When Jacob twitched his head to flick aside bangs that weren’t there anymore, that was the moment Maggie started to believe she might actually be in love. She’d been crushing on him since the summer, during which they had both worked as lifeguards, and by the start of the school year he had begun a bashful courtship. Four months was a long time to wait for an official title—compared against their peers, anyway—but Maggie knew Jacob was holding out for some perfect occasion. He had insisted, when their summer friendship became a nascent relationship, on proper dates—picnics, movies, long drives—and he always both picked her up and dropped her off. No lounging and playing video games in his living room; she hadn’t even been to his house yet. Maggie’s friends, mostly bookish types whose closest male acquaintances were horses, were of course jealous of this incongruously old-fashioned romance, and while she genuinely took no pleasure in their envy, she was thrilled to be, in a sense, the object of her own. The next step in the relationship was obviously imminent, and with Christmas approaching, it seemed likely she would enter the new year with her first boyfriend at the advanced age of seventeen.
“It’s too short,” he told her, “I feel like Pee Wee Herman.”
Jacob fiddled with his fresh haircut, still compressed from the beanie he’d just removed. It was indeed a little short for her taste, but Maggie didn’t mind. Seeing him without his trademark shag, which she had found extremely sexy, registered as a new level of intimacy. Without the cover of his hair, he looked younger, more vulnerable, and yes, a little less attractive. Was it love that she felt creeping into the space that simple, fluttering attraction had previously ruled? Across the pool during those slow July days, she had found him inaccessible; magnetic, yes, but also intimidating. As they had gotten to know each other, however, she had begun to see hints of a guileless, chivalrous streak. He had covered her at work and walked her to her car daily, even when she had tested him with the invention of a fake boyfriend. Maggie had assumed that in life she’d have to choose between boys with sweeping bangs and sturdy shoulders and boys who would treat her well, but Jacob had proved an exception.
His new, slightly neutered hairstyle illustrated a more private facet of him, no less genuine, just as Maggie’s bare, swollen face had of her when she was fighting off a weeklong bug and finally permitted Jacob to visit. This was the hair of a middle school boy on picture day, which he must have been, once. She was delighted at the thought. On his perch at the pool, he had looked almost like a man, and Maggie knew that if they had lived in earlier times, he would have been called one. But even men had baby photos, had childhood bedrooms, and she wanted to see his. She knew that she—possibly more than anyone—had access to the secret surfaces of Jacob, and she wanted to uncover them all. After all, what was loving beyond a dedication to knowing?
“It’s cute,” she said, reaching up and mussing it further, careful not to distract him from the road. “Anyway, hair grows fast.”
“I hope so. It was ten bucks at Supercuts; I guess you get what you pay for.”
He tossed his imaginary hair unconsciously to the side again and Maggie smiled. Jacob had been tossing his bangs out of his face every minute, give or take a few seconds, for as long as she’d known him. The younger girls at the pool had watched for these casual flicks of the head and tittered as a group when they spotted one. Now, in the absence of hair, it continued, a pointless and vestigial quirk. As they talked, Maggie’s anticipation of the twitch would gather steadily until finally, subtly, Jacob would toss clear his phantom wisps, and Maggie would feel a private pang of fondness.
“What?” Jacob asked her, looking over suspiciously after one such pang overtook her and left her unable to suppress a giggle.
“Just the snow,” she lied, benignly. “It’s perfect. Today looks like a painting.” This, at least, was true. The sprawling lawns they drove between were almost entirely coated now, errant blades of dead and dying grass piercing the cover like tiny Excaliburs, their shadows elongated by the setting sun. The houses of Old Lake, spaced widely and separated by forest, began to light up as they passed, as if in coordination, spilling window warmth and dim Christmas colors onto the fading purple of the sunset snow.
They detoured to roll by the old mill house before dark, iced like a gingerbread sculpture and redolent of historical postcards, then crossed the invisible border that separated Maggie’s township from Jacob’s. The wipers made easy work of the flurries, which glided naturally from the windshield as the car went. Through the trees, among which twilight was given a head start, Maggie spotted the last of the true sunlight caught on the surface of a lake in the woods. There were, enigmatically, no lakes in Old Lake, only a scattering of ponds. This body, a proper lake, belonged to Early township and, as her dad had explained many times while driving her to the elementary school in Early, had been formed when the giant chunk of ice that had dug out the space had finally melted. Depth, he had explained, was the difference between a lake and a pond—not surface area, as most people assumed. Maggie had asked him if this meant their backyard well was technically a lake, which had made him pause and consider for a moment.
“It could be argued,” he had granted, and Maggie had loved feeling she’d stumped her dad.
The momentary silence in the car made Jacob uncomfortable, as silence usually did, so he dispersed it.
“My dad’s making mac and cheese. Did I tell you that already?”
“Only about seven frickin’ times,” Maggie teased. While Jacob’s awkwardness was an inner layer, belied by his relaxed exterior, his company made Maggie feel the perfect inverse—like she had been concealing a latent extroversion, unknowingly, all this time. She was aware that she appeared uptight to others. Her piano teacher, a man with a ponytail who ran a small recording studio, had taken in her cardigan and meticulous plait and joked that anyone watching would assume she was the piano instructor. Maggie had lived naturally and comfortably within the expectations held for girls of her type, and for years had found no unhappiness in their confines. Realizing she had come into the affections of the charismatic Jacob, though, had made her feel like maybe she could be on the back of a motorcycle someday, and in his moments of anxiousness or sweet, boyish clumsiness, she thought she might even like to try the front.
“Welp…no changes. In the menu,” Jacob informed her, drumming his hands on the steering wheel.
“Good,” she assured him, “I’ve put in six months for this mac and cheese. Would have lost my shit.”
They arrived at Jacob’s house in the earliest minutes of dark.
