Unleaving

by Melissa Ostrom

  “Loving is the operative word,” Thomas said.

  “Linnie loves Kate,” Sam said sharply.

  “Linnie’s a poor wreck,” Aunt Wren said. “Listen. More than anything, Kate needs stability. What she’s got now is not stable.” She threw up her hands. “Do you want to know how Kate will make out living in a precarious situation, living with constant trouble? She’ll grow up scared and sad and angry. She’ll grow up thinking about fighting or fleeing. She’ll grow up trying to get away.” She rapped the table with a knuckle. “She’ll grow up like I did.”

  Mom’s mouth dropped open.

  Her color hectic, Aunt Wren glared at her sister. Then she looked away and pressed her lips together.

  “But—but our parents, Wren, I mean … how they brought us up with church on Sundays and good food on the table and taught us to share and be honest and work hard.” She searched her sister’s face. “Dad was a little distant, but Mom—Mom couldn’t have been gentler…”

  Kate suddenly groaned. Flushed with sleep, hair sticking up on one side, she scrunched her face, raised her head, and squinted at the table gathering, all while voicing displeasure, a sound between a whine and a cry.

  Sam smoothed her hair. “Boy, you wake up grumpy, don’t you?”

  She dropped back to his chest hard, a head-butt, and shut her eyes again.

  Aunt Wren stood quickly. “I’ll get you some milk, sweetie.”

  Mom pulled her anxious frown away from her sister and smiled halfheartedly at Sam. “Evening naps are the worst. When Maggie was that age, I could never keep her awake when she wanted to sleep, especially if we were in the car. No matter what time it was, if we started driving somewhere, she’d pass out in seconds. And if it happened on the way to a restaurant, she’d spend the whole meal just like that. Miserable.” She turned a more genuine smile on Maggie. “Do you remember that, honey?”

  “No.” Not the crankiness or the napping, either. Sleep. It was hard to believe she’d once slept so easily.

  * * *

  Maggie curled onto her side and peered out the window overlooking the woods. A paleness sifted through the trees. Moonlight or dawn? She had no idea what time it was. In the morning, Aunt Wren would go back to work in the studio, and Mom would drive home, though Maggie would see her and Dad at Thanksgiving, and her mother had promised to return again at Christmastime.

  Maggie would miss Mom. But she needed a break from her. A break from reporting on how much she’d eaten or how long she’d slept or how she was feeling. Maggie would finally have time alone.

  Well, not really alone, of course. There was the aunt. And Sam. That guy was always around and obviously not just because he was the studio assistant. Maggie suspected he’d show up even if he didn’t work for the aunt, on account of his dad’s friendship with Wren. Sam was clearly comfortable hanging out at Wren’s place, leaving his child in her care, sitting at her table, sharing food and conversation, listening to advice and criticism—at home here, regardless of whether or not the aunt was around.

  This didn’t bother Maggie too much. Sam worried about Linnie. He worried about Kate. He did not worry about Maggie. In fact, he hardly seemed to notice her. He called her Megan and Mindy and, once, inexplicably, Lisa.

  For six months, Maggie had been the object of interest, speculation, hatred, accusations, and jokes. She was grateful for Sam Blake’s lack of interest.

  4

  “I WANT YOU to take it.”

  Maggie closed her hands into fists, crossed her arms, and tucked those fists under her armpits for good measure. “I don’t want it.”

  “But your friends, Mags.” Mom presented the phone in a pleading way. “Don’t you want to stay in touch with your friends?”

  They stood by her mother’s car. The morning sky, heavy with clouds, turned the lake into pewter. Maggie said to the hard gray, “It isn’t just friends who write to me now.” So did people who despised her. Who believed she’d lied, exaggerated, wanted precisely what Matt Dawson had arranged and helped deliver, who blamed her for his and his pals’ expulsions, who thought she hadn’t just gotten rid of Carlton’s champion and ruined the football season but fucked up the team, tarnished the Tigers’ reputation, stolen the whole town’s—the whole state’s—good fun.

