In the kitchen, she looked out the window at a homeless man dragging his cart along the sidewalk, a group of hipsters in tight dark jeans sharing a cigarette on a graffiti-covered stoop across the way. She had never been able to see the beauty in this neighborhood, no matter how much Gabe praised it. She wondered, not for the first time, how it was going to feel to leave her lovely tree-lined Brooklyn Heights, with its streets of perfect brownstones, the view of the Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge from the Promenade, the Sunday farmers’ market where she and Gabe had so often gone in early autumn to buy fresh vegetables, and apple crisp, and dahlias for the fire escape, which she could never manage to keep alive for long.
It was hard to imagine living here, in a neighborhood meant for young late-night partiers, a neighborhood full of dive bars and concrete. Especially with a child. Or maybe they would move again by then, someplace quieter and more kid friendly. Park Slope perhaps.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she thought that maybe they wouldn’t ever have a life together, and this whole situation would turn out to be an extension of her foolish history with men—huge, impossible hopes that eventually came to nothing.
Maggie hadn’t told anyone that she was pregnant, even though she had known for nearly two weeks. There were plenty of moments when she panicked and picked up the phone to call her mother or her best friend, Allegra, but she resisted. Gabe should be first.
Never in her life had her emotions run so hot and cold—she could talk herself into the possibility of this being a superb idea and feel at ease for all of three minutes, before completely freaking out and deciding she’d made the biggest mistake of her life.
She knew exactly how it had happened. For months, she had been thinking about babies. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, she wanted one, and understood for the first time what women meant when they talked about biological clocks. She found herself gazing longingly at toddlers on the subway or at brunch. At certain points in each month, she thought she might kidnap the closest person in a high chair.
Maggie knew that she and Gabe weren’t exactly ready. But one night in mid-April, they had a long, winding freshman-year-of-college-type talk about the way events unfold, how, as her mother often said, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. They were both artists in their way, and they ascribed so much meaning, too much, to how they’d met. Gabe said that their next chapter could likely be as random, as accidental, as fated, however you chose to look at it. That night at eleven, when she was supposed to take her pill as she had done every night at eleven since her first year at Kenyon, she left it in the package instead. She did the same the next night and the next, before panicking and swallowing all four pills in one gulp on the fourth night.
After the initial shock of it, this crazy, exhilarating game of Russian roulette, she waited, without telling Gabe what she had done. Her period never came. She took a home pregnancy test. Even though she probably shouldn’t have, she felt stunned when the result was positive. All you heard about in New York these days was how impossible it was to get pregnant. How could she have accomplished it in a single try?
Hiding the pregnancy test from Gabe was one thing, but she knew there was something truly, deeply, wildly wrong with her when she found herself making a doctor’s appointment, sitting across from her middle-aged female gynecologist in a paper gown calmly talking about prenatal vitamins, and then going to meet Gabe for dinner afterward as if none of it had happened. They had even had sex that night.
On average, they did it six times a week, a fact that stunned her group of friends from back home in Massachusetts, most of whom were married, as well as Allegra, her best friend from college, who considered herself exceedingly liberated in every way, but found this amazing even so.
There was an electricity between them that never diminished, even when they were fighting. So Maggie couldn’t be sure when it had happened. For some reason, this seemed important, a real omission on her part. She remembered them having sex in the shower that second day with no pill—she was bent forward with her foot up on the edge of the tub, and he stood behind. She cringed thinking about it. That was no way to make a child. She knew this was the least of her problems, but it seemed like a sign of just how unfit they were to become parents.
Then again, they weren’t teenagers. It wasn’t exactly a scandal for two people in their thirties to have a baby, even if it wasn’t planned. They could do this. She thought she could, at least.
She decided that she would tell him in Maine. There, he’d have time to process, time to get accustomed to the idea. Maybe he would be happy.
Gabe knew she wanted children someday in some abstract way, though they had never really talked about kids. But Gabe was impetuous. He made decisions on a whim, and managed to be happy with them—move to New York, leave New York, come back to New York. She herself had never been that way, but he brought it out in her, which perhaps accounted for that business with the pills. She hadn’t been sick at all so far and she took this, at least, as a good omen.
Maggie turned away from the window and pulled two mugs from the cabinet over the sink. She filled Gabe’s with coffee and poured cranberry juice into her own. She had stopped drinking caffeine two weeks earlier, and no one had noticed. She wasn’t drinking booze either, but she hardly ever did that anyway. She was mindful of the family history around drinking—her mother had dragged her along to enough AA meetings as a child, presumably because she couldn’t find a sitter, but more likely as a sort of cautionary tale. As a result, all these years later Maggie rarely had more than a single glass of wine during the course of a night. She had never been drunk in her life, aside from two or three times with her extended family at Christmas.
For months, she had been looking forward to Maine. She could almost smell the ocean. The cottage and her grandmother’s house next door were built on three acres of grassy land. Beyond those was a stretch of sand and miles of dark blue sea. You couldn’t make out a thing on the other side. As a little girl, Maggie believed that the world dropped off out there, that if you swam far enough you might fall into a starry sky.