“Mom, Dad, we’re here!” Jacob called, pulling off his jacket and tossing his hat. “Unchained Melody” played on the radio in what turned out to be the kitchen. Maggie peered inside and saw a woman, presumably Mrs. Lowery, chopping a carrot beside a pile of other salad fixings. Her husband, directly behind her, enclosed her hands in his own, playfully guiding them, as if teaching his wife of however many years how to slice a vegetable. Maggie could envision clearly his reaction when the song had come on, embracing his wife in an imitation of Patrick Swayze, the silly pageantry suffused with genuine love. Maybe, she thought, it all looks like pageantry to people outside of your love. Jacob had surprised her with a red rose one night, bought from a local farm stand, and the pure intention—and complete unpretentiousness—behind the gesture had melted her. When Jacob led Maggie in, the adults separated, laughing together.
“Maggie! So nice to meet you!” Jacob’s mother gushed, dropping the piece of carrot she was holding, “Jacob’s—”
“—told us so much about you!” Mr. Lowery finished, as his wife went after her fumble.
“Oh, good things I hope!” replied Maggie, playing her part and enjoying it. The script of the meeting was comforting to her; this was how it went in movies. She was in Jacob’s world, after all; was it any surprise to find it charming for—and not despite—its cliches? That his parents chopped vegetables together and finished each other’s sentences made perfect sense to her.
The dining room was cozy, decorated in an endearingly bizarre rooster motif. The mac and cheese was legendary, as Jacob had promised. (“It’s the roux,” his father had confided.) Their conversation never dipped into awkwardness and Maggie found, incredibly, that she was having as nice a time meeting her incipient boyfriend’s parents as she did alone with him.
◆
It was still snowing, gently, when the meal was over. After a warning from Jake’s parents to drive carefully on the powdery roads, the couple was back on the road to Old Lake, this time returning Maggie home. Full of comfort food and unbelievably cozy in the steady blast of heat from the dashboard, Maggie turned on the radio and tuned it through static and tiny leaps of signal.
“Wait go back go back!” Jacob demanded, as Maggie passed over a muted guitar beat that sounded almost like morse code.
She obliged, backtracked, and recognized the Scottish harmonies of The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be.” Jacob sang along in a valiant attempt at the accent.
“When I come home, well I know I’m gonna be
I’m gonna be the man who comes back home to you.
And if I grow old, well I know I’m gonna be
I’m gonna be the man who’s growin old with you.”
Maggie bobbed her head aggressively, tugging loose her hair and whipping it around, and joined in for the chorus, which she knew.
“And I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door.”
Jacob’s exaggerated brogue turned the word “five” into “fave,” ”thousand” into “though send.”
When the final, sustained organ chord faded into a commercial block, Maggie reached over to the volume knob and, through Jacob’s window, noticed again the glimmering lake set back in the forest. It was the light from the moon, now, and some from the car that dappled and revealed its hidden plane, which had gathered a camouflage pattern of powder in places.
“Hey do you mind if we pull over for a sec?” she asked, tapping Jacob’s shoulder. “I think the lake in there’s frozen and I bet it’s gorgeous right now.”
Jacob shrugged, ticked on his blinker—a purely symbolic gesture on the empty road—and pulled the car onto the shoulder. The sound of Maggie swinging the car door shut rang into the silent landscape, followed after a moment by Jacob’s. A bright yellow halo appeared on the ground ahead, and she knew he had brought the flashlight from his glove compartment. It wasn’t necessary, though; the moon hung in a cloudless fixture and the snow around them distributed its glow, dimly lighting their path.
They passed through the strip of woods at the roadside, leaving deep footprints as they went, and after a hundred feet or so were at the edge of the lake. It was frozen, as Maggie had expected, and startlingly bright. The absence of tree cover left a wide mirror for the cold moonlight, which diffused among the flurries in the expanse above and lit the entire scene like a football stadium.
In the lake’s center, about three times the distance between the road and the water, Maggie spotted a small island, roughly the size of her own house. Its ivory edges sank into the frozen surface around it like bloodless gums. An assortment of winter bare trees lined these edges, the tallest of which was a gnarled willow, bowed almost double over the lake. It had retained its broomlike fibers and many of the longer ones, which in warmer days dipped peacefully into the water, had been trapped there by the freeze.
Jacob swept the island with his flashlight, jaundicing the trees and projecting harsh shadows behind them. Something glittered on the ground near its center, which was otherwise darkened by the sentinel growth. He passed the light back again and there was a flash, dazzling, like high beams off the iridescent coating of a road sign. Was there a sign out there on the island that had fallen flat? During the summer, people made rope swings out of stolen fire hoses, which often bore reflective strips, tying them to branches over the deeper bends of the Succasunna river. You could see them flicker in the trees, sometimes, if you drove by one at night. Had someone rowed out on this lake and left one there?
“Weird,” said Jacob, bouncing lightly on his knees in the cold, “but it is pretty.”
Maggie approached the edge of the lake, assessed the cloudy mantle of ice, tested it with her booted foot, then added the rest of her weight.
“We could go out there!” she hissed, excitedly, “It’s frozen solid!” She was feeling like Motorcycle Maggie. Jacob hummed a flat, skeptical note.
“It’s frozen at the edge, you don’t know if it’s fully frozen in the middle yet. Also it’s like ten now. If I get you home any later it’s gonna be awkward with your parents.”
Maggie chanced another step, and then another, almost unconsciously. The island hung, still, in the center of the glacial lake, which she knew from her dad was deep enough that sunlight never reached its lowest depths. It didn’t make sense to her, from the story of how it had formed, that there would be an island in the center.
“Mags,” came Jacob’s voice from behind, and she believed she could feel it passing her, sweeping along the ice to catch in the trees huddled at the center around their shadowy secret. She felt his hand swat the back pocket of her jeans and she came out of her thoughts. “Come on, we gotta go. We’ll come back sometime.” She looked back to see that he had reached out as far as his arm would go, choosing not to set foot on even the shallowest part of the ice. Reluctantly, she began to withdraw her paces, and then realized, from the tension in his stance, that Jacob was worried for her, not himself. It wasn’t cowardice that kept him back, but an unwillingness to endanger her by adding his weight to hers, which might make the load unbearable.
