by Ilana Masad
She isn’t running away, she tells herself over and over again as she crosses into Nevada. She isn’t. She tries to put the psychic slash astrologer out of her mind. Why should she believe Madame Fausti anyway? It’s all bullshit, speculation, guesswork, and common denominators.
* * *
• • •
HAVING THOROUGHLY DISTRACTED herself by singing along at full volume to the Wicked soundtrack almost twice—there was a slowdown on the I-95—Maggie rolls into Las Vegas with the sun still blazing, before the city becomes what she thinks of as its true self. She’s been only a couple times with friends, when they all turned twenty-one and then a couple years after college graduation, trips full of drugs and clubbing and light gambling. She remembers the place most for its exceptional ability to cater to hangovers with more alcohol. She’s not sure she’s been anywhere in the city that didn’t have an expansive and expensive bar.
Driving into the city in the daytime is jarring. The highway lets her off somewhere that isn’t the Strip, but rather a wide street lined with apartment buildings painted different shades of dust, as if meant to blend in with the rest of the desert’s tan and sandy yellows, golden browns, and occasional reds. For a long stretch, the apartments are replaced with walls lining both sides of the road, hiding whatever houses and pools lie beyond. It reminds her of parts of Los Angeles, just strip malls and palm trees and an endless blue sky with barely visible mountains on the horizon.
The sun is ahead, blinding her, and she finds herself suddenly in the middle of an intersection after the light has turned red. She didn’t see it switch and sailed through. Cars on either side of her who’ve started driving honk loudly, and her heart pounds hard as she guns the engine to get to the other side before anyone rams into her.
Before she has time to freak out too badly the GPS chimes in, telling her that her destination is on the right. There’s plenty of street parking, so she pulls up right in front. This apartment building is gray and brown, two stories, with a roof that’s so red that it looks out of place, like it’s meant to live on top of a storybook cottage.
She checks her phone. During the drive, she screened two calls from Ariel, so she calls him back. “Hey, buddy,” she says. “What’s up?”
“When are you coming home?”
“You keep asking me that. I’m still doing this delivery thing.” She knows she sounds like a bitch but can’t bring herself to care. Ariel got the wedding rings. He can take care of shit.
“It doesn’t matter, I guess,” he says, but she can hear the sulk—or maybe the sad—in his voice. “I just . . . It’d just be nice if you were home. Like with Dad. And me.”
She refuses to feel guilty right now, not when she needs to focus on the next letter. So she does what she always does with Ariel—she bites. “Isn’t Leona there fucking your brains out? I’d only cramp your style, little bro.”
“Fuck you, Mags.”
“Well, isn’t she?”
“We’re not—I mean, we—that’s not the point. She’s just helping me feel better.” Maggie can detect the small smile of pride in Ariel’s voice. She’s pretty sure Leona is his first lay. He must be stoked. Her own cherry popping was pretty revelatory, though she can’t imagine women who lose their virginities with men have the same experience. She’s heard the painful, awkward stories. She hopes for Leona’s sake that she’s ridden lots of horses and bicycles before Ariel or that she’s had plenty of sex already.
“Good for you, buddy,” Maggie says. “Nice manipulation of circumstances. Bet Mom would be proud.” She realizes she’s gone too far because Ariel lets out a huff of air and hangs up on her. She calls back but this time he screens the call and sends it to voice mail. She leaves a message. “Hey, I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m just stressed. Obviously. I didn’t mean to be an asshole.” She knows what he’ll say—that she absolutely did—but hopes that by the time he listens to the message he’ll have forgiven her. She hopes Peter is okay, but since Ariel didn’t say anything about him, she assumes he’s doing all right, or at least no worse.
Though he hasn’t called to check on her himself, she realizes. Peter has never been one to let more than a couple days go by without saying hello, whether through text or email or phone. But she saw him yesterday, she reminds herself. He was fine.
Well.
Relatively.
