by Ilana Masad
“Ugh, this is so stupid,” Maggie says as her eyes immediately fill. “Sorry, I just. I don’t usually cry so much.”
“It’s okay,” Liam says. “Oh, wait a second.” He gets up and rummages through kitchen drawers, grumbling, until he finds what he’s looking for. “My card,” he explains, handing it to her. “I don’t do social media. But keep in touch, if you want. Iris was something special. Plus, you queer kids need to learn that we’ve always been here. Don’t forget that, or else you let the idiots keep thinking we’re just rebels sticking it to their Adam and Eve shit every generation all over again. We’ve always been here.”
Impulsively, Maggie hugs him tightly. She’s never really known older queers. Iris and Peter didn’t have any gay friends that she knew of, and the one lesbian professor she had in college for a gender and sexuality course was also a harried mom with young twins and didn’t really get close to the students. Liam hugs her back, and this time his eyes are moist when she pulls away. “I will,” she says. “I’ll keep in touch.”
“Thank you, Maggie,” he says. “For the letter. You didn’t have to give it to me. Hell, you could have opened it and never told me she died. So. Thank you.”
Maggie puts on her shoes and collects her bag and returns to her car. The stack of unopened envelopes is shorter.
“Two down,” she tells it. “One missing. Two to go.”
* * *
• • •
“HEY MAGS,” LUCIA’S voice crackles through the car’s speakers as Maggie takes a breath, relieved beyond measure that she picked up, that she isn’t ignoring her. “You sound exhausted.”
“I am,” Maggie says. “And also I’m—I’m sorry about last night. About being . . . I don’t know. Mean.”
Lucia laughs. “That wasn’t mean, babe. Besides, you said you were what, three shots in already? At some stranger’s house? All things considered, I’d say you’re handling all this like a champ.”
“But Lu,” Maggie says, nervous to bring it up again but deciding to anyway. “You really haven’t ever, like, called my mom a bitch for any of this. Or even said she was wrong. Do you think she had a reason to step out on my dad? Like, do you think she’s justified?”
“That’s . . . It’s not my place, Mags. I didn’t know her or your dad or their circumstances. I’m so, so sorry she’s hurting you, and I’m sorrier that she’s dead and that you can’t talk to her about it. But judgment? I just don’t think I can. Everyone has reasons for everything they do. Good, bad, racist, phobic, logical or not, doesn’t really matter. The reasons exist, for them.”
“True, but reasons don’t mean I should forgive her,” Maggie says, trying to keep her impatience with Lucia’s ability to see every point of view out of her voice. She doesn’t want to fight again, but she wants her girlfriend to be able to say it with her, that Iris was being awful, deceitful, neglectful, gross—anything but this calm and collected understanding.
“Of course not,” Lucia replies, sounding surprised. “Forgiveness is a whole other thing.”
They hang up soon. It’s two hours later in Missouri and Lucia is getting ready to go out to a Sunday evening quiz night at a bar, and they were talking over Skype since her phone won’t be ready to pick up until tomorrow. Maggie misses her now ferociously, in a way that she’s never felt before with anyone. It’s an ache, a physical itching at her fingertips when she wants to touch Lucia’s cheek or hair or arm after something she says but can’t because there’s miles of distance between them and only technology connecting their voices. She wonders whether Iris felt this way about any of these men, about Abe, about Liam. About these others.
She wants this to be over. It isn’t just the hangover, the second day in a row, that’s making her tired. It’s all of this, this trying to understand a person who doesn’t exist. When she thinks of it that way, her mind feels like it’s shrinking, the corners of her vision going momentarily dark—the same way they do when she’s high and tries to contemplate the vastness of the universe. The idea of Iris just not existing, nowhere, nothing, it rocks her, an existential inability to fully grasp the concept.
She’s so, so tired.
She entertains the idea of just dropping the remaining letters in the mailbox and heading home, first to Oxnard and then home-home, to St. Louis. She’s thinking about getting a cat. For no reason, really, except that the idea of having a cat waiting for her is newly appealing. It would make home feel more permanent. More hers. And Lucia has a cat, so she could teach Maggie whatever she needs to know.
