by Julie Cross
As I walked closer, a man about my dad’s size pushed a little person with a bright pink sweater on the swing. A little boy with brown hair attempted to climb the slide, while a woman with lighter brown hair shoved his rear end up every time he slid back down.
Courtney and I would have been two years old on this day … it had to be us. I sat down at a picnic table and turned on the little device Dad had just given me. Then I slipped my earbuds into place.
Dad was definitely the man pushing Courtney in the swing, but he looked so young. Maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. The map Dad had given me was folded up inside my back pocket. I pulled it out and laid it on the table so it looked like I was studying something.
He took the redheaded toddler out of the swing and carried her toward the sandbox. Then the woman picked the younger me up and joined them in the sand. It was so weird to see myself, still in diapers, toddling around, trying to climb up the steep slide like Spider-Man.
Dad sat on the edge of the sandbox, Courtney at his feet. I could hear her singing. It sounded like gibberish at first, but then I realized she was singing in French while chewing on a shovel covered in sand.
A woman’s voice joined in with Courtney’s song and it was familiar. Or maybe just pleasant enough to feel familiar. She must have been a nanny or babysitter. She almost looked young enough to be a college student. Maybe she worked for Dad while going to school.
She sat on the bench next to the sandbox. My toddler self jumped into the sand and continued to hop all the way across.
“Do you want a bucket?” Dad asked Courtney.
She nodded her head, shaking the little pigtails that stuck out sideways, and kept on singing. Dad set the blue bucket in front of Courtney and then glanced at the woman and smiled. It wasn’t the kind of look you’d give your hired help or even a secret-agent partner.
It was something more.
The little me hopped right behind Courtney and grabbed a fistful of sand, then sprinkled it onto her head. “Raining, raining.”
She slapped her chubby hands over her face and screamed, “No!”
For a moment I was captivated by my two-year-old self’s ability to produce the most innocent yet devious look ever. It was as if I lived to make Courtney shriek like that.
“No, Jackson,” Dad said.
Courtney turned around and pushed my face away with both hands. “Stop!”
She pushed the little me so hard, I fell down on my butt. Little me stood up right away and grabbed a dump truck and started driving over the mounds of sand.
“Let’s make a castle for Princess Courtney,” Dad said.
I rolled my eyes. So that’s how it started. My entire childhood, it was always, “I’m the Princess, so I’m in charge. Daddy said so.”
Dad filled a bucket using Courtney’s shovel, but I could see him scanning the trees beyond the park, checking for something. Working. Courtney grabbed handfuls of sand and tossed them into the bucket. She patted the top and then pointed to Dad and said, “Kevin.”
Only it sounded like, “Kebin.” But she wasn’t calling him Dad. I didn’t have a chance to contemplate that because the woman on the bench got up and sat right in the sand. “Jackson, you can decorate me. I don’t mind.”
She had a Scottish accent. The little me grabbed some sand to sprinkle over the woman’s head. She just laughed and leaned her head back, eyes closed. I could see her face clearly now from where I sat. She was very pretty, radiant in a way, but also plain. Maybe she was just happy. Happy about a little boy dumping sand over her head.
The woman snatched the little me in her arms and started kissing my face while the younger me laughed this loud giggle that rang through my earbuds.
“We can make sand angels,” she said.
I watched with fascination as she lay back in the sand next to little me, spreading her arms out and flapping them like she expected to fly away. Courtney looked up from her castle and giggled, then crawled over next to me to make her own sand angel.
“You’ll be shaking sand out of their heads for days,” Dad said, turning over Courtney’s bucket. “This is just like the finger-paint that never made it to the paper.”
His voice was filled with affection, not annoyance.
“But ten years from now, all they’ll remember is this part. Not the sand we’ll dust out of their beds for a week,” the woman said.
Then she sat up suddenly and grabbed Dad by the front of his shirt, pulling him down next to her. “Come on, get down here.”
Dad laughed loudly, but he didn’t get up. “Eileen!”
Eileen. The name on my birth certificate. The one I had thought was made up.
He reached out and took her hand, sliding it under his leg, concealing his fingers, now laced through hers. Who was he hiding it from? Surely not the oblivious two-year-olds taking a bath in sand. And what a great photo moment this was: four people lying in the sandbox like it was a giant water bed.
“You look so different when you laugh,” the woman named Eileen said to Dad. She turned her head just enough for her forehead to touch his cheek, and I saw her lips barely touch his face and he smiled.
“Jackson,” Dad said. “Tell your mother the funny joke I taught you.”
“Knock, knock,” the little me said, still flapping my arms in the sand.
Eileen laughed. “Who’s there?”
“Knock, knock,” little me repeated.
“That’s as far as we got,” Dad said.
Then they both laughed.
The sandbox activity wasn’t the only noise I was picking up. The sound of leaves crunching came from the trees in the distance. Dad must have been more observant than I realized, because he jolted up suddenly and stared through the trees. Courtney sat up, too, and the little me stood and started stomping on Courtney’s angel.
