by Ilana Masad
She texts Allison, the closest of her friends and also an ex, about what’s going on. Just as the server puts her burrito in front of her on a plate with a blue and yellow rim that she instantly wants to find and buy for her apartment, her phone rings. It’s Allison. Before she thinks too hard about it, she answers. “Hey.”
“Em, I’m so so sorry about your mom. I can’t believe it. Are you okay? Of course you’re not okay. But, like, are you surviving? Is it—”
“It’s okay, Ally, stop. It’s okay. I mean, yeah. It blows. Super blows. But I’m surviving. Actually, I’m taking a road trip.”
“Yeah, I just saw your post. What’s that about?” Maggie tells Allison about the will, about the necklace, about the letters. “So, wait, your mom just had these random letters to dudes? What, were they like waiting for her organs or something?”
The possibility of Iris’s organs being placed with these men—or with anyone—never occurred to Maggie, but she doesn’t think that’s how it works. No one knows who they’re donating to before they die, do they? Wouldn’t that imply Iris knew she was going to die? The image of her mother’s body cut open, her organs carefully being harvested, is horrible, even if Maggie has the box checked on her own license. She isn’t actually sure if her mother did, or if there was anything salvageable. She gulps, pushes her plate away for a moment, the smell of food overwhelming her.
“Uh, I don’t think so,” she says.
“Shit, Em, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—I’m horrible at this, I’m really sorry. I love you. I’m sorry.”
Maggie tries to shake it off, even as irritation prickles down her back. “Anyway, look, I’ve been stewing in my own shit for days. Tell me something about your world. What’s going on with the Devon and Alexa situation?”
As Allison regales her with the latest drama going on with the couple she’s dating—her being poly is one of the reasons she and Maggie didn’t last long—Maggie only half listens, but the familiar voice and safe topic have their desired effect and she manages to eat the rest of her burrito. She waves her hand at the server, who’s sitting across from the off-duty cook again, and mouths “Check” at him with a lift of her eyebrows that she hopes indicates a request rather than a demand.
“Wow,” she says when Allison explains how they worked everything out in a two-hour conversation last night. “So that’s good then?”
“Yeah. It is. I’m so emotionally exhausted, though. I think I may cancel my hookup tonight.”
Maggie rolls her eyes, but doesn’t say anything. She’s frankly impatient sometimes with Allison’s determination to live a polyamorous lifestyle, feels like it’s unfair of her to keep taking all the good people. Besides, it seems like Allison spends eighty percent of her time with her lovers just talking about their relationships rather than actually experiencing them.
“Are you really okay, though?” Allison asks after a moment of silence. “This whole road-trip thing—you’re being safe?”
A surge of rage rises in Maggie’s stomach and she says, much louder than she intended, “I’m not cheating on Lucia, if that’s what you mean, and even if I did, you’re one to talk.” The server and the cook both begin turning their heads toward her but manage to keep their eyes on their newspaper and phone, respectively. She’s embarrassed, and waves to the server again with her card and the curling check he put in front of her.
“Whoa. Dude. Chill. I didn’t mean anything like that. I meant like, are you hitchhiking.”
“Oh,” Maggie says, sheepish. “No. I’ve got my dad’s car.”
“Okay. And also,” Allison adds, “I know you’re not in a great place, and I’m not mad, but like, I’ve literally never cheated, so while I know what you’re implying, please don’t.”
“I’m sorry, Ally. I just . . . I don’t know.”
“It’s okay,” Allison says, a little too magnanimously for Maggie’s taste. “Em, I love you and I’m here for you, okay?”
When they hang up, Maggie stares at her phone a bit. She decides it’s time to follow Ariel’s example. She takes a selfie—it’s not great, but she chooses a filter that makes her look less wan, which she hadn’t even realized she was looking. She posts it to Instagram and shares it to Facebook, along with her announcement:
Hallo frands. On the night of August 20, my mother, Iris Judith Krause, died in a car accident. The funeral took place yesterday. If I’m out of it or don’t answer for a while to messages that’s why.
As reactions, messages, texts, and comments start flowing in, she turns off her notifications.
* * *
• • •
BACK ON THE road, Maggie listens to KCRW in the car, the second airing of Morning Edition. Charlottesville is still in the news, and her blood boils remembering the incident—no, the atrocity.
The night it happened, she and Lucia had been out together, which rarely happened, after their first few dates, they tended to snuggle up and watch movies or fuck and talk and smoke and pass out. But that night, they’d gone to see Newsies, which Lucia had enjoyed and Maggie had hated for its twee love of boy orphans. On the way back, they were debating the merits of the musical, when both their phones buzzed, which meant, Maggie knew, they were probably getting the same alert. “Uh-oh,” Maggie said, mostly joking. “What’s the New York Times saying now?”
Lucia had her phone in her lap, and she didn’t say anything for a long minute. “What is it?” Maggie asked, a knot in her stomach. Everyone she knew—well, everyone she knew and liked—had been dealing with anxiety and fear since the election. They discussed it often, trying to figure out how to keep going when they felt the fabric of the cushioned world around them fraying, exposing the rotting underside that had been there all along, except that people like Maggie—white, middle-class people—had been willfully unaware of the extent of this intense, ugly reality. But that night, something further shifted for Maggie when Lucia leaned back in her seat and said quietly, “The Nazis are marching. I want to sleep at my place if that’s okay.”
