When Maggie first came out, there were those kids at school who asked her why she hated men. She didn’t answer them, because they didn’t deserve an answer, but she thought about the question. Did she hate men? No, she didn’t. She hated male dominance and the patriarchy, of course, but that was different. Men, on an individual level, she didn’t hate. How could she, when she joined in the boys’ games all the way until puberty, disliking the girly things she was supposed to like back then? She simply wasn’t attracted to masculinity, though she adopted some of it for herself. She wanted to tell those kids in high school that it was impossible to hate men as a category when she had a father who was distinctly male—in the essentialist way she would later reject as being true, because the binary was bullshit—a father who had been nothing but a gem to her. They had their share of fights about curfews and dating—both before and after she came out—and the way her mom could be a total bitch, but still. He was the best dad she’d heard of. He was there. He was paternal and maternal, making up for Iris’s long work hours and frequent business trips.
And he was talented too, though she didn’t really register this until much later. She was just used to seeing new lettering, logos, and designs hanging around his office, not quite thinking about the fact that Peter was creating them entirely from scratch for his clients. It wasn’t until she took a graphic design class in her first year of college and hated it—the software was so finicky, and doodling on notebooks was very different from creating consistent shapes—that she realized the extent of her father’s abilities. That he was, though he didn’t call himself that, an artist.
But now—now Maggie looks at her father sitting at his desk, still, his head lowered, reading something, not moving, not reacting to her voice.
“Daddy,” she tries again, and begins stepping toward him. He lifts his head, an expression of mild surprise on his face.
“Oh, hello.” He sighs and looks back down. “This isn’t very good. But I can see why Iris loved it so much.” Peter and Iris almost never used each other’s names when speaking to their kids, usually saying “your dad” or “your mom,” and it’s strange for Maggie to hear the way her father says her mother’s name, like she’s some woman Maggie’s never heard of.
She walks closer and says gently, as if speaking to an invalid, “What are you reading?”
He lifts up the book and shows her. It’s a detective novel, one of the many her mother read and loved. She had shelves and shelves of them, collecting all the books by the same author, becoming obsessed with one for a while, reading everything they wrote, and moving on to the next. LA noir, Florida noir, medical thrillers, psychological thrillers, literary crime, spy novels—she collected and read all of it. Maggie’s never been the reader her mother was—Ariel inherited that trait far more clearly—but she sees the appeal, though she prefers true crime to fiction and viewing or listening to reading.
“Dad, you need to get up and do stuff,” Ariel says from the doorway. His face is screwed up and angry, and as he speaks, his voices rises. “There’s shit to do, stuff to plan, you can’t just sit there!” Ariel’s arms wave around as he yells this, and Maggie knows she needs to stop this and control the situation.
“Okay, now, Ariel, come on—”
“No, no, don’t you do that, Maggie, don’t you dare, it’s not your responsibility, it’s Dad’s, he’s the parent—hello? Are you still a parent?” Ariel is full-on screeching now, and Maggie wonders what the last eighteen hours have been like in this household without her. Ariel is supposed to start his junior year of college at UC Irvine in a month and is still home for summer vacation, and he was here when it happened, when their mother’s car was found rammed into a tree, probably after swerving to avoid something, a child or animal. This is what Ariel explained happened last night, but Maggie realizes she doesn’t actually know many of the details and needs to regroup, to get things figured out. The body, for instance—where’s the body?
First order of business, she thinks, is to get Ariel out of here, get him doing something useful. She’s pretty sure her hands are shaking, so she balls them up into tight fists, clenches hard. “Ariel,” she says, turning to him. They’re virtually the same height, and she stands close so he can’t see Peter and has to focus on her face. “Go get those flowers from the front door. Make a list of all the people you think we need to call. Find out how we get an obituary in the paper. Can you do that for me?”
Ariel stares, his jaw working hard as he tries to stop himself from crying again. Maggie flashes back to when he was a young teen and she’d just become officially legal; back then, whenever she told him to do anything, he’d respond with a loud, sarcastic “Okay, Mom.” She wonders if he’s thinking of this as well, of how he can’t say that anymore. Without a word, he turns and slams the door of the office shut behind him. Maggie’s shoulders jump at the sound, and she feels a surge of anger, or maybe just adrenaline, but tamps it down. She can’t fall apart now. She’s the oldest child, the independent one, and apparently the most capable grown-up in the house at the moment. And she has to deal with her father.
“Daddy, have you eaten anything?” she asks him. He shakes his head and murmurs a no. “Okay, let me get you something. Also, is your lawyer still Janice, the woman who helped with my arrest that time?”
“Arrest?” Peter asks mildly. “Oh, that. That was so long ago.”
“Janice, Dad. Is she still your lawyer?” Maggie asks. It’s hard to keep from shouting, but she manages.
“Mm.”
Well, okay then, she thinks, and swallows again, pushing away the panic, anger, adrenaline, whatever it is, because she has to believe that Peter will be all right again eventually, that he’ll be normal, recognizably her father. She doesn’t have time or energy to consider the alternative. “I’m going to call her, okay?” she says.
He doesn’t respond. She leaves his office, wanting very much to slam the door like Ariel did but restrains herself. She knows, without really thinking about it, that she will restrain herself a lot in the coming days.
* * *
• • •
MAGGIE SITS IN her childhood bedroom for a moment, on the single bed her parents never agreed to graduate her out of. She isn’t out of breath, but she feels she has to catch it. She isn’t dizzy, but she needs everything to stop spinning. She isn’t jet-lagged, has never been jet-lagged, but she feels like daylight savings has just happened and that she’s flown across the Atlantic to boot.
Her room looks nothing like her anymore. It’s a reflection of a past self. On the wall above the bed are taped-up pictures of an androgynous Johnny Depp torn out of the teen magazines she would buy—until recently, he was the one exception to her disinterest in men, but when she found out he was an abusive asshole, she had let him go, not without regret. Beside Johnny are pictures of women—Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Gwen Stefani in her most punk No Doubt phase, Janet Jackson pre–Justin Timberlake Super Bowl. There’s a hole in the center of Gwen’s picture from where the poster was ripped out of the magazine, cutting off her cocked hip.