Marvels: Maggie

Part 5

by DarkMark

I must write the next part.

I think I want to about as much as did the guy who wrote about David and Bathsheba in the Bible. But he had to do it because it was part of the story. So I have to, as well.

Afterward you may know why I have waited this long to write the rest of the story of Maggie. Having gotten this far, it has taken me about two weeks to get up the courage to write the rest. If there is a prophet coming to my door later with a parable that ends with the words, "You are the man", I can't say I didn't have warning.

Let me put it off a little by telling you about what I was thinking, having spent four months with the lovely little gargoyle-girl who fell into my life twice. No, better yet, let me tell you what my wife was saying to me one night in bed, which was the one place we were fairly sure Maggie could not hear us.

"We can't keep her in the house forever, Phil," she said.

I didn't want to say anything.

"Someday, sometime, somebody is going to find out about her," she continued. "Or she'll get out on her own. What then?"

"I don't know," I said. Honest, and it was a good all-purpose answer.

"That's not good enough, Phil," she said, tracing a line on my chest with her finger. "You know it isn't."

"It means I don't want to talk about it and I'd like some sleep, Dorrie dearest. It means I've got no good answer for you right now."

"She's growing up, Phil. She's going to want to be around other people besides us. She'll get to be a teenager, and then--"

"And then she'll want to find out about malt shops, sock hops, and rock 'n' roll. No, thank you. We have enough trouble with Beth and Jenny, and Maggie will just have to learn to..." I didn't want to say it, but I had to. "Do without," I finished.

Now it was Dorrie who didn't say anything. She just lay beside me.

"I'm sorry if it sounds cruel," I said. "I suppose Anne Frank felt the same way. You know what they had to keep her safe from."

Dorrie snuggled a little closer. She does that when she wants to get something through to me. "What are we keeping her safe from, Phil?"

"The real world, Doris. The world that's full of mutie-haters and people who'll scream at her or make fun of her or chase her."

"Should we keep her safe from it, Phil?"

"You want we should bring her home dead some night? Is that what you want, Doris?"

"We'll be taking almost those same risks with Beth and Jenny in a few years."

"Oh. Right. Like they're..."

"No. They don't have Maggie's face, that's true. But we'll be sitting up, worrying why either of them is a little bit late coming back from a date. We'll be wondering if they're going too far, or what they're drinking, or if they're experimenting with other stuff."

"Not my kids!"

"I tend to agree, Phil. Beth and Jenny, I think we can trust them. But you know what teenage is like. Your whole world shifts perspective."

"I know. Dirty jokes you're just starting to understand, football players and cheerleaders you're starting to hate, zits popping up like ragweed on your face--"

"Sex."

"That a statement or a request?"

"A comedy writer you are not. You will disgrace the whole tribe."

"I did that regularly when I was 14 to 18. My dad told me every week."

"Well, I take care of that now." She smiled.

"You do."

"You've changed the subject, Phil."

"I have. Talented, aren't I?"

She didn't say anything for awhile. Then, when I was convinced I could go to sleep, she said, "We won't be around forever, Phil."

"Uh huh."

"Beth and Jenny will leave in a few years."

"I suppose they will."

"What about Maggie?"

"Dorrie. I really, really don't know."

Pause.

"Then you'd better find out."

I had no answer to that.

I was relieved that she turned over then, and went to sleep. Or at least faked it enough that I could.

I managed it after about an hour, I think.

-M-

It wasn't long after that I found something else out when I checked on little miss Maggie down in the basement one night. Didn't exactly make me Mr. Solomon Holmes when I did it, either. It was just that time, she must've been too tired to hide it.

Maggie's hours were sometimes different than the rest of ours, though we'd gotten her mostly out of her stay-up-all-night-and-spend-the-day-sleeping routine. Often Doris had to get her out of bed in the morning to get breakfast with the rest of us, because family breakfast is a ritual that we were by-damn not gonna break. No matter what kind of doghouse my brothers and I were in during our early years, my dad insisted every one of us, plus Mom and the sisters and Aunt Estelle, were down at the breakfast table every morning to be together. If you tried to sleep in, he went up and grabbed you by the earlobe if you were a son, or just banged on the bedroom door if you were a daughter or aunt. Miss dinner or lunch? Not to worry. But breakfast? You missed that, you better run down to the temple and see if they still did sanctuary.

