Lonesome.
That was the immediate thought she’d had after her mother hung up on her, a month after she’d arrived at Birch Hills. They had tentative plans for Christmas, for the whole family to come back home and be together, shaking the loneliness out of the old bones of the house, and giving Maggie slightly more sanity than Norman could provide. Her mother had been confirming their plans, promising the arrival of people into her life again.
“Now, Margaret, we must talk about next year at some point,” her mother had begun, and then the fighting had started. It hadn’t ended until her mother had hung up the phone, cutting Maggie off in the middle of the sentence.
Norman had picked his head up at the noise, and then placed it back onto the hardwood floor, staring straight ahead towards the door. Maggie realized, at that moment, that there are been a point when this had been her biggest fear. That she would be alone, without anyone to keep her company. And now, and now after a month alone, there was something comforting about it. About the quiet that had fallen on Birch Hills when the first flakes of Maine winter fell from the skies onto Maggie’s awaiting tongue and Norman’s wagging tail, her grandparents’ ghosts standing in the open doorway, staring out over the rolling fields of their property.
Lonesome.
That was the churning in Maggie’s chest as she laid awake at night in the dark, warm, alcove of the attic that she had chosen to sleep in. It was a gaping hole in her chest, a cavern filling and emptying with every breath she took. The dog slept at the foot of her bed, and she gazed out of the small window onto the winding road that lead towards town, the only light in miles the light hanging off of the garage wall, flickering as her grandfather’s ghost stared out at the driveway, kicking gravel as he had almost every night when he’d been here, with her.
The sadness in the pit of her stomach sometimes took a concrete form, when she laid in bed at night and thought about calling Wilder and asking him how his semester has been. Thought about reaching out to the person who had known her better than anyone else, who had held her when she’d found out about her grandmother, had wiped the tears off of her face when she dropped him home for the last time. She hadn’t talked to him since she’d arrived at Birch Hills, not necessarily on purpose, but because he hadn’t seemed to ever call her.
That was the first seed of loneliness for Maggie, before it had blossomed into a beautiful bloom of lonesomeness. The kernel planted when Wilder didn’t call her, didn’t text her back as often as he once had.
Lonesome.
Maggie had written the text that she sent to Wilder a million times before she actually sent it, telling him that she was at Birch Hills, and that she felt at peace in the loneliness. She’d debated the medium through which she should send it, wondering if an email or voicemail would be better than a text. But, in the end, she had settled on a text.
She had sat at the kitchen table, the entire room glowing in a yellow light as she stared at her phone, the stairs creaking under the weight of her grandfather’s ethereal feet, composing her text again and again and again.
“hey wilder, its me. im alone at birch hills. ive been thinking a lot about you. i miss you and i love you. please text me back.”
That was what she had settled on, after half an hour. He hadn’t responded when she went to bed that night, trying not to think of the lack of notifications on her phone. The whole house seemed gray and empty, larger than it ever had before. Six weeks alone, six weeks into her self-imposed isolation, and she felt as though she hadn’t made any progress. The only thing that Maggie had made progress on, it seemed, was by identifying the swirling black whirlpool of emotion in her gut and labeling it:
Lonesome.
That was the feeling jolted out of her when the doorbell rang, three days before her family was supposed to come up for the holidays. Norman beat her to the door, barking aggressively and wagging his tail, his nails skittering against the hardwood floors as he made a beeline to the front door. Maggie followed, tentatively, pushing a piece of hair that had escaped her bandana behind her ear.
Wilder was standing there, a bag dropped on the step next to him, staring at her in the mid-afternoon December sun, its weak light shining through his auburn hair. He hadn’t texted her back, after she’d sent him that text the week before, and everyday Maggie had assumed the likelihood she ever heard back was decreasing. But, nevertheless, here he was, dressed in green fleece and jeans, a tentative and small smile falling across his lips.
“Hey, Mags, I…”
She didn’t let him finish as she threw herself into his arms, hugging him as though she needed to prove that he was not yet another ghost there to grace Birch Hills. It took him a second, but he wrapped his arms around her, holding her just as tightly as she had held him.
“Can I stay for the holidays?”
Maggie just nodded into his chest, as if she was worried that her vocal cords would betray her, betray the immense relief that had come with not feeling so completely and utterly alone anymore. Maggie let go of him, opening the door and ushering him inside.
And suddenly with Wilder seated at the kitchen table, drinking tea from a mug and grinning as he began to tell her stories of his first semester at school, Birch Hills didn’t gray. Color began to seep back into the room, the pinks and purples in her grandmother’s rose and lilac drapes becoming brighter, the wood furnishings become a warmer tone.
With Wilder there, Birch Hills had begun to thaw.
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