I Still Dream About You: A Novel (36 page)

Maggie felt a sudden pang of pity for that poor dumb dreamy girl with so many disappointments ahead, so many illusions to be shattered. Remembering her now was like remembering someone she had known in another lifetime.

Going back home, she drove through downtown, and just as a spur-of-the-moment thing, she did something she hadn’t done in years. After a few times around the block, she found a parking space on the corner and went into a little hole-in-the-wall place called Gus’s Famous Hot Dogs. She went in, sat at the counter, and ordered two chili dogs with mustard, onions, and sauerkraut and an
orange drink. Gus’s Famous Hot Dogs was one of the few places left where she and her parents used to go when she was little and then later, as a teenager, she and her girlfriends had always eaten there. The place had not changed a bit, and the chili dogs were as delicious as she remembered. Then she ordered two big pieces of lemon icebox pie. Why not? On her last day on earth, why not have a little fun? She knew she would probably have terrible indigestion tonight, but it was worth it. She remembered the days when she had been able to eat anything she wanted, French-fried onions and cheeseburgers, and not have to pay for it later. The last time she had eaten there was with four or five of her high school girlfriends, when they had been running from one place to the next, going to the movies or hanging out at the record store. She wished those days could have lasted longer. It was hard to believe that most of those giggling girls were grandmothers now.

Maggie looked down at her watch. It was still pretty early, and she wondered what she would do for the rest of the day. She started toying with the idea of maybe going on to the river this afternoon and not waiting until the morning. When she paid her bill, she was pleasantly surprised to see that you could still get a good meal and a cold drink for less than five dollars. She was in a good mood until she walked outside, just in time to see the traffic cop on a scooter driving away from her car. She had just gotten a parking ticket!

Oh, no! She had never gotten a ticket in her life. What had she done wrong? She had put money in the meter. Her time was not expired. She opened the ticket and read what the woman had written: “Improper parking, too far away from curb.” She stepped back and looked. Well, maybe her car was a little too far out in the street, so she guessed she was guilty as charged, but as she read further, she was greatly relieved to see that she could pay the fine by mail; it said
DO NOT SEND CASH—PAY ONLY BY CHECK OR MONEY ORDER
. She was in luck. As fate would have it, her next stop was the bank, to close out her account again. Had this happened later in the day, she would have been in a bind. After she had written the check to the Department of Motor Vehicles and closed her account, she mailed the ticket outside the bank.

After roaming all over town and driving down all her favorite streets and places, she went back down the mountain and parked her car across the street from Caldwell Park and watched the last afternoon light fade. She sat there until dusk, until the street lanterns in the park blinked on and reflected their yellow lights in the trees and on the shining sidewalks.

It was a fitting ending for her last day—just like life itself: incredibly beautiful, incredibly sad, bittersweet. She started the car, took one long last look, and then turned and headed back to Avon Terrace.

But before she went home, she slowly drove by Crestview one more time, and it made her happy to think about David and Mitzi living there. She had found Crestview good owners; not much in the scheme of things, but at least she had accomplished something. She could now leave without feeling like a complete failure. Maggie sat down and went over her “Things to Do” checklist again, and by the time she finished, it was almost six o’clock. She decided it was too late to go to the river today. She guessed she would just wait and go in the morning.

M
AGGIE WOKE UP AND LOOKED OVER AT THE CLOCK. SIX A.M
. Good. She might as well get an early start, and there would be less traffic on the way down to the river at this hour. After she was dressed in her fishing shirt and jeans and men’s boots, she emptied out the refrigerator, took out the garbage, placed the ant traps under the sink, and took out the “To Whom It May Concern” letter and laid it on the kitchen counter. When she left, she locked the front door behind her and put the key under the mat. The taxi was right on time, waiting, and to her surprise, the driver looked exactly like Omar Sharif from
Doctor Zhivago
. The bad news was, he could barely speak English, and she had a hard time explaining how to get to the river. But the good news: he was from Siberia, so he had no idea she was a former Miss Alabama or that she was not Mrs. Tab Hunter.

She tried to be pleasant and asked him how long he had been in America. When he told her eleven years, she asked, “Do you ever miss Siberia?”

He looked up at her in the mirror and said sadly, “Oh, yes, I can’t wait to get back.”

She couldn’t imagine how anyone would long for Siberia, but she guessed everybody loved their home, no matter where it was. As
they drove, Maggie sat and thought about how life was so full of surprises, even up to the very end. She was sure a lot of other people must have considered ending it all at one time or another but had chickened out at the last minute. She’d bet that a lot of people would be surprised that
she
, of all people, had actually gone through with it. But then, they say it’s always the quiet ones you never suspect. She was even surprised at herself and was amazed at how calm and serene she felt. She knew intellectually that this should be a big dramatic moment, but she didn’t feel it. She had been more nervous just going to the dentist than she was now. But real life was never the same as they showed it in the movies. And then, too, she had made this same trip so many times that now it all seemed anticlimactic.

When they reached the river road, she had the driver let her out a few minutes from the old Raiford Fishing Camp. She gave him a nice tip, and when he was out of sight, she walked the rest of the way to the spot where her things were waiting. When she reached the clearing, she went down the path, snakebite kit in hand, but luckily she didn’t see one snake. Near the water, she was glad to see that everything was still there, exactly as she’d left it. Maggie inflated the raft with the pump that came with it and placed all four weights in the boat. She then climbed in and pushed herself off with the paddle and started rowing out to the middle of the river.

