Page 39 - WTP VOl. X #6

pected that adulthood would last a matter of weeks, a fleeting surge of power that tore through all of their lives—gone before it even began.
Maggie thinks about her mother’s Catholic beliefs, how she’d explained that without being baptized,
a person would exist in purgatory when they died, confined to a place between heaven and hell, forced to cleanse themselves of their sins before they could move on. “And no one knows how long it lasts. It’s
a waiting room,” she said. “Do you want your baby locked up in a waiting room without you?” And although it had sounded like nonsense, now she can’t shake the image of Pete floating around between clouds, becoming entangled in dark, tornado-like funnels, lingering in a space where time doesn’t exist.
She imagines her mother saying that visiting a me- dium violates some sort of commandment. But Mag- gie doesn’t care. For her, crystal balls and tarot cards are not so far from priests wearing robes and waving incense. Talking to a medium might be no different than praying to Saint Anthony to find lost posses- sions or wearing Italian horns around your neck to ward off the “evil eye.” Maybe it’s all bullshit, a dis- traction from the fact that we are all going to die. But the problem is, she has no way of knowing.
She pours more wine into her glass, lets it pool un- derneath her tongue, stinging her gums before she swallows. She wonders what Pete and Thomas had been up to the night of the car wreck. Whether they had been drinking beer or smoking pot, or doing something more than that. She thinks about the religious folk who hand out flyers on the streets of Boston, who speak about Jesus “saving” while grip- ping pictures of cartoon-like devils with red horns, pits of eternal fire, limbs and heads falling into a
black abyss. A man who once told her, “You should know, without a doubt, where you’re going when you die. Where your family’s going.”
Maggie’s two most recent paintings hang in the kitchen and living room—portraits of people seen
in this small Massachusetts town—a fiddler on a street corner and the profile of a fisherman, his facial features against the horizon, his pole bent in front
of him, the line immersed in steel blue sea. “I like how you blended his face into the sky,” Pete had said. She began painting just as he entered his teen years, his life expanding outside of the house, into a world of friends and school and sports. In art she found a freedom, an inexplicable relief that nothing, perhaps not even being a mother, allowed her. But now that Pete is gone, she cannot allow her mind to focus the way painting demands, even though she desper- ately needs a break from wrestling with what went wrong, with how she might have prevented it. Her small studio off the kitchen looks neglected, empty canvases and brushes in disarray—so many projects unfinished.
She gets up and goes into the living room, kneels in front of the fireplace, admires her stack of logs, begins to crumple sheets of newspaper, tossing them above the grate covered with ash. She strikes a match. The blaze of fire calms her, and she stares at the blues and reds and yellows, mesmerized by the crackling sparks, then tosses the pamphlet in, watches it burn.
~
Weeks later, Maggie races through rain, passes the blinking lights in front of the brick building. Water drips from her eyelashes onto her cheeks; she pulls up the hood of her jacket. The door to the building opens, and a familiar voice calls out to her. “Lovely Maggie. What are you doing out there without an umbrella?”
“Mrs. Gallagher?” Mrs. Gallagher wears a salmon- colored hat with a wide brim, and a bow attached to its side; it looks like it’s from the 1930s. Maggie gravi- tates toward her, drawn in by the woman’s enormous eyes, her lids brushed with brown shadow. She lets the front door close behind her, the chimes sound- ing. “What are you doing in here?” She puts her hand on her patient’s shoulder. Candles light the corners
of the room. The bearded man, who’s straightening items on the shelves, fixes his eyes on them.
“Sal here was nice enough to give me a cup of tea. My
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