Recovering Maggie Read online

  “What?—may I please be excused?” Her voice was a tight gasp and when she pulled her hand back her mother let go this time, but she still held her gaze.

  “The pain will go away on its own, Margaret.”

  “I have to go to my room,” she whispered, standing quickly but stiffly, the feet of the ebony chair squealing across polished concrete.

  The eyes of her parents on her back as she trotted out of the sterile room made her feel naked. And by the time she’d hammered up the steps and sealed herself in her bedroom she was afraid she knew why.

  His flight, the second one in a month, left him tapped, and he took a bus from the airport instead of a cab. It took almost two hours to get from O’Hare to the lake shore.

  Now he was in the center of campus, right where the directions told him, but it couldn’t be right.

  “What the hell?” he said, looking from phone to building and back again.

  It was right, but not what he expected. Once inside the massive church he saw a directional arrow with descriptive text telling him the way to the dorms. The passages were dark and narrow, black wood ceilings and gothic archways; his footsteps echoed off the pale stone. The route took him through a library where sombre students sat reading old tomes at polished tables, under circular timber chandeliers suspended on chains.

  Up three steps from the library, under one more arch, he found himself at a wooden door with black numerals spelling out 115. He pushed his travel bag behind his hip, knocked, and hoped the timing would be all right.

  When a surly voice called out, “What?” from behind, he knocked again, this time more firmly.

  Footsteps shuffled on wood floor, then the door yanked open and the expression on his brother Connor’s face was priceless.

  Max said, “What’s up, player?”

  “Oh my God, Max,” Connor laughed and held out his arms.

  He stepped into his brother’s dorm room and they embraced, slapping each other on the back and rocking back and forth.

  “Dude, Max, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Came to surprise you,” he said.

  “For what?”

  They stepped back and looked each other over. Connor was looking good and healthy, his red hair cut short but kept long and wavy up top. Max smiled and did the best to hide his pain.

  “No reason,” he said, but his brother’s smile showed he’d been caught.

  He strolled into Connor’s room and slung his bag onto a chair. “You gonna let me crash here for a night or two?”

  “I could have booked you a guest room,” he said.

  “It’s not Mom and Dad, it’s me.”

  “Yeah, man, of course. Of course you can stay here. Everything cool? How’s Mom and Dad?”

  “They’re good. I just saw them. So, seriously, this fucking building. Fucking Hogwarts shit.”

  “I know,” he laughed. “Isn’t it crazy?”

  Max looked around his brother’s dorm room. He’d already heard (been bragged to) about it. A room the size of his double at Farmingham but solo occupation. The dorm room shared a bathroom with one similar dorm on the other side, and then another common living area. It had been a seminary school at one time and there were a dozen prime dorms in the old church now assumed by the university.

  “This is unreal.”

  “Upperclassman shit,” Connor said, as if he wielded some seniority on the campus of twenty-thousand.

  Max said, “I’m an upperclassman, I still got a roommate.”

  “Yeah, but you go to that weird little school in the mountains.”

  “I like my school.”

  “You get credit for making maple syrup, right?”

  “Yes,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “Your Dean—I heard he’s a mean flatfoot dancer.”

  “We all are, asshole.”

  “Can I offer you some moonshine?”

  Max sighed as if he would answer, but abandoned it, instead sitting down heavily on Connor’s bed.

  They stared at one another for a while without saying anything, then Connor asked: “How’s Maggie?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking away.

  Connor nodded. “Why not?”

  “I called the wedding off.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Connor murmured and rubbed his forehead.

  Max took a deep, long, and careful breath; it was very easy to get lost in the emotion of it and he didn’t want that. “Yeah, I did.”

  Connor sighed. “Max, man, what happened?”

  Max shrugged, the words frozen in his mouth. The whole reason he came here, and now he couldn’t even utter what hurt him.

  Connor sat down next to him. “Is it final?”

  He opened his mouth but still nothing came out, his throat croaked. “I ... I hope not.”

  “Then why ... why did you call it off?”