It took her about fifteen minutes to get there and, just as she expected, there was not a single person or a boat in sight. She picked up the two ten-pound ankle weights and applied a generous amount of the sticky, white, As Seen on TV “miracle glue” onto the Velcro and wrapped them around her ankles; she did the same thing with the two wrist weights. Now all she had to do was wait the twenty minutes for the glue to dry and she’d be good to go. She set the egg timer on the seat and realized that she had worn her expensive watch. She should have left it in the envelope at home for Lupe. That was so stupid. Oh well, one small detail missed. Everything else had been taken care of. As she sat there waiting for the glue to dry, she found out that twenty minutes is a long time, especially if you have nothing to read. She should have brought a magazine.

As she sat there, an old song ran through her head, and she began to sing, “Oh, Mr. Sandman … bring me a dream, make him the cutest that I’ve ever seen …”

After singing the entire song all the way through, twice, she looked down at the rooster egg timer again … Good Lord, eleven more minutes to kill. So she started another song that had always been one of her mother’s favorites: “Blue champagne, purple shadows and blue champagne.”

It was a strange sight, a woman alone, sitting in the middle of the river, singing all the “oldies but goodies” she could remember. Finally, after another ten long minutes, the timer’s bell went off. She put one leg over the side of the boat, then the other, and slowly lowered herself into the cold water. She held on to the side of the boat with one arm for just a moment, then let go.

The second she let go, she immediately began sinking straight down to the bottom at a surprisingly rapid speed, and her last thought was “Well, I did it.” As the cold water rushed past her ears with a loud roar, she sank deeper and deeper, and the water became darker and darker. But just at the very moment she was expecting to black out, a brand-new thought suddenly hit her.

“Wait a minute, this is a
mistake!”

In that one second, she had completely changed her mind and now wanted to go back up to the surface. Maggie began to flail around in a panic, kicking and struggling with the weights around her wrists, desperately trying to pull them apart, and as she continued to sink, she jerked and pulled at them with all her might, but to her horror, she could not get free. As advertised, the “guaranteed-or-your-money-back magic glue” was holding tight. Sinking deeper, she could hear herself screaming and yelling underwater, “Wait! Stop!” And then came the terrible moment, the horrible realization that she could not save herself. It was too late.

As she gasped for what she knew was her last breath and felt the heavy ice-cold water rushing down her throat and into her lungs, just as she was on the very verge of losing consciousness forever, she suddenly shot straight up in bed with her heart pounding in her chest, covered in sweat, still screaming at the top of her lungs,
“Wait! Stop!” She sat in the pitch dark struggling for breath, still in a blind panic, not knowing if she was dead or alive. Had the river been a dream or was this a dream? She could still hear the sound of the water rushing past her ears. Was she dead? She reached over to the nightstand and grabbed the remote and, with shaking hands, clicked on the television set, and when the gray light came into focus, there sat Rick and Janice on the set of the
Good Morning Alabama
show, and Maggie had never been so happy to see any two people in her life.

Still, her heart continued to race out of control. It was pounding so hard that she wondered if she was having a heart attack and if she should get up and take an aspirin. Ironic that someone who was planning to drown herself was now terrified about having a heart attack and dying, but she was. She jumped up out of bed and ran into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet, but it was empty. She had thrown everything away last night. So she just stood at the sink and did some deep breathing until, finally, her heart slowed down a little. She was still slightly disoriented, but now that she thought more about it, she realized that of course it had all been just a terrible nightmare, a bad dream. She should have realized it sooner. What had she been thinking? Omar Sharif was from Egypt, not Siberia!

She made her way into the kitchen and fixed a cup of herbal tea. Still sweaty and shaky, she then went outside and sat on her patio in the fresh air, just as the sun was starting to come up over the mountain. She sat there, still in a state of shock. She had had nightmares before, but never one that vivid or real and certainly never that terrifying. Up until a few minutes ago, she’d had no idea she wanted to live, but clearly, she did. She had fought with all of her might. Even though it had just been a dream, she still felt exhausted from the struggle. What a total surprise! She had assumed she was perfectly ready to go, but she had been wrong. Just yesterday, she couldn’t think of a thing to live for, but right now, a hundred reasons flooded her mind. For one, it felt so good just to be able to breathe; why hadn’t she noticed that before?

Maggie looked up at the sky and watched as it turned from early
morning pink to a pretty robin’s-egg blue. The colors were so amazing; she hadn’t sat out on her patio in months, and almost never at dawn. How beautiful it was!

As she sat there looking up at the sky, she realized something else. This happened every morning. No matter what was going on in her silly little life, the sun always came up. Why hadn’t she remembered that? Then something Hazel used to say popped into her mind: “Remember, girls, it’s always the darkest right before the glorious dawn.” Hazel had been referring to real estate at the time, but it could apply to her this morning. Hadn’t she just gone through her darkest hour? And hadn’t there just been the most glorious dawn? Certainly the most glorious one she had ever seen. And now, in the early morning sunshine, everything looked so fresh and beautiful, like something out of a movie. The world had suddenly turned from dark gray to bright Technicolor. She fully expected Gene Kelly to come dancing around the corner and swing on the lamppost at any moment. She felt absolutely
joyful
. But then she thought, Wait a minute.
Why
was she feeling so happy all of a sudden? Could she have just had a break with reality? Had she finally just snapped and flipped out and gone completely crazy? Or had she been crazy before? Surely, planning to jump in the river was a pretty good indication that
something
had been off. Could the dream have scared her so badly that it had shot an overload of adrenaline into her system and flipped her back into her right mind? Or maybe this euphoria she was feeling was just some sort of temporary chemical imbalance from all the lemon pie and hot dogs she had eaten yesterday. Of course, her heart had been pounding pretty hard, so there was the possibility that she could have just suffered a minor stroke, but whatever it was, she was feeling absolutely—what was the perfect word? Hopeful, that was it.