The Vanishing Season (15 page)

Maggie snuck out the first night they were back, surprising him by tapping on his window. She crawled in, and he pulled her under the covers with him and covered her in kisses, on her lips, her cheeks, her neck, her forehead—breathing her in, in his sleepy, half-awake but very turned-on way. He touched her as if he were afraid of offending her or invading her space, just very lightly on her arms, her neck, shyly, his hands slightly trembling like he was trying to keep himself in check. Maggie was less gentle toward him and was embarrassed by how much she wanted to touch as much of him as possible. He threaded his fingers through hers tightly. “I never saw this coming,” he kept saying.

They didn’t talk about Pauline. Her name was conspicuously missing from their hours together. Maggie didn’t even have room in her head for Pauline. She was threaded as taut as a wire; her thoughts were scattered and her blood ran hot; even running didn’t help on the days when the road was clear enough to do it.

She couldn’t burn the energy out of her veins. And Liam, apparently, felt the same way. Often he lingered in her yard with Abe even after they’d said good-bye, as if going farther and farther out of her sight was painful. He’d crouch and scratch Abe’s ears, delaying, and smile up at her window before trailing off slowly through the woods or down Water Street.

But there was the sense of waiting too. There was a feeling that they were in a bubble, and Maggie had the overwhelming sense, from time to time, that it would have to pop whenever Pauline came home. But that might be months away. And it might be never.

16

MAGGIE HAD DECIDED TO SUCK IT UP AND START DOING HER OWN LAUNDRY, but she still always hurried through it because she didn’t like to stay down in the cellar long. One afternoon as she was yanking the last of the warm, dry clothes from the dryer into her laundry basket, she noticed an envelope at the bottom of the stairs that led to the slanted outer door. It looked like it had been slid in under the door. She opened the envelope to find a folded note and some dried flowers.

Maggie,

You may never find this, since you never go underground, but I thought it might be cool to see if you did.

I picked these daisies in the summer and stuck them in a book. Now they’re a little piece of summer for you.

Maggie, I don’t always string words together brilliantly when I’m talking, but I wanted to say you are so beautiful. Your curves and those firm legs make me light-headed. But you’re also this beautiful person. You always think about other people. You never shout for attention, you’re a sleeper, you hold all your best stuff close to your chest. You always seem to know where you’re going. You always seem to know exactly who you are.

I’m so glad I met you. I can’t wait to touch you again. Smack my mouth, but damn I have to say I like touching you.

Liam

Maggie traced the words with her fingers. She wondered if he’d picked and dried the flowers thinking he’d give them to Pauline. But she decided she didn’t care, that she wouldn’t look a gift flower in the mouth. The old Maggie would have parsed things out and gone over the possible negatives. But not now. She blushed thinking that her mom might have found the note instead of her.

She started to tuck it into her pocket, but instead she decided to hide it somewhere in the basement, like her own dragon treasure. She tucked it near the back of the room, on a ledge, under an old piece of loose cinder block. Maybe someone would find it one day and wonder about it, just like Liam had found the bracelet.

That afternoon they raced through the woods in their big boots, and Liam caught her around her stomach and hugged her tight against him like he’d never let go, then threw her in the snow to make her laugh. Cold and wet, they ran to the sauna and, once inside, they sat with their legs entwined and took off their shirts. Maggie felt as if she were unwrapping pieces of herself and letting him see, inside and out.

He leaned his forehead against hers. It was strange how she’d never made so much eye contact with anyone in her life, but it was endlessly interesting with him. It felt like she was coming to know exactly the numbers of lines in the coronas around his pupils. He traced her shoulders with his hands, carefully avoiding moving them anywhere else.

“I should have built this for you,” he said.

“Let’s pretend that you did.”

Liam sat up, pulling away from her. She felt the loss of his body the moment she wasn’t touching him. “Okay, let’s make it official,” he said. He opened the sauna door, peering around onto the ground outside, then stepped out in his bare feet.

“You’re going to freeze, Crazy.”

After a couple of minutes the door opened and he reappeared, happy and shivering, with a nail in his hand. “I knew I’d left a couple of these suckers in the gutter.”