  “I ... I made a big mistake,” he muttered, gaze cast across the room at his brother’s desk, laptop opened, messenger active, texts popping up in word balloons from his friends.

  “What did you do?”

  “She made mistakes, too,” he muttered.

  “Maggie? What did she do?”

  He moaned and hid his face in his hands. Connor’s hand fell on his back, rubbing his shoulder blades and squeezing his neck.

  “She cheated on me.”

  Connor laughed. Max turned to face him.

  Connor stopped, said, “No, she didn’t,” frowning in disbelief. “Maggie? Dude, is it your imagination?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Come on,” Connor said.

  Max showed him a face that would prove he was serious.

  “Maggie? I just can’t believe it. She’s not like that. What do I know, I guess ... Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe it’s not what you think—”

  “I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “Oh,” he said, sitting straighter. “Oh, fuck.”

  “Oh, fuck is right,” he said.

  “Saw what?” Connor asked.

  Max huffed and faced him again, “What do you think?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “You can be ... sorry, you can be weird and hysterical sometimes.”

  “What? Fuck off,” he said.

  “Dude, I am so sorry,” Connor said, putting his arm around his back and hugging him. “I mean it, man. I thought Maggie was perfect, I mean so perfect for you. I’m sorry.”

  “She is. She’s so perfect,” he sobbed, heaving forward, but clenching a grip on his knees and keeping it at bay.

  Connor’s hand went in soothing circles again, and he said, “No, fuck her, Max. I mean it. Fuck that bitch.”

  “Don’t say that,” he moaned. “Don’t call her a bitch.”

  “Don’t defend her, Max. How can you trust her now? You’re going to marry someone you can’t trust?”

  “I love her ...”

  “Who?”

  “Maggie ....?”

  “No, who did she sleep with, Max?”

  He groaned again and hid his face in his hands.

  “Well, was she drunk or something? I mean maybe ... I don’t know ... tell me what happened.”

  Maybe coming here was a big mistake. There were things he couldn’t confront, and he knew he was running away. But, fuck, he was getting what he wanted. A hand on his back, compassion, support. Love. In the fallout from what he witnessed in The Twilight he’d never felt more alone in his life.

  “Cole,” he said.

  “Your friend?—wait, your fucking Best Man?”

  He nodded and felt the tears seeping into the creases of his palm and fingers.

  “You have got to be kidding me, Max ...”

  He shook his head slowly, his back beginning to heave with silent sobs.

  Now Connor encircled him with his arms and held him. He exhaled, “Oh, Max, Max, Max ...”

  “I made so many mistakes, Connor ...”

  “It’s okay, Max, it�
��s okay ...”

  “I want her back. I want her back more than anything.”

  Connor squeezed him tighter. “No, you don’t, Max. No, you don’t.”

  She’d never intended to reveal to her parents a single thing about her and Max. Somehow, once her barricades took a couple of hits, her sentimental heart sent its hurting contents gushing over the barrier. And her mother knew. Somehow knew; a woman more machine than human, heartless certainly, saw the entirety of her sheltered daughter’s complex relationships, putting pins in their moving vectors with remarkable clarity. And now there would be no way to claw back her privacy—a glimmer of her hurt and truth revealed to her parents, and it is, of course, met with uncaring pragmatism. That pain was her own and maybe she flashed it to them because, for once, she might like to feel someone care for her. Now that her Max was gone.

  She reeled, kicking off her loafers and crossing the room, climbing up on her bed, one she’d shared with the two boys she loved … and she was climbing right over the bed, stepping off on the other side, stumbling into the bathroom and collapsing on her knees at the base of the toilet—dinner wanted up but she pinched her lips closed and slumped till her forehead touched the cold floor.

  This was too much to bear; her parents fully enveloped in her reality now made all of their transgressions even worse; worse by emptying them of meaning—you messed up, Margaret, everybody got hurt and we don’t care for the details, you have Harvard at the end of August to concern yourself with.

  “Fuck!” she cried, pounding a knee with her fist.

  What did she expect?

