Love,
Maury
She waited for a day, then two, then three, before she wrote again.
Did my email get to you? Because you didn’t answer. It turns out that I’m really a cruddy singer. My coach, Melody, says we have to rip me apart and put me back together. I told her, Been there, done that. But she says I have so many bad habits, like puffing my lips out when I sing, that I have to learn all over again. Well, I’m good at that. The food is pretty basic here, so tell your mom any goodies will be greatly appreciated. My mom sent me some gingersnaps the other day. Hard as hockey pucks. She never was much of a baker, but your mom is a pro.
Love,
Maury
A day later she got an answer.
Great that you’re having so much fun. Same old, same old here. I’ll tell my mom to send you some cookies. Everybody says hi.
Your friend,
Danny Carmody
Your friend? Danny CARMODY?
Well, what had she expected?
He was either still mad at her for leaving or never cared at all.
When the brownies came, she gorged on a few, then shared the rest with her suite-mates. Four girls shared a common bathroom, and her roomies were merciless. When she took too long, they pounded on the door and told her to get her slow butt moving. All in all, that was good for her.
Just before the Valentine’s Day dance, one of her suite-mates, a girl named Ali who’d become a friend, told her that Josh Jancy had a crush on her but didn’t know if she had a heavy hometown honey. Of course, they all knew who she was, but no one made a big deal about it.
Aching for Danny, Maureen made it clear that she would happily accept Josh’s invitation.
Josh Jancy stopped the next day after history and asked, “If I’m willing to wear a suit for you, will you forgive me for stepping on your feet?”
“I’m not much of a dancer,” she told him nervously when he picked her up at her dorm, just across from the Great Hall.
“Most people just stand there and shuffle from foot to foot,” he said. “When they start the fast songs, I sit down. So you’re safe with me.”
A week later, on Saturday night, Maury was surprised her gossamer prom dress still fit. Josh picked her up at eight at her dorm across from the Great Hall. “You can walk over, right?” he asked.
“You have to carry me, “Maureen answered.
They talked more than they danced. Josh was studying piano but didn’t want to concertize—not that he was good enough. He wanted to get into a good school, such as Northwestern, and become some kind of interpreter. He was basically fluent in Spanish. Maureen began to wonder if she might be able to make a living signing, not singing. She had learned to sign in rehab, to help her communicate when she had trouble retrieving a word. There were all kinds of places that used people who could do simultaneous translation for the deaf—from churches to the theater. “I’ve always loved watching the interpreters,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Josh said. “I’ve heard you sing. You might be able to do that if you could write songs.”
“I have written a couple,” she said, as he put his arms around her and they moved out onto the dance floor. Josh was so big and tall, much taller than Danny, that she practically felt lifted as they danced. They raced for the tables when the deejay began to spin R and B. “I can sing it, but I haven’t got the moves,” Maureen told Josh.
“Not everybody has to be able to dance,” Josh told her. “Half the girls here just dance with their arms anyway. It’s like they were cheerleaders.”
“I was a cheerleader,” Maureen said. “Before I got in a bad car accident.”
Josh gave her a turned-down smile. “I know,” he said. “We all know. You’re some woman.”
“Not so much,” Maureen told him. “Anyhow, I didn’t have a choice.”
“Most people would have just curled up in a ball.”
“I tried!” Maureen said. “They wouldn’t let me.”
But she still tired sooner than the others did. Josh walked her back to her dorm room before the event ended.
“Sorry,” she told him. “I’m just not used to the grind here yet. It’s a hard school!”
“Can I come in and talk for a while?” he asked. She knew he didn’t mean talking, really, and felt a little thrill in her chest.
Both of them were flushed and sweating after half an hour of making out on her bed.
Finally she said, “You better get going before my roommates come back. And, this is really as far as we should go.”
“I didn’t think you’d even let me kiss you. I know you’re still all over your guy back home.”
“He’s not my guy,” Maureen said. “We broke up before I left. Mutual.”
“So I wasn’t out of line,” Josh said with a smile.
“Not at all.”
“So if we go to brunch tomorrow, it’ll be okay.”
“Sure,” Maureen said. At the door, she stood on her tiptoes—her right foot cooperating for the second it took—and gave him a kiss.
Then, without even bothering to take off her silver dress, she threw herself on the rumpled bed and thought, At last. I’m over Danny.
But she couldn’t sleep. She tried drinking a glass of milk and eating a few saltines, then finishing her paper on Emerson. Still, she couldn’t sleep. By the time Josh showed up tomorrow, she’d look as if she were forty. At last, she flipped open her laptop and scanned her emails. The usual greetings from Mom, who warned her to wear her boots with the treads on icy walks. A cheerful hello from Dad and a note from Jack, saying he was traveling to Spain with the soccer team at spring break. Fabulous, she wrote back. We’re all hitting the road!
There was no word from Molly or Danny.
Although it was past one AM, Maureen tapped out a note to Molly, describing the dance and Josh, telling Molly she had become the biggest grind in the history of the world and that she was sure she’d be back in Bigelow by spring, having flunked out of this place.
