AUGUST 21, 2017
Maggie collects her suitcase and walks out to the curb. Ariel said he’d pick her up, but she doesn’t know yet how a mother’s death changes responsibility, whether he’ll forget or oversleep or show up. She doesn’t know what home will be like, whether it will feel like it used to or like a nightmare reflection. The world is atilt. LA’s air smells faintly of tar. The sky is so blandly blue it could be a tarp, the kind set up to provide shade for the outdoor picnic tables at the park where Maggie’s classmates had birthday parties when they were all little kids and the most exciting rush was sneaking third and fourth slices of birthday cake when the adults weren’t watching. The distance Maggie still feels from the existence of her grief makes her intensely self-conscious, as if she’s acting in a movie about a woman who goes home when her mother dies rather than actually experiencing it. She runs her hands through her hair, styled in a curly top fade to accommodate both her thick waves and her workplace—she slicks everything straight back and flat for the office—and considers texting Lucia to tell her she’s arrived, but a car honks at her and she sees it’s Ariel in his 1994 Jeep Wrangler, a car older than Ariel himself, but which someone sold him in high school when he worked at an OfficeMax that has since closed.
“I can’t believe you’re still driving this thing,” she says when she opens the door and heaves her suitcase into the narrow space of the back seat. Ariel rolls his eyes, and again, the entire scene feels unreal, too normal. “Hey, are you okay?” she asks as he tears away from the curb. LAX is as bad as the St. Louis airport about letting people sit and wait. Everywhere is. This constant coming and going of humanity, Maggie thinks, makes it impossible to pause anywhere. We’re all just going-going-going until we’re gone.
“What do you think? Are you okay?” Ariel spits at her. He turns the radio up. It’s something she doesn’t know, a rapper tossing out lyrics and rhymes in Spanish. She recognizes the curl and curve of some words, but can’t grasp the overall meaning. Maggie wants to tell Ariel that yes, she’s okay, more or less.
Instead, she says, “Jeez, okay, just don’t take it out on me,” and wonders what she means by that. Who else is Ariel supposed to take things out on? It’s not like he has a girlfriend, as far as she knows, and then is disgusted with herself for assuming she’s supposed to take things out on Lucia. Although hasn’t she already? Just in the last sixteen hours or so? But it’s a good thing, really, she thinks, pulling absently at the yellow-brown foam poking out of the seat. It’s good because now that Lucia has seen how cold Maggie can get when something bad happens, she’ll know she should leave. And that’s good too, Maggie tries to convince herself as Ariel plucks the chunk of foam from between her worrying fingers and asks her sternly to stop. It’s good because this way Maggie will at least know that she didn’t cheat this time, that she didn’t fuck it all up half on purpose.
The drive is longer than it should be because of the traffic getting away from the airport, but eventually the 101 clears up enough for it to feel like they’re actually moving again, and Maggie watches the hills that always look dry, burned-out—some of them really are, the fires have been bad lately—with what greenery there is lying low, fighting for its life and the few drops of water it can get from the arid land.
“Remember when Mom took us sometimes when she had work in LA?” she asks, the words tumbling out of her mouth. Ariel’s hands tighten on the wheel and he nods. He pushes his fist under his thick black-rimmed glasses and rubs each eye with a tight twist, as if shutting off a faucet, as if this’ll keep him from crying. “That was so fun,” Maggie continues. “Well, for me it was. You were so little, you usually just watched whatever I was doing and then fell asleep.”
“Yeah, but you’d tickle me to try to wake me up. You know that’s why I’m not ticklish? I trained myself to ignore you because if I looked like I was asleep Mom would pick me up and bring me to the car. I mean, everyone fakes that, right? Like, do kids really stay asleep when grown-ups pick them up like that?”
“No idea. I also pretended,” Maggie says. They fall silent again, and she thinks about that feeling of being wrapped in the warmth of an adult, a person she could trust. She knows she’s an adult herself now, technically. Usually, she’s proud of this, that she’s made it, as if growing up is an achievement rather than a force of nature, but now, she wishes she could go back.
* * *
• • •
WHEN ARIEL PULLS up to their childhood home, Maggie sighs, relieved. It looks the same as it always does, the same as it always has, and though she grew up thinking it was ugly and old and was always jealous of the kids who lived in the newly built houses, she realizes now that she was lucky to live in a somewhat vintage place, even though it’s still ugly on the outside. Ariel parks in front, without opening the garage door, essentially blocking it, and on any other day Maggie would have told him off for this annoying habit, but at the moment, she feels a rush of fear. Ariel hasn’t mentioned their father once, and she’s been too scared to ask. She has to wait for Ariel to open their front door, which is littered with several wreaths of flowers delivered apparently in the past couple of hours.
“Who are these from?” she asks, and Ariel grunts something and bends down to pick one up and check, but she doesn’t wait. She walks straight through the foyer, doesn’t glance at the kitchen or living room or the backyard where her mother left out a birdfeeder that was usually used by the squirrels. She goes right to the door of her father’s office, which is ajar, and pushes it open.
“Dad?”
She drops her backpack. It thunks loudly, the metal water bottle at the bottom landing hard. Her father doesn’t look up. Ariel mutters from behind her, “He’s been this way since last night.”
Peter is sitting at his work desk, the place where Maggie and Ariel have seen him a thousand times before, but it’s all wrong. Rather than the busy, harried focus on paper or screen he usually had when they were kids—or the pacing that accompanied his bouts of creative frustration—he’s still. Peter isn’t a still man, or never used to be. The death of his wife appears, Maggie thinks, to have made the clockwork inside him run down.
Throughout their childhood, Peter was the one who cooked, who cleaned, who picked them up from after-school tutoring sessions or sleepovers on the weekends with friends. Peter was the one who made their house a home, always welcoming them when they arrived. He was a stay-at-home dad, a work-from-home dad, a dad like no other dad they knew. He was good with his hands but wasn’t handy, and he hired people to fix things when they broke—plumbers and electricians and car mechanics. They weren’t wealthy, but they were in that middle-class place where they could weigh time against money—Peter knew, for instance, that instead of trying to learn how to pull things out of toilet piping or attempting to figure out his car engine on his own, he could cook for his children or find a new client to work for. He was good that way, knowing when to extend himself and when to keep to the things he knew.