He shoved the door closed and, still shivering, raised his hand above it, just under the roofline, etching something in the wood with the tip of the nail. When he stepped back, she saw he’d carved a word there:
Maggie’s
.

He sank back down beside her, laying the nail in a slat of the bench.

“I wanna take you somewhere this afternoon,” he said. “If we leave early, we can be back when we’re supposed to.”

“Sounds familiar.”

Liam looked pained, and then he said, “No. It’s something just for you. I’ve never even been there myself.”

Maggie sank in tighter against him, their chests touching.

“Yes,” she said. “Okay.”

They left within the hour.

I step back. I give the lovers their privacy, that’s the least they deserve: one moment that’s just for them. For these moments of Maggie’s life, her love flares up and lights up the world. It’s like dropping a match into a well.

I hide in the cellar and try, instead, to imagine myself into these places.

I imagine us as friends. We laugh and run around in circles, leaving our footprints in the snow. I don’t know what my footprints would look like, what size shoe I had if I ever lived, who Pauline and Liam and Maggie would have seen when they looked at me. But still I imagine we’re lying on the Larsen roof, talking about all the people we know, that I am a teenager too. In my imagination there are so many people I know and love.

We could have set the world on fire too, if we’d been friends. But we never were.

I try to imagine that the three of them—or even just Pauline and Maggie—come with me into the cellar, where the bright emptiness is, the growing shaft of light. I try to imagine that they stand beside me when I finally get close. But I always get there first and too fast. And the big, empty place is there as if it’s just been waiting for me the whole time. And I’m so scared—so deeply scared with every fiber of my invisible existence—to go away.

Then again, sometimes I worry I will never leave Door County at all.

A couple of days later, Maggie and Liam drove to the local diner for dinner in Liam’s dad’s car. It was dusk, and they wove along the windy road into town, watching the lights begin to come on in the houses along their route.

They kept the windows cracked despite the cold because it smelled so good, piney and fresh. Liam turned up the heat full blast, and the cold and hot mixed together. He tuned the radio to
Delilah
, and soft, cheesy music drifted into the air. He grinned at her. But Maggie was lost in thought. She wanted to say something, but she didn’t know how. She thought maybe Liam Witte was her first great thing, and she wanted him to know. But then the moment passed by as he took a slow left and they pulled up to the diner.

They were just pulling into a spot when she noticed the flashing red and blue lights at the police station across Route 42. Liam parked, and they climbed out and stood with their backs against the car, staring.

Reporters had gathered in front of the main door of the station, and the parking lot was so bright with camera lights, it looked like it could be daytime. A few people had come out of the diner to watch, and one of the waitresses Maggie knew walked up beside them.

“Can you believe it?” she asked. “He works at the antiques shop. All this time. Can you believe it?”

They stared at the spectacle across the street as Gerald Turner was led across the lot in handcuffs. Cars and TV crews were pouring into the lot, and so many flashes were going off, it felt like lightning.

That night it was on every broadcast in the county. The Door County Killer had been caught.

17

PAULINE BODEN CAME HOME HOLDING JAMES FALK’S HAND. SHE STOOD AT Maggie’s door one gray afternoon in early February like she’d never left. She lowered her chin into her bright blue Patagonia ski jacket and said that her mom had let her come home for good now that the killer had been caught.

She shoved a gift into Maggie’s hand: a snow globe of Milwaukee, white snow coming down on the buildings and the river. Maggie held it in her palm, not knowing what to say.

James—tall, dark-haired, muscular—stood beside her, looking at Maggie directly and confidently. He looked exactly like the kind of guy Maggie would have pictured Pauline with when she’d first met her—very handsome and athletic, with an air of holding the world on a string. He thrust his hand into Maggie’s.

“Mags. Great to meet you.”

Maggie raised her eyebrows at Pauline.
Mags?
Pauline shrugged.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” James went on, reaching an arm around Pauline. “My girl really missed you.”

“Um, yeah, I missed her too,” Maggie said.

