Gone Before Goodbye

Chapter Two

Marc says, “You’ll hem and haw, but we both know you’re going to go.”

He’s right. Again.

Maggie is walking across campus. She’d stayed long enough so it would not appear that anyone had run her off, but as soon as the speeches were done and the mingling began again in earnest, Maggie slipped out.

“So,” Marc continues, “what do you think Doctor Barlow wants?”

“I was hoping you’d have an answer,” Maggie says.

“Hmm, let me do a quick search on him... whoa.”

“What?”

“Did you know Evan Barlow is on the Forbes list of richest doctors?”

Maggie makes a face. “Forbes has a list of richest doctors?”

“Top one hundred, yeah.”

“And Barlow is on it?”

“Number forty-two. Net worth estimated at nearly a billion dollars.”

“He makes that as a doctor?”

“Not really, no. He makes it as, I don’t know, I guess you’d call him a medical entrepreneur. Barlow Cosmetics is a major brand. Plastic surgery is still their mainstay, but they’ve gotten into home remedies and beauty products. Ironic.”

“What?”

“None of the richest doctors made their money seeing patients. It’s either from pharmaceuticals or insurance or patents. A few doing biotech, pushing the bounds of medicine, as their slogan says.”

“So what does Doctor Barlow want with me?”

On the too-small screen, Marc shrugs. “He was your favorite teacher, right?”

“Yes.”

“Your mentor. Close to your family.”

Maggie nods. “He told me tonight that he’d always been in love with my mother.”

“So maybe that’s it. Maybe he just wants to help you out.”

“How?”

“Give you a job at Barlow Cosmetics.”

“But I lost my license. I can’t do surgery.”

“You could still do some other kind of work for him.”

“Like what? I’m only good at one thing.” Maggie sees the smirk on Marc’s face. She sighs and rolls her eyes. “Don’t say it.”

Marc smiles. “What?”

“Just don’t.”

“You mean about you only being good at one thing?”

“Stop.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, raising his hand in mock surrender. “But I still think it’s most likely Barlow knows your situation and wants to help.”

Because her head is down and her eyes are on the screen, Maggie nearly bumps into a group of students walking in the other direction. One of them mutters something about watching where she’s going, and she offers a sincere apology because, to be fair, she hates when people are walking with their heads down and eyes on the screen.

“What else do you see?” she asks.

“He opened the first Barlow Cosmetic Center seventeen years ago. Supposedly it’s cutting-edge and state-of-the-art.”

“What’s the difference between those?” Maggie asks.

“What?”

“They always say that in ads. ‘Cutting-edge and state-of-the-art.’ Aren’t they the same thing?”

“Cutting edge refers to the most recent and advanced tools or platforms in a particular field. State of the art refers to the best technology or techniques made up of the most modern methods.”

Maggie makes a face. “You just looked that up.”

“I did, yes.”

“He wasn’t a billionaire when we were at Columbia,” she says. “He did cleft lift and palates, burns, reconstructive surgery. Worked almost exclusively with the underserved.”

“Like you,” Marc says.

Maggie shakes her head. “Like us.”

“I never did a cleft—”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do, yeah. Either way, all that is probably in his past. My guess is, Barlow does mostly breast augmentation and facelifts now. The details on his practice are pretty secretive.”

“He’s got some famous clients,” she says. “They probably demand discretion.”

“Probably.”

She thinks about it and then figures, Why not? “I saw Sleazy Steve.”

“Did he hit on you?”

“Yes, but he can pull younger tail now.”

“Younger tail?”

“Apparently that’s a thing.” Then she says, “He said he works at Apollo Longevity.” When there’s no reply, she says, “I thought it closed down.”

“It still has its original mission: longevity. Blood spinning, ozone therapies, cell regeneration, stem cell, EBOO therapy.” He grins. “All cutting-edge and state-of-the-art.”

“But WorldCures is out?”

“There is no more WorldCures, Maggie.”

