“He's a star pupil,” Quinn said proudly, and Jack looked slightly embarrassed. “Jack tells me you're a teacher,” he said to Maggie, as he served dessert and made coffee.
“I was,” she said easily, enjoying their company more than she had expected. They were a motley crew, drawn together by proximity, circumstances, and good intentions. “I haven't taught in nearly two years.” She looked a little wistful as she said it.
“What did you teach?” Quinn asked with interest. He could easily imagine her surrounded by very young children, maybe kindergarten.
“Physics, in high school,” she said, and surprised him. “The subject everyone hated. Or actually, they didn't. Most of my students were fairly gifted. They don't take physics unless they have a knack for it. If not, they opt for biology or calculus, or integrated sciences. Most of my students went on to major in physics in college.”
“That means you did a good job with them. I always liked physics in college. I never took it in high school. What made you stop?” he asked casually, and was startled and saddened by her answer.
“My son died. Everything came to a grinding halt after that,” she said honestly. There was no artifice about her, and Quinn liked that. “He committed suicide nineteen months ago.” She could have told them in days or weeks, but no longer did that. She hated the fact that it was months now, and soon it would be years. Time was slowly creating an ungovernable distance between them. She couldn't control it, just as she had been unable to control his actions in the end. “He suffered from severe depression. Most depressed kids don't commit suicide, even if they think about doing it. Usually, it's more bipolar kids. But Andrew couldn't pull out of it. He pretty much lost his grip once he got to high school. I just didn't have the heart to go back to school once he died. They gave me compassionate leave to do some grief counseling. And after I did, I realized I wasn't ready to go back. I'm not sure I ever will be.” But sooner or later, she knew she had to work, at something, if not teaching.
“What do you do now instead?” Quinn asked quietly.
Maggie sighed before she answered. “I've started counseling other parents like me. I'm not sure I'm a big help to them, but at least I've been there. And three nights a week I work for a suicide hotline for teenagers.
They call-forward a line to me, and I can do it from home. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not, but at least I feel like I'm doing something to help someone, instead of just sitting home and feeling sorry for myself.”
Quinn wondered if that kept the wound open for her, but in spite of a look of sorrow in her eyes, she seemed to be a fairly well-balanced person. He wondered where her husband was, but didn't want to ask her. She volunteered the information a short time later on her own.
“I probably would have gone back to work by now, but Andrew's death kind of unsprung my marriage. I think my husband and I blamed each other for what we couldn't change or stop. Things had been shaky between us for a while, and in the year after Andrew's death, the marriage fell apart completely. He walked out two days after the anniversary of Andrew's death. Our divorce was final the week after Christmas.” She said it in a strangely matter-of-fact voice, as Quinn realized that that was when he first met her, and an instant later, she confirmed what he had thought. “I got the papers in the mail the day the storm hit on New Year's Eve. The storm seemed like a suitable end to all of it. I must have seemed like a crazy person the day I talked to you,” she said apologetically. “I'm not even sure I was coherent. I was pretty upset.”
“You seemed fine to me,” Quinn said reassuringly, remembering her standing in the pouring rain without a raincoat or umbrella. There had been something devastated in her face when she told him she had Niagara Falls in her kitchen. And now he understood it better. She seemed to have no need to hide what she was feeling, and he suspected that she felt better now. Better enough to come to dinner at least, and he was suddenly glad that Jack had pressed him to invite her. More than anything else, this woman needed friends to distract her. They were like three souls in a lifeboat. And for the moment, Quinn was rowing. And he suddenly decided to share something with her, if only to let her know that she was not alone in her agony, and would survive it.
“My son died twenty-three years ago, in a boating accident,” he confided as he set his fork down and looked at her across the table, as Jack watched them. He had never heard that from Quinn before, and was deeply touched by the admission. The only child Quinn had mentioned to him was Alex, in Geneva. “He was thirteen, and I think I only realized recently how deeply it changed both of us. I withdrew even deeper into my work, and my wife became more introverted and stayed that way. We were both grief-stricken, but when I read her journals, after her death, I understood better how profoundly it altered her. I was busy then, and probably insensitive about it. I'm sure I wasn't much help to her. It was too painful for me to talk about, so I seldom, if ever, did. She wrote some beautiful stories about him.” There were tears in his eyes as he spoke, and he didn't confess to her that he had forced Jane to put away Doug's things within weeks after he died. And the little she had kept unboxed, she had concealed from Quinn in her closet. In a sense, he had forced her to do that, and now that he understood what it had meant to her, he deeply regretted what he'd said and done. He had thought he was doing the right thing for her, for himself, and even for Alex. But now he knew he'd been wrong. He had learned so much about her and himself in the months since she'd been gone.
“It's not a great thing to happen to a marriage,” Maggie said, looking at Quinn. Her eyes bored into his like drills, as though asking a thousand questions. She wanted to ask him how he had survived it, or how his wife had. She still blamed herself for the end of her marriage.
She had always felt that her husband had lacked empathy for the depths of their son's depression, and that perhaps unknowingly, because of it, he had exacerbated Andrew's desperation. And because of that, she had never forgiven Charles for Andrew's death, and he knew it, whether she said it or not. He in turn felt she should have been able to stop it. Their final year together had been one of relentless silent accusation, until they could no longer stand each other. And no matter what they did to each other or themselves, nothing would bring their son back. Although she was devastated when Charles left, she felt he had made the right decision for both of them. In the end, their marriage had been as dead as their son. Charles had given her the best settlement he could, in the form of the house he had paid for her to buy, to escape the one where their son died, and he had given her enough money to live on for the next few years. Eventually, she'd have to go back to teaching. But for the moment, she was still hiding, as Quinn was. He understood that much about her. She had wrapped herself in a cocoon, to protect herself from the realities and blows of life. She needed time to heal, and was giving herself time to do it, which seemed sensible of her. But when she wasn't talking or even sometimes when she was, her eyes looked agonizingly sad to Quinn.
“You've been through a lot of trauma,” Quinn said softly, and she nodded. She had no need to deny it, nor did she want to portray herself as a victim. In spite of the injuries she'd sustained, Quinn had a sense that she was both brave and strong.
“A lot of other people have been through trauma,” she said sensibly, “the counseling work I do reminds me of that. Suicide is the second biggest killer of kids in this country. We have a long way to go before most people understand that. Andrew tried it twice before the last time.”