There’s a fresh-faced young man on my front porch, holding a large bouquet. It used to be fairly common for strangers to come to the house, bearing gifts, but it almost never happens now. I don’t miss it. We’ve settled into a peaceful, pleasant routine. When I open the front door, the young man looks surprised and nearly drops the bouquet. He probably didn’t expect me to answer.
“You can leave those in the box by the street,” I tell him, nodding toward an empty wooden crate I set out years ago.
“Oh,” the boy says, turning to the crate and then back to me. “These are for the house, inside. For Maggie.” The flowers are wrapped in craft paper and tied with a pretty blue ribbon. They look fresh and expensive.
“I’ll make sure she gets them,” I say. I reach for the flowers, but the boy pulls them to his chest.
“I’d like to meet her,” he says, and before I can shut that idea down, he continues: “But first, I’d like to tell you a little bit more about myself.”
Odd, is what I think. Not odd that he wants to meet her. Lots of people want to meet Maggie. But what an odd, polite, confident young man. I don’t trust him.
“OK,” I say.
“My name is Craig Vogel,” he tells me, and offers a hand. I fold my arms and he withdraws the hand. “I’m a senior at Whitmore High School, just around the corner. It’s the school I think your daughter would have attended, if, well, if she’d been able. I have a respectable GPA, play three sports, and I’m the student body vice president. Next year, I plan to attend—”
“Why don’t we have a seat, Craig?” I say. I step out onto the porch and close the door behind me. The neighborhood is quiet, except for the distant, maddening sound of Frank Oliver practicing his trombone. Maggie loves that trombone.
Craig looks around, sees the porch swing, and sits. I sit next to him, close enough to make it awkward. I don’t want this kid getting comfortable.
“Why don’t you tell me what you want, Craig?”
“I want—” He’s looking directly at me. Impressive eye contact. “I want to be of service.”
“Of service, huh? To whom?” I ask. “Or what?”
“To you, partly,” Craig says. “But mostly to your daughter.”
I’ve met more than my fair share of weirdos over the years, all with their own warped ideas of how to “serve” Maggie. People who said they wanted to adopt her and move in with me. Artists who wanted to paint Maggie, by which I mean they wanted to paint on her. One was an architect who had a plan to rebuild our house into a giant version of Maggie. Or Maggie’s face. Doesn’t matter. Either would have been dangerous for her. Some, more than a few, told me they worshipped Maggie and wanted her blessing. This was when Maggie was a toddler.
I can only imagine what this kid means by being “of service” to my daughter.
“OK, Craig,” I stand up, and the swing rocks backward. “I think I’ve got the shape of this. Time for you to go.”
Craig stays put. “Please,” he says. “Hear me out.”
I nod but don’t sit back down. Is Maggie watching now? Listening? I have to imagine so. She’s able to see and hear most of what happens in or near the house. But she hasn’t summoned me.
“The Whitmore Senior Prom is coming up,” he says. “And I was thinking, well, I’m pretty sure that Maggie hasn’t gone to a dance.”
“She hasn’t gone anywhere since she was ten months old,” I say, plainly. Not annoyed, exactly, but getting there. “And her situation hasn’t changed.”
“I know,” Craig says. “That’s why I want to bring the dance to her. Just something small. A few of my friends and I would come over and play music. No drinking, no wild stuff, promise. We have permission from the school.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” I tell him.
I feel the house shudder. Craig feels it, too. He looks around.
“I know you’ll need to think about it,” he says. “And discuss it with Maggie.” He looks through the window next to the swing. “Could I say hello? Give her the flowers?”
I don’t allow many people into the house, not since the scientists left. But lately I’ve been worried about Maggie’s lack of socialization. When she was younger, I tried inviting a few children over for playdates. The result was inevitably a variation of the same mini drama: Maggie and visitor play; visitor asks or does something stupid; Maggie overreacts; visitor freaks out, says or does something worse; I say or do something unwise; visitor says they want to go home; parent of visitor picks visitor up, asking what is wrong with me/my family, aside from the obvious?
