The Separatists

by Lis Wiehl

  Oh, Jenny, your mother loves you, I love you so much.

  Stop! Think! Erica wills herself to breathe, in and out, in and out. Try and make sense of what’s happening. You’re in the trunk of a car. Two men are taking you somewhere. They’re going to open the trunk and pull you out. That’s your chance. Erica wriggles her body into position and pulls her legs up to her chest, ready to kick. She holds the position as the minutes tick by and then suddenly the car is bouncing, it’s on a rutted road, and she tenses, coils her whole body, waiting.

  And then the car stops. Two doors slam. The trunk pops open and Erica senses where the man is and then she lets loose a hard, fast kick and connects with his torso. “AHHH!” followed by a thudding fall and spitting curses. And Erica steels herself and clenches her teeth and knows this might be her last breath and . . . Jenny, my Jenny . . .

  “Haven’t you ever heard of standing back?” one of the men says.

  “I want to rough her up,” the other man says, wincing in pain.

  “No, no damage.” Then the voice is closer, he’s leaning into the trunk. “Listen, Erica, we’re nice guys. Just playin’ with you a little.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “We may not be Harvard professors, but we’re not that dumb. I can tell you this—you’re just one more gig for us. Come on now, take it easy.” The man reaches into the trunk and lifts Erica up. She doesn’t struggle. He stands her up on her feet and leans into her, so close that she can feel his hot breath, and runs his hand down her cheek. “I’m putting your purse down next to you. See, perfect gentleman.”

  “We do have a message for you—consider it friendly advice,” the other one says. “You can’t bring the dead back to life. So why die trying?”

  And then there are footfalls and the car doors slam and the car drives away. Silence. Then a slight breeze and leaves rustle. And Erica realizes she’s alive and in one piece and then she starts to shake, to shake all over, uncontrollably, almost violently, and then she heaves and bends over and a thin stream of bile pours out of her mouth. She struggles with her wrists but they’re bound with plastic cuffs. Then she walks slowly, slowly, sliding one foot and then the other out in front of her. Her left foot bumps into a tree and she slowly, slowly lowers her head and leans into the tree with her scalp until it bumps gently against the trunk and she moves it around slowly until she feels a knot on the trunk. Then she so slowly, so carefully brings her head up until . . . until . . . the bottom of her blindfold catches on the knot. Then she moves her head down and the blindfold slowly peels back—and she can see!

  Erica looks around. She’s in the woods. She listens. It’s so quiet. Then traffic, faint but steady. There’s her purse. She stands with her back to it, squats down, grabs the handle with her right hand, and picks it up. Then she begins to walk down the dirt track toward the sounds of civilization.

  CHAPTER 45

  IN ABOUT FIVE MINUTES ERICA comes to a quiet suburban road. Asphalt never looked so good. The kidnapping car turned right onto the dirt road, so Erica turns left, heading back. As she walks she pulls her thoughts together. Someone just sent her a message—it came through loud and clear. But who? She’s obviously getting too close for their comfort, but she still feels a thousand miles from any answers.

  She comes to an enormous old colonial with an expansive front yard dotted with specimen trees and bordered by an old stone wall. All those empty rooms. Empty rooms scare her. A little farther on, a stately brick Edwardian sits on a rise. This is a tony suburb, she thinks, Concord maybe, Belmont or Lincoln, judging by how long she was in the car. She’s about to approach one of the houses when, behind her, she hears an oncoming car. Fear fear. She ducks into the woods. The car passes, it’s an SUV, going about thirty miles an hour; the driver is a woman about Erica’s age, alone in the car, well dressed.

  Erica rushes back onto the road and yells, “STOP! PLEASE STOP!”

  The car does stop, and the woman twists around and looks at Erica. Then she backs up and Erica runs over to her window. The woman zips it down. “Are you all right?”

  Erica takes a deep breath and says, “Yes.”

  “You look a little . . . Wait, aren’t you Erica Sparks?”

  “I am.”

  “What happened to you? Oh my goodness, you’re handcuffed. Hang on.” The woman pops open the rear door, gets out of the car, and retrieves garden clippers from the back. It takes a few tries, but she cuts off the cuffs.

  Erica rubs her sore wrists. “Thank you.”

  “What happened to you?” Erica hesitates, and the woman adds, with New England discretion, “If I may ask.”

  “I had a little run-in with . . . It’s a long story.”

  “Would you like me to take you to the police station here in Belmont?”

  “What I’d really like is a lift to the Kennedy School. I’m on a panel that starts in twenty minutes.”

  CHAPTER 46

  THE WOMAN, WHOSE NAME IS Adrienne, pulls up in front of the Kennedy School.

  “I can’t thank you enough for this,” Erica says.

  “I’m guessing you don’t want me to tell anyone,” Adrienne says with a knowing smile.

