What you do to children matters.
And they might never forget.
—Toni Morrison, God Help the Child
The truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down.
But a mother never should.
—Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
I’ll tell you a secret. A lot of times, parents are not the best at seeing their children clearly.
—Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
AUGUST 21, 2017
Maggie is in the midst of a second lazy orgasm when her brother, Ariel, calls to tell her their mother has died. “Don’t pick up,” Lucia says, the lower half of her face glistening. But Maggie doesn’t listen; she lives for moments like this.
“Hello, Brother. I am currently being eaten out. What are you up to?” And when Lucia pulls her face away, peeved, Maggie leans up on her elbows and says, “No, don’t stop.”
But then she listens, and she sits up and pulls away from Lucia, tugs her knees close to her body, protective. She can feel her face turn stony, is sure the color is draining from it as her brother talks. She sees how she must look through her lover’s shifting features, Lucia’s eyes widening with concern, her mouth hanging open a little, chin still wet.
“Okay,” Maggie says. She repeats it. Then: “I’ll text you my flight details.” She doesn’t say “I’m sorry,” though she is, nor “I love you,” though she does. She can’t think clearly enough to say the things people are supposed to say in such moments. Not because she’s stuck—she isn’t. She isn’t even thinking about her newly dead mother, nor of the violence of her death, a car crash along a route she can picture well. Instead, Maggie is several steps ahead, thinking of the funeral, of who she needs to call, of what will happen to her father. She’s thinking about whether they need to print programs, whether the synagogue will do that, and whether that’s even really a thing, or just something people do on TV. She’s thinking about her planner, sitting in the kitchen, so far from where she needs it.
“Mags, you’re scaring me,” Lucia says. She’s sitting very close to Maggie now rather than between her legs, kneeling, her brown breasts hanging heavy, nipples grazing Maggie’s knees. “Where are you going?”
Maggie stays hunched into her phone, looking at flight options, prices and times. “Home,” she says, and she leans forward to kiss Lucia, whose lips look especially swollen, though it’s just that her lipstick is smeared despite its no-smear promise. “You’ve got a smudge,” she says, and thumbs it away. “My mom died.”
“What?” Maggie tends to shriek when she’s surprised, but Lucia goes soft and still. It makes people lean forward to hear, and somehow amplifies her presence. It’s one of the things Maggie likes about her so much. Her solidness, the space she takes up without trying. “Babe, your mom?”
“Yeah,” Maggie says, lowering her eyes to her phone again. “A tree crashed into her car. Can you hand me my wallet?” But Lucia pulls the phone out of her hands instead. “Hey—!”
Lucia holds Maggie’s face in cupped palms, looks into her eyes like she’s trying to find something there, something that isn’t. “I think you’re in shock.”
“No, I’m not.” Maggie jerks her head away and gets up. “Fuck it, it’ll be easier on the laptop.” She grabs her underwear from the ground, pulls on the baggy Babadook T-shirt she wears to sleep, and walks out to the living room where her laptop is still hooked up to the TV, paused on the credits of the documentary she and Lucia had been watching. It’s Monday already, the night having turned early morning without her realizing. She needs to compose an email to her boss to explain why she won’t be at work for a few days. She needs to call her dad. She needs—
“What can I do?” Lucia has followed her, still naked, and hands Maggie the wallet she left in the bedroom, on the chain she keeps attached to her jeans.
Maggie doesn’t know what to say, because she doesn’t know what Lucia can do. Her mother has never died before. She’s never before had a girlfriend for this long, this many months in a row. She doesn’t know what having a person help her in this intimate way should look like. She can’t ask Lucia to call her dad for her. She can’t ask Lucia to look up flights for her. She can’t ask Lucia to figure out how to get hold of the will and whether her parents still have the same lawyer now as they did a decade ago, a plucky blond woman named Janice, whom Maggie had the displeasure of meeting when she got arrested for smoking pot at age seventeen. She isn’t even sure what she’s told Lucia about her mother, whether they’ve really talked about their parents. It seems like they’ve been too busy fucking the life out of each other for most of the past five months.
When Maggie’s foot begins to fall asleep, she realizes how long she’s been sitting with it underneath her on the couch. The same position her mother always sits, an inherited trait, or maybe a picked-up habit. Sat, she thinks. The same way her mother sat. The tense change feels like a fist around Maggie’s esophagus, its permanence making the edges of her vision cloud. But no—she can’t fall apart yet. There are practicalities to attend to. She’s been staring at flight options for far too long, switching to another tab and googling “how to plan a funeral fast” and “Jewish funeral” and “what to do when your mom dies.” She pulls her credit card out of her wallet, inputs the numbers. The tips of her fingers are numb.
A mug of tea appears next to the laptop, not steaming, which is good, because Maggie can’t drink anything hot. She usually puts an ice cube in her tea to avoid needing to wait fifteen minutes before drinking it; Lucia must have seen her do this, or maybe it’s been that long already. “Here you go, babe,” Lucia says, and sits on the couch next to Maggie, her hip—now underpantsed, her torso T-shirted—pressed close. “Did you find a flight?”
“Yeah, in the morning.”
“We should get a few hours of sleep before I drive you to the airport. Come on, let’s go to bed.”
“You’re driving me?” Maggie looks up from an unhelpful listicle of ten things no one expects when losing a parent. Lucia’s irises are usually two different shades of brown, one deep and rich and the other golden in the light, almost like an eagle’s eye. In the shadow of the dark living room and the glow of the laptop screen, they just look black, as if all pupil, like on the night she and Maggie met, both of them on molly and dancing to EDM at an overpriced warehouse party.
“Of course. I mean, if you don’t want me to, I won’t, but I’m here, babe.”
Maggie wants her to. She also doesn’t. This is not where they’re at yet. This is what she usually considers too real. This is when she bails.