American Spy

by Lauren Wilkinson

  “Better than he was with us,” I said coolly, and gave her a look: Did she want to call his parenting into question? Was that the thread she really wanted to pull on?

  She tensed at the unspoken accusation, then said, “All right. Yes. They can stay with me.”

  The muscles in my shoulders loosened and relief washed over me. “Thank you, Maman.”

  She nodded her head once. Curt. “I’m going back in. Good night.”

  Poochini followed her back into the house. I sat and finished off the last of my drink. Listened to the quiet, and felt reassured. But when I returned to my room, I still couldn’t sleep. So I went to the vanity, where I’d hidden this journal and pulled it out. As I was pawing through the odds and ends in the drawer, looking for a pen, I came across Helene’s memorial program instead. I sat for a moment and looked at it. I wouldn’t have chosen the picture Pop had. It was cropped from a picture of the three of us at Pop’s swearing-in ceremony, when he became deputy commissioner. She’s wearing a green turtleneck with a flat gold chain, looking away from the camera and smiling stiffly. I missed her then, as acutely as I ever had. I put the program back into the drawer, sat at the vanity, and started to write.

  After I got back from my visit to Helene in North Carolina, I decided to let her make the first move. I was confused about what had happened between us in the fitness center; I’d never experienced anything like it in our relationship before. Sometimes I worried that the visit had revealed an animosity she’d always felt that I’d just been oblivious to. At other times, I felt like maybe nothing was wrong, that if things were strange between us it was only because I was making them that way. Three months passed before she finally did call Pop’s house, and then it was not to mend fences with me. It was to tell us she’d been assigned to the post on Long Binh.

  While she was gone I was obsessed with worry. A silence like the one that had stretched between us demanded analysis, and I thought about it every day of her tour. She wrote me letters, mostly gossip about the other women that worked in the HQ building along with her. She seemed bored. She could’ve been; I got the sense that the army kept its female personnel cloistered on the post. Or it could’ve been that maternal instinct made her want to shield me from any horror stories. Or maybe it was that I was mistaking boredom for something else that she was feeling toward me. Anything seemed possible. I felt like I’d been wrong to believe I understood her.

  * * *

  —

  IN JANUARY 1973, the peace agreement was signed in France, and the United States started pulling personnel out of Vietnam. Her tour cut short, Helene returned to the U.S. safely and called from the Oakland army base. I’d screamed with joy when I heard her voice on the static-filled line. I had a million things I wanted to tell her, but the thoughts crowded my mind, and all I could get out was, “Helene! I’ve missed the hell out of you!”

  “You too.” She laughed, and it filled me with so much joy to hear that noise again.

  “When will you be back in New York?”

  “End of the week. We’re driving. I’ve got some news I want to tell you and Pop in person.”

  “I can’t wait!”

  “See you soon,” she said.

  “Love you,” I said, but I think it was to an empty line.

  * * *

  —

  I’M SORRY. I HAD to step away for a moment. This is all as hard for me to write as it is to remember.

  Her wake was held in a funeral home in Laurelton, in a large white Colonial that was out of place on an otherwise commercial stretch in Queens. My memories of that day are an unreliable scatter. I think I remember a young attendant in a suit and shoes that were too large for him. I think the halls in the funeral home were carpeted in a vivid, assaulting green. Robbie’s sister, Pam, sang a few gospel numbers either that day or at the actual funeral. It’s unusual that I can’t remember more, and that I’m not sure about what happened when. As you can tell from these pages, my memory is generally exceptional.

  I stood with either Pop or my grandfather beside the door, shaking hands with everyone who came in and thanking them. We’d invited just a few of Helene’s friends from North Carolina, but thirty or forty showed up, so word must’ve spread.

  When her friend Daniel Slater appeared I shook his hand.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “Thanks for coming,” I answered on autopilot.

  “Marie. I’m so sorry,” he said, and I nodded at him through the haze of my disassociated perception. “Before I forget, I have something for you. It was on the fridge.”

  He produced the photo strip that Helene and I had taken in the bar and handed it to me. I looked at it and then up at him. The rush of affection I felt for him then was overwhelming, because it had nothing to do with the gesture and everything to do with my vulnerability.

  “Thank you.” I hugged him. I clung to him, treating him exactly like what he was, something steady to hang on to to prevent being washed away by a tide. I felt ashamed of having been so lukewarm about him when we’d first met. Helene had liked him. How could I not?

  I wanted to talk to him some more; I wanted to crack his head open and scoop from his cerebrum the answers I needed about my relationship with Helene, but Agathe came through the door then and in my grief I was easily distracted.

  I hadn’t seen her in more than a decade. I put my arms around her and my head into the curve of her neck. As I did, I felt a confusing surge, as happy to see her as I was furious.

  “Agathe. Hello,” my father said behind me, then turned away. Had I been expecting some sort of revelatory, cathartic exchange between them I would’ve been disappointed.

  “Let’s sit,” I said to her. I was exhausted. I’d been sleeping for eighteen, twenty hours a day, but there was no amount of rest that was enough. We walked down the aisle together and sat in the pew at the very back. She asked me how I was doing.