I heard the familiar click of a trigger before I could even make out the man hiding behind a tree. The gunshot was loud, but all I saw was Dad diving over Eileen and grabbing me with one arm and pulling Courtney underneath him with the other. The little me got slammed hard onto his back and immediately started crying.
Dad shouted to someone, but I couldn’t see another agent or anyone except the man behind the tree. Dad pulled a gun from the back of his pants and fired a shot in that direction. He was covering the two little ones, giving him minimal ability to aim well. The hiding man darted toward another tree, and that’s when I saw his face and his red hair.
Shoe-print guy.
I don’t know what made me even think to do what I did next. It was like some buried instinct took over. My heart stopped pounding and slowed to a normal rate and images flashed in my head so quickly—the area, the distance between me and the shoe-print guy—I could see all of it clearly. Then I pulled out Agent Freeman’s gun and fired. I had never even picked up a gun until today, but I still knew without a doubt the bullet would hit him right in the chest.
And ninety percent of my brain wished I would have missed.
He fell to the ground and I took off running in that direction. I slowed down as I approached his body. He was lying on his back, staring up through the trees, eyes still open, but his chest was frozen. I dropped down beside him and pressed my hands over the blood seeping through his sweater.
Gasping for air, I dropped the gun right on the man’s chest and couldn’t bring myself to pick it up again.
I could see Dad from where I sat. He was squeezing the little me so tight and mumbling, “You’re okay.”
Two other people ran over, a man and a woman. They must have been agents, because Dad nodded to them and the woman picked up Courtney and Dad handed me over to the other dude and they took off. Dad flopped into the sand on his back and Eileen leaned over him with her hands covering her mouth. “Oh, God, Kevin, you got shot!”
Then his body shook with laughter and he reached up and pulled her down so their faces were close. “It’s just my shoulder, I’ll be fine.”
She laid her head on his che
st and I could hear her sobs loud and clear even without the aid of fancy electronics. “They could have killed you.”
“Shh, it’s okay. Don’t worry about me. I’ve been shot before.”
“What about the kids? Where are they?”
“Relax. They’re already in the bulletproof car. That’s where you should be right now. I could kill Freeman for disappearing like that. Where the hell was he?” Dad asked.
Eileen lifted her head and then grabbed his face and kissed him, like she was taking advantage of his inability to use one of his arms. He used his free hand to run his fingers through her hair and then a couple seconds later he pushed her away, just a little.
“Marshall’s coming,” he whispered.
She nodded but kissed his cheek again, then said very quietly, “I love you.”
“Don’t move!” Chief Marshall’s deep voice came from behind me.
I closed my eyes and jumped before Marshall had a chance to get his hands on me again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
AUGUST 15, 2009, 1:20 A.M.
“Jackson!”
My forehead was pressed against the wooden table. “Huh?”
This was the worst I’d felt after a time jump by a mile. It was like having a fever of a hundred and five.
“Let’s get you out of here,” Dad said.
He lifted me from the booth and put one of my arms around his shoulders. We made it down the hall and into the elevator, then stumbled into Dad’s room. I fell back onto the couch, closing my eyes, unable to move a single muscle.
“Damn, this is bad,” he muttered. “What do you need? Food, water?”
“No,” I moaned. “I’ll just puke it back up.”
He flipped a light on. “What’s wrong? Why are you staring at your hands?”
I hadn’t even realized I was staring until he said that. My hands were perfectly clean, but it was like I could still feel the sticky blood between my fingers. “I touched the wound. The man was bleeding … I can’t believe I did that.”
“What man?”
“The man I shot. He’s dead. Actually, he’s not really dead, but I did it anyway.”
“But … did you see what happened? With … her?” He choked on the last two words and dropped his eyes.
“What was supposed to happen? When I wasn’t there?” It hit me right away. I had no memories of Eileen, and Dad asked if I saw what had happened to her. “She was killed? In the real 1992?”
Dad nodded slowly and released my hands. He sat all the way down on the floor.
So, when that event really happened, when I wasn’t there, the red-haired guy didn’t have anyone to stop him from shooting her.
“Dad, it was the same guy … one of the guys that was there when Holly got shot.” I couldn’t stop looking at my hands … Where the man’s blood had vanished. It wasn’t real, but it felt real. “I’m sorry … I couldn’t let him go and not—”
“Do something?” he asked before standing and sitting in the chair across from me.
“It was stupid. It didn’t change anything.” I pushed the thought from my mind and dug for another question. “Who was she? Eileen, I mean.”
He was quiet for a minute, collecting himself. “A scientist. Completely brilliant and working with Dr. Melvin. She’s also the woman who carried you and your sister. Though you’re not biologically connected. She called herself your mother.”
“I heard that. But we were just a project for her? An assignment? Dr. Melvin explained about the surrogate mother for the experiment.”
He shook his head. “Maybe at first, but the second she felt you two kicking … then, later, when she could hold you … you were her children. Two amazing babies who would change the world with their brilliant minds. That’s what she wanted from the experiment.”
“What was your job? Protecting her?”