  Maggie stared blindly at the lake, remembering the posts she’d read on social media. Another trashed bitch runs off at the mouth … Shit, girls exaggerate, lie, fuck around on their boyfriends, then pull a stunt like this to cover their tracks … Matt Dawson and five others are facing expulsion for what?! I can’t believe it. Those boys could snap their fingers and make girls appear, just like that. This doesn’t make sense. They don’t need to break the law … Here’s one nasty strategy to worm your way into the limelight: Find some decent guys, point your finger, and lie, lie, lie. Thanks a lot, bitch … We’re behind you, Matt! One hundred percent! Vermont loves you!… Women who falsely accuse men should be locked up in prison … This sounds like a girl who couldn’t get a date with The Dawson. This sounds like petty vengeance …

  “Maggie. Maggie.”

  She blinked.

  “We need to tell the police if you’re getting mean messages.”

  “No.” No way. Maggie was done with the justice system. “Please don’t.”

  Mom shook her head, noncommittal, and thrust out the phone. “Take it. Delete whatever you’re unsure about. Don’t even read it. But I can’t have you cutting yourself off. It’s not healthy, honey. What about Shayna and Jen?”

  Mom didn’t mention Sara Wood. Maggie sighed, thinking about the girl she’d hung out with at Carlton last year—almost daily until March. Turned out, Sara hadn’t been such a good friend, after all.

  “You’ve known Shayna and Jen forever, long before all this happened.”

  Before. Was there such a time?

  Her mother ducked her head.

  Maggie looked up. And what she saw was an exhausted woman, helpless, hurting, a mom who couldn’t change what had been done to her only child. No kiss could make everything better. There wasn’t a simple solution or even a hard one, not for Mom, not for Maggie. Just addressing what had happened heaped trouble upon trouble.

  Mom’s sadness undid her. Maggie put out her hand and accepted the phone, accepted the tight hug, too, and let Mom tuck the charger in her hoodie pocket.

  * * *

  After her mother left, Maggie went up to the loft to charge the phone. When it was plugged in, she stayed crouched by the short wall, holding the phone and staring at its screen, before abruptly dropping it on the floor. Rising, she swiped her hands against her sweats, then hurried down the stairs.

  * * *

  Maggie had one objective for the foreseeable future: to work on keeping the worst parts of her mind from working. But she didn’t want to just bum around, reading and beachcombing. Well, she kind of did, but that didn’t seem very fair to her aunt—not that Wren had said anything about her earning her keep.

  Since Maggie couldn’t cook, she figured she’d clean. On Monday, the day after Mom left, she polished, swept, and scrubbed her way through the cabin.

  At suppertime, clay-streaked and rubbing her neck, the aunt entered the kitchen and froze. “Wow.” She took in the room with wide eyes. “Thanks, Margaret.”

  Tuesday passed. Then Wednesday. Maggie got into a solitary routine, eating suppers with Aunt Wren but otherwise idling along by herself. Their meals weren’t major productions. Toast and more toast. Soup, then leftover soup. Maggie ate little and quickly, and whenever she took breaks from the beach and returned to the cabin, she washed any dishes she found in the sink.

  Mostly, Maggie just read—primarily outside. The beach was preferable to the loft. She hadn’t checked her phone yet. Still attached to the charger, it seemed to be waiting for her. Do it. Get it over with, she kept telling herself. But always, the thought of hundreds of unread emails and texts stopped her.

  Hateful words were buried in the inbox. She was sure of this. And the
y were like land mines. She didn’t want to risk being blasted. Or reeled back to the past.

  So she stuck to the outside as much as she could. On an old quilt from the loft, spread across some sand by the cattails, where the shoreline began its curve toward the rugged peninsula, she plodded through Villette. Lucy Snowe’s world distracted her—until Thursday rolled around. On Thursday, she read whole chapters without absorbing a word.

  Her own story, the narrative that wouldn’t leave her brain, took over. Her memory of what had happened last year … it was like a book, too; more like a flipbook with random pages torn out, a story she was forced to read.

