Maxine (3 page)

Gail is looking down and nodding, lost in wonder at it all, and Barb is looking down and similarly shaking her head and then, as if a conductor had bounced a baton, they both tip up their chins with what appears to be eagerness.

What he
said
—

Yes—

Is that he had to pee. So he went into the bushes but he was going to have to take off his coat and pull down his snow pants, poor little guy, and there were all these people around. So he went way into the trees—he crossed a road or a path—much farther than he needed to. They're modest at that age—

Sure they are. Gail pronounces this with confidence, as if she knew anything about it.

And these big kids came by and I guess they realized that he was all alone and sort of...

Vulnerable?

Exactly, and they made him—well I don't know, but they brought him farther into the woods—first they were all buddies, and he doesn't have any friends here really, he's the new kid—and then they were mean to him. They didn't beat him up or, you know, far as we can tell, but they teased him and said mean stuff and shoved him around a little, just enough to scare the daylights out of him. And then they took off and left him, and he didn't know where he was, and it was dark by then, snowing, and he was alone and totally lost in the woods, he didn't even have his hat, he walked for hours—
Stricken
,Maxine thinks, is the word to describe the look on Barb's and Gail's faces, and Barb is crying and Gail is going over and wrapping arms around her—oh, now Gail's crying too, and Maxine observes them coldly, two women who knew nothing of this until it was all over, the one for some reason not hearing herself being paged repeatedly at the hospital and the other out for dinner with her husband—how in God's name, Maxine had screamed at one low moment of the early morning, could you spend that long over DINNER?—while Maxine was freezing her ass in a dark park, marshalling the help of strangers, deciding when the mother should be called, when the police should be called, calling. It's easy enough to bawl about it after the fact, thinks Maxine, who might forgive them, but not today.

By Monday, the sliding seems a long time ago. So long it's not clear it ever happened to anyone, let alone Maxine. And the last thing she wants is to go over it all again, so it's Back To That Novel! She'd thought of it as a fairly long-term ambition until one of her two best friends, Cindy, was diagnosed with cancer last year, at thirty-two, was told she might make it to Christmas and didn't, expiring quietly on the ninth of September, 2001. Her death was a life-changing event. Especially for Cindy. For Maxine, there has been a loss of trust. In her body, in the future—not the long term but, say, next week. It might not be there. Maxine decided that what was on her to-do list better start getting done, because who knew.

When the doorbell rings, Maxine often feels the urge to dive under the couch. It will almost certainly be Barb with another note, gift, peace offering, invitation. These have been arriving all weekend with relentless frequency. Sometimes it's the doorbell, which goes unanswered, followed an hour later by a note through the mail slot. Or a gift (the mail slot again) and then a phone message. It's not clear whether she's apologetic or friend-hunting. Maxine realizes the shock of coming here from Bermuda might not be insignificant and there is a loneliness factor, but she does not want to hang out with Barb just because of the Pippy Park fiasco. She senses in Barb a disturbing unwillingness to give up on a plan. Maxine has never wanted to be Barb's plan, Barb's coffee buddy. She will probably have to take action if she wants to avoid being hauled into the orbit of these people, but it's just possible that if she does nothing, they'll disappear of their own volition.

This once, though, it's already mid-afternoon when she hears stomping up the wooden staircase outside that leads up to the small landing in front of her door and the bell makes its grating buzz. Afternoon is not Barb's usual pouncing hour. Maxine has put in a good day's work for the first time in a while and feels just fractionally smug and jaunty about that, and she happens to be in the kitchen, where she can see along the hall to the frosted glass pane in the door. It's not Barb Larsen, just some kid wanting to be sponsored for one of those stay-awake-all-night-watching-movies-and-drinking-pop-a-thons. Maxine is old enough to remember when you were supposed to be sponsored for actually accomplishing something, but in modern times this is apparently a curmudgeonly thought. She reaches for a jam jar of change, unscrews the lid, strolls to the front porch and opens the door.