  “Good guess.”

  On the drive over Erica reapplied her lipstick, ran a brush through her hair, and put on a favorite pair of clip-on earrings. Her dress is a little worse for wear, but who cares? She also called Shirley to tell her she was in one piece, and to please not tell anyone about the car mix-up.

  The panel is being held in the school’s main hall, and Erica is directed to the green room, where she finds Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric, Joy Reid, and Brit Hume. Brokaw quickly runs down his plans as moderator. He’s deeply concerned that lying has become commonplace among politicians and that journalists have become complicit, rarely challenging the lies and thereby devaluing the truth. It’s a vicious cycle. He’ll get things started with a couple of examples and then let the panelists run with it “in any direction you want.” He’ll only jump in with a new topic, angle, or question when the previous one has been exhausted.

  Erica is at the craft services table, fidgeting with fruit and trying to focus on what Brokaw is saying. She’s still fighting to compose herself after her little joyride, and equally anxious to find out if Jenny is in the audience.

  A stage manager ducks his head in the room. “You’re on.”

  They all file into the lecture hall and take their seats at a long table. Erica scans the capacity audience. And there she is! There’s Jenny near the back of the hall! Erica waves and Jenny waves back. She’s sitting with a thin, older woman who is wearing a red mohair sweater, a little too much makeup, and whose hair is salon colored and coiffed.

  Who is that woman? Now she waves at Erica and smiles.

  Erica knows that smile. And that’s when it hits her.

  It’s her mother.

  CHAPTER 47

  ERICA SITS BACK IN HER chair, reeling. Brokaw is talking, but his voice sounds a million miles away. Susan waves again, beaming. Now Joy Reid is saying something, something about the truth.

  The truth is, Erica, your mother brought your daughter to see you.

  Jenny has only met Susan once, when she crashed Erica’s wedding. Erica hired a car to take Susan back to Maine that same day and she hasn’t seen her since. Until now. How did this happen? What is going on? Did the two of them conspire to do this? No, no, this can’t be happening.

  “Erica, do you have anything to add?” Tom Brokaw asks.

  Erica looks over toward Brokaw—he, Couric, Reid, and Hume are all looking at her with concern. She picks up the glass of water at her place and takes a long drink.

  Pull it together, you have to get through this.

  “Well, um, Tom, with so many different so-called news outlets, including all forms of social media, there’s no central arbiter of what is true and what isn’t. And so lies go unchallenged. And they get repeated. Each faction of our Balkanized society has its own cultural landscape and ech
o chamber. They’re able to create, in effect, their own ‘truth.’”

  Erica can hardly believe she’s capable of speech, let alone thought. She drinks some more water, wills herself not to look at Jenny and Susan, and forces herself to listen to the other panelists, even though her heart is pounding in her chest and her left eyelid is twitching and all she can think is: What now?

  Somehow she makes it through the hour without making a total fool of herself. The panel ends and she steps down off the stage as people are filing out. As she walks toward Jenny and Susan she feels like she’s having an out-of-body experience. She was able to stay coherent for Tom Brokaw; will she for her own mother and daughter?

  And now they’re all together, three generations, standing awkwardly in the aisle. Jenny seems tentative, maybe abashed. Susan looks like a different woman—she’s shed thirty pounds, has found a terrific colorist, a better dentist, and looks like she gets regular massages and facials. But a little bit of the sow’s ear is still showing—under her too-assertive perfume, she smells like an ashtray.

  “So . . . ,” Erica says, “how did this happen?”

  “Aren’t you going to give us a hug, honey?” Susan says.

  Erica gives her mother a perfunctory hug, mostly because they’re in public and she sees cameras out. Then she hugs Jenny.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “How did I do?”

  “Joy Reid was better.” Thanks, I needed that. Jenny sees Erica’s stricken look and adds, “But you were okay too. You were good.”

  “So, again, how did this happen?”

  “Gosh, Erica, I follow you on Facebook and Twitter and everything, and when I saw you would be in Boston, I thought, well, why not just get in my new Intrepid, I lease it, honey, only $259 a month, and by the way I got this sweater at Nordstrom Rack, you see, honey, I’ve changed. Thanks to you, of course.” She leans in close and whispers, “I go to my meetings. I have eight months clean and dry. I don’t want to be a pathetic loser anymore.” She leans back and raises her voice. “After all, I’m Erica Sparks’s mother. That means something in this world. Oh, you should see my townhouse, how I have it fixed up with a sectional and my art glass collection. Maybe someday you and Jenny will come visit.”

  Erica keeps looking at Jenny, who is looking at her grandmother with a puzzled and fascinated expression on her face, like you might look at some exotic animal at the zoo. By now the lecture hall is mostly empty. Not as empty as Erica, though. She feels like she’s in some realm beyond shock and surprise and fear and anxiety, she’s just flatlining emotionally.