But the curiosity—bone-weary as she is, it still rears up. Who are these men? Why did Iris want them? What did they give Iris that she didn’t have at home? What did she give them that she couldn’t give to her family?
By the time she merges onto the Santa Monica freeway around six in the evening, Maggie’s beginning to feel not just tired but sweaty and unclean, like she’s going to jump out of her skin. She’s eaten by now, at least, but she’s still wearing the same clothes from yesterday and hasn’t showered, and her hair feels oily and unpleasant.
She rolls down the windows as she gets onto surface streets. The air has cooled down significantly, so she shuts off the car’s air-conditioning. It’s rush hour, which it always seems to be in LA, and she slows to a crawl, watching people in neighboring cars fiddle with their phones, pump up or down the volume of their music, do their makeup.
The evening after a hangover is always a tenuous thing. It feels raw and tender, like the new skin below a picked-off scab. She feels a delirious kind of sobriety, her head floaty and her limbs a little loose. The traffic is so bad that as she sits through three red-green circulations in front of a messy intersection, she has time to make her reservation at the cheapest motel in town and text Ariel to let him know she’s staying away another night. She knows she could technically drive home to Oxnard but she doesn’t want to now, not until she finishes this ordeal. It was easy to leave the first time, and the second time after meeting Abe, but she thinks it’ll be too hard to leave a third time and go anywhere but back to Lucia. To stave off missing her too badly, Maggie turns her daydreaming to the bed and its clean, crisp motel sheets, and the shower.
But before that—Karl Jelen. Though she permits herself to hope no one is home so that she can postpone seeing and talking to him until tomorrow and get her body clean, her head high, and both to sleep.
“You’ve arrived,” the GPS chirps.
Maggie wishes she had gotten some more coffee on the way, feels her eyes drooping, but she isn’t going to turn back now. She picks up Karl Jelen’s letter and walks up the stone steps across a lawn that looks far too lush to be legal in this drought. There’s a small nook beside the door with a gorgeously carved wooden porch swing. Next to it is a planter whose damp soil is stuffed with cigarette butts and ashes. The smell of old, wet tobacco rises from it. Whoever lives here, she thinks, must smoke a pack or three a day. Iris always liked the smell, because she said her parents had both been smokers; but maybe she lied, Maggie thinks. Maybe it was about this dude. She grabs at the necklace that’s still on her, then self-consciously lets go and knocks.
There’s a flickering light in the bay window to her right, so she knows someone’s home, but she hears no footsteps. She knocks again, louder. Nothing.
“Fuck this,” she mutters to herself, and using both fists, pounds on the door. She isn’t sure where this surge of energy is coming from, except that she’s been feeling angry on and off for days now, which isn’t something she’s used to. Sure, she’s familiar with political rage, but that’s more like a dog’s bark—you use it to try to say something, and you don’t know if anyone hears you. This rage, though, this is the bite. For a moment, the shows she used to go to and mosh in when she was in high school flash in her mind. She should get back into punk.
“You know the rules, Bill,” someone is shouting from inside the house, his voice growing closer. “Yo
u can’t come in after curfew!” Maggie can see the shadow of a head behind the small pane of frosted glass at the top of the door. “Go to Natasha’s and sleep there, fuckhead!” the man inside yells.
“I’M NOT BILL,” Maggie bellows through the door. Her fists are clenched, and the door swings open.
“Oh shit, you’re not. Who’re you?” the man asks. He’s white, very red-faced and puffy-looking, of indeterminate age, with a shaved head and sparse eyebrows. A second, brown man walks up behind him, a gold hoop glinting in one earlobe, who looks to be in his early twenties.
A third man approaches behind them. He’s tall, older, and, Maggie assumes, of East Asian descent, with a full head of the kind of exquisite gray hair she dreams of having when she gets to be his age. He gently nudges the other two and they move to let him through. “Hello,” he says. “What can I do for you this evening?”
