When they returned an hour later, Danny had joined Jeannie and Patrick at the table, but no one had eaten another bite.
“Well,” Bill told them. “She agreed not to press charges if you stay a hundred yards away from Sarah and Eliza at all times and if…and if…if you don’t drive.”
“Let her press charges then,” Patrick said. “She has no right to take Maury’s life away.”
“It will be her word against Maureen’s. If this gets into the papers…I told her you…I said you wouldn’t drive until next summer.”
“Daddy!” Maureen shouted. “That’s wrong!”
“It’s all wrong, but it’s better than you being examined by a court-appointed psychologist, Maureen! Maybe getting your license taken away! Kitt told me to my face, ‘That girl is promiscuous. That girl is dangerous. That girl shouldn’t be out alone.’ If she’s told me, she’s told others. When I went over there, she didn’t smell of booze. She was all dressed up in a pink skirt and blouse with her arm in a sling!”
“I’ll drive you around,” Danny said helplessly.
“That’s not the point,” Maureen told him. “It’s my car! I earned it! I love my car! I want to be like everyone else!” Maureen cried. But the downcast eyes around the table told her she had lost this battle. She scampered up the stairs. Danny got no answer when he knocked at her bedroom door. In the end, he went to buy his suit alone.
That night Danny’s father asked him into his den for a closed-door talk. Surrounded by Danny’s, Dave Jr.’s, and Dennis’s sports trophies, he laid down the law. This was enough. Danny was not going to forfeit his future for some foolish small-town scandal. If his feelings for the girl were strong, they would survive.
“Survive what?” Danny asked, terrified that his father had found a way to send him to military school or something.
His mother came into the room. She nodded as his father told him he was going to Sky, Montana, for the rest of second semester. He would live with his uncle, his father’s brother, who had two boys, one a year older than Danny, one a year younger. He’d work on his uncle and aunt’s ranch; and if he wanted to play baseball in the spring out there, he could play.
“What about Maureen?” Danny asked.
“She has plenty on her plate,” his mother said. “Kitt Flannery is saying terrible things about Maureen. Now, I’m not saying that they are true; but I’m not having you be part of a huge scandal, Danny. I’m not having our family made to look foolish. I agree with your father. It’s a break; that’s all. You’ve done your season. And if it’s real, it will last.”
“The semester is half over!” Danny said.
“Your uncle talked to a counselor in Sky. The credits will transfer back.”
His father told Danny he was leaving in three days. His mother had already started packing.
“This is ridiculous. It’s bogus and you know it,” Danny told both of them. They didn’t blink an eye.
The next night when he told Maureen, she began to cry and, of course, blamed herself. Exhausted, Danny tried to bolster her confidence. He suddenly felt as though he’d done nothing else for his whole life.
“Now I’ve lost my car and you, and everything,” she said. “People in town think I’m crazy and a slut…and practically everyone wants you to stop seeking me,” Maureen told him as they lay in the basement at Evan’s house. She sighed. “I mean they want you to stop seeing me. I’m so sick and tired of correcting myself. I’ve probably said twice the number of words I intended to ever say in my entire life.”
“I told them nothing would do that. But they want me to look at the college out there, which I do want to do. Or the college wants to look at me. In Montana. My uncle’s going to make sure I go over to look at Colorado at spring break. So it’s not all a loss.”
“Just for me,” Maureen said. “You’re not even coming back for spring break?”
“They say they can’t afford it,” Danny said murderously.
“You could drive,” Maureen said.
“But if I did, I’d have, like, two days here.”
“I know,” Maureen said, resigned.
“Well, at least you have your music, and you could get a job,” Danny suggested. “You have Molly and school.”
“You don’t even care!”
“I do,” Danny said, and kissed her nose and eyes. “It’s only three months till summer.”
