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She's like a zombie, after. Her body doesn't feel like her own. Every morning, when the alarm goes off, she has to remind herself that she doesn't have to wake Sam. After that, she can't go back to sleep, so she wanders to the kitchen in a daze, starts the coffee maker, takes a shower. It doesn't make her any less bleary-eyed, but the heat of the water gets rid of some of the knots in her muscles, allows her to move again.
She pours herself a mug of coffee, double the usual amount of sugar, and leaves it on the counter to cool down. Her fingers fidget on the surface. She doesn't have to make Sam breakfast. She should be used to this, after all the time he spent in the hospital, but that was never routine. That never felt like routine. Now she's home and she's supposed to stay home. No rush to go anywhere. She doesn't have to fold the laundry she left in the dryer last night; doesn't have to get back to Sam and bring Nate clean clothes.
The sun's only beginning to rise. She takes her mug to the living room and lets the couch drown her. She's never liked this couch; it's too soft, it makes her sleepy and wrinkles her clothes. It doesn't help that she hasn't opened the curtains. She swallows down half the coffee at once; it feels good when it goes down. Her phone blinks at her from the coffee table. It's all missed calls. No one texts to say they're sorry you lost a child. That kind of thing has to be done face to face, but apparently voice to voice will do if you live so far away you couldn't even make it to the funeral.
It's pretty satisfying to turn the phone off. Those five seconds. Then she's back to not knowing what to do, so she grabs her mug and paces the room twice before heading back into the kitchen. Nate should get up soon. It's been almost two weeks since—it's been almost two weeks. The grace period is over. He could have extended his leave, she thinks, but he didn't. He has to go back to work. They can't really live on wallowing.
She has his coffee ready when he stumbles into the kitchen. His stubble's starting to look more like a beard. His face is contorted into a pained expression; she saw him drinking last night, she knows he's hungover. He mumbles, "Hey," and takes the mug from her hands, taking a large swig and grimacing. He leaves it on the kitchen island and opens the cupboard where they keep the booze.
There's a sentence on the tip of her tongue—isn't it a little early to be drinking? The sight isn't unfamiliar, and neither are those words, but it's different, today. It's a working day. The hangover's not collateral damage to a good night. There's no camaraderie in the way she feels about it. Commenting on it sounds like an accusation in her head, and she doesn't feel like she has the right to judge his coping mechanisms.
"I have another two hours before I have to be at the museum," she says while he pours whiskey into his coffee. She tries not to measure how much goes in, but she's relieved he caps the bottle quickly. That's not even Irish coffee proportions. She can handle not even an Irish coffee, for now. "I can drop you off on the way. If you want."
Nate shrugs, leaning against the counter. This time he doesn't grimace when he drinks. "That's okay," he says. No mumbling this time, either, though his voice sounds rough, unused. "Company car's picking me up." There's an edge to the words she chalks up to the state he's in; she'd be pissed too if she looked like that. She doesn't even want to guess what kind of headache she'd be experiencing if she'd drunk as much as he did last night. She stopped after the first two rounds.
*
Work is exhausting. She's thankful they have no new exhibits planned for another five weeks, that the two freelance consultant jobs in her schedule are still months away. She walks through every room and scans everything with a tired eye, inertia pushing her along, just trying to remember where she is and why this is what she does. Eventually she heads for the storage rooms where she's in charge of upkeeping, checking meters and graphs and making notes. She finds three or four items that aren't in the right place, probably the work of someone not that familiar with the museum's organization system, and getting them to the right place takes up most of the rest of her morning.
Everyone's nice to her, at least. Even the IT guy doesn't make her wait when the database won't let her edit locations. An intern asks her for help on a research paper she's writing when Maggie is about to leave, two hours piled on her schedule, but she can't imagine what else she'd spend them on. At least this way she feels useful.
She picks up groceries on the way home, off a list she wrote up while she was killing time this morning. They have more leftovers from the wake than basics at this point, and a lot of it must have gone bad. She throws it out when she gets home. Nate isn't there yet. She calls him, but he must have turned off his phone. Maybe he's in a meeting. She knows it's wishful thinking as soon as the thought crosses her mind, but she doesn't want to think about him getting drunk in some dingy bar with whatever little lunch he's managed to keep down in his stomach.