They stayed up half the night on their phones, propped up next to each other in Lucia’s bed. Her cat, who usually hid when Maggie was over because she didn’t like the noises the women made, came out that night and curled up next to Lucia, intuitively knowing that her person needed comfort.
“Honey, I—” Maggie had tried at one point. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. I know I’m white, but I’m not one of them? I’m Jewish, plus I’m queer, and they hate me too? No, none of that would have been right or relevant. The Jewish part was true enough, and whenever Maggie let herself think about it for too long, about the history, about what could happen again, she found herself dismissing it, because surely—not here. It was impossible. And anyway, she still had the day-to-day privilege of whiteness. Lucia—Afro-Latina, daughter to born-and-raised Puerto Rican parents, a lesbian to boot—was so much more visible to these hateful people. Her and Maggie’s relationship was still new enough, raw enough, that they had so far skirted the issue of how different their lived experiences as queer women had been.
“You’re what?” Lucia asked, her eyes red-rimmed; they’d been smoking out her window every half hour or so.
“I’m here,” Maggie said. It felt lame, but it was what she could offer, and Lucia seemed to appreciate it. She bumped her shoulder into Maggie’s and went back to her Twitter feed. Eventually, Maggie fell asleep, and in the morning, Lucia told her, with the manic energy of one who hadn’t slept all night, about the counterprotest she and some of her friends were organizing. It was the first political thing they’d done together, though Maggie knew and resented that just holding hands together on the streets of St. Louis was political, whether they wanted it to be or not. But this was intentional, and Maggie had watched Lucia that whole day, mesmerized by her energy, her ability to make this happen. As she listens today to a reporter talking to a Democratic strategist, she feels
all their words are futile and empty. Lucia and folks like her—activists, people who know how to get shit done, a quality Maggie has been working to gain in recent months—are doing the real work, she believes.
By the time Ariel calls her almost three hours after she finished her breakfast, Morning Edition has ended and given way to music, with a feature about an indie rock band from Philadelphia, and the phone’s ring breaks Maggie out of her reverie. “Where the fuck are you?” he says, his voice echoey on the speaker, but she can still practically hear his jaw grinding down through the phone.
“Near Greenfield, I think. Just passed it. Never been there, though, have you?” she says. Coming home, talking to Ariel—it always brings out this side of her that she doesn’t like. It’s as if the voices of her parents and brother, or maybe it’s California itself, awakens her bratty inner teenager, the one who fought with her mother, who stayed out past curfew, who resented how amicable her brother was with Iris and how easily he followed rules. It’s like a reaction to nails on a blackboard—involuntary.
“Fuck you,” Ariel says. “Dad needs us.”
“Yeah? Well, so does Mom. I’m taking care of the letters she wanted to send.”
“Send, idiot. Send. What, there wasn’t a mailbox closer than fucking Greenfield?”
“Yeah, okay, well, maybe you’re not curious, but I want to know who these guys are she’s sending letters to. After her death. So like, people who are important to her, right? Dudes. All of them dudes we’ve never heard of before. You think that’s normal? I don’t.”
He breathes heavily for a moment. “When are you coming back.”
“I don’t know. I’ll probably stay in Sacramento tonight.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, little brother.” There it is again. She’s so glad that Lucia has never seen her like this. That Allison, who has seen her like this, has forgiven her.
“Fuck. You. Straight. To. Fucking. Hell,” he says. Maggie wonders if he’s aware of the way they talk to each other, like animals, like children. Their age gap was always such that she wanted nothing to do with her little brother most of the time, and when he was four and five and six, old enough to be interested in her and her friends, she had no patience for it. She remembers smacking the back of his head, swatting at his little shoulders, shoving him—usually in private, and Ariel, who so wanted her to let him stick around, would rarely squeal. But once, when Peter caught her at it—she was shoving her door closed on the foot Ariel had stuck in to try to prevent her from keeping him out—he’d been livid, the angriest she’s ever seen him. Not usually a strict parent, he grounded her for two weeks. No TV, no Game Boy Color, no computer time on the family machine, no seeing friends outside of school. If she was bored after she finished her homework, he would hand her one of the volumes of the children’s encyclopedia set she’d gotten for her birthday the year before. She refused to speak to Ariel the whole two weeks, as if it was his fault.
“Mags, Dad isn’t doing well, I don’t know what to do with him, okay?” Ariel whines. He sounds like he did all those years ago when he begged her to talk to him, and she feels immediately awful. He’s her baby brother, after all, and isn’t she, on some level, supposed to protect him?
“Just—just make sure he eats,” she says, trying to swallow her guilt. “I got a bunch of instant shit from the grocery store the other day so you don’t have to cook. Tell people today you’re vegan, okay? I bet you someone will pass it along and folks will bring more vegan stuff when they come tomorrow. That’s the point of shivas, to get fed, you know? You can do this, Ariel. You can.”
“I dunno . . . Like, shouldn’t I take him to a doctor or something?”
