Chapter Four
Give me another chance, Maggie thinks. I’ll fix them.
And sometimes, in her dreams, she gets that chance.
The big do-over. They are alive. All of them.
She can save them if she moves fast enough.
She feels a sudden joy, a rush of hope, an odd clarity and focus and even peacefulness, and then something outside the dream—the alarm going off, Sharon calling out to her, Cole slamming the front door, whatever—pulls her away.
There’s this brief, horrible moment where Maggie is still in the dream, rising out of that cusp between sleep and consciousness, when the faces begin to fade away, dissolve, and Maggie realizes with cruel certainty that this is not reality, that this is a dream, that she will soon wake up to a world where the dead will always be dead.
Enough, she tells herself.
Maggie throws her feet off the bed and onto the floor.
She takes a few deep breaths, lets her pulse slow down.
She tries to remember the last time she drank too much, and an outdoor bar in Juba on a hot South Sudan evening comes to mind.
Trace kept buying rounds of Araqi, a delicious date-based liquor, and Maggie and Marc kept imbibing.
There had been lots of laughs as there always are after too much horror.
Trace had a girl with him—Maggie couldn’t remember her name because Trace always had a nameless girl with him and then the girl would be gone and there’d be another.
Trace doesn’t like attachments. Or more likely, he can’t do them.
On the surface, Trace gives off that sort of healable fragility, that vulnerability that draws in every woman who thinks they can fix him, but whatever is broken inside of him stayed broken.
Where is Trace Packer right now?
No clue.
Maggie blinks. It takes her a few moments to get her bearings.
She’s at the Aman hotel.
She stumbles out of bed, flicks on the light, enters a ginormous bathroom.
On her right is a too-inviting pink-crème bathtub the approximate size of a Cadillac Escalade.
On her left is a black-stone shower room—room, not stall—with an array of showerheads.
Maggie chooses the shower, in part because she fears that if she sinks into that bathtub with its potpourri of bath crystals and bath teas and bath salts and bath oils and bath pillows, she may never be able to extract herself.
She strips out of the oversize T-shirt she slept in last night. The T-shirt is from the Vipers gift shop. Porkchop had given it to her. Across the chest, it reads:
I DON’T SNORE. I DREAM I’M A MOTORCYCLE.
Hard to escape the dad jokes with Porkchop.
Maggie turns on the showerheads, all of them, full blast. She steps into the middle and lets the sprays blast away at her skin from every direction.
The water pressure is excellent, almost piercing her skin.
She doesn’t want to move. She thinks back to her time overseas, how she’d yearn for a hot shower, how she realized that one of life’s greatest and most unappreciated luxuries was a hot shower.
If you think about it, no human on planet Earth had even experienced a hot shower until, what, a hundred years ago maybe?
She once googled it—because that’s how her brain works—and hot showers were not common until the 1970s.
“Enjoy the smaller moments,” her father had often told her. “That’s where life is lived.”
So she does—at least for right now. After some time passes, when she realizes that she must regretfully turn off the sprays and step out of her black-stoned cocoon, there are plush Frette robes and thick towels.
The hotel phone rings, a gentle gong, letting guests know that there is an incoming call but not wanting to disturb their serenity.
Maggie answers. The voice on the other end of the line probably does voice-overs for hypnosis apps.
The voice asks what food or beverage she “craves” for breakfast, promising an arrival in five minutes.
“Coffee,” she says. “Black. Strong.”
“The Florentine omelet is a specialty.”
Maggie passes. Just the coffee.
Her mobile phone jangles in the stillness. It’s Porkchop. She answers on speakerphone.
“Good morning,” she says in a quiet voice.
“Why are you whispering?” he asks.
“Something about this room is making me stay quiet.”
“You quiet? Must be a miracle room.”
“Are you being a wiseass?”
“Just a little.” Then he adds, “You okay?”
“I’m good.”
He waits.
She sighs. “It was just a lot, you know.”
“I do.”
“I wasn’t really prepared for that.”
“That’s on me.”
“No, it’s not,” she says.
“Everyone was happy to see you.”
“I know I sort of zoned out.”
“You did, yeah.”
“I hope I wasn’t rude.”
“You’re family—no such thing as rude,” Porkchop says. “How are you feeling now?”
“Pretty hungover.”
“Same.”
“Wait, you?”
“I’m not as young as I used to be, Mags.”
Pinky had been the designated biker. He drove her back last night.