In the small office at home, on her desk, there's a list of names. They're in her brother's handwriting, research he did for her while she was busy saying thank you to sorry-for-your-losses at the door. Every name—every therapist—has at least a pro and a con, except two that are all cons, and one halfway through the list where the only con has been struck out, 'expensive' replaced with 'you can afford her.'
She makes an appointment for Thursday two weeks later. That way she has something to show her brother when he flies in Saturday next week like he said he would. Her brother is many things, but unreliable isn't one of them. It's one of the few things they have in common.
Nate's response isn't much of one, when she tells him at dinner. He grunts and shoves a piece of chicken in his mouth.
"Maybe you should consider it, too," Maggie says.
"Therapy," he says, a delayed echo, more of an incredulous dismissal than a question or something he'd be willing to consider.
She sets down her fork. "I know we're not dealing with this the same way. But talking to someone may help."
His only answer is a long eyebrow raise, so she tells him to forget it. Again, if this is how he's coping, then—then this is how he's coping. Maybe he'll pull out of it on his own. What can she do about it? Find him at a bar and drag him back home? Cut off his alcohol supply? It's not like he can't buy more. And if she relied on this to get him through the day, she doesn't think she'd appreciate someone cutting in and telling her they know how to deal with her grief better than she does.
It's only been two weeks. He's going to work. He's functioning. After all they've been through this month, this year, he deserves some time to try and sort it out on his own. Nate has never liked to be coddled. He's always said it's condescending, and Maggie is his partner, not his mother. He's also always apologized afterwards, historically, but she has a hard time believing he would this time.
Her protective streak is limited, anyway, and Sam's death may well have blown it to bits.
She picks another therapist off the list that night, and makes an appointment in her lunch break the next morning. She wants to have options. She's not big on being patronized, either, and she remembers how much she hated the therapist her mother sent her and her brother to when their father died. Like everyone else, therapists market themselves, and you can't know exactly how much they embellished until you meet them.
In a few days she's restocked the kitchen. Nate is keeping his meals down now, too. She doesn't know if it's because they're not leftovers anymore, or if he's drinking less. She doesn't want to bring it up; Nate would go the other way if she did.
*
She's still getting up an hour too early, and it comes in handy when she has to pick up her brother at the airport. He's on a 6AM flight, and his layover got cut short. He leaves his luggage in the foyer—just a small carry-on; he's not bringing anything, just himself—and washes up so they can go for a walk. Knowing Ben, he'd probably go for a run right now, but Maggie's fitness craze didn't make it past her college years. She's hit the gym on and off since then, but definitely not enough to keep up with Ben. Taking care of a kid consumes—consumed, but it's not like it's not still true, not even like it's not still applicable—enough energy. A walk she can manage, especially if it involves breakfast that she doesn't have to make.
When they leave, Nate is still sleeping. He has the day off. She doesn't wake him.
Ben treats her to lunch, too, and acts like the kind of functional person Maggie's always shocked to see her little brother's turned into. She tells him about the therapy appointments and they laugh for a while about the one and only other time she was in grief counseling. It takes something to make her laugh, probably the shared experience, the time that's passed since she was fourteen and Ben was eleven and they conspired to pretend their therapist was so good he'd gotten them through the other side of acceptance in record time. He tells her he considered applying for a transfer here, but he couldn't uproot his girlfriend just like that. The girlfriend he's been with longer than she's been with Nate.
It's a sobering thought, though Maggie's not sure what exactly is sobering about it. The longevity? The solidity? They don't have kids. They have a dog. Their house is always a mess. Maggie's always thought she was too much of a neat freak for pets. It never mattered with Sam, but that was different.
