The Vanishing Season (19 page)
Maggie and Liam sat down silently on the cold metal.
“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry,” Maggie said, when she saw him open his mouth.
He closed his lips. Then he started again. But he couldn’t help himself.
“I don’t think even you can know all the things I’m sorry for,” he said. “About the dance and Pauline and being a coward since then. I feel disloyal to Pauline if I come talk to you and disloyal to you no matter what . . .”
His voice crackled a little. He wagged his feet back and forth agitatedly.
“I want to wish it—you know, you and me—never happened. Because then I’d still be your friend, and things would be simple between us. But then I’d wish away all this stuff that was . . .” He searched for words, getting desperate. “That was so . . .” And he didn’t have to say it. She could see everything he meant by it—he didn’t want to banish the walks in the snow and the times in his room and the sauna. . . . She wondered if life would be easier if people could talk to each other in pictures.
“If this had happened differently.” He paused, flustered. “If it hadn’t been that I met her so long ago and that she’s . . . in my bones. It’s been her, ever since I was little. I do love you.” Words finally failed him. Which was good, because each word was an arrow in Maggie’s heart. She wanted to ask him if he really thought Pauline would stay with him. She changed her mind every five minutes, about everything. But Maggie guessed that was the risk he was willing to take. And she wanted to be above saying such petty things.
Finally she collected herself enough to say something back. “Liam, I think . . . when things happened . . . maybe we were both just missing Pauline.” She turned her eyes to his, finally. “It didn’t mean . . . so much.” She’d never been a good liar, but she thought she was being convincing now. Her voice sounded steady and calm. Liam visibly winced. “We were missing her,” Maggie repeated. “We were bored.” The words were so small compared to the real feelings. She could have said it had been like being broken open for the first time. But instead she forced her mouth into a thin, steady line.
“You know,” she went on, “it’s stupid. I’ll probably be moving soon. I’ll be graduating soon. There’s a guy back home. It was all just . . . cabin fever.”
Maggie could feel herself hiding; her whole face felt like a mask. She made the wildly hurting parts small inside herself.
Liam had been surprised into silence. His eyes looked wide-open and honest and hurt. But they both knew he had no right to be hurt.
Finally he knotted his hands together in defeat, as if whatever had really needed to be said had been said. “I still don’t know why you would have let a crazy person like me get his hands on you.”
Maggie softened. All the anger flooded out of her for a moment. “You’re not crazy,” she said. “It’s small towns that are crazy.”
“What if people always say that, but really it’s never any different? What if everywhere you always felt like that, like somewhere else is the right place and you are in the wrong place? What if it’s just a personality trait?”
The door creaked behind them, and Pauline came out on the stairwell. “It’s freezing out here,” she said, and it sunk in that she was right. They followed her indoors.
On the way home at dawn, Maggie leaned her face against the car window and watched the scenery, pretending to be asleep. When she pulled her face back, the window was wet from where her eyes had been watering, the moisture shot through with the glare of the moonlight bouncing off the snow.
That night Abe barked at the woods until dawn, and no one paid attention to him. Everyone was too wrapped up—completely and passionately—in life. How could anyone who was alive think about being anything else?
Maggie glanced out her window and saw Pauline and Liam lying beside each other in the back field, on an old camping tarp in front of a bonfire. They had zipped two sleeping bags together for warmth. He had her face in his hands and his thumbs lightly on her cheeks. There was the sense that they were the only two—not just alive, but possible and real.
The warmth they created rose like steam from where they lay on the ground and reached and dissipated into the night air. It leaked into the cracks of the houses.
Maggie sat in her bedroom that night, listening to songs on her dad’s old radio. She stared at herself in the mirror—her scattering of freckles, two tiny beauty marks on her right cheek, so familiar she could point to them in the dark. Later she wouldn’t understand why she did what she did. She got out the paints from the back of her closet. She mixed them on her palette—making lush purples and forest greens and deep orangey reds out of a tiny bit of cyan, the right amount of yellow, an instinctively well-sized blob of magenta.
