The Narrows(59)

Matthew would have taken the footbridge to get to the old factory on the other side of the Narrows, she rationalized with herself. The bridge was only for automobiles.

But could she be so sure?

Still trembling, she climbed back inside the truck, turned around, and went home.





Chapter Nine


1


Up until about a week ago, Maggie Quedentock would have had a difficult time identifying the worst thing she had ever done. She had been promiscuous and slept with married men prior to her own marriage to Evan. She had shoplifted small items from Lomax’s as well as some of the big department stores in Cumberland on occasion when she thought she could get away with it. She had even walked out on her tab at Crossroads a few times when the bartender and owner, Alvin Toops, had been too drunk or preoccupied to notice. And now, of course, there was the issue of infidelity with Tom Schuler. What is the worst thing you have ever done, Maggie? It wouldn’t have occurred to her to acknowledge the abortion she’d had when she was seventeen.

In fairness, she hadn’t thought about it in many years. Also in fairness, a different type of person might not have termed it a horrible act. However, having been brought up in a strict Catholic household, such things as abortions (or even premarital sex, for that matter) were unacceptable.

Her father, Aaron Kilpatrick, had been a brutish factory worker who had believed that anything shy of corporal punishment—for both his daughter and his wife—was tantamount to shirking his domestic responsibilities. By the time Maggie was in high school, Aaron Kilpatrick had already fractured her jaw, broken the pinky finger of her left hand, and tattooed a pattern of black-and-blue bruises along her buttocks and upper thighs on so many occasions she had lost count. The man had done similar things to his wife, Katrina, a timid and soulless woman who always seemed to suffer the abuse with the acceptance of the biblically damned. Maggie grew to hate her father because of his behavior but she grew to categorically loathe her mother because of her helplessness, her weakness. When compulsion struck—and when her father wasn’t home to mitigate such things—she felt perfectly justified raising a hand to Katrina herself, cracking the woman across the face for piddling bullshit reasons…or sometimes for no reason at all.

When she was twelve years old, she found herself in a car with Barry Mallick, a seventeen-year-old high school dropout who smoked dope and carried a switchblade everywhere he went. At twelve, she was too young to be attracted to Barry’s delinquency—arguably, she was too young to comprehend the intricacies of genuine attraction at all—but she did achieve a certain sense of acceptance from him that made her feel good. In the backseat of his car, she had willingly taken her pants off for him. And while she did not believe it had been Barry’s intention to cause her physical pain, he did not seem all that bothered by the fact that it did.

She pretty much lost part of herself after Barry. In high school, sex was the only sword she wielded. It was a sliver of power to the otherwise powerless. Often, she would allow these boys—these clumsy, smelly, greasy, bad-tasting boys—to do what they wanted with her, and she would willingly oblige their requests, too. Most times, they did not even have to ask—she found it thrilling to be the aggressor. Sometimes, in the middle of doing these things, she imagined that whatever smelly, greasy, bad-tasting boy was having her was in fact her father. It had nothing to do with physical attraction or even with sex. It had simply to do with something she had that he did not. Something he would want, as all boys and men wanted it. Her power over the man who otherwise held her powerless…

At seventeen, when she learned she was pregnant, she went to a boy named Lyle Pafferny and told him the baby was his. (What she didn’t tell him was that, at the time, he had a one-in-three chance of being the baby’s father.) Lyle cried. He was about to graduate high school and he wanted to move to Miami to work on boats with his older brother. A baby would crush that dream, he told her, and yes, she agreed that it would. But he was off the hook, she said, because she didn’t want to keep the baby. She was willing to go to a clinic in Garrett County and have an abortion. She just needed the money for the procedure and someone to take her there to get it done.

So Lyle Pafferny came up with the money and borrowed his old man’s Toyota pickup to drive her to the clinic in Garrett. She’d spent the next three days at home in bed. Her father was easily convinced that she had a terrible fever and was gravely ill. Her mother never said a word, though a part of Maggie Kilpatrick thought the woman knew something suspicious was going on.

And that had been that. She’d never thought about the abortion again.

Until now.

“What are you doing?” Evan said. He leaned in the doorway of the living room, eating macaroni and cheese out of a microwavable container.

Maggie turned away from the window. She was sitting on the couch, an unread book beside her. Outside, the floodlights illuminated the backyard. “I was reading,” she lied.

“Yeah?”

“I mean, I was. I thought I heard something outside.” This part wasn’t a lie.

“Yeah?” It was as if he knew no other words. Cocking one eyebrow, Evan sauntered into the living room and peered casually out one of the windows. “I don’t see nothing.” His mouth was full of food.

Maggie pulled the book into her lap. “Was probably just a coyote.”