Oh. My. Kyle. Um. Come in?

She holds the door open and he steps in, looking as if he'd rather have each of his limbs detached gradually, and stares down at the black plastic boot tray in the tiny entrance, mumbling in its direction a speech the gist of which is that he's sorry for what happened. His winter coat is open; he's still wearing his navy school sweater and grey flannels. The striped tie makes him look absurdly young, as if he'd dressed as a banker for Halloween. Maxine studies all nine miserable-looking years of him, and it is so clearly not his fault and Maxine so vividly remembers not only every moment of the time after he went missing, when she thought he was dead, but also the look on his face when they first went downhill together, a look of such robust joy Maxine won't forget it any time soon, that she goes suddenly all thick in the nasal passages, and says, Wanna beer? When he looks up in surprise, she says Only kidding. Chocolate-covered almond? He nods and she gives him the loonie from the jam jar. He eyes the loonie with suspicion.

No don't eat that for heaven's sake, put it in your pocket. I just happened to be holding it. The almonds are in the kitchen, come on.

He kicks off his boots and follows her to the kitchen. He accepts a large handful of the chocolate almonds he sold her last week for the St. Simeon's band fundraiser, makes for the living room, and sits in the computer chair. He says Wow, nice monitor. He says What games do you like?

Frédérique did not procrastinate. Instead, she chose to work on projects that interested her at the time. Less interesting projects were put off. This was not her fault. It was the fault of the project.

Maxine tries to develop a snapshot of Frédérique in her brain but the details are indistinct. Black hair, slim, a smidge taller than normal. Maxine herself is thoroughly normal, physically. As far as she knows. On the outside. Medium height, medium build, brown eyes. Chin-length hair frames her face like two parentheses, as if her head were an optional extra, but it's a good cut, nicely angled, and the colour, her own, not mud-brown but a proper deep chestnut. Peeling brown paint on the clapboard of her second-storey apartment, old brown carpet on the living-room floor. As if she were tea, infused by something essentially brown.

So, Kyle says, How come you work here, not in an office?

Oh, different reasons...One reason Maxine decided to leave her real life and embark on something completely impractical was, ahem, not something Maxine would readily admit, even to a boy.

A motivational speaker.

Maxine's former office encouraged employees to participate in professional development activities, and the flyer for this one had caught Maxine's attention. This was, oh, a year ago—soon after Cindy's death. The subject of the workshop wasTime Management. It was essentially the lesson she'd just learned from Cindy—Death is coming, get a move on. This one was cast in a positive light, though. It was about setting goals. Mortality was alluded to, but in scientific terms—we have on average X number of minutes; we choose what we do with them. Death was not explicitly mentioned. Theminutes were a gift, and there were lots of them. (Maxine could see why they presented it this way rather than, say, in decades.) Choice was possible. All kinds of things were possible. Maxine's hokeyness detectors were set to full alert; her give-me-a-break face was at the ready, like a pair of sunglasses you keep on top of your head to slip down the second you head out the door. And yet. Even before the first Nutrition Break,Maxine was finding the whole thing incredibly uplifting—the emphasis on deciding how to use your time, on setting goals for the next week, the next three months, the next year, five years, ten years. Could you really just decide? Maybe you could. Not that deciding was
all
there was to it, but still.

Maxine wound up in a small group sharing goals with two other women and a man. The woman was from the phone company and in the next year she wanted to improve her relationship with her daughter and learn to read music. This week she would call her daughter. Just pick up the phone, she said, I'm going to pick up the phone and say I love you, no matter what. If that's all I say, or whatever she says to me, I'm going to get that much out. And she was going to buy the music book and take ten minutes of her lunch break to practise every day because she was in the church choir and she wanted to know how to read the part of the hymn book that wasn't words.

Aim high, the Time Management Expert said. If you aim low, you might get what you want but it won't be worth it. Don't aim for a bunch of grapes, aim for a vineyard in Tuscany. As soon as you have written down your goals, you've started the process of making them happen. Opportunities will present themselves, opportunities that would not have been there without the goal. The goal creates the opportunities.