She returned to the bank, crunching over snow and dead plant matter, looked up into his face, and kissed him. It was cold enough outside to numb against the subtle smells of the woods, but pressed against Jacob with her eyes shut, she could make out the whispered scent of his skin, which had become too familiar to describe in comparisons—it did not lead the mind to other places, was instead a place to which other things led. Home, she reminded herself, was what that was. Her kiss traced the wind-chilled cool of his outer lip over and down as it faded to soft, wine dark warmth—the tender boundary between his outside and his inside. For the length of the kiss, as with all truly good kisses, it seemed the surfaces of hers that touched him were all of her that existed. When they parted, she was back in her body, a little dizzy. She held in a deep breath, then they both laughed, fogging the air between them for a moment. The two made their way back to the car and held hands over the gearshift for the rest of the drive, letting the radio choose their soundtrack.
◆
“I’m ho-oooome,” Maggie called melodically into her house as she shut the door behind her. She stepped out of her boots and kicked them aside.
“Hello-oooo,” her mother called back from somewhere upstairs. Maggie ascended the steps, which creaked as she went. The house was old, very old in fact, and the flexing grunts of the hundred year old wood were the voice of home to her. When she reached the upstairs landing, she tiptoed lightly, as if once again assaying the strength of an ice sheet, and then took an extra long step.There was a particularly noisy floorboard just outside her brother Maury’s room, hidden below the carpet, and although the four-year-old slept soundly through all sorts of household chatter, the bark of that floorboard always jerked him awake in helpless terror.
Her mother poked her head into the hallway from the laundry room. “How was dinner?”
“Really good!” Maggie chirped, then crossed to her parents bedroom and leaned in to greet her dad.
“Hey, daddy. The glacier lake in Early is frozen.” She offered this news to impress, like a spotless report card—of which, incidentally, she had plenty. She knew her dad was pleased when she showed interest in his interests, which is how many of them became her own.
“Hot dog!” he responded, looking up from the book he was reading in bed. It was one of the standard exclamations, sharing a roster with ‘dagnamit!’ and ‘boy howdy!’ that he had adopted from the Westerns he enjoyed. “Maybe it’ll freeze up completely and roll out of there,” he joked. Maggie gave a sweet and patently girlish laugh. She bade her parents both goodnight and decided, uncharacteristically, to skip brushing her teeth. She knew it was silly, was pageantry even, but she wanted that kiss to stay on her as she lay in bed. On the way to her own bedroom, she peeked quietly into Maury’s. He was deeply asleep in his cuffed, lizard-patterned pajama set, impossibly small thumb in his mouth, shining with a modest portion of drool. His soft breath rose and fell, shifting the pattern of his quilt beneath the shadow of the window grilles. His wispy blonde hair shone in the moonlight, angelic, and Maggie felt a swell of love for her little brother. She closed the door carefully and stepped safely over the Loud Spot, then into her room.
Lights off and shades drawn, Maggie struggled to find sleep. The fervid beam of her dad’s outdoor “smart” light, triggered by some trash digging animal or wandering deer, kept winking through the cracks in the blinds and directly into her eyes. This puzzled Maggie, because the shed, on which the lamp was mounted, wasn’t visible from her room. Finally driven to the window in frustration, she found the source of the problem: the intermittent strobes were glancing off the roof of her own silver car, which was deflecting them into her view. After several failed attempts to cluster the blinds strategically, she gave it up and decided to move the car.
She made it out to the driveway soundlessly and found that the snow had stopped. She slid into the car and started it up. Her parents’ bedroom overlooked the back yard, so there was little worry of rousing them. Maggie shifted the vehicle backward by exactly its own length, primly, as if moving a chess piece, and parked it, leaving the engine running. She leaned back in the seat, lulled by the hum and the vibration, and by the slow heating of the air, feeling the acres of mute woodland around her. The night was still and expansive and the car held her in it until, hardly aware she was making a decision at all, she found herself backing down the length of the driveway. When she reached the end, she cut left, straightened out, and began to drive westward on the county road.
Margaret Tierney, in her white pajamas and black boots, hair discharged from its daytime braid, drove the fifteen minutes to the Old Lake/Early border like she was padding down to the kitchen for a glass of water. It did not feel odd to her to leave her house in the middle of the night, nor did she worry that her parents might awaken and somehow notice her car missing. She reached the spot where the snow on the left shoulder was still flattened in two arcs by Jacob’s tires and pulled off onto the opposite side. There was no flashlight in her car, but she didn’t need one; it was still uncannily bright out and the lake stood out between the trees more clearly than ever. Again, the frigid air petrified the delicate membranes of her sinuses and she smelled nothing after the lurid pine of the car’s air freshener. She passed through the layer of forest that separated her from her destination, aiming for the footprints she had left hours before, and paused when she finally reached the shoreline.
The air was now motionless, absent the snowfall, and the scene ahead was almost lunar, a blinding crater under pinprick stars. Like the moon, the ice borrowed its shine and gave no warmth. To Maggie, it appeared even more solid now, stronger. She noticed pine needles, oak and beech leaves suspended in its thickness. She stepped out, leaned forward on her right foot, and twisted it left and right to see how much friction it would give. It was about as she had expected—not treacherous but she would have to shift her weight mindfully, which she did then as she began to walk out onto the lake. She passed miniature dunes of snow, swept into shapes by the wind with strange intention. As the shallows she walked over became depths, the ice became darker, less opaque. The glossy blackness was now marbled with diaphanous, turquoise fault lines like roads on an atlas, their edges studded with still bubbles. In the midnight silence of the world, under the invisible tide of air, the lake thrummed like rushing blood between the ears of the forest.
The island waited ahead. The snow dusting its barren canopy made it look as if it had risen up through the crust of the lake, catching white matter in its branches and bushes, the bent willow unable to pull free the last of its dangling hairs. Its center remained in shadow—that is until it happened again, as if a crystal chandelier sat glinting in the darkness within the copse of trees, or a castaway, signaling her presence with a shard of mirror at the hope of passing ships.
