“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell you,” she says. “It just seems irrelevant.”
“Hmm.”
“So what do we do now?” Maggie asks.
Porkchop gives her a charismatic grin and wiggles his eyebrows. “We get shit-faced drunk at Vipers.”
Chapter Four
When Maggie’s alarm goes off the next morning, she sits up fast — too fast, her head reeling in protest. A jackhammer batters her skull from the inside. Her heart thumps deep in her chest. She flashes back to the night before, at Vipers, sitting on that cracked-leather stool, the floor sticky from spilled beer, Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” on the jukebox, the bar loud and growing hazier, old friends embracing her, regaling her with familiar stories of Marc as a precocious child, stories she’s heard a dozen times before and had always relished. But not tonight. She tried so hard to listen, to engage, to give her full attention to every single person who approached because they deserved that at the very least, but even as she tried to hold on, Maggie could feel herself slipping away into her own personal darkness. She drank her whiskey neat — Porkchop was currently endorsing Laphroaig 10 Year Old Islay — the weathered faces surrounding her, getting too close, blurring, becoming one indistinguishable mash. Then other faces emerged in their stead, dozens, maybe more, faces with pleading eyes, staring up at her with the blend of hope and despair that only a doctor witnesses. Marah, Joseph, Ahmed, Seema... And then, in the end, the last face, always the last face, was Kabir’s. She tried to comfort them, tried to stop the bleeding, tried to understand what they were saying to her. But they were speaking a foreign language, their pained words drowned out by mortar fire and the roar of helicopter rotors and the screams.
Give me another chance, Maggie thinks. I’ll fix them.
And sometimes, in her dreams, she gets that chance. The big do-over. They are alive. All of them. She can save them if she moves fast enough. She feels a sudden joy, a rush of hope, an odd clarity and focus and even peacefulness, and then something outside the dream — the alarm going off, Sharon calling out to her, Cole slamming the front door, whatever — pulls her away. There’s this brief, horrible moment where Maggie is still in the dream, rising out of that cusp between sleep and consciousness, when the faces begin to fade away, dissolve, and Maggie realizes with cruel certainty that this is not reality, that this is a dream, that she will soon wake up to a world where the dead will always be dead.
Enough, she tells herself.
Maggie throws her feet off the bed and onto the floor. She takes a few deep breaths, lets her pulse slow down. She tries to remember the last time she drank too much, and an outdoor bar in Juba on a hot South Sudan evening comes to mind. Trace kept buying rounds of Araqi, a delicious date-based liquor, and Maggie and Marc kept imbibing. There had been lots of laughs as there always are after too much horror. Trace had a girl with him — Maggie couldn’t remember her name because Trace always had a nameless girl with him and then the girl would be gone and there’d be another. Trace doesn’t like attachments. Or more likely, he can’t do them. On the surface, Trace gives off that sort of healable fragility, that vulnerability that draws in every woman who thinks they can fix him, but whatever is broken inside of him stayed broken.
Where is Trace Packer right now?
No clue.
Maggie blinks. It takes her a few moments to get her bearings.
She’s at the Aman hotel.
She stumbles out of bed, flicks on the light, enters a ginormous bathroom. On her right is a too-inviting pink-crème bathtub the approximate size of a Cadillac Escalade. On her left is a black-stone shower room — room, not stall — with an array of showerheads. Maggie chooses the shower, in part because she fears that if she sinks into that bathtub with its potpourri of bath crystals and bath teas and bath salts and bath oils and bath pillows, she may never be able to extract herself.
She strips out of the oversize T-shirt she slept in last night. The T-shirt is from the Vipers gift shop. Porkchop had given it to her. Across the chest, it reads:
I DON’T SNORE. I DREAM I’M A MOTORCYCLE.
Hard to escape the dad jokes with Porkchop.
Maggie turns on the showerheads, all of them, full blast. She steps into the middle and lets the sprays blast away at her skin from every direction. The water pressure is excellent, almost piercing her skin. She doesn’t want to move. She thinks back to her time overseas, how she’d yearn for a hot shower, how she realized that one of life’s greatest and most unappreciated luxuries was a hot shower. If you think about it, no human on planet Earth had even experienced a hot shower until, what, a hundred years ago maybe? She once googled it — because that’s how her brain works — and hot showers were not common until the 1970s.
“Enjoy the smaller moments,” her father had often told her. “That’s where life is lived.”
So she does — at least for right now. After some time passes, when she realizes that she must regretfully turn off the sprays and step out of her black-stoned cocoon, there are plush Frette robes and thick towels. The hotel phone rings, a gentle gong, letting guests know that there is an incoming call but not wanting to disturb their serenity. Maggie answers. The voice on the other end of the line probably does voice-overs for hypnosis apps. The voice asks what food or beverage she “craves” for breakfast, promising an arrival in five minutes.
“Coffee,” she says. “Black. Strong.”
“The Florentine omelet is a specialty.”
Maggie passes. Just the coffee.
Her mobile phone jangles in the stillness. It’s Porkchop. She answers on speakerphone.
“Good morning,” she says in a quiet voice.
“Why are you whispering?” he asks.
“Something about this room is making me stay quiet.”
“You quiet? Must be a miracle room.”
“Are you being a wiseass?”
“Just a little.” Then he adds, “You okay?”
“I’m good.”
He waits.
She sighs. “It was just a lot, you know.”
“I do.”
“I wasn’t really prepared for that.”
“That’s on me.”
“No, it’s not,” she says.
“Everyone was happy to see you.”
“I know I sort of zoned out.”
“You did, yeah.”
“I hope I wasn’t rude.”
“You’re family — no such thing as rude,” Porkchop says. “How are you feeling now?”
“Pretty hungover.”
“Same.”
“Wait, you?”
“I’m not as young as I used to be, Mags.”
Pinky had been the designated biker. He drove her back last night. She feels weird about having too much to drink, but again, her issue had been pills, not booze, and boy, that sounds like a pathetic loophole. So did the idea that she had “issues” with pills and not an “addiction.” She had stopped taking them cold after the... What does she call it? Incident? Accident? Catastrophe? Could she have done that — stopped the pills cold — if it had been a real addiction? She doubts it, but does it matter? The damage was done.
She isn’t sure what to say next, but Porkchop takes over, asking in a quasi-mocking tone whether she’s on her way to her “big, secret meeting.”
“I need to get dressed,” she says.
“Call me when you’re done.”
“You don’t have a mobile phone,” she reminds him.
“I’ll be by the payphone. Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what this meeting is about?”