She unrolled an old canvas, sat in front of it, and made one broad, quick stroke of reddish purple. Then she took the brush and, for no reason she could say, ran it along the underside of her wrist, leaving a long, thin stripe of the same color there—like blood, only more deeply dark, more rich. She painted her elbow and then up along her arm. She turned to her full-length mirror and painted along the curve of her neck, and then the insides of her arms. Green, purple, orange.
The smell of campfire smoke wafted in through the miniscule spaces around the glass, and the reflection of the moon on the snow blinked up at her window. Etta sang, and Maggie painted herself black and blue.
That night a shadow tried to push a girl into a car in downtown Gill Creek, and she managed to scream for help. A policeman nearby saw the struggle from where he was parked at the side of the road, got out, and chased the attacker into the woods. By morning over thirty cops were beating the bushes and trailing through the trees that stretched back behind Al’s Grocery. Though they’d brought dogs in to follow the scent, they’d lost him, his trail vanishing at the lake’s edge, as if he’d walked across the ice to the middle of nowhere.
MAGGIE AWOKE TO PAULINE’S VOICE IN THE YARD, CALLING FOR ABE. HER MOM was in the kitchen looking over a finance book, studying for her second interview with the bank in Chicago.
When Maggie walked outside, pulling her coat and boots on over her pajamas, Pauline was standing in the middle of the field at the clothesline, staring out at the woods and huddling in her long, thin, plaid coat. A light breeze blew tiny ice crystals against their faces.
“I haven’t seen him for two days,” Pauline said. “I thought he’d at least be back when I woke up this morning. He spent another whole night out somewhere. You think he’s okay?”
Maggie nodded. “Yeah. Of course.” She tried to sound confident to reassure Pauline. But it wasn’t like Abe to let her out of his sight.
“Do you think someone took him?”
“No.” Maggie shook her head. “No, that’s crazy. He’s probably off looking for some girl dogs. He’ll be back.”
“My mom called the ASPCA,” Pauline said. “I can tell she doesn’t think he’s coming back. She adores that dog—you wouldn’t think so, because she never pets him—but she does. He lost one of his tags.” Pauline held up a little red tag, then dropped it again in the snow.
She looked out at the back lot, where Abe had stood guard between the house and the woods. “He watches out for me,” she said plaintively. “I just know something’s happened to him.” Pauline stared into the trees. “We’re meeting Aunt Cylla halfway for breakfast,” she said, tossing back her head in frustration. “She and Mom are doing a benefit together this weekend in Milwaukee, courtesy of Tidings Tea. Mom says I have to go.”
“Do you wanna come inside for a few minutes?”
Pauline followed Maggie in and up to her room. She pulled off her scarf but kept her coat on, trying to warm up. Maggie turned on the radio while Pauline ran her fingers along Maggie’s books.
“I wish I had your brain,” Pauline said. “I have no attention span.”
Her fingers lit on Maggie’s sketchbook, and Maggie moved forward to pull it away from her, but it was too late. Pauline had opened to a random page and stared down at the picture Maggie had drawn. It was of Pauline, her hair falling over her shoulder in a soft braid, some wisps wild and escaped, her eyes faraway, lit up but also a little sad. Maggie had drawn it from memory. She’d done another perspective on the next page, from behind, and had included Pauline’s scar down the side of her back—like a stripe on a beautiful flower—as if she would have been missing something without it.
Pauline looked up at her, eyes wide.
“I don’t see myself like this,” Pauline said.
“See yourself how?”
Pauline touched her finger to the drawn face. “You make it look like I have a beautiful soul.”
Pauline flipped through the pages. Through drawings of Abe and Maggie’s mom and the house, her dad poised over a banister sanding it, the sauna in the woods. “I thought you gave it up, drawing.”
“I picked it up again recently.”
Pauline settled on a flower Maggie had drawn. It was a winter flower, delicate, vivid. “That’s like you.”
Maggie smirked and rolled her eyes. “That’s a flower.”
“Yeah.” Pauline pulled back the book. She went on flipping the pages. And just as Maggie remembered that the back pages were full of Liam, Pauline came to them. There were Liam’s hands; there was the model ship hanging from Liam’s window. Maggie hadn’t drawn Liam himself. It had felt overwhelming to look at him that long.