As Maggie’s ears grew familiar with the low static hum of her surroundings, they focused instead on the delicate scrape of her footsteps and the space between them. To this sound, she relaxed into meditation and her unfocused mind began to call up slices of memory indiscriminately: a hotel she had once stayed at with an indoor amusement park…contained within a geodesic dome? A laundromat television playing a medical drama. The smell and roughness of burlap during a Christmas pageant. These were offered like cards in a Jukebox, inviting her to choose one to be pulled from the hidden wheel of records. She was jolted back into the present by a new sound, and by a single, gargantuan pulse felt through the soles of her boots. It was a suffocated, prehistoric moan, sensed distantly by every hair on her body, every bristle of the surrounding pines. She halted, immobilized with terror, and had to remind herself that she had heard such a sound before, that the lake was not preparing to swallow her. Maggie had learned from her dad on an ice fishing trip that large bodies of frozen water were never still, were in constant negotiation between two states. What she had felt and heard was a millimetric skirmish at unfathomable pressures, the momentary unrest of sightless waters transmuting underfoot.
Vivid with adrenaline, Maggie resumed her pace. As she drew halfway to the island’s rim, senses newly sharpened, she thought she could make out a sound with each discrete, luminous burst in the shadows ahead. The effect she heard—imagined?—wasn’t metallic, as it would be in a movie, a soft swipe across a cymbal. Nor was it the fine tinkling of wind chimes or fey stirring of sleigh bells. It was the pizzicato note of a rubber band being plucked, each time a band with a different length, thickness, or tension. When she paused, there was no change in her perspective to set the bright surface sparkling, and she wondered if there had been any sound at all. She closed her eyes with the goal of isolating her stimuli, took a few more steps, and heard only her footfalls; even the hoarse breath of the lake seemed dampened. When she opened them again, still moving forward, the lights and her impression of strange music resumed at once.
At twenty feet away, she was sure the muted twangs were real, were not misheard harmonics from some far off, natural source. They were coming from, or triggered by, the twinkling island ahead, and there was something else: they came more rapidly, along with the flickering, as her separation from the island waned. Ten feet away she could still not discern their origin, but the scattered sharps and flats came in clusters of five or six per stride, so that she imagined she was pushing forward through thickets of out-of-tune tune violin strings, each step a messy strum. She found unbearable the slow palpitation of their response, the pause while she balanced carefully, the staccato rush as she moved forward, and so she left her caution and began to move quickly as the mystery increased in its rhythmless rhythm, flashing in fits like paparazzi bulbs.
In the final three feet at the margin of the island, she thought she could feel the resistance of these imaginary bands, could feel them resonating, snapping with her effort like strong but unseeable strands of spider silk to the random arpeggios of the elastic song, each coinciding with an erratic glint in the dark. Maggie stepped, finally, onto the frozen bank, and she was released. The air was abruptly void of sound, but for the faint gasp of the crisp earth beneath her foot. She looked back to the shore and it seemed dreamily distant. The island ahead was lucid, its outlines cut deep into reality.
She pressed through the fence of dead growth into a dim clearing and came immediately upon the source of the gleaming light in a shallow basin ahead. A large network of pools and puddles, so clear that reflections were all that betrayed their existence, had frozen between the intersecting roots of the surrounding trees. They were perfect mirrors, like the still lagoons in underground caves. They looked, Maggie thought, like frozen air, or whatever replaces air in the blackness of space, trapping the stars like bubbles. The smallest of them were little more than footprints; the largest could have contained Maggie herself, lying in a fetal curl. Nested together unmoving, all perfectly level, they made the appearance of a miniature Pangaea, a swimming pool sized supercontinent in the slow process of separating. The moment she was clear of the brush, Maggie was seized by a spasm of nausea. She hunched over, clenching her middle until it faded to a tolerable gut heaviness. The feeling crested whenever she looked directly into the silvery clarity of the pools, so she withheld her focus. She moved carefully around the edge of the complex, balancing on roots and steadying herself on the trunks they supported. The moonlight that leapt between the pools made her cheekbones stand out white in the lower periphery of her sight, and a small voice inside her—unheeded in what was now almost a trance—began to warn with an animal intuition that she should not be where she now was.
Circumscribing the basin and its cluster of root ponds, she realized, suddenly, that she was hot, had in fact been sweating for an undetermined amount of time in her thin white pajamas on this frozen island. She remembered hearing once that the late stages of hypothermia felt like heat and began to panic. What had she been thinking? How long had it been since she was adjusting her blinds in her bedroom, miles away? Why had she thought this was safe? More alarming still: from which direction had she come to the island? She had not even thought to keep track of the spot where she had boarded the lake, and all was dark in comparison to the lake and the sky. If she was truly lost, it would take an hour or more to walk its perimeter in the freezing cold. She searched along the ring of the faraway shore, and in her delirium was met with the unnerving impression that it was drawing itself to keep just ahead of her scanning eyes, then relaxing out of existence, out of form, as she moved on. Maggie hugged the stooped willow, the nearest tree, to steady herself, and remembered that its distinct figure had been on the left side of the island as she approached. Directed by this revelation, she squinted at the horizon to her left and thought she could make out the twin reflectors that flanked her car’s trunk, although their proximity to each other suggested they were farther from her than made sense. She anchored herself to the reflectors and started toward them. As she did so, the heel of her boot slid down the side of the willow’s root. She lost her balance, stumbled, and took several steps backward to regain it. The last of these steps landed squarely on the glassy pane of a pool the size of a dinner plate. It crunched inward, wafer-thin, onto nothing, and instantly the air around Maggie was thick with dread.
She felt another heaving pulse, just like the grind and slip of the underwater ice, but this time it was inside of her, inside her skull. Black nimbuses seared her vision, radiating from its edges, as sometimes happens when fluid rushes too quickly from the head, and she doubled over once more, echoing the posture of the weeping willow, her hair dangling into the snow. When she was able to see clearly again, she started off in the direction of the car, hopping over bushes and skidding as she went, sliding off the land and onto the ice. She fell over and over on the cold stone of the lake, which had been so radiant in the view from the road, but did not slow down. The lake made no sound; the wind made no sound. Only her sharp breathing and the rake of her feet across the ice. When she reached land, she slowed a little, but did not look back. Her car was waiting for her and she collapsed into the seat with the urgency of a diver surfacing for air. She slammed the door shut, started the engine, and—after a moment’s disorientation—performed the hasty U-turn that would point her home.
