Gone Before Goodbye

Chapter Three

When Maggie gets off the Amtrak at New York City’s Moynihan Train Hall, Porkchop is already waiting by the tracks.

Porkchop is not playing with a phone. He’s not shuffling his feet. He just stands there with Zen-like patience, an older version of his surgeon son. Porkchop looks like what he is — a lifelong biker. He’s got the salt-and-pepper beard, green bandana holding back the long hair, leather jacket, faded blue jeans with splashes of motor oil discoloring them. His silver belt buckle is a skull and crossbones. His skin is tan and weathered from years on the road, his face handsome and hard, like something carved into stone.

Porkchop meets her eye and gives the slightest of nods. If he’d been wearing a cowboy hat, he would have tipped it at her. She hurries over, trying not to run, and Porkchop spreads his thick arms wide to welcome her. When he hugs her, she vanishes for a moment. Her eyes close. Porkchop is a big bear of a man. He makes her feel small and safe, and since those feelings don’t come often, Maggie just settles into that for a few moments. He holds her close and stays silent. Porkchop exudes both calm and electricity.

Like his son.

There is the faint whiff of Marlboros — Porkchop has always been a smoker — and here that familiar smell deepens her comfort. She almost asks him for a cigarette, even though she hasn’t smoked in ten years.

Once they step back, Porkchop asks, “Where are you staying?”

There is no reason for the normal “how are you, how was the trip” type pleasantries with Porkchop; the embrace took care of those.

“Aman hotel.”

“Whoa. Classy.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were broke.”

“I’m not paying for it.”

Porkchop arches an eyebrow, and she sees the echo of his son when he does. “Oh?”

“It’s a business proposition,” she says.

“Oh?”

“Stop that.”

Porkchop grabs her overnight bag, and they start for the door. “Want to tell me about it?”

“I do not,” Maggie says.

“Then should we head to Vipers?”

“It’s a little early, no?”

“We do a nice brunch now.”

“Seriously?”

“Tourist trade, my dear. The gang is anxious to see you.”

Vipers for Bikers is partially what it sounds like — a biker bar located in the shadow of MetLife Stadium off Route 17. Back in the day, it was a hardcore biker bar/strip joint with the moniker, written out in neon flickering script, Hotties on Hogs. Porkchop had bought Hotties when it went bankrupt eight years ago and gentrified it into a touristy cosplay biker bar/restaurant called Vipers for Bikers.

“That’s nice,” Maggie says. “And I want to see everyone.” Then she puts her hand on Porkchop’s arm. “But I need to stop at Trace’s apartment before we go.”

She waits for Porkchop’s reaction, but she doesn’t get much of one.

“Why?”

“Because I always do that when I’m in the city.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And maybe we can get a beat on where he is.”

“Bangladesh.”

“Do we still believe that?” Maggie asks.

Porkchop doesn’t reply.

They exit the station onto a packed Eighth Avenue. Madison Square Garden in all its coliseum-like splendor is across the street. Porkchop’s bike is parked on the corner of 31st Street. Maggie is surprised when she sees it isn’t a Harley-Davidson.

“Since when do you ride a BMW R 18, Porkchop?”

“Since they started sponsoring me.”

“For real?”

Porkchop nods. “I get a free bike, free gas, plus a grand a month.”

“Sweet,” she says.

“I also prefer the BMW’s shaft transmission over the belt transmission of a Harley. Makes for a smoother ride. The BMW has three ride modes — rain, roll, and rock — whereas the Harley only has one.”

“They tell you to say that?”

“And exactly that,” he replies with a grin. “Took me three weeks to memorize it.”

Two young bikers guard the BMW. Both wear a patch with the Serpents and Saints logo on their upper right sleeve. Serpents and Saints is Porkchop’s... She would call it a motorcycle “gang,” but that brought up Hells Angels connotations and that didn’t come close to fitting anymore. Maybe thirty years ago. Not anymore.