Just like that. Matter-of-fact as can be.

“Right,” she says. “I know.”

“So when are you going up to New York?”

“Tomorrow morning,” she says. “I’m going to call your dad at Vipers, see if he’s around.”

“Have you seen him recently?”

“Not since he and the gang road-tripped through here last month.”

“How’s he doing?”

“You know Porkchop,” she says.

Marc doesn’t say anything, just waits.

“He’s good,” she lies.

Maggie turns the final corner. Up ahead is the saltbox colonial she grew up in and where she now resides with her sister Sharon and nephew Cole.

“Maggie?”

“Yes?”

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

She stops. “About the meeting with Barlow?”

“Yes.”

A cold finger traces down her spine. “What makes you say that?”

“Nothing. I mean, no facts or anything.”

“Just a bad feeling?”

“Yes.”

“Except,” Maggie says, “you don’t work off feelings.”

No reply.

When Maggie sees her nephew step out of the house, she hits the red disconnect icon and drops the phone in her pocket. Cole pops on a huge smile when he sees his aunt. It’s been a tough year for the kid — too much death, divorce, and debt for a fifteen-year-old boy — but Cole always manages a smile for his aunt and his mother. Maggie doesn’t know whether the smiles are authentic or not. She suspects not. Cole is so damn kind and perceptive, Maggie suspects that he sees the stress his mother and aunt are under and does his utter best not to add to it.

“Hey, Aunt Maggie.”

She gives Cole a hey back. He starts a gangly, endearing trudge toward her. It tweaks her heart, the humanness of his sputtering movements, his youth and vulnerability.

“How’s Mom?” Maggie asks.

His face falls. “She’s at the kitchen table again.”

“It’ll be okay,” Maggie tells him. Then: “She’ll be okay.”

“Your being here, with us — I know it’s not your responsibility—”

“It’s my responsibility,” Maggie says.

Cole nods, forces the smile back onto his face. The honk of a horn draws their attention. A car pulls up with a bunch of teens hanging out the windows. They call to Cole, who looks an apology at her, but Maggie smiles and waves him off.

“Go,” she says.

“You sure?”

“I got this.”

Cole does the gangly trudge toward the car, though this time with more speed. Maggie watches, glad for this bit of normalcy. Her nephew deserves this. The back door opens and swallows him whole.

When the car vanishes down the road, she takes out her phone and calls Vipers. She hears the ringing of the retro black payphone in the corner of the bar with a sign reading OUT OF ORDER so no patrons use it. This is Porkchop’s version of a Batphone. Her father-in-law, Porkchop — yes, that’s what everyone, even his son, calls him — redefines old school. He doesn’t own a mobile phone or computer. For that matter he doesn’t own a house or car or television. Porkchop once told her, “All I own is a motorcycle and the open road,” and when she made a face, he shrugged and said, “I read that on a matchbook in some biker bar in Sturgis.”

When the phone is picked up, a woman speaks. She sounds somehow both young and like she’s seen it all. “Vipers for Bikers.”

Maggie can hear the customary background racket of the biker bar. “Bat Out of Hell” is on the jukebox, one of Porkchop’s favorites, Meatloaf right now rocking that when the night is over, he’ll be gone, gone, gone. Maggie and Marc played the song at their wedding, she and Marc and Porkchop and Sharon standing in a circle on the dance floor, shouting every lyric at the top of their lungs until Marc pulled her close and the world vanished and the song softened for a moment and Marc sang along that she’s the only thing in this whole world that’s pure and good and right. And then they stared at each other until the song picked back up again and she’s reminded that Meatloaf is really singing about their last night together and the stanza ends with him screaming, “We’ll both be so alone.”

“Is Porkchop there?”

“No.”

Maggie can see the scene — that jukebox in the corner, the sawdust on the floor, the collection of neon beer signs, the heady smell of worn leather, diesel fuel, and testosterone.

