“That a girl, Enid. And I believe you will ultimately triumph.”
“Well.” Enid would not smile. “None of us know what is going to happen. Those Republicans are so evil. They will do everything they can to rob the national treasury; they are so greedy . . .” She had to stop herself.
“Maggie, Enid raised four children before acing law school. Can you imagine?”
Maggie felt the truth of her own failure. She’d lost one to custody.
“Enid,” she said. “Thank you so much for this oppor—”
“Don’t thank me.” Enid had a china-teacup quality to her skin. Pale blue stretched over fragile bones. She either could have been imported from England or righteous American high society from a small town in Texas. “I was married to a compulsive gambler, and I don’t believe in giving people third chances. Michael forced this absurd plan on us by charming me into a coma.”
“I’m sorry,” Maggie stumbled. “I didn’t mean to thank you.”
“Time will tell.” Enid wasn’t nasty, per se. She just left no room for doubt, the harshest of options. “We’ll see.”
“And this . . .” Michael smiled, pointing to a short, burdened, overweight black man in his early thirties who was staring at his phone, clearly needing to be anywhere else because he had so many things on his plate, things that mattered like his clients, his wife, his co-op board, his annoying mother, his overachieving sister, his Dominican personal trainer recommended by Michael. “This is Craig Williams, your coinvestigator.”
Craig looked up and smiled, a Harvard or Yale kind of smile, like he was happy to see her but wanted to be sure she knew he really wasn’t.
“Craig is our IT whiz.”
Once the smile was completed Craig went back to his device, so when Maggie reached out her hand and said hi, he missed it and left her arm suspended in optimistic traction.
“Great to meet you,” Maggie tried again, too hard, instead of taking the huge hint of rejection, and she regretted it because it was pushy to try to connect. And it became insistent and inherently criticizing to tell Craig, in front of everyone, that he should be looking at her and shaking her hand instead of solving crime.
The pause in the room’s chatter loomed into an intrusive silence. Used to everyone else’s banter as white noise, Craig sensed that something was wrong and finally looked up. He smiled that $250,000-tuition smile and in a charming, friendly, and almost loving way clarified his position.
“I don’t really need a coinvestigator. Frankly, I think it’s insulting.”
Maggie shook hands with the air.
“I’m Sandy,” a voice called forth, the receptionist trying to assert herself. It was an office filled with resentment, like all families.
And Sandy smiled at Mike for confirmation that she mattered, and he smiled back, and Maggie understood that the anger in this room was not directed at the daddy in the wheelchair who signed their paychecks, but at each other. Because that is what daddies do all day. They breed division between others so they can stay on top.
Maggie still thought like a detective, even if she could hardly dress herself. It was some kind of interim personality, in transition from one life to another, clinging to the core instinct of investigation. Instead of the freedom of authority, she had to develop routine. But she still thought analytically. Maggie could be staggering into a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and still suss out every room like it was a crime scene, and in some way, it usually was. She cataloged the personalities: Enid, the brittle detractor; Craig, the well-trained but suffering resistor; and now bouncy, ditzy, and frazzled Sandy, dressed in one of her three professional blouses, who leaped up and hugged Maggie, unable to resist gratitude for anyone else who would surely be on the outs here in the office, as she, Sandy, the lowly servant, always was and always would be.
“WELCOME, Maggie! Welcome!”
Maggie understood by Sandy’s weirdness and wrongness that she must be another one of Mike’s charity cases. Perhaps she was a failed actress, or soon-to-be failed actress, unless by chance she got cast at the last minute as the frazzled ditzy one on a sitcom about an office, and could finally buy that one bedroom with an elevator.
“Hi, Sandy. Thanks.”
“Every morning when you come into work, Maggie, well, I’ll be right here. And I’ll buzz you in.” She sat down abruptly behind her front desk, content at having asserted her role, and so the initiation hazing seemed to have come to an end.
“See,” Michael grinned at the obvious success of his plan, “everything is going to be just fine.”
