“Maggie,” Michael said softly, so quietly that he was barely making a sound. “Have you been drinking?”
“No.”
“Okay, then. If Maggie says she has not been drinking, that is good enough for me.”
She was not alone.
“You believe her?” Enid protested, but she also knew that this prosecution had been postponed.
Michael was going to help her.
“Of course, I believe her. Maggie told me the truth about my son that I refused to hear. If I had listened to her then, he would still be alive.”
“You don’t know that for a fact, Michael.” That was Maggie.
“You’re right again. I don’t know that.”
“Your partner got killed?” Craig still could not believe it. “No one tells me anything around here.”
“That was not my fault.”
“Maggie!” Michael shut down the bickering.
What was he going to do now? Fire her?
“Maggie,” Michael said, calmly. “Make your case, and we will consider it. But you’d better have something there.”
“Well.” Maggie relaxed because this next moment would rely on her intelligence, not her judgment. “I have two questions.”
“Okay.” Michael reached for a yellow pad and pen, and pushed his oysters aside.
“My first question is: How did struggling actress Jamie Wagner, who lived in an awful apartment, afford to pay Florence, the energy therapist, two hundred dollars a session?”
Michael looked at the others. “Good question.”
“Steven Brinkley wasn’t paying it,” Maggie reminded them. “He hated Florence and he also had an ethic about Jamie becoming autonomous so that they could have a more equal relationship. Her father is indigent.”
“Okay, team.” Michael enjoyed his ability to unite everyone. “Any answers?”
Craig brought his phone to his lips. “Speakerphone. Florence Black.”
Everyone heard the ring. And then Florence’s knowing voice.
“Hello?”
Craig held the phone out to Maggie.
The tide had turned.
Again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
10:00 AM
“Hello, Florence?”
“Yes?”
“This is Maggie Terry.”
She waited. Florence’s voice crackled over the speakerphone.
“You and your husband are afraid of change.”
“Exactly. Well, my husband and I have talked it over extensively. It wasn’t easy, but we came to . . .”
Everyone in the office had their eyes on Maggie.
“He and I disagree about you. He’s not convinced, but I believe you, Florence. I believe that you are the key to my healing.”
“I am,” Florence said calmly.
Craig scowled. He hated her.
“But I was wondering, is there any alternative to the two-hundred-dollar fee? Since I would be going on my own, and Craig doesn’t want to contribute, do you have a sliding scale?”
“No, I make no exceptions. The more you pay, the more you invest in your therapy.”
“Do you think my insurance would pay for it?”
“No, my methods are unorthodox and unique, and besides, insurance requires paperwork, and I just find that creates an obstacle, energetically. I become anxious about having filed the paperwork and it inhibits our exchange and communication.”
“Well, what do you suggest?”
“I always say,” Florence chirped, now that she was over the hump of being asked to give up money. “Try to find a relative to pay for your treatment. That’s what I advise all my patients. There’s nothing like needing money to bring a family together. People have to be nicer when they ask for money, and sometimes others feel better if they can help out.”
“Okay, I will.”
Maggie hung up the phone. It was so abrupt, the silence jarred her. But there it was.
Michael was grinning from ear to ear, he was delighted. He was literally bouncing in his wheelchair.
“Someone else was paying the bill! Maggie, you are brilliant! You are so brilliant. Find out who was paying this quack and we have our killer. Great job, Maggie.” He was happy. He had been reaffirmed in his philosophy that, as a leader and a person, he had the responsibility to hear people out, even at the risk of discomfort.
“Okay.” Craig was disgusted but knew the jig was up, and he had to get back in the game. “I’ll locate Florence’s banking records.”
They all started clearing the paper plates, napkins, draining the last drops of peach juice.
“Wait.” Enid stopped the action. “You said that was your first question. How did she pay the fee? But what is your second question?”
“Where,” Maggie asked carefully, “is Jamie Wagner’s mother?”
“Good question.” Enid was sincere.
“Excellent question. We will get on that one as well.” Michael pulled the napkin out of his collar signaling that the frivolity was over, and thankfully investigation, once again, was about to resume. “Everyone back to work. Maggie, I want to talk to you.”
The others filed out, headed for their new assignments, and once they were gone, Michael took Maggie’s hand and looked into her eyes. His were shaded by white eyebrows, she could see the hairs on the side of his brow.
“Maggie.” He seemed very concerned. “Fix up your office. It is a mausoleum.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Do it now.”
“Okay.”
After lunch, Maggie came back with a large shopping bag.
“Did you get something nice for your office?” Sandy asked, either showing insight or having overheard the earlier conversation on the intercom.
“Yes, I did.”
Sandy followed her down the hall. “What did you get?”
Maggie opened the bag and lifted out a potted cactus, identical to the one she had at home. It would be a comparison study. Which one would thrive, the public life or the domestic? Where would she be more respectful, more responsible, more caring? Finally, something to think about that wasn’t connected to death.