“Can I leave a message for him?”

“Depends. You one of his old ladies?”

“Old ladies,” Maggie repeats. “Did Porkchop tell you to say that?”

“Yeah.”

The man never changes.

“Tell him it’s Maggie.”

The woman doesn’t bother with an “Okay” or “I will.” She just hangs up.

Maggie puts away her phone and enters the house, nearly tripping over a pair of Cole’s sneakers the size of small canoes. “Hello?”

“In the kitchen,” Sharon calls back.

The house is stuck somewhere in the... Maggie wasn’t even sure of the era. Seventies? Eighties? When you grow up in it, you don’t get how dated your own home is, and of course there is nothing wrong with that. The green-beige curtains are too heavy with tassels. The Persian carpets are pattern-complicated and threadbare. The antique “knickknack cabinet” — that’s what Mom had called it — has dozens of small, silver-framed photographs, most of them black-and-white, along with various cheesy figurines like Hummel children — boy in apple tree, girl with umbrella, that kind of thing. They had always been there, as far as Maggie knew. She didn’t remember her parents ever buying or putting one up or moving one or changing any. None of the knickknacks seemed to hold any particular significance to her parents. They never talked about where the Hummels came from, but Maggie assumes, knowing her parents, that someone had gifted them or they’d inherited them and their fate was either storage in the basement or placement on the knickknack cabinet.

It wasn’t that her parents were cash-strapped or, to be more blunt, tacky, but it was more that the “Doctors McCabe” couldn’t be bothered. Mom and Dad didn’t care about the dated wallpaper or the worn shag carpeting. Her parents were wonderful and kind and distracted; they were readers and healers and academics. They spent their money on books and experiences, not upholstery or décor. She could still see them in this living room with their friends, maybe fueled by a little too much alcohol, the debates lasting into the wee hours of the morning in the days when disagreeing was considered a good thing, when differing viewpoints were welcomed because they challenged and honed your thinking rather than producing anger and scorn.

But Maggie isn’t in the mood right now for that kind of... Was it nostalgia? What do you call a longing for critical thinking and common sense and decency?

Maggie’s family history is still told via framed photos on the fireplace mantel — she and Sharon at their dance recital when Maggie was eight and Sharon was six, various graduations, weddings, births, you know the deal. We have all seen it before. Maggie stops at the largest photograph — a horizontal group shot from her and Marc’s wedding. She and Marc are beaming in the center. Next to Maggie is Sharon, her obvious maid of honor. Next to Marc is his best man, Trace Packer. Trace could have been on either side of them, really. Trace had met Maggie first, serving with her as a Field Surgeon 62B in combat for two tour duties.

When she introduced Trace and Marc, the two men hit it off immediately. Eventually the three of them — Marc, Trace, Maggie — would create WorldCures Alliance, one of the world’s most dynamic charities, specializing in providing medical services for the most impoverished.

In the photo, Maggie’s parents are on the far right, looking heartbreakingly alive and healthy. Now that she looks again, does Maggie see hesitancy in her mother’s body language? Or is that “had I but known” projection on her part? Porkchop, Marc’s father, is on the far left. All the men wear matching tuxedos, except for Porkchop, who did don the bow tie and piqué bib white shirt but kept on the leather biker jacket and the smile-skull jewelry, and Maggie would have wanted it no other way.

As though on cue, her phone rings. The incoming call simply says PAYPHONE.

“Hello?”

Porkchop’s gruff voice barks. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Maggie says, still looking at Porkchop’s image in the old wedding photograph. “Well, except that whoever answered your phone is referring to fellow women as your ‘old ladies.’”

“What, you prefer my ‘girlfriends’?”

“Not really.”

“What then? My ‘hotties’? ‘Main squeezes’? ‘Love monkeys—’”

“Did you say ‘love monkeys’?”

“My bae, my boo, cuddle muffins—”

“Please stop.”

