American Spy

by Lauren Wilkinson

  “She really liked milking,” my mother said. “She was good at it too.”

  “She looks like she’s having fun.” I put the photo back. “I’ve always wondered why she didn’t stay.”

  She cocked her head slightly as if the answer was obvious. “She wanted to go back to New York because that’s where you were. She loved you, Marie.”

  “I know,” I said unconvincingly.

  “She was angry at me for leaving, and at your father for sending her down here. But never at you.”

  I shook my head. “She was angry at me too.”

  I was overwhelmed by sadness for my sister. It hadn’t been her job to make sure I was okay. I wish she could’ve stayed in Martinique with the cows for a little longer. I wish she could’ve had a little more time to be a kid. I wish she could’ve had more time in general.

  I wanted to hear more about Helene, but Agathe told me to get in bed, and as I undressed, she went to the kitchen. Returning with a cup of tea, my mother handed it to me before pulling the door behind her so I could rest.

  JANUARY 1988

  My ob-gyn was in Fort-de-France, thirty miles away. I’d gotten into a routine of taking the ferry there, traveling across the bright blue water from my mother’s part of the island to the capital city. Before my appointment, I’d go to the strange and beautiful Schoelcher Library to leaf through the newspapers, even though there was rarely any news about Burkina Faso in the French press.

  I would only be able to fully piece together what happened after the coup much later, after you were born and we’d moved back to the United States. There are African newspapers on microfiche in the New York public library; from them I learned that Sam Kinda and a few of the other witnesses to the assassination had recognized the commandos and named them all to the police. The men weren’t jailed—they were rewarded with positions as soldiers in Blaise Compaoré’s presidential guard.

  Compaoré quickly reversed all of the CNR’s social programs and adopted austerity measures to pay back the IMF debt—precisely the kind of move that Thomas had condemned at the UN. The country continues to suffer badly under Compaoré’s rule. While Thomas had augmented the budget by cutting government excess, Compaoré does it by cutting social services. He’s also managed to accumulate massive personal wealth—enough so that he owns a private jet. Several of Compaoré’s enemies were tried and executed; others disappeared. A journalist was assassinated. Thomas would’ve been outraged.

  I still miss him every day. If I’ve been cagey about that, it’s because I feel unentitled to that emotion. I wasn’t his wife. In the aftermath of his death, I wasn’t the one forced to flee the country with two small children. That wouldn’t happen to me until much later.

  I learned I was pregnant with twins at twelve weeks—after the ultrasound I closed myself in the doctor’s bathroom and almost cried. I splashed water on my face, patted it dry. Walked over to La Savane, a park where groups of teenagers from a nearby high school were sitting on the cement benches, and people in business suits were already appearing from the surrounding offices for lunch.

  In the park there was a statue of Josephine, the first empress of France, and I sat on the bench closest to it. I glanced up at Napoleon’s first wife, the accidental symbolism not lost on me. There were food kiosks on the paving stone stretch in the center of the park, and I watched the people queuing up. I was happy, but also terrified. I felt sure I could raise a child by myself, but two was an overwhelming prospect. I must’ve looked worried, because a gray-haired man walked past my bench and told me to smile, adding, “It’s too nice a day out to look so mean.”

  I nearly told him to kiss my ass—if only it were so easy to smile. To just put away the complex emotions swarming inside me. Instead I got up and walked slowly back to the ferry launch.

  My mother was waiting for me in the parking lot on the other side. I went to the truck and found my aunt, Sido, sitting in the cab too, holding a package. She moved over so I could get in.

  “You all right?” Agathe asked. “What did the doctor say?”

  I told her I was fine, that the baby was fine. I’d insisted on going to the appointment alone, and it would be a few more weeks before I told her I was carrying twins. I instinctively keep secrets. These journals are a huge departure for me; I have never told anyone as much about myself as I’ve told you here. I hope you understand how much I love you, how because of that I think you deserve to know the truth about me.

  Sido handed me the package. “This is for you.”

  “It came to the house today,” Agathe said.

  I opened it and pulled out a small stuffed elephant. I looked at the return address, which said Primary Consulting and nothing else. My stomach tightened. It was a threat: Ross knew where I was and knew I was expecting.

  “That’s cute,” Sido said. “Who’s it from?”

  “An old friend.”

  A face appeared at the window next to me and I jumped, but it was just a hitchhiker. He said something to Agathe in Creole, a language it had never occurred to me that my own mother spoke before I’d heard her doing so with Nicolas, the farmhand. The teenager hopped into the truck bed. Sido lifted up a handful of my curls then let them drop back against my collar. “It’s so long.”

  “It’s the pregnancy hormones,” my mother said as she started up the engine. “My hair grew fast too. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “I bet you’re sorry you didn’t inherit your mother’s good hair,” she said to me.

  “It’s been sixty years. When are you going to let all this color struck nonsense go?” Agathe said, mixing French and English.

  The two of them continued to bicker as she drove. My aunt thinks I don’t have nice hair because it’s not bone straight, which is a demonstrably stupid thing to believe. I was too overwhelmed to bother arguing about it. It’s not that I didn’t care about their (oppressively well-visited) argument, I just had other things preoccupying my attention, like abject terror.