When she gets home, Nate is mulling around the kitchen, making a sandwich. He's clean. He's shaved. She can't tell if he's sober, but she can't tell if he's drunk either, and he's not drinking. Maybe it's because Ben is here, because Ben was always a little wary of Nate and Nate doesn't want to give him the satisfaction of proving him right, but it's such a far cry from the rest of the month that all Maggie feels is relief. She joins him in the kitchen and kisses him back when he backs her against the counter. His breath smells like toothpaste.
At night, when she climbs into bed, he meets her in the middle, curls an arm around her waist. He's still wrapped around her when she wakes up in the morning, force of habit. It's early. She doesn't have to go anywhere. She has always slept in on Sundays, anyway. Sam used to wake her, when he was seven, eight, but he stopped a while ago. She doesn't associate this with anything.
She drives Ben to the airport in the evening, and Nate's made dinner by the time she gets back. They talk, not much, not about anything sensitive, but they talk. It's more than they've done in a while.
The alarm goes off at the usual time again on Monday. She sighs. It beeps again, and she turns it off. She falls asleep again instantly, and is woken up in the middle of a dream she forgets as soon as she opens her eyes, Nate's hand lightly shaking her awake from his side of the bed.
She feels unsettled, disturbed. She powers through her morning routine on a mild, aimless rage. Nate gives her space; he knows what it's like to want it. She wants to ask if this happens to him, too. If he has nightmares. She's not sure why she hasn't before, but she doesn't want to talk about her own.
Her first therapy appointment is after work on Tuesday. She walks into a sleek-looking office, faces a woman in her thirties, maybe. She's wearing a suit, and her hair would fall in a straight line if it weren't tucked behind her ears. She thinks Maggie's doing really well, considering everything. She thinks Maggie would get more use out of couples therapy than this. Maggie thinks, yeah, and you'll get fifty percent more of my money, and then she feels guilty, because it's not that far-fetched. She's put together. She retouched her makeup before coming here; she changed her shirt. This is how she's presenting herself to the world, to her job, to this therapist.
She doesn't make a follow-up appointment, anyway.
*
Nate gets home late that night. He's tense, tense like she's never seen him, going through files and mumbling a mile an hour about 'getting them back.' She assumes someone cheated IYS, or IYS cheated someone. It's hard to tell. It always has been with Nate.
The next day, she gets up as usual, sets the coffee maker, takes a shower, sits in the living room waiting for the day to begin.
There's no need for her to be out of bed yet. Not for another hour. She runs a hand through her hair, rubs her fingers over her eyes. They feel like craters, the skin underneath soft and inconsistent and sunken. She sips her coffee, which is still scalding hot, and takes a look around the room. It looks the way it's always looked. She's doing what she's always done.
Maybe that's the problem.
That night, she sets the alarm five minutes later, and five minutes later the next day. She stops when she's forty minutes away from where she started; she needs that little while to get ready to deal with Nate. He's been better, lately, but that doesn't mean things won't get worse again.
The therapist her brother picked out just listens to her. She says very little, just questions to keep Maggie talking. She has two big armchairs in her office, comfortable but firm enough. She leans her elbows on her knees when Maggie flounders for words. She doesn't make any rash diagnoses. When Maggie gets home, she realizes she barely talked about Nate. Whenever Maggie went in that direction, Dr. Ward reined her in, made her talk about something else.
Maggie doesn't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but she wants to find out, so she decides to go again.
*
Nate gives her tickets to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, this weekend. IYS has insured it, and is sending Nate to supervise opening night. "They gave me two tickets. I'm pretty sure they're sending you to supervise, it's just easier to send me with you than draw up a contract." His tone is playful, but his smile is thin, tight. Still, it's an exhibit she wants to see, and they haven't gone out, just the two of them, in months, even before—even before.
As dates go, it's a great one. Nate looks good, and he oscillates between civil and friendly, shaking hands and introducing Maggie to everyone he thinks she will find interesting and she hasn't met already. She doesn't stray too far from him, but she's not really sure why. He's stable. Maybe she just misses him, misses Nate like this, loose-limbed and letting his first glass of champagne last a long time.
