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From the backseat of Kelli Montgomery’s real estate van, Maggie stretched out her aching legs and listened to the cadence of conversation between Kelli, Janine, and Maxine. They drove along the southern coast of Martha’s Vineyard as the December sunlight cascaded through the windows and danced across their cheeks. Maxine was wide-eyed with wonder over the story of Kelli and her recent sale of the Aquinnah Cliffside Overlook Hotel, an old-world hotel on the western edge of the island, which had been destroyed by a hurricane in 1943.
“But the weird thing is, my grandfather sold the place to the man my grandmother was married to,” Kelli explained as she drove them toward the fourth of six houses she planned to show off to Maxine that afternoon.
“Oh my! So when did your grandmother leave this other man?” Maxine asked excitedly.
“Around the same time,” Kelli affirmed. “But all this just came out a little while ago. Family secrets galore.”
“You divide your time between the real estate business and your boutique, don’t you?” Janine asked Kelli. “I just love that place.”
“To be honest with you, my daughter has taken over most of the boutique responsibilities,” Kelli continued. “My new boyfriend is the man behind the reconstruction of the Aquinnah Cliffside, and I find myself out on the construction site more often than not. It’s so exciting to see it all come together. It’s beyond my wildest dreams to dig into the past and build this new reality from the old world.”
Kelli parked the real estate van outside a moderate-sized mansion just a mile or so west of where Elsa had raised her children with her now-deceased husband, Aiden. Janine, Maxine, and Maggie stepped into the chilly light and followed Kelli up to the front door.
“This house just went on the market,” Kelli explained. “It’s three bedrooms, two bathrooms, with a picture-perfect view of the beach and access to the neighboring woods.”
“And not too far from us,” Janine added pointedly.
Maggie followed them through the marble-floored foyer into the living area with its bay window that glowed with a beautiful view of the Atlantic Ocean just beyond. The ocean had tamed since Maggie’s arrival; the waves lapped in a friendly manner over the sands.
“Three bedrooms seems a bit much, doesn’t it?” Maxine asked Janine as they headed for the kitchen.
“Who knows where life might lead you?” Janine pointed out. “You might want to receive guests here.”
Maxine chuckled, but not unkindly. “Janny, you’re the only person in my life these days.”
Janine blushed and opened a kitchen cabinet. “Lots of space for kitchen supplies.”
“Right. Because I’m always cooking, as you know,” Maxine teased.
“It is a lot of space,” Kelli offered, trying to be understanding of her client’s needs. “I have a number of smaller properties, of course.”
“Oh, this is simply wonderful to look at,” Maxine said hurriedly. “I’m just trying to figure out the next stages of my life. Considering renting out my place in Manhattan and trying out island life more full-time. It’s a huge leap, though.”
“There’s no rush with these kinds of things,” Kelli assured her. “If you don’t feel the pull toward a place, we can move on to the next one. Property purchases normally rise around springtime. I imagine this place will stay on the market until then.”
Maxine and Janine stood in front of the large bay window and gazed out across the stands. They discussed various ways to construct the backyard and whether or not it would be appropriate to put in a pool. Maggie couldn’t help but think that the house was perfectly stellar for a young family of three or four. How often had she told Rex they would have to find something different when they had their second child, as theirs was only a two-bedroom apartment? How many children had she planned for in this amorphous, non-future? Had she really pictured her and Rex as the parents of four, maybe five children? It seemed laughable now.
“What do you think, Mags?” This was Maxine, who flashed her a magazine-ready smile as she turned around. “Could you see me here?”
“Um. Yes?”
Maxine laughed good-naturedly. “It’s too big. I know that.” She turned to face Kelli and asked to move on to the next place. “I’m in no real rush. The place in downtown Edgartown is cozy enough for now. And you’re right. I want it to be perfect.”
They investigated two more less-than-perfect properties before Kelli dropped them back at the real estate office in Oak Bluffs. They piled again in Janine’s car as Maxine expressed the desire for a “small glass of wine.” They headed for an Edgartown Wine Bar and parked just outside as snow began to flutter around them.
Once inside, Janine ordered them a single bottle of Primitivo with three glasses. Maggie realized she hadn’t said a single word in over ten minutes. Maxine’s eyes found hers and glimmered with curiosity.
“How are you doing these days, Mags? How is that handsome husband of yours?”
“Just fine.” What did people expect her to say?
“You must have a packed social calendar in the city for the holidays,” Maxine continued. “I remember my mid-twenties well. It seemed that every day, I was on a quest to find the perfect outfit for the night’s cocktail party. It was exhausting, and I lived for it.”
“Remember that one party? We were maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven, and you spilled wine all over that woman’s dress?” Janine asked brightly.