As she sped back into Old Lake, Maggie fought to close her frigid fingers into a grip on the wheel. A glance at the clock told her she had left her home just over an hour ago. By the time she approached her driveway, she had regained enough sense to turn off her headlights and creep slowly into her space, although she didn’t think to park shy of it to prevent the issue with the shed light. This, it turned out, was of no consequence. Once up the stairs, over Maury’s Loud Spot, and inside her bed, she found the darkness of her space was absolute.
◆
Maggie woke once in the night, from a dream about a pool under a glass dome. The dome had caved in, and she snapped awake with a petrified surety that falling glass had amputated a limb she could still feel. When she was satisfied, in her bleariness, that no part of her had been sliced away, she sank back into sleep, and the remains of the dream dwindled and disappeared.
◆
Well after sunrise, now a winter break Sunday, Maggie was greeted with a fresh nuisance from the window. A bird with a call like a shopping mall security alarm was perched on the snowy planter box just outside. It was a little nuthatch, one of several to whom she had started feeding sunflower seeds, and who had learned to rely on her for a snack. She had a bag of the seeds, unsalted, in her desk drawer for this purpose. It was a ritual she looked forward to, fulfilling a request made in birdsong like a cartoon princess, but this morning Maggie was not in the mood. Exhausted and sore from the night’s events, she flared with irritation at the deafening ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack of the nuthatch peering at her dumbly through the glass. She waved her hand in dismissal and turned away from it on her bed. As she did, her duvet and pajamas brushed over her skin, and the sensation startled her. She pulled up a sleeve and examined the flesh of her arm. It wasn’t pink or peeling, was in fact paler than usual, but it felt raw in some way. She slid a finger along the crook of her elbow, experimentally, and pulled it back quickly, finding the heat of her finger disquieting.
“Ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack!”
“Buzz off!” Maggie yelled, flinging an extra pillow at the window, which sent the bird flying. She’d had enough of nature for the time being. She picked up her phone, which had slept under the pillow that now lay slumped across the room, and saw she had a text from Jacob:
when I wake up. well you know I’m gonna be I’m gonna be the man who wakes up next to youuu
Her first reaction, to notice the mistake in his transcription of the song, was funny to her, so she expressed it:
I’m pretty sure it’s WELL I KNOW, not WELL YOU KNOW.
An icon jittered, indicating that Jacob was typing, and in a moment he had responded.
whoops
well it’s been stuck in my head since last night
my parents loved you btw
obviously
and that lake was really beautiful. like you.
The lake. Maggie’s memory of her walk out on the ice, of the island and its shimmering, lobelike pools, gathered and became solid in her groggy brain. It wasn’t a lake, she thought, it was a mountain. It was a strange thought, a nonsense thought, but she couldn’t avoid it. She tried to remember how it had looked when Jacob had pulled over for her—the spectacle, the enigma, the invitation of it. She could recite now the thoughts she’d had, but she couldn’t conjure the feelings. It was difficult, even, to remember the textures of her midnight excursion. Again, she remembered the beats, could retell the aberrations she had experienced, but they were hollow memories.
Her phone dinged again; Jacob was still going.
im free in a few hours if you want to go out?
Maggie considered, She wasn’t feeling well, mentally or physically, but Jacob’s company always buoyed her.
My folks are out with my brother if you want to come here.
Jacob replied, after a moment.
let’s go out and do something! still snow everywhere
Maggie made a frustrated sort of grunt. She wanted to stay inside, and she felt she had been clear about that in her invitation. She typed back:
I need to wrap my parents’ presents while they’re gone. Do you want to help or not?
Jacob told her he’d be over that afternoon. Still in bed, Maggie cycled through several well-worn shows that normally served to comfort her, but she had no appetite for them today, no patience to hear the actors grinding through jokes she had already memorized. One character, known for making frequent eye contact with the camera, actually drove her to snap shut her laptop after one too many cheeky glances. Her head was throbbing and she decided she shouldn’t be staring at a screen anyway. She pulled off the covers, stood up, and sat down again; she had risen too quickly. The dizziness and rumbling passed in a few seconds and she was on her feet again, only to meet a more complicated hurdle: the space of her room felt incorrect. Not in any specific or discernible way, just—incorrect. Maggie, far from a competent artist, had experienced this feeling on the few occasions when she had tried to draw out an image from her mind’s eye. It was not what it was supposed to be, but no changes she could make brought it any closer to the image in her head. She had, by this stunted process, produced a number of unicorns and horses with alarming proportions before giving up on portraiture. Now, like the length of a muzzle or the angle of a joint, the location of her bedroom window seemed wrong, but nowhere else she could imagine it felt more correct. No “hotter” or “colder.”
Stupid bird gave me a stroke, she thought, but reminded herself that it probably had more to do with screen fatigue and low blood sugar. Indeed, as she headed downstairs for a late and much-needed breakfast, she nearly lost her footing. Her instinctive sense of the distance between these steps, gained by rote over her lifetime, had deserted her in this curious state, and she finished the staircase only by stepping with care, the dual creaks of each step doing nothing to improve her headache or her mood. At the bottom, Maggie looked up from her feet to find the foyer skewed by the same quality that had affected her bedroom—not surreality, but something like the opposite. It was much like the sensation of returning to a childhood haunt, an old school or the home of a distant relative, and being newly acquainted with the harsh details of a territory hitherto stored as a fuzzy map.
Such places earned their defamiliarized cast, though, through years of absence. Why was the same uncanny sense now following her through rooms in which she had walked comfortably yesterday? Since childhood, Maggie had, despite the position of the main entrance, unconsciously considered the left side of her house to be the “front,” for such unclear reasons as would impress upon a developing brain. She had never been aware of this inclination until now, because now—it was gone. Nothing replaced it, there was simply no pole tugging at her internal compass. Yet as strange as this all was, it was not so acute as to seem outside the range of problems caused by bad sleep or hunger. It reminded her, in fact, of descriptions she had heard of hangovers, which gave her the idea to splash cold water on her face at the kitchen sink. This comparison made the experience more manageable, and the treatment seemed to ground her. She poured some cereal and slid in at the kitchen table for a solitary meal.