He kisses her on the porch, when she's rummaging in her bag for the keys. He turns the light on when they make it inside and she flicks the switch off immediately, lacing her fingers with his and pulling him closer. It's not amazing sex, but it borders on great; he's present, and attentive, and they don't talk much, but he listens whenever she says anything. It's much better than the couple of times they slept together when Sam was in the hospital, their bodies too wound-up and not rested enough for anything resembling intensity.
They have a good week. It reminds her of when they were first married, before they even thought about having kids. They talk about their day, they indulge in takeout, they rent movies. He picks her up from therapy and asks about it like he thinks it's good for her. They have sex on the nights they get home early enough for it.
They have a good week.
And then Nate gets fired.
He tells her at night, an hour after dinner. She guesses she should be thankful he let her keep it down. She asks him why, and he tells her he just wasn't performing to their standards. There's a lot of resentment in his voice. "There's something you're not telling me," she says, leaning forward on her knees. He's not looking back at her. His only response is a shrug.
Maggie doesn't even have the heart to be in the same room as him when he reaches for the vodka the next morning. She takes her coffee and heads to the living room. She draws the curtains, turns on the news, sits on a chair. She sips her coffee quietly. She looks at the couch and wants to sell it. She thinks she's going to sell it. She snaps a picture of it with her phone and asks an intern to put out an ad on craigslist for her. It has no emotional value. It doesn't have much value, period. It was a gift from Maggie's aunt, for their wedding. She can get rid of it if she wants to.
She has Friday morning off, so she sets out a couple of hours there in her schedule to pick a new one out. Nate isn't drinking yet when she grabs her purse, but it's a matter of time. She asks if he wants to come with her.
"Whatever you pick out will be fine," he says.
She could make him come with her. She could drag him out. She could pour all the booze down the kitchen drain. She could do those things, and she could also realize they're all lies. She's not going to save him. He's not a helpless little boy.
"I don't understand why you're so against therapy," Maggie says at dinner.
"I don't understand why you’re so for it."
"I could get a recommendation from Dr. Ward. She's good, Nate. She's helping me."
"And I'm happy for you, Maggie," he says. He could probably sound further from happy, but she's not sure how.
It takes four days before they stop talking at all at dinner. Six days before they stop talking before Maggie leaves in the morning, aside from bleary-eyed heys and don't leave the door opens. At least he doesn't start drinking until she's left. At least he doesn't leave much of a mess around. At least his clutter is contained. At least he doesn't get angry. At least, at least.
"Do you think that's going to stop being enough before things get better?" Dr. Ward asks. Maggie doesn't have an answer.
*
Ben flies in again that weekend, with his girlfriend, Sarah, this time. Maggie has always liked Sarah, but in that vague way where they're so different they never had much to talk about. She's younger, she's athletic, she sells real estate for a living and coaches kids' baseball on weekends. She loves animals, but she doesn't want kids. She's always been upfront about that. Maggie thought it would be a problem for Ben, and she's still not sure it won't, but it has yet to drive them apart.
They have lunch on the terrace of a casual restaurant. When Ben is in the restroom, Sarah takes a swig of his red wine and says, "You don't have to stick with Nate. He's not your responsibility."
"That's not what I said when I got married," Maggie says, without much feeling.
"Well, maybe not, but marriage is just a relationship plus a contract. The contract can be broken. It doesn't make you weaker or a liar. It just means you tried and it wasn't sustainable. It's the relationship that matters, and relationships need nurturing. From everyone involved. Even if you're already together, you have to renew those promises. And they have to be mutual. You can't keep a relationship going on one person's force of will alone."
"What Sarah's saying is," Ben says, sitting down, "you can choose yourself." He throws Sarah an apologetic look—he does have a bad habit of summing up other people's thoughts for them. Sarah nods and smiles at him. "And I agree with her."
Maggie picks up a napkin and dabs at her lips, grease coming off in spots. She crumples it up in her hand and drops it on her empty plate. She says, "I know."
And she does. But it's not just that. She loves Nate. Or she loved him once. She hasn't felt strongly about much since—since she lost Sam. She can think that. Since she lost Sam. Since they discovered he was ill and wouldn't get better. Since he died. It was a draining experience. She's been hanging on since then. That's been enough.
