Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Alice thought she’d try to get him onto a different topic, and so she said, “Hey, Pop, what do you think about the Red Sox? Are they going to make it to the Series this year?” She had no clue about the Red Sox, they all knew that. But it was something to say and she felt the need to protect her sister.

  “You shut up,” he slurred, fully worked up now. “Mary, you used to be the good one. Now look at you. Ever since you met that man, you’re a different girl. Too big for your britches. And for what? Someone like that—he’s never going to marry a girl like you.”

  Though Alice had been thinking the same thing a moment earlier, she was livid. Of course he was going to marry her. Henry was going to save them both. Maybe that’s what made their father so mad.

  “My daughter turned down by a cripple,” he said with a cruel laugh, and Alice imagined socking him clear across the jaw.

  She looked at her mother, but she just sat there, silent. There was no telling what he might do to her when he got like this, or to any of them for that matter. Their mother had never once come to their defense, even when they were small.

  “He will marry her,” Alice said defiantly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He rose from his chair, standing slowly, coming toward her. She vowed not to move, but at the last second, as Mary screeched, Alice got up and ran to the bedroom, with her sister close behind. He chased them up the stairs, grabbing hold of Mary’s skirt for an instant before she managed to pull away. Alice slammed the door right in his terrible face and stood holding it closed until she heard him slink off.

  “He’s a fool,” she told Mary, who was crying hard now.

  “Oh, come sit by me.” Her sister sat beside her on the bed, putting her head in Alice’s lap. “It will all work out, you’ll see,” Alice said, stroking her brown hair.

  She was trying to sound certain, but she couldn’t sleep that night for wondering what would happen next. Three weeks later, she would know for sure. But by then Mary was gone.

  Alice folded the towels one by one, filling a plastic laundry basket to its brim. She had hoped that coming up to Maine would help her stop thinking about her sister, but she realized now how foolish that had been. Maine was for quiet contemplation, Daniel had always said. Or, in her case, just plain stewing.

  She carried the basket on her hip like a toddler, out through the house’s screen porch and over to the cottage. She saw a cardinal swoop down from one of the pine trees and land on a bush by the grassy patch where they parked the cars, since there was no driveway. Daniel had fancied himself an amateur bird-watcher, and had always given them silly names. She imagined what he might have called this one: Miss Scarlet, maybe.

  There was a ceramic plaque on the cottage door that read Céad Mile Fáilte. “A hundred thousand welcomes.” She and Daniel had gotten it on a trip to Dublin probably thirty-five years earlier. For some time, it had hung on the front door of their house in Canton, and then she tired of it, and so, like many other posessions with which she couldn’t quite part, she brought it to Maine.

  Alice unlocked the door and took in the familiar musty scent. She went to the bathroom linen closet, piling the towels one on top of the other.

  So much of her life had been defined by the loss of her sister. Daniel said it was the reason for her drinking when the kids were small. For her insomnia, her moods. She told him she didn’t know if all that was true—he had never known her before Mary’s death, so how could he be so sure?

  For years at a time, Alice could go along fine, not dwelling on it, until something came along again to open up the wound. This year it had been that story in The Boston Globe. Two years ago, Alice was sorting through a box that had once contained Patrick’s ice skates and was now full of papers and photographs. At the very bottom, she found an envelope. Alice lifted the flap, and flipped through photos of her brothers in uniform; a few of a twenty-six-year-old Daniel on the porch in Maine, with baby Kathleen in his lap; and then a shot of two young women and one man, clad in long khaki shorts and button-down tops, their hair blowing wildly in the Newport breeze, all of them laughing gaily. On the back, in her sister’s handwriting, were the words, May 28, 1943. Me, Alice, and Henry.

  It had been taken six months to the day before Mary died, and just the sight of it had sent Alice into a tizzy. She tore the picture up and threw it in the trash, only to regret doing so an hour later.

