The Vanishing Season (18 page)

One of these mornings, while Maggie was looking for one of her snowshoes, which had somehow wandered off from its mate, her mom announced that she had an interview in Chicago. Maggie turned to her in shock and sat back on her heels from where she’d been kneeling to reach under the couch. Her whole body lit up.

“You mean, we’d move home?” she asked, disbelieving.

Mrs. Larsen shrugged. “If I got it. I don’t know how many people they’re interviewing. Don’t get your hopes up yet.”

But Maggie’s heart beat rapidly. It seemed like a perfectly timed escape. She could put Pauline and Liam and the fear that had bloomed all over Door County behind her, go back to Jacie, the familiar streets, her old, comfy, safe life. She smiled for the first time in days and, ensuring the snowshoe was nowhere to be seen under the couch, walked down the hall toward the last place it might be.

She opened the door and walked down into the musty cellar. The one ceiling bulb cast only a dim circle of light, leaving shadows in the corners of the room. Maggie looked under the stairs, moving a few boxes around before giving up, and then stood for a moment, listening. She tried to decide whether the silence was an empty one or a waiting one. She tried to imagine the life of the house before her and wondered if it had been easier then, like Pauline believed. Maggie glanced at where she’d hidden her letter under the cinder block and decided she’d leave it there forever.

Pauline was waiting in the hallway when she got to the top of the stairs.

“I tricked my way in.”

Pauline had a handful of pine branches wrapped in a red ribbon and shoved it into her hands. Her cheeks were bright pink, and her coat wasn’t zipped. She was glowing, but her heart looked to be in her mouth.

“Please accept this expensive bouquet as a peace offering.”

Maggie took the bouquet and laid it on the step.

Pauline looked nervous enough to vomit.

“They’re doing an all-night movie lock-in thing at the Avalon next week, for all the young people. A chaperoned kind of thing. Old movies.
Snow White and
. . .” Pauline trailed off. “I was wondering . . .”

Maggie stared at her.

“Hit me. Yell at me. Something. Anything.”

Maggie felt herself burn like a cool flame. She covered the icy anger that swelled up with an expressionless face. She looked at Pauline flatly, like she didn’t know her. Her hands trembled, but she steadied them on the banister so Pauline wouldn’t see.

A tear dribbled down Pauline’s left cheek. “I know it’s crazy. I know what I always said. About how I felt about him.”

Maggie just went on looking at her coldly.

“Say something. Don’t you care?” Pauline, who wore everything on her sleeve, couldn’t recognize that some people had feelings that were deep and as still as glass.

Maggie led her down the hall, through the kitchen, and opened the door for her.

Pauline bit her lip, another tear squeezing out. A moment later she was walking off into the snow, Abe running behind her. Maggie could swear two birds circled her head and then flitted off. Like goddamned Snow White herself.

21

ASIDE FROM THE OCCASIONAL GIANT BILLBOARD FOR HOTELS OR SUBWAY OR cheese curds, the highway was flat and featureless on the drive to Chicago. Slowly buildings and then the city rose up ahead of them and replaced the humble pines of Door County with the towering buildings of the Gold Coast section of town where Maggie had grown up.

Climbing out of the car in front of her old, redbrick, eighteen-story apartment building, the first thing that struck Maggie was how loud it all was. Cars zoomed past, and two lots away a new building was going up, complete with the sound of jackhammers and bulldozers breaking concrete and beeping in reverse.

“See you tonight,” her mom said, before pulling away. Her interview was in a little over an hour. Maggie turned and faced her building again. She hadn’t expected to feel so nervous and giddy at the same time.

The hallway and the elevator seemed smaller than she’d remembered; everything seemed to have shrunk in the months since she’d left, like she was Alice in Wonderland. She pushed floor five and waited.

At the end of the hall on the fifth floor, she knocked. The door opened, and a familiar face beamed at her.

“Jacie,” she breathed. The two girls sank into a hug.

She and Jacie spent the first hour catching up on what had been happening with their old friends: breakups, arguments, one or two new people who’d moved into the building. Jacie was animated as she related the latest news.

It struck Maggie with a shock that, really, it had been only six months since she’d left, and nothing had changed all that much in Chicago: The same people were dating, the same people were fighting, and everyone was doing the same things on the weekends and after school.