She doesn't know if she's ready to want more than that.
*
On the way home, she makes a detour to a rehab center, picks up some pamphlets. She looks up a few more places on her computer, prints out information so she can compare it later, when she's not still reeling from the idea of locking Nate up somewhere so he'll get better. It's not like that. She knows it's not like that, but it still feels like such a forceful thing to do.
She doesn't get to do it, anyway; the next time she sees those printouts, they're peeking out the edge of the trash can. She didn't leave them around for Nate to find, so her first reaction is to scream at him, until she remembers that she has to get to work and her office isn't just hers, even if she's the only one who's been using it.
An intervention may work, but she has no idea who she'd call in for it. Ben and Sarah would come, but they're her family, not Nate's. She knows his dad is alive, but she doesn't have the first clue how to find him. He wasn't even at Sam's funeral. She remembers bits of conversations, Nate implying his dad was in jail among several other things, things that make Maggie doubt Nate would take advice from his father even if she found a way to get hold of him. So that's out. And who are even his friends now? Before—before everything happened, Maggie would have asked James for help, but the last time she mentioned him to Nate, Nate's face closed off and he went straight to bed. Whatever happened with IYS, James must have taken the other side.
Still, Nate got himself out of this mess before, she tells herself. He can do it again. He should be able to do it again.
Only it's not the same as before. He has no job to distract him. He's not making an effort to find one. He won't go to therapy, he won't even talk to her. He hates the idea of taking medication, always has, like alcohol is any better. Maybe alcohol doesn't ask for a commitment, but it's what it's gotten from Nate anyway.
She starts to wonder if she's deliberately looking for excuses not to help him. If some part of her is looking for a way out instead.
It's early in the morning, the sun is rising outside the window, and Nate walks into the kitchen before Maggie's gone. He couldn't go back to sleep. He's wound-up. He's tired. His mouth is too dry, his shoulders too tense. It's not bright inside, but his eyes are narrowed anyway, like the daylight bothers him.
He looks hungover, and she's sure his head is killing him. There's ibuprofen on the counter. It's been a fixture for a while. He bypasses it for the booze cabinet, and she stands there, cradling her steaming mug of coffee while he pours himself a drink, dry, warm, breakfast be damned.
She stands there cradling her mug until she's left it on the counter. Her body doesn't feel like her own, but it feels like it's waking up. It feels like it's gearing up for something.
She takes a deep breath, and says, "Isn't it a little early to be drinking?"
His head turns slowly, surprised. He doesn't face her entirely. He says, "I don't know," and then, "to be honest it kind of feels like too late," and that's it. She takes his glass and pours its contents down the sink. She doesn't smash it because she hates broken glass. She hates the way it smashes into hundreds of pieces, hates having to pick them up and remember not to walk barefoot, coming across tiny bits of glass on the floor for weeks that are just going to go in the trash anyway.
"You're not doing this to me," she says. "I'm not going to let you."
"Well," he says, his expression closing off, "good thing I'm an adult, then," and heads for the foyer.
She doesn't go after him. She just flinches when the door slams shut.
*
At work, several people ask her how she is with the same look of concern they constantly wore around her when Sam was in the hospital. She must look worse than she thought. Her boss invites her to a wine-tasting party, but drops the subject when he sees the look on her face.
"I'm just busy that night," she covers, unconvincingly, "but thanks."
Another curator tells Maggie she can always crash on her couch, if she needs a timeout. She knows more about Maggie's problems than most; they're the same age, they're both married, they've been here for about the same amount of time. Amy has two kids, two daughters. Maggie says she's okay. She likes her bed better. Amy smiles just as convincingly as Maggie had lied.
It's an intern that gets Maggie to take a timeout, a girl in her mid twenties, Cassandra, who's got her life more together than Maggie does, but who doesn't come off as an adult yet.
Friday night, Maggie goes out clubbing.