The Serpents and Saints logo is a mean-looking, black-and-gold, heavily fanged snake with a halo over its head. Marc had a tattoo of it on his upper right quadriceps, albeit a far more cartoonish version with a goofily smiling serpent who looked about as mean as Snoopy. Instead of black and gold, his Serpent and Saint was garish orange and purple; instead of an intimidating glare, his serpent had a silly, exaggerated wink.

The tattoo, Marc had explained in bed, was the result of a late-night drunken visit to a New Orleans parlor on Mardi Gras when he was nineteen.

“It’s kind of ugly,” she’d told him.

“Don’t worry, my love. Only you’ll see it. Unless you think I should wear a Speedo.”

“Only I’ll see it.”

One of the young bikers is tall, thin, long-haired, white. The other is short, round, buzz-cut, Black. Together, they look like a bowling ball heading toward a pin. Porkchop takes two helmets from the Pin and hands her one. Maggie straps it on and hops on the back of his bike.

“Pinky will drop your bag at the Aman.”

Pinky, she now sees, is Bowling Ball. Porkchop, Pinky — the members like nicknames. Pinky takes her suitcase. Porkchop gets on the front of the bike. Maggie wraps her arms around his waist and feels the hum as Porkchop starts up the engine. When Marc had first introduced Maggie to his father, it had taken her a little time to get used to riding on the back. It wasn’t that Maggie didn’t trust Porkchop’s driving — it’s just that she hated to be in any situation where she wasn’t in control.

Now she relishes it. No talking. No music. No podcast. Nothing but the feel of the world being washed away by the wind.

Porkchop cruises them up Eighth Avenue. They turn west to Riverside Drive and then back north. Fifteen minutes later, Porkchop pulls up to the front of their old apartment building in Washington Heights, four blocks from NewYork-Presbyterian medical center. For a long moment, she and Porkchop just stand there, both of them straddling the bike.

“Porkchop?”

“It’s fine. Go. I’ll wait here for you.”

She watches Porkchop for another moment, but he is already fiddling with something near the throttle. As she turns toward the entrance, the doorman greets her with a wide smile. “Doctor Maggie!”

“Hey, Winston.”

Winston looks as though he wants to hug her, but decorum is what it is. She wants to reach out too, but she isn’t sure she can handle another hug right now. They both stand there for an awkward second before Winston’s smile fades away.

“I’m sorry about...” He stops. “Just about everything.”

“Thank you.”

“You still have Doctor Trace’s key?”

“I do,” she says, showing it to him. “Have you seen him at all?”

“Not in many months,” Winston says. “Doctor Trace’s mailbox got all filled up. We emptied it out, put everything in a box for you. It’s in his apartment.”

“Thanks.”

Maggie stays quiet as the elevator dings its way up to the eighth floor. They had all moved in at the same time. Maggie and Marc had taken a two bedroom on the fourth floor. Trace had grabbed a one bedroom on the eighth. They’d chosen this building because it was reasonably priced and had doormen and, most importantly, it was walking distance to NewYork-Presbyterian medical center. All three of them had crazy hours doing their surgical residencies.

She unlocks his door and enters. She expects the place to smell stale, but it doesn’t. There is almost no dust, and Maggie wonders whether Trace hired a housekeeper. Probably. At Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, the team used to tease Trace for being such a neat freak. Maggie had at first seen Trace as more hyperorganized, an überpreparer, someone tightly wound in a way that made him focused, detailed, a great surgeon.

The furniture is modular, beige, functional; everything about the place screams, “A man lives here alone.” There are two items on display with any flair or prominence — and they stand side by side on his acrylic dining room table. The first is a model of the human heart signed by two legendary cardiothoracic surgeons credited with creating the first artificial heart, Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley. It’s the kind of anatomy model you might find in any doctor’s office or biology class.

The second item, displayed under Plexiglas next to the DeBakey-Cooley model, is an inoperative (though it would definitely be described as cutting-edge and state-of-the-art) prototype of, per the engraving, THUMPR7-TAH — what they’d all hoped would eventually be the next generation in making artificial hearts more permanent and efficient.