“What a nice cactus.”
Maggie placed it on her desk.
“Do you need a second chair?” Sandy suggested gently. “Maybe someone else will be here with you . . . someday.”
Was that a come-on?
When the door closed behind her, Maggie approached her office window for the first time. There was a view, a wonderful view. The metropolis. The streets, the veins of the urban body. The transportation of feeling. There was so much possibility out there. Somewhere out there was another lonely woman, in a reasonable apartment, who had room for Maggie Terry. Someone smart and cute. Easy to be with. A wild side and a responsible side with a good work ethic, who she would respect, and therefore care for. Someone busy. Someone who could help her get Alina back.
She pulled out her phone and Omar’s business card.
“Omar, it’s Maggie. From Program. Hi, I would like to meet up for coffee. If you are still willing. After work would be great. My office is in Chelsea. I get home by seven. I’ll call you then. Bye.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in.”
Sandy was back, staggering in with a massive gift basket. “Don’t forget this, and Michael wants to see you.”
Maggie walked into the conference room where Michael, Enid, and Craig were reviewing bank files.
“Maggie, look.” Mike was happy. “Look what Craig found, you were right. Several two-hundred-dollar checks deposited in Florence’s account by one Louisa Wagner.”
“Her mother,” Enid conceded. She looked Maggie in the eye. “You were right.” Enid was sorry.
“Her mother.” Maggie had lived so long in the land of the missing mothers that she hadn’t considered the obvious. “Jamie has a mother somewhere who loves her, who cares for her, who supports her, who wants her to get better and be happy. There was one person
in Jamie Wagner’s life who she let love her. She had hope. She should have lived.”
“That’s a nice fairy tale.” Enid’s contrary approach was now familiar, not threatening and even somewhat endearing. “I have four children and I can attest that mothers can only save the day in fairy tales. In real life, someone needs to rescue mothers from their children and save us all from our mothers.”
“No mother would ever voluntarily abandon her child.” Why was Maggie hearing herself be so shrill? She was getting all emotional just as she had crawled back into the group’s good graces. Sabotage. Sabotage.
“Craig,” Enid generously avoided the confrontation, “I am continually disturbed by how much information you can get on everyone, and how quickly.”
“That’s why I get paid the big bucks.”
It was a save. Enid was saving her from ruining everything again. Enid was being a friend.
“Hear me out, Enid.” Craig looked over with some compassion. She was old and didn’t have a clue; Maggie saw that gloss of youthful information in his eyes. “The government knows everything about you now. Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning risked all they had to let us know how much the government really knows, and how little protection we actually have. Corporations understand everything about you: what kind of porn you watch, what kind of hair-growth products you use, they know every fear and curiosity that you have ever googled. The police know your retina shape. So, Enid, you need to adjust your thinking. It can’t be that the normal status quo is unimaginable for you, or you will never be effective again. If all your foibles and flaws are legible, so are everyone else’s. Why do you need that illusion called privacy? Ask yourself what you are hiding. Let it go.”
“But I don’t want anyone to know.”
“Consider it an opportunity,” he said. He had a theory about this and now he had found the occasion to explain it, to show them how valuable he is. How much they needed him if they were going to understand and be functional in their own world. “Before, everyone was lying about what they were doing. We were all pretending we were exceptional but we were all doing terrible things and hiding them. Now, the ship is transparent. Everyone’s mistakes are legible. So, we can’t pretend anymore that we are clean.”
“Thank you, Craig,” Maggie said, feeling seen and moved.
“Not you.” Craig laughed. “You aren’t like everybody else.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
6:00 PM
Maggie staggered out of the building onto Eighth Avenue, barely able to keep her outstretched arms firmly gripped around her enormous gift basket. Craig toddled out after her, trying to catch up but weighted down by his own lucre.
“Hey, Maggie, hold up.”
She stopped, hoping he wanted to be friends. Perhaps he knew that he had been mean and was ready to take it down a few notches. After all, she was sure he had googled the police commission report, so he knew they officially ruled that she had nothing to do with Julio’s death. Even though that was a lie. She wanted to be Craig’s friend. She needed a straight-guy buddy in the world, who was smart and responsible. And since Mike had paired them together, they were going to be collaborating and there was a lot of room for camaraderie there. Craig had issues, but who didn’t? He was just uptight and might learn a thing or two from her as well. Julio had been the rock in her insane life, until insanity reached his. They provided each other with routine, and routine bonds people. It is the basis of community and a feeling of trust, which is why people with business to work out have to have experiences together. Share them. See that there is something good.
“Hey, hold up.” He was panting, overweight, sluggish.
“Hey.”
“I found some info as you were on your way out.”
“You mean that I was cleared by the police commission in Julio’s death.”
“No, I found that out at 10:33 this morning.”
“Okay, what then?”
“Maggie, I called you on your cell.”
She was sincerely sorry. It was time to grow up. “I’m sorry, Craig. I haven’t had a moment to figure out how to retrieve messages. But it is on.”
