“No,” he said after a long minute. “No problems with the truck.”
“Then I’ll advise you to head on home. Streets are flooded, traffic lights out, quite a few accidents around the city. You’d best call it a night.”
Jack nodded, not really listening. Maggie’s last words kept floating around in his skull, looking for a place to land.
I can’t have children…not ever…
I can’t give you what you want…
That’s why she left me? That’s why she wanted the annulment? A band tightened around his temples. Why didn’t she just tell me the truth?
Jack stumbled backwards and reached into his pocket for the keys. How do you make that kind of decision when you’re twenty? How do you know in five or ten or thirty years which things you’ll want, and which you’ll give up? With all that had happened in the last four hours, Jack couldn’t imagine not having Maggie in his life. Nor could he imagine not having a family. He’d always pictured kids, two or three of them running up and down the stairs, clutching at his legs, making him crooked paper Valentines and Father’s Day cards. His mom had devoted her life to making a safe and solid home for the four Major sons, full of warmth and good smells and spaces where you could figure yourself out. He wanted that too. He’d never worked through the when and the why and the how the way he knew a lot of women did. He’d always just assumed it would happen.
But what happens when you never have the choice at all?
How had Maggie dealt with it? How had she kept that kind of secret for so long? Jack recalled all the times he’d curved his body around hers and tickled the back of her neck with his breath. Did she lie awake after he fell asleep, staring at his walls and missing the children she’d never have? Did she listen to him talk about the future and change his words inside her head? Did she stare at mothers and babies on the subway and then go home and weep? Or had it become simply part of who she was, like a callus or a scar from a long-ago injury? How the hell, by the way, did you heal from something like that?
Jack tried to remember something Maggie might have said back then, a hint she might have dropped about a secret of that magnitude. He couldn’t. And he wondered how well he’d known her all along.
Thoughts of all sorts followed him as he crawled back into the dark of the borrowed SUV. Without bothering with the seatbelt, he made his way to the first open parking spot he found, a block away, and sat.
Why didn’t she ever tell me? Longing for something he couldn’t identify swept over him, and Jack closed his hands around the steering wheel. He tried to pin down a single feeling and couldn’t. He tried to sift through memories and failed. Everything swarmed around him: pain and frustration and anger and loss, confusion and resentment and most of all, love, ballooning over him despite its ragged edges and kinks. He dropped his head and closed his eyes. He wished he knew which choice to make. But he didn’t.
*
Maggie had never understood when people talked about terrible things happening in slow motion. She couldn’t see how the seconds might slow, how the air could squeeze the life right out of you as time smashed to a halt. If you were staring down a speeding train, wouldn’t you feel as though the world were rushing in at a thousand miles an hour? If you were that close to death, wouldn’t it feel like all your time was running out? Slow motion didn’t make sense.
But that was exactly what happened when the other car hit them. Everything stopped, even the movement of the air around her. Her hands remained frozen in the ten and two positions on her steering wheel, until it ripped itself away from her and the rough, hot fabric of the air bag rushed out instead. Neve’s body flopped like a rag doll, sideways and back. The building across the street moved toward them as their car slid sideways. Maggie heard a guttural sound, like an animal struck, and for a minute she wondered if they’d hit someone standing in the street. When it stopped, though, and her own throat burned, she realized the wail had come from her. Without even knowing, she’d opened her mouth and made some kind of inhuman sound.
The car ground to a halt. Everything quieted. Something warm ran down Maggie’s cheek. She tried to move her feet, but they felt wedged into place. Under something? Against something? She couldn’t figure it out. She looked past the deflated airbag, through her windshield. Something wasn’t right. Something looked…off. It took her a full minute to realize that her car had ended up nose-first inside the metal stanchions of a bus stop. Maggie turned to Neve and couldn’t fix her brain on what she saw: a darkness that spread onto the passenger seat and down to the floor.
