Page 55 of The Undead

Maggie

Oh, God, it was day again. The rain tapped on the window over her head, birds squawked, thunder grumbled. AU was right with the world.

Maggie Magill Bowman lay there on her side of the bed and, for one crazy minute, thought she felt his warmth curled up behind her, breath soft on the back of her neck as he slept. When she put her hand back, there was nothing there, nothing at all. Just cold empty sheets.

God, Mike, sleep—oh, please sleep—

As she waited to come up out of drowsy grief and into gray life, it all rolled past her eyes again: the Bronco slamming into the guard rail, tilting, hit from the rear and sliding farther out over the drop … and Michael, blood streaming from the side of his head, eyes brilliant and blue, reaching out to her with that half-smile on his lips, the fear so vivid in his face—

And then they’d jerked her out, and she’d watched him disappear in a scream of metal. He’d tried to yell something, maybe her name, but she hadn’t heard him. She’d still been there, wrapped in blankets and friendship by the uniforms on the scene when the divers had pried Michael out of the crushed beer can of the Bronco and brought him up. They’d tried to turn her away, to get her not to look, but she had watched anyway.

The terrible thing was that he’d looked just like every other corpse, glaze-eyed and waterlogged and gray. He wasn’t Michael. He was meat, something to be logged and investigated, something that might once have been alive but was just an excuse for other people to cluck their tongues and poke around in their private life. He was the kind of thing Maggie had spent the last six years looking at.

No offense, ma’am. It’s just a job. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.

She blinked and opened her eyes on the rainy morning. Her head throbbed dully, as it usually did when the weather took a dive, and she shuffled out of bed and off to find some ibuprofen. She downed two, frowned, downed another, then shook the rest of the coarse red pills into her hand and counted them out, meticulously, wondering how many it would take.

In the end, she was still too strong. She poured them back into the bottle. It was just a thought, brief and unreal. Maggie stared at her reflection in the mirror; it wasn’t a pleasant sight. She looked like shit. Shefeltlike shit.

There were tears running down her cheeks. She wiped them away with numb fingers and turned the taps on in the shower.

It wasn’t until she was under the spray that she remembered coming to him in the shower on their anniversary. His body had been warm and smooth and slippery, his hands so beautifully clever. Maggie braced herself on stiffened arms and turned the water on hot, hot enough that her skin turned red where it hit. It was hard to breathe the steam. She put her head down and gasped while the scalding water dripped from her chin, her breasts, her trembling arms. The pain almost made her forget.

Conversation ceased in the kitchen when she came in. Connie stood up for a sisterly embrace, but something in Maggie’s expression convinced her that it wasn’t such a good idea. She stopped and lowered her hands to her sides.

“How are you, Maggie?” she asked.

What a question,Maggie thought, and pushed her out of the way to pour a cup of coffee. She drank it black, more punishment to make herself forget.

“The car will be here in about fifteen minutes, okay?”

If she said it wasn’t okay, Maggie wondered, would it all go away? Would they all look at each other and say, Oh, okay, let’s call it all off and let Michael come back? No. Probably not.

“Okay,” she said distantly. She blew on the surface of her coffee and stared at the closed kitchen blinds. There was a brief, awkward pause. It was not surprising that Mike’s cousin Larry jumped right into it.

“Aren’t you going to change?” he asked, too loudly. Maggie raised her eyebrows and turned to look at him. His face went dark with a sudden mottled blush. “Jeez, it’s a funeral, Maggie. You might dress up a little.”

She put her coffee down and walked over to him. Nobody moved, not her fragile little mother, not Connie, not even Larry’s timid wife, Berna. Maggie pulled up a chair and sat down next to Larry, facing him, all wide-eyed earnestness. She pointed to the blue jeans.

“After the last time I made love with Michael, I put these on.” Her fingers smoothed over them, over the faint stains that Luisa hadn’t been able to wash out. “See this sweater? It was his favorite sweater, I was wearing it that day and it’s still got his fucking bloodstains on it,so don’t you fucking tell me what to wear, Larry!”

When she finished, Maggie had her hands on his coat lapels and pulled him almost out of his chair. She was shaking all over. So was he. She let go and he dropped bonelessly back down, mouth working wetly in a search for something to say. Maggie leaned back.

“You’re crazy,” Larry finally managed. She didn’t say anything. “Jesus. You’recrazy.”

“I’m a cop,” she reminded him blandly. “We’re all psychos, don’t you watch TV?”

Michael’s sister was hiding her mouth behind her clenched hands, but from the way her shoulders were shaking Maggie thought she was probably laughing. She turned away and began clanking some dishes in the sink. After preserving his dignity for a full minute, Larry got up and slunk out of the kitchen. Berna, twitty little Berna, fluttered out after him, all shock and murmured pet endearments.

Another coffee cup—full—appeared in front of Maggie with a rattling thump. When she looked up, her mother put her thin hands on Maggie’s shoulders, squeezed, and kept squeezing, frowning at the knots in her muscles.

“Sweetie,” she finally sighed, “I love you. I loved Michael. You can wear what you want, and nobody should tell you any different. But you use that language in my presence again and I will slap you, do you understand, Margaret Fagan Magill?”

Maggie started giggling. The spasms bubbled up like carbonation, driving tears out of her eyes and down her face until she bit her knuckle to stop them. Her mother smoothed her hair in gentle strokes. Laisha Magill smelled of White Shoulders and fresh powder, just as she always had; she looked fifteen years younger than her real age, even at sixty-five, hair still mostly dark and thick and lustrous. Maggie desperately craved the illusion that her mother never changed, especially now, when everything had changed so much. She turned into her mother’s embrace and let the tears run down her cheeks.

“When your father died, I spent days and days doing nothing but going through his clothes,” Laisha continued. I kept saying I was going to give them away, but I couldn’t, I just kept touching them, folding them, ironing them. It was weeks before I could touch them without crying, but it did get easier. It will get easier, Maggie.”

I don’t want it to get easier, Maggie thought distantly, and picked up her coffee cup. As she did, someone knocked at the front door, and the cup slipped out of her hand to knock against the table. A wave of dark coffee sloshed over to form a little lake of caffeine. Maggie froze, staying perfectly still, and shut her eyes. When she’d been a little girl she’d played hide and seek by covering up her eyes and pretending that made her invisible. Just now that seemed—reasonable. Logical. If she didn’t acknowledge that knock, then she wouldn’t have to go, and they’d call off Michael’s death.

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