Halfway to You(35)
“Are you all right?” Ann is watching her, her brows drawn together ever so slightly, as if she’s trying to read Maggie’s mind without Maggie knowing.
Maggie sets the letter on the counter. Nods.
When she was a sophomore in high school, Maggie attended her first unchaperoned party. Samantha Liu’s mom had been working late and unaware of her popular daughter’s habit of stealing cheap rum. When Maggie arrived with three of her Lit Club friends—all wearing their tightest pairs of skinny jeans—red Solo cups crowded every counter, side table, and shelf. Her classmates were smoking and laughing and making out in dark corners, and Maggie felt both thrilled and out of her depth.
Lit Club had just read Chasing Shadows for the first time, and Maggie wanted to be worldly like its main character, Jane. Jane smoked, drank, and had sex. And despite Jane feeling the same angst and melancholy that Maggie knew so well (for Maggie, a mere symptom of puberty), Jane was confident, and empowered, and bold. Maggie wanted to be just like Jane, so she picked up her first-ever Solo cup and choked through her first-ever cigarette, and two hours later, Maggie’s head was spinning, and she burst out the front door to puke on the Liu residence’s porch.
Her friend who’d driven her there was nowhere to be found. Maggie couldn’t call her parents, for fear of their disappointment and wrath, and so Maggie called the only other person she could trust: Keith.
He picked her up fifteen minutes later, and she rode with her head between her knees all the way to his house. He parked in the driveway and shut off the car, their porch light shining through the windshield like a policeman’s flashlight. Guilt burned across her face, but when Keith spoke, his tone was gentle.
“Adolescence is hard,” he said. “You want to be independent, cool, and accepted by your peers. It’s a rite of passage, I think, to try so hard to control what people think of us, all so we can learn who we really are.” Keith held Maggie’s bleary eyes, his gaze steadfast, anchoring her. “Did you feel like you tonight, Maggie?”
She shook her head, stirring up the spins and nausea still swirling through her system.
“Then this is a good lesson, don’t you think?”
She became tearful, though she was not exactly sure why.
Keith drew her into a hug and kissed her hair. “Do you want to know a secret?” he whispered. “Chasing Shadows took a lot of editing. A lot.” He pulled back but gripped her shoulders to stabilize her, ensure her attention. “We’re all works in progress. Even Jane. Even Ann Fawkes. Even me. The important thing to remember is to learn from every experience.”
Maggie stayed in Iris’s old room that night and woke up the next morning thinking about Chasing Shadows and the betrayal Ann had captured on the page. It was the same sort of betrayal Maggie felt, a deep, bladelike cut slashing her heart each and every time she wondered where she came from: adoption, or infidelity, or a sperm donor, or one of those stories on the news, of a baby left in a dumpster or at a firehouse. Despite Keith’s words being comforting, that night sharpened a pain in Maggie that she thought she had managed to dull.
A couple of years later, it was that same pain that made Maggie want to try a journalism course at the community college, and it’s that same pain that slices through her now, sitting in Ann’s kitchen.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Ann asks.
Maggie blinks from the letters to Ann’s face. It’s strange to think that this woman—whom Maggie has known for less than a week—possesses the same grief and enduring fondness for her uncle as she does. That both of them have their own collection of touching, embarrassing, and happy memories.
“I’m just surprised by Keith’s impeccable penmanship,” Maggie quips. “You’re the writer, isn’t yours supposed to be the neater script?”
At Maggie’s joke, Ann’s face transforms, brightening. “You forget that, despite being a golden retriever in a man’s body, Keith had his shit together—far more than I did.” She taps on a letter. “I always loved his handwriting—it was so methodical. It made me feel like he cared.”
Maggie nods, remembering a similar feeling when she read the edits he made on her essays or the way he wrote such thoughtful cards on her birthday. She still has her high school graduation card from him.
Ann tilts her wrist to read her watch. It’s evening now, the outside a deep indigo, glowing slightly in the remaining twilight. “I have more letters to dig out of the attic,” she says. “Do you want to pause here?”
“Have you given more thought to recording—”
“Why don’t we discuss it in the morning?”
Rather than heading back to the B&B to fret over her last night here, Maggie drives downtown and ducks into a dim, half-full bar. She takes a seat at a two-person table in the back, nestled against a wall. A waitress comes by with a happy hour menu and a plastic cup of water; Maggie orders a beer, and her first sip fizzes in her throat all wrong.
To distract from the soldier march of stress in her head, Maggie takes another three gulps and texts Grant an update: She’s going to sleep on it.
Later, feeling a slight buzz, Maggie opens the Whitaker Family text thread on her phone. She doesn’t allow herself to think or doubt, just type.
Remember the time Keith broke his clavicle at Breckenridge? she writes.