  There were always small reminders: she still felt a twinge every time she drove by the Liberty Mutual headquarters on Berkeley Street where Mary had worked; or at Easter, remembering the silly rabbit-shaped cake Mary used to bake each year. She often wondered who Mary might have become. What sort of life would have unfurled from out of her youthful dreams, what sort of children she and Henry would have brought into the world. It was strange to think that Alice had turned into a mother of three, while her entirely maternal sister never had the chance to bear a single child.

  Daniel had always tried to steer her away from the what-ifs, which he considered only wasteful, morbid thoughts. But now he too was gone. Since seeing that newspaper article so many months earlier, Alice was haunted by memories of her sister even more than usual. Maiden Mary, the newspaper had called her—anyone who was old enough to remember that night remembered her story.

  The part they didn’t know was that Alice was to blame. Sometimes she thought that carrying the knowledge of it around was a piece of her penance. Lately, as if God were emphasizing this, she had become painfully aware of the pairs of old ladies everywhere she went. In church pews and at the beauty parlor, and walking along the sidewalks of Boston, arm in arm. The men didn’t last—that was something they never told you when you were young and desperately searching for one, thinking he’d make your life all that it was supposed to be. No, in the end, it was only women; in the end, just sisters. She had her friends, but that was different. Friends kept their distance after a certain age. She couldn’t exactly invite Rita O’Shea over for a slumber party or call her at midnight with her worries.

  If Mary had lived, they might be here in Maine together. If Mary had lived, Alice’s whole life might have been different.

  It was almost lunchtime. She thought she might as well stay in the cottage for a while and make herself a sandwich. She went to the kitchen—her old tiny summer kitchen, which she had complained about countless times over the years, yet so preferred to all the marble and stainless steel next door. She opened up a can of tuna, draining the water into the sink. She had cleaned out the fridge a week earlier and filled it with new condiments and pickles and seltzer and Pepsi and a dozen fresh eggs. In the freezer, there were Popsicles and several leftovers from her own kitchen back home, wrapped in tinfoil. On the counter, she had lined up a bag of onions and a stack of paper plates and cups. In the coming weeks, her children and grandchildren would come through, adding their own bits and pieces, so that by the end of the summer there would be four half-eaten boxes of cereal and several almost empty bags of chips in the cupboard; in the freezer, a lone frozen waffle and a gallon of ice cream from Brigham’s with one bite left in the bottom of the drum. But the staples came from Alice.

  She had once heard her grandson Christopher ask Kathleen how it happened that the cottage was always fully stocked. “Magic,” Kathleen had said, and Alice had interrupted, “Actually, there’s nothing magic about it, Chrissy. It’s called your grandmother.”

  Now she pulled a small onion from the bag and a knife from the block on the counter, part of a set she had bought off the TV a couple winters ago. She began chopping.

  She chopped in silence for a minute or so, saying a Hail Mary in her head as she went.

  Outside the window, something darted across the lawn, catching her eye. Her chest tightened. Her hand locked tight around the knife. She knew exactly who was out there.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” she said out loud.

  She stormed outside, just in time to see the blasted baby rabbit eat a hunk out of one of her beauti
ful pink roses.

  “No! Out! Out!” she said, stomping toward the creature like a maniac, waving the knife in the air. He perked up his ears, and looked straight at her. The nerve!

  Alice rushed toward him, scrunching up her face, pointing the knife. A moment later, he darted under a hedge and into the woods.

  “That’s it,” she yelled after him. “This means war!”

  Her heart pounded, but she felt a bit silly now, standing alone in the yard with a steak knife, shouting at no one. She straightened up, smoothed her blouse, and went back inside to finish making lunch.

  Maggie

  Maggie had been standing in front of Gabe’s building like a pathetic crazy person for twenty minutes. A cab came by with its light on and she hailed it, beginning to cry softly, admitting defeat. She told the driver her address and almost said, “I’m pregnant,” as a way of explaining her tears, but that seemed a bit much.

  She wanted to believe that she was overreacting. She didn’t want the problem to be Gabe. Or, if it was Gabe, she wanted him to do something so big she couldn’t let it go by—not just lying about being out with friends or buying drugs, but lying about another woman. Not just grabbing her uncomfortably by the shoulders, but actually slapping her across the face.