CHAPTER THREE
NOON
By midmorning she was already itchy. By quarter to twelve, concentration had become impossible. Two hours of staring at the Fitzgerald & Robbins employee handbook’s list of procedures, interspersed with Mike’s witty catchphrases, produced no new understanding of her fate. Revelation was all she was looking for, apparently, and the other daily requirements of being normal and functional sat in the way of her transformation into a person happy enough to not be a burden to others. But rules were rules, so Maggie hoped she could pick up what she needed to know on the job. Winging it was both her secret strength and fatal flaw.
By the time church bells announced noon’s arrival, she strategically waited two full minutes and then ran down the stairs and hurried the three blocks to the local YMCA. Rachel had made a map of all the 12 Step meetings in a ten-block radius, which was probably a violation of Rachel’s Al-Anon requirement: Don’t Be a Doormat; Don’t Be a Nag. But Maggie was grateful. She never would have made it through the day without support, and she never would have been able to think clearly enough to have figured out a list in advance of the moment of truth. Need was always a crisis and crisis always a surprise. There were a lot of meetings in Chelsea, the West Village, and Midtown: debtors, meth heads, gamblers, purgers, people who were not loved and therefore loved others to a degree that someone deemed “too much.” Maggie’s lunch break was spent eating her nails at an NA meeting in the Y’s gray-carpeted rear room. Despite qualifying for many branches of Program, she knew what itchy meant. It meant she was an addict and had to get her sorry ass to NA.
It didn’t take long, feeling ill at ease in her normally familiar folding chair, to realize that this meeting was the first time she’d entered the Rooms as an employed person. The difference was immediately obvious. Her uncomfortable work clothes made her standard fallback, slouching, impossible. No longer able to huddle against the force of her own self-created misfortune, she had to sit upright, legs crossed at the ankles. Fear of wrinkles, and even more stains, dictated her posture. This made it harder for Maggie to feel. Fear usually did that job. Refusing to collapse took a resolve that interfered with pain, making it secondary to the effort of sitting up. Was there still only room for one thing at a time in her broken-down machine of a body? Either pain or maintenance? Pain or posture? This was not the goal. The goal was integration, to have it all—pain, posture, clean shirts, nuanced thoughts, clarity. Alina within arm’s reach. A self, a self. She had none of that, but today, for the first time since she had been stripped of her badge in disgrace, she had a job. Gratitude!
One Step at a Time. She inhaled, relaxed, actually smiled. Her heart opened, and then, suddenly, the pain came roaring in: the smell of her daughter’s waxy ear as she gently cleaned it with a Q-tip, the ultimate sign of domesticity. Was it always going to be this way? As soon as some space was cleared in her mental fog, the loss of her beautiful Alina’s giggle would intrude on that nanosecond of self-satisfaction. How could it be that all this work of trying to be a real person was only to make room for the pain? It was exhausting. To not fight it off, but to learn to sit with it. To face it. This was not how she had imagined progress. Progress was resolution and happiness. Alina smelled of clean dirt, because her heart was clean.
As the meeting’s qualifier rambled on, Maggie picked up the phrase “Our household was always in chaos.” Of course that was a claim Alina coul
d already make as she approached the age of six. Chaos. No point in Maggie denying that her child’s life already bore the consequences of her own epic failure. Alina would always hold the yelling, the missed appointments, the crazy-high acting out, and then Maggie’s disappearance into rehab and her ban, her end. Did Alina even remember her anymore?
A glimmer of a memory of a moment with Alina tried to crawl into Maggie’s mind, but she stopped it. Alina toddling over to her, propelled by the uncontrollable, newly minted ability to walk, hands waving for balance, her smile so huge. Some teeth. Maggie. Her daughter called her Maggie. She’d heard Frances say it so many times: Maggie, stop it. Maggie, calm down. Maggie, honey, relax. That doesn’t make any sense, Maggie. Maggie, please. Maggie sounded like Mommy, right? Right?
Oh God, someone at the meeting was sharing about Trump.