“Some of the youngins call them ‘shorties,’” Porkchop continues. “That better?”

“No,” Maggie says. “And never use the term ‘youngins’ again.”

“It’s cute when I say it.”

“Yeah, it’s really not.”

“Sooooo,” Porkchop says, dragging out the word, “this has been a fun icebreaker. What’s wrong, Maggie?”

“Can’t I call to say hello?”

“Sure.”

Silence.

“I’m coming up to Manhattan tomorrow,” Maggie says.

“Taking the Amtrak?”

“Yes.”

“Time?”

“The seven fourteen.”

“I’ll pick you up. You’ll tell me all then.”

Porkchop disconnects the call. Maggie’s eyes travel across the wedding photograph again, her mind blank and everywhere all at once.

From the kitchen, Sharon calls out, “Maggie?”

She wrestles her eyes from the photograph, inhales, and, taking a cue from her nephew, forces up a smile. When Maggie enters the kitchen, Sharon is sitting at the table, per what Cole said, her laptop open, papers strewn as though someone had dropped them from a great height. There is an open bottle of red from the Château Haut-Bailly. Just seeing it leads to a deep pang in her chest that has nothing to do with her sister’s recent desire to drink to excess.

“What are you doing?” Maggie asks.

Sharon looks up. “Coding to enable a hyperdimensional generative interference through stochastic gradient descent optimization of artificial intelligence by leveraging — should I continue?”

“Please don’t.”

Sharon takes off her reading glasses. “So how was the event?”

“Pretty good, actually.”

“Liar.”

Sharon is a genius. For real. Maggie had been a top student — high school salutatorian (damn Stuart Kleinman beating her for the valediction spot by.003 GPA points), driven from a young age to be a physician like her parents — but her sister Sharon had been a true polymath, what teachers and administrators used to call “academically gifted” or “overly advanced” or most commonly, “child prodigy.” Sharon could have graduated high school at the age of eleven, but the truth is — a truth her parents both understood early on — child prodigies don’t make it long-term. Think about the ones you knew growing up. Where are they now? See? They end up paralyzed by anxiety or abandon too many hobbies or spiral into self-doubt and self-hate or... Who knows?

They crash and burn.

Her parents, understanding this, encouraged excelling, but they insisted on routine and normalcy. Dad loved to quote Flaubert on the subject: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so you may be violent and original in your work.”

But it was never easy for Sharon. Her brain couldn’t — still can’t — slow down. Her neural signaling and power impulses and transmission synapses, whatever — they all ran too hot. Brain activity is commonly referred to as electrical, and hers would surge until the fuse blew. She couldn’t ease up or pace it. Even the smallest mistake would cause Sharon to obsess, blow it out of proportion, self-flagellate.

“Who gave out Mom’s award?” Sharon asks.

“Bonnie Tillman.”

“Oh, good. Mom liked Bonnie.”

“Don’t rub it in.”

“What?”

“Never mind. And Mom never liked her. She said she’d make a great doctor.”

“Same thing to Mom,” Sharon says, which was true.

Sharon too had served in the military, albeit for a clandestine branch of the army, breaking codes and developing AI, refining advanced reconnaissance software. At some point, Sharon and her husband, Tad — Cole’s father — turned to doing tech work privately, building an app that could in fact change the world. Sharon had designed a more advanced “humanoid AI” in the hopes the device might enhance and improve well-being through constant and immediate access to experts. Would you like to speak to your physician at any hour? Sharon’s anthropomorphic AI version of your favorite doctor is always available for a chat. Care to consult your attorney twenty-four seven, though this version of them has the wisdom of a thousand attorneys? Sharon’s app can do that. Do you sometimes need an emergency session with your therapist, maybe in the middle of the night, but of course, they aren’t available? Well, the AI version is there for you twenty-four seven, and for a small fee...

You get the gist.