“Uh.” Maggie is confused now. She isn’t sure how these three men are connected to one another but it seems clear that this one is in charge. “Does Karl Jelen live here?”
“Who?” the red-faced guy says. His tone is insufferably rude, even though he’s only uttered the one syllable. The gray-haired man in front glances at the speaker and then back at Maggie.
“May I ask why you’re looking for him?” he asks.
“I, uh, I’d rather discuss that with him,” she says.
“Fellas,” the man says, turning to the two behind him. “Go back to the TV room, please. Or wherever, okay?”
“’Kay,” the rude one says. The other dude follows without a word but first he turns to Maggie and winks at her. She has no idea why. The man still in the doorway looks after them for a moment then steps outside to the foyer and pulls the door almost shut behind him.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he says quietly. “Karl used to live here and be employed here, but I’m afraid he died about a year ago.”
Of all the obstacles she’s considered running into, Maggie hasn’t thought of this one yet. She assumes Harold is old if he’s in a nursing home, but she hasn’t thought anyone else would or could be dead. Isn’t sixties young to die? Iris died young, everyone at the funeral said so, people at the shiva uttered things of that nature. That’s assuming all the men are around Iris’s age, though both Abe and Liam seemed a bit younger. She tries to bring herself back to the present.
“Okay, uh, so—” And something about the man’s open face and demeanor, the careful way he watched after the others like he was a papa goose and they were his goslings, has her spilling out a brief version of the story. She tells him about Iris’s death and the letters and how there’s one for Karl.
“That sounds very difficult,” the man says. She still doesn’t know his name. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“You said Karl was employed here?” Maggie asks.
“Yes. This . . . well, I shouldn’t be telling you, but it sounds like you’re really here only about Karl. This is a sober living facility. We don’t advertise the fact to our neighbors, though I’m sure most of them have figured it out by now. We like to keep the place anonymous and homey. Anyway, I knew Karl for a long time. We both landed here at difficult parts of our lives, a few years ago, and we both began working here afterward in different capacities. Karl became a live-in manager a few years ago. When he died, they hired me for the same position.” The man wipes his eyes, and Maggie recognizes that he is also grieving.
“How did he die?” she asks, though she probably shouldn’t.
“Overdose,” he says, and shrugs. “It happens. Anyway. I better get back inside. I’m sorry not to be of more help, miss.”
“Maggie,” she says. “What’s your name?” It feels inconceivable, to see a person cry and not know their name.
“Thomas,” he says.
“Thanks, Thomas.”
“Good night, Maggie,” he says.
As she walks back to her car, a white man reeking of booze passes her without a second glance and begins pounding on the door. She wonders if he’s the Bill who’s supposed to go sleep at Natasha’s.
* * *
• • •
SHE SHOWERS AT the motel, using the entire tiny bottle of shampoo on her hair just so she can run her fingers through it until she feels relaxed. The showerhead has two settings, one that’s meant to give a massage effect, and though it spurts badly from the sides, she lets the concentrated stream relieve her lower back muscles, aching from so much sitting still and driving.
By the time she’s out, she’s gotten a second wind and rolls a fat joint on the room’s empty desk to take outside. She stands, smoking, looking at the neon sign for a strip club flickering across the street. It’s called Cherry’s, which makes her think of small-town diners or beauty salons. The Y keeps flickering out, making it look like a misspelled CHEERS. Slowly, she thinks about the decision she has to make. The Y going in and out doesn’t help. She smokes the joint too fast and watches the Y tell her yes when it’s lit, then no when it goes out, then yes, no, yes, no. When it sticks in the on position for longer than three seconds, she hurries inside, so she doesn’t see it go off again.
The letter. The letter for a man, another man Maggie and Ariel and Peter know nothing about but who gets to have a missive from Iris while they don’t. A letter to a man who is dead. Surely, if she can open any of them, this is the one. She can’t imagine trying to track down the guy’s next of kin, whoever that is. Would they know about Iris? Would they want the letter meant for their father, uncle, brother, cousin? Maybe they would. But Thomas didn’t ask to have it, or tell her anything about Karl’s family, and she can’t bring herself to care enough. Abe and Liam made it seem like their relationships with Iris—which, Maggie realized during her drive from Vegas, didn’t overlap—were quite private, even secretive in Abe’s case. Maybe the same can be said for Karl. If, when she reads the letter, there is mention of his family, then maybe she’ll try to figure out how to find them, or she’ll bring the letter back to Thomas for him to deal with.