She's too old and she doesn't like it, doesn't like the music or the noise or the lights or the heat of all the people around her. It reminds her why she never did this much when she was Cassandra's age. Cassandra stays with Maggie like Maggie's her pet project, tells her to call her Cass, introduces her to her friends, drives her home when Maggie decides she's had enough. The cab drops them off in front of Maggie's house and Cassandra says she hopes Maggie got it all out of her system. Maggie thanks her and gives her a few bills to take care of the cab. She thanks her again. She makes it to the front door.
She's actually fairly coordinated, having sobered up on the ride over. She doesn't trip or try a wrong key or drop anything. She's already inside the house when she bends over to take off her heels and one of them catches on the strap of her bag, sending its contents rolling out onto the floor. "Shit," she mumbles, not really that low, and she hears rustling in the living room before Nate comes out to meet her.
"What happened to you?" he says, his hands careful on her arms, just there in case she stumbles, and she huffs out a snort. His voice is rough, like he just got up. His hair is in an even rougher state. None of it is unfamiliar. None of it is comforting, either. None of it is much of anything.
She picks up the bag and hangs it on the coat rack by the door. "I can't believe you just said that."
"What does that mean, what does that—are you okay?"
"I'm fine," she says sharply, walking into the living room, plopping down on a chair to take off her shoes. Halfway through undoing the clasp on the second, she looks up and says, "Actually, no, I'm not fine. I have an unemployed, alcoholic husband who at one point stopped talking to me. I'm so screwed up an intern at the museum took me out clubbing and got me drunk. An intern. She's twenty-five. She's been working at the museum for six months and she knew what I needed—she took a chance on guessing what I needed before my husband moved a finger."
"Well, if that’s all that’s bothering you," Nate says. He's dropped the protective thing and is sitting on an arm of the couch now, looking at her without meeting her eyes.
Maggie shakes her head and laughs, because if he thinks—if he thinks for even a second that she doesn't care, that she just got over it, well, then this is even worse than she thought. "Nate," she says, a warning tone.
"No, I know I'm a mess but I'm not a mess for no reason!"
"I was there too! He was my son, too. I lost him every bit as much as you did and I've managed to hold myself together and—I'm not saying we're the same person or we should feel the same way but I've tried to help you and you won't let me. You don't want me to help you. It's like you like being angry and—sometimes it feels like you're trying to avenge Sam and you can't do that."
"Maggie—"
"You're never going to be able to do that," she goes on. "All you can do, all any of us can do is deal with the fact that we lost our son. It happened. We're never going to get him back. And you're not acknowledging that, you just—you—you drink. And you don't talk to anyone and you drink, and you don't let me help you and you drink."
She's out of words, doesn't know what else to say, and to Nate's credit, he doesn't jump to excuse his behavior or turn the accusations back on her. So they sit there in silence, looking at each other and looking away, until Maggie's eyes are gleaming from glancing at the lamp by the armchair, the one Nate switched on when she stumbled at the door.
"At least now I know you feel something," he says after a while, and that sends her off again.
"Of course I feel something!" she says, and her voice breaks. Her throat hurts. She lowers her voice; she was yelling. "But someone had to keep working. Someone had to buy stuff, groceries and—and toothpaste and soap, and—and make sure we both ate, and the bills were paid and we didn't go down in a pile of debris, and it's not like you were trying to fill that slot. That wasn't an option for me, Nate. You got to think, well, okay, if I don't make dinner Maggie will. You assumed I'd pick up the slack, so that wasn't an option for me. And then, honestly, Nate, how did you expect me to have any energy left for anger? I didn't."
"It's not anger. It's—you don't know—"
"Because you haven't told me! If there's something I don't know, it's because you haven't told me." She breathes in, trying to calm down, failing. Eventually, she adds, "Every single morning since he died, I wake up and I head for his room. To wake him up for school. It's a fantastic start to the day. Fantastic. Couldn't be better." Her shoe is still hanging from her foot; she reaches one hand to disentangle it and drops it on the floor. She'll pick it up tomorrow. Right now, she can't stand to look at Nate a second longer.
*
She went to bed alone, and wakes up alone. There's a blanket on the new couch. Nate is in the kitchen. He offers her coffee when she walks in.