  And I was quiet because watching Agathe with her sister made me sad; it reminded me of the many ways I didn’t know her. I’d had a mother who was mostly absent, who had parts of herself that were hidden from me. I hated how abandoned that had made me feel. I’m truly sorry to do the same to you.

  Agathe called my name. “You sure everything’s all right?”

  I wasn’t, but I nodded and asked, “Can you drop me at the beach?”

  “Sure.”

  Near the roundabout closest to our farm, Agathe stopped the truck for the hitchhiker, who scrambled out of the car and called his thanks. She took me past the farmhouse to the very end of the road, where I climbed out and went to her window. “I’ll walk back. See you in an hour or so.”

  I crossed the narrow parking lot and passed beneath sea grape trees, their leaves crunching underfoot, then stood for a second on the brown sand, looking out at the ocean. The air smelled like a mix of the sweet of the sugarcane being processed somewhere nearby, the salt of the ocean, and the sour of cow dung. Now, the smell makes me nostalgic for that time in my life. Overall I really enjoyed being pregnant.

  I stripped down to my underwear and waded into the water. Turned on my back and floated, looking up at the bright sky. Twins. Two different people! I thought of my sister—I was especially missing her that day. I had a vision from a version of the future that would never exist: Helene holding one of you to her chest, smiling down on you. I ached for her then as acutely as I ever had.

  I saw shapes in the clouds and described them to you. During my pregnancy, I often talked to you while I was floating—it’s a little silly but I thought of it as a kind of sympathetic bonding because you were doing the same.

  A nearby splash made me stand abruptly and look around. The only other people in the water were a father and son. Talking to you made me feel good and peaceful, so I had let my guard down for just a mom
ent, but I couldn’t afford to do that. I felt at my most vulnerable when I was pregnant. I often stayed up at night hearing Ross’s footsteps in the settling noises of the house.

  I got out of the water and sat on the sand, looking out at the view. I can’t bear Agathe’s Catholicism, which gets more mystical with each passing day, but there are intangible things about this world in which I have faith. There are all kinds of soul mates, all kinds of bonds I’ve shared that seem like more than the products of chance. I had one with your father, whom I loved intensely despite everything that I am. I have one with Daniel Slater. Plot our trajectories. Picture us as bodies colliding with the fact of Helene’s death, the trauma sending us on separate courses that share an exact intensity. I have one with Ed Ross, to whom I am now bound. I didn’t hunt him down then because I was afraid that act would ruin your lives. But now he’s forced my hand, and I have no other choice.

  As a kid, I must’ve asked Agathe to tell me the story of my birth dozens of times—it appealed to the natural childhood inclination toward mythologizing my origins. I was born in the afternoon, at Brooklyn Jewish hospital in Crown Heights, which has since gone bankrupt and no longer exists. Your story’s much more interesting.

  You were born a little early. I’d started having contractions at night but didn’t want to wake up my mother. I didn’t sleep at all and was worried in the morning when I heard that the gas strike was still on. At the breakfast table Agathe told me I looked exhausted.

  I remember that my water broke as I was still poking at my meal. I looked across the table at my mother and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “About what?” She didn’t know that my water had broken. I didn’t even know why I was apologizing, except that it was my body, and I felt I should’ve had some control over what was happening to it. I showered quickly and went to my bedroom, where I looked at myself in the mirror attached to the chest of drawers. My mother was right: I did look exhausted, my face covered in sweat. I put my hair up and began to put on makeup. Agathe eventually knocked on my door and said: “Marie. Let’s go.”

  I ignored her. It wasn’t that I cared so much about my appearance. I just wanted to get one thing, even if it was small, under my control. It was terrifying to lose command over my own body, the only thing that, through all that had happened, I’d remained convinced I could depend on. Labor made me understand that too was an illusion; it was like a trapdoor opening beneath my feet. I can laugh about it now, almost, but at the time it was terrifying. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared, and it wasn’t the kind of thing I could express to my mother just then.

  Instead I reached for my mascara and unscrewed the cap, my hands shaking. She came over, put her hands on my shoulders, and spun me around so that I was looking into her face. “That’s enough now. We have to go.”

  She picked up my overnight bag and led me out to the truck where she helped me into the cab. As she started the engine, both of us looked at the dash—the gas gauge flitted up then dropped down below the last bar. The gas strike had taken us by surprise, so we hadn’t had a chance to fill up the tank.

  “Shit,” she said.

  We coasted down our hill and out onto the road. The roads were very well maintained, leagues better than any street in Ouagadougou. I’d never seen them so empty. Agathe parceled out acceleration very carefully as she drove. When we rolled into the relatively flat stretch in Le Lamentin, nearly ten miles from the hospital, the lights on the dash started to flash. Agathe pulled over to the side of the road.

  “Shit,” she said again.

  I was breathing in and out as deeply as I could, focusing on a spot in front of me. A parallelogram of reflected sunlight fell across it. A fly buzzed in, bounced between the dashboard and the window, flew out.