Pauline put down the sketchbook and thought for a long time. She went to the window, crossed her thin arms, and sighed. “It’s hard to look at that stuff. I get jealous. But I’m grateful.” She nibbled at her dry lips, thinking, working something out. “I don’t think it would have ever happened if there was no you and Liam. When I saw you two together, that night at the Turkey Gobble, before we went and set off the fireworks . . . that’s when I first thought . . .”
Maggie tried to take it in. Pauline had seen what was happening between them, and it had made her
jealous
?
“You never tried to just be happy for me?” she asked, her stomach churning.
Pauline turned to her. “Maggie, I’ve known Liam since I can remember. It’s not just . . . some fling.”
Fling?
Pauline was starting to look flustered, like she knew she was saying all the wrong things. “It’s hot in here,” she said agitatedly. She unbuttoned her coat and pulled it off. And there was . . . it.
Maggie just stared. She was wearing it. The dress. Sea-foam green. Tiny airplanes.
“You got that dress?” Maggie blurted out.
Pauline seemed to remember the dress and shrugged. “From my mom.” She looked perfect in it. “Oh, I have this for you,” Pauline said suddenly. She picked up her coat, reached into the pocket, and put something into Maggie’s hands. It was the bracelet Maggie had sent her in the mail. “I get why you gave it to me. Because Liam gave it to you. But we want you to have it.
I
want you to have it.”
Maggie cupped the bracelet in her hand. She moved her palm so that the cherry charm dangled back and forth. It should have come with a charm that said,
I took a chance and all I got was this lousy bracelet.
But she still couldn’t get over the dress. She wondered, with building rage, if Pauline would get everything she wanted her whole life—Liam, the dress, jobs, whatever—because she was beautiful and rich. She wondered, maliciously, if Liam would even
love
Pauline if it weren’t for her looks. If Pauline were ugly, would Liam have left Maggie? She clung tightly and bitterly to the thought.
“He cares about you,” Pauline said, as if it weren’t possible for the words to hurt. Maggie didn’t reply; she kept her rage inside like a weapon. Sensing she’d worn out her welcome, Pauline went home a few minutes later, pulling her heavy coat back on again and stomping off with bare legs across the field.
The living always think that monsters roar and gnash their teeth. But I’ve seen that real monsters can be friendly; they can smile, and they can say please and thank you like everyone else. Real monsters can appear to be kind. Sometimes they can be inside us.
I can’t quite stay in this moment. I’m peeling away from it. Something bothers me—and it isn’t just that the hole in the cellar is wider than ever, big enough for me. I can’t concentrate. There’s something about this time, an answer gnawing at me, and after a few moments it takes shape. And it fills me with a terrified heat.
I think I know. Why these people, why this place, why now, why me.
THE ADULTS OF WATER STREET HAD ALREADY MADE THEIR PLANS BY THE time the forecast came. The weather that would arrive after they’d gone was sweeping the whole Midwest. All over the middle top of the country sleepy towns and cities were muffled under snow and temperatures that made their bones rattle. In Minnesota and North Dakota, animals froze in their pens.
“You’ll just have to come with us. I don’t want to leave you alone.” Mrs. Larsen stood at the foot of her bed, laying a pair of pumps into her suitcase. Maggie sat propped up against the headboard, watching.
“Mom, please. I’ll be fine. I have a ton of schoolwork right now. And Pauline’s mom will be here.” She remembered after she’d spoken that, actually, Pauline’s mom would be in Milwaukee. But by then her mom was looking halfway soothed.
“Mom, this is our
house
; we have to feel safe here. I’m not going to go anywhere. I’ll just stay in with the alarm on till you get back. I’ll keep the doors locked and everything. Really, it’s not a big deal. I’ll stay in.”
Her mom studied her. “Maybe you could have Pauline and her mom stay over.”
“Sure, I’ll ask her,” Maggie lied. She didn’t want to ask Pauline. But she knew her mom was being overly cautious.
Her parents packed the last of their things, and Maggie helped her mom lug her suitcase down the stairs. They ate a quick dinner together, and then Maggie got up and did the dishes while her mom gathered up her purse and coat. They bundled themselves up and surveyed the room, as if trying to think of anything they’d forgotten.
“Are you sure, honey?” her dad asked.