“What do you know about it? You don’t even come to meetings. You’re always playing cards. If you paid more attention, you’d know we’re going to be here for years and years.”
Wale shakes his head. “People have been setting up communes for decades. They all think they’ll work twenty hours a week and live like kings. It never happens. Brook Farm, New Harmony, the Oneida Community—all gone. You know why?”
“Because people have hearts made of shit?”
He chuckles and nods. “But it’s nice you think otherwise.” Then he adds, “In some ways you’re a lot like your father.”
Maggie scowls at him. “How would you know? You’ve never even met him.”
“I met him in Laos.”
At first Maggie assumes it’s a joke, but he isn’t laughing.
“It was in May,” he tells her. “While I was on the lam.”
“You were in Laos?” She doesn’t understand. It’s impossible. He must be lying.
“Hardly any white people over there,” he says. “They tend to run into each other. It’s like in Africa with Livingstone and what’s his name. Your dad and I, we met at Long Chieng, the big CIA airbase. The reds were on the offensive, so half of Laos had hunkered down there. I was on my way back here, and your dad was heading to some refugee camp.”
As he speaks, Maggie feels a growing anger. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“You broke off contact with him, didn’t you? I figured you weren’t interested.”
But she knows that’s bullshit too. He’s been playing with her, waiting for the right moment to spring the news, a time late at night with no one else to interrupt.
“You really talked to him?” She can’t help asking it. “How was he?”
“We only spent a couple of hours over beers, but he seemed happy enough.” Then Wale’s brow knits as if he’s rethinking it. “No, not just happy. Maggie, he was radiant. It freaked me out. I mean, Long Chieng isn’t Disneyland. I figured your dad had to be working an angle.”
“Angle? What angle?” The question carries an energy with it, as though if Wale could give her the answer, it would let her feel better about the situation. But he only shrugs.
“I asked him that, flat out, and he said he was there to make something of his life.”
Her chest tightens. It couldn’t be so simple and piteous. “He went to Laos because he was broke, and because he didn’t have me at home to look after him anymore.”
Wale raises an eyebrow.
“Did he tell you about the things he said to me before he left?” she asks. “Did you even tell him you knew me?”
“Sure I did. Then you were all he wanted to talk about. Whatever happened between you two, he was feeling bad about it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he had a hard time when you left for college.”
A pain of remembrance shoots through her.
“Hey, I sympathized,” says Wale. “If I had you all to myself and you split, I’d have a hard time too.”
She remembers Wale in Boston, the intensity of his gaze at the bar, the way he seemed to be mapping her inch by inch. He’s looking at her like that now, and it’s no less alarming than it was then. What did she do to merit such attention? He reaches out to clasp her by the elbows. “Don’t,” she says.
“You really see something in that guy?” He’s looking over her shoulder at the editing machine. When she turns to it, she realizes that the image of Fletcher being punched in the gut still glows in the viewer.
“Don’t,” she says again, shaking free of him and flicking off the editor. A low electric hum disappears that she didn’t notice until the moment of its vanishing.
“You haven’t written your dad lately?” says Wale. “You haven’t heard from him?”
“Why do you care?” It’s impossible to stay here; she has to leave. “I’m going to bed. Turn out the lights, will you?”
She starts for the door, wishing there were something she could say to let them speak of more trivial things in the future. Instead, she ends up asking, “Did you really meet my father?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t believe you just ran into him. It’s too much of a coincidence.”
“What do you think happened?”
She doesn’t reply because she doesn’t know.
“Good night,” she says, worried he’ll call after her and wake everyone. The trip down the hallway seems to take forever. When she makes it to her room without hearing his voice, it feels like a lucky escape.
In bed, unable to sleep, she remembers the father she once had, the one unwilling or unable to change his life. Gran always thought the solution was for him to marry again. She said a man in his thirties was still young. Besides, she insisted, playing her trump card, Maggie needed a mother. Gran always said this in a patronizing tone Maggie loathed. “I don’t,” Maggie wanted to say. “My father’s all I need.” But she never spoke the words aloud. It wasn’t until she had been accepted for college and was on the verge of freedom that she decided she could say whatever she liked.
“You don’t really want him married,” Maggie told her then. “You’d rather have him to yourself.”
By that point she was too old to be grounded or sent to her room, so Gran’s only response was a hurt silence. Maggie should have felt guilty about it, but after a childhood assuming it was a requirement to love her grandmother, she had realized she didn’t even like her very much. All through Maggie’s years of high school, Gran had taken every opportunity to tell her how to live her life, her favourite topic being the sacred temple of a girl’s body and the dangers of young men. It was ridiculous of her to dwell on it, because Maggie never dated anyone. She knew she needed to win a scholarship if she wanted to attend college, and she told herself she didn’t have time for boys.
For that reason, it surprised her when, in the spring of 1966, Peter Leggat asked her to the senior prom. All year in Latin class she’d sat behind him, admiring the back of his head and growing weak in the knees when he conjugated verbs. They’d barely spoken to each other, though, and she was so startled by his invitation that she wasn’t able to feign indifference. Right away she blurted out a yes.
Afterward, she made up for it by not telling Gran or her father. On her own she bought a pair of pointy blue shoes and a chiffon dress with cape sleeves and an over-skirt that the saleslady said would twirl nicely in a waltz, leaving Maggie distressed because she had never waltzed in her life. Once she’d snuck the outfit into her closet, it seemed quite natural to say nothing to anyone until the night itself.
That evening, while her father watched television downstairs, she put on the dress and shoes, then crept into his room, never before having entered it on her own. Her mother’s dressing table was against the far wall. Maggie had often peered at it from the hallway when her father wasn’t there, studying her reflection in the mirror. Now, drawing close, she examined the things spread across the table’s surface: the pots of cream, the perfume bottles and lipsticks, a wooden jewellery box embossed with metal hearts. In a small pewter frame was a photograph of her mother at seventeen or eighteen, sitting on a bicycle with her hair pulled back, wearing a long grey coat that hung past her knees, smiling at some secret thought.
Maggie picked up a tube of lipstick from the table and removed the cap. She had already put the stick to her lips when she realized it stank foully, and she fled to the bathroom so she could wipe the stuff off.
Downstairs, she waited by the edge of the living room until her father turned to see why she was lingering. He took in the chiffon dress and the pointy shoes, and suddenly she apprehended just how preposterous she must look.