by Ilana Masad
I’m not going to tell you how you hurt me, Karl. But I know I hurt you too. You wanted to know things about me, and I couldn’t tell you. I’m realizing now that my privacy, the way I tried to protect both you and myself was really more self-serving than anything else. I wanted to keep you in a special little pocket of my life. A private space that was nobody else’s but mine. Maybe that was cruel? I don’t know! I’m not going to apologize either, though, because what happened happened and apologies twenty-two years after the fact don’t help anyone, do they?
Apologies are overrated, anyway, I think. I don’t know who they’re for. Maybe this is an excuse for why I haven’t apologized much in my life? Maybe something to talk to my shrink about! Just kidding—I’m not seeing a shrink anymore (I did once, though, and I think he would be proud of me now).
I will tell you something of my life, though, just a few things that I guess I wish I had told you over the years. I think about you, even though it’s been so long. You introduced me to many things I never could have imagined before (I’m sure you remember some of that! I think the kids today would add a winky face here, right?). Anyway, here are some things about my life:
1. I am still married to Peter. He makes me very happy most of the time, which is, I think, the most any of us can expect of another person.
2. I am still a corporate witch—remember when you called me that? I think for a while I wanted to put that on my business cards!
3. My daughter is now a beautiful twenty-five-year-old. She works as an insurance agent, and she is apparently very good at it. I’ll be honest, I don’t understand much about her job, but I am glad that she likes it and is enjoying herself. I worry about her, but she’s also my biggest success. She is very independent (a lot like me?) and strong-willed (like Peter! But in a very different way—Peter is a patient mule; she’s a hardheaded rhino sometimes!). She is also gay. For a long time, I felt very conflicted about this. I was, I’ll be honest, disappointed. I remember what you told me about your brother, you see, and how he didn’t make it. And I confess, that was something I kept thinking about for a long, long time. I was so scared for her, Karl. But things are changing, or they have changed, I guess, and I think I’m finally changing too. I don’t understand her, exactly. But I love her, and I am doing my best, finally, to be better.
4. I had another child in 1996. He is not yours! I found out a few months after you stole my necklace, after we ended. That’s when I went to a shrink, you know. I worried I was having a second child at least partly to prevent myself from going back to you. I knew I couldn’t arrive on your doorstep pregnant, or with a squalling infant. But with the help of my shrink, I figured out the opposite was true, really. I wanted to make sure that what I had with Peter was as sustainable as I thought. And it was. It is. (Also, it was about my mother, but I suppose everything is, in some way or another, about our parents, isn’t it?)
5. I have had other relationships like the kind I had with you. I just want you to know this, because I remember a couple times you started beating yourself up about what a bad person you were for seducing me. It was always my choice to be where I was.
6. I never told you at the time, because I didn’t think it was something I was allowed to feel and because I didn’t think you meant it when you said it. But I did love you, in the way that I could. And I am so glad you finally got clean and well. You deserve nothing but happiness, and I hope you have had that in your life.
Fondly, full of memories and few regrets,
Iris
AUGUST 27, 2017
When she finishes reading the letter for the second time, Maggie puts it aside, drained. She started crying several times during both the first and second readings, and each time she’d put the letter facedown on her chest, waiting until she could compose herself, trying to savor the scant pages of her mother’s handwriting. She doesn’t think she’s seen a full letter from her mother since the last long birthday card, on Maggie’s thirteenth. After that, Iris always got her joke cards with puns, or the kind that sang whenever you opened it. Why didn’t you leave words for us too, Mom? Maggie thinks again, rubbing the amber pendant on the necklace, which she put on again after she showered. She likes its delicate weight on her chest, the way it feels warm when she fondles it. Did you think you had more time? Did you just procrastinate on ours? After all, the letter to Karl is dated years ago—maybe her mother just never got around to it. It’s a comforting thought, but also feels too easy.
Maggie has a million questions after this letter, and she’ll never be able to ask them, let alone get answers. Heroin? It’s hard to picture Iris’s sensitive skin, pinkened so quickly by the sun, resting under the shadow of a needle. Maybe they smoked it? Allison’s cousin smokes it, which Allison always implies is a safer option, though Maggie doesn’t know if that’s true. What is certain, though, is that heroin is one of the few drugs Maggie has never had even the slightest desire to try—it evokes too strongly the terrors of D.A.R.E. talks at school.
Her mother, in other words, experienced this thing that Maggie never has. Of course, she knows her mother went through a whole life full of things that are unknowable to Maggie, who can barely believe there was a time when people didn’t wear seat belts in their cars. But this is different. This is something that, like Liam being part of Iris’s life, seems more on brand for Maggie.
But besides the actual drug itself, the idea that her mother could date someone with a substance use disorder without judging him the entire time seems impossible. When Maggie was arrested when she was seventeen, Iris had refused to bail her out that night. She’d waited until morning, making Maggie sit in lockup with a few sex workers, a homeless woman the police didn’t know what to do with, and two other teenage girls who whispered to each other like the popular kids in school did and wouldn’t talk to anyone else. Maggie had been separated from the guys she was smoking with when they got caught, Anthony and Kyle and some friend of theirs who insisted they call him Buzz, but she saw their parents collecting them, hurrying them out of the station as if they could catch criminal element cooties.