Anyway, she'd do breakfast and if she was still sleepy, she'd head back to the basement and check out for as long as it took. It was Sunday morning and I didn't have to go to work or worship. I'd been doing one of my infrequent helpings of Doris with the dishes. She'd never let me near a glass, which was wise. Anyway, it had been an hour or so since noshing, and Beth and Jenny were outside doing whatever 12-year-old girls do when parents aren't looking over their shoulders. What they did back in the mid-Sixties, that is. So I decided to look in on Maggie.

Not that anything was supposed to be wrong with her. I just liked checking in on her. You know?

Maggie was lying asleep in bed. A real bed, one that we'd bought for her, not a cot. With blue blankets and a pink pillow in a basement which was fixed up like a real girl's room, which we told the meter readers and occasional guests was used as an auxiliary bedroom whenever Beth or Jenny felt like it. We would've said it was there for their sleepover guests. Except that they didn't have any of those for the last few months, though they went over to other kids' slumber parties.

I am stalling.

Maggie was asleep. Lids over those huge eyes, her hair actually grown long enough to cover most of the places which would be covered on a girl's head. She still tied bows in it. That made me smile. She kept her hands under the covers and didn't snore much. I knew she had trained herself--or maybe she didn't have to train herself--to sleep light, because she might have needed to light out of wherever she was if she heard a suspicious sound in times past.

But those times were past. She didn't seem to need to wake up when I was down in the basement.

I liked that.

She had several pairs of shoes now. We had to buy them for her without her being there, so it was a blessing the darn things fit. You wouldn't believe how grateful the kid was for them, or maybe you would if you knew how long she'd had to wear the same pair of white-top laceups between the time we lost her and got her back.

Looking at her down there, sleeping on her back underneath a blue blanket, with a Nancy Drew book flopped down by her bedside and a kiddie record player with a Vogues 45 on the spindle (she always liked "5 O'Clock World" and did that "hep" thing in perfect rhythm), I had to admit that she was coming to occupy a place in my heart just under that of Beth and Jenny.

I liked that, too.

Did I mention shoes?

Well, the pair that she had been wearing the night before were red Keds and the front edge of one of them was just poking out from under the edge of the blanket. Maggie was a fairly neat child and liked to line up her shoes along one edge of the wall, as if invisible soldiers were standing at attention in them. Yet, her Keds were under the bed.

On a whim, Daddy reached down and picked at the shoe, figuring the other one was down there beside it (it was), and was going to line it up against the wall with her other three pair.

I picked it up and was about to go after the other one and froze.

I couldn't tell how long I froze, but I was sitting on the floor beside the bed holding the shoe in both hands when I came back to myself, and the shoe was facing sole-up and I didn't want to believe what I was looking at, but it was in living color, 3-D, and maybe even Todd-AO.

"Jesus Christ," I said. Then I said it louder: "Jesus CHRRRIIIIST!"

Hey, it might be the wrong religion. But I'm American. I figure I was entitled. And even if I wasn't, we were both Jewish, so maybe I could be pardoned.

Funny. I still want to insulate myself with jokes.

Maggie was sitting upright, staring at me, breathing heavy, her eyes as wide as they physically ever got, saying nothing. Doris had heard me and was coming downstairs as fast as her high heels would allow, making creditable time, actually.

Maggie looked like she wanted to bolt, but it was light enough in there for her not to hide, I was between her and the door, and I was who I was and not somebody she didn't know. So maybe that was why she didn't try to run. But she looked about as scared of me as I ever saw her, and she had damn good reason to be.

"Phil," said Doris, from the stairs. "Phil! What's wrong!"

I was looking at Maggie, holding out the shoe. "Maggie," I said. "Maggie. Can you explain this?"