"Thanks," she says, sipping it carefully. It doesn't burn.
He looks good. Well, he looks better than usual. His hair is damp from the shower. He's wearing going-out clothes. He's put his pieces together to take care of her.
She feels thankful, for a second, and then she wants to smash the cup in her hand so much she puts it down. It's not fair. It's not fair of him to sink and sink and just when she's about to give up make her think he's not completely out of reach yet.
She doesn't think he's a lost cause. It's hard to give up hope on someone you've loved so long. But this—this routine they've established, where he's like another sick kid who won't let her do anything for him, this routine isn't working. It's not working for him, and it's not working for her. It isn't helping anyone.
There has to be a point after things have broken when someone says enough, and gathers up the pieces and gets rid of them. There has to be. Maybe this is it for Maggie. Maybe this is her breaking point.
"I just don't understand why you're so angry," she says. "There was nothing anyone could have done."
He snorts and says, "There was something."
She shakes her head. "It wasn't—it wouldn't have worked. The doctors knew. Everyone we talked to said we shouldn't do it. That it was a—a waste of money and dangerous and we couldn't get our hopes up."
"Not everyone," Nate says. "I found—" He bites his lip into his mouth before he goes on, his voice even quieter, his eyes fixed on the tiles. "I found a doctor."
"You did?" she asks. This is the first she's hearing of it. "But you didn't—"
"I didn't want you to be disappointed if it didn’t pan out. Not like it did me any good."
He can't blame everything on that, she thinks, doesn't say. It wasn't just one thing, it was many. Most of which reached her, too. "What happened?"
He takes a while to answer, long enough that she lifts her chin to try to figure out what's going through his head. She has about as much idea after looking at him as she started out with. Eventually, he gives a brief shrug and says, "He pulled out. He decided it was too risky."
"Like the others," she says.
He looks at her with something like sadness in his eyes. She still has a feeling there's something he's not telling her. But he just says, "Like the others, yes," and leaves it at that.
He goes out, later. She doesn't ask where. She sits in her office and starts on an article, scraps it, starts again. Eventually she gives up and wanders around the house. She opens Sam's room. She doesn't go in, but she opens it. Everything's packed in boxes on the floor. The walls are a mild dark blue, the way Sam wanted them, but other than that there's nothing in this room to remind her of him. It's a room ready to be refurnished. There's a bare desk, an empty closet, a bed with just a mattress in it. Nate and she agreed, when they were still talking, not to keep a shrine to Sam. Ben stayed at their place after the wake to help clean up, and he took it upon himself to take care of Sam's room. Maggie doesn't have to look in the boxes to know Ben didn't throw anything out. That's Maggie and Nate's job, deciding what to keep.
She shuts the door carefully and goes back to the study. She doesn't make a conscious decision, but she ends up looking at apartment listings, places closer to work, places meant for someone who lives alone. She prints some of them out, stacks the papers in the first folder within arm's reach.
*
She has a verification job in New York, has to be there by Monday, so she spends the next week living out of a hotel room. It's weirdly freeing for something she's never liked before. She doesn't call Nate once. Nate only calls when she's almost on the plane back home, and she lets it go to voicemail. She sends a text a while later, I'll be home in four hours. Hope you're doing well, like he didn't reach out first.
He's not home when she gets there. He doesn't get back until she's taken a shower and a nap. He's lost a shoe, somehow. His eye is swelling. She's on her feet so fast she can't see for a second, running straight for the first-aid kit. He doesn't need stitches. He doesn't tell her what happened, when she asks. Maybe she's imagining that he looks like he wants to. Maybe she just wants there to be something she doesn't know to explain everything.
But even if it did, even if there was something, how would it help?
*
The apartment listings she printed out stare at her from her desk all week, until she gives in and takes a day off. She walks in and out of four, five apartments, her realtor getting increasingly antsy, until they find one she likes just as much as her house with Nate—more, even, because it wouldn't be her house with Nate, and because it's closer to work, and because it doesn't have an unoccupied room Ben packed into boxes so Maggie wouldn't have to.