That night, Maggie had learned a few things about herself, and in hindsight, she thinks Iris made the right decision—and maybe, she thinks, Karl is the reason for it. Maggie learned that she was terrified of the concept of being in prison. She learned that she was incredibly spoiled, lucky, and privileged. More than either of these things, she also learned that she was capable of letting go. Yes, she’d been scared, and had felt small next to the sex workers talking about day care and alimony and bad men and worse women—“They call themselves sisters but they snakes,” one of them had said, and the words still reverberate in Maggie’s head whenever she sees women advocating for making abortion illegal. But Maggie had also listened, settling herself against a wall with her knees curled to her chest. She kept her eyes open for as long as she could, but she did fall asleep, eventually, her head on her knees, hands gripping elbows tightly. If she’d had to, she could have survived confinement for longer. She hopes she never needs to, and knows statistically speaking, her chances are low, despite her constant illegal weed smoking. She’s white, after all. Jewish-ish, queer, yes, but still white.
Maggie stares at the ceiling, reliving the tense silence Iris had treated her with for half the car ride home once she’d picked her up before exploding into a lecture whose words were less important than her tone. She’d never yelled at Maggie quite like that, with an edge of hysteria in her voice.
Yes, maybe this, him, Karl—maybe he’s why.
If only that were the worst of it, Maggie thinks, curling up on her side and switching off the bedside light. If only she didn’t now need to make a decision about whether to tell Ariel that there’s a chance her father isn’t his father. Iris said he wasn’t Karl’s—but did she know for sure? If there was reason for Karl to suspect the timeline—and clearly, there was, otherwise Iris wouldn’t have made a point
of saying that, would she?—then there was reason for Maggie to suspect it too. Iris had been lying to her family for years about the extensiveness of her work trips—last-minute additions to her schedule, often away on weekends, missing parts of Maggie and Ariel’s winter and summer holidays from school . . . Maggie had always accepted her mother’s apologies, her insistence on the necessity of her schedule. It was normal, really—she doesn’t remember a time her mother wasn’t always coming and going, except during those six months when Peter was taking care of his father.
She pulls her phone off the side table and its bright screen makes the room eerily glow around it as she asks Google whether it’s possible to test DNA without participant consent. The first result—“Can I Do a Secret Paternity Test Without Mom, Dad, or Child Knowing?”—includes an image of a manicured finger held up to bland white-girl lips pursed in a hushing sound. She puts her phone back down. She doesn’t want to know if it’s possible, because she’s pretty certain it’s deeply unethical. She’ll have to think about that more tomorrow.
If she breathes in slowly and calmly, she thinks she’ll be able to fall asleep, and maybe she’ll even be able to acknowledge what Iris wrote about her—about her coming out, about her own biases, about Karl’s brother who “didn’t make it.” What does that even mean, Maggie wonders: A hate crime? Suicide? AIDS-related complications? Maggie knows the treatment in the early nineties wasn’t as good as it is today, and death was more common.
And what about the other line—she can’t help it, she unfolds the letter and finds it again, using her phone’s flashlight—“she’s also my biggest success, I think.” It seems too good to be true and, even if true, it’s unfair to Ariel, who always seemed to have such an easier time with Iris. Is Maggie really so selfish and horribly shallow as to forgive Iris just because she said something nice about her for once? And besides, her mother never told her any of this, and Maggie wasn’t supposed to see this letter, so does it even count? No, she thinks, she can’t forgive Iris, not for any of it. That would mean betraying Peter. Peter who fed her and Ariel, clothed them, helped her buy her first pads because her mother was out of town when she got her period. Peter who has never said one thing against her identity, who hasn’t hinted around asking about male suitors or asked pointed questions about the rates of mental illness, incarceration, and drug use in children who grow up without fathers. That one always hurt worst, because procreation was something she hadn’t even decided whether she wanted for herself before Iris began implanting those fears in her. Maggie has always known that kids raised by two moms are fine, and she can back up that certainty with all the studies she wants—and she has, on sleepless nights, after bad phone calls with her mom—but she’s never yet been able to shake away the fear of the tiny chance Iris was right.
Pain blossoms in her forehead and she realizes she’s been furrowing her eyebrows so hard that the muscles ache. She tries to smooth her brow by pushing her fingers down to feel that there are no ridges, but it still hurts. She wraps her arms around herself and begins counting her breaths, waiting for that moment of liminality that she sometimes remembers the next day when, not quite awake nor quite asleep, she can physically sense the nerves shutting themselves off from her brain’s grasping fingers.
AUGUST 28, 2017
She sleeps hard and deep, her dreams a jumbled mess that keep pulling her back whenever she begins to wake up. She oversleeps her alarms, turning them off in gummy half-consciousness before sinking back into slumber. When she finally wakes, it’s with the feeling that she’s been running from or to something again. Images of the dream she was having—Iris’s presence, but not her face, long hallways lined with hotel rooms, a lost backpack—seep away as she rubs her eyes and checks the time. Almost eleven already. “Shit,” she says, and jumps out of bed, frantic, the tatters of the dream dissipating completely. She doesn’t want to pay for another day at the hotel if she doesn’t have to.
