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She never thought that she'd find the will to divorce him, to take her son, still such a little thing, all angles and toothy grins, somewhere where her husband and his fists couldn't get to him.
(She calls her son 'little,' but at six foot three, he towers six inches over her, and his cheekbones and jaw have dropped their last remnants of babyfat and his hands are broad and calloused. His whole body is leaner, now, and he wears dark skinny jeans and detergent-soft band shirts and her eyeliner around his big eyes instead of onezies and Spider-Man pyjamas and food around his mouth. He wraps his fingers in rings and has eight tattoos, with plans for more. He went to university and escaped, but he's still her son, the little boy she couldn't get away from Wentworth soon enough).
When she moves to Derry, she learns to adapt.
She learns to adapt to the charming old man who sells eggs and cheese and wool at the market every Wednesday afternoon, the one who watches his grandson count coins and weigh wool with the attentiveness of a teacher and the care of a parent.
She learns to adapt to the Rabbi and his wife, both quiet, with gentle smiles. They greet her as she comes home from church, ask her about the service and her minister. He makes a teasing remark about converting her to Judaism, quick with his smiles. She's considering taking him up on his invitation.
She learns to adapt to Mrs. Hanscom, who gives a quirk of her lips and a friendly wink when she sees her come out to grab her newspaper in the morning.
It takes her longer to adjust to Mr. Denbrough, tall and intense, keen to talk, but not as keen to laugh or listen. She sees him with his son, one day, a tall, reedy boy with a serious slash to his mouth and a head of auburn hair. She sees how far apart they stand, how stiff their words are, the way they flinch away from each other so much they create negative space. and she hurts a little for the boy who doesn't know his father.
She refuses to adjust to Mrs. Kaspbrak - an unpleasant woman with a constant frown and squinty eyes, always suspicious. The woman snaps at her son the way other, equally as unpleasant people snap at their dogs. Maggie watches the way the boy - not a boy, not really, he looks old enough to be starting university - and sees the way he flinches, the way he tucks his chin up, looks his mother in the eye and says, 'No.' She hears the fight that ensues, the crash of plates and glasses and other things. She hears the words she calls her son, and her mouth goes tight. Her fingers inch towards the phone, but she doesn't call. She hates herself for it, just a little.
She starts working in the local cafe, and ignores the looks Mr. Marsh gives her chest and legs as she walks by. She doesn't smile at him, doesn't accept his tips or his flattery. She refuses to be cowed by a man like this. His daughter - beautiful, with fierce lines around her eyes and in the sharpness of her cheekbones - smiles at her, and makes casual conversation only moments before she backhands her father and leans across the table to spit in his face. She leaves a thirty percent tip. Maggie gives Beverly ("Call me Bev, Mrs. Tozier") a discount after that, and invites her over for dinner every night.
Her son and Beverly get along so well she nearly regrets ever putting them in the same room together. He calls her Molly Ringwald and teases her relentlessly, he touches her hands and bumps their shoulders together as they wash dishes after dinner. Maggie watches. She knows what it's like to go from a woman abused to a woman not, and how hard it is to remember that not every touch a man delivers is one intended to hurt. (He stops shouting the first time she flinches, and he never jokes about having sex with her, or about her dad. He notices that it makes her small and so horribly un-Bev like that he pulls back immediately). The first time Maggie finds Beverly and Richie splayed across the couch, their feet around each other's ribs, one of his hands on her ankle, she stops worrying.
The house that Maggie and her son live in is big and sprawling, uncomfortable in its size, but the floorboards and walls and ceilings and everything except the bone structure of the building are collapsing. She bought it for five thousand dollars.
They spend a summer fixing it up.
She got a lot of money in the divorce settlement and her father is an honest, hard-working man who calls in old favour after old favour. Men with rough palms and rougher mouths tip their hats to her and offer her a beer with their mouths full of nails as they take her rotted plaster and replace it with insulation, plywood, white paint. They take her rotted floorboards and replace them with knotted hardwood. Disease and decay are swept from the house. They leave her with a house with a floor that doesn't creak and stairs with banisters thick enough to slide down. There are cupboards in the kitchen, white ones, and the floor is tiled white and black. The appliances are stainless steel.
She reels.
Her father takes her and Richie to buy beds and dishes and dresses, vanities and toilet seats and sinks and cutlery.