She and Gabe had had a marvelous time the previous summer. They did all the activities Maggie had loved to do with her family as a child. They lay on the beach reading for hours; they canoed through Penobscot Bay while loons serenaded them from the shore; they watched fireworks in a field in Kennebunkport, sitting on an itchy blanket in a crowd of families sitting on itchy blankets of their own. They brought a picnic dinner—turkey sandwiches, cheese and crackers, a thick slice of chocolate cake, and a bottle of wine. Children ran here and there, shaking glow sticks in the darkness, eating Popsicles that melted too fast and dribbled red, white, and blue down their chins. When the display started, a young father near them lifted his excited daughter up onto his shoulders, while his wife consoled a fearful younger brother, bribing him with a whoopee pie.
“That’ll be us someday,” Gabe had said. She had felt joyful at the thought.
They always seemed to do better outside of their everyday environment, as if away from the stresses and distractions of New York life, they were suddenly able to imagine themselves as different people.
In Maine last summer, Gabe had patched the screens on the cottage and helped install an air conditioner in her grandmother’s house next door. He had taken her grandmother’s photo, falling in love with Alice as people outside the family often did, taking notice of her beauty and her charm, not sensing the iciness that lay beneath. The picture—a stunning portrait in which Alice looked like an old movie star, with a highball glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other—was taped to Gabe’s refrigerator, along with dozens of others he had snapped. It was slightly disconcerting, meeting her grandmother’s gaze every time she went to get an orange, or milk for her tea.
When Gabe finally emerged from the bedroom, sleepy-eyed and gorgeous in just his boxers, Maggie blurted out, “I wish we were leaving today.”
“I wish
I didn’t have to work tomorrow morning,” he said, coming toward her, wrapping his arms low around her waist, sending a current through her, even though he had done it a million times before. “Should I blow off the assignment so we can leave sooner?”
She felt a nervous twinge when he said it, in spite of herself. He hadn’t had a job in weeks.
“Nah,” she said, trying to sound breezy. “We’ll wait. Anyway, this is pretty nice, too, having a quiet morning here together.”
A while later, she led him back into the bedroom, and placed his open duffel bag on the bed. They filled it with his swim trunks and T-shirts, sunblock and books they both wanted to read. Maggie’s whole body felt filled up with light, as it always did when things were good between them. At the same time, she felt a trace of trepidation: when they hadn’t fought in a while, there was the chance that a big one was coming, and she needed him in a good place for the news she was about to deliver. So she tried to step around problems, tried not to agitate, as he said she tended to do.
Maggie found three sundresses hanging in the closet, left over from the previous summer. She put two of them in the bag, but left the third on its hanger.
“You want to take that to your place?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Only to bring it back here in two months?”
“By then, summer will be two-thirds over,” he said.
In August, when the lease was up, his dopey roommate, Cunningham, would be moving out and Maggie would move in.
Gabe had asked her in the middle of May, not long after she found out she was pregnant. They were having an argument, which had started off as a discussion about marriage: He thought it was a stupid, outdated institution. She halfway agreed, but also thought people said that only when they hadn’t met the right person yet.
“When are you going to start believing in us, huh?” he asked, in a wounded tone of voice that made her all but forget about the fights they had had, the lies he had told. Maybe they had finally turned a corner.
“I’m one hundred percent committed,” he said. “I’ve even been thinking about asking you to move in.”
Though her gut told her this was a consolation prize, that it didn’t necessarily mean he was ready to be a father, she felt elated by the thought. He wanted to live with her; they were one step closer. Maggie knew her mother and her friends would tell her she was crazy, but she said yes, she would love to live with him. She took the offer as a sign that it would all work out. She had never been one to believe in signs, but then, she had never needed one quite so much. Maggie pushed any doubts from her head that night, running a flat palm over her flat stomach as he slept beside her. Soon enough everything would change.
The next morning, she asked him if he was sure, and he said yes; he loved her, wanted to wake up next to her every day. She asked if his roommate would be okay with that. Ben Cunningham was one of Gabe’s two best friends from childhood, along with Rich Hayes. Gabe mostly referred to them only as a unit: “Cunningham and Hayes,” or more often, “the Goons.”
Gabe said he was the one who had found the place, so it was his call. Besides, Ben, like Gabe, was thirty-four, and had been making rumblings for some time about the fact that he was getting a bit old to be living with another dude and should probably bite the bullet and move in with his girlfriend of seven years, Shauna. No matter that he had cheated on her countless times since leaving their hometown in Connecticut, where she still lived.
Maggie believed the move would improve their relationship, in ways small and large. No more arguing about who was going to spend the night at whose place, no more schlepping her blow-dryer to and from the office three days a week. No chance that she might be standing in his kitchen cooking pasta, hear the door open, and see a man other than her boyfriend walk through.
In the past, she had felt like she was pulling Gabe along in her little red wagon, but not anymore. He wanted them to live together. They hadn’t had one of their nasty blowups in months.