She checks out in the nick of time, and then sits in the lobby with a cup of tea—the coffee from the complimentary breakfast has already been taken away, but there’s still a hot water dispenser and tea bags—and waits for it to cool. She texts Allison a brief update on what’s going on, but she’s probably at work and not checking messages. But should she tell Lucia? She’s not sure she should—what if she doesn’t like how Lucia responds again? Maybe she should take more time, figure out what to think and feel before sharing this.
But, Maggie thinks, all this time she thought her parents’ marriage was so perfect, that she could never do what they did, have what they have. It was a lie all along, at least on Iris’s side—she wasn’t being loyal, she wasn’t being the perfect wife, she was being selfish and greedy and grasping. So why should Maggie look up to this sham of a marriage anymore, anyway? No, she decides, she’s done with that. Lucia’s always saying that good relationships—of any kind—require trust and communication. If Lucia gets sick of her or her neediness or her complaints about her mother, it’s her job to communicate that. And it’s Maggie’s job to trust that she will, and to take in Lucia’s honestly expressed opinions, and to deal with conflict rather than spend her time trying to prevent it.
With that decision, she messages an update to Lucia too, along with another heart emoji and an I miss u, bb, so much. After a long minute of staring, waiting to see if Lucia will start typing back, Maggie closes the app and makes herself take a deep breath with her eyes closed. Trust her, she tells herself, and try to chill for fuck’s sake.
When she opens her eyes, she texts Ariel, Hows dad? but he doesn’t answer right away either. He’d let her know if anything got worse with Peter, she assumes. She hopes.
She checks social media. Her selfie on Instagram from a few days ago has garnered more than two hundred likes. Because her mother is dead? Or because she looked good? Probably the former. Some of the latter. The combination of both is probably what it really is. Tragedy and sex appeal go together.
Finally, Maggie gets back into the car and plugs in the address of Drake & Cardinal, which she assumes is this Eric Baishan’s workplace. It’s in Brentwood, about a twenty-minute drive away, if there isn’t traffic, which of course there will be.
When she switches on KPCC, she catches the tail end of a story about Hurricane Harvey and the displaced families in Texas. She wonders idly why they always talk about families. Where are all the single people who live alone? Or those with roommates and pets and plants for company? Are they spared the torrent of nature just because they don’t have children? Or do they deserve to be forgotten and left out for the same reason?
Traffic is as horrible as she anticipates, though apparently because of an accident rather than the usual LA problem—which is just that too many people have cars—so she tries calling Ariel. He picks up, groggy.
“Hey. When—never mind.”
A rush of warmth toward Ariel rises up in her. He’s trying so hard to hold it together. Bless him, she thinks. She should be nicer. “Tonight,” she says quickly. “I’m coming home tonight. Today. Whenever I can. I have one more errand to run and then I’m there. How’s Dad?”
“He’s gotten bored with Jonathan Kellerman and is firmly in P. D. James territory now.”
“That means literally nothing to me,” she says.
“Oh, um, he’s gone from psychological thriller to literary mystery,” Ariel says. One thing she’ll never have is Ariel’s connection to Iris’s mind through books. She can almost see him rubbing his eyes as he yawns, his silly face with its narrow nose and ears that look a little bent at the top. Being a big sister hasn’t always been particularly important to her, but it certainly reminds her of the passing of time. She’s known this person since he was born. Since the literal day of his birth, when Maggie’s grandparents were still alive and took care of her during the day and took her to the hospital in the evening to meet her new baby brother. She was so disappointed that he just slept the whole time sh
e was visiting that she told Iris she’d never share her toys because he wouldn’t know what to do with them. The next time she’ll know someone else from the day of their birth like this will be when one of her friends has a kid, or when Ariel does, she thinks—because even if she does end up wanting one herself, she knows it won’t be anytime soon.
“What are you doing today?” Maggie asks, trying to get her mind away from mothers.
“Nothing much. Waiting around to see if people show up. Oh, Mom’s assistant came by day before yesterday She said she’s, like, keeping the ship afloat but that she needs to talk to Dad about what’s going to happen next. He was sleeping again so I told her we’ll figure it out next week or something.”
Maggie realizes she hasn’t thought about this at all. Not for a moment. What’s going to happen to all of Iris’s clients? Are they pissed off that she’s dead, that she’s not doing the work for them that needs to get done? Do they even know? Did Anya have to tell them? She can’t imagine how weird that would be, to have your boss die like that, to have to pick up the slack. “That’s good,” she tells Ariel. “Next week is good.”
“Yeah,” he says. Also, some people you knew in high school came yesterday? One of them was that girl I had a crush on when I was in fifth grade. I pretended I remembered her name when I saw her but honestly I always used to think of her as Maggie’s Pretty Friend. But it’s something with a D?”