Jacob arrived as she was washing her bowl and spoon. Maggie had forgotten about the haircut and felt guilty for the instant of repulsion that jarred her when she answered the door—it was the shock of taking a sip expecting your own water and getting someone else’s Sprite. They retrieved the wrapping paper, scissors, and tape, before adjourning to the floor of her bedroom. Jacob began singing the Proclaimers, theatrically, as he arranged the materials. She interrupted him.
“Your parents seem like they’re really in love. Is that canoodling in the kitchen routine for real, or did they just pull it out for company?” Jacob laughed.
“No, it’s for real. It’s kind of gross but, you know, it could be worse. At least they keep their clothes on.”
Maggie nodded absently, rifling through the rolls of wrapping paper to find the least obnoxious holiday pattern. She needed to wrap a WiFi Enabled fan for her dad and a tissue box from her mom’s favorite wicker basket company. Usually they let her pick something they bought for Maury as her gift to him. Maggie was confident in her understanding of her parents’ taste and had been excited about the gifts hidden under her bed, but in this moment, she couldn’t overcome the simple truth that they were both fundamentally useless objects. She tried to summon back the excitement, the charge of a happy secret, but it wasn’t there.
“The idea of a tissue box is insane,” she said, resentfully breaking the silence that she knew was making Jacob uneasy, and which she had been cultivating almost as a challenge to him, “Tissues already come in boxes. This is a tissue box box. Who needs this?”
“Go off, Lewis Black,” Jacob chuckled, jerking away his phantom bangs. “Which paper are we going with?”
“I guess that one,” Maggie surrendered, pointing at a roll with a green plaid pattern. Jacob unfurled it, revealing the grid lines on the back.
“You know, that is amazing,” he said, when Maggie fell silent once more, “I always forget they put these lines on the back. Whoever thought of that deserves the Nobel prize.” He twitched his head again. After placing the box containing the fan on the paper, he counted along the squares of the grid and marked a line for Maggie to cut, singing “But I would walk five hundred miles and I would walk five hundred more” as he went. Maggie wondered if he was trying to force it into the designation of ‘Their Song.’ She hoped they’d get a new one, organically, because she lost a little respect for him every time he performed that accent with such pride. She had friends who did musical theatre at school and she recoiled at their constant, cartoonish interpretations of British speech. It was like watching someone talk with food in their teeth—something humiliating about the unawareness of something so obvious to everyone else.
Jacob was visibly antsy as Maggie worked the scissors, and she found herself resenting the burden he was placing on her to chitchat, as if he believed the world would end if one of them let the torch of the conversation burn out. He tried again.
“Did you notice that one line in that song, he says, ‘If I haver, I’m gonna be the man who’s haverin’ to you’? I was listening to it in bed last night and I swear he says ‘haver.’ Is that even a word?”
“Why don’t you look it up?”
Jacob pulled out his phone, obediently, and did so.
“Huh. It’s Scottish slang. It means just rambling, talking nonsense out of nervousness.”
Three, two, one. He twitched his head.
“You haver, you know,” Maggie told him, not looking up from her cutting. He laughed, nervously.
“Do I?” He ran a hand over his head. “God I hate this haircut!”
So you do realize your bangs aren’t in your eyes, she thought, coldly.
Jacob havered. “Well I like the song. I don’t know. It’s stupid and romantic. I like the idea of walking a thousand miles and collapsing at someone’s door to show you love them.”
“Yeah but like, what does it accomplish?” she asked, not looking up from her work, “There’s no intelligence in the gesture. He’s basically just saying ‘I can’t think of something actually useful to do, so I’m gonna do something stupid just because it’s hard.’ Like a caveman. ‘I’m gonna move a big rock to prove I love you.’” Maggie found herself digging into this argument despite understanding fully the point of the song. She didn’t even really agree with what she was saying, it was just so predictable; Jacob whose old parents acted out mawkish imitation foreplay in their kitchen and whose most original gift idea was a red rose would find that romantic, and probably every other generic love song. It was so completely Jacob of him, which had made her mad, for some reason. Why did that make her mad?
“I guess so,” Jacob surrendered, and that only frustrated her more. She worked wordlessly, psychically daring Jacob to force her into idle talk again, but he didn’t. She took a deep breath, focusing on the intersecting blue lines that backed the wrapping paper, the blank spaces between them.
Five, four, three—he twitched his head.
In her mind, Maggie felt her heel descend onto the brittle skin of the frozen pool, felt it snap like a tendon.
“Shit!” she swore. The thin paper had pinched between the scissors and torn, leaving a large section of the wrapping useless. Her eyes welled with moisture, but not enough to break into tears. She looked at Jacob.
“I’m sorry. I just—I feel like there’s a film on my brain,” she began, although that wasn’t quite right. “I could barely get down my breakfast this morning, it was like eating sand. And my skin—I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Jacob tried to assuage her, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You probably got a cold last night; sinus stuff will mess with your taste.” Maggie said nothing, hoping this, at least, might be true. “And the rest is just a bad mood. What can I do to cheer you up?”
She almost did cry, then, for how hopelessly alone she was, for how far Jacob was from what she needed right now. Something was wrong and she couldn’t share it with him. What was the socially appropriate way to tell your almost-boyfriend, ‘Hey, I feel like I bought something I want to return; everything about you is annoying me right now; please go away and don’t kiss me.’
Then, before she could stop him, he did kiss her, and what it felt like was a hot, wet, breathy mouth on the skin of her face, which itself felt stripped and dry. During that kiss, she could think only of cold, evaporating saliva, of the rank, slimy fibrils on every tongue of every species, and she pulled away before she could gag, hoping it she hadn’t done so too quickly. It wasn’t just Jacob’s kiss, it was the very idea of kissing that was all at once grotesque to her.
“I think I just need to be alone,” she told him, not meeting his eyes.
“Did I—do something?” Jacob asked, earnestly.