To her shock, a message from Molly popped back up almost instantly.
Hey baby! Molly wrote. I’m so glad you’re settling in. We miss you so much! We just got you back and you took off. But really, I am so happy for you. I’m trying to get my parents to let me drive there and pick you up for spring break—you would think it was France instead of one state south! It’s really neat about the guy. I’m dating someone new, too. It’s weird. Everybody in a small school seems to end up dating everyone else. Well, I got my acceptance letter back from UM! I’ll be Nurse Molly in a few years! Got to crash now…. LUV U MOST!
Before Molly could go off-line, Maureen typed, A new guy? Tell, tell, tell! Now I know why you’re so slow answering me!
She thought Molly must have shut down and was about to do the same herself when a reply popped up.
Actually, I’m dating Danny, Maury. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you. It’s totally nothing serious…
Maureen couldn’t bring herself to read the rest. She looked down at her dress, the dress she had worn on the night she and Danny…on the night she came back to life. Carefully, sure she would rip it to shreds if she let herself and then regret it later, Maureen got her dress into its garment bag and slipped into her pajama bottoms. In the drawer, she found Danny’s old Bulldogs wrestling T-shirt and tenderly pulled it over her head. I’m glad I loved him, she thought. But suddenly her world seemed to have shrunk to the size of the room. Molly! How could Molly do this? But she was the one who’d left. Maybe Molly made Danny think of her—as she had once made him think of Bridget.
She was better off out of it.
But she messaged Josh, telling him that she had realized too late that she was too backed up on studying to go to brunch—how about next Sunday? When Ali knocked, Maureen said she had a stomachache and was going to sleep it off. After writing to Molly that she was happy for her and for Danny, Maureen lay down carefully on the bed.
This was as bad as it got, she thought.
r /> It didn’t get worse than this.
What her parents went through when they thought she was dead was worse; but for someone her age, this was major. If she could get through this, she would be fine. She would be fine.
Maureen slept for hours, then hopped into the shower and joined everyone for dinner.
A note from Danny was waiting for her when she got back to her room. A real, printed note, not an email. Her hands tingling, she opened it. A valentine.
On the front was a small boy offering half his candy bar to a little girl. On the inside, Danny had written, “I said you’d be the one who goes. I guess you did. But there isn’t a day goes by I don’t think of you, and how proud I am of you. Maury, you were my first real love. Don’t expect me to forget.”
Maureen almost tore the card in two—he would have written this days before Molly told her the truth. Then, instead, she placed it in her top drawer, beneath a stack of clean and folded shirts.
And she didn’t hear from Molly again for a month.
The annual concert was to be held a day before the school closed for spring break. Molly wrote that her parents were being total idiots and would not let her come; but Maureen’s parents surprised her by telling her they were coming to bring her home and to attend the concert, with Pat and Henry and even Rag Mop. The drive was not that long. They would stop to see Grandma on the way.
So it was with longing and excitement that Maureen passed the week, taking her midterms, getting respectable Bs in everything but math, still passing that with a low C. She began practicing her solo. It was no honor. Every voice performance student had one. But her song was in Latin and not an easy one to learn, despite the many times she had heard it. Over and over, Melody told her, “Stop rushing! I want to hear reverence in your voice. This is a song of praise. Everyone knows it. So slow down and form each word.”
Maury listened to the tapes of herself and then, with a backing tape Melody made for her, sang the song so many times that her suite-mates complained that it felt as if they were taking Communion.
She retreated then, tromping through a wet and unexpected snow, to the basement of the arts building, where it was possible to reserve one of the ten soundproof practice rooms.
Two days before the concert, on Melody’s orders, she stopped singing altogether and simply spoke softly and drank cup after cup of tea.
She thought she would go mad with joy when she heard the plop of a snowball against her window and saw her brother Henry standing outside. As close as she could come to running, Maureen made it down the stairs and threw herself into four pairs of waiting arms. Rag Mop wiggled out of her mother’s purse and, after polishing Maury’s face, jumped down and raced around and around them in the snow. That night she stayed with her parents at a cozy bed-and-breakfast, sleeping on a roll-out sofa, sitting up late to talk to Jeannie—outlasting even her brothers.
“Mom, I know Danny is dating Molly,” she said once Bill had turned in and they were alone.
“I thought you would. How do you feel?”
“I felt horrible at first. I couldn’t eat. I never thought that Molly would betray me that way.”
Jeannine asked, “Do you really feel that she betrayed you by dating a boy you broke up with? And is Molly really the one you should be angry with?”
“No,” Maureen said honestly. “I don’t think that. But I feel it. I’m not going to let it ruin my summer at home, though.”
“So you’ve decided against the summer term? I’m so glad. That house is too quiet,” Jeannie said.
Maureen fell silent. If she took a full load in summer term, she could go home for a few weeks but make up most of a whole semester and graduate only one semester behind her Bigelow classmates. She could start at the University of Wisconsin, her first choice, in the spring of next year.
“I’m not sure, Mom,” she said. “It might be too painful for me back in Bigelow. Especially now. Speaking of that, are the Flannerys doing better?”