“Oh gosh. She wasn’t just any woman. She was my date’s mother...” Maxine blushed at the memory. “She told me I would never outgrow my Brooklyn roots and informed her son that if he continued to see me, she would disown him.”
“Did he stop seeing you?” Janine exclaimed.
“I mean, formally, yes. He still popped up every once in a while...” Maxine added mischievously.
Maggie was more like her mother. She couldn’t understand the exhilarating nature of dating around. Alyssa was more like Maxine and Grandma Nancy in this way. She saw dating as this beautiful patchwork of different experiences. Maggie was a romantic. Maggie’s heart, even now, ached for only one man, Rex.
Each had a glass of wine before Janine grumbled that she had to make a pit stop at the Lodge to grab a few papers. “I have to go over some things tonight, unfortunately,” she sighed.
“Well, thank you for going around with me to look at these properties,” Maxine told her. “I appreciated the company from both of you.”
“You mind if we stop by the Lodge?” Janine asked Maggie, who’d very nearly faded out of the conversation entirely.
“No, I don’t mind at all,” Maggie recited, just a moment too late.
Maxine walked back to her downtown Edgartown apartment, gliding through the snow as though she walked through a dream. Maggie slid into the passenger seat of her mother’s car and snapped on her seatbelt.
“Is it really okay with you that Maxine stays on the island?” Maggie asked pointedly.
Janine turned up the radio. “You can deal with it however you want. I’ve found my own way.”
This shut Maggie up all the way to the Lodge. She recognized her inner sorrows had begun to manifest as sharp-edged remarks to others. This wasn’t her personality, more a marred version. Once at the Lodge, she stepped into the foyer to greet Mallory, who was about to depart for the day.
“Lucas wants to have another talk about getting back together,” Mallory grumbled inwardly.
Maggie had to bite her tongue not to tell her, don’t do it.
“What are you going to say?” Maggie asked.
“I’m going to tell him I’m still thinking about it. And also, that I’ve enjoyed this time apart. It’s given me space to consider my new life as a mother and what kind of mother I want to be. I certainly don’t want to be the mother I was when we lived together. All we did was fight. I was exhausted constantly. I had nothing to give Zachery. Now, especially with all of you around, I feel an understanding of love and companionship I’d forgotten when I was with Lucas.”
“Maybe that’s all you need right now,” Maggie breathed.
“Maybe.”
With Mallory gone, Maggie wandered through the halls of the Lodge, which flowed with beautiful and bright-faced women, each on a different day of their mental, emotional, and physical health journeys— and each armed with enough green smoothies to feed a small army. They spoke with what seemed to be enlightenment about their new discoveries about their personalities and tendencies and how they planned to “work on themselves” after leaving the Lodge. Maggie wanted to pick fun at them but found, instead, that she was jealous of them. Her insides were sour. She worried she would never find the light again.
Maggie strolled into the kitchen, where the chef greeted her warmly and gestured for the oven. “I’ve made cookies. If you wait around another four minutes, you can have one fresh from the oven.”
Maggie grinned sheepishly. “I imagine they’re nutritional and sugar-free?”
The chef nodded. “But you know I put my magic touch in them. You won’t notice a thing.”
The chef was correct. With the first bite, Maggie’s eyes closed as pleasure rolled across her taste buds. “You’ve done it again,” she breathed as the chef giggled with excitement. “Grab a few more before I sound the alarm. The minute these women catch wind of fresh cookies, they’ll be gone.”
Maggie grabbed two more, thanked the chef, and headed back out into the enormous dining hall, with its glowing windows. Dusk had fallen into darkness, and the sharp sliver of the moon glittered its light across the waves of Katama Bay. Only a few women remained in the dining area, chatting over juices or tea, some with clay masks plastered across their faces. All wore soft pink robes, the kind the Lodge gave you when you checked in.
Toward the far corner, a woman sat alone and gazed out the window at the waves beyond. She wore a pink robe and a pair of slippers and hovered a pen over a notebook. Her grey-blonde hair was styled simply, and she’d removed her makeup, which revealed a fresh and sweet face, one that looked to be in its mid-sixties. This made her a bit older than most of the other guests at the Lodge. Maggie wondered if this was why the woman kept her distance from the others. Was she embarrassed about her age? Did she just lack understanding of what to say?
Maggie stepped over to the woman. As she made her way closer, the woman sensed her and scrunched her face with confusion. She even turned her head around to look behind her, as though certain that Maggie was en route to someone else.
Maggie slipped a cookie onto a spare napkin and placed it before the woman. “I just wanted to make sure you got one before the others pounced on them,” she said simply.