"Are you sure?" the realtor asks, cheery and determined, obviously expecting she'll say yes. It's a pleasantry, really.
Maggie's kind of tired of pleasantries. "I like the place," she says, "I'm just not sure I want to move."
"Well, you have my number. You can call me when you reach a decision, or if you need any more information," the realtor says, and gives her some paperwork, just in case.
*
Nate is asleep on the couch when she gets home. I'm moving out, she mouths, just to try it. He doesn't wake up. She feels childish, whispering something in front of someone just so they won't hear. Moving out isn't a curse word. It's not something she's getting away with. It's a choice. It's her choice. Which she has now apparently made.
"I'm moving out," she says out loud, and again when Nate stirs and he rubs at his eyes. "I'm moving out. We can't keep doing this."
"What?" Nate mutters.
"We can talk about it later," she says on the way out of the living room. "I'm calling my realtor now. We can use her when we sell the house, too."
"We're selling the house?" he says, clearly not that awake yet. She's not unaware of how badly timed this was, but she can't imagine a good time to tell your husband that you're leaving him, so this is what they're working with. At least it's out.
She calls the realtor from Sam's room. It has the best window in the house, the best sights, the best lighting. Someone should use it, at some point. When she ends the call, she half-sits, half-leans back on the desk, stroking the edge of it, feeling for the rough cracks where Sam rubbed the needle of his drafting compass into the paint.
She's not sure how long she's there, but after a while Nate joins her, looking a little better than before. He's changed out of his pajamas, and he's fixed his hair. At least he's still taking showers regularly, she thinks, and then, no, there's no at least here. That's over now. She's not thinking in at leasts anymore.
"I think this is the part where I try to change your mind," he says. He still sounds tired.
"Don't," she says, but he goes on over her.
"But I have no idea what to say, so we can skip that step."
She frowns. "Okay."
"I'm not saying—not saying I want you to go. I don't want you to go, Maggie," he says. She looks down, bites the inside of her cheek. It's a nervous tic she thought she got rid of. Apparently not entirely. "I don't want you to go."
"Nate—"
"Hey, I'm not going to lie and say I'm glad you're doing this, because I'm not. I know it's your decision and I know it's not fair to convince you otherwise and I know it's not your job to clean up my messes. I know those things. I still don't want you to go. But I'm not going to stop you. I'm not going to guilt-trip you. That's all I have to say."
Maggie nods, almost says thank you. It feels wrong, somehow. Instead, she says, "What do you want to do with the boxes? I thought we could unpack them. In case there's anything we want to keep in them. I'm not sure what system Ben used for this stuff."
"He probably just threw things in the nearest box that wasn't full," Nate suggests, no meanness behind it. He's right, too. Ben is thorough, but he's not very methodic.
"Or we could throw it all out. If you don't want to deal with it."
"Do you?"
"I don't know," she says. He breathes in deep, his chest heaving with it, his eyes flickering around the room. "I guess we'll find out," she decides.
To her surprise, he stays sober through the whole thing, doesn't even run away at any point. They end up sitting together on the bare mattress, scattering things over the floor—toys, books, pencils, clothes. There's a lot they could give to charity. There's a good pair of scissors Maggie thought was lost. She keeps that, and a few other things, things she can use or look at without crying, or at least without feeling horrible. The pair of bookends her mom got Sam the last time she was in town, when he was six. The old-fashioned telephone-shaped clock Sam always hid in a drawer when his friends came by.
Nate sets out a box that's filled to the brim by the time they've repacked everything else. It feels fast. It feels like she's rushing, now that she's made a decision. Every little choice reverberates through her head, making her second-guess things like why she's the one moving out, why she's leaving instead of making Nate go, how much time settling into a new apartment will suck out of her life, how much the movers will charge. She hasn't moved in over a decade, not since she married Nate.
But they're all the right choices. They're the right choices because she made them, because she's doing something. Because she's not letting Nate drag her down with him. Because there's more to life than grief.
Because there's life, period, and she wants to live hers.