Maybe it’s time to try again.
“OK,” I say. The house moves once more, this time with a softer, mild vibration. Like a happy sigh. I open the door and show Craig into the living room.
I don’t see Maggie at first and wonder if she’s retreated to another room. Craig finds her immediately.
“Hello, Maggie,” he says.
She’s in a corner, leaning against the edge of another wall. I think she’s trying to look casual. That’s new.
“Oh, hello,” she says. Her voice is silvery, somewhat higher pitched than usual. “Welcome to our home, Craig.” So, she has been listening.
“These are for you,” he says, and walks the flowers over to her. He’s uncertain what to do next. He looks at me. I nod, and he lifts the flowers toward Maggie.
Maggie can interact with things outside the wall for a limited amount of time. I don’t think that’s widely known. She reads books that way and sometimes paints.
Maggie takes the flowers from Craig and holds them in hands that extend just beyond the wall’s surface. She bends her head toward them, and sniffs. Maggie can’t smell, but she’s good at pretending.
“They’re lovely,” Maggie says. “Thank you, Craig. Won’t you sit?”
Craig sits on the sofa and I withdraw to the kitchen, where I’ll be close enough to listen to tone without hearing details. Or hear details without being too obvious about it. I busy myself with organizing the refrigerator. When there’s a lull in the conversation, I return to the living room. Maggie is holding the flowers still, but I can tell her hands are getting tired. The petals are quivering. I take them from her.
“I’ll put these in a vase,” I say, and wonder if we still have one.
“Maggie and I have discussed the idea,” Craig tells me.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Maggie says, smiling. Or I think she’s smiling. I can’t always tell, depending on the shadows.
“Of course, we need your permission,” Craig says. “Do we have it?”
Should we trust this boy, who is so earnest, so polite? Maggie is holding her hands together in front of her. A prayer. A supplication. Her face, behind or within or commingled with the wall, is so hopeful and expectant that I’m not certain I have any choice.
***
Maggie’s mother Jeanie left a few days after Maggie’s first birthday. The timing wasn’t ideal but I didn’t blame her for leaving — and still don’t. The media attention, the scientists, the judgement from our neighbors. It was a lot. She deserved a better life, and when Dr. Nathan Knopf offered her one, she understandably accepted it.
One thing that the TV movie The Confinement of Baby Maggie got wrong (aside from the implication of the title) was that Jeanie and I didn’t have a big dramatic argument before she left. She just told me that she was leaving with Nathan and I said “OK” and something like “I get it.” I definitely did not scream “But what about Baby Maggie?!” although that’s exactly what I was thinking.
It was a TV movie. They had to add some drama.
Another thing they got wrong — and this is important, speaks to motivation — is that I was not trying to open a door to another universe at the time of the incident. I was just trying to reverse gravity.
***
We get a modest stipend/royalty from the government, Maggie and I, so I don’t have to work. That probably sounds ideal, an opportunity to focus on my experiments, but I’m specifically barred from doing any science. I can’t publish anything related to my findings and I’m obligated to share any new thoughts, theories, novel concepts, etc., with Ms. Allensworth, my government handler. I don’t think she can read my mind, but she can definitely read my face, so I try to minimize deep thinking.
Which isn’t to say that I’m idle. I teach Maggie most of her subjects (not science — we bring someone in for that), cook, clean, garden, read, and try to stay in shape. In my spare time, I make miniature versions of famous paintings using cardboard, glue, and tiny glass beads. I’ve sold a few pieces, mostly to fans of Maggie.
I only leave the house and Maggie for short periods of time because she gets nervous. I sense this more than I know it.