They spend a week putting it all away, organizing their two bedrooms and the four other spare bedrooms. Each room is half the size of the apartment they lived in during the divorce and hers and Richie's breaths catch as they walk in everyday. There is a lightness to the house - a physical one in the light floors and the white walls and the huge windows, and an energetic one, in the way they chase each other down the stairs and start food fights while they're making dinner.
It finally feels like a home.
The first one she collects is Beverly.
It's a week until school begins and the girl absently mentions returning to stay in a room at the orphanage, one that she shares with two other girls. It's not a demand for pity, or a request for any kind of reciprocal and sincere response, which is exactly why Maggie's first instinct is to wrap her in a hug and beg that she stay with them.
"Bev," Maggie says, and she tries to keep her tone light and un-motherly, but she doesn't think she manages it, not judging by the sudden tenseness in the girl's shoulders. Maggie sighs, and rubs the back of her neck. She combs her fingers through her hair and catches her claddagh ring in her curls. "Sorry," She murmurs. That tone of voice is one reserved for questions that most women don't like to answer. are you okay? is he hurting you? you know you can get help. why don't you just leave? why are you still with him? can i help?
Bev shakes her head, but won't meet her eyes.
"Look, kid," Maggie says. The redhead's shoulders relax, just a little. Her tone's a little rougher, a little more like Richie's low, cigarette-burnt voice. "I may not have had a dad like yours, but I had a husband like him, and I know what it's like to be afraid of people because one person fucked you over." Bev stares at her. She wonders if she's never sworn in front of her, before she realizes that it's definitely her Voice - her Richie Voice. "We have four empty bedrooms, and Rich loves you like a sister. I make good breakfasts and there's always food around. And, Richie will always be around to bother you, which is the fucking dream, right?"
Bev's face twists from suspicion to guilt to something soft, vulnerable, her lips parted and her eyes wide. She looks completely shocked, as if the thought of someone extending their genuine goodwill to her is unheard of.
Maggie raises an eyebrow.
"You're scared," She says, and shakes her head as Beverly opens her mouth to protest. "You are, darling. It's alright." Maggie shrugs. "Let me know what you decide. Or don't - just show up with your stuff and we'll get you settled in. I don't work Wednesdays."
She hopes that her words don't sound like an empty attempt to sympathize. Beverly sniffs and brings her hands up to her eyes, wipes away careful tears.
She smiles, small and shakes and desperately hopeful and lets Maggie fold her into a hug.
She doesn't say goodbye.
Three days later - a Wednesday - the doorbell rings while Maggie's on the phone with Wentworth.
She throws it open, catches a glimpse of red hair and waves Beverly in. "Aw, sure thing, I'll let our son know that his father who spent the first fifteen years of his life beating him and his mother bloody just got a new wife who fucks him up the ass with her stiletto heels while he sings the motherfucking nation anthem." Maggie Tozier's voice is sweet, and her eyes are bright and fierce the way Bev has seen Richie's get when Henry Bowers tries to say something about Bill Denbrough's stutter, or Mike Hanslon's dark skin or Eddie Kaspbrak's preference for pink and nail polish. Bev flushes, the adrenaline of a woman, of a mother defending her young. "Just make sure the child support shows up on time. Six hundred bucks, Went, and every penny of that is going straight to buying Richie a new fucking guitar."
Maggie hangs up and drops her phone on the counter with a satisfying slam. She wipes a hand down her face and stars combing her hair with her fingers, gathering the long, curly mess into a bun.
She nods at the bags on Bev's back and hanging off her shoulders. "That all your stuff?"
Bev nods and looks down at her feet, at her stained dress and old boots. Maggie watches her face, memorizing her freckles and the expression she wears and decides she never wants to see this hesitancy on this woman ever again. She tells her so. Beverly flushes.
"Go pick a room - Richie's in the one that smells something fierce and mine is the one with the rose on the door. Any of the others are your pick."
Bev's mouth falls open. She blushes, adjusts her bags, says, "Thanks, Maggie" and heads up stairs.
The stairs don't creak beneath her feet, and neither do the floorboards in the hall. Bev stares at her the two doors in front of her - one clearly Richie's, plastered floor to ceiling with overlapping posters of David Bowie and Metallica and Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd, the other bare. No roses in sight.
Adjusting the bags on her shoulders, she reaches out for the door handle. It catches perfectly, and opens without squeaks or old hinges.
