trucks pulling in between two houses. When she finally arrived at the Malones, the front door stood open, as though the place had been abandoned.
On the way over, scuffing her sneakers along the cement, she had begun to think of the summer before, when she and Debbie had lain in sleeping bags in the Malone backyard and listed the things they no longer believed in. They had decided they no longer believed that if you held a Milky Way in front of the open mouth of someone with a tapeworm, the tapeworm would leap out. They no longer believed that someone with four children had done it four times. (“Or someone with six children six times,” Maggie had added, not wanting her parents to appear to be the only sex maniacs in Kenwood.) They no longer believed that heaven was in the sky, or that nuns had crewcuts. (Maggie had seen her aunt Margaret’s hair one day when they were both in the bathroom at her grandfather’s house.)
Maggie had been thinking of that night as she dragged along in the heat, because she was no longer sure what she believed in. She had dreamed about the hospital room, and the plastic tubes winding round and round the bed like the forest of thorns in Sleeping Beauty. In the dream Monica was lying there instead of John Scanlan, and her eyes were staring straight ahead; she looked as if she was dead, except that she was smiling. When Maggie drifted up from the dream, the light hazy through her gingham curtains, she wondered how much of what happened yesterday had really happened, and how much was the dream, or something she’d seen on television, or read in a book. She knew the fight between her parents was real because she could still remember how good it felt when she held her mother’s hand, and how long it had seemed since that had happened. She remembered her fear and disappointment when Connie let her go.
But when she tried to think of telling Debbie about everything, about her cousin lying on the beach beneath a boy and the moon, about her grandfather lying there drooling, about her mother disappearing and her father fogging up the intensive care waiting-room glass as he sobbed, she could not think of a way to make any of it sound like part of the life they had both known up until then. And she could not bear to think of a different kind of life, a life where things went bad and fell apart all the time, in which people stepped over, trampled really, all the lines she had counted on to give order and shape to every day. She wondered how much of what she felt was her imagination. On the way to the Malones she stared into the sun, as though to burn up what was in her brain; she wondered if she had, as her grandfather Scanlan often said, “spun a bit of a yarn into a sweater.”
But when she saw the open front door of the Malone’s house, she knew that the one place she had counted on always to stay sane had gone crazy, too.
In the center of the hallway, where someone could trip over them and break a leg if they weren’t careful, were two pale blue Samsonite suitcases and a box of books.
Maggie peered into the box: the top two books were Wuthering Heights and something Maggie had never heard of called The Prophet. The suitcases smelled like new plastic, like Christmas morning, and had the gold initials HAM stamped on the combination locks. Anyone but Helen Malone would have faced ridicule about those initials, but she never even seemed to notice them. Debbie’s initials were DAM, of which she was rather proud. With all the rest she had to do, Mrs. Malone could not be bothered dreaming up middle names: all the girls got Ann, and all the boys Robert.
Maggie stood in the hallway for several minutes, alone, wondering whether she should go around and come in the back door as usual, when suddenly Mrs. Malone came running down the stairs. Her face looked bleached in the morning light, and she moved so quickly that her belly bounced and swayed separately from the rest of her body. She scowled at the sight of the suitcases. “The hell of it is,” she said, “that I bought her those damn suitcases for a graduation present. I should have bought her the desk