“Neve?” Maggie’s voice came out as a croak “Are you okay?” When no answer came, she reached shaking fingers toward her friend. She found a pulse, but barely. “Can you hear me? Neve?” Darkness rushed in, heavy and frightening. Everything dimmed.
Sometime later, maybe five minutes, maybe fifteen, Maggie heard sirens somewhere far away. She stared through a shattered window and realized it was the only sound, besides her own terrified breathing, she could make out.
3:00 a.m.
Maggie tried to sit up and look around, but it hurt too much. Somewhere close by, she thought she heard the mumbling of voices.
“Hello?” The word was unintelligible even to her own ears. She might not have spoken it aloud at all. Neve didn’t move. No one came to look inside the car. Maggie’s cheeks felt hot and she wiggled the fingers on both her hands to make sure she still could.
Anxiety tightened her stomach into a ball. For a minute, she thought she might throw up. She sensed the urge at the back of her throat, the upheaval of everything inside her needing to find a way out. She tried to draw a full breath, tried to find some oxygen inside the broken car. The feeling passed, after a minute. She swallowed and forced her eyes to focus.
Everything hurt: her neck, her back, her bottom lip where she’d bit it upon impact. Her shoulders. Her wrists. Even her ankles, which she suspected she’d sprained by trying to press two imaginary brake pedals through the floor. Worst of all was the immense pain that ricocheted inside her skull. It grew with every passing second, turning the edges of her world fuzzy and taking away all color, so that everything appeared beige and brown.
Beside her, Neve made a sound and moved her head. Summer-squash strands of hair fell across her cheeks.
“Neve?”
This time the young woman moaned. Her eyelids twitched. Her hands moved in the direction of her belly, like small starfish seeking the waves.
Oh, no. The baby.
Maggie scrabbled at the key still in the ignition. She reached for the door handle. Then the window crank. Anything to get out of the car and find some help. But her fingers felt heavy, thick, ineffective. She pushed at the door. It didn’t budge. Then she saw that her side of the car was wedged against one of the bus stop supports. The hood of the car, accordioned toward the windshield, blocked her view of anything else. She looked at the passenger side door: damaged as well, bent at the hinges and split from end to end. Ragged edges gaped open, exposing the vein-like wires underneath. Glass lay scattered across their laps, the floor, and the dashboard. Maggie reached up to scratch her temple and found shards of it in her hair.
Someone knocked on the roof of the car.
“Hey. You in there. You okay?” A face appeared at her broken window, that of a kid Maggie placed in his early twenties. He wore a red and yellow striped shirt with an alligator sewn onto one pocket. Its tail was loose, she noticed. The guy’s right cheek was bruised and puffy, and an open gash on his chin oozed blood. Red-rimmed eyes squinted down at her. His breath, thick with liquor, caught her off-guard. You son of a bitch, she wanted to say. You ran that light. You’re drunk. You’re… But her lips wouldn’t work.
“Lady?” This time he reached a hand inside the window and touched her on the shoulder. “You in shock or something?”
“Call the police,” she whispered. “Call 911.”
He nodded. “My buddy already did.”
Your buddy? For the first
time, Maggie saw another guy sitting on the curb a few feet away. His skin looked gray-green, and as she stared at him, he pitched forward. Head between his knees, he retched.
The face at Maggie’s window disappeared.
“Hey, Rog, hang in there.” Striped shirt jogged back to the curb and squatted beside his friend.
Sharp pain continued to radiate in both of Maggie’s temples and stars speckled her vision. Her eyes closed, and all of a sudden she felt one hundred years old. The two men on the sidewalk, the fractured car around her, a silent Neve beside her, all disappeared. Traffic whined somewhere in the distance but it was as if everything were removed a degree or two. Nearby voices became cartoon bubbles in her head.
It’s funny where the mind goes, Maggie thought as she floated in the blackness. Straight back to the moments you’ve never really left behind. Beyond Jack. Beyond college. Back to the moment that started it all, to the turn in the path that separated Maggie from everyone else. Memories came flooding in minute by minute, slippery things with tails that closed in on her and made her see. Made her realize. Made her remember all the things she’d wanted so much to forget.