He probably would walk a thousand miles to stand at her door, like the nuthatch waiting dimly at her window sill for seeds. The thought was hateful and Maggie tried to sweep it away, but its truth held it coldly in place.
“No, I just need to be alone, please.”
He left her, promising to check in later, and she sat on the floor of her room, staring at her walls, willing them to become familiar again. She looked at the WiFi Enabled Smart Fan on the torn paper. Her father would buy a bag of horse turds if it were WiFi Enabled. She could imagine him unwrapping it so clearly, vaulting his eyebrows and going “Hot dog!“ like he did fifty times a day. He probably told himself it was ironic once, a harmless little affectation, and then it just stuck to him, caught in the gunk of some unexamined lack. He wanted to be a cowboy so badly. On a more elementary level, what he wanted was to be masculine, to seem competent. This perspective, which hadn’t occurred to her before, seemed wholly obvious now. His theory about the lake didn’t make any sense with the island there, but he kept repeating it as if he were an expert. They’d only caught one fish on their ice fishing trip, even with his little sonar fish finder, and that one had practically aimed for them. His WiFi gadgets only worked half the time, forcing him constantly to locate and reset them, more than negating their supposed value. She wondered if she had any blind spots so nakedly embarrassing as her father’s pretensions, or as Jacob’s cringe-inducing karaoke accent. Was there anything so repellant as a clear glimpse of how someone wants to be seen? She tasted bile and kicked at the box, wanting nothing to do with it. It slid on its cellophane across the carpet and over to her nightstand, where she kept, pressed and framed, the rose Jacob had given her. The flower, for which a receipt lay smothered in a landfill somewhere, hung in its frame, inert, charmless and flat.
Her parents returned with Maury a few hours later. They had been at the mall, and Maury had met Santa Claus, as he felt compelled to remind her every five minutes for the rest of the evening.
“Maggie! Did you know that…I was with Samta?” His speech was punctuated with the hypnotized pauses of a young child whose entire world is refreshing every few seconds, thoughts trailing behind his undirected attention. The skin around his lips was dyed in an unpleasant red ring because he could not stop licking it in the dry winter air, and possibly also with juice—Maury’s refined palate favored vintages with strong notes of blue number 1 and red number 40. Using this afflicted mouth, he had asked Santa for some child-friendly handheld game he had played at the store, which Maggie knew he’d be getting. She tried to remember what it was like to be young enough to believe elves made video games. What a privilege, she thought, to live so obliviously, snuggled in artifice, insulated from the pale reality of things. Maury was high on Christmas, bouncing between rooms and bellowing nonsense renditions of the holiday anthems that had begun assaulting the soundscape the day after Thanksgiving. He was particularly fond of butchering “My Favorite Things,” from The Sound of Music—“raindrops and raindrops and biscuits and kittens,” went the Maury version—until Maggie reminded him it wasn’t even a Christmas song. “Oh,” he had replied, pensively, and quietly removed it from his rotation.
Jacob texted several times in the hours after Maggie had dismissed him, asking if she was feeling better, then changing the subject to some movie he was watching, then asking again if he had done something wrong. Maggie, who’d had no appetite for dinner and was feeling worse by the hour, couldn’t summon the motivation to respond. Part of her wanted to, felt guilty for leaving him to fret in the silence of which he was so afraid, but she had nothing comforting to say, and she could not imagine a single thought Jacob could offer that she would want to hear just now. She felt that a window had closed. Maggie didn’t want to give a bout of moodiness more influence than it was due, but this conclusion really did feel like her own—more like fresh, dismal insight than a grumpy caprice. Something had changed between them, and she was suddenly certain that the perfect moment they had both been waiting for would not come.
Maggie splayed across the couch in the living room and avoided thoughts of Jacob by scrolling through videos on her phone for a while. After her father put Maury to bed, he came downstairs to watch TV, using his phone to turn it on via WiFi and beaming at the convenience of it. It was a brand new 4K television, but he hadn’t been able to turn off the unwanted “frame blending” setting, which came enabled by default and made even the most familiar and lavish backgrounds appear manifestly like sets, the characters like actors. The image was at once too sharp and too blurry, the visual equivalent of a sterile stairwell echo. Maggie’s brief research revealed that the internet called it “the soap opera effect.” The Muppet Christmas Carol was airing, which, thanks to the feature in question, starred a lifeless idol of green felt with the voice of Kermit the Frog. Her father seemed not to notice the difference or, more likely, was pretending not to because he couldn’t fix it.
“Looks amazing, doesn’t it?” he asked her, searching either for approval of his purchase or some position on the weirdness of the picture. Maggie made a vague noise she knew he’d interpret as agreement. She could have turned the feature off, having learned what the setting was called and under which menu to find it, but she felt that her father should get acquainted with his limitations. She wanted him to admit something was wrong that he couldn’t figure it out, but he just watched the movie, occasionally tapping through unrelated menus, then exiting them casually as if he had opened them by mistake. Maggie eventually found this too uncomfortable and vacated the couch for bed.
At the top of the stairs, side-stepping the Loud Spot, she nudged open Maury’s door. He was out cold, wet hand to his wind-chapped lips, a shallow procession of snot crusting between them. There dawned a faint, sour scent that was likely urine—Maury had been toilet trained for nearly a year, but his subconscious had not yet caught up. The room was a mess, strewn with toys and gadgets soon to be abandoned in favor of the spoils of the holiday.
In the bathroom, Maggie began to brush her teeth, studying her reflection and the new, slightly sickly quality of her skin against the backdrop of ugly pink tile, until a quick rattle from beside the sink pulled her attention down to her phone. The screen showed a preview of a message: Jacob had sent a heart and a rose. She thought of the lakeside kiss they had shared, the sensory rapture of it, and then of the insipid kiss today, and she felt a dam give—a spasm of desperation that had been swelling under resolute denial since the nuthatch had called her awake. She had broken something. She was—injured, or impaired in some irreparable, nightmare way. Her cereal tasted like wood pulp, her brother’s piss was the first thing she remembered smelling all day, and there was some worse yet wound, scarring even now, inside her head. Whichever cerebral flap directed things that were familiar, understood, predictable—things that met expectations—down to their places within her heart had been paralyzed. Naturally these things were capable of arousing disgust or contempt, but at least as often should have produced fondness and warmth, yet Maggie couldn’t summon those feelings. Jacob’s tick, today, had been like the ceaseless drip of a water torture on her forehead. Contemplating his transparent notions of romance, and her father’s of mastery, had nauseated her. The more clearly she understood things, without apparent exception, the more horrible they seemed.
