Page 22 of Gone Before Goodbye

She’d planned to tell him about the safe deposit boxes, but what’s the point? “All good,” she says.

Porkchop shakes his head.

“What?”

“First you don’t tell me why you’re here. Now you won’t tell me what you found in the apartment.”

Porkchop was seventeen years old when he became a father with Marc. Yes, seventeen. Marc’s mother had been Porkchop’s high school math teacher. She was thirty-six and married with three kids when she got pregnant by her student. She wanted to abort. Porkchop didn’t like that. He convinced her to go to full term—there may have been some threat of public exposure involved—and give Porkchop custody of Marc.

So yes, Maggie’s dream man had been raised by a single teen dad in a motorcycle gang. It made for a strange yet wonderful upbringing.

Porkchop says, “Spill it.”

“It’s a big nothing.”

He beckons with both hands for her to go on.

“There was a bill for some safe deposit boxes,” she says.

“Do tell.”

She does. Porkchop listens without reacting. When she’s finished,Porkchop scratches his beard. “Why wouldn’t you want to tell me about that?”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell you,” she says. “It just seems irrelevant.”

“Hmm.”

“So what do we do now?” Maggie asks.

Porkchop gives her a charismatic grin and wiggles his eyebrows. “We get shit-faced drunk at Vipers.”

CHAPTER FOUR

When Maggie’s alarm goes off the next morning, she sits up fast—too fast, her head reeling in protest. A jackhammer batters her skull from the inside. Her heart thumps deep in her chest. She flashes back to the night before, at Vipers, sitting on that cracked-leather stool, the floor sticky from spilled beer, Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” on the jukebox, the bar loud and growing hazier, old friends embracing her, regaling her with familiar stories of Marc as a precocious child, stories she’s heard a dozen times before and had always relished. But not tonight. She tried so hard to listen, to engage, to give her full attention to every single person who approached because they deserved that at the very least, but even as she tried to hold on, Maggie could feel herself slipping away into her own personal darkness. She drank her whiskey neat—Porkchop was currently endorsing Laphroaig 10 Year Old Islay—the weathered faces surrounding her, getting too close, blurring, becoming one indistinguishable mash. Then other faces emerged in their stead, dozens, maybe more, faces with pleading eyes, staring up at her with the blend of hope and despair that only a doctor witnesses. Marah, Joseph, Ahmed, Seema… And then, in the end, the last face, always the last face, was Kabir’s. She tried to comfort them, tried to stop the bleeding, tried to understand what they were saying to her. But they were speaking a foreign language, their pained wordsdrowned out by mortar fire and the roar of helicopter rotors and the screams.

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.