  She had been waiting and waiting, and now perhaps that thing had come. He didn’t want her to move in, and didn’t seem to care whether that meant they were over. She was pregnant with his child and she was alone. What a dick. What a chronically avoidant, immature asshole. And what kind of freak was she that a tiny part of her was already regretting how she’d acted, wishing she had said, “Okay, fine, we won’t live together,” so that they could go to Maine tomorrow and fall in love again. They’d been trying to make this work for two years, even though it was sometimes hard.

  As her mother had put it when Maggie called her crying after one of their fights: “I know you want to be married and settled, but give it up. You can’t make chicken soup from chicken shit.”

  Kathleen was forever saying things like that, things that probably made some sense in theory, but were not in the least bit helpful when it came to actually living your life. She kept handwritten AA mantras on Post-it notes stuck to her fridge and printed on coffee mugs and tea towels all around her kitchen: One Day at a Time. Live and Let Live. To Thine Own Self Be True.

  In her less charitable moments, Maggie thought that her mother had really just replaced one addiction with another: the pride and the self-righteousness of sobriety instead of the rush and release of alcoholism. But then she would remember moments from childhood: her mother passing out on the front lawn after a cousin’s wedding; her parents, drunk on margaritas at the cottage in Maine, laughing and singing and then usually fighting until after midnight, letting Maggie stay up (or, more likely, forgetting about her), which thrilled her, and scared her too.

  After Kathleen joined AA, she started doing a lot of yoga. She also began concocting herbal remedies—calendula and witch hazel for Chris’s acne, ground-up nettle leaves and plum oil for Maggie’s allergies. Never have two adolescents coveted Noxzema and Benadryl so much.

  Kathleen gave Maggie a dream catcher as a sixteenth birthday gift, and it was all Maggie could do not to tell her how stupid and clichéd this was. The same year, her cousin Patty got a car for her birthday, and she didn’t even have her permit yet. Maggie was jealous, and then immediately guilty—her mother might have gotten her a Camry, too, if she could afford it. Maggie made herself feel so lousy about the situation that she decided not to get her license that year. Sixteen years later, she still didn’t know how to drive.

  Now Kathleen was off in California. Maggie knew her mother had her reasons for leaving, but part of her felt like Kathleen had chosen Arlo—a man she hardly knew at the time—over her own children. It was the same feeling she had as a child when Kathleen would go on dates and leave them with Ann Marie. On those nights, Maggie would sit at the table with her cousins in Ann Marie’s bright, open kitchen, wishing she belonged there.

  • • •

  When she got home from Gabe’s apartment, she climbed the stairs to her fifth-floor walk-up, sobbing. From the fourth-floor landing, she heard a door above creak open and prayed it was not Mr. Fatelli, the lecherous old guy next door, who always smelled like soup and wanted her to come inside and have a look at his pet lovebirds, Sid and Nancy.

  But then she heard Rhiannon’s voice: “Maggie?” came the soft Scottish accent.

  “Yes, it’s me,” she said, walking up the last flight, wishing she could get inside and be alone, despite the fact that she genuinely liked Rhiannon.

  Her neighbor on the other side was a gorgeous girl from Glasgow. She was not yet thirty, but had already divorced the older American businessman who had brought her here. Now she worked as a hostess at a trendy restaurant in SoHo by night and attended graduate school at NYU three days a week. Rhiannon seemed like a free spirit, maybe because she was a foreigner, and therefore felt adventurous (or maybe it was the reverse—she was bold enough to come here because she was just the adventurous type). She was always going on a boat ride up the Hudson or biking through the Bronx or trying every pizza place in Staten Island in the course of a week. She lived in New York the way everyone imagined living there, but no one actually did.

  A few months earlier, at Rhiannon’s urging, Maggie and Gabe had gone to the restaurant where she worked for dinner. Rhiannon had worn a tiny tight dress in Lewinsky blue; her muscular arms and legs were everywhere as she led them to their table.

