During the walk from the employee parking lot to the redbrick school building, Milo clung to Maggie’s waist like this was his first day of kindergarten, little hands tugging on her airy sleeves. But this was the first day of second grade, and never since the second day of kindergarten had Milo clung to anyone.
Unless he clung to Luz.
Whether he had was as unknowable to Maggie as her children themselves.
Dr. Ruby had offered the skeleton of an explanation, in the kitchen, in the summer.
“You’re telling me that what’s happened is some sort of … what, shared hallucination? It’s not a hallucination that has Hank carving words into his skin and Ana slicing her face open and my son, my seven-year-old, screaming that he hears—damn it.”
Maggie put her palms against her temples, pressing hard, trying to forget the way Milo’s eyes had glittered when he told her what sang him to sleep all summer.
“Milo hears what?” Dr. Ruby’s eyes were obscured by safety goggles and her face was blurred by those scars, but certainly she was frowning.
“Let’s go ahead and pretend it was just termites. If it’s a hallucination, it doesn’t matter what he told me, does it?”
Those lenses reflected the yellow of the opaque tent beyond the window, headlights in an otherwise dim kitchen. “But it wasn’t a hallucination.”
Maggie fell back against the counter. “All that matters is my kids need help. You’ve seen them. We just need help.”
“I have seen them. This is very real for them.”
“Then why are you asking us to call it a hallucination?”
“What has happened here is unexplainable. If you want to carry on with your lives, it’s best to put this experience in terms that are easier to process. A coping strategy. For them, and for you.”
“And what if we can’t cope with it?”
Dr. Ruby twisted painted lips. “What choice do you have?”
“Sprinkles.” Milo’s grip tightened, pulled Maggie back to the sunny crosswalk.
Soon the blare of his headphones was canned by the school foyer, and then the sound was lost in the bustling hallway. Kids with bobbing backpacks, the dazed eyes of the youngest and the flushed cheeks of the laughing fourth graders showing off their new clothes, cartoon lunch boxes.
Maggie breathed deep. This was her habitat.
Some teachers dreaded the end of summer vacation.
Maggie savored the free fall into the lilting rhythm of a new school year: the boomeranging between teaching and planning meetings and back to teaching and then hurried bathroom breaks and then missing lunches and teaching and juggling parents. All these things compounded, until Maggie thought she would crumble—
But always she could return to the classroom.
Always Maggie could sit down with students, and time and time again witness the moment they solved an equation or fixed a sentence or finished a drawing and realized they were capable; they were trying; they were people.
They helped Maggie realize the same about herself.
Every year she stepped into a classroom of the unknown and by the end wore the unknown like a cloak of tiny handprints.
She’d often heard people ramble about how they loved their own children but couldn’t love the children of strangers.
Maggie loved both, and she loved them painfully. And somehow, after all these years, the greatest strangers were still those three children who slept in her house and looked halfway like her.
Maggie waved at three former students and the principal, Peg Olsen, and prepared for the plunge—
Milo held her back.
“Milo, I have to go. You know where Mrs. Stuart’s room is?”
His grip tightened. The buzz of his music dug into her torso.
Two boys passed and their eyes became planets. Maggie was fluent in the language of their expressions: But he’s not a BABY, so why is he hugging his MOM?
I am not ashamed of my child. I am not.
Maggie ruffled Milo’s hair, careful not to knock the headphones askew.
Over the course of seven years, Maggie had watched this creature stretch from a mute toddler to an unfathomable boy with distinct unease. Milo would be the last Vasquez to experience a “first time at the dentist,” a “first Christmas,” a “first day of preschool.” But beyond all that, Milo was very … Milo.
Teaching aside, Maggie had never seen herself as motherly. In high school she was the type of girl who swore she’d never marry or “spawn children,” who knew she would travel the world by train until she died in a country in Europe, in a room with golden wallpaper. By then she’d have a tattoo of Sylvia Plath or Ophelia on her calf. No men would have treated her how her father had treated her mother.