“Look, so far Dad seems to be good at doing what he’s told to do. And it’s been like barely any time since Mom—since it happened. So let’s give him a minute before we go full-on straitjacket on him, okay?”
Ariel seems calmer by the time they finish talking. She hopes people will show up soon, like her dad’s stepbrothers, who said they’d come by at least another couple of times. She hopes Ariel’s girlfriend or fuck buddy or whatever she is also shows up to help get him through this.
It occurs to her that what she’s doing is extremely irresponsible. She isn’t sure Peter has insurance on his car for her specifically or for another driver at all. She doesn’t know if it’s really a good idea to leave Ariel alone with Peter. And for all she knows, the people she’s intent on delivering these letters to could be dangerous. Maybe they’re all in a biker gang—but no, she can’t see her mother consorting with anyone wearing as much leather as a leather-daddy.
So maybe they’re ax murderers, she thinks idly, and wonders, as she pulls into a gas station, whether ax murders are even a thing anymore. A tall, broad-shouldered and stocky white woman with a blond mullet is filling up her truck from the opposite side of the pump that Maggie pulls into, and she smiles, jerks her chin. Her snaggletooth is incredibly sexy, and Maggie is flustered as she turns around to place the suddenly obscene-looking pump into the gas tank. “I like your hair,” the woman says.
“Thanks,” Maggie says, her cheeks reddening. Normally, she would be flirting back, telling the woman her truck is cool or that her cheek piercing is hot. But she thinks of Lucia, and doesn’t really want to. Or she does—does she?—but she isn’t doing it. She’s not used to this feeling, this keeping herself to herself.
She realizes also that this is the closest she’s felt to turned on since she got the call from Ariel on Sunday, and even this isn’t really that. She can’t believe it’s only Thursday. She can’t believe it’s already Thursday. Her mother has been dead for only four days. She has been orphaned of her mother for four days already. The words feel bland and empty, not sinking in. It’s when she lets herself think of nevers that the emotion wells up. She’ll never hug her mother again; never hear Iris’s distracted voice on the phone; never see her lighting Shabbat candles, which she liked doing even though they didn’t keep kosher or stop using electricity over the weekend. The things she’ll never see or hear or witness keep coming, and she thinks that death isn’t about the person who’s dead; it’s about the people who are still alive. Grief, she realizes, is selfish. It’s about what she’s losing, not what her mother lost, not what her mother still had time or desire to do in her life—and surely there was a lot. Iris was young, as old people go.
Maggie can handle being existential when she’s high, when she can generally accept that the world is complicated and people are both selfish and selfless. It’s easier to hold more than one concept as true and valid in her mind when she is less than clearheaded. When she’s sober, like now, she just feels the spiral of thoughts tightening, stifling her.
For the next leg of her ride—the dyke with the truck has driven off, and she’s glad she didn’t need to consider flirtation again—Maggie decides to listen to a true-crime comedy podcast. The voices of three jolly men discussing some terrible crimes that happened in the 1970s soothe her as the highway stretches on ahead, and she drives into the afternoon.
* * *
• • •
MAGGIE’S BEEN UP to Sacramento only once, years ago, when she was considering going to college there. When she shockingly got a scholarship from the Midwestern school she ended up attending—“I bet,” she had said uncharitably at the time, “they’re trying to diversify”—her parents agreed to let her go out of state. They still had to contribute some, and she took out student loans whose minimum she reluctantly still pays every month, refusing to hurry up and get out of a debt she resents; she hadn’t really wanted to go to college in the first place. She may have been a dumb seventeen-year-old—she embraces this fact now, certain that everyone considers their younger selves to be idiotic—but she knew even then that she was a reluctant student, preferring to learn things on her own during long, late-night Wikipedia trawls, a vari
ety of informative podcasts, YouTube videos, and the occasional nonfiction book. But her parents insisted that she had to go, that no kid who could afford college didn’t go these days because how else would she get a job, and so she’d applied to a few select schools out of state to try to get away from them.
As she drives into the state capital, she thinks of how Peter and Ariel must be saying goodbye to people by now and her shoulders tense at the thought of what today would have been like if she hadn’t left. She pictures herself hurling plates at people who repeat empty platitudes, or yelling at Peter in front of the guests, and she’s relieved, again, that she didn’t stay to risk that.
“In a quarter mile, turn right,” her phone chirps, and Maggie remembers how when she came here last time, with Iris, neither of them had smartphones yet, and Iris’s GPS device, a cheap one, pronounced Sacramento with a long A at the beginning, making them laugh. Peter had taken Maggie to see other places in-state, and she’d gone with her junior class to a few nearby colleges, but Iris had a job prospect in Sacramento and offered to take her. On the drive up from Oxnard, Maggie remembers Iris admitting that the job interview could have easily been done over the phone but that she’d wanted an excuse to take Maggie on a college visit. Maggie is sure she was dismissive, probably replying with “whatever, Mom,” but she wonders now why Iris had needed an excuse in the first place. Couldn’t she have just said that she wanted to go with Maggie? Couldn’t she have just taken time off work? But no, of course not. Iris was big on work ethic.