  “So you called Jenny and then picked her up in Dedham, and the two of you drove here together?”

  Jenny nods.

  “That’s just exactly what happened,” Susan says.

  “And your father was all right with it?”

  “I told him I wanted to see my grandmother, and he said that was understandable.”

  Erica doesn’t have much time, she has to catch her flight back to LaGuardia and do her show. She wanted to go out with Jenny, for ice cream or a sandwich or something, but she’s not sure she can handle the thought of Susan being there. She was thinking about Henrietta’s Table, the nice restaurant in the Charles Hotel, just a block away. But it’s always filled with well-known Bostonians, and no doubt a lot of people who were at the panel discussion will be there. Erica will be fussed over and have to make small talk. And worst of all, she’ll have to introduce this peculiar woman as her mother.

  “This is such fun, us all being together,” Susan says with forced brightness. “Oh, Erica, look at my new front teeth.” She smiles too widely and then she tugs at her skirt and frowns and looks around as if she’s lost, and Erica sees how deeply insecure the woman is, how fish-out-of-water she is, sober, in a place like Harvard. This is a distant planet for her. The poor, sad creature never had a chance, really—her childhood with a boozy, illiterate mother and boozy, crude father who was overly affectionate and not in a good way. Erica is glad she takes care of Susan, buys her things, sends her money. The woman is her mother. The only one she’ll ever have.

  Erica flashes back on a spring Saturday when she was about six. Her father had been AWOL for a couple of weeks, and with him away Susan had cleaned the place up a little, was a little less manic, took fewer pills, smoked less pot, and it was raining that day, it was a warm spring rain, and Susan took Erica’s hand and led her outside and they played a crazy game of tag in the rain, which turned into a downpour, and they kept chasing each other and laughing until they were sopping wet and then they went inside and stripped their clothes off and Susan dried Erica with a big towel and then made them hot chocolate from little packets she had stolen from the coffee bar at the 7–Eleven.

  Erica had loved her mother that day, and on other days too. When she walked her to school or picked her up. She even tried to help with her homework a few times. She was just unequipped to be a mom. She had no example to follow except abuse, poor thing.

  “Listen, I don’t have a lot of time, but there’s an IHOP across the street,” Erica says.

  “I’m going to get chocolate chip pancakes,” Susan says, taking Jenny’s hand and heading up the aisle.

  “Not me, I want peanut butter!”

  Susan turns and looks back at Erica, an indulgent smile on her face, and in that moment she almost seems like a real grandma, bemused and loving and . . . happy. Could they all be happy together? Susan does look so much better, maybe she’s aged out of her wild impulsiveness, maybe her anger has dissipated with the years, maybe having a successful daughter has been good for her sense of self and inspired her to clean up her act, to rise to the bar Erica has set.

  Standing there in the now empty auditorium, Erica’s heartbeat seems to be echoing back to her and she feels hope for the three of them, the three generations, hope that out of all the chaos and pain and hard work and bitterness and disappointment, they can forge something . . . meaningful, even beautiful.

  “Come on, Mom!” Jenny calls from the doorway.

  “Coming!” Erica says. Then her phone rings.

  “Hello, Erica, it’s Detective Chester Yuan of the LAPD. I’ve been analyzing that photograph you sent me and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion.”

  CHAPTER 48

  “ONE SECOND, DETECTIVE.” ERICA CUPS the phone and calls to Jenny and Susan, “You go ahead, I’ll be right over.” They turn and look at Erica and then smile at each other conspiratorially as Jenny says, “Take your time, Mom.”

  How sweet. But Erica has bigger fish to fry than her three-headed maternal monster.

  It is bigger, isn’t it? Well, it’s safer anyway. At least emotionally.

  “I’m eager to hear your thoughts, Detective.”

  “I’m going to send you a copy of the photograph that I enhanced. Will you be able to look at it?”

  “On my phone.”

  “That’s better than nothing . . . Did you get it?”

  “. . . Okay, I’ve got it.” On first glance, it looks exactly the same to Erica, but then she begins to see what looks like an outline of some object, a tiny portion of some large object; is it tube-shaped?

  “Can you see the delineation about a third of the way up in the black part of the picture?”

  “Yes, I do, I do see it. It looks round to me.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s the base of an object. Now you probably can’t make it out on your iPhone, but there are some barely discernible numbers and letters on the side of the object.”

  Erica can feel her adrenaline kick into overdrive. She loves nothing more than taking a step toward the truth.

  No, that’s wrong, of course. She loves Jenny more. Doesn’t she?

  “I can’t see any letters or numbers.”

  “They’re very faint. I can’t read them right now, but I’m going to try and enhance them further. I’m pretty sure they’re identifying numbers. And that the object is a ballistic missile.”