The Wish(32)

“Maybe at first. After that, it was all you.”

Maggie took in the restaurant; like so many spots in New York, it was decorated for the holidays, featuring both an ornamented Christmas tree and a glowing menorah in the bar area. There were, by her estimation, more than the average number of red dresses and red sweaters, and as she studied the patrons, she wondered what they would be doing on Christmas, or even what she would be doing.

She took another sip of her wine, already feeling its effects.

“Speaking of stories, do you want me to pick up where we left off now or wait until the food arrives?”

“If you’re ready now, I’d love to hear it.”

“Do you remember where I stopped?”

“You’d agreed to let Bryce tutor you and you’d just told your aunt Linda that you loved her.”

She reached toward her glass, staring into its purplish depths.

“On Monday,” she began, “the day after we bought the Christmas tree…”





Beginnings





Ocracoke

1995



I woke to sunlight streaming through my window. I knew my aunt was long gone, though in my haze, I imagined I heard someone rummaging in the kitchen. Still groggy and dreading the barf because it’s morning thing, I gently pulled the pillow over my head and kept my eyes closed until I felt like it was safe to move.

I waited for the nausea to take over while I slowly came back to life; by then, it was as predictable as the sunrise, but strangely, I continued to feel okay. I slowly sat up, waited another minute, and still nothing. Finally, putting my feet to the floor, I stood, certain that my stomach would start doing cartwheels any second, but still there was nothing.

Holy cow and hallelujah!

Because the house was chilly, I threw on a sweatshirt over my pajamas, then slid into some fuzzy slippers. In the kitchen, my aunt had thoughtfully stacked all my textbooks and various manila folders on the table, probably to get me kick-started first thing in the morning. I pointedly ignored the pile because I wasn’t just not sick; I was actually hungry again. I fried an egg and reheated a biscuit for breakfast, yawning the whole time. I was more tired than usual because I’d stayed up late to finish the first draft of my paper on Thurgood Marshall. It was four and a half pages, not quite the five pages required but good enough, and feeling sort of proud of my diligence, I decided to reward myself by blowing off the rest of my homework until I felt more awake. Instead, I grabbed the Sylvia Plath book from my aunt’s shelf, bundled up in a jacket, and took a seat on the porch to read for a while.

The thing is, though, I’d never really liked reading for pleasure. That was Morgan’s thing. I’d always preferred skimming bits here and there to get the general concept, and after opening the book to a random page, I saw a few lines that my aunt had underlined:

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.



I frowned and read it again, trying to figure out what Plath had meant by that. I thought I understood the first part; I suspected she was talking about loneliness, albeit in a vague way. The second part wasn’t so hard, either; to my mind, she was just making it clear that she was talking about loneliness specifically, not the fact that being in a quiet place is depressing. But the third sentence was trickier. I guessed she was referring to her own apathy, perhaps a product of her loneliness.

So why hadn’t she just written, Being lonely sucks?

I wondered why some people had to make things so complicated. And, frankly, why was that insight even profound? Didn’t everyone know that loneliness could be a bummer? I could have told them that and I was just a teenager. Hell, I’d been living it since I’d been marooned in Ocracoke.

Then again, maybe I’d misinterpreted the whole passage. I was no English scholar. The real question was why my aunt had underlined it. It obviously had meant something to her, but what? Was my aunt lonely? She didn’t seem lonely and she spent a lot of time with Gwen, but then again, what did I really know about her? It wasn’t as though we’d had any deeply personal conversations since I’d been here.

I was still thinking about it when I heard an engine and the sound of tires crunching gravel out front. After that, the thumping of a car door. Rising from my seat, I opened the slider and listened, waiting. Sure enough, I eventually heard someone knocking. I had no idea who it could possibly be. It was the first time I’d heard a knock at the door since I’d been there. Maybe I should have been nervous, but Ocracoke wasn’t exactly a hotbed of criminal activity, and I doubted a criminal would knock in the first place. Without a care, I went to the front door and swung it open only to see Bryce standing before me, which pretty much made my brain freeze in confusion. I knew I’d agreed to let him tutor me, but somehow I’d thought I had a few days before we’d begin.

“Hi, Maggie,” he said. “Your aunt said I should come by so we can get started.”

“Huh?”

“Tutoring,” he said.

“Uh…”

“She mentioned that you might need some help preparing for your tests. And maybe catching up on your homework.”

I hadn’t showered, hadn’t brushed my hair, hadn’t put on makeup. In my pajamas and slippers and jacket, I probably looked homeless. “I just got out of bed,” I finally blurted out.