she brushed some errant curls from his forehead and patted them back into place.