Maggie stares at the device, pushing away the bad flashback. The THUMPR7 had been developed and registered by WorldCures Alliance — that is, Marc, Trace, Maggie. She hadn’t wanted that — her name attached — because though she had trained in cardiothoracic surgery and assisted Marc and Trace plenty of times, she’d opted to make reconstructive and trauma surgery her official specialties.

The TAH stands for Total Artificial Heart, but the THUMPR7, despite its blend of robotic design, DNA coding, and stem cell research, remained a distant pipe dream.

Maggie knows that better than anyone.

On the wall, there is a framed color photograph taken by war photojournalist Ray Levine on what had been one of the worst combat days for Maggie and Trace. From his embedded perch on the ground in Kamdesh, Levine had gotten an almost surreal shot of Maggie and Trace furiously working to save two soldiers while their medevac UH-60 Black Hawk copter hovered above the ground. The sky above them is striking blue, the blood on their hands striking red, and something about the composition made it appear that Maggie and Trace were somehow defying gravity, that there was no way they wouldn’t tumble out of the copter in the next second or two, that the only thing preventing disaster had to be some kind of divine hand keeping them up in the air.

Maggie remembers it all too vividly. Trace’s soldier survived. Maggie’s did not.

Only two hours after that mission ended — right after they showered and cleaned up — Trace came to her tent and said, “Come on, let’s go.”

“Trace...”

He held up the bag of lollipops. “Now.”

Trace did this almost every time, especially when the mission had been particularly bloody. He grabbed a jeep and drove Maggie to the local town. When they pulled in, Trace shouted, “I’m here!” Children came running out from everywhere, squealing with delight. They already knew Trace — and his beloved lollipops. He started passing them out, smiling, nodding for Maggie to do the same. Several adults came out to greet them and offer them food. Maggie passed, but Trace told her she was being rude. He devoured everything, to their hosts’ delight. Then he played some kind of exhausting tag game with two boys. More children came out. Trace made funny faces and farting noises — mouth-to-palm style — and they all howled with laughter.

Maggie just watched in awe.

Trace.

That night, after they got back to camp, she and Trace lay under the stars, the smell of thyme and cedar in the cool desert air. For a long time, neither spoke, comfortable in the silence. Then Maggie whispered a truth into the dark sky:

“The dead don’t leave us.”

Not ever. The dead stay by your side, as though you held on too hard as they tried to pull away and something had broken off. The man dying in Ray Levine’s photograph was named Greg Steeple. He’d been twenty-one years old and had a mother and a father and two younger brothers and a fiancée named Claire.

“And yet,” Trace whispered back, “we’ll always long for this thrum in the blood.”

That is what they don’t warn you about when it comes to combat.

It’s terrifying, it’s awful, it’s the worst thing imaginable, you wish it on no one.

But it’s also addictive.

She can’t get the faces of the dead out of her mind.

But she also can’t get the memory of the adrenaline spike out of her blood.

The unspoken part of what makes it hard for combat soldiers to come home isn’t the flashbacks or the fear of returning — it’s almost the opposite. It’s the sudden quiet, the cloying calm, the suffocating safeness and sameness of normal life. One moment you’re ducking bullets, half hanging out of a moving helicopter, your hands working inside a warm abdomen to keep some kid like Greg alive — and then, what, you’re supposed to go back to your suburban split-level and do laundry and pick up your kids from soccer practice and sit in too much traffic on your way to work?

It would be easy to say they — she, Marc, Trace — created WorldCures Alliance for purely altruistic reasons. That had been a good story — three combat doctors who saw a need and eschewed the comforts of home to save the needy and revolutionize health care, but that felt too much like spin to Maggie. It’s not that you are not genuinely concerned about your patients — you acutely are — or don’t believe in your mission — they did — but the terrible secret, the secret she and Marc and Trace shared, is that you do it to be special. To paraphrase Eminem, a normal life is boring. The idea of going home to the kids, the laundry, the car pool... no, not for, pardon the play on words, M&M.

Scratch the surface of a person doing good works, and you’ll find someone who fears the mundane and conventional.

