Surfacing by Nora Raleigh Baskin

about it. She was too young, they felt
. It will just confuse her.
I heard them talking, but, of course, parents protect themselves and pretend they are protecting their children
.
    Sometimes I wonder if Maggie even knew I had died, or if she sat waiting for me — if she’s sitting there still — downstairs in the den, where we kept all our toys, our books, all the little dolls we made out of paper and felt and colored with Magic Markers. That afternoon, Maggie sat for hours, not moving until our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Tate, went down there herself
.
    “You can’t stay down here all afternoon,” Mrs. Tate told her. “You need to come upstairs and eat something.”
    “No,” Maggie said. She faced the wall of glass doors that led out to the backyard, where we used to sit cross-legged in the grass and play clapping games, like Miss Mary Mack and Itsy Meanie Teeny Eeny
.
    “Now, Maggie,” Mrs. Tate said, “I insist. You’ve been waiting down here since everyone left for the —”
    “For where?” Maggie looked up. “Where did everyone go?”
    “Well, that’s for your mother to talk to you about.” And Mrs. Tate turned on her heels, back up the stairs. The swinging door into the kitchen banged shut
.
    They were all at my funeral, dressed in dark colors, faces red and swollen, and Maggie was alone. She was alone in a way she had never been before. At the service nobody talked much, except for the reverend. He talked a lot and said nothing at all. The room was hot — too much air, too much carbon dioxide. The reverend went on and on. He read some poetry, the 23rd Psalm, and then he talked some more
.
    “OK, Maggie. This is it.” Mrs. Tate had trouble with stairs, but she made her way down again. This time holding a plate of chocolate-chip cookies, warm from the oven. “With raisins,” she offered. “Your favorite.”
    Maggie got up from the floor
.
    “Good girl,” Mrs. Tate said
.
    She took a cookie. It melted in her mouth. “I’m not a good girl,” Maggie said. The cookie was sweet and delicious. I know it was, and it made her instantly thirsty, but she didn’t ask for a drink
.
    “Oh, nonsense. Here, take another one.”
    Maggie stuffed another cookie into her mouth. It was hard to chew; her mouth was dry, her voice crumbly. “That’s why they don’t want me there.”
    “That’s not true at all, Maggie. Why do you make up stories like that?”
    I always thought that I was the bad one, the one who got in trouble, so I knew what Maggie was feeling, but there was nothing I could do about it now
.

    When Maggie was at the height of making herself available to Matthew last year, most of her time was actually spent waiting.
    She waited for him to text her. Waited to bump into him at parties. Waited for his sister, Jennifer, to invite the girls over to work on another school project so Matthew could say “See ya” again, but it didn’t happen. She waited as if it were an art form, and this Thanksgiving break — other than swim practice, eating, and sleeping — Maggie perfected it. Over Thanksgiving break, Nathan texted dozens of times and even called her house phone, but with all the family obligations she claimed to have — of which there were none — Maggie managed to remain home doing nothing other than going to the pool and waiting.
    Saturday morning, after an early practice, Maggie sat in front of the TV with her computer on her lap, the volume muted. She intermittently checked her Facebook and popped another Frosted Mini-Wheat into her mouth. The rest of her family was still sleeping, even the boys. The house was perfectly quiet but for the ticking of the kitchen clock, a square blue face painted with the White Rock girl gazing into the surface of a gentle pond.
    Maggie used to pretend — and sometimes still did — that she
was
the White Rock girl, with her little fairy wings that sprouted like tree branches. It would worry her, though, that those disproportionate tiny wings would be