“Well, I was just dropping her home so . . .” James leaned over and kissed Pauline, pulling her in by the waist. Pauline gave the slightest resistance, let him peck her lips, and then pulled away. “I’m sure I’ll be at Pauline’s a lot, but don’t be a stranger. The more the merrier. See you.”

“Bye.” They watched him walk across the yard to the driveway. Maggie wondered if he had just given her permission to hang out with her friend. Pauline turned back to her, her eyes lighting up.

“Come help me unpack.”

In Pauline’s room items flew from her suitcase like a hurricane. Her mom had cleaned her room while she was gone, but it was quickly disheveled as Pauline tossed clothes on the floor and toiletries across her desk. Two iPods; her portable Bose speakers; several sparkly tops; and a pair of new, bright-red platforms tumbled onto the floor, where Pauline shoved them under her bed. She talked excitedly while she threw her clothes in the pile and tossed everything else—a cracked iPad, a Tiffany heart bracelet, two purses—toward her dresser. “I’m so happy to be home. So, so happy. How are things? How’s the shop? How are your parents?”

“The shop is closed. I didn’t tell you? My parents are good. Everything else is”—Maggie paused, looking around the room—“the same.” Maggie swallowed guiltily. “They’re planning a Valentine Social thing, down at the Clipper.”

“Oh, they always do that.” Pauline waved her hand dismissively. She was pale and thinner even than she had been when she’d left.

Pauline noticed Maggie studying her. “I know, I look like I’m withering away. I can’t take another week of winter, I’ll die.”

“You should try eating something other than Twizzlers.”

Pauline pulled a wrinkled, balled shirt out of the suitcase, squinted at it like she’d never seen it in her life, then threw it across the room. “Yeah, I just haven’t had much of an appetite. I don’t know why.”

Maggie nodded. “So, James seems, um, familiar with you.”

“I know,” she said apologetically. “It’s a little intense. He’s been trying to get me to go out with him forever, so I guess he’s a little . . . enthusiastic. He’s already saying that if I move to Milwaukee after I graduate, he will too.”

“Huh.” Maggie couldn’t picture Pauline ever liking someone so clingy.

“He’s kind of . . . intent on things. But he boxes, to get out all his energy.”

“Huh.”

“I know. Who boxes? But he likes it.”

Pauline unpacked sweaters and boots, and at the bottom of her suitcase was a postcard. It was a piece of old Scandinavian-looking art, pencil-drawn, with a wooden Scandinavian-looking house in the background and a creepy, bony old lady hobbling along the rocks of a lakeshore. Pauline saw her studying it.

“It’s from Liam,” Pauline said. “It’s so dumb.” She held it up. “It’s Pesta. Remember, the goddess of death I was telling you about? He said he saw it in a junk store and thought of me. Because he thinks I’m kind of obsessed with her.” She crumpled it, then dropped it lightly into the trash can beside her dresser.

“So how does it feel that the Door County Killer gave you a gramophone?”

Maggie hated talking about it. It still felt surreal to her. She actually hadn’t come around to believing it yet. She knew she should tell her parents, but the idea of laying that kind of stress down on her mom right now—just when things seemed to be coasting for the first time in years—was extremely unappealing.

They sat in silence for a while. Finally Maggie said, “Did you hear about the fire?”

Pauline nodded. “My mom told me.”

“Have you gone to see him yet?”

Pauline stood up and went to her mirror and put on a wool hat she said she’d bought in Milwaukee at a winter street fair. She shook her head.

“He said you weren’t writing him.”

Pauline tugged the hat this way and that to position it.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Maggie said finally, when she didn’t reply.

Pauline turned, looking uncertain for a moment. “Me too.” She knelt by the bed.

“Pauline, what happened that night?” Maggie asked. “That night you got caught? Why were you out so late?” She’d never wanted to ask Liam. But now she wanted to ask Pauline.

Pauline picked at her fingernails. She looked at Maggie. “We argued,” she said. Then she turned back to her suitcase. As if there were nothing more to say about it.

Maggie crept into Liam’s window late that night, sneaking out after her parents had gone to bed. He woke with a start, then reflexively pulled her into his arms and kissed her, breathing into her hair.