  The new horizon for Margaret Becker?—suffocated in the fold of her parents’ control, starting school anew, honor, discipline, hard work, and results tantamount. No relationships. Work work work. Study study study. She’d been free. So close to free. Maggie and beautiful Max together and married and happy, and away, and free free free, and oh, how she wanted it. And the cause of her ruin?—the repressed sexuality her teenage imprisonment allowed to fester and swell; she’d been kept in her birdcage so long, when someone finally opened its door she beat her own wings so frantically she bashed her little stunted bird brains against the windows of her greater confinement. What did she even want? She wanted it all, apparently. But maybe she was selfish—did that make her selfish? What made her think she could have two lovers, a fiancé, a dangerous stalker, painting, cello, perfect grades, and now Harvard Law?

  The absence of her two men sent an ache through her. One she exiled and kept at bay though he begged for her, the other a ghost, a spectral visage, no longer by her side where she needed him, refusing to talk to her, leaving school for a week now. He was hurting, and she’d done it. She loved him bottomlessly. The look on his face in the Twilight Motel would haunt her forever. Surfing on her newfound effect on men she’d seen the scale of her power revealed, and to witness its damage to her loving Max broke her heart. Not a platitude: when he’d removed the ring from her finger she’d suffered profound physical pain in the centre of her chest. Crumpled, broken, devastated; she collapsed on the motel room floor and while her beautiful Cole caressed her and coddled her as she wailed, she hated him for it. It was his fault. Cole had brought the pain to Max and now Max had redirected it to her, and oh, how it hurt. It hurt incomprehensibly.

  How could she suffer so greatly when no one struck her?—because it wasn’t Cole’s fault. It was her. All her.

  “No, no,” she moaned, grinding her brow into the stone floor. It was her lust, her dirty lust.

  Out again, out from the bathroom, looking to avoid it all, looking to escape her own thoughts, her accusations … Standing at the foot of her bed under the gaze of the enormous manifestation of that sheltered fervor straining against her seams. She laughed at it. That stupid fucking little girl. That dumb mouse. She opened her arms to it.

  “Here it is, okay? You wanted it.”

  Laughter turned to tears, and she went to her easel in the corner, slid her metal stool in place underneath the huge award winning painting she’d been so proud of at seventeen. Like she’d got away with something. Laid it all out, splattered her sexual angst onto canvas and then stood back as the erudite pursed their lips and studied it with manufactured interest, pretending to see meaning when there was nothing real at all to it. Not that they would see. Nodding knowingly, but the joke was on them; you better not be nodding knowingly, you are essentially looking at a half-Chinese nerd opening her legs and pulling her panties aside, begging for someone to fuck her pussy.

  She laughed again, cried too, lifting the painting off its two metal posts that held it in place, forgetting how heavy it was, and watching now as it left her hands, scissoring down hard on top of the shelf below, lightbulb popping in a blue flash as it toppled a table lamp before crashing onto the floor on one corner, sending a cracking tremor through the frame. It pivoted, landed paint-side-up and she jumped from the stool landing her bare feet in its centre. She jumped a few times, watched that once-cherished painting flex, heard the tap-tap of the canvas as it slapped the floor under her feet.

  Something was weighing on her, over her shoulders and back, an enormous weight. She hopped off the painting, dropped to her knees to the cart on wheels on the right side of her easel, knocked over bottles till she found what she was looking for. Got the white nozzle flicked open and stood, feet apart and black latex bottle gripped in two hands. It squirted and squelched, and she drew squittering zigzags, whipping the lines back and forth and for a while today’s addition didn’t alter the composition that much. But it wasn’t long until most of that young girl’s burgeoning sexuality was completely spritzed in black.

  She plunked down the paint bottle, grabbed a broad brush, returned, and straddled each corner of the painting, leaning over and covering it with wide, arcing strokes, moving from point-to-point until almost the entirety was blacked out. By the time she was done, she breathed heavy, back heaving, that weight still pressing. Huge and broad, not like a narrow point.

  Now it was hard to breathe. She dropped the paintbrush onto the centre of the ruined painting and turned, falling to her knees and looking at her bed—that place where only two months ago she had sex with Cole while Max watched. She’d been loved by both of them, and the joy she felt, the passion, the salaciousness, had her and Cole bursting from this room looking to spread their filth as far as they could.