On a practical level, the possibilities are an endless wow. But the moral implications started to weigh on Sharon, slow her down. Tad, who saw the dollar signs and realized, perhaps correctly, that someone might beat them in this global race, didn’t like that. He stole their patents by having Sharon sign papers she didn’t understand, and then he ran off with his assistant. The subsequent divorce had been brutal. Sharon tried every legal avenue to remedy the situation, but Tad’s father was a powerful federal judge, and if you think our legal system is about truth or fairness or equality, you’re either not paying attention or delusional.

Now Sharon is in heavy debt with no recourse.

Kind of like Maggie.

Yes, the McCabe Girls, raised by the Doctors McCabe to excel and be so accomplished, have been sidelined by enormous financial burdens, legal peril, and yes, scandal, with seemingly no options left.

Except, maybe, perhaps, who knows, Maggie’s old mentor in New York?

“Tell me the truth,” Sharon says. “How was the event really?”

“So many students adored Mom.”

“I meant for you?”

“Oh.” Maggie thinks a moment: “Shit.”

“Sorry,” Sharon says.

“Yeah, it’s okay.”

“Can’t say we’re surprised.”

“We are not, no,” Maggie says. “Doctor Barlow was there.”

“Oh, that must have been nice for you.”

“It was,” Maggie says. “He told me he was in love with Mom.”

“I bet he wasn’t the only one,” Sharon says.

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Maggie says with a head shake. She scans the papers on the table. They aren’t scientific research — they’re bills. “What’s up with this?”

Sharon puts on the half-moon reading glasses again and peers over the top of them. “I’m calculating our financial options.”

“And?”

“And we have to sell the house.”

“Not yet.”

“Mags, it’s just a house. You get that, right? An inanimate object. A corporeal entity. Inert matter. Wood, bricks, mortar. It’s not...”

“Mom and Dad,” she finishes for her sister. “I know. Look, I’m going to New York tomorrow. Let’s talk about it when I get back.”

That gets Sharon’s attention. “What’s in New York?”

Maggie had planned to tell her about Barlow’s invitation, even though Barlow had insisted she not, but now that the moment is here, she is suddenly hesitant. She isn’t worried about betraying Barlow’s trust — her sister trumps an old mentor — but it suddenly feels like the wrong move to drag Sharon into this until she knows more.

Sharon mistakes the pause for something else. “Are you, uh, meeting someone?”

“What? No.”

“It’s okay—”

“Sharon—”

“Okay, never mind. Did you see any guys from your class at this thing?”

“Sleazy Steve.”

Sharon makes a face. “Eww, gross.”

“Right?”

“So why are you going to New York City?”

“To see Porkchop.”

Sharon pins her with a gaze. “What else?”

“What do you mean, what else?”

“It goes without saying that we all love Porkchop,” Sharon says, “but he’d road-trip down here if you need to see him.”

Maggie sighs. “Just... There’s a possible business situation.”

“What kind of business situation?”

“God, you’re nosy.”

“I prefer ‘inquisitive.’”

“Can you be okay with me saying ‘I don’t want to tell you yet’?” Maggie asks.

“If you can be okay with me saying, ‘I worry a little.’”

“Don’t worry.”

“I’d never judge you, Mags.”

“I know.” Then: “Also there’s nothing to judge.”

“What about Trace?”

Maggie feels the cold travel down her spine again. “What about him?”

“Is he back? Will you see him in New York?”

“Trace is still overseas,” she says. “Bangladesh, I think.”

“Trying to resuscitate WorldCures?”

Maggie shakes her head. There is zero chance of resuscitation. Sharon knows that, which makes the comment weird, but Sharon can be that way. Maggie McCabe, the face of WorldCures, is a pariah now. The funding is gone.

“In other news” — Sharon lets loose a deep breath — “I signed up for a dating app.”

“Good for you. About time.”

“The app is called Melody Cupid. It matches you by musical taste.”

Maggie puts her hand to her mouth. “Oh God.”

“What?”

“You have terrible taste in music.”