The wagon hits a rut and I accidentally whack my brother in the head with the umbrella. Thomas throws me a black look.
“Whoops.” I shrug.
I swear he’s purposely steering our old horse into every rut in the street.
“You know I was here yesterday,” he grumps.
“I know.”
“And the day before.”
“I know,” I say more forcefully.
I expected my brother to be angry. And I probably deserve more grief than he’s giving me, but I’m annoyed anyway, and I can’t keep it out of my tone.
“You’re not right in the head, Maggie Higgins. Do you know that?”
I tighten my grip on the umbrella. I’m not right in the head, and I do know it. But it’s not from lack of trying. Why doesn’t life ever give you anything for trying?
I can’t help envisioning my mother lying in her sick bed. What has life given her? And she’s done a heap more than try.
I sigh. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Where else would you be?” he scoffs.
Thomas Higgins. My personal undertaker . . . his words dragging me deep into the dirt. Where else, indeed. But though my body may be bumping around in this broken-down wagon, my head can’t seem to accept it. Do I tell him I’ve imagined a hundred other places to be? Do I tell him I always believed I was on my way to one of these places?
No.
Because then I’d have to admit I don’t even know where these places are, or why I want to head to them.
Becoming a doctor had always been the dream. And even if it had been more my father’s dream than my own, I’d been fine with his choice. Because doctor had really just been a word to stand in for the feeling of being or doing something important, which has sat in my stomach all my life. Which still sits in my stomach, even as Thomas makes the turn off Market Street.
But if I told my brother this . . . that I ache to be and do, I think Thomas Higgins’s head might explode all over the wet street.
He glances at me and then back at the road. “Pull yourself together, Maggie.”
Yes, my irritable undertaker, it is my head that’s exploding. It is my insides that won’t stop jangling around like a loose harness. It is my legs that are itching to leap from this wagon and run.
But like Thomas said . . . where would I go?