***
I’m in the kitchen making manicotti — Maggie can only eat pasta and some dairy, as far as we know — when there’s a knock on the door. I listen for the trombone. If I hear it, I know Frank is safely at home. If I don’t hear it, well, good, but also bad because it could mean that Frank is coming over to check in on us. This is something he started doing shortly after Maggie’s event, bringing food, offering to run errands, offering to house/babysit.
Frank thinks he’s my friend. I don’t have anything against the man, but we’re nothing more than neighbors. Friendly, yes. Friends, no.
I open the door and Frank is there, wearing a tuxedo. Likely en route to a performance. He’s holding a plain, flat white box.
“Frank,” I say.
“Hi,” he says. “I thought you could use this. You and Baby Maggie. Maggie.”
Maggie is 16 now but to many she’s still “Baby Maggie.” That’s how the news stories always referred to her. “Baby Maggie trapped in family home.” “Day 72 for Baby Maggie.” “Little hope for Baby Maggie as anniversary approaches.” More recently: “Baby Maggie. Where is she now?” That last one is something of a cruel joke. Baby Maggie was still where she’d always been. If she were elsewhere, anywhere, that would be news.
Frank hands the box to me and I shake it. The weight is modest. Not food.
“Ha ha,” Frank says. “It’s not dangerous. Open it.”
Still, I proceed with caution, prying open one corner to peek inside. What I see is pink and fluffy. Is that taffeta? Is that the collar of a dress? I remove the lid entirely. Yes, a dress. A fluffy, frilly, pink dress.
It takes me a moment to process. I haven’t purchased any clothes for Maggie in over 15 years.
“For the dance,” Frank says. “It was my sister’s. She died before she could wear it. I thought it might fit Maggie.”
Ah, the dance. A dress for the dance. Frank knows about the dance because, well, Frank always seems to know what’s happening with Maggie and me. (Maybe I actually told him during a recent check-in.) But what’s Maggie going to do with a dress?
“Frank,” I say. “You know Maggie can’t wear this.”
“I know,” he says. “But I thought on the outside . . .” He holds up his hands and makes circular, cleaning motions.
“May I see?” Maggie asks from the living room.
I feel bad for not having invited Frank in. Well, not bad, but rude.
“Of course,” I say. And we bring the dress in to show her.
***
Nathan Knopf is not a medical doctor. He has a PhD in theoretical physics. Which, honestly, in another timeline, in other circumstances, I would have, too.
Knopf — Nathan — was one of the scientists who came to stay with Jeanie, Maggie, and me after the event. That’s how Jeanie met him. That part The Confinement of Baby Maggie got right. The movie sort of works as a romcom, if you ignore the terrifying parts. They had a meet-cute in the kitchen, there’s an adorable kid, a challenging situation, a love triangle, and a happy-ever-after ending. For Jeanie and Nathan.
Nathan was famous before the movie, both as a scientist and a popular science writer. I used to read him. For a while, I admired him.
Here’s a crazy full-circle moment for you: his explanation of gravity led to this whole situation with Maggie.
In A Handyman’s Guide to Science, Knopf asks the reader to imagine space as a trampoline. Put a bowling ball on that trampoline and it stretches. The ball rolls to and settles in the center. Now put a ping pong ball on the trampoline. Where does it go? Toward the bowling ball, right? It’s easy to visualize. Now imagine that space is made up of infinite trampolines, occupying infinite planes. Any object — a bowling ball, or an asteroid, or a star — creates a distortion in space. That distortion is gravity and the greater an object’s mass, the greater its gravitational pull.
Such a beguiling concept, space as myriad trampolines, filled with all sorts of distorting matter. I thought about it all the time. I sketched goofy diagrams of it on whiteboards at work. I made mini, intersecting trampolines using wire hangers and scraps from one of Jeanie’s old one-piece swimsuits. I dreamed about it. I even wrote Nathan Knopf a fanboy letter about it. Which he never brought up.
Eventually I began to wonder: what would happen if you could straighten that trampoline — those infinite trampolines — out? What happens to gravity if you remove the distortion of space?