  I don’t remember what I said. I remember staring at the roses on Helene’s casket. They were pink. I know that for certain. I hated those awful flowers.

  Agathe put her arm around me. I put my head on her shoulder and was surprised that she still smelled familiar, like talcum powder and cigarettes. Matt Testaverde was up front, studying the photos of my sister on display behind her casket.

  “I should go up there.” She stood. I watched her slowly make her way up the aisle to the casket, and seeing her there, looking down at Helene’s face, was what finally made me cry.

  * * *

  —

  THE AFTERNOON AFTER THE FUNERAL, I drove Agathe to the airport in the Bean Can. Before her flight, we each paid a dime and took the stairs up to the observation deck. Only a handful of other people were up there, some of them watching the taxiing planes at the binocular machines.

  Agathe leaned against the guardrail and took out a cigarette. She was wearing the same long-sleeved black dress she’d worn to the funeral, part of the generation that still dressed to fly. She looked out toward Co-op City and pulled hard on her cigarette. I watched, with an echo of the pain I’d felt after she’d first left reverberating along my spine. That pain was defining. It was what childhood felt like for me. I used to imagine her turning up again, just as abruptly as she’d left, sweeping me up in a hug, unpacking her things. Now I imagined her turning to me to say that she’d decided to stay a little longer. That she could tell I needed her. She turned then and did say something that I didn’t quite hear over a plane engine that had started screaming on the tarmac.

  “What?” I said.

  She shook her head and opened her big black purse. Took out a handkerchief. And then, as she wiped her face, I was all at once tipped away from longing into fury. Most of the time I was too frightened by my own rage to lean into it. But at that moment, I felt possessed by Helene’s anger. I let go. “Stop it, Agathe. I’m not going to stand here and
watch you cry.”

  “What’s the matter?” she said, startled.

  “I don’t have the energy for this. Don’t pretend you just lost her. You lost her when you left her. You left both of us, and I don’t remember you crying back then.”

  “I wish you could understand. You all were better off without me around.”

  “What kind of mother says that?” I spat out angrily. “What kind of mother are you?”

  She let out a small, involuntary noise—like I’d hit her—and tears welled up in her eyes. But I couldn’t find any sympathy. I couldn’t even look at her, so I turned and started toward the exit.

  I didn’t talk to my mother again for close to a decade, and didn’t see her until I showed up at her farm pregnant with you two. My grief for Helene was so intense because she wasn’t the only one I’d lost.

  When I got back to Pop’s house from the airport I found him sitting at the kitchen table. He was wearing his reading glasses and had been poring over some papers spread out in front of him, but as I came through the door he started to gather them.

  “I didn’t hear you pull up,” he said.

  “What’s all that?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, playing dumb.

  I looked at him and hated how calm he was. Only now do I realize I was mistaking exhaustion for calm, that he was as devastated as I was but couldn’t let me see it. I wish he could’ve been able to grieve with me. I know he was only trying to protect me, but it was worse to be isolated with those feelings. My only glimpse into his emotional life was what I was able to surmise from how little he’d been sleeping and the weird bout of clumsiness he was suffering through—I never noticed his hands shaking, but that must’ve been the reason he broke as many dishes as he did.

  I snatched the first page from the pile he’d gathered. It was a copy of the investigation report for Helene’s accident.

  “What are you doing with this?” I asked.

  “Just looking. Wanting to make sure there was nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Is there?”

  “No.”

  I looked into his face. He was torturing himself in his own way and it broke my heart. I didn’t know what to do for him. I sheepishly put the page back. “I’m sorry.”

  He gave a sharp shake of his head and wiped the tears that had sprung to his eyes. As he stood he exhaled deeply. Crossed the kitchen toward his room. His door closed. I paced the avocado tile for a few minutes, then climbed the stairs to my old room. Looked around. I’d been staying there the last few days and had been comforted by how everything was exactly as I’d left it when I’d moved out the year before—even my Star Wars poster was still unstuck in one corner. I pressed it back into place knowing it would come loose again, briefly buoyed by that small reminder of my old life.

  I crossed to Helene’s door and stood in the threshold for a moment. It was also exactly as she’d left it, but the effect there was cruel somehow. How awful that all of her things could still be there waiting for her to walk back in, when she never would.

  I opened her window, looked out into the darkening evening. It was early spring—the air was warm and the buds on the maple tree in the backyard were starting to open. Bunny was buried under that tree. I opened her desk drawer—inside were pens, markers, and some change; a strip of photo booth pictures of her and Pam making goofy faces. I opened a pencil case and found a plump dime bag, smiled as I put it back.

  I looked in her closet. There were her cheerleading sneakers. She’d loved those things despite the ugly red and white pom-poms growing from their tongues. I used to tell her they looked like tumors.

  In one column she was the cheerleader and the girl who grew up making me dinner and checking my homework. In the other she was the boxer, the girl who beat up Rhonda. And then there was a third column: She was the woman who sent me genial, not fully interpretable letters from Long Binh. That was Helene: putting together a puzzle, getting it all finished, then finding a leftover piece in the box.