Now, his suitcase packed and stacked neatly beside hers in the bedroom, they sat on the couch, eating pancakes and bacon that Gabe had made. She watched TV and he read Sports Illustrated. Cunningham hadn’t come home the night before, and she willed him to stay in whichever girl’s bed he had landed, not wanting him to shatter their nice day. He often clambered in after a basketball game with a friend or two in tow, eating all the groceries (which she had bought and paid for) out of the fridge without asking, and switching the channel to ESPN, even if they were watching a movie. It was his apartment, so she couldn’t really complain. And Gabe—always annoyingly passive and laid-back when it came to his friends—never said a word.
Once, she and Gabe had hosted a dinner party, and she had gone to extravagant lengths: a linen cloth on the big table in the living room, roasted chicken and strawberry pie, bottles of champagne they couldn’t afford. Cunningham was supposed to be in Chicago that weekend, but at the last minute he had decided not to go. After the salad course, he bounded in in his sweaty gym clothes and sat down on the couch, two feet from their dinner guests.
“Can I get you a plate?” she had asked him reluctantly.
“Sure,” he’d said.
Not Yes, please or Thank you, just Sure.
He didn’t join them at the table. Instead, he ate off his lap on the couch. He filled a coffee mug with Veuve Cliquot, and turned on Sports Center, muting the volume since they had music on. Maggie felt enraged, giving Gabe a pleading look.
He was drunk, watery-eyed, and just laughed.
She mostly disliked Cunningham because he was Gabe’s partner in crime, the person Gabe was inevitably with when he lied about where he’d been or drank so much he had to call in sick to a job the next day. Cunningham brought out the bad teenage boy in Gabe, as she imagined he had in high school, when they’d sneak out of chemistry class together and go jump in the old stone quarries that, years later, their hometown filled in after some other fearless teenager accidentally fell to his death.
Now she imagined what it would be like here, after Cunningham had gone: her pale blue couch and love seat in place of his two oversize pullouts. (“Why do straight men always make it their mission to fit as many sofas into a room as possible?” her friend Allegra had said when she first saw the place.)
Maggie clicked through the channels—a Woody Allen movie, a roundtable of political pundits, an infomercial about closet organizers that could change your life for the low, low price of $29.99.
She stopped at the infomercial.
Gabe looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “Really?” he said.
“It’s my hour,” she said. “At one you can switch to baseball.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “It depends on whether I can tear myself away from watching the Storage Saver 5000.”
She grinned. “Now I know what I’m getting you as a housewarming gift when I move in.”
She found infomercials strangely soothing, the way they made it seem as though a piece of plastic might actually eliminate all chaos and uncertainty from your life. She had been watching them since she was a kid, though she never bought anything. Her grandmother seemed to have developed a slight home shopping addiction since her grandfather’s death, a fact that Maggie’s mother and brother found hilarious, while she herself thought it sad.
She imagined Alice and other lonely old ladies and frazzled young housewives and overworked co-eds all around the country watching at this very moment, picking up the phone at the promise of “no more lost shoes, and no more lost hours—instantly get more time with your loved ones, more precious time to do what you want.”
“We should make an effort with my grandmother when we’re in Maine this week,” she said. “Invite her out to dinner with us and really refuse to take no for an answer.”
“Sounds good.”
“I should probably make plans to visit my mom in California soon too. Maybe this fall.”
By then she would know the outcome. She imagined them al
l sitting around Kathleen’s picnic table, discussing baby names while the sun set over the mountains.
“Absolutely,” Gabe said distractedly.
He and Kathleen didn’t get along as well as Maggie might have liked. Her mother thought Gabe had a lot of growing up to do, and he in turn had no shortage of worm-farm jokes in his arsenal. Maggie sometimes got offended when he mocked her mother’s job, or the fact that her house was always a disaster, even though she herself made similar comments all the time.
“Do you want to come?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. He squeezed her shoulder gently, kneading his fingers into her skin. “But maybe we can stay in a hotel this time.”
A while later, Gabe dropped his magazine onto the floor. He got up to take a shower, kissing her on the forehead when he passed.
“I can’t wait to be at the beach, where a dunk in the ocean is all you need to wash off,” Gabe said as he walked toward the bathroom.
“You know, some people do still bathe in Maine,” she said with a smile.
“Yeah, but not me, baby doll.”
“Well no, not you, of course not you.”
He closed the bathroom door and she heard the water start.
Maggie stretched out on the couch and began to read over some draft pages of the novel she was working on. She had vowed to spend at least four hours a day on it in Maine. She had been neglecting her real work lately, and phoning it in somewhat at her day job too.
For the past two years she had been doing background research and writing copy for Till Death Do Us Part, a true-crime cable show about women who murdered their husbands.
Her boss, Mindy, was very relaxed. She didn’t care if they worked from home or in the office as long as they got their stuff done. Maggie went in all the same, afraid that too much time at home alone would make her depressed, or that she’d watch nine hours of television every day and eat the entire contents of her cabinets by lunch.
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