She was perhaps a block away from the house when she almost stepped on a half-naked couple sprawled on a blanket. She drew back and then squinted in the darkness, able to make out the curve of the boy’s bare buttocks and the ridiculous welter of clothes gathered around his ankles. “Oh my god,” he kept repeating, moving up and down. “Oh my god.” Beneath him a girl seemed to be staring blankly at the sky overhead, the whites of her eyes visible even in the darkness. Maggie realized that the girl was staring at her, and that it was her cousin Monica, looking expressionless, grim, her fingernails sparkling on the boy’s shoulder as the moon momentarily emerged from the clouds. “Oh my God,” he said again, and Maggie drew back and ran across the sand to the break in the dunes.
She kept on running across the street, up onto the porch of the guesthouse; then she sat there hugging her knees for a few minutes before she went upstairs to the room she and Monica shared. One of the twin beds was lumpy with what Maggie knew would be an artful arrangement of pillows. She pulled out her own pillow and turned on her side, feigning sleep when she heard footfalls an hour later. She spent all night wondering what to do, but the matter was settled for her the next morning, as she and Monica walked to the beach together several steps behind their grandmother. Monica gave her a level look, not unlike the one she had given her the night before on the beach, and said quietly, “Who’d believe you? Grandpop says you have an overactive imagination.” Then she walked ahead, her carefully oiled calves shining in the sun, talking to Mary Frances.
Maggie lagged behind, and so it was she that Mrs. Polisky, the owner of the guesthouse, reached first as she came trotting up behind them, her fat face red. “Tell your grandmother you’ve got to come into the house,” she gasped. “You’ve got to go home. Your grandfather’s had an accident.”
9
JOHN SCANLAN LAY IN THE HOSPITAL bed, the left side of his face looking as though it was melting into his shoulder, a thick line of saliva edging his jawline. “Wipe his mouth,” Mark said to one of the nurses, but as soon as she had done so the spittle crept down again.
Except for the fact that his family stood behind a sheet of glass, kept out of the intensive care unit by regulations that even now her uncle James was appealing, Maggie thought that it looked like one of the deathbed scenes of the British royal family in her book about Queen Victoria. Her grandfather did not look dead; he looked ruined, as though he would have to be renovated from top to bottom to regain any semblance of his former self. Mary Frances was sitting beside his bed, stroking his hand and clutching the cord to the intravenous feed.
“Will he die?” Maggie asked, the only one of the grandchildren left there, the twins having been sent home by cab, Teresa sent to the cafeteria in hysterics, and Monica left in the waiting room with some of the aunts, reading an old copy of Vogue.
“What kind of question is that?” Mark asked. “Jesus. Of course not.” Maggie noticed that a tube running from underneath the covers down the side of the bed was bright yellow, and she began to feel sick. She had been in a hospital only twice before, once for stitches in her knee, once to visit her mother when Joseph was born, her father sneaking her in past the nurses’ stations, but it had not been like this. Even the smell was different; there was still the odor of disinfectant, but it was overlaid with that of rubber and dirty clothes. She went outside into the waiting area, where her father was talking on the pay phone.
“Did you find her?” Monica was asking him.
“Mind your own business,” Tommy Scanlan said, dropping in another coin.
“Maggie, honey, do you have any idea where your mother could be?” Aunt Cass asked.
“At home.”
“No, she’s not.”
“At Celeste’s?”
“Your brothers are there, thank God. But Celeste doesn’t know where your mother went.”
Tommy slammed down the pay phone and said, “She can’t even drive, for Christ’s sake. She hates the train. Where is she?”
“Did you call Grandpop?” asked Maggie, who thought it was probably a bad time to mention that her mother might be