  She tried to whip through the details and finish, just, please, God, let me get through this, but instead, she tripped over moments, got stuck on stark specifics—Sara Wood standing with Maggie in the frat house, a loud corner rank with beer and sweat; Sara laughing up at the guy who was backing her out of the room; Matthew Dawson smiling at Maggie and handing her a drink; the drink, itself, with its strange salty sweetness and potency; Maggie, uneasy, deciding she should leave, abandoning the half-finished drink on the filthy kitchen counter, looking for Sara, staggering dizzily into a room, “Have you seen Sara? Sara Wood, I mean,” holding her stomach, palming her forehead, trying to focus; Matt exchanging a glance with a shorter guy, then suggesting she check in the basement; Maggie, gripping a bannister to keep herself upright, panicking at the odd weakness in her legs, calling for Sara from the top of the staircase, making her way down, down, down into a cellar, empty, musty, dim, and then not empty because someone, Matt Dawson, was shadowing her and then another guy, too, and then another and another and another and another; and Matt glancing toward the top of the stairs and ordering, “Shut the door.”

  Maggie curled up tightly on the old quilt spread across the sand and buried her face in the novel she was reading and not reading.

  Its pages smelled like mold. She choked out a sound.

  Help.

  * * *

  Friday was better.

  For the most part, Maggie was able to concentrate on Villette.

  Toward the end of the novel, a great V of geese crossed the sky. The cattails wavered woodenly, except for their shriveled tips, which trembled violently in the wind that swept off the lake.

  By late afternoon, she finished the novel and went inside to swap it for another. Middlemarch sat on top of her stack of new books. The novel was huge. That nosy girl at the bookstore was right: This one would keep Maggie busy for a while.

  When she flipped through it, something fell out of its pages—a small rectangle of paper that swooped to her feet. It was a payroll check made out to a Carina Applegate. A check for two hundred and thirty dollars.

  Maggie picked it up. That was a lot of money. Whoever she was, Carina Applegate was probably missing it. Maggie would have to drop off the check at the bookstore. It was dated the first of August. Would a bank cash a seven-week-old check? Maybe it was too late—and Maggie would be off the hook. Automatically, she picked up her phone to call her dad. He’d know.

  As soon as she thumbed her password, she came out of her distraction and realized her mistake. “Shit,” she said, absorbing the daunting numbers bubbled over the icons. “Oh shit.”

  Forgetting all about the check, she stared at the illuminated screen. Then abruptly, before she could change her mind, she tapped it.

  Texts first. There were fewer of these than emails. Plus, they seemed safer, since the only people who had her cell number were friends, family, and acquaintances—in other words, no one who wanted her jailed or humiliated.

  The messages came from familiar people who were checking in. That’s what most of them actually wrote, a nervous “just checking in,” as if Maggie were a creepy motel in a horror flick, the kind of place where a guest had to glance continually over her shoulder, shower with the curtain parted, and sleep lightly, if at all. I’ve become the setting of a scary movie. Great.

  She didn’t answer the texts. Mom was right. Maggie did want to cut herself off. What happened hadn’t just ruined her freshman year of college; it had sabotaged everything that came before it. It was like a black sweater shoved into the washing machine with the whites. The innocuous, happy, sweet memories were now tainted, sullied, grayed.

  Shayna, her friend since kindergarten, and Jen, her high school pal—Maggie was close to these two … or had been, at one time. She’d never collected a ton of friends. But there were also texts from Rhea, the girl she’d worked on her Greek civilization project with last year; and Kim, Doreen, and Tara, college freshmen she’d been getting to know. And, of course, Mom and Dad. Maybe a dozen people total, just checking in. Nothing from Sara Wood.

  Maggie got out of her messages and frowned absently at the blue sky framed by the windows. I’ll write back to them later. Eventually.

  She dried her sweating palms on her hoodie and then, holding her breath, checked her emails … hundreds and hundreds of unread emails. After scrolling all the way down to the oldest ones, she began deleting. The majority she deleted without reading, but some she read. There was a nice email from Dr. Warner, her Chaucer professor, another sweet one from Kendra, the girl she’d sat next to in statistics. Maggie would have to write back to them, too. At some point.