“You have to come back,” Jacie said. She’d lightened her curly, dirty-blond hair, gotten a tiny bit heavier. “I miss coffee at Meredith’s and shopping at North Bridge. We could watch
Housewives
again.” Maggie had secretly hated
Housewives
, but Jacie loved it. It had always been weird to her that Jacie loved to see people fight on TV.

Still, she felt weirdly floaty while they talked. All the time she’d been getting to know Pauline and Liam and the isolated beauty of her little peninsula, Jacie—and probably most of her friends—had been mostly steady, in a holding pattern. Suddenly, for the first time, Maggie felt happy that she’d left and—at the same time—a gnawing sense of loss.

“Are you scared to go to sleep at night?” Jacie asked. “With everything going on, I bet you’re freaked out.” Jacie was the same old Jacie: full of questions, bubbly and uncomplicated, rarely worried about too much. Even the killer seemed like a salacious detail to her.

Maggie nodded. “Kind of. I don’t know. I guess I just think it couldn’t happen to me. I think there’s some philosophical name for that.”

“You’re the main character of your life,” Jacie said. “You’re too important to die. That’s how everybody feels.”

“Yeah, I’m too important to not be invincible,” Maggie said.

“Delusions of grandeur,” Jacie added. Before Maggie had started homeschool, they’d taken Psych together, along with a million other things. It was a tiny jab, but Maggie didn’t feel the way she’d used to about Jacie’s tiny jabs—like they were a necessary part of any friendship. She knew, now, that things could be better than that.

Her mom came to get her about an hour and a half later. Maggie knew Gill Creek was only a few hours away, but saying good-bye made her feel like she was returning to the ends of the earth. Jacie got teary-eyed, and they made their good-bye quick.

She and her mom drove for about an hour in silence, neither of them even turning on the radio, both lost in their thoughts.

“How was the interview?” Maggie finally asked.

“Good.” Her mom nodded. “Good, good. I think I’ll get a callback.”

“That’s great, Mom.”

Maggie looked out the window, her mind moving this way and that. “Mom?”

“Yeah, Mags.”

“How do you know when you give too much or too little to someone else?” she asked tentatively. “Like, how do you figure out how to love people, but then, not get . . . you know . . . walked on? How do people figure that out?”

Her mom thought for a while. “I think there probably aren’t many people who have it figured out perfectly. I guess it’s just little increments, always correcting this way or the other, like a seesaw. I don’t know if there’s any perfect balance between standing up for yourself and being generous. Although your dad sees it differently. He doesn’t measure things like we do. He lives by that Saint Augustine quote: ‘Love, and do what thou wilt.’ He’s a hippie.”

“I don’t think Saint Augustine was exactly a hippie,” Maggie said.

“Well, you’ve always been smarter than me.” Her mom glanced over at her, like she had a lot on her mind but was choosing her words carefully. “Mags, I do know that guys come and go when you’re young. But your friends . . . those are the people who stay.” It sounded to Maggie like stock parent advice—distant and cliché. Maybe her mom knew this, because she went on. “Honey . . . I know you’re upset. Something with Pauline and you and Liam.” Maggie picked at the upholstery under the window. Her mom always seemed to know everything Maggie didn’t tell her; it was one of her gifts, like her green thumb and her knack for charming strangers and her head for numbers. “And you’re trying to just hold it in and get over it on your own. But if you don’t let it out . . . it’ll keep growing. Things you bottle up can get bigger than you.
Talk
to Pauline. Get angry, that’s fine, but just let it out.”

Maggie thought about it on the way home while her mom played eighties soft-rock music on the radio.

When they climbed out of the car in the driveway that night, Maggie lingered while her mom went in. She took in the yard and her house. It looked beautiful and warmly lit and cozy, nothing like what they had started with. They’d taken something difficult and made a life out of it. Maggie realized how far they’d come, how much the house had become hers. She understood why, when she had been talking to Jacie, she’d felt like she’d lost something. She didn’t belong there anymore. She belonged here.

Instead of continuing into the house, she turned and crossed the thick, wide, white field to Pauline’s front door.