She prospected her imagination, searching for the glint of something nice, of anything nice—Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. She found no inspiration, but did that really support such an insane conclusion as now presented itself? Wasn’t she being a bit paranoid? Maggie spat, then, and realized that she had not tasted the toothpaste. She went back to the tube and squeezed a thick link onto her brush, thrusting it into her mouth as if it were food. It could have been tempera paint. She added Maury’s bubble gum paste, smeared it along her gums and tongue. It sat in her mouth like ointment. She set down her toothbrush, opened the medicine cabinet, grabbed the child-strength grape cough syrup, and poured a capful of sweetened purple concentrate into the flooded basin of her jaw, unsure of whether she wanted to test its flavor or—desperately, childishly—its medicine. It was bitter and soaplike, the normally cloying fruity notes absent or silent. The confirmation of this, the most concrete wrongness, made all of it hideously real to her. There was a film—over her mouth, her insides, all of her, and it constricted her tightly now. At the same time, she felt that there was no film, that a layer had instead been peeled off, roughly and completely, leaving her somehow both nerveless and utterly susceptible to the most dreadful sensations. She had been a girl in love last night, and now she felt like a piece of driftwood, leached and impotent. Everything was so wrong. Maggie began to cry.
Am I being punished? she wondered, wildly. I could go back. Oh, please, please, I’ll go back! She could return to the frozen lake. She could scoop more water into that little cavity, and maybe it would freeze into a smooth surface again with time! But it hadn’t been water, really, had it? Now, as she inspected the memory of the pools, there rose a ringing, with undertones like plucked rubber bands, and something else: in her mind’s ear, unbidden, a pink tile spoke to her from the wall, right near an outlet.
“I’m number sixty-two,” it rasped, “isn’t that fucking stupid?”
“I’m number two hundred and twelve,” choked another, closer to the floor, “isn’t that fuuuuuucking bleak?”
A third tile, right beside her head in the toilet alcove, stuttered, “I’m nu-nu-number three hundred and fifty and I’m d-doing my b-b—best! What the fuck am I for, M-Maggie?”
She knew this was ventriloquism, that these were thoughts and not voices, but she was helpless to stem their intrusion, and she slumped backward onto the closed toilet seat, knocking her toothbrush to the floor and began to weep through the tasteless mixture in her mouth.
“I’m number one!” came a whimper from the very corner of the room, near the ceiling, “Am I important? What do I fucking win? Do you love me?”
Maggie noticed, and wondered how she hadn’t earlier, that the pink walls were filthy, mottled with spots of mold and chalky smears. She looked down to see if the floor was in a similar condition and imagined she could see the grout lines between the larger, white tiles warping slowly into a jagged arrangement like subsurface cracks. She drew up her knees and hugged her legs close as the whispering squares chorused around her.
“I’m number nineteen and I’m scared! Pay attention to me! Fucking care about me!”
“I’m doing my best! Did you notice me? Do you love me, Maggie?”
“Will you bring me to your bed? Will you pry me off and fucking love me?”
“Ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack!”
Still streaming tears, she counted to three and inhaled. Counted again, exhaled. Counted again, and again, willing her imagination to release her. She sat there weakly, surrounded by pink, and tried to slow her breathing as spit-thinned toothpaste, stained with cough syrup, trickled from the corner of her open mouth.
◆
After a long time, Maggie stood up shakily, spit, and cleaned herself up. She retrieved and rinsed her toothbrush, then went dazedly out to the hallway and toward her bedroom. She didn’t call goodnight down to her father, who was performing delight to an empty room about an expensive toy that left him dissatisfied and confused. She didn’t think she wouldn’t be moved to report on frozen lakes to him anymore, or solicit his reactions to fallen trees and fresh beaver dams. She felt, also, that she needed to have a talk with Jacob, although she had no idea how deeply it would wound him or for how long. Maggie had never been loved in such a way before, and only bitter experience can educate one on how many wrong things there are to say, and how few right. More than she worried about him, though, she envied him. He was whole, because his caution had kept him away from what hers had not. She knew, with a dull certainty, that she would pass the lake many times in the years to come, might even get out of the car and walk over to wonder, or grieve, at its shore, but she would never do more than look out at the island. The thought of stepping around in that nebula of pools, of moving among their taut, fragile skins, risking contact with another, perhaps a larger one, brought a boiling panic up into her chest, and threatened to brush a spark—“isn’t that fuuuuuucking bleak?”—down some blood-curdling synapse that had been left exposed. She put it out of her mind with a violent effort.
Maggie had heard of people regaining partial use of damaged or excised organs—not through donations and transplants, but grafts from the same body, from intact places with simple tissue to spare, stretched and knitted and partitioned. There were, too, those compensating efforts made, after shock subsides, by a body detecting and adjusting to its own loss—redistributing its loads, resourcing its catalysts and inhibitors. There were those stories of the newly blinded making their way with sharpened hearing. Missing parts could sometimes be, over years, assembled from other pieces, or their duties approximated. She would hope, then, for something like that. At the very least, the borders of all cavities would close in with time. A body has no reason to preserve room for that which has departed.
Instinct halted her midstep. Maggie’s bare heel—which she now noticed bore a murky but painless bruise—had frozen inches above the carpeted wood in front of Maury’s door. Gingerly, she stretched her leg forward and touched down two extra feet beyond the spot where she had almost landed. While the toddler slept, his older sister straddled the space in front of his door, giving half of her body carefully to her forward foot, then the rest as she slowly withdrew the rear. Her eyes shimmered and burned, and she balanced there in the sallow light of the hallway, listening to the dull murmur of the downstairs television, until she was tired.