Here in the present, June 15, 2020, Maggie is home from her second stay in the psych ward, and is mostly quiet. She’s tweeting about her children and Paul McCartney, but Calvin and I can feel her winding up. Last night she sat on her stoop, smoking and listening to music playing from her phone. We now have security cameras tracking her when she is in front of or behind her house. She keeps strange hours and seems to be wandering, talking to herself.

This morning, however, Maggie raised the stakes.*

It all began with where I left off the last post: the day in the alley where she told Wyatt and Calvin she was getting divorced and on the stoop when I confronted her and the locksmiths and she threw a bottle at me. Shortly after that horrible conversation, Ben had a conflict with her about the noise and the throwing of garbage into our yard.

Then I launched my master plan. Like the other Americans inside during the pandemic, I made a lot of bread. I followed recipes in James Beard’s Beard on Bread and had some success with his raisin bread, heavy, slightly-sweet bread with raisins that have been soaked in rum. I love this bread, and the rest of the family liked it okay. The recipe makes two loaves, too much for us, so I had planned to give one loaf to Maggie as a peace offering. Talking to or yelling at her wasn’t working, so I didn’t have a lot of options.

So I went outside with my bread (and no mask) and said, “I know you’re having a hard time. I know you’re lonely. We’re lonely too. Can we just talk? I have this raisin bread I want to give you.”

So we talked. We genuinely did connect and I did not argue any of the insane jabs she took, that Daisy had bullied and tormented her daughter. I argued nothing, and just said that I would speak to Daisy about it immediately. We talked about the years when our children were younger and I told her how hard those years were, that we were worried about Daisy and didn’t know if she would do okay.

At age 3, Daisy had been diagnosed with PDD-NOS, an autism spectrum disorder. That diagnosis was changed a year and half later, downgraded to a communication disorder. Daisy had responded incredibly well to all interventions. Now she was in a regular public high school and her Independent Education Plan, or IEP, which dictated what kind of services and interventions she should get, had been terminated.

Daisy is a success story, a beautiful, kind young woman who would never be mean to anyone except her brother. In our earlier conflict, Maggie had called Daisy “an autistic cunt,” but I did not bring that up in our talk. I promised her that we could have coffee every day–I would come out and we could chat. The talk ended on a warm note.

I am working on a city council campaign, and Sunday nights are our calls, so I had no time to tell Calvin everything we talked about before I had to jump on the call. But sometime during that hour I was on the phone, Maggie curdled, and any friendly feelings she had toward me and our family soured. At the end of the campaign call, Georgia, the candidate, asked me to stay on the line a little longer.

“So let’s talk about Maggie,” Georgia said and my heart sank. “She’s posting on my Facebook page,” she said, “about you.”

I told her what was going on, and fortunately, Georgia had also witnessed the last breakdown on Facebook. Somehow she had stayed Facebook friends with Maggie. I had bailed out years ago when she began tweeting that we were anti-Semites, but Georgia has the impressive knack for remaining friendly with everyone and remembering the names of everyone she encounters, including their kids.

“I’m going to untag myself from these posts,” Georgia said.

“That’s a good idea,” I said. I wished we could untag our house from the side of Maggie’s house.

When I came upstairs, Calvin showed me we had a gift–a bottle of Cupcake wine (gross—I’m sorry. I do not like that kind of wine) and a yoga book that Maggie and I had discussed earlier. “What do we do about this?” he asked.

We decided to do nothing and we all started getting ready for bed. That was when the music began. It was different music from inside the house, and it was loudest—vibrating-the-wall loud—in Calvin and my bedroom. I called Maggie.

“Can you turn down the music on the second floor?” I asked, as nicely as I could.

“What music?” she answered. “Are the tenants playing music?”

“There are no tenants, Maggie. It’s you.”

“Oh no, not me! Didn’t you tell my locksmith that the tenants were legally there, even though they have been stealing from me?”

“Just turn down the music,” I said.

She hung up on me and if anything, the music got a little louder. The kids could hear it in their rooms but not to the degree Calvin and I could. So we slept in the basement that night.

Why didn’t we call the cops then, I still wonder. We kept talking about it but we kept saying to each other, “We’re in a pandemic. We can’t bug cops during a pandemic.”

The music continued all night until she turned it off around 10 AM.

The next morning the four of us stumbled around, no one having slept well. That’s when Maggie self-combusted, courtesy of first responders.

*I’ll get to that soon.