“Honey, a for sale sign went up in front of their house last week. They’re not leaving Bigelow, but I gather the business is doing great and they’re building a super mansion out at The Corners.”
“Wow. Is that a relief for you?”
Jeannie sighed and nodded. “I’d like to look across at a friendly face, I have to admit it.”
“So much has changed.”
“That’s the one constant of life,” Jeannie told Maureen, stroking her daughter’s hair.
It was nine at night when Danny Carmody turned to Evan Brock at Overture Cinema and said, “Road trip.”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
“Where?”
“Iowa. Five hours by my calculations.”
“You’re nuts, brother. She doesn’t want to see you…or me. And what’s Miss Molly going to think?”
“All I want is to hear her sing. Coach says she has a solo at this rinky-dink school with a hundred students. I don’t want her back. I don’t even know if I want to talk to her. We’ll stay one night and turn around. I’ll drive most of the way.”
“Gee, I always wanted to see Iowa in March,” Evan said with a groan.
“I’ll go myself then. I’m a free man, pushing eighteen. I can cross a state line.”
“No way. Let’s get some subs and clean drawers though.”
They pulled into the Holiday Inn Express outside Fall Creek at three in the morning. The only room left had a single king-sized bed.
“I never thought of you this way,” Evan told Danny as they sat down on opposite sides and chucked their shoes.
“Life’s full of surprises,” Danny told him, slapping Evan across the head with a pillow. He fell asleep as soon as he lay down, but not before thinking, She’s a mile away from me.
The auditorium was already filled by the time he and Evan showed up. An irritated woman with the biggest boobs Danny had ever seen on anyone in real life shone a flashlight on their tickets and pointed them to seats in the first row of what she called “the loge” but which was a big cliff of seats that jutted out above the main floor. They could see Coach and the family in the third row down there.
“How’d you get these seats?” Evan asked.
“Called two weeks ago.”
“So this wasn’t really just on the spur of the moment.”
“Kind of,” Danny said. “I didn’t think I’d have the nerve.”
“So you bought twenty-five-dollar tickets. Two, no less. I think you take me for granted.”
“Shut up. It’s starting,” Danny said.
They had to listen to people squall for what seemed liked years before Maureen, dressed in a long blue velvet dress, walked out onto the stage.
The music began, low and tender. A harp. A single flute. Maureen waited. Then she raised her face.
“Ave Maria,” Maureen sang. “Gratia plena, / Maria, gratia plena…”
How her voice had changed.
It had grown from a single-stemmed flower into a young tree.
Danny could still hear the voice he knew, but something richer and finer now trembled in its depths. He caught himself holding his breath for Maureen, willing her to reach for the higher notes. “Ave Maria,” she sang, “Ave Maria…” And then it was over. Maureen dropped her shining blond head and gently dipped one knee. He heard Jeannie’s trademark whistle, but he was too stunned even to applaud. Another girl sang a song from West Side Story.
At the end, all of them joined hands onstage while the families stood and clapped for them. Maury was shorter than anyone else by six inches. She looked up as the lights came on, and he saw the smile drain away from her face. She had seen him.
Danny began to jostle his way to the exit.
Evan yelled after him, “Wait up! Idiot!”
“I’ll get the car,” Danny called back.
But when he emerged into the lobby, there she stood, at the foot of the staircase.
He had no choice.
When Jeannie and Bill, with the
boys and Josh—whom they’d met that day at lunch—slipped past the other parents into the lobby, they saw Maureen in Danny’s arms, kissing him as though his mouth held her own breath.
a place for us
And then they were lost.
There was only waiting—for her visits on the weekends, for his visits to her, the hundreds of phone calls with bills that made the veins stand out in Bill’s neck. He’d chosen the family plan.
After a week of sulking, Molly blogged on MyPlace that true love was a force too great for anything to overcome. She enjoyed a certain celebrity at school, being a part of the most romantic story any of them knew firsthand. Molly thought it was easily as good as a Nicholas Sparks book. Leland thought the crash added a lot to it. Molly thought Leland was morbid by nature.
Maureen announced that she had decided to come home for the summer after all.
Jeannie announced that Maureen had already applied for and been granted her summer scholarship, and she was going to use it or answer to her father. One day in May Danny drove Maureen home for the confrontation. He had barely closed the door behind him when he heard Coach roar, “And I am telling you no, Missy! I will not have you end up pregnant! No! You’ve come too far for that.”
“Dad, all it means is that it’ll take me a year instead of a semester,” Maureen pleaded. “I should work for the summer and pay you back for some of those phone bills….”
“Don’t hand me that, Maureen. I know exactly why you want to come back here. And it’s fine. If it lasts for you two, it’s fine. But no daughter of mine is going to get married out of high school.”
“Like you did!”
Danny fled.
The next morning a chastened Maureen was sitting on her front porch when he pulled into the driveway.
“Does your dad have a shotgun in there?” Danny asked.
“No, it’s the other way around. He’ll shoot you if you want to marry me! I lost this round.”
Danny took a short breath and sat down. Marriage? He loved Maureen. He knew he did. But marriage…that was a long way off.