  Now she was on her knees and elbows supplicating herself before the altar where she’d first fucked Cole. The weight couldn’t be ignored.

  Horrible thought, but unshakable: … She could paint it all black but that thought couldn’t be avoided. When she’d bared herself unwillingly—unwittingly—to her mother, Carol’s acknowledgement, Carol’s shocking clarity, had a frightening implication.

  She could picture a high definition video of a daughter and that daughter’s best man skipping through the halls, naked, running to the music room, pictured a mother watching that daughter get fucked. Mother could’ve watched her own daughter taking two men at once. One in each hole. She could’ve seen her own daughter orgasm. Did she? If her mother saw that, what would she do? A mother like Carol? … It couldn’t be possible, could it …? …

  If a mother watched a daughter in a video so terrible could she use that knowledge to manipulate her daughter?

  “Aww, no,” she cried at the enormous fear that she’d been seen, that all she thought was private was known.

  On her belly now, she writhed until she lay under her bed. Still trembling she pulled her phone from her pocket and called the only person in the world she could think of who would talk to her right now.

  When he answered, she said, “I need you, I need you so bad. Will you come to me? Please, please, come to me …”

  2

  Costumes

  Saturday, October 28th

  Just past midnight on Saturday and Max was drunker than he’d been since high school, a night he ended up hospitalized.

  How the evening came about: Connor’s
girlfriend Skyped Connor in the morning and he told her she and their friends needed to go out and get hammered, it was Saturday night after all, and Halloween; told her his brother was in town and needed cheering up. Connor put him in a headlock and brought him to the laptop, and his girl, Andie, said Oh, he’s cute, and that she would invite Marta, who Connor seemed to know, and when Max said he was engaged Connor told Andie Max was kidding.

  During the afternoon, while Max and Connor chilled and talked, Andie worked at the school’s Project Pumpkin giving Chicago kids a haunted house tour, fun in a bouncy castle, and she and a bunch of other students, including Marta, painted their faces, ran games, and gave out candy.

  Andie and Marta showed up in the early evening, Andie, a tiny girl dressed in a tight fuzzy monkey costume (with long curled tail, the face hole enough to show her pretty features but he couldn’t even tell the color of her hair) which accompanied Connor’s yellow pants, shirt, hat, and polka-dot tie. Marta was from Portugal but had no trace of an accent. She wore red short-shorts, a pink T-shirt, and canvas Keds. When she hung up her coat behind Connor’s dorm room door he saw she sported a pale purple backpack. He burst out laughing. Dora the fucking Explorer.

  Marta and Andie, knowing he had no costume, presented him with a very official-looking protester’s picket sign that read: NUDIST ON STRIKE! BARGAINING MUST BEGIN!

  They went out for dinner; Max, Connor, Andie, and Marta. Also attending: a guy with a long beard called Samuel who graduated Journalism at Northwestern (but now just ran his own YouTube channel), dressed in a Boy Scout uniform with shorts and cuffed socks; Mikey, an African from Nigeria here to study Mechanical Engineering, who came as Titus Andromedon from Kimmy Schmidt, just tossing a generous purple scarf around his neck, already sporting a shaved head; and Yvonne and Harry, an engaged couple attending Kellogg for Management, in the most unbelievably elaborate foam Mario and Luigi costumes.

  They ate at a Vietnamese restaurant called Yum Dum Duk and he had a Bánh Mì with fried egg and a pork vermicelli noodle salad, and the first three beers of the evening. After dinner they walked around downtown Evanston, winding up at Bay 12 which was raucous and out of control. A wild sports bar with beer towers and vintage American flags; they got a table and split nachos and six pitchers of beer. Coats back on, they took cabs to campus, ambled into a packed lecture hall and watched a crazy chemistry demonstration in the dark. Some lecturer blowing fireballs out of his mouth and making controlled explosions in scary darkness—performed with a backup student dance troupe, cheerleaders, and a marching band.