But she also can’t get the memory of the adrenaline spike out of her blood.
The unspoken part of what makes it hard for combat soldiers to come home isn’t the flashbacks or the fear of returning — it’s almost the opposite. It’s the sudden quiet, the cloying calm, the suffocating safeness and sameness of normal life. One moment you’re ducking bullets, half hanging out of a moving helicopter, your hands working inside a warm abdomen to keep some kid like Greg alive — and then, what, you’re supposed to go back to your suburban split-level and do laundry and pick up your kids from soccer practice and sit in too much traffic on your way to work?
It would be easy to say they — she, Marc, Trace — created WorldCures Alliance for purely altruistic reasons. That had been a good story — three combat doctors who saw a need and eschewed the comforts of home to save the needy and revolutionize health care, but that felt too much like spin to Maggie. It’s not that you are not genuinely concerned about your patients — you acutely are — or don’t believe in your mission — they did — but the terrible secret, the secret she and Marc and Trace shared, is that you do it to be special. To paraphrase Eminem, a normal life is boring. The idea of going home to the kids, the laundry, the car pool... no, not for, pardon the play on words, M&M.
Scratch the surface of a person doing good works, and you’ll find someone who fears the mundane and conventional.
There is only one other framed photograph in the room — a slightly faded color one of a smiling ten-year-old Trace Packer on the Jersey Shore with his matching-smiling mother, Karen. Genetics. There is no doubt that these two are mother and son. In the photo, Karen wears the stunning square-cut emerald ring that always adorned her finger. A family heirloom, Karen had once explained to Maggie, given to her by her own grandmother. Years later, at Karen’s funeral, Trace clutched the green emerald in his hand for the entire ceremony. Maggie never forgot that image — Trace, sitting in the front pew by himself, opening and closing his fist, staring at his mother’s glistening square-cut emerald, as though the gemstone had some magical power that could bring his mother back to life.
Trace has a floor-to-ceiling redwood wine rack on the one wall that would get no sunlight. She checks the bottles. All reds from Château Haut-Bailly, a Bordeaux from the Pessac-Léognan appellation. Maggie knows it well. Trace, a true Francophile whose second love after medicine is French wines, had invested in it — count on Trace — and she and Marc had visited the vineyard not long before she returned to Baltimore to take care of her mother. Maggie remembers that trip to Bordeaux so vividly. It was after a particularly grueling month in a huge refugee camp in Kakuma. They needed the break before heading to Dubai, but neither she nor Marc handled their spirits well. Trace arranged for his “closest pals” what he labeled “a palate pilgrimage” — a fancy term for a tasting where everyone gets overserved — and it had been fabulous and delicious and then she and Marc both got sloppy and laughed too much and, man, that had been a night.
No need to go there right now, Maggie thinks.
The pain never goes away. The pain never lets you go. You just learn to live with it.
Maggie forces herself to turn away, and when she does, she spots the cardboard box loaded with mail. She drops to her knees and thumbs through it. Junk mostly. Trace had set up automatic bill pay on most everything — utilities, rent, cable, internet, whatever — so it’s mostly ads from real estate agents (“Look What Sold in Your Neighborhood!”), discounts for food takeout, and furniture catalogues.
There is also a letter from Wells Fargo Bank.
Hmm. Maggie takes hold of it and lifts it into view. It’s thin — one page or two at the most — so it’s not a financial statement. She wonders whether she should open it, but of course, that’s why Trace had asked her to stop by whenever she was in town — to make sure everything was in order and copacetic. She doesn’t want to look as though she’s invading his privacy, but does she just ignore this?
It’s probably an ad for a credit card or something.
Except it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like something important.
She slits the envelope. There is only one sheet of paper.
It’s a bill for a safe deposit box.
Maggie’s first thought is Trace’s mother’s square-cut green-emerald ring. Karen’s emerald, she remembers, had been appraised for over twenty thousand dollars. It isn’t like Trace wore it. He’d have wanted to keep it safe. Where better?
But — check that — it’s a bill for three safe deposit boxes. Two of them are ten inches by ten inches. One is three feet by six feet.
A little much for a piece of jewelry.
She reads both the front and the back of the bill to see where the safe deposit boxes are kept. Oddly enough, it doesn’t say. She looks at the postmark — the bill was mailed two weeks ago from San Francisco. That’s probably the main headquarters for the bank. Is that where he keeps the boxes? She doubts it but maybe. Had she ever heard Trace talk about San Francisco? Not that she can remember.
So now what?
Do the smart thing, she figures. Maggie snaps a photo of the bill, scrolls to Trace in contacts, and texts him the image with a quick note:
Want me to pay it or will you handle?
No reply. Then again, there hadn’t been one in a very long time.
Maggie stares at the bill from the bank for another moment before putting it back in the envelope and dropping it into the cardboard box. She then does a quick walk around the apartment, turns the faucets on and off, flushes the toilet, makes sure the windows are locked. Everything seems in place. She wonders about the keys to Trace’s safe deposit boxes. Does Trace keep them here, in a drawer somewhere?
Does it matter?
Her phone buzzes. She looks down and sees a text from Dr. Barlow.
Barlow: Pickup tomorrow at 8AM. Black Mercedes Maybach with tinted windows.
Maggie: No need. I’ll make my own way to your office.
Barlow: Better we drive you.
Maggie: You’re on Park Avenue and 51st. It’ll be a nice walk through the park.
Barlow: No.
Maggie: No?
There’s a delay and the three dancing dots seem to sputter before the next text pops up.
Barlow: Pickup tomorrow at 8AM. Black Mercedes Maybach with tinted windows.
She sighs. No reason to press it right now. She makes sure to turn off all the lights and heads back down.
Back on the street, Porkchop leans against his bike, doing the Zen patient-waiting thing again.
“Anything?” he asks.
She’d planned to tell him about the safe deposit boxes, but what’s the point? “All good,” she says.
Porkchop shakes his head.
“What?”
“First you don’t tell me why you’re here. Now you won’t tell me what you found in the apartment.”
Porkchop was seventeen years old when he became a father with Marc. Yes, seventeen. Marc’s mother had been Porkchop’s high school math teacher. She was thirty-six and married with three kids when she got pregnant by her student. She wanted to abort. Porkchop didn’t like that. He convinced her to go to full term — there may have been some threat of public exposure involved — and give Porkchop custody of Marc.
So yes, Maggie’s dream man had been raised by a single teen dad in a motorcycle gang. It made for a strange yet wonderful upbringing.
Porkchop says, “Spill it.”
“It’s a big nothing.”
He beckons with both hands for her to go on.
“There was a bill for some safe deposit boxes,” she says.
“Do tell.”
She does. Porkchop listens without reacting. When she’s finished, Porkchop scratches his beard. “Why wouldn’t you want to tell me about that?”