The room is bigger than four of the rooms at the orphanage - the ceilings are high and one wall is all windows, with long white drapes that hand delicately to the floor. A queen bed, with a twisting pattern of yellows and oranges and reds floats, headboard-less, in the middle of the room. Against one wall is a dresser, the other a closet door, plastered with polaroids of --
She moves closer, and blinks tears away.
-- of her. Of her and Richie at dinner and washing dishes, the two of them sprawled on couches in furniture stores, and juggling avocados while buying groceries. There's a photo of them outside, tanning on a half-finished porch, surrounded by drills and planks, Richie's face painted with a shit-eating grin, Bev laughing, her head thrown back, a cider lifted partway to her mouth. There are photos of her and Maggie, hugging and laughing and play-fighting with spatulas. There's a photo of Richie that Bev drags her fingers over the edge of. He's sitting with his back against a cupboard in their kitchen, his hands half covering his face as he gives his mom his 'love-you-ma' smile. He's wearing a yellow sweater she recognizes but can't place.
She stares at the photos for a minute or an hour, entranced.
How Richie knew she would pick this room is unimaginable, but the evidence is splattered across the walls. She looks at the bedspread. She remembers pointing it out while they shopped for things for Richie's room. She remembers telling him that Pride and Prejudice was her favourite book. On the bookshelf in the corner, is a copy, along with a bunch of others she's dreamed of reading. Her fingers drag across the spines.
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, Emma, Moby Dick, The Raven
She reaches out to put her bags on her bed and pauses, looking at her sleeve.
She looks at the photo of Richie against the cupboards, his big glasses crooked, and realizes that the yellow sweater she didn't recognize was hers.
Falling back on the bed, she smiles.
Home.
The second one Maggie Tozier brings into her home is Mike Hanslon.
It's an accident, really. She's exchanging absent, casual words with the boy's grandfather when he mentions being homeschooled. She asks why. He says that it takes the boy an hour to bike into Derry in the summer and that he could never make the trip in winter.
She offers him a room at the price of eggs and meat and cheese, every week. His grandfather looks at her. He measures her, assesses her. His gaze asks, What's in it for you? She tries to say, Your grandson's future.
He nods. He says, "How would you feel about that, Michael?"
The boy looks shocked, hopeful. "That'd be amazing, Mrs, Tozier."
His grandfather nods, satisfied. "You feed and clothe Mike during the school year. If the snows aren't horrible, he comes home at Christmas and Easter. If his grades drop, he comes home. He can leave your home whenever he chooses, but I expect you to discipline him, to mother and father him. In exchange, all of your groceries, for your entire household will be free for as long as you live in Derry. And I'll get you out of that café and out doing some real work - the florist needs an assistant. She's old and blind and slow and she pays damn well."
Maggie tilts her head. She appraises him. She nods, spits in her palm and sticks it out for him to shake. An old man's calloused, spit-wet palm meets her own.
They shake on it, and Mike Hanslon is added to the Tozier-Marsh family.
The third is Stanley Uris, the Rabbi's son.
He comes to her, this time. He stands on her porch with a backpack over his shoulder and three clips of large bills. He looks at her, quiet.
She looks at him. His shoulders quake inwards and there are bags under his eyes, heavy and ugly and purple. His jaw is bruised. His hair is fine and brushed and his yarmulke is precarious in his curls.
"Why?" She asks.
"My father thinks a Rabbi's son can't be sick. He thinks I can't be--" His voice cracks. Maggie wonders how old he is. He looks younger than Mike and Beverly, certainly younger than Richie.
"I don't want your money," She says softly, and steps aside to let him in.
They argue for a week about the money. It's nearly six thousand dollars. It's his, and she knows he isn't lying. She finally takes it, takes it to the bank and opens a new, stable savings account with high interest in her favour. She asks them about RESPs and purchases three, before she remembers the tall boy who stands apart from his dad and the small boy who tells his mother 'no,' and her son, who talks about teaching degrees with quick, excited hands. She buys three more. The woman behind the counter makes a crack about forgetting about her kids. Maggie smiles and laughs. "Yes," She says. "I have so many I lose count sometimes."
For a while, it's the five of them. Richie likes to poke fun at Stan, to call him Stan the Man, Jew boy. Mike is strong and quiet and likes to read and quietly tell Maggie about the history of Derry as they make dinner. Beverly discovers Maggie's enormous collection of books and bonds with Mike over a love for jazz and blues. Stan lies on Richie's bed and listens to him talk.