But in fact, he was weary, tired of fighting his parents day and night over something he could not explain and they could not understand. It was so much worse since the underwear and TV show incidents. He was sick of gossip. He almost looked forward to being away from the constant tension, from Maureen’s fragility. He thought of riding his uncle’s horses and skiing his uncle’s hills, and it didn’t sound all bad. A break, that was all. Like his mom said. He didn’t think Maureen would go out on him. With a guilty gulp, he realized that he didn’t think anyone would ask her.
But when he tried to look at her with unfamiliar eyes, he saw that she was beautiful. She was desirable again, even if she was still too skinny. And if he could get past those things about her that bothered other people, so could another guy.
Ev, for one, said that once you knew Maureen, you didn’t even notice them anymore.
“I have something for you,” Maury said.
“What?”
“Music,” she said, handing him a CD.
“What’s this?”
“Music to your song, that you wrote back then. I got a mike for my computer. Or, I’m sorry, there’s a microphone in my computer.”
“My one song. I was going to be the new Vince Gill. You remember that?”
“Funny, huh? I didn’t remember. Didn’t. Mine. Mine. My own. My father, but I remembered this.”
All the way out to Montana on the plane, he listened to Maury’s CD, to her pure, high voice singing, “I won’t be the one who goes. You will. / Your hand will crush the sweetest rose. You will. / Your heart is restless and it shows, and everybody knows. / You will, you know you will.”
And Danny thought, This makes no sense.
parting
After the one-two punch of Kitt’s attack in the cemetery and the abrupt loss of Danny, Maury would gladly have spent the rest of the school year in bed.
As much as she wanted to deny it, Kitt’s words in the cemetery sounded a cruel, hollow gong of unwelcome truth. She knew that what Kitt said about her was only what other people thought.
Maureen would always be an object of pity and suspicion.
A weirdo.
On display.
The killer crip, who should have driven her own car and killed her own stupid self instead of her best friend.
Why would Danny’s parents want him to be with her?
Whose parents ever would?
If she got married, she’d forget to turn off the gas and blow up at her husband, or go off on him for getting the wrong kind of bagels. She’d done it to her mother! How could she be sure if she had a baby that she wouldn’t forget and leave it outside in the rain? Danny understood. No one else ever would.
Who knew how long he would be gone? What if he had to stay for the summer? How many girls would he meet—girls who didn’t need a cane and didn’t show up at school wearing one blue shoe and one black shoe? Sure, he had turned to her in the terrible days after Bridget died. But out there? With new people to meet who might think Minnesota was actually interesting because they’d never been there? Who wouldn’t start over?
But she soldiered her way through the days until spring break. “It’s like some horrible Romeo-and-Juliet thing,” Molly said one night when she and Britney dropped over to play the cheer squad’s new dance music for Maureen. A big competition was coming up, and Eddy had hopes that Taylor had improved enough as a tumbler that Bigelow could at least place in the top three. The girls were only trying to make her feel part of them. Maureen knew that, and clapped and smiled when they showed her pieces of the complex dance. It was torture, though.
She could still feel the dance moves in her legs, legs too watery and weak to obey her. “It’s not like you won’t wait for him. You totally love him. But why do the Carmodys have to be such idiots?”
“It’s not just him. We’re seventeen. We’re just kids,” Maureen said. “We thought it was love because we went through so much together. But I don’t know if it really was. And his parents obviously don’t want him to be around a…well, a handicapped girl.”
“You’re not handicapped!” Britney squeaked. “You’re only a little different! No one who didn’t know you could tell!”
“Same distance,” Maureen said.
“You mean, ‘same difference,’” Britney went on.
“See?” Maureen asked with a shrug.
“Danny doesn’t think like that. Danny thinks you’re a goddess,” Molly added.
“I’m so snot,” Maureen said, and burst out laughing despite herself. “I mean, I’m so sure. My words have been mixing up much…much…mix much again more…again since he’s been gone.”
“It’s so romantic,” Britney said. “You’re totally falling apart. He’s probably up on a mountaintop right now, on his horse, thinking of you.”