***
For many months after the event, Maggie stayed in a single wall, the one that separates the living room from the kitchen. She could crawl all over it but couldn’t navigate from one wall to another, or to the ceiling. Thank god for that. Much easier to keep an eye on her that way. After a while, Maggie discovered that she could pass through what she later called “broken” sections of the wall. The ceiling was the first place she wriggled her way to. Hoo, boy, was that chilling. Seeing your baby crawl upside down above your head. Giggling! Horror movie stuff. From the ceiling she could connect to another wall and another and so on. Pretty soon she was able to roam the entire house with the exception of the basement. She prefers the living room, though, and stays there almost exclusively.
But on the night before the dance, she’s not there.
“Maggie?” I call to her. There’s no response, just the brief echo of my voice. I walk down the hall from the living room to the bedrooms, calling her name. Maggie does not answer. I check my bedroom, the bathroom, her baby room, the hall closet. I am about to look in the basement, when I hear her.
“Dad?” I backtrack to the living room. Maggie’s there after all, hiding in a shadow on her wall. She’s made herself very small, legs and arms folded around her body. Her bug pose.
“I didn’t see you,” I say.
“I was here,” she says and yawns. “I just felt like being quiet.”
“Ready to sleep?” I ask.
“Maybe,” Maggie says, and yawns again.
I turn off the living room light. “Good-night, Maggie.”
“Good-night,” she says. Then, as I walk away: “Dad? Do you think you could fix me up a little?”
“Do you mean the makeup?” I ask. She and Frank have a plan. “I can try.”
“I mean all of me,” she says. “The entire house. There are a few holes in the hall walls and a broken outlet cover in the kitchen. Also some missing molding in your bedroom.”
This is the first time I’ve heard her refer to the house as her, or vice-versa.
“Sure, honey,” I say. “I can go to the hardware store tomorrow. If you don’t mind being alone for a bit.”
“I’ll be ok,” she says. She unfolds a little, one leg stretching toward the floor. After a moment, she says: “Do you need to be here? For the dance?”
Oh. What she’s asking is perfectly natural, perfectly normal. It’s good for someone Maggie’s age to want some space and independence from their parents, right? Developmentally healthy.
“I could stay in the basement,” I say. “Give you some privacy.”
“Yes, OK,” she says, and smiles. “The basement. Thank you.”
This is what it feels like, I think. This is how a child who can’t leave moves away.
***
The Confinement of Baby Maggie does a pretty good job of showing the actual event that led to Maggie’s — damn, I guess “confinement” is a pretty good word. It doesn’t make me look like an attentive father, but it’s accurate.
For the record:
1. It’s true that on the night of the event, Maggie was about to take her first steps and I was in the basement, working on my gravity device.
2. It was spring, as the movie suggests. Whether that’s relevant to the science is an open question. Nathan doesn’t think so, but I believe the relative positions of the Earth and sun are critical data.
3. The device they show in Confinement is visually very similar to the one I made. For legal and national security reasons, I can’t elaborate. But I can confirm that I was trying to make a ping pong ball float.
4. Yes, the device used a lot of power and, yes, my experiments occasionally resulted in brief (brief!) outages for my neighbors. I still hear about it.
5. It is accurate that I began to float along with the ping pong ball but I did not cry out “Jeanie! I’m flying!”
6. It is true that I was so absorbed that I initially did not hear Jeanie’s screaming.
7. And, yes, when I ran upstairs and saw Maggie stuck inside the wall, I started screaming, too.
Except stuck isn’t the right word. Maggie had fused with the wall. Some of the scientists who came to study Maggie call this phenomenon architectural chimerism, not that there’s any precedent. They say that Maggie and the house occupy the same space, that they are now one and cannot be separated. We proved that when we tried to saw Maggie out on the very first day. The fire department, a general contractor, and a city emergency response team also tried to get Maggie out, using axes, power drills, and something called a “thermatic knife.” Every attempt seemed to hurt her, no matter where she was on the wall.
