Lucia shrugs. “Be safe, babe,” she says. “I’ll check in with you, okay? Tell me when you land?”
“Sure.” Maggie forgets this as soon as she’s out of the car with her suitcase and her Trans by JanSport backpack, the same style she’s had since high school, the only purse she ever wants or needs.
* * *
• • •
ON THE PLANE, the pilot talks about how they’re all going to miss the complete solar eclipse. “You won’t see it right in California,” he admonishes. Maggie and Lucia were planning to video-chat during her lunch break to watch it together. Oh well, she thinks, as the plane begins to accelerate. She has a row to herself, since apparently a Monday morning in August isn’t prime flying time. She’s grateful for it, and once the plane is in the air, toe-ankles her way out of her Converse, the same pair she’s flown in since moving to the Midwest for college. A good-luck charm.
It was her first, that flight nine years ago. She was eighteen and fluffy-haired after shaving her head the year before, intending to donate her lengthy curls to a cancer charity, though her braid in its plastic bag was returned in the mail due to some postal mistake and ended up staying on her bedroom floor, forgotten. She was scared when the plane took off from the small Oxnard Airport—still in service back then—and her mother, Iris, had taken her hand and squeezed it. “You’re doing great,” she said. She’d surprised everyone by insisting that she should be the one to help Maggie move in. It wasn’t just that Iris almost never took time off work, it had also been a bad year for the two of them: Maggie’s increasingly flaunted weed smoking causing endless fights, her coming-out evoking uncomfortable silences. But Iris took her hand on that flight, told her she was doing great.
Maggie’s left hand reflexively tightens on her jeans. The denim is coarse or soft, depending which direction her fingers move along the lines of its weave. It feels nothing like a human hand. Self-consciously, she holds her own hands together and closes her eyes, tries to imagine that her right hand isn’t hers but her mother’s. Just for a moment, she manages to divorce herself from the touch of one hand, focusing so completely on the other that it’s as if Iris really is there, really is holding her hand again on that onetime bonding experience.
But then the illusion disappears and a heavy warmth settles on Maggie’s chest, the kind that comes before crying. Her mother is dead. She will never again comfort Maggie on a flight, or any other time. She’ll never again tell her that she’s doing great. Not that Iris was quick to express love, or that Maggie has needed her all that much in recent years; it’s that the option was there. The nest existed. Her parents, cocooned in their separate and busy lives but coming together for their children, at least most of the time.
No more.
She shuts her eyes and breathes deeply, swallowing past the lump in her throat as best she can. She decides to deploy the relaxation method she uses when she’s smoked something unfamiliar that makes her paranoid or when she has a bad hangover that makes her feel half dead: recalling her work scripts, the things she tells people when she’s trying to sell them more insurance or when they have questions about the things they want to purchase. The scripts are relatively new, because the agency she works for changed a bunch of their product titles a couple of years ago, and everyone had to practice replacing the earlier language. Auto-Death Indemnity, for instance, became Medical Payments Coverage.
“No one,” the company rep in charge of retraining explained, “wants to hear the word ‘death’ when buying insurance.” Insurance is a tricky business that way; it prepares people for the worst, which they hope won’t happen, but it also makes them aware that it could. “Don’t remind people of their mortality,” the rep said. “Or remind them how vulnerable they are. Explain how vulnerable they could be if they don’t purchase our product. Ultimately, you’re selling them a promise that nothing bad will happen to them. That’s really what we’re about.”
It’s a soothing lie, Maggie knows, but it was a novel one when she started working there—her parents rarely made promises, even down to little things like reasonable birthday gift requests, so she never learned how empty so many of them could be.
Medical Payments Coverage, she explains to an imaginary faceless customer while trying to maintain her steady breathing, is a no-fault auto-insurance coverage for the worst-case scenario. She hopes Iris had the right kind of insurance. What if you and your loved ones are driving down I-55 . . . They have some savings, but a lot was lost in 2008, and they had to take out a second mortgage on the house at one point . . . and some asshole—excuse my French, ma’am—is texting behind the big wheel of his truck and he plows right into you? That’s not what happened, though, was it? It was a tree, Ariel said, not anyone’s fault. Well, if you choose this coverage . . . What a strange word: “coverage.” Like a blanket . . . we’d be able to help pay medical and funeral expenses for you or your passengers . . .
Maggie feels the plane lurch and sits up straight, yanking her earbuds out, heart pounding. She must have fallen asleep.
“We’re descending now to LAX, folks,” the captain’s voice comes on the overhead speakers, crackly and soft. “The weather is sunny and mild, with southwesterly breezes and a lovely seventy-eight degrees.”
IRIS
AUGUST 20, 2017
Stillness. Darkness. Waves of passing sound. Death, she discovers, is like being taken out to sea by the tide. Peaceful once she stops fighting the pain of it. Or is this just the story she tells herself in order to handle the sharpness running through her?
But no, before that. Before the end.
It was Iris’s day off. A Sunday. She’d just returned from the first half of a corporate weekend in Las Vegas, leaving the last couple of days in the hands of her capable assistant, Anya. She disliked Vegas, but more and more companies seemed to be making semipermanent homes there, for tax reasons she assumed, and still others just liked flying their people out for lavish yet well-contained vacations. The thing about Vegas, Iris felt, was that it was predictably glitzy, which made it lose its teeth. No, that wasn’t quite right—after all, the Strip was just one part of the city. It was the tourists who were predictable in Vegas. You could often tell, she thought, what people would want to do there, and what services bosses would want to provide. Her clients tended to underestimate the prices, though, as if Vegas being a place of clichés built upon other clichés made it cheap. There was the toilet-paper manufacturer who brought his corporate office to a retreat and wanted everyone to get free massages, then balked at the price and complained to Iris about his budget. There was the head of a bridesmaid-model company who insisted on finding not just one but three separate male revues for her girls to go wild at and then got peeved at how much she was billed for lap dances. Iris always tried to warn them, but it seemed people forgot money’s worth in Vegas. Part of Iris’s job as a corporate events planner, of course, was to keep things inside the client’s budget and she almost never strayed out of it, keeping a section cordoned off for extra expenses that her clients never thought to consider.