“He’s everywhere, terrorizing the people,” a young woman was saying. This was not the place to talk about the president. Maggie wanted her to shut up. Deal with it yourself.
Maggie knew that once she started collecting Alina moments, they would become limited and dried up, repetitive because there was never going to be a new experience with her beloved child. Not ever. Unless . . . unless . . . well, what’s-her-name, Frances’s new wife—actually her first legal wife—would have to die or shoot heroin or something and that could always happen. After all, humans are unpredictable, and vulnerability is the definition of being alive. But . . . but, that was a lot to ask for, that Frances would find another addict, a disaster on the other end. New wife Maritza worked in Administration. They tended to be a bit more sober, office workers. Lots of people do repeat though, substituting one fucked-up addict lover for the next. If there was an addict at her office, Frances would have had a good chance of finding her. Maggie could hope for that much. Then she wouldn’t have to be the only terrible person in Frances’s life. Maybe if it happened a second time, Frances would have to take some of the blame.
Some woman, Elvira, was sharing her story. She looked washed-up. She was one of those addicts whose jaw muscles had slackened and her teeth were whittled down and on their way out. She’d overdone it. She was talking about how, when she was a kid, someone had blamed her for everything wrong in the world while she was sucking his cock, or some such common addict-as-child situation. In response, she’d spent decades trying to get back at him by jabbing her arms, hitting the pipe, and selling hand jobs, and it was just too fucking late.
“No one ever called the police on my father.” She had the growl of a smoker, and the vocabulary of someone who lived in 12 Step meetings and prison-mandated therapy. She had memorized what the social workers had told her and recited it. Sometimes twice a day. “Since no one had ever called the police on my father, I was always calling the police on anyone I couldn’t control. Then I found out the hard way that I couldn’t control the police, and ended up in Bayview and then I went to Bedford.”
It was admirable, though, Maggie had to admit, to come crawling to meetings when it was too fucking late. But then again, where else was this chick going to go? And people always have to go somewhere. This girl wore her history on her face, which meant no going back to normalcy. Her whole life was over. She would never be able to pass. May as well sit here where the wealthy gay men and Xanaxed housewife types would be forced to listen. Nobody else was going to pay attention to this one, unless they were high or behind bars.
It was a type.
That other lady over there, who was now speaking, Sandra. She was one who had quietly given up exactly the way Maggie expected to give up. And as they say in Program, Maggie identified. In her, Maggie saw her own negative potential and likely future self. Sandra came to NA meetings because she could only watch television so many hours a day. This woman was in too much pain to sit through a movie, she couldn’t bear another meal alone, she couldn’t walk down a street because she couldn’t see something that mattered and have no one to tell it to. So, she went to NA meetings, thirty years after her last dose. Her sobriety wasn’t threatened, but it was all she had left, NA. She was revisiting, revisiting it all over and over again, those mistakes. The mistakes of her life. The things that no one would forgive her for, even if they could no longer remember exactly what she had done. This was Maggie’s fate, clearly. As long as Alina was kept from her, she was fated to dead time. And tasteless apples. Maybe she should buy a TV to help pass the rest of her sentence, her life. Do they still have TV stores, she wondered, with salesmen who explain how everything works? Or did she have to buy a computer and learn how to go online so she could order one? How did that work again?
“Is there anything ever on TV besides Senate hearings and a media obsessed with being dissed by a president no one can understand how to get rid of?” A Jewish lady was complaining. Must be a teacher.
Serenity Prayer already. Stand and touch another human’s hand, maybe the only flesh in your life. “Keep coming back, it works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it.”
What the hell did that even mean? Spend her whole life in the repetition of meetings so she didn’t die in the repetition of picking up? Why couldn’t Frances see that the lack of access to her own child kept Maggie in circles of despair? Maybe that’s what Frances wanted, to punish Maggie so hard and so constantly that she would never have to take anything on herself. Asshole. Frances had what everyone wanted. Why be such a bitch? What is she fucking getting out of it? Frances! Frances! As long as Maggie couldn’t be a full person—love, deal, connect authentically—then Frances was perfect. Maggie’s loneliness was evidence of Frances’s success. The NA meeting was over, so why was she still thinking?