The vineyard sounded nice but the very idea alarmed Maxine. Pesticides. International markets. Hail. She tried to think of a goal the size of a vineyard but all she could think of was towels. She had two bath towels with frayed edges and the pile was so worn it was like drying yourself on a T-shirt. Maxine would have liked two fluffy new bath towels, but that's not the kind of goal you're supposed to have. In the spirit of openness she confessed about the towels. Her group looked sympathetic but you could tell they didn't feel she had internalized the vineyard idea.

The morning proceeded—explanations, anecdotes, exercises. Maxine stared at the Time Management Expert as if she wanted to soak him up, as if she were the French bread and he were the thick mushroomy wine sauce left on the plate. She believed him without ever having expected to. His stories sounded so convincing she could visualize every detail of them. She could see him by that hotel pool in a chance encounter with a woman who would help him meet his goal, could see his sunglasses, the blue-green water, the woman in the beach wrap who was able to further his plan only because he had a plan, had long since articulated it, had mentioned it in passing, and it turned out that the woman was related to someone who knew someone who worked for… Maxine couldn't get enough. More stories with happy endings! By lunchtime Maxine admitted she wanted to write a novel. She'd been trying to repress this thought for years, but the telltale signs were there. The English degree littered with writing courses, the small wooden chest full of carefully preserved journals and notebooks that accompanied her whenever she moved, a general attentiveness to matters literary, new releases, local writers, this year's prizewinners... Really, it wasn't that she hadn't known until now, but she hadn't listened. She had stuffed that thought in her underwear drawer, underneath and at the back. But now she was certain. Now she'd do it. Making decisions might not be Maxine's strong point but hanging on like grim death? She can do that.

Workshop participants were scattered around the hotel lobby checking their email before the afternoon session while Maxine crunched numbers. Rent. The value of her car. RRSPs. Overtime. Unused vacation. In the middle of the afternoon, Maxine was telling a different small group that in five months she would take a leave from work, after 365 days of which she would have written a full draft of a novel. She might not yet have submitted it anywhere but the completion date was carved in stone as of this moment. Maxine felt jittery with excitement. She wanted to stay in the workshop—she could feel it transforming her, like in a horror movie, with a new self ripping and bursting out from the old one, squelching, weird protuberances—but, somehow, in a good way. Good protuberances. She wanted to run to the bathroom and get a look at the new, goal-setting Maxine, the one with plans, she wanted to leave immediately and get started on meeting her goals— really there was no time to waste. She had three pages of goals. But she didn't want to miss any information on how to meet them. She stayed until the last question had been asked and then hurried out of the room, excited at the idea of a new start. On the way home she bought three medium-to-expensive fluffy towels even though that deadline was still six days off. No time like the present. Tick.

The phone rings midweek before Maxine's even out of bed. She doesn't answer. It's almost certainly Barb Larsen. She calls at least once a day. Sometimes she calls and leaves a message and then calls and breathes into the silence and later in the day makes Kyle call. Sometimes the phone seems to sound different when it's her. More insistent. She wants to have coffee or lunch or go for a walk or she has some sort of plan. Maxine starts typing fast and hard on the keyboard. December's just around the corner. Up and at 'em.

Frédérique gazed sternly at the dusty computer monitor. She was preparing a presentation for an annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Frédérique typed fast and hard on the keyboard.

Maxine has been reading about the importance of observed detail but she's flailing about in a phraseological ocean with a strong undertow.

She frowned and sighed. When she stopped typing she rolled her shoulders and drank a mouthful of tea. Gulped a mouthful of water. Sipped mineral water.

Maxine has just settled at her desk after lunch on Thursday when the doorbell rings. Since this is about the time the mailman normally comes, she skitters off to the door on a teeny adrenaline rush of anticipation and swings it open. The person is not the mailman but Barb, wrapped in a green shawl and carrying a shoebox.