  “It’s the twenty-second of July,” my mother said. “I hope they come today.

  “You want to know why?” she said. I didn’t answer.

  “If they do their birthday will be Mary Magdalene’s memorial day,” she said.

  “Agathe,” I gasped. “Please.”

  “What?”

  “Just shut up. Please.”

  We waited in silence. Eventually I heard the sound of a car and looked up. It was approaching from the wrong direction, but Agathe was out of the truck anyway, standing in the middle of the road. “Please! It’s an emergency!”

  The driver stopped, and I watched as she spoke to him, then came back to the truck and helped me down. The driver was out seeing to an emergency of his own that he wouldn’t elaborate on. Still he was kind enough to go out of his way to take us to the hospital.

  There is such goofy humor in a newborn’s seeming bonelessness. I remember laughing at it through chattering teeth when the doctor flopped William onto me. Tommy, you arrived soon after, with the umbilical cord wrapped around your neck so tightly that your face was blue.

  I looked down to Agathe’s hand nervously squeezing my stirruped foot, only vaguely registering how surreal it was not to be able to feel it.

  “Is he okay?” I asked. The doctor didn’t answer right away, and I asked again, my voice pitched a little higher.

  He said, “We’re gonna see.”

  Once he’d cut away the cord, Thomas, you immediately began to cry, and the doctor finally said, “Yes. Yes, he’s all right.”

  The nurse took you away quick, Tommy, to clean you up. Everything was too quick. The placentas came out. I started feeling like I was looking at the room through gauze and knew I was going to pass out.

  The doctor had been too fast to look away. He was distracted, talking to one of his medical students. I called my mother’s name, told her something was wrong.

  “Marie?” She took my hand and called to the doctor. “She says there’s something the matter.”

  He glanced over and shook his head—too quick to dismiss me—right before the blood pressure monitor began to sound. He hurried over. “That’s too much blood.”

  The last thing I remember was that he called for a shot of Pitocin. Thinking about it now reminds me of Kamal’s mother. I still think sometimes about how scared she must’ve been. I don’t even know if she lived.

  The hospital where you were born wasn’t a great one, but at least they kept me alive. I do think your birth was the closest I’ve come to dying, edging out the time I spent in the desert and even that night the man came to our house in Connecticut.

  I woke up again to the doctor standing beside my bed with a startling amount of blood down the front of his blue gown. My first thought was a panicked one, my mind disordered because I’d been unconscious. I thought he’d been attacked before I realized it was my blood.

  “Marie,” the doctor said. “Marie. Can you focus on me?” I nodded, still feeling woozy.

  “You had a postpartum hemorrhage,” he said.

  I’d looked to my mother. She’d been crying and that scared me more than knowing I’d passed out. I wanted to put my arms around her, but they were too heavy for me to lift. I asked her, “How long was I out?”

  “A few minutes.” She took my hand and squeezed it.

  “Shit,” I said, and she smiled.

  I could feel my strength and lucidity coursing back. Once I was strong enough, the nurse rested you on my chest, one in the crook of each arm. I looked down, exhausted and happy. I started to cry. I’d never felt such violent love. Like in that one episode of that cartoon I shouldn’t let you watch (I’ll confess now that I like it too) where the main characters fall into a black hole, explode, and are reassembled anew. Love like that.

  You spent the first two years of your lives here, and Agathe worked hard to support us and to help me take care of you. Pop came down for a visit when you were about a month old. The bell rang, and as I crossed the living room I smelled my mother cooking accras de morue. My mother knew he loved codfish cakes, as my grandfather had.

&
nbsp; Pop was standing on the porch waiting to be invited inside like a ghoul in a story. As soon as he put his suitcase down he was hugging me as tight as he could. My mother came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “Hello, Bill,” she said in English.

  “Agathe.” He nodded at her. “You look like you’re doing okay.”

  “Thank you. You also look as if you are doing well.”

  I smiled at their strained formality. It was so endearing that I nearly wept; then again, my emotions had been running near the surface since you were born.

  Pop went over and looked down at the two of you lying in your bassinets. “You want to hold one?” I asked as I joined him.

  “I better not. Not yet.” He added, “Jim sends his regards, by the way.”

  “Tell him I said hello.” My life had changed too much for me to stay angry at Mr. Ali.

  “Bill. Hold one of your grandsons,” Agathe said. “You won’t drop him. Just go wash your hands first.”

  He went into the kitchen and did as she’d told him. When he returned, she gestured to the sofa. “Sit.”

  She put William in Pop’s arms. He held you awkwardly to his chest and looked down. “Well, hello there. Hello.”

  After a few moments of bonding with him, William, you began to cry.

  “He’s hungry.” I took you from Pop.

  The crying woke up Thomas, who began to cry too. It would take me awhile to get used to the way you’d cry in stereo. Before you were born I understood that having twins would be difficult, but not in the way that it was. I expected to be tired and I was. I expected to be frustrated and guilty about your crying and I was. What I didn’t expect was the way you challenged my approach to things.