“It’s time for you to learn.”
“You’re right.” She nodded. And he was right.
“I know you are interested in the Ashford case,” he said. “And I think I understand why. Just letting you know that the family filed charges in civil court today.”
“What can that do?”
“Well the cop who killed their father can’t go to jail. But the NYPD can pay out large fees. It’s better than nothing.”
“Thanks for the update. Anything else?”
“Yeah, it’s about Jamie’s mother.”
“Louisa Wagner.”
“That’s the thing.” He tried to shift his gift basket to balance on one hip while reaching for his phone. “Her name isn’t Louisa Wagner. It’s Carrie Moyer. She’s a piano teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico.” The reward slipped to the ground. “Whew.” He sweated. “I’m taking a cab.”
She watched him ride away as she heaved her burden of gifts into a wider, tighter grip and started toward her apartment, pausing on every other corner to take a break and breathe.
Eighth Avenue was looking very unloved. All the places she and Frances had passed on a daily basis were dead, and their corpses were long gone or still rotting in the gutter. The old corner liquor store in a Civil War–era building was gone; Rawhide, the gay cowboy bar was long gone. The gay porn and video store was for rent. The long line of overpriced restaurants that had always lined the block were hanging on, with the last remaining old gay men consuming margarita happy hours and egg-white omelets. Next to them she saw the young couples—straight and gay, they were equally obnoxious—move into these new high-rise condominiums, housing projects for the wealthy. They were nondescript, derivative, and elite, with lobbies that seemed from a distance like an upgraded Marriott. It was all so ugly and so bland.
And suddenly Maggie felt that she was getting better. She was developing taste and standards, likes and dislikes. She was starting to care. And maybe she would have to move soon. To a real neighborhood that she could relate to. Maybe nearer to Frances. They had to work it out. Then she could live down the street, and Alina could come over after school and do her homework. It all made sense. It was reasonable. And therefore, it could be.
She paused on another street corner, balancing her gift basket on a wire trash can while catching her breath. She would never give up on Alina like, her own mother did, like Jamie’s mother did, abandoning her, leaving her in the clutches of that crazy father. Jamie Wagner, Jamie Wagner. Her mother was not her savior. Think, think. Maggie had to focus. Be Jamie. Pay attention. Think like Jamie. Breathe. Get inside of Jamie’s mind.
I have been manipulated by the sick mind of the person I love the most in the world, my daddy.
I finally meet someone who wants to help me get better, to face it, to become an equal party in love.
But as soon as I open my heart to him, I feel he is going to annihilate me.
The way my daddy did.
I’m in a rage about my life.
I can’t sleep.
I am dissociated.
I am blaming the person who can help me heal.
My life is a fog of pain.
I go to a therapist because she doesn’t tell me anything that I can’t handle. And I can’t handle very much.
Therefore, I never get better.
Pain. Pain.
I blame it all on my lover who is truly there for me. I can’t bear his care.
I shut my father out but I still can’t sleep.
My mother has fed me to the wolf.
Every night I come home from the show, have some Chinese takeout on my fold-out couch, in my windowless apartment, and listen to the mentally ill man downstairs yell at his mother.
I can’t have real friends because they will see that something is wrong.
That I am like my father. Sick.
So, I tell Steven that he’s “the sick one.” That I am going to have him arrested, because no one ever had my father arrested. I want Steven in jail because he is the dangerous one. He makes me feel and I can’t stand to feel that deeply about someone else, because then I will care about all the pain I am causing him and I don’t have room to care. He makes me feel something that I can’t handle, something real. I’m in so much pain that I can’t sleep. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?
And then Maggie realized.
I have a drink.
She stepped out of the cab, gift basket first, and looked around. East Eighty-Second Street off of Second Avenue was also generic, but in a slightly different way. The decay here was one of compliance. Heterosexual families and single white women. It was the same bad food, the same overpriced restaurants, but a different kind of despair, one without community. There were still some old people in rent-controlled apartments and very few good places to buy fresh vegetables. It was rotting in the very particular way that Manhattan had started to rot.
Maggie stood in front of Jamie’s building, set her giant gift basket on the concrete to rest.
Okay, it’s night.
Jamie had gotten off from work and bicycled home from the theater district, locked her bike to the front gate. She ate her dinner. There were sleepless hours ahead of her, and she needed a drink. She needed some way to calm down and to be with people without them knowing her secret. That she was suffering.
Maggie turned her back to Jamie’s building and looked up and down the block. To her right was a brightly lit pizza place. Directly across was an old tenant, a tailor. He wouldn’t be there much longer. And then, diagonally down the way to the right, she saw it. A bar. It was so close. Jamie didn’t even have to cross the street to stumble home and flop on her bed. Maggie got closer. The Red Den. She carried the basket, and opened the front door to a wall of laughing, glasses clinking. It was packed. Three deep at the bar.
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