“My job was to protect you and your sister. Agent Freeman—not the one you attacked today, but his father—was assigned to protect Eileen. I joined the project when you and Courtney were just starting to walk … maybe eleven months old.”
“After I shot that man, you were mad at Agent Freeman … said you didn’t know where the hell he was.”
The color drained from Dad’s face. “That’s not what I meant for you to do. I just wanted you to see what happened, to know why I do what I do.”
“You don’t have to explain.” I held up my hands, even though the blood had vanished, and he nodded. “You loved her, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” His voice cracked and he turned his eyes toward the TV. “If I could change anything, it would be that day. Fifteen seconds and I could have covered her.”
“You almost did, but you grabbed me and Courtney instead,” I said, barely above a whisper.
“I know what you’re thinking. It’s not like that, Jackson. People always talk about resentment like it happens all the time. If I would have saved her and let something happen to you or Courtney, she never would have forgiven me. Ever.” He smiled a little, but it was more of a grimace, filled with grief. “To me, she left something she loved. Two somethings. A part of her that I could keep. I wanted to be your father before she died. To marry her and be a family. It was frowned upon, of course, but it was a line I was willing to cross once I figured out the best way to tell those above me.”
“I’m so sorry, Dad,” I said, then sighed heavily. “I’ve been wondering who raised me before you came into the picture. Now I know.”
“I know you don’t want to trust me, but I’ve already lost the only woman I’ve ever loved and my daughter. I don’t want to lose you, too.”
“And you lost your partner?”
He nodded. “Agent Freeman, Sr., was my mentor. He was brilliant. He died the same day as Eileen. And then having his son join as well, knowing he’d lost his father in this job … it’s not easy. But there’s a reason why agents are so young in Tempest … most don’t last long.”
“They quit?”
“No, nobody quits. Ever,” he said, then changed the subject. “Here’s the thing, Jackson. There are ways around this system if you’re good, and fortunately, I’m that good. I’ve concealed a number of things from Marshall and from Tempest to protect you and Courtney. You don’t have to give up your life for this.”
I was still trying to catch up with my latest dive into the past. “But … why is her name on my birth certificate? With your last name?”
“She was the closest person you had to a mother, and using my last name helped with the cover story I gave you and Courtney about your mother dying in childbirth.”
“What was her real name?”
“Covington. Her family was extremely wealthy … they’re Scottish. I’m sure you guessed that already from the accent. That’s where our money comes from. She left her entire trust fund to you and Courtney. We live in her apartment. I gave you the life I thought she would have wanted you to have. Very different from the way I grew up.”
“How did you grow up?” I asked.
Dad patted my shoulder. “That’s a story for another day. Remember what I told you … Marshall knows what I’m capable of and he’s constantly on guard. It’s unlikely he’ll let me have much involvement in your training.”
“Why?”
“He knows who I’m really working to protect.” He grinned. “Besides, they want you to be good, but not good enough to work alone.”
“Or against them,” I added.
A loud dinging noise came from the radio on the bathroom counter and Dad’s head snapped in that direction. “Shit!”
“What?!”
“The sensors I put in your room.” He spun the dial on the safe and pulled out a gun. “Someone may have gotten in.”
Despite the fact that I could barely move moments ago, I jumped up from the couch and beat him to the door. Both of us charged down the hall and up the emergency staircase. I flew around the corner and smacked right into Holly, who was standing outside the door to our room.
> Holly gasped but stayed on her feet. I was too weak to hold myself up and fell back onto the carpet. It must have taken her a second to realize it was me barreling into her. All the CIA stuff probably made her a little edgy.
“God, Jackson, you scared the crap out of me,” she said. “I was just going to find you … what’s wrong?”
Dad reached out a hand and helped me to my feet. “He’s a little sick. Might be food poisoning.”
“You look really pale,” Holly said before putting one of my arms around her shoulder. She opened the door to the room and I crawled onto the bed as soon as I walked in.
“I’ll get some water,” Dad said.
Holly untied my shoes and pulled them off before sitting up on the bed and leaning against the headboard. “Move closer and we can share the blanket.”
I moved over just enough so my head rested on her lap. She tossed the blanket over me and ran her fingers through my hair.
“Thanks, Hol.”
“Do you need anything else?” she asked.
I shook my head right before drifting off to sleep.
* * *
“I know, the first time I told my little first-graders I was taking the subway home, one of them actually cried,” Holly said, laughing.
“The crime rate on subways or any public transportation is far lower than most people think,” Dad said.
“I blame Hollywood. Too many movies about exploding buses and chasing bad guys on a subway,” Holly said.
“Was it strange for you? Supervising kids who have personal servants and no knowledge of any other way of life?” Dad asked.
Holly laughed again. “At first, maybe. When I taught gymnastics, I used to bribe the kids with pennies to try a new skill. I knew after the first day of camp, pennies wouldn’t get me anywhere. But I think every kid is sheltered from something.”
“Yes, that’s probably true,” Dad said.
I finally opened my eyes. Dad sat in a chair across from the bed. I turned over and looked up at Holly. “How long was I asleep?”