I’ve never denied that there’s a relationship between my gravity experiments and Maggie’s situation. But I wasn’t experimenting on her, nor was I an “armchair scientist tinkering with highly dangerous forces that are beyond his ken.”
That last thing was a line spoken by Nathan Knopf, who played himself in The Confinement of Baby Maggie. Ken? Who says “ken”?
***
I spend the morning of the dance roaming the house looking for cracks, open holes, missing molding, and old outlet covers, repairing as I go. Maggie follows me around, inspecting and encouraging my work. She is especially talkative today.
“I wonder what everyone will be wearing?” she says. “I wonder how many boys and how many girls. Do you think it will be equal amounts?”
“I imagine so,” I say, patching a small hole in the hall. “Although sometimes boys like to go to dances with boys and girls with girls. I expect Craig will come alone, as your date.”
“Oh, right,” she says. Is it possible that I hear a blush in her voice? “I can’t wait to see what they’ll wear!”
Frank arrives in the late afternoon with a camera around his neck. Maggie has requested that he help her get ready, especially with the makeup. The dress is draped over a chair in the living room. I go out onto the porch to watch the day give way to night. There’s an undercurrent of warmth in the otherwise cool spring air.
I called Jeanie yesterday, to let her know about the dance. A courtesy. There was no answer at the house. I understand from Scientists Weekly that Jeanie and Nathan travel a lot.
So it’s just me here to witness Maggie’s rite of passage. Me and Frank.
“Come and see,” Frank calls from the living room. My chest feels tight and my stomach roils. Frank greets me at the threshold of the living room. “Are you ready?”
Raising Maggie was a series of experiences and challenges that I was absolutely not ready for, but I managed. With a little help. But am I ready for my daughter’s prom, a common, happy occasion? Maybe. Mostly I’m just worried about her expectations. I worry that she’ll mistake this dance as the beginning of a normal life with friends and lovers and a family of her own. I worry about the disruption to our pleasant routine.
Frank ushers me into the living room and Maggie is there — not just present in the wall, but seemingly in the room. She’s holding the dress up at her shoulders so it drapes over her, long sleeves hanging naturally. I can just make out her fingertips extending beyond the wall’s surface. She does a little sashay, and the skirt and sleeves move just as they would with a girl inside. I laugh, and so does Maggie. She seems so happy — and I can tell, because for the first time I see her in detail, thanks to the makeup Frank has applied to the wall. He has lined her eyes, pinked up her cheeks, painted her lips, and added a tasteful layer of base makeup to her face and neck. To complete the effect — to make it really seem like she’s wearing makeup — Maggie has to stay pretty still and limit her head movements.
The shape of her eyes, the high cheekbones, the small mouth. She looks so much like her mother.
“Oh, daddy,” Maggie says. “Are you crying?”
I suppose I am.
***
The kids arrive in one big, giggling, chortling, well-dressed batch. Craig introduces them to me, Frank, and Maggie. I try but can’t keep the names straight. There are seven in all. Three boys, three girls, and Craig. They seem like a good, well-meaning group of young people. Friends of Craig. Poised, polite, kind. While the rest of the kids begin decorating the room, Craig presents a corsage to Maggie.
“Thank you,” Maggie says. Craig is trying to figure out where to pin it. Frank comes to the rescue. He takes the corsage and affixes it to his dead sister’s dress, near the neckline.
“You look beautiful,” Craig says. “I love your dress.”
“Me, too,” says one of the girls. She has dark hair and a pierced nostril. “I’ve never seen anything so pretty.”
Maggie is blushing. It’s not just the makeup.
“Let’s get a picture,” Frank says. Craig and the other kids surround Maggie and Frank takes three quick pictures. Maggie’s smiling so broadly that the lipstick on the wall can’t keep up.