Instead of a Boston city sidewalk, instead of a mess of mangled metal, she saw him again: ten-year old Dillon, tickling her in the den. Thirteen-year-old Dillon, stealing her training bra out of the laundry and showing it to his friends. Sixteen-year-old Dillon, giving her rides to school when she didn’t want to take the bus. Seventeen-year-old Dillon, standing in her doorway with bloody fists and trying to explain how he’d defended her honor.
It was ironic, really, that she’d come to Boston in the midst of one heartache and found another. She’d thought she was seeking a favor from a stepbrother, but maybe she was really seeking forgiveness from him. That’s where the healing needs to begin, she realized in her fog. Not with Jack. With Dillon.
All the anguish, all the years of blame, all the ways she’d tried to find someone else to fasten her heartache on, it came down to this. This understanding that you couldn’t go back and fix things or change things. You couldn’t hold your breath or hide under the covers. The sun always rode its white horse over the horizon, announcing another morning. Mistakes might be your fault or someone else’s, but at the end of it all, blame only drove a wedge between the people who meant the most to you. So you could live with your anger, you could hold on with cramped fingers to the pain that devastated you or you could muddle on and do the best with what the new hours brought.
A disease. An operation. A new love. A new job. An ailing mother. A broken heart. A ball. A chance to try again.
“It wasn’t his fault,” she tried to say aloud, but it felt as though the words only ran through her mind. It wasn’t Dillon’s fault, what happened that night. I blamed him for not protecting me, but I shouldn’t have. He didn’t know.
“It wasn’t his fault,” she said again.
She heard a chuckle, a deep, jolly sound that seemed out of place considering the time of night and the circumstance. “Well, why don’t we leave that up to the police to decide? Try not to move.”
Maggie started anyway, and her shoulders spasmed against the seat. She didn’t recognize the voice or the hands moving about her face and neck. “What—”
“You’ve been involved in a car accident.”
She tried to swim back up from the mess of dreams that fuzzed her brain. The hands went away for a minute and shadows moved outside the car window. Her gaze swept the sidewalk. Striped shirt and his friend had vanished. In their place stood a paunchy middle-aged guy and a young, thin woman. Both wore some sort of dark-colored uniform with a collection of equipment belted to their waists. EMTs, Maggie thought after a minute, thinking of the television show she watched on Tuesday nights. Emergency Medical Something-or-Other. She furrowed her brow. Technicians. The word came to her after a minute of thinking.
As if each one of her senses were taking its time coming back into the conscious world, she heard more voices and a siren whining somewhere close by. Her peripheral vision widened, and Maggie became aware of an emergency vehicle parked just beyond her wrecked Honda. Past that, a police car. No, two. She realized that her seatbelt still pinned her down, and she fumbled with the clasp to release it.
“Neve!”
“Is that your name? Or your passenger’s?” The EMT appeared again in her window. He seemed kind, Maggie thought, and she liked the way he smiled at her, without panic or concern in his eyes. As if they had just met on a sunny street and were exchanging pleasantries.
“It’s hers.”
“Can you tell me your name?”
“It’s Maggie. Maggie Doyle.”
“Do you remember what happened?”
Of course she did. And she’d tell him all about it, over coffee sometime after he got her out of the mashed piece of metal. But that wasn’t the important thing. There was something else she needed to say, something else the kind-faced man needed to know. She reached for his wrist. Fine black hairs tickled her fingertips.
“Neve’s pregnant.”
At that, the man’s expression did change. Bushy gray eyebrows rose. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”
Maggie watched him trot over to the young female EMT with a sort of limp in his gait, as if one leg were shorter than the other. He jabbed his thumb toward the car while the woman fumbled for the radio at her hip. A police officer approached them both and pulled out a notebook and a stubby pencil. Maggie wondered if she should get out of the car, try and clear up some of the confusion about the accident. Only thing was, an enormous heaviness had begun to press her into the seat, and she couldn’t quite feel her feet anymore.