The room had emptied, and Maggie picked up her purse. Stopping in the ladies’ room, she looked in the mirror. No wrinkles. Okay, that was an accomplishment. Her life was a dead horse but there were no wrinkles. Right on! The miracle of the 12 Steps. And now she had a job. That too was good. Gratitude. It was great.
CHAPTER FOUR
1:30 PM
That afternoon was Maggie’s first staff meeting. She had been warned by a gentle, whispery Sandy that there was a signal, a series of buzzes, that meant right now! Toilet paper in hand, needle in arm, cock in mouth, or one foot out the window, when summoned, everything had to stop for the gathering of the team. BLAST BLAST BLAST. Maggie jumped and ran to the conference room, the first to arrive. The room itself was a brand. It trumpeted how Enid and Mike wanted to be perceived: sophisticated, smart, in control, and perfectly situated. But no matter how high-end the art design, every system has flaws. Showing the flaws is what makes life . . . real? Work? Bearable? Possible.
That’s what her NYPD partner Julio Figueroa had always said, “Some people care more about their image than anything.” And his example shifted as the years passed, but the final one, Maggie remembered, was Beyoncé. “Take Beyoncé,” Julio would say. “She has enough money. She still cares what we think about her.” And this belief proved very effective when they were on a case, sussing out who to believe, who was invested, who would benefit, who was just out of control. “Some people only care about others.” Julio always pointed that out when they were investigating a new case. “Remember,” he’d say. “There is always history to every relationship, and history is filled with a lack of resolution.”
She waited quietly, staring out through the impressive glass wall of the spacious office onto the valley of rooftop penthouses, hidden behind landscaped greenery so extravagant that there appeared to be actual watermelons, corn stalks, and apple trees growing out of the heads of buildings. Urban grow-your-own. She had missed this trend and so many others. She had missed the return of bacon, she had missed young men with hair buns caring about how coffee beans were roasted, she had missed apps, of course, and expensive green water. She’d missed Minecraft and could not ID a single celebrity in People magazine. She’d been drunk through all of it, and then she had been in court and in detox and in rehab and in a bathrobe and slippers, crying, tearing her heart out over the
mess she had made, and in this way, she had missed voting. And there were hearings on every television in every restaurant window and taxi radio, and outlandish headlines on every newsstand. The level of blatant lying by the president was remarkable. Observing it had become a national pastime, like bird watching. He made a bunch of addicts look reasonable. Trump was giving people approval for being ignorant, and too many of them seemed to love him for it. She’d been a detective long enough to know why people liked bullies; it’s because they wanted to be bullies but weren’t powerful enough to pull it off. That’s the nature of submission.
One time Maggie and Julio had been called in to deal with a domestic. When they arrived, a family—a father, mother, and young son—were crawling around naked on the floor of their apartment. They thought they were lions. They growled and roared and ate raw meat with their hands. Later, when the shrinks separated them, it turned out that only the father was truly psychotic. The other two were only imitating him. They identified with him so strongly out of fear, that they entered his insanity and took it on. That was like America: imitation as degradation, as a desperate grasp for survival.
She looked up. Craig had joined her, immersed in his machine.
“How do they farm up there?” she whispered to Craig, busy performing busy.
“Low-maintenance, subirrigated planter systems.”
Maggie suddenly thought of flowers and wondered if she could keep anything alive. She thought about someday after work buying flowers, whose deaths were guaranteed, but they would need to go in something. There was a time when people bought coffee in cans and then used them to sprout avocado seeds, but that was when she was still an undergraduate living in a Vassar dorm and made her own coffee and added Kool-Aid to grain alcohol and shopped for avocados. Now that staying sober was a full-time job, the thought of all those tasks and responsibilities overwhelmed her. She would conserve in other arenas: live off take-out and delivery, never open a can or prepare a dish. But if she could keep a plant alive, that might be a good thing.
Maggie Terry Page 3