to run faster, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was happening in the tide.
I finally caught up, but only because Janis had come to a dead stop, letting out a howl that sent a shiver through me as I looked down on those sightless eyes, wide and blue, staring up at me.
Maggie.
Naked. Her hair matted with seaweed.
And, from the look of things…
Dead.
5
Maggie
It’s all over but the shouting.
My funeral depressed me. Not because I was the main event, but precisely because I wasn’t there. Not really. First there was the priest, who kept calling me Margaret. I guess that’s what it said on my birth certificate, though no one has ever called me that except my mother, and I hadn’t seen her for years. It was nice of her to come, though the way she stood huddled in the corner with two of my brothers, sobbing like an idiot, embarrassed me. But at least someone was crying. Outside of Zoe, which was pretty weird, since the girl barely even knew me. The other surprise was Sage, who I discovered was behind the big wreath of lilies by the coffin. Probably out of guilt.
Tom, of course, was the perfect host, though I hadn’t seen him shed a tear yet. But that was Tom. Onward and upward. Life goes on, etc., etc. I know I made some mistakes in my life. Some pretty damn big ones, too. But watching Tom greet people, dry-eyed, accommodating, I wondered if perhaps the biggest mistake of them all had been marrying him.
He didn’t even remember to put a rock ballad in the funeral program. I always loved a good rock ballad. Funerals are such dull affairs. I thought a little Queen might liven things up. Or even something more rousing, like Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.” Tom played that one for me on our third date. He’d taken me back to his place, and after he’d cued up the track, he gave me that look guys always get when they’re in the early throes of courtship—hungry, a bit gooey-eyed—and asked me if I was going to break his heart like Maggie May. Of course I fell for that type of doomed romantic talk—especially when it was set to music.
I should have realized then it would be Tom who’d break my heart first.
I guess after everything that happened between us, I shouldn’t have expected my husband to remember my funeral request. After all, it had been ten years since I’d made it. We’d just been married and, filled with the kind of paralyzing fear that the great big bubble I’d stepped into when I’d entered Tom’s world would burst, I had given him my last request. “You’re crazy to even think that,” he’d said, kissing my head, much like a father would a child. “You’re only twenty-nine.”
Well, now I’ve just barely cracked forty and I’m about to be buried. Who’s the crazy one now?
I wasn’t surprised when the police ruled my drowning accidental. What else was the medical examiner going to find beyond a woman who had had a little too much to drink and was skinny-dipping on a balmy June night? I knew I shouldn’t have taken the Valium. Now they’re blaming the whole thing on me.
I suppose I couldn’t really complain about the funeral. If there was one thing I could always count on Tom for, it was to throw a good party. In fact, it was one of the things in our marriage we did best together. We put on a good show. Though I was a little surprised when he chose oak for my coffin. Oak? Have I ever liked oak? Ten years and two houses of furniture later, you’d think he’d know I was a solid mahogany girl. But it just goes to show you how many years you can live with a person and not pay attention. It bothered me though. If nothing else, I’m all about the details.
It wasn’t that Tom and I didn’t have a good marriage. In fact, some would call it fairy-tale. I know my friend Amanda did, but then I had gotten the fairy tale that she was hoping for. Others, mostly Tom’s family and even some of the more snide in his circle, saw it as a classic case of Midlife Crisis Meets Gold Digger. Mostly because I was a decade younger than Tom. Those people really annoyed me. Gold Digger. I hadn’t even been interested in marriage when I met Tom. I had just started working for WQXY radio. It was my first job in my field of choice, though I had studied communications in college with some vague idea of doing something a bit more glorious than working for the accounts payable department, I had discovered I was good at what I did. I had a good head for numbers and had one of those filing systems so organized some might attribute it to mental illness. I was happy enough though. I was young and, mostly due to Amanda, who was in PR, I got to go to my pick of parties. I could give a shit about all those things that seemed to fuel Amanda—like marrying well and before thirty. Thirty seemed like light years away and marriage like one of those things you did when you started thinking about IRAs and 401Ks. And since I was barely supporting my half of the two-bedroom apartment Amanda and I shared on the West Side, I was nowhere near that mindset. But according to Amanda, that was exactly when you met your proverbial Mr. Right. When you weren’t looking.
I didn’t even feel like going out the night I met Tom. But Amanda insisted. She had gotten invites to some kind of fund-raiser. I had been dragged to enough of them by Amanda to know that they were boring as hell. Filled with the kind of people who identified themselves by what class they came out of Harvard or Yale. I usually went and entertained myself by making up identities as I went along. When I had too much to drink—and I drank at lot at these humdrum affairs—I was Maggie Germaine, reporter for Rolling Stone. Or Maggie Germaine, brain surgeon.
But the night I met Tom Landon, I didn’t care about impressing anyone. I was simply Maggie Germaine, the fifth child of an otherwise unremarkable family living on the South Shore of Long Island. Usually I never admitted to South Shore, except to give some vaguish impression that I lived somewhere near Southampton, the more desirable part of the South Shore. But the truth was, I grew up in Shirley, later restyled Mastic Beach, though the real estate values never came up to par with the kind of name that suggested cocktails and cabanas. Mastic Beach was more Budweiser and monster truck shows. To Tom, the only son of a North Carolina manufacturing family, Long Island was the legendary home of Howard Stern and the Shoreham nuclear power plant. It was bizarrely exotic in the way a seven hundred pound cat on the cover of the National Enquirer is. Though you don’t want to understand the forces that could bring such a thing into being, you can’t look away.
It seemed Tom couldn’t look away the night we met, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the Long Island upbringing I’d tossed in his face. But when I forked over my phone number, it was with the kind of blasé indifference born of having had this kind of conversation one too many times already.
Of course, it was just the kind of indifference that works like a charm, at least according to Amanda.
He took me to La Grenouille on our first date. I figured he was trying to impress, but the truth was, dining at places like La Grenouille was a way of life for Tom. Not so for me. My typical culinary experience in Manhattan included the All You Could Eat Ribs Night at Dallas BBQ. Which was probably why, over four courses filled with foods I had never heard of, much less considered, my indifference morphed into insecurity. I was suddenly very aware of the cheap rayon cling of the dress I wore, embarrassed that I could barely choose a wine and a bit overwhelmed by the understated elegance of it all. “Old Money,” was what Amanda had called Tom Landon. “Old man,” was what I had thought at first. Not so once I was sitting across that pretty table from him, surrounded by lush flowers, soft candlelight and simpering waiters with French accents. Tom brimmed with the kind of confidence I had not experienced in men up to that point. Maybe that’s what attracted me most to him. That and the fact that he opened up to me a world I had been shut out of for most of my life. He had everything a man could want. An Upper East Side palace, a garment industry empire.