The woman blinked up at her with confusion. Probably, she’d sat by herself on purpose— armor from a social reality she didn’t want. But after a pause, she lifted the cookie and took a small bite.
“Oh. Goodness.” The woman lifted her eyebrows. “The next thing you’ll tell me is it doesn’t have any sugar in it.”
“It doesn’t,” Maggie affirmed with a smile.
“Ridiculous,” the woman countered. “I need this recipe. It’s divine.”
“The chef has told me several times that she’ll never reveal her secrets.”
The woman lent her a soft smile as she positioned the rest of the cookie on the napkin, as though she wanted to savor it. The chef called to the other women in face masks that she had a fresh batch of cookies. Like hyenas, they scuttled to the source of food and grabbed them as Maggie and the woman before her shared a giggle.
“I take it you don’t know any of them?” Maggie asked.
“I keep to myself, I suppose,” the woman said. “My naturopath doctor says I have a whole lot of work to do. I’m trying to write some stuff down to make sense of my life.”
Maggie sensed such sorrow behind her words. She decided not to tell the woman that her mother was Janine Grimson Potter, her doctor. She didn’t want to complicate things.
“I’ve never made sense of anything,” Maggie replied simply.
“Yes, well. I suppose I didn’t have much of anything figured out at your age,” the woman told her with the smallest of smiles. After a strange pause, she leafed through her journal and drew out an old photograph, which featured a beautiful twenty-something woman who carried a small baby. Beside her, a truly handsome, twenty-something man had his arms around her, an act of protection. Their smiles were electric, without fear.
“I was around your age here, I think,” the woman told her.
“You’re so beautiful,” Maggie breathed.
The woman’s eyes watered. “It was a perfect moment in an otherwise imperfect life. Perhaps I should have given more thought to things back then. Perhaps I should have looked at the big picture. I don’t know.” A single tear fell, which she hurriedly wiped away.
Maggie’s heart shattered at the sight. Whatever had happened in this woman’s past, she had a hunch it wasn’t terribly happy. Had the husband left? Had the baby died? Maggie dropped her chin to her chest and exhaled all the air from her lungs.
And without fully comprehending why she did it, she found herself telling this stranger the truth.
“I just found out that I can’t have children. It’s all I’ve wanted since I can remember. And I don’t even know how to talk about it. I can’t even tell my husband.”
The woman’s shoulders fell forward with sorrow. She placed the photo back in her journal and reached for Maggie’s wrist, which she held tenderly. They held the silence of their joint pain for a long moment.
Finally, the woman spoke.
“All my life, I’ve run from pain. But it’s caught up to me, over and over again. It’s been the monster hiding under my bed.”
Maggie wondered if this woman could see how much Maggie wanted to run from her pain, too. Was it that apparent?
“Whatever this means to you, I hope you find the strength to stare it in the face,” the woman continued softly. “I hope you find a way to carry it with you without letting it destroy you. I hope you will not end up like me: a very lonely woman in the corner writing in her journal about her past regrets.”
“Maggie? You ready?”
Maggie glanced back to find her mother coming toward her with a file folder under her arm. She grinned broadly as her eyes found the stranger in the corner.
“Linda! I see you’ve met my daughter.”
Linda’s eyes widened as she shifted outward to face Janine. “She’s quite a remarkable woman. She just snuck me a cookie from the kitchen before the others got to them.”
Janine’s eyes shimmered with confusion, but her smile did not falter. “Oh gosh. Are those the chocolate avocado ones? I hope I’m not too late...”
“They’ve been pounced on, I’m afraid,” Maggie replied as she turned her eyes toward Linda’s. She hoped her expression translated just how much she wasn’t ready to tell her mother her truth. Somehow, Linda seemed to accept this in stride.
“Too bad. Well. I hope you have a nice rest tonight, Linda! It was so wonderful to meet you this morning,” Janine stated as she stepped back.
“Good night, Linda,” Maggie said softly as she joined her mother.
Once outside the Lodge, Janine positioned her file folder in the back seat and adjusted herself in the driver’s side. “That woman is so lonely, I think,” she commented with a heavy sigh. “I asked her about her life in the city, and she seemed to suggest that any kind of social life was a thing of her deep past. I can help her here and now, but two weeks from now? A month? I just imagine her on the streets of Manhattan, cold and alone. It breaks my heart.”
Maggie marveled at the weight of loneliness within Linda, a woman who carried around an old photograph from a bygone era as her final link to some sort of happiness.
“What kind of decisions lead you to that, do you think?” she asked her mother now.
“Oh, gosh. Life just weaves and winds, doesn’t it? It’s hard to say what led her here. It fills me with such gratefulness to know we have that big house of love back home.”