“Frank,” I say. “Let’s give these young folks their space.” I lean toward the basement door.
“Oh,” he says. “Yes. Nobody wants an old trombone player hanging about.”
The kids laugh at that, like “old trombone player” is a thing people say.
As we descend, somebody turns on the music. We hear footsteps and laughter. I haven’t had this many people in the house since the scientists left, with Jeanie. The house, quiet for so long, is once more vibrant and alive. This was right. This was good, to allow Craig and his friends their act of service. I stand in the middle of the staircase for a moment and listen.
Frank is at the bottom of the stairs, looking at all of my equipment. I realize that he’s never been down here. He’s looking in particular at my powerless gravity device.
“Yes,” I say, walking down. “That’s it.”
“It’s a lot smaller than I thought it would be,” he says.
I laugh. “Big enough.”
“I thought maybe someone would have taken it away,” he says. “The government.”
“They tried,” I say. “I refused. I let them inspect it but told them it had to stay right here.”
“So you could bring her back?” he says. “Get her out?”
“Yes.”
Frank approaches the device with a kind of reverence. He does not touch it.
“I don’t blame you,” Frank says. “It was just an accident. Could have happened to anyone.”
Sure. Anyone foolish enough to tinker with powerful forces beyond his ken.
Frank spies my old black-and-white TV. “Hey, there’s a game on, right? Can we watch?”
I plug the TV in, Frank and I sit on old folding chairs, and we watch the game. Like two old friends. Jolly noises upstairs. I feel a specific and rare sense of peace.
And fall asleep.
Frank shakes me awake. Or it just seems so because the house is shaking.
“Get out!” Maggie is saying from upstairs, from everywhere. “All of you. Especially you!”
Frank and I run up the stairs and into the living room. Maggie has scrambled up the wall, very near the ceiling. Her makeup face is now near her feet. Her dress is on the floor.
“Maggie?” I say.
The music is still playing but the kids are frozen, gaping at Maggie.
“Maggie, please,” Craig says. “Nobody meant anything by it.”
“I want them to leave,” she says to me. “I want everyone OUT OF MY HOUSE!” The house rumbles with those words. The kids don’t need to be told another time. They scramble out. Craig is the last to go.
“I’m sorry, Maggie,” he says.
“Leave!” Her voice is augmented by the rattling of windows.
I follow Craig out and tug him by the arm before he reaches his car. “What happened?”
He turns toward me, face full of anguish and confusion. His eyes shine.
“We were dancing, all of us, having a good time,” he says. “Maggie, too, I think.” He pauses, rubs a cheek, and inhales with a shudder. “She did this fun little twisting thing, some kind of dance move and, well, her dress fell down. A couple of kids laughed. They were stupid. I don’t think they meant anything by it but it embarrassed her.”
Oh, I think. “Oh,” I say.
“I’m really sorry,” Craig says. “Please tell Maggie.”
“I will,” I tell him. He nods and I can see how close the tears are. He gets into his car and closes the door. God bless this sweet boy. He tried.
I rap on the window. He doesn’t roll it down but looks at me. “She’ll be OK,” I say, not knowing if that’s true.
Craig and his friends drive away.
When I walk back into the house, Frank is kneeling on the floor with his arms around a folded bug Maggie. He’s buzzing his lips like a trombone, hum-singing a lullaby he used to play when Maggie was small. This tableau reminds me of our early days with Maggie in the wall. Jeanie and I trying to cradle and comfort our baby through layers of drywall and paint.
Maggie does not want to talk about what happened at the dance. “I can’t tolerate this,” she says. And repeats it a dozen more times before falling asleep in that same, closed posture. Frank stays for much longer than is necessary or expected. I am grateful for his company. After he leaves, I collapse on the living room sofa and fall asleep.