But damn it, she thinks, if the intended recipient is dead and so is the sender, there’s really no harm or foul, is there?
She gets a cup of ice from the machine down the hall to crunch on, a habit she picked up in college to deal with pre-exam nerves. Her freshman RA had recommended it to their entire floor, something about how it was a release of energy that also kept you hydrated. As far as Maggie knows, she’s the only one to have taken it seriously.
In the room, she sits cross-legged, leaning on four of the six pillows provided with the bed and places the letter in front of her. Through the wall behind her, she can hear the murmurs of a TV. She wiggles her toes. Cracks her knuckles. Puts another ice cube in her mouth. Feels overly dramatic, and picks up the letter. Her jeans are twisted on the floor beside the bed and she doesn’t feel like moving again, so instead of using her knife as a letter opener, she uses her pinkie to get under the envelope flap and begins to yank up. The envelope tears unevenly, destroying the neatly printed address on the front.
Her hands shake as she removes the handwritten pages from the envelope and unfolds them.
June 3, 2016
Dear Karl,
I hope you read this far in the future, and that you look back from your flying car à la the Jetsons and think of how young—relatively—and naive we were when we first met. You might wonder how I found you—well, you approved me on LinkedIn a couple years ago (I wondered then if you’d even noticed it was me. I know I just usually say okay to all those requests because why not!) and I saw you were working at Hearth Sober Living in LA, and I was so proud of you.
Maybe that’s a strange thing for me to say. Nevertheless, it’s true.
You may be wondering also why you have received this letter from me. Well, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Karl, but if you have gotten this letter, it means I have died. I wanted to leave some letters to p
eople who mattered to me very much over the years—people I also might have hurt. You are one of those people, obviously.
Maybe you’re old and senile by now, so let me remind you of some things:
1. You asked me out first. You saw my wedding ring and you asked me out anyway. I don’t always wear my wedding ring (my finger was getting fat even back then!) but I did that day we met. Can you believe it was 24 years ago? Almost a quarter of a century! I don’t know why I said yes when you asked.
2. I’m glad I did. Never forget that, Karl.
3. I think my favorite memory with you is the night we hiked in Griffith Park and watched the sunset and the twinkling lights that came on (they say it’s pollution, but I still think it’s pretty magical!). We kissed a lot like we were in a movie, remember? It was one of the only nights you weren’t high. Or maybe you were and I didn’t notice? It took me a long time to understand and notice.
4. I found an old photo booth strip of us a while ago. I think we took it on the pier? Anyway. We looked so ’90s! I can’t believe my hair used to look like that. Pushed up and big like that. Fashion changes so fast. We all looked like fools in the ’90s and the kids today know it too! In the photo strip you’re dressed kind of piratey. I don’t remember why, though. Was that when you were doing the living statue thing in Hollywood or maybe it was Halloween or you were having one of your days?
5. I will never forget the night we did heroin together. Never, ever, ever. I still dream about it sometimes.
6. I will also never forget the time you stole my pearl necklace, the one my husband gave me, and sold it for more. That was when I knew I’d lost you completely.
You know all this, though. If you’re still remembering things, I think you will remember me. But maybe you won’t, or not very well. A couple times after we were over I went to Al-Anon meetings and this girl, she was maybe nineteen or twenty, very young to be dealing with that sort of thing, said that it was hard to wait for people to make amends because sometimes they didn’t remember what they needed to make amends for, and if you told them how they hurt you, they’d only feel bad about it and then you’d feel worse about yourself. Other people said a lot of very nice things about self-love and accepting and all that crap about God not giving you more than you can handle. I don’t know about all that. I just liked how honest that girl was about how complicated it all is.