I should have them call someone, she thought. Someone needs to know what happened. Eden? Jack? Who would tell her mother?
The world inside Maggie’s head began to tilt again, and pain coursed through her. For a minute she thought it might eat her up, swallow her and replace her with a giant open wound that pulsed against the sky. She felt herself spinning toward some kind of tunnel, and though she could see the black, she couldn’t avoid it. She tried to reach for something to slow her descent. She tried to grip the edge of the cliff she felt herself balancing upon, but her fingertips flicked against air and found nothing. Panic grew inside her chest, fighting like an injured bird and fluttering under her skin. She wanted to stay awake. She needed to.
She couldn’t.
Maggie slipped away.
4:00 a.m.
Jack sat in the Navigator. One hand ran over and over the steering wheel, as if in memorizing the stitching, it might open some kind of portal that would tell him what he was supposed to do.
Go after her and find her. Tell her it doesn’t matter. Tell her the only thing you care about is being with her.
Let her go, for now. Call her tomorrow, or even next week, after she’s had time to work everything out. After you have.
The bodiless voices sat on opposite shoulders and chattered back and forth inside Jack’s head. Part of him, the part that made his skin ache with want, the part that remembered how Mags had once filled up his life, wanted to listen to that first voice. The other part wanted to give her space to breathe, step back and analyze the consequences. After all, he wasn’t twenty-two any longer. He had a company to run, a mangled engagement, a fractured family still trying to pick up the pieces after his mother’s death. He couldn’t jump headlong into the past to chase a memory that had changed shape and color.
Be honest, he told himself. She was right. Ten years is a long time. You both were different people back then. Maggie today wasn’t the Maggie he’d known in college. She was someone different, someone with a secret he never suspected. Jack shivered, suddenly cold. What if they had nothing left between them but history? You couldn’t build a future on the shaky legs of something that had dusted over. Could you?
Weary, he rested his forehead on the steering wheel. He knew that tomorrow, half the conversations in the city would feature The Break-up of Jack and Paig
e. People would yap over brunch and whisper in church pews. They would buy their lattes on Monday morning and hurry to work a few minutes early just to rehash the details.
Sour regret coated his mouth.
You let Mags walk out of your life back in Vegas, and the next thing you knew, an entire decade had swept by. You want that to happen again?
Jack sat up. Wind buffeted the vehicle, squealing through the vents. The bottom line was, he couldn’t let her go. Analysis, consequences, a plan, a way out—he shrugged off everything he’d learned in business school. Some things, the important things, you couldn’t fit to the rules. You had to simply feel your way along and hope that intuition told you that you were doing the right thing.
He floored the gas and yanked the truck back into traffic. How long had he sat there? Ten minutes? Thirty? A siren-red Corvette swerved around him, its horn sounding. He braked and let it pass. Then Jack took the first turn he could, negotiating the side streets he knew by heart and hoping they’d take him where he needed to go.
*
Maggie felt cold. Too cold. Like her fingers and toes were icing over and moving through the zone of painful freezing to sheer numbness. She tried to open her eyes, but she every time she did, all she saw was Neve beside her. Or the EMTs outside her window. Once, she thought she caught a glimpse of a police officer bellowing and waving his arms around. From where she sat, he looked like a cartoon character, a man with huge arms that hung from his shoulders like slabs of beef. She watched him, curious, as he talked to someone beyond her view. She imagined he was telling the person to back off, to give everyone some space, the way the rescue personnel always did on television. But she couldn’t imagine who he might be talking to. Who would be standing out in the rain staring at a car wreck, when they could be sleeping safe at home?
No one, she thought. Just silly me, caught up in another mess I can’t get myself out of.
One Night in Boston Page 21