  I always suspected there was a theory of her personality that nicely accommodated the elements I thought were contradictory. And that was who she really was. But I never learned the theory. I never saw that person, and even now, twenty years later, thinking about that is enough to make me want to cry.

  * * *

  —

  ALMOST A WEEK PASSED in Martinique. After you’d go to sleep, I’d spend a few hours each evening, writing in this journal and drinking whisky, which relaxed me enough to loosen the grip of my insomnia. I’d started to get enough rest to function.

  One morning, while the three of us were playing in the back pasture, I heard tires on the gravel. My heart lifted. I told you not to go farther than the line of lemon trees—so Agathe could keep an eye on you from the kitchen window—then went into the house and out again onto the front porch. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I watched as Robbie appeared from the cab I’d insisted he take from the airport. On the night my mother had told me I couldn’t take on everything alone, my only thought had been to call him.

  “Hey, dummy!” he called as he came toward me, which made me laugh.

  “Hey,” I said back as he put his brand-new suitcase down on the porch and his arms around me.

  We held each other, swaying slightly, for a few long moments. I immediately felt safe in his company, and I needed that. I grinned up at him; he’d gotten a fresh shape up before he’d come out there, which was an expression of gallantry that I appreciated.

  When I’d called, I’d only told him that I needed him because I was in trouble. I said, “I’ll tell you everything later. But come in now and say hi to everyone.”

  I led him into the house where Poochini was waiting for us. I closed the door firmly. “Careful not to let the dog out. He’s a runner.”

  Poochini sniffed at Robbie, which made him tense. I’d forgotten that he doesn’t like dogs. He’d never admit it, but he’s afraid of them. My mother came into the living room from the kitchen. I said, “Agathe. You remember Robbie?”

  “Mrs. Mitchell, ma’am.” He took her hand and spoke slowly in his formal voice. “It must be thirty years since I’ve seen you.”

  She nodded, and I was shocked to realize he was right. He’d been on Rikers for Helene’s funeral. I went out onto the back porch.

  “Tommy. William. Come inside. I want you to say hello to someone.”

  Tommy, you came up onto the porch and darted into the house.

  William, you stayed in the pasture. I asked, “You coming?”

  “I don’t want to!”

  You were in a phase where you said no just to say it, even if it was to your detriment. I knew you’d be bored out there by yourself, and that your curiosity about the visitor would get the better of you, so I shrugged.

  Back in the living room, Tommy, you were feeling shy. You had your back pressed up against your grandmother’s legs and were answering Robbie’s pleasantries in a small voice.

  “Tommy, this is Uncle Robbie,” I said. “You met him once when you were a baby.”

  William, you raced into the living room then shouted to Robbie, “Coucou!”

  “Uncle Robbie speaks English,” I said.

  “Hi!”

  “All right, little man.” Robbie held his hand out and, William, you slapped him five.

  “You tired?” I asked Robbie.

  “Nah, I feel good. Slept on the plane.”

  “Want to go to the beach? It’s not very far.”

  “Yes!” William, you were excited.

  “Okay,” Robbie said, looking down at you. “I guess we’re doing it.”

  I helped you boys into your suits, got mine on, and went to find my mother in the kitchen. She’d chopped up a couple of mangos and held out the cubes in a Baggie.

  Writing about Helene’s funeral had made me
freshly angry with her—detailed remembering has a lot of power. This might sound petty to you, but if she would just apologize for how much she hurt me at the airport I could deal better with the residual anger. That feels so obvious to me that I start to see something malicious in the fact that she’s never done it. I would never bring it up to her. I shouldn’t have to.

  You two followed me from the kitchen to the living room. I’d set up a cot there for Robbie, which I sat on as we waited for him. You’re both oblivious to the tension between Agathe and me. We never argue; ill will just hangs out with us, follows us around, a malignant old friend. I felt like a teenager, which meant I knew I was being petulant. I appreciated Agathe—although I prided myself on my competence, I couldn’t have seen you through your infancy on my own. But I would much rather have walked out into the pasture, lain down, and died there, than told her I was upset.

  Robbie appeared from the bathroom, and the four of us went out to Agathe’s truck. He went around to the driver’s-side door.

  “I’m driving,” I said.

  “Let me.”

  “Why? You know where we’re going?”

  “No.”

  “Your license still suspended?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you’re not driving my kids.”

  He put his hands up: fair enough. As I got behind the wheel I said, “You’re losing your edge.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Five years ago you would’ve fought me on this. Like if I didn’t let you drive you weren’t a man. I hated that.”

  “That’s ’cause you take everything I do like I’m trying to control you.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  He laughed. “I’m trying to take care of you. I tell you that all the time, but you don’t hear me.”

  “I hear you. I just don’t—”

  “Believe me, yeah, so I’m trying something different.”

  “Where’s all this coming from?”

  “I’m not allowed to grow? It’s not coming from no place. I’m just glad you called.”