22

MAGGIE KNEW SHE SHOULDN’T BE THE ONE WHO WAS NERVOUS, SO SHE TRIED TO look like she wasn’t. Pauline drove, Maggie sat up in the front seat, and Liam in the back. They barely had to look at one another on the way to the theater, and Maggie held her chin high as she watched the trees pass the window. Her anger seethed under the surface, but she tried to be nice; she’d said hi when he’d gotten into the car as if it were no big deal. She willed herself to have a good night; she didn’t want to think she’d made a mistake in coming. She wanted to be ready to do this and be past it.

Her mom had said, when she’d told her they were going, that superhuman emotional strength hadn’t exactly been what she’d had in mind when they’d talked. “But you’re determined,” she said, taking in Maggie’s face. “You’re a determined girl.” And Maggie was.

Inside, not content to sit with the rabble downstairs, Pauline immediately found a back staircase to the balcony, which was off-limits. Once settled in above, they sat peering down on the crowded lower tier, watching people they knew and others from nearby towns trickling in. James Falk and some of his friends settled into one of the middle rows, and Maggie was thankful they didn’t look up.

Pauline almost sparkled with the nervousness of the three of them being together but, also, happiness she couldn’t hide. Maggie’s chest felt like there were hot coals in her rib cage. She tried to douse it with Sprite.

Her mom had told her to let herself get angry at Pauline, but she hadn’t. It had felt too much like putting her soul out even further to get pummeled. So instead she’d told her that she wanted to forget. And so that was what they were all trying to do. They were going to collectively forget that anything had ever happened between Maggie and Liam. Pauline and Liam had ended up together, just like all the experts had predicted, and they were all going to live with that. A movie was a good place to start, it seemed, because they barely had to talk.

Around 2:00 a.m., in the intermission between the third and fourth movies, the three snuck out onto the wide fire escape and sat dangling their legs over the edge, their puffy coats making their shadows against the brick back wall of the theater look like abominable snowmen. They watched the empty street below, so quiet with everything else in the town shut down.

“How’s James taking the breakup?” Maggie asked, trying to think of something to talk about to distract herself. Her voice sounded distant, like small talk, as if Liam and Pauline were strangers.

“He says he’s going to beat up Liam.” Pauline rolled her eyes. “He’s called my house a few times; it’s like he thinks he owned me or something. You know, he’s not such a perfect guy like everyone thinks he is. He has a temper.”

“I never thought he was perfect,” Maggie said. “What about your mom?”

Pauline and Liam looked at each other. “We haven’t told her yet about, um, us.”

From inside, the opening of
Snow White
began to play, and Pauline pulled Liam up to dance. He cooperated, looking self-consciously at Maggie. Then Pauline ducked and pulled Maggie up and twirled her slowly around. Then she pushed Maggie and Liam together.

“Why are you guys so stiff?” she asked, jamming their hands together. “Dance like you know each other. Don’t be dorks.”

“Pauline.”

“Well, are we friends or not?” she asked. “Are we going to fix this or not?”

Liam spun Maggie around once, twice, in his awkward way. But he avoided her eyes. Finally, as soon as Pauline allowed it, Maggie pulled out of his hands and sat back down, feeling like she could disintegrate and be perfectly content with that instead of being here.

Pauline shivered and blew mist rings above her head. “Sorry.” She looked sadly down at her mittens. Her voice faltered, then came back. “I had this dream we’d all move somewhere warm together one day. Like Austin. We could go to the Chili Parlor Bar. I could learn guitar and be a singer-songwriter. Liam could build houses. You could work at one of the high-rises, doing something where you wear a suit.”

“You have a different life’s dream every week,” Maggie said. The ice melted, just a crack.

They gazed down on the alley. “We could catch the killer from here. We’ve got a bird’s-eye view,” Pauline said.

Suddenly, inside the theater, there was a scream. Pauline’s and Maggie’s eyes met, and they all three hurried inside to see what had happened.

But it was only the movie. Snow White had bitten the apple, and the witch was cackling.

“I’ll be glad when this is all over,” Pauline said. “When I can hear a movie witch cackle and not automatically think someone’s just been murdered. I have to pee.” She looked at both of them thoughtfully, as if second-guessing herself, and then disappeared while the two of them walked back out onto the fire escape.