When life went another way and Maggie woke up in her late thirties to find herself living alone on the edge of a pit with three half-grown children, she felt even more removed from other mothers. Those other mothers, who scrapbooked lost baby teeth, who kept umbilical cords as mementos, who forgot who their children were becoming in order to pine after who they’d been.
That high school girl was trapped inside Maggie, begging for gilded walls, demanding the tattoo needle. Maggie didn’t miss Donovan like she missed that girl.
Just as there were others inside Maggie, there were others inside Milo.
There was the Milo who taught himself to read and then chose to read only about suspension bridges for a year.
The Milo who learned baking techniques, then refused to bake. He’d whisk the air in empty mixing bowls, measure out ingredients only to pour them back into their bags.
The Milo who got in trouble with his kindergarten teacher, Mr. Howard, for drawing death in his notebook: kittens with x’s for eyes, dogs with their tongues out.
That was simply who Milo was that week, Maggie had understood, or the girl inside her had.
Mr. Howard hadn’t. He sat down with Maggie in the teachers’ lounge, gave her a hot beverage and a look of utmost concern. He asked how Milo was faring without a dad.
“Mr. Howard. Have you considered that Milo just likes drawing dead things?”
Maggie refused to mourn a living man. From the very start, she’d refused.
But after a week had passed without sight or sound of Donovan’s rattletrap on the blacktop, her children’s questions began to occupy even the crevices between tiles and mortar in the Vasquez home, the spaces between one breath and another.
Maggie answered honestly: “He’s gone back to his first family. When I met your dad, he already had a wife. They had kids, too, but after I finished school, he chose to live with us. It gave him nightmares.”
Maggie had heard him whisper the names of a stranger’s daughters in his sleep. He’d soaked the pillows with tears. The guilt Maggie felt on those nights grew bigger than all the rest of her. She wondered what those daughters looked like. Did they braid their hair, or leave it loose, or cut it short? Were they gentle, or did they bite like Ana? Were they passionate about cinematography?
Maggie had almost forgotten the stranger, reimagined her as a ghost. But the stranger’s daughters were ghosts that haunted.
“Basketball starts again in a month.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll get you to practice and back.”
“That’s not what Hank’s saying.” Ana’s teeth, hiding tears. “He means, ‘what about us?’ ”
“You’ve got me. And each other. It’ll be enough.”
“Will we get another turn with Dad?” Milo sounded so reasonable. “He promised to teach me to bike ride. When I’m seven. Big enough for Hank’s bike.”
“What, you think he’ll come back when he starts having nightmares about us?”
“Ana.” Maggie had almost laughed. “No. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
Hank vanished to the Moreno courts, duffel bag in tow. Ana buried herself in trading cards. Milo ignored Maggie’s embrace, counting the distance from four to seven on his fingertips.
“Milo, look—there’s Antonio!” Maggie pried herself free.
Milo muttered to himself, “I know, I know. Grow up, Milo. Be normal.” He did an about-face and disappeared in the crowd. Maggie cringed.
New arms appeared around her waist—a former student, a bear hug, a cry. “Ms. Vasquez! I missed you!”
“Thank you, Lillian.” Maggie held her hands up. Lillian knew when to let go.
Maggie wished Milo knew. She wished she did.
Buck up, Maggie. She adjusted her collar. Be normal.
For the first two hours, she was. Her class played icebreaker games to learn names and decorated name tags for their desks, just to be sure. They learned the morning routine—announcements, followed by the pledge, followed by warm-up writing. Malachai cried because he couldn’t remember how to tie his shoes, and Maggie bit her lip to keep from laughing when Amelia braided them for him instead. She dropped her students off at music class, watching them squeal at the sight of the woodblocks on the floor.
She forgot to check on Milo. It wasn’t intentional. It was the cost of normalcy.