  Afterward, she chatted with them for a bit, joking with Gabe about her name: “This is what happens when Fleetwood Mac fans mate,” she said. “I’m thinking of starting a support group with my friend Gypsy.”

  “Seriously?” he responded, clearly captivated.

  “No, not seriously,” she said.

  “Ah, you got me,” he said, giving her a wink, which annoyed Maggie ever so slightly. She imagined for an instant how he behaved when she wasn’t around.

  Out in the street afterward, Gabe said, “She’s pretty hot stuff.”

  “You’re not really her type, sweetie,” Maggie said. “She goes for rich, old geezers.”

  “I meant her attitude,” he said. “She’s spunky. She must get bored with a gig like that. Why does she do it?”

  Rhiannon had told Maggie that she had gotten the restaurant job only because she needed dental work. Until then she had done fine without health coverage. Maggie herself wouldn’t dare to live without insurance for a single day. That would no doubt be the day that a piano fell from a tenth-story window and landed on her head.

  “Are you okay?” Rhiannon asked now, seeing Maggie’s tears.

  “Gabe and I had a fight,” Maggie said.

  Rhiannon nodded. “Why don’t we pop downstairs for a drink?”

  “I just want to go to bed,” Maggie said. “I hope that doesn’t sound rude.”

  Rhiannon laughed. “Yeah, goddamn your rudeness. You really need to get that in check. Seriously, though, I’m worried about you. Do you want to talk?”

  Maggie shook her head. “Maybe later?”

  Rhiannon was her first New York neighbor who had become something like a friend. The two of them weren’t all that close, but they had had several long chats out in the hallway, and on the day Rhiannon’s divorce was finalized, they’d gone for dinner at a new place on Orange Street, and toasted to freedom, though Maggie wondered whether Rhiannon actually saw it that way.

  “I’ll be here if you need me,” Rhiannon said now.

  “I appreciate it,” Maggie said.

  Inside the apartment, she left her packed suitcase by the door and crawled into bed. A pair of Gabe’s corduroys hung over the arm of a chair. His Yankees hat was on the coffee table.

  Maggie cried until she fell asleep. She dreamed of her grandfather at the beach in Maine, dancing on the shore alone, in his old palm-tree-print bathing suit, little curls of white hair on his chest. He was laughing, carefree.


  When she woke up, she thought first of him. In a lot of ways, he had been more of a dad to her than her own father ever had. It was her grandpa who used to make her giggle with his ridiculous jokes when some kid at school hurt her feelings; her grandpa who came over and shoveled their driveway after a snowstorm. At the cottage in Maine, he’d sing lullabies to the grandkids at bedtime, always in an exaggerated, melodramatic voice.

  He had been the one to drive Maggie to college, with all of her belongings in the back of his Buick, all the way to Ohio. That road trip was one of her happiest memories: she got to talk to him in a way that she never had before, without her brother and cousins there vying for his attention.

  After ten hours in the car, they stopped for dinner at some ramshackle place on the side of the road. Her grandfather drank a pint of Guinness, and told her that when he had first met Alice he’d been so startled by her beauty that he nearly ran off; every word out of his mouth was utter nonsense. He told her that the day her mother was born was the most amazing one of his life, and that he had left his wife and new baby sleeping in the hospital room and gone straight to morning Mass at St. Ignatius, where he put a hundred-dollar bill in the collection plate.

  “Your grandma and I are so proud of you,” he said. “We know you’re going to be a very bright star, Maggie.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re the first one in our family to go to a non-Catholic school, you know,” he said, and she rolled her eyes because he had been mentioning this all summer. “You’ve broken our hearts, but that’s fine.”

  “Grandpa!”

  “Be sure not to give up on your faith, okay?” he said. “You’re going to the sort of place where they’re not too keen on religion. But remember where you came from.”

  The food arrived, and he said with a straight face, “Maggie, my dear, do you know why you shouldn’t lend money to a leprechaun?”