The tattoo, Marc had explained in bed, was the result of a late-night drunken visit to a New Orleans parlor on Mardi Gras when he was nineteen.
“It’s kind of ugly,” she’d told him.
“Don’t worry, my love. Only you’ll see it. Unless you think I should wear a Speedo.”
“Only I’ll see it.”
One of the young bikers is tall, thin, long-haired, white. The other is short, round, buzz-cut, Black. Together, they look like a bowling ball heading toward a pin. Porkchop takes two helmets from the Pin and hands her one. Maggie straps it on and hops on the back of his bike.
“Pinky will drop your bag at the Aman.”
Pinky, she now sees, is Bowling Ball. Porkchop, Pinky — the members like nicknames. Pinky takes her suitcase. Porkchop gets on the front of the bike. Maggie wraps her arms around his waist and feels the hum as Porkchop starts up the engine. When Marc had first introduced Maggie to his father, it had taken her a little time to get used to riding on the back. It wasn’t that Maggie didn’t trust Porkchop’s driving — it’s just that she hated to be in any situation where she wasn’t in control.
Now she relishes it. No talking. No music. No podcast. Nothing but the feel of the world being washed away by the wind.
Porkchop cruises them up Eighth Avenue. They turn west to Riverside Drive and then back north. Fifteen minutes later, Porkchop pulls up to the front of their old apartment building in Washington Heights, four blocks from NewYork-Presbyterian medical center. For a long moment, she and Porkchop just stand there, both of them straddling the bike.
“Porkchop?”
“It’s fine. Go. I’ll wait here for you.”
She watches Porkchop for another moment, but he is already fiddling with something near the throttle. As she turns toward the entrance, the doorman greets her with a wide smile. “Doctor Maggie!”
“Hey, Winston.”
Winston looks as though he wants to hug her, but decorum is what it is. She wants to reach out too, but she isn’t sure she can handle another hug right now. They both stand there for an awkward second before Winston’s smile fades away.
“I’m sorry about...” He stops. “Just about everything.”
“Thank you.”
“You still have Doctor Trace’s key?”
“I do,” she says, showing it to him. “Have you seen him at all?”
“Not in many months,” Winston says. “Doctor Trace’s mailbox got all filled up. We emptied it out, put everything in a box for you. It’s in his apartment.”
“Thanks.”
Maggie stays quiet as the elevator dings its way up to the eighth floor. They had all moved in at the same time. Maggie and Marc had taken a two bedroom on the fourth floor. Trace had grabbed a one bedroom on the eighth. They’d chosen this building because it was reasonably priced and had doormen and, most importantly, it was walking distance to NewYork-Presbyterian medical center. All three of them had crazy hours doing their surgical residencies.
She unlocks his door and enters. She expects the place to smell stale, but it doesn’t. There is almost no dust, and Maggie wonders whether Trace hired a housekeeper. Probably. At Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, the team used to tease Trace for being such a neat freak. Maggie had at first seen Trace as more hyperorganized, an überpreparer, someone tightly wound in a way that made him focused, detailed, a great surgeon.
The furniture is modular, beige, functional; everything about the place screams, “A man lives here alone.” There are two items on display with any flair or prominence — and they stand side by side on his acrylic dining room table. The first is a model of the human heart signed by two legendary cardiothoracic surgeons credited with creating the first artificial heart, Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley. It’s the kind of anatomy model you might find in any doctor’s office or biology class.
The second item, displayed under Plexiglas next to the DeBakey-Cooley model, is an inoperative (though it would definitely be described as cutting-edge and state-of-the-art) prototype of, per the engraving, THUMPR7-TAH — what they’d all hoped would eventually be the next generation in making artificial hearts more permanent and efficient.
Maggie stares at the device, pushing away the bad flashback. The THUMPR7 had been developed and registered by WorldCures Alliance — that is, Marc, Trace, Maggie. She hadn’t wanted that — her name attached — because though she had trained in cardiothoracic surgery and assisted Marc and Trace plenty of times, she’d opted to make reconstructive and trauma surgery her official specialties.
The TAH stands for Total Artificial Heart, but the THUMPR7, despite its blend of robotic design, DNA coding, and stem cell research, remained a distant pipe dream.
Maggie knows that better than anyone.
On the wall, there is a framed color photograph taken by war photojournalist Ray Levine on what had been one of the worst combat days for Maggie and Trace. From his embedded perch on the ground in Kamdesh, Levine had gotten an almost surreal shot of Maggie and Trace furiously working to save two soldiers while their medevac UH-60 Black Hawk copter hovered above the ground. The sky above them is striking blue, the blood on their hands striking red, and something about the composition made it appear that Maggie and Trace were somehow defying gravity, that there was no way they wouldn’t tumble out of the copter in the next second or two, that the only thing preventing disaster had to be some kind of divine hand keeping them up in the air.
Maggie remembers it all too vividly. Trace’s soldier survived. Maggie’s did not.
Only two hours after that mission ended — right after they showered and cleaned up — Trace came to her tent and said, “Come on, let’s go.”
“Trace...”
He held up the bag of lollipops. “Now.”
Trace did this almost every time, especially when the mission had been particularly bloody. He grabbed a jeep and drove Maggie to the local town. When they pulled in, Trace shouted, “I’m here!” Children came running out from everywhere, squealing with delight. They already knew Trace — and his beloved lollipops. He started passing them out, smiling, nodding for Maggie to do the same. Several adults came out to greet them and offer them food. Maggie passed, but Trace told her she was being rude. He devoured everything, to their hosts’ delight. Then he played some kind of exhausting tag game with two boys. More children came out. Trace made funny faces and farting noises — mouth-to-palm style — and they all howled with laughter.
Maggie just watched in awe.
Trace.
That night, after they got back to camp, she and Trace lay under the stars, the smell of thyme and cedar in the cool desert air. For a long time, neither spoke, comfortable in the silence. Then Maggie whispered a truth into the dark sky:
“The dead don’t leave us.”
Not ever. The dead stay by your side, as though you held on too hard as they tried to pull away and something had broken off. The man dying in Ray Levine’s photograph was named Greg Steeple. He’d been twenty-one years old and had a mother and a father and two younger brothers and a fiancée named Claire.
“And yet,” Trace whispered back, “we’ll always long for this thrum in the blood.”
That is what they don’t warn you about when it comes to combat.
It’s terrifying, it’s awful, it’s the worst thing imaginable, you wish it on no one.
But it’s also addictive.
She can’t get the faces of the dead out of her mind.