She takes Stan to a psychiatrist, and let's him have the room and the privacy to himself. She sets his mediation in a little plastic container labeled with the days of the week and leaves him a glass of water at his place at the table everyday. She doesn't ask about the appointments.
She helps Mike with his math homework, hunched over the kitchen table, muttering about logs, exchanging high fives when they work out a difficult problem.
She teaches Beverly how to to her eyeliner and takes them all shopping. She buys Mike clothes that fit him better and Stan lots of big sweaters with long sleeves that cover his hands.
But there is still something missing. There is a lull in the conversation when there shouldn't be, a pause for a peel of laughter that never comes. They are waiting for their missing pieces.
And then, on a cold day in March, nine months since Bev moved in, eight since Mike and six since Stan, the doorbell rings.
Maggie Tozier answers the door with a phone against her ear and gives them bright smiles. She waves them in, points at the shoe rack next to the door and then through to the kitchen.
Eddie Kaspbrak notices thirteen things about Maggie Tozier in the first ten minutes he knows her.
First he notices her smile - gorgeous and toothy, even though her front teeth are crooked and catch on her bottom lip when her mouth closes. Then it's her clothes - a pair of light wash, high-waisted jeans rolled at the bottom and a baby-blue tank top, with slits that show off an inch of white, white skin. His mother, Eddie thinks, has never worn something like that in her entire life. Third is her hair. Maggie leans against the counter and stretches huge hands up to pull three huge pins from her hair. Eddie stares at the curling, dark chocolate hair, the honey brown that streaks through, the silver and grey at her roots and at her temples, in a skunk stripe. Fourth are her nails, manicured and clean and pale pink. Fifth, as he tilts his head back to look her in the eye as she shakes his hand, is how tall she is. She towers above him, six or seven inches, more than most women do. Even stringy, bean-like Bill hovers almost eye level with her.
The sixth thing he notices about Maggie Tozier is her mouth - how wide it is, how proud, painted pink, shimmering with her cheekbones when she turns her head. Then he notices the words that spill out of her, the phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear as she chops apples and spoons peanut butter into little bowls. Loud, unfiltered. Sharp, and yet charming. Eighth is her language - the severity of her words that he's never heard from an adult and certainly not from a woman, not even one on TV. "If you call my son a cocksucker one more fucking time, you homophobic douche canoe, I will castrate you and shove your wrinkly, hairy little balls down your throat and then beat you with your own cock and your whore girlfriend's saggy tits."
The stairs creak and laughter bubbles as a door opens. A man comes bounding down, all long, loose limbs and skinny jeans and rough, wild hair. He winks at Maggie and throws an apple slice into the air, catching it between his teeth and grinning like a cat who caught the canary, pleased and creamy. She smiles and so does he and it's like looking in a mirror. Their noses are stern and hooked, with huge mouths that grin and big eyes, freckles cheeks and sharp cheekbones and broad, liberal hands. Nine: Maggie Tozier's son looks just like his mother and calls her 'ma' with unbridled affection. Richie shouts, "Fuck you, Bev! Eat my dick." And a girl with fiery red hair leans over the rail on the stairs to shout back, "I'd rather mack your dad's asshole, Trashmouth!" Maggie cackles. Ten: The Toziers like to swear, and they're very good at making it seem like the respectable thing to do.
The eleventh thing Eddie Kaspbrak notices about Maggie Tozier is her caring. She hangs up the phone and folds her son in a hug, ruffling his hair. He brightens immediately. A quiet, boy, smaller than Richie and Maggie, suggests pizza, which earns crows and shouts. Maggie shouts loud enough that two bedrooms doors open and the same girl who yelled at Richie and another boy poke their heads out to give requests. "I'll get from that kosher place, first, Stan, 'cause they take longer. And then I'll get-- Rich, I swear to fuck if you try and tell me one more time that you want jalapeno special I'm gonna beat you with a coaster." She sees him and Bill hovering at the door, blinking, stunned by the Tozier riptide. She takes Eddie's hand when he offers it and grins when he presses a kiss to her cheek, something he's done to his own mother many times and hated. This one makes him smile. She yanks Bill into a hug and then shoves him toward Stan. "Stuttering Bill, meet Stan the Man - try not to make-out on the couch." Then she winks at Eddie, curls her fingers around his wrist and pulls him into the kitchen, popping herself up onto he couch. She kicks her son with blue yarn socks. "Eds, right? Pretty sure I've met your mom a couple times - hot fucking lady, think she wants a taste of my dick?" Richie asks and leans forward a little, wriggling his eyebrows. Eddie lifts his chin.