In fact, at that moment Danny was at the trail opening of the road to Wolf Face Mountain. But he was in the steamed-up cab of his cousin’s truck with Lindy Lassiter, a leggy, red-haired senior. In Sky, the whole senior class was only twice as big as one of the English classes back home. Bigelow was a small town. But there were at least fifteen kids in a class. In Sky, kids came from eight ranches and two streets of houses plus the apartment where the Carson kids lived over the grocery store, there were only fifty seniors. Danny, a junior, was flattered. A senior with guys running after her from all over the county, Lindy played basketball. She was fully as tall as Danny and could beat him when they went running. Her hair fell to her waist in natural corkscrews like some rock singer, making her as hot as any girl he’d ever seen anywhere, including the Twin Cities. She had a complete crush on him, too. They worked out every day, and he went to see her in the play-offs when Sky’s team won. They rode up to Grave Creek Ridge and hung out in a hunting cabin up there, drank beer, and danced to somebody’s million-year-old CD player. Lindy was as wild as the Montana wind. And she was eighteen, almost nineteen. He could do whatever he wanted.
In the coyote-wild darkness with Lindy—his shirt off and Lindy’s bra unhooked—it was hard to hold back. But Danny did. The thought of Maureen, so trusting, so completely his, held him back when he was with Lindy.
Until he could tell Maureen that they had to stop seeing each other—and he didn’t know if he would ever want to do that—he couldn’t hook up with anyone else.
They went out for two months. Eventually, Lindy sent him a note saying she was going to start seeing a guy Danny knew slightly, a senior who was going to Texas on a basketball ride. “Life’s short,” she wrote. “You’re one sexy guy, Dan. But I’m moving on, because I can tell when a guy doesn’t have his mind on me.”
Danny didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved.
When Maureen didn’t hear from Danny, she didn’t know if she’d been dumped or was being mourned.
She was being mourned.
Danny tried hard not to think about her. Everything was easier when he didn’t. Lindy had been a major distraction. He could have fun, goof around, stare at girls, flirt, play ball, and play cowboy. When he was alone at night in his bed, though, he remembered Maureen’s sweet, pale body on the night of the prom, and those few other times when they’d really been together. It made him sick to think of her with someone else, now that he was over thinking no one else would want her. Evan was right…. It wasn’t a turnoff if you knew her.
Maureen lay awake and tried to picture Danny’s face just before he kissed her. She thought she would go out of what little mind she had left.
Jeannie could see that the progress Maury made was withering. The pain of continued loss was too much.
“It’s like I am being punished for living,” Maureen told Jeannie.
Jeannie held Maury against her shoulder. “I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear. This is the price you pay for living, Maury. Bridget got away easily. I don’t mean that her parents did. But you went on living with the suffering and loss; and she went on to our Lord, where there are no problems and memories of grief. Life is much harder. You have to pray for the strength, because no one is going to give it to you on a plate.”
“I wish they would,” said Maury.
Jeannie didn’t answer. But she knew she had to get Maury out, back into the community so she could see that she wasn’t universally despised. She had to get her back into life without Danny’s arm to shield her. Jeannie and the rest of the O’Malleys weren’t about to give up Maureen’s progress to a depression. Without her, the O’Malleys held a family meeting when the boys were home from spring break.
It was Patrick who first drove Maureen to the community pool. Though she swam weekly against the current at the therapy pool, Maureen hadn’t been to the town pool, with its big roll-back top, since the summer before last. Patrick had to threaten to carry her into the building. The Bigelow swim team was practicing, and Maureen did not want them to see her.
“I am not walking out onto that deck with that cane,” Maureen told him. “I look like Queen Elizabeth. I’d rather crawl.”
“Then crawl,” he said. “You’re never going to build up that right leg unless you use it hard, Maury. I’m not saying you’ll be a ballerina. But you could lose that cane and just have a limp. And lots of people have a little limp.”
