Page 38 - WTP VOl. X #6

Spiraling (continued from preceding page)
to steer a life in a certain direction. It seemed she’d tried to do everything right. For years, when Mag-
gie found spiders in the house she cradled them into napkins, ushered them out the door with her hands rather than even thinking of hurting them. When they had mice in the house, she threw away the traps Sam bought and replaced them with Have-A-Heart traps, the tiny cages rodents walked right into before she drove them miles and miles out of town, Pete in his car seat, kicking his legs, excited to see where the ani- mals lived. Like Chelsie, she paid attention to every little detail—deliberated about how long she would breastfeed, contemplated whether cloth diapers made more sense than regular, grappled with wheth- er he’d sleep in a crib or bassinet, be in daycare or stay at home. And when Pete grew older, she weighed the pros and cons of curfews and classes at school and extracurricular activities. But now, she can barely fathom that version of herself.
Maggie grabs her coat from the chair and turns to look at Chelsie, whose bright, young eyes wait for Maggie to say more.
“Can I ask you something?” Maggie asks. Chelsie tilts her head. “Will you have a christening?”
“In the church? Yes. Why?”
“Just curious. Good. That’s good.” Maggie slips her arms into the sleeves of her coat. “I’m off. See you to- morrow. I really do love the name,” she says, winking at Chelsie as she walks through the double doors.
~
In the middle of another sleepless night, Maggie heads into the kitchen and flips on the light. She grabs a glass from the cabinet and pours from an
open bottle of red wine beside the stove. She sits
at the kitchen table as she sips, stares at the lonely placemats, the pile of unopened mail stacked in the center. She pulls the medium’s pamphlet from the pile. In a grassy field with dandelions (the ones Pete used to ask why people mowed, even into his teens), a woman and a black bear stand a few feet apart from one another. The brochure claims that Charese, the fair-skinned woman with the thick, parted lips and perfect eyebrows will give you the “emotional freedom you’ve been looking for.”
Maggie imagines one more day, one more hour with her son. His breezing into the house, tossing a bas- ketball at Sam, who, despite his clumsiness, does
his best to catch. His towering over her as he opens the fridge and leans in to kiss her cheek: “What’s up, Ma?” His chuckling at the jokes on SportsCenter TV, which was constantly on, the volume turned up high, despite Maggie’s insistence on music or quiet. She’d keep that channel on for all her days now, every hour and minute, if it would bring him back.
In fact, she can’t stand the silence. Still holding the pamphlet, she turns the knob of the radio on the kitchen table and flips through channels. She stops
at Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” one of her own mother’s favorites. When she finally became pregnant with Pete after five years of try- ing, her mother told her, “You don’t know it yet, but with your own child, you’ll stand in front of a train for him without thinking. Plop yourself right on the tracks. Biology overtakes you.” And it had been true. When they were driving, and she’d been cut off by another car, her first instinct was to thrust her arm and shoulder across Pete’s body, to block every inch of him from moving forward. When they walked down the road, she nudged him toward the inside of the sidewalk, and when a car went by too quickly, she hollered uncharacteristically, hugging him into the curve of her waist.
Maggie and Sam had meant to have Pete baptized. It was part of the plan, part of the mindless motions of their Catholic upbringings: christening, communion, confirmation. But they were tired of making every- one else happy—her drunk and distant father, Sam’s depressed mother, whom he had tip-toed around his entire life—so after the formal engagement and the church wedding, and the five long years it took to conceive Pete, they ignored the pressures and made their own rules, designed their tiny family as they saw fit. Pete would eventually decide for himself what his religious beliefs were, and if he wanted to be baptized as an adult, he would. But no one sus-
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