There is only one other framed photograph in the room — a slightly faded color one of a smiling ten-year-old Trace Packer on the Jersey Shore with his matching-smiling mother, Karen. Genetics. There is no doubt that these two are mother and son. In the photo, Karen wears the stunning square-cut emerald ring that always adorned her finger. A family heirloom, Karen had once explained to Maggie, given to her by her own grandmother. Years later, at Karen’s funeral, Trace clutched the green emerald in his hand for the entire ceremony. Maggie never forgot that image — Trace, sitting in the front pew by himself, opening and closing his fist, staring at his mother’s glistening square-cut emerald, as though the gemstone had some magical power that could bring his mother back to life.

Trace has a floor-to-ceiling redwood wine rack on the one wall that would get no sunlight. She checks the bottles. All reds from Château Haut-Bailly, a Bordeaux from the Pessac-Léognan appellation. Maggie knows it well. Trace, a true Francophile whose second love after medicine is French wines, had invested in it — count on Trace — and she and Marc had visited the vineyard not long before she returned to Baltimore to take care of her mother. Maggie remembers that trip to Bordeaux so vividly. It was after a particularly grueling month in a huge refugee camp in Kakuma. They needed the break before heading to Dubai, but neither she nor Marc handled their spirits well. Trace arranged for his “closest pals” what he labeled “a palate pilgrimage” — a fancy term for a tasting where everyone gets overserved — and it had been fabulous and delicious and then she and Marc both got sloppy and laughed too much and, man, that had been a night.

No need to go there right now, Maggie thinks.

The pain never goes away. The pain never lets you go. You just learn to live with it.

Maggie forces herself to turn away, and when she does, she spots the cardboard box loaded with mail. She drops to her knees and thumbs through it. Junk mostly. Trace had set up automatic bill pay on most everything — utilities, rent, cable, internet, whatever — so it’s mostly ads from real estate agents (“Look What Sold in Your Neighborhood!”), discounts for food takeout, and furniture catalogues.

There is also a letter from Wells Fargo Bank.

Hmm. Maggie takes hold of it and lifts it into view. It’s thin — one page or two at the most — so it’s not a financial statement. She wonders whether she should open it, but of course, that’s why Trace had asked her to stop by whenever she was in town — to make sure everything was in order and copacetic. She doesn’t want to look as though she’s invading his privacy, but does she just ignore this?

It’s probably an ad for a credit card or something.

Except it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like something important.

She slits the envelope. There is only one sheet of paper.

It’s a bill for a safe deposit box.

Maggie’s first thought is Trace’s mother’s square-cut green-emerald ring. Karen’s emerald, she remembers, had been appraised for over twenty thousand dollars. It isn’t like Trace wore it. He’d have wanted to keep it safe. Where better?

But — check that — it’s a bill for three safe deposit boxes. Two of them are ten inches by ten inches. One is three feet by six feet.

A little much for a piece of jewelry.

She reads both the front and the back of the bill to see where the safe deposit boxes are kept. Oddly enough, it doesn’t say. She looks at the postmark — the bill was mailed two weeks ago from San Francisco. That’s probably the main headquarters for the bank. Is that where he keeps the boxes? She doubts it but maybe. Had she ever heard Trace talk about San Francisco? Not that she can remember.

So now what?

Do the smart thing, she figures. Maggie snaps a photo of the bill, scrolls to Trace in contacts, and texts him the image with a quick note:

No reply. Then again, there hadn’t been one in a very long time.

Maggie stares at the bill from the bank for another moment before putting it back in the envelope and dropping it into the cardboard box. She then does a quick walk around the apartment, turns the faucets on and off, flushes the toilet, makes sure the windows are locked. Everything seems in place. She wonders about the keys to Trace’s safe deposit boxes. Does Trace keep them here, in a drawer somewhere?

Does it matter?

Her phone buzzes. She looks down and sees a text from Dr. Barlow.

There’s a delay and the three dancing dots seem to sputter before the next text pops up.

She sighs. No reason to press it right now. She makes sure to turn off all the lights and heads back down.

Back on the street, Porkchop leans against his bike, doing the Zen patient-waiting thing again.

“Anything?” he asks.

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.”