She looked at me, her mouth open, not trying to say anything.

"The shoe, Maggie," I said. "Look at the shoe, not me. Explain that."

She looked at the shoe.

It had mud on the sole.

Doris had caught sight of it too. She drew in a heavy breath, kneeling beside the bed, and expelled it. "Oh, Maggie," she said. "Oh, dear."

Maggie was almost too scared to speak. I didn't like the feeling that I was standing in her long-lost daddy's place by what I had to do. But I went ahead. "Maggie. You've been getting out at night, haven't you?"

She slowly nodded. "Yes, sir," she said, squeakily.

"How many times, Maggie?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Four? Five? More, even?"

"I don't know."

Doris clutched at Maggie's arm. "Maggie, don't you know what you've been doing? Don't you know what you're risking, what they could, what they could do to you?"

"I'll tell you what they could do to her," I said. "They could do just what I saw them do to a guy who they only thought was a mutant, the night I first found out about her. They beat him so hard it was a week before he walked without a wheelchair, and he can't see out of his left eye now. And you, Maggie, you--"

"I'm sorry!" she squealed.

"--You chanced bringing all that down on yourself, and on us!"

Doris didn't say a thing. She knew when to let me carry the ball, and this, little as I liked it, was one of those times.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Sheldon, I'm really, really sorry," Maggie said, close to tears. "All I wanted to do was go out and see what it was like outside again and all. Do some walking around. I'm, I'm good at hiding."

"Oh, you're good at that, all right. So good I just found out about it when you didn't clean your shoe off before I could see it. Maggie, this is your haven. There are people out there who would hate you. Not just because of the way you look, but because they might think you are what you are. A mutant. There are people out there who could kill you. And if they saw you coming back here, they could kill us, too."

She breathed heavily, but didn't say anything.

"My God, Maggie, my God," I said. "I've been trying to keep you safe, to keep the family together, to keep you secret so that you won't have to, to live like an orphan hobo, and you--"

"Phil," Doris said, more or less to let me know she was there.

"--You go over the wall! What the hell were you thinking? Were you thinking at all, Maggie? Were you thinking at all?"

She started bawling then, and I didn't blame her. But part of being Daddy is knowing when not to ease up, even in the face of tears, when you have to stay hard.

"Maggie, I am just about at the point of putting you over my knee," I said. "This is about the absolute equivalent of walking around with a yarmulke on the streets of Hitler's Berlin. Where did you go?"

"Not far," she said, still sobbing. "I'm sorry."

"How far? How far, Maggie?"

"Only a few blocks. I kept, I kept in the alleys for a lot of it. I didn't, let 'em, see me, hear me."

"But you don't know if they saw or heard you," I said.

"Nobody came after me!"

"You still don't know."

She was burying her face in her hands. "Maggie, come here," I said. "Get up from bed, and let me show you something."

"Phil, what are you going to do?" Doris was looking motherly-apprehensive, and had a right to.

"You can come along, too," I said.

I grasped Maggie by the wrist once she was into her slippers and trundled her up the basement steps. I showed her every room in the house--mine, the kids', Doris's, the bedroom, the darkroom, the den, the bathrooms, the kitchen, the dining room, everything. Suburban splendor. Then I took her to a back window, the one which looked out upon our fenced yard. Nobody could see her looking out from this vantage point, since the fence was higher than the window.

"What do you see, Maggie?" I said.

"Beth and Jenny," she said. "Playin'."

Beth and Jenny were out there indeed, playing with a set of Jarts. They saw us and stuck their tongues out. When they saw I was not amused, they quit mugging and gave us curious looks. I spoke to Maggie.

"Now you've seen everything I have," I said. "Everything I stand to lose. Including myself. My wife. My two daughters. If anybody had seen you, Maggie, or better yet, if anybody has seen you--that's what I will lose. Because there are lots of good people out there, Maggie, make no mistake about that. But there are evil people as well, and they like to hurt, and sometimes kill, things that make them frightened. Or just things they think don't fit into the norm. I've seen it."