And besides, she doesn’t want to ask Ariel for more details, because then she’ll have to hear that Peter probably hasn’t asked about her, that he’s not worried about her, that he’s possibly forgotten her existence entirely.
She pushes home out of her mind, and gets the letter for Liam Ainsworth out of the little stack on the passenger seat. She hesitates, then finds her mother’s amber necklace in her backpack and puts it in her pocket. After a moment, she pulls it out again and clasps it around her neck. Something about the browns of the desert reminded her of it earlier, and she wants it close. For good luck, for proof—it was easy to convince Abe she was Iris’s daughter, but what if it isn’t that simple this time?—or maybe just to have some part of her mother touching her. Here we go, Mom, she thinks. Let’s hope this guy is as nice as the last one.
Out of the car, up the stairs that lead to unit number three, and she’s faced once again with a door she isn’t sure of. There’s no buzzer. She knocks.
“Yeah, yeah, one second!” The door swings open to a slim white man in his fifties with gray hair. “You’re not Hugo,” he says, and closes the door in her face.
“No, wait—” Maggie says, but the door is closed. She’s about to knock again when another man steps up behind her. He has a round face and his black hair is tightly parted and slicked down. The sleeves of his button-down are rolled up, revealing arms covered in swirling black tattoos. He glances at her, but then pounds at the just-shut door.
“Liam, come on, man, we gotta move!” he yells. He turns to Maggie. “Young, aren’t you?” The door opens again and he repeats this to Liam. “Young, isn’t she?”
“What? Jesus, Hugo,” Liam says and comes out. “I don’t know her.” He locks the door with a key behind him, and he and Hugo begin stomping down the stairs, leaving Maggie still on the landing, looking after them. They’re wearing matching outfits, black pants and thick white button-down shirts, with black vests over them.
“Liam Ainsworth?” she calls and starts to follow them.
“Not if I’m getting served,” he yells over his shoulder, raising two fingers in a peace sign.
“I’m not fucking serving you!” She jogs down the stairs after them and runs toward the black sedan both men are making a beeline for. “I’m Iris Krause’s daughter!”
Liam stops with his hand on the passenger door. He turns, and it looks like he’s about to say something, but Hugo slaps his hand on the top of the car and barks, “Ben’s going to fuck us right in the ass with a blowtorch if we’re late again.”
Maggie hovers on the sidewalk a few feet away from them. She can’t read Liam’s face, but he’s torn enough to stay standing as his friend climbs into the driver’s seat. He leans down and into the car with his butt still sticking out, and emerges a moment later, banging his head on the doorframe. “Fuck! Okay, get in.” When she hesitates, he opens the back seat door for her. “What, you’re a lady or something? Come on already!”
Conventional wisdom says that Maggie, a young woman, should certainly not get into a car with two older men she’s never met. But she’s never been very good at that kind of wisdom, so she gets into the back seat and pulls the door closed—she likes throwing herself into the unknown, isn’t that what Madame Fausti said?—and barely gets her seat belt on before Hugo peels away from the curb.
“Man, this is bad. You don’t go bringing drama to work,” Hugo says, presumably to Liam. He eyes Maggie in the rearview mirror and shakes his head.
“It’s not drama,” Liam says. “Or is it?” He tur
ns around so his head and torso come out over the center console to stare Maggie down.
“I don’t know, really,” she says, truthfully. “My mom, Iris, died a few days ago. She left you a letter. I want to understand why she’d do that.”
The silence is loud and tense after this, and Liam keeps staring at her until a speed bump makes his body rocket up and he hits his head again. “Fuck,” he says, clutching his cranium. “Twice in one day, what is up?” He isn’t buckled in, Maggie realizes. “Look, just give me the letter and I’ll get you a Lyft back to wherever you gotta go.”
“No,” Maggie says. She fingers the reassuring contour of her knife in her pocket, there just in case. “I drove for hours to get here, and I want to know how you knew my mom.”
“Fuck me,” Liam says, and turns to face the windshield again. Another long silence reigns, and Maggie lets it. She doesn’t know what Liam is thinking but hopefully he’s considering how far she’s come, and how maybe a woman in grief isn’t the best person to get into a pissing contest with.