***
When I wake Maggie is missing again. Her makeup is still there but she’s not behind it. It’s a sunny morning and her wall is brightly lit. No dark corners to hide in. She’s not in the living room ceiling. She’s not in the kitchen, or the hall, or the bathroom, or my bedroom, or her baby room. I check every room twice, three times. I open all of the curtains to let the sunlight in.
The panic starts with an odd disassociation. I observe myself searching for my teen-age, home-fused, architecturally chimeric daughter. Nothing bad is going to happen, none of this is real. How could any of this be real?
I hear Frank practicing his trombone. If this were an actual crisis, would I pay attention to that detail?
“Maggie, honey,” I hear myself saying. “Please tell me where you are.”
Frank’s trombone goes quiet.
I backtrack to the living room just as Frank walks in my front door.
“You didn’t answer,” he says. “Where’s Baby Maggie?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think she’s gone.”
“I’ll help.”
He does, for well over an hour.
“Should we call the police?” he says. “The fire department?”
“I don’t have the energy to explain everything to them,” I say. “Not again.”
Frank puts a hand on my shoulder and nods, like he understands completely. He walks to the basement door.
“Maggie never goes down there,” I say. “I don’t think she can.”
Frank opens the door anyway and walks down the stairs. I follow him. “Maggie?” he says. Something about his tone makes me think he’s found her. He hasn’t, but he has found something.
Maggie’s corsage is sitting on my experiment table, next to the ping pong ball I made float 15 years ago.
“Maybe she is gone,” Frank says. “Not gone, gone, but moved on. Not moved on, moved on. I mean, maybe she’s not gone. Maybe she just left.”
God help me. That’s the thing that scares me the most.
***
It’s been about a week since the prom. Frank and I looked everywhere in the house for Maggie, including the darkest recesses of the basement, where I thought she couldn’t go. We stopped short of doing anything destructive. No floorboards were removed, no walls cut open, nothing that might injure her. Frank bought an endoscope, and we used it to peer into the walls and ceilings through electrical outlets, switches, and light fixtures. No Maggie.
I haven’t reported Maggie’s disappearance to the authorities because, well, what could they do? In fact, I haven’t told anyone that Maggie is missing, not even Jeanie. Only Frank knows, and he promised to keep it quiet.
***
Maggie’s corsage is drying on her wall, where I pinned it. I left the makeup for a few days and then painted over it. It looked too much like a death mask. Frank took the dress back to his house. Now I’m reclining on the living room couch, the only place I can sleep these days. I keep staring at the dark corner where Maggie sometimes hid, expecting her to emerge from the shadows. I’m thinking about calling Nathan to see if he can help when people begin to appear on the street near the house. Maggie’s followers. They’re carrying signs, and the gift box is full.
Frank is at my door.
“I didn’t tell anyone,” Frank insists. I invite him in, and we watch the followers through the window.
More arrive. After sunset, they light candles. Soon, the group is large enough that they’re blocking traffic and spilling onto my front yard. Time to tell them to leave. Frank and I walk to the crowd.
“Maggie’s not home,” I say. A phrase I don’t think I’ve ever spoken.
“We know,” says a middle-aged woman wearing a Baby Maggie sweatshirt. “She’s roaming.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I’ve seen her,” says a young man. “In my house. She asked for some macaroni.”
This sounds like nonsense. Wishful thinking. But he said macaroni. Maggie’s diet is not common knowledge.
“She came to my house, too,” says a woman holding a wide-eyed infant. “Maggie kissed my baby.”
Others agree that they’ve seen Maggie or heard about sightings from reliable sources. I look at Frank, who is nearly as wide-eyed as the baby.
“Who saw her last?” I ask.
“I did,” says Craig, emerging from the back of the crowd. I hadn’t noticed him. “She thanked me for the prom and asked me which way to downtown.”
Craig. Craig. Trustworthy Craig. I’m overcome with relief and pull him toward me.
Matt Lindenburg is a writer based in the Seattle area. House of Maggie is his first published short story.
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 