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just that--"

"Sorry!" I flat-out yelled it. "Sorry? This isn't real enough to you yet, Maggie? If somebody bashes you over the head with a club and you're lying there expelling your brains into the gutter, if they say 'Sorry', will it automatically make your brains go up into your head again? Will it, Maggie?"

"No," she said, still crying. "But I feel like I'm in jail!"

Dead silence.

Doris finally broke it. "You aren't in jail, Maggie. This is your sanctuary. Your hiding place. But if you go out there, and get seen--there'll be no place to hide. For any of us."

"What do you think they'd do to us, if they found out we'd been harboring you this long, Maggie?" I said. "No, don't even think about running out on us again. I don't want that, Doris doesn't want that, and you know you don't want that, either. And you know it wouldn't solve anything. But we haven't been sending you to school, we haven't declared you as a tax exemption, the real world doesn't even know you exist."

Maggie said, quietly, "I'm glad."

"Oh, that's nice. So you tempt fate every time you go out there in your little red Keds, any time some galoot hears a barking dog by the fence and decides to go see what's making Rover go crazy, and he looks over, and he sees--" I sighed. "Maggie, Maggie. What in the hell am I going to do with you?"

She looked at me and, after a time, said, "I could leave again."

"You can NOT! Do you think I've gone to all this trouble to make you a runaway again?" I said.

Doris said, "Don't you know we love you, Maggie? Don't you realize, after all this time, that we really, truly, love you?"

"I know that, Mrs. Sheldon," she said, her tremendous eyes holding more sadness than, God help us, any kid her age should have to know, and all of whom seem to. "And I love you back. You, too, Mr. Sheldon. I don't want to leave here. I really don't. But I...I miss feeling the cold wind out there at night. I used to feel it lots of times. It almost froze me, sometimes. Didn't think I'd ever miss it. But you know what? I do."

"Mm-hmm," I said, my arms folded.

"And I, oh, I just miss being able to look up and see what stars you can in the sky. And hearing all the night noises, and being able to, well, just walk or run anywhere I can get to, if I'm not seen. Just being able to take a walk. I'm sorry if I..." She faltered, then hung her head. "I just don't know. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done it."

The washing machine in my head had the agitator going at full blast. Why me? Why not some wealthy guy like Rockefeller or Tony Stark, who could have kept her on a big island or estate somewhere, waited on by a bunch of servants who were sworn to secrecy, and taken her places, protected by money and privelage from the mutant-hating nuts?

She had a point, and I knew it. How well was she developing in this hot-house environiment? Sure, it was better for her than scrabbling for what food she could steal, seeking out some hidey-hole to sleep in every night, keeping away from people who would chase the monster. But wasn't it, in the end, every bit as much a prison?

But sometimes, a prison is all you've got.

"Young lady, I do not want you to do this ever, ever again," I said, leaning against the basement wall. "If you do, I swear, I really mean this, I will put you over my knee and wear you out. You will eat your next twelve meals standing up, and you will sleep on your stomach because you have to. Clear?"

"Yessir," she said.

"If I can...IF I can...maybe, just maybe, I will try to find a way to take you somewhere," I said. Her eyes lit up like the Truman Library picture of the A-bomb test. Doris drew in a breath. "This is a very big if, young lady. I do not know how I will accomplish it, and your old major domo is getting awfully tired of all the hats he has to juggle lately. Most likely, it will be only you and me. At most, some of the rest of the family."

"Can Beth and Jenny come too?", she said, excitedly.

"It depends. It will most likely be at night, and you can be darn sure that it will not be to a place where you can be easily seen, if at all. I'll be lucky if the neighbors just think I'm a Commie spy. But your smiling face does not please me, young lady, because this is a serious matter. The guys with the guns and torches could have come for us, just because of what you did. You understand that?"

"Yessir," she said, a bit more subdued.

"No more uncle Phil, or aunt Dorrie, or Beth and Jenny. That could have happened. Because of what you did. You understand that?"

"Yessir, uncle Phil," she said. I had to admit, I liked that a lot more than "Mr. Sheldon".