At a stoplight, Hugo asks Liam quietly, as if Maggie can’t hear him in the back seat, “What, you fuck this girl’s mother?” Which confirms what Maggie was suspecting already, but Liam doesn’t.
“Just drive, will you?” he says.
The car turns a corner and they’re on the Strip. The sun is setting and the lights are all on already, making the street look like a fully decorated birthday party before anyone’s arrived yet—prepared, but a little sad. Hugo turns into a garage and drives down the tunnel and turns left at the end, toward a gate marked EMPLOYEES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. He lowers his window, swipes a badge in front of a sensor, and the gate rattles open for them. He parks and they all get out, Liam urging her to hurry up and follow them.
Hugo uses his badge on another door and they enter what she assumes must be the service corridors. They pass a kitchen, and Hugo yells a greeting to a couple of guys inside, but doesn’t stop to chat. Liam has his hands in his pockets and his face pointed to the floor. He reminds her of a teenage boy, his hunched shoulders sulking like Ariel’s not too long ago, if Ariel were this skinny.
“Here, I’ll be at a table in a minute.” Liam holds open a door that lets out onto the floor of the casino. “Get some chips, you’re gonna have to play if you want to chat.”
Once again, he shuts a door in her face.
There’s nothing distinctive about this casino as far as Maggie can tell, but she’s never been good at being able to spot the differences between them. The Strip, to her, is tacky through and through, but she also thinks of it as one of the few places she’s been to where no one is trying to be anything but themselves in that particular moment. Gamblers gamble, drunks drink, models snort coke in the bathrooms, old men with big glasses and expensive suits hold on to the waists of escorts and wait for their ears to be nibbled. It’s all exactly what it advertises, with no pretense of being anything else.
She hovers around the blackjack tables, nervous about going to get chips before she can make certain that Liam is really going to be where he says he is. The smoke is everywhere, stinking of tobacco and the sickly sweet scent of cigars. She should have rolled a joint to have here. Is weed legal in Las Vegas? She can’t remember, but she’s certainly brought some over state lines.
Liam comes out from behind a barely noticeable partition wall and taps a dealer on the shoulder. They change places, and Liam pulls out a fresh deck of cards, unwraps it and begins to shuffle vigorously, doing the show-off dealer thing, making shapes on the green table and letting the cards fall in columns between his capable hands. Maggie keeps an eye on him and goes to exchange some cash. She gets chips for forty dollars, figuring that if she can spend that much on a star chart reading that she didn’t even finish, surely she can spend that much on trying to learn something about her mother.
There are two other women at the table, both long-haired blondes, their faces made up perfectly. Maggie has a hard time seeing the difference between them. It was something she and Lucia laughed about on their first date—how all the white, long-haired blond chicks on Tinder looked exactly the same, their faces blurring together.
Maggie throws in a five-dollar ante, the minimum—it’s a low-stakes area of the casino, this much is clear, full of amateurs—and taps the table twice. Liam deals her in along with the other women. They’re both giggling and flicking their eyelashes at him, their tall glasses of booze almost empty. They stay for a couple more rounds, Liam scooping up their money and Maggie’s both times, and then totter off in their high heels and short, clinging dresses. Maggie admires the ass of the one on the right and catches Liam doing the same. She’s usually creeped out by straight men, but there’s something about Liam that she can’t put her finger on that makes her think he isn’t. Maybe it’s his slim wrists or the way the delicate vertical lines on his face seem wise.
Now that the women are gone, she decides it’s time. “So my mom.”
“Your mom,” Liam says, and sighs. “She’s dead?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You and everyone else. So how did you know her?”
“What’s your name, again?”
“Maggie.”
“Maggie,” he repeats, and seems to take a long breath. “The gay one, right? Maggie, how about you have a cigarette.”
“I don’t smoke. Not tobacco anyway,” she says.