  Again, nothing from Sara Wood. But business advertisements, college reminders, and absolutely anything from a stranger with a male name—automatically deemed unreadable. Delete, delete, delete.

  She opened a few from women and then wished she hadn’t. The fourth one left her trembling and clenching her jaw. After that, she erred on the side of caution and deleted anything from a stranger. I know better, she thought, angry and impatient with herself. Women didn’t always have other women’s backs. Sara Wood had been the first to teach her that. Maggie should have learned by now.

  The light faded in the loft. Shadows lengthened. Maggie lost track of time. The personal emails dwindled the closer she got to the present—went from a glut to a scattering to, by July, practically none at all.

  Maggie exhaled. Maybe the haters had spent their hatred—or simply found someone new to hate. Or maybe they’d heard that Maggie had left Carlton. She pictured them cheering, She’s gone! We won! Go Tigers!

  She waded through one advertisement after another—Amazon, Forever 21, Prairie Schooner, H&M, Kenyon Review, Zara—and deleted them swiftly. Once, she paused to lower her tense shoulders, roll her neck, and look around dazedly. One more month to go.

  She nearly had her phone back now—really back, as in something she could actually use. She’d excised the hatred, cut out the malignant parts. She could move forward. Hit reset. Everything that had happened before—deleted. She was determined to forget. I’m giving myself a do-over. She felt a little spark of something good. Something like hope.

  And then … another message from a stranger.

  It was a relatively recent email, from someone named Jane Cannon. Still riding that wave of relief, Maggie hesitated only for a second, long enough to reason away the possibility that someone would be trolling her six months after the incident, and then she opened it.

  Jane Cannon

  To: Margaret Arioli

  Hello

  September 15 at 1:33 AM

  Hi. My name is Jane Cannon, and I’m a freshman at Carlton College. We’ve never met, so I hope this email doesn’t annoy you, but I don’t have anyone else I feel like I can talk to, not when it comes to what happened. Actually, I don’t even think I can write about it. But I know something similar happened to you. I guess I’m just looking for someone to talk to and maybe give me advice. If you’re willing to talk, please let me know. Thanks.

  Maggie reread it. She shook her head, swallowed hard, and re-reread it. Oh no.

  A quiver traveled through her body. The phone fell to the floor. No, no, no.

  She tucked her hands under her chin and tore her gaze off the phone. Bleakly, she focused on her shadow, a black puddle spilled across the floor.

  I kno
w something similar happened to you.

  Maggie drew in her legs and wrapped her arms around them.

  Oh God, she was sorry for this Jane Cannon; she truly was, but … no. No way. The girl had asked the wrong person for advice, any kind of advice, but especially advice on this. Maggie wasn’t the right person to reach out to—wasn’t reachable, period. She shook her head again, thought wildly, I can’t help anyone. I can barely help myself. She didn’t want to reflect on what had happened or offer guidance to someone else. She couldn’t. Going back mentally would totally ruin starting over.

  “Margaret?”

  She started with a gasp.

  “Margaret, honey?” the aunt said louder from the foot of the stairs. “You all right?”

  “I’m okay.” Her answer came out wispy. I am not okay. I am not all right. I am not the right one to ask for help. Queasy, clammy, she cupped her damp forehead and scooted back toward the stairs. Her butt hit something. Middlemarch. The check to Carina Applegate was on the floor, too. She grabbed it and scrambled to her feet.

  “Well, you’ve been up there frickin’ forever,” the aunt said, her teasing a thin veneer over worry. “Want to come down and have some supper?”

  “No. No, thanks.” She glared at the phone from across the room. All she wanted was to be left alone. Why couldn’t she be? Was that asking too much? Just to be left the fuck alone?

  She’d scrunched the check. Smoothing it against her stomach with a shaky hand, she turned her back on her cell. “I—I have to run out real quick,” she said from the top of the stairs.

  The aunt didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “Where?”

  “To the bookstore in Kesley.” She’d go for a drive, a fast drive. Get away. Forget. Delete, delete, delete. “Can I borrow your truck?”

  “Well, you can, but … are you sure you don’t want me to drive you?”