"Therefore you are gonna get penalized, and it is only because of my withholding good judgment that I am not laying upon you the 39 Whacks. For the next week, no TV. No radio. No records. You can have your Nancy Drew, your other books, and your comics. But none of the other. Any infringement, and I shall paddle your backside. Understand?"

"Yes, uncle Phil."

Doris put in, "And if he forgets it, darling--I won't."

I sat down beside her on the bed. "Maggie. Uncle Phil is tired. Uncle Phil has to hustle a living as a photographer, and keep the bills paid, and try to take care of everything with the good right arm of my Dorrie here to rely on. It is not easy, even with things running well. So do you understand that uncle Phil needs you to be a good girl from now on, and not to gum up the works by doing things that could get you killed?"

"I'll try," she said, trying to smile and sniffle at the same time.

"That's good," I said. "Because you--"

Coincidence. It's the mark of bad writers and Charles Dickens. But it happens. If this makes God a bad writer, I don't know. You should take it up with Him, okay? It happens.

"MOM!"

The voice of Jenny, amplified to the nth by terror. The sobbing of Beth, as an undertone to it. It came from upstairs, in the living room. Neither Doris nor I could see our daughters at that moment, and it seemed as though that howl of Jenny's must have taken twenty seconds at least.

Nonetheless, we were in the basement one instant, and in the living room the next, grabbing at our daughters, and I can swear to no interval in between. If you said we teleported, I would not disagree with you.

The damage was there and obvious in Beth's red, dripping hand. She'd been holding one of the Jarts, which are a kind of lawn dart, with the tip pressed against her palm while she was coming inside. She trips on the front step, boom, down she goes.

The damn Jart, blunt tip and all, pierced her palm. Jenny, not even knowing what she was doing, pulled it out, which made the bleeding even worse.

I cannot reproduce any of our dialogue with a degree of accuracy. I know I took off my belt and wrapped it about Beth's upper arm as a tourniquet. I know Doris grabbed part of the tablecloth off the table and was trying to wrap it around Beth's palm. I think I yelled at Jenny to call the ambulance, and she asked what to dial, and I yelled at her to dial the operator and told Doris to get some ice and tried with one arm to keep my Beth's face away from looking at her hand while we tried in our stupid way to wring lesser chaos out of greater chaos.

I can't even tell you that Maggie said, "Let me." But I think she did.

She had materialized somehow on the top step, ran over, pulled the gory piece of tablecloth away from Bethie's gushing palm, and, taking Beth's larger hand in both of hers, spit up on it.

The stuff she spit wasn't from her stomach.

It was some clear, glistening, gluelike gumstuff that she was careful to spread thickly all over the wound. And even though it didn't stop the pain, it did stop the bleeding. A natural spray-on Band-Aid, ages before such stuff was even conceived, outside of maybe NASA.

Maggie spit some more on Beth's hand, and wiped her mouth carefully, and dripped what she could from her hand on my baby's wounded palm.

Doris and I must have been looking at her with some kind of stunned-ox expressions. Actually, we probably looked as though we had witnessed some shock bit from a horror movie, which, though terrifying, was beneficial--and all the more frightening for that.

Beth managed to say it, looking at the glistening and hardening gum on her hand.

"Maggie, my hand," she gasped. "My hand. That stuff. It's your mutant power!"

Maggie looked up at us in astonishment. "You mean, you can't do that, too?"

I looked at my wife. "Doris. Call the ambulance."

"Phil, she might--"

"Call the ambulance! NOW!"

Bethie was still sobbing, as she had a right to. But, as I held her there on my lap, I could see she was fascinated by what strange gift Maggie had been able to tender. And that, perhaps, there was an upside to the thing that had made her a gargoyle, whatever that was.

I looked at her. "Maggie. Thank you. Thank you very much."

"You're welcome, Mr. Sheldon," she said.

"The record player. But no TV or radio, still. Understand?"

"Yes, uncle Phil."

I had a brand new set of things to worry about, now, superseding the old ones.

It made me almost glad.

To be continued...