violently into the toilet. It’s mostly bile. The tiles she’s kneeling on are cold and the snow outside her window is no longer beautiful. She tells her mother she’s sick and doesn’t come out of her room for the rest of the day.
The tricky thing is that he was the person to whom she told it all. Now she would have to find one of the people she forsook. Sammy? She didn’t know Maggie’s interior cliffs. Her parents? They were troubled by their own demons, and he had been helping her come to terms with their limitations. He had been helping her grow out of them. Her brothers and sisters? They had their own kids, their own system of fears and grievances. They lived far away and every time she was on the phone with them they were distracted by a child at their knee and there was always someone to pick up from a field. Anybody else in North Dakota? The acquaintances who acted nice but were myopic and subversive beneath the flesh. They couldn’t help her, they didn’t love her.
On the heels of deathcall there’s a great flood, biblical in its scope and timing. The school week is canceled. Maggie holes up in her room for days and doesn’t eat a single thing. The panic attacks come furiously and often are bitterly punctuated by sleep. People who say sleep is sweet don’t take nightmares into account. Even in the absence of dreams, when you are asleep you are systemically unaware of the brief reprieve from pain. Sleep is not sweet but dumb. It is a gap in time, a gap in pain.
The only thing sleep does is reset her, so that each time she wakes up, Maggie will have to reconstruct the event, to apprehend all over again that the love of her life has just said, We are finished. Everything you thought you had is over. Go anywhere in the world, except into my arms.
And she couldn’t even talk about it. Because he was also her teacher.
It’s debatable whether it’s better to be told no forever than to be stretched out like hide, waiting for word, reignition. Some might argue that there is no such thing as forever, that even in the case of a suspected forever, anyone knows it means only that you are on a waiting list. That if everyone else dies, he may then call upon you.
She knows there’s no pride in waiting around. At the same time, she understands she would be hurting only herself if she didn’t take him back.
The first time she sees him after the phone call, the big snow is cleared and only the cigarette-punctured slush remains. She stays after school and begs. For life to go back to what it was. She can’t bear thinking that if she had just not sent one text, everything would be normal. She can’t bear having been the end of her own happiness. The winter with Aaron has meant more than her whole life.
He tells her what happened: the way Marie found the text and how Aaron lied and said that W was a paraprofessional from Colorado. He admitted having an affair but lied about his lover’s identity. W for Woman, not Wilken.
He says he must stay for the children.
Does she hate you? Maggie asks.
Sometimes I think that she does, he says. Then he turns cold, like she is crossing a line. He says, I’m not going to change my mind, Maggie.
She wipes her eyes and walks out and passes the rest of her senior year like a kidney stone. She doesn’t want to graduate but to die. She is pale and ornery. The worst thing is that she still has to go to his class.
She can’t even revel in the role of demon whore. Aaron told Marie the woman he was having the affair with was nothing, nobody, a blip. Maggie is not even somebody whom somebody hates. She is a nobody whom nobody knows.
As an assignment, she must make a senior year video for Aaron’s class. The sort of video that before the breakup would have been filled with inside jokes and coded I love yous. Now the video is gloomy, full of songs that make her think of him. Her family and friends figure prominently in the video. They act in it as though Maggie is still Maggie, but she isn’t. They are chillingly unaware of how little it all means to her. How close to death she is.