“Oh-kay,” Liam speaks slowly, like she’s an idiot, and elbow nudges a pack of cigarettes that’s materialized on the table beside him. “How about you pretend to smoke and offer me puffs.”
“Uh, sure.” She doesn’t know why she complies. She could just demand answers. She doesn’t have to be this patient. But what keeps holding her back—and what held her back with Abe as well, probably—is knowing that her mother respected these people enough to want to communicate with them postmortem. Unlike her, and Ariel, and Peter, she thinks bitterly as she lights the cigarette and takes in a tiny pull, without inhaling, to keep it going. She sort of smoked for a while in college, but never learned to like the flavor and density of straight tobacco. She offers the cigarette to Liam and he looks around briefly and takes a long puff. He keeps the smoke in for a moment, his eyes closed, and lets it out.
“Your mother and I had an affair, Maggie,” he says, handing her the cigarette back.
“When?” she asks. She wonders how many men her mother had going at the same time.
“Fuck, like . . . two years ago? I mean, it ended two years ago. Started about three? Three and a half?”
“You knew she was married.” Maggie states this and tries to gauge Liam’s reactions. “And had kids. Two.”
“Grown,” he rebuts. “And yes, I knew she was hitched, but she said it wasn’t something I needed to concern myself with and I believed her.”
So there it is again, Maggie thinks, her mother managed to charm another man so much that he decided not to take responsibility for his actions or question hers. “So you didn’t care that you were a home-wrecker,” Maggie says.
He glares at her. “You know nothing about my life, missy. So before you bring your little judgments in here, and before you assume you know diddly-squat about what I care or don’t care about, I suggest you take a good, hard look in the mirror and think about what kind of moral standards you expect from your elders that you don’t keep yourself.”
Maggie feels like she’s been slapped. Liam is glaring at her with such intensity that she feels like she’s supposed to apologize. But she won’t, because she doesn’t owe him an apology. She yanks the letter out of her back pocket and slaps it on the table between them. “Here. This is yours. I don’t know what the fuck she saw in you.” It’s a pointless insult that he clearly won’t care about, but she’s seething. She puts the barely smoked cigarette out in the ashtray between them and gets up to leave.
Everything abou
t this place looks disgusting to her now, the people pulling the levers of the slot machines, the drunk idiots high-fiving each other around a craps table, the absolute and painful straightness of it all. Yes, she thinks, this is the thing about Vegas that she doesn’t like: as fun as it can be it reeks of performative straightness at every turn. Each macho man and girly girl walking hand in hand, each painful high heel and golden cuff link, each and every bit of this place is like the 1950s gone wild, with straightness being the only public presentation allowed.
As if to prove her wrong, a pair of drag queens pass by her in glittering dresses, one of them wearing a feather boa and the other a sleek fur stole. One of them winks at Maggie as she passes, and her rage deflates slightly.
In the lobby, she pauses to orient herself—there are several sets of doors she can leave through—when a tap on her shoulder makes her jump violently, and she reaches for her knife and has it in her hand before she’s realized she’s turned.
“Whoa.” It’s Liam, his hands up as if trying to calm a horse. Crumpled pages are in his left hand. The letter, Maggie assumes. She crosses her arms and waits for him to say something. “I was real rude back there, and I’m sorry. It’s hard to hear she’s dead. I’m not really processing it, you know?” He rakes his free hand through his hair. “Look, let me make it up to you. I’m on shift until midnight, but how about I give you the key to my place and you make yourself at home—there’s a sofa bed, sheets in the hall closet, it’s all easy to find, though my fridge is pretty bare, you might want to order takeout—and then we can talk more later when I get back or tomorrow morning when you’re up? How about it?”
“Okay,” Maggie says before she can think about it. Here is another man offering her a place to stay because her mother meant so much to him. What is she supposed to make of this? But she’ll get a chance to snoop around Liam’s place a bit, maybe figure him out. Plus, she hasn’t thought about how much staying in Las Vegas, even in a motel, is likely going to cost.