“I’m not going,” Maureen said. Patrick pulled open the passenger-side door before she could lock it and took hold of her wrist. Finally, he picked her up and brought her inside.
Maureen didn’t use her cane. Slowly, she all but slithered out onto the deck, step after tentative step. And when she was no more than a foot from the protective support of the pool ladder, she slipped and fell flat on her rear end. The glare she sent Patrick was tipped with a thousand poison arrows. He felt tears tickle his eyes as he looked away, determined, while Maury, in front of a dozen members of the boys’ swim team—one of whom had the class to actually snicker—slowly got up to her knees and slipped into the warm pool. It was all Patrick could do not to rush to her and pick her up. But he made her drag herself into the water and use the paddleboard for a full half hour that night, until she was exhausted.
Within a few weeks she was doing the breaststroke—crookedly, but with all her might—and by the end of April, the sidestroke.
Soon Maury had real muscles—maybe not the rugged muscles of cheerleading, but real muscles, visible muscles.
One night when Patrick had to pick up a few things at the grocery and had dropped her off at the pool, Maureen pulled herself out after her laps and met Miss Bliss, the chubby lunch lady she and Bridge had conned out of Girl Scout cookies so long ago.
Miss Bliss was just about to get into the pool.
“I work here nights now, Maureen,” Miss Bliss said. “I work in the back office. But a couple times a week, I come out here and do water aerobics to get rid of some of this fat.” She slapped her big thigh. “The first time I had to put on a bathing suit in front of Catherine Castellucci and some of my other neighbors, the lap swimmers, I wanted to die. But I had to, or die. You know, really die. Die young. Well, not young. But too young. And with a bad-looking body, too.”
Not understanding, Maureen smiled. “Did you lose weight?” she asked.
“Twenty-six pounds so far,” said Miss Bliss. “The thing is, I’ve been watching you, and here’s the thing, I thought I was brave. But you put me to shame.” She put her arms around Maureen and held her close. “Don’t think that there aren’t a lot of us in town just cheering for you.”
“Thank you,” Maureen said. “Miss Bliss, I feel like all everyone does is stare.”
“They stare because they can’t believe how much you can do. I p
romise. Not all of them are staring because they think you’re weird. And the ones who are, well, to heck with them, right?”
Maureen couldn’t really believe what Miss Bliss said, but she tried to.
Jeannie’s next task was to get Maureen a job.
What could it be?
Maureen worked hours each night on homework she once breezed through. All she had time for afterward was piano practice and a round of phone calls before she crawled into bed exhausted. The things that had come easily to her brought her to tears when she simply could not remember how to do them—because she could remember the feeling of knowing how to do them. All the adaptations in the world would never make Maureen the math student she had been. Nothing would ever let her hope to study it in college—if she ever got to college.
Jeannie and Bill talked it over.
“Why doesn’t she work at the country club on weekends?” Bill asked. “So many girls from the high school do.”
“She can’t stand that long, Bill. And she’d have them out of dinner plates after one sitting…wouldn’t she? We’ve replaced six sets of dishes since last year.”
Jeannie pondered.
Maureen needed something to do when she would otherwise be thinking about Danny. Or cheerleading. When she would be thinking about what was lost for now, or what was lost forever. Molly still came; but as spring days grew longer, she came less often. Maureen’s friends were going to be seniors next year. They were all taking their ACTs. Those who had their eyes on the world outside Bigelow were starting to think about what they would do when they got there.
Jeannie worried that Maureen might never have such a life. Her daughter would certainly live on her own. She wasn’t stupid. But could she go to college? Her memory had come as far as the rehab specialists believed that it would. Only with her tutor was she pulling Bs and Cs. Unless she found a specialized field, or gave up the love she had for math and science for art, design, or something else she could do with computers (because computers would function as her memory) she wouldn’t be able to hack it at UM or even the community college. Jeannie wanted her daughter to start focusing more on what was possible instead of dwelling on what was not.