"Only if you pay for her hospital bill when you give her the clap," He says mildly. "And don't call me that." He flinches when Maggie blinks at him, before her face cracks and she laughs so hard she has to put her coffee down. Eddie glances over at Bill, who's smiling at Stan with a softness he's never seen before, and then at the Toziers, cackling and cracking jokes, sharp elbows driving into ribs.
This is a home, he realizes, as the smell of pizza creeps from greasy boxes and the girl - Beverly - wipes sauce from her face and leaves it on Richie's cheek. They eat straight from the box, with their fingers. Even Stan, whose eyes are cold and fixed firmly on the ground. He finishes his piece and waits, one, two, three beats before surging to the sink, washing his hands twice over. Maggie smiles at him and hands him a plate, a knife and a fork and a crisp-looking napkin. Bill sticks his tongue out at Mike and laughs at the string of cheese stuck around Ben's mouth. Eddie calls Maggie an asshole and raises a hand to flip her off when she calls him Eds. He flinches, before he watches Maggie and Richie laugh and a wide grin stretch Stan and Mike's mouths. Richie wraps an arm around his shoulders and kisses his temple, pinches his cheeks when he blushes. "Cute, cute, cute!"
He's safe here. He doesn't need to walk on glass leftover from the vase his mother threw at the wall, or the eggshells that spill from their garbage can.
He's home.
When she sees the boy with the serious mouth and the boy with the defiant chin she is at once pleased and overwhelmingly sad. They sit around and eat pizza with her and her loud family and they are the missing pieces. The boy from next door, the one whose mother always smiles, comes over to offer them all cookies and is quickly absorbed into the group.
Maggie doesn't ask why they came. She pays enough attention to know, she hears the screams from Mrs. Kaspbrak and she seems the identical bruises on their faces - red, swollen handprints from outraged mothers or fathers.
Richie declares Eddie 'Eds' and immediately peppers him with affection and insults in equal measure. Maggie watches on, amused, as her son flirts without shame, touches and nudges and giggles and stares.
Richie is older than Eddie - older than all of them, an arts degree in photography and music pinned to the wall above his desk. He's nearly twenty-three, five years older than Eddie's soft, thank-God-highschool-is-over eighteen. She thinks about taking him aside to remind him, to say something, but she watches the way Eddie leans into him, flirts back better than Richie does, retaliates with sharp, whispered comments that make Richie's cheeks spot his colour. She watches as Eddie sucks chemical air from an inhaler and the way that Richie catalogues his movements. He steals dispenses it a couple times, grinning and cracking jokes. He hands it back with a floppy grin. She makes a note that if Eddie ever has an attack and can't dispense his inhaler, Richie can.
They sit in the living room until four in the morning, full of pizza and beer (Maggie doesn't mind being the cool parent who supervises alcohol intake). They lose Ben to his curfew at one, and Stan and Bill to sleep soon after. Maggie doesn't mention their clasped hands or the sound of only one bedroom door opening and closing. Bev follows, stumbling up the stairs with a laughing Mike at her side.
Eddie wordlessly picks up plates and cans and helps Maggie clean. He washes with a precision she wouldn't have expected from a boy of eighteen. He flinches when she suggests he try the other soap, something better for soft hands. He relaxes, smiles at her, but she saw the ticking of his pulse jump.
Something in her gut catches.
Before she goes to bed, she sees Eddie and Richie outside his room, leaning against the door. Richie has Eddie caged against it, kissing him and they tumble in with quiet noises, little desperate teenage sounds Maggie remembers well.
She rolls her eyes and fishes the box of condoms out from under the sink, the bottle of lube afterwards. They're both still packaged, which Eddie will appreciate. She ding-dong ditches them at their door.
Stepping over the creaking floorboard outside Stan's room, she hears the whispers and then the hum of two soft voices, the groan of a bedframe. She goes back to the bathroom and ding-dong ditches them, too.
Her home feels like a home, she realizes. These people are a family.
She smiles.