She feels weird about having too much to drink, but again, her issue had been pills, not booze, and boy, that sounds like a pathetic loophole.
So did the idea that she had “issues” with pills and not an “addiction.” She had stopped taking them cold after the…
What does she call it? Incident? Accident?
Catastrophe? Could she have done that—stopped the pills cold—if it had been a real addiction?
She doubts it, but does it matter? The damage was done.
She isn’t sure what to say next, but Porkchop takes over, asking in a quasi-mocking tone whether she’s on her way to her “big, secret meeting.”
“I need to get dressed,” she says.
“Call me when you’re done.”
“You don’t have a mobile phone,” she reminds him.
“I’ll be by the payphone. Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what this meeting is about?”
“Bye, Porkchop.”
She hangs up and throws on black jeans, boots, a denim shirt, and a blazer.
It’s a massive mind melt that never seems to have a clear answer: Never be too provocative but never be too stuffy…
Oh, but have a sense of style and always know what’s trending so you don’t appear, gasp, out of date—always trying to find the right balance between feminine and practical.
Utterly exhausting.
Maggie props up her phone on the bathroom vanity as she starts her makeup. She hits the icon and waits. When Marc’s face appears, Maggie says, “I saw your dad yesterday.”
“How is he?”
She chooses a little avoidance because she doesn’t want to go there right now. “Vipers is doing great. You ought to see what he’s done with it.”
“Did you both get drunk?”
“No.” Then: “Yes, of course.”
Marc smiles. “I’m glad you two have each other.”
Which is an odd thing to say.
“How long until your meeting with Evan Barlow?” he asks.
Maggie checks the clock on her phone. “Shoot, I’m running late. Talk later.”
She takes one last look in the mirror, shrugs, pockets the phone, and heads into the corridor.
She reaches the fourteenth-floor atrium.
The elevator doors are already open and waiting for her.
The Mercedes-Maybach is parked at the quieter entrance on 57th Street.
The chauffeur wears a black suit, black tie, and completes the look with a peaked newsboy cap. He holds the back door open.
“Hi,” she says. “I’m Maggie.”
“I’m Alou.”
She sticks out her hand and meets his eye. “Nice to meet you, Alou.”
He hesitantly shakes it. “Yes, ma’am.”
The windows are fully tinted, so no one can see in. She slides onto the plush leather in the back. The seat’s heater is already on full blast. There is a woman in the front passenger seat. She turns and gives Maggie the full-wattage smile.
“Hi, Maggie, I’m Dawn! I’m your Barlow concierge!”
Dawn speaks in exclamation marks, which are not welcome this early in the morning ever, never mind after a night at Vipers with Porkchop. Maggie looks back at Alou before he closes her door. He shrugs as if to say, “Yeah, this is how it is.”
“Hi, Dawn.”
“Many of our patients demand total confidentiality!”
“I’m not a patient, Dawn.”
She blinks and the full-wattage smile flickers but stays strong. “Oh, I know. We just thought you might want to experience the service. Plus, well, I was asked to assure your ride is comfortable and discreet.”
“I appreciate that. Where are we going?”
“To see Doctor Barlow, of course.”
She turns to face forward. The car starts up. Maggie stays quiet for a moment. When they start heading north on Madison Avenue, she leans forward and says, “Isn’t Barlow Cosmetics south of here?”
“That’s the public office,” Dawn says. “We think of it as our storefront. Most of the elite surgeries are done in, shall we say, a more private location.”
“And that’s where we’re going?”
“That’s where we are going, yes.”
“Can you tell me where specifically?”
“I never remember the address. It won’t be long. Would you like a Minus 181 mineral water?”
Ten minutes later, the Mercedes heads into a garage under a Dolce & Gabbana. There are cars lined up to be parked, but Alou circles around them and veers down a ramp. They drive two floors down and pull up to an elevator with its door open.
“Here we are!” Dawn exclaims in a singsong voice.
Maggie tries to open the door, but it won’t give. “I think my door is locked.”
Dawn turns to her from the front seat. “First, do you mind leaving your phone here?”
“Pardon?”
“We don’t allow phones on the premises. Company policy. For the privacy of you and all our patient—” Dawn stops, corrects herself. “I mean, visitors. Don’t worry. Your phone will be safe with Alou.”
“And if I don’t want to give up my phone?”
Dawn’s reply is a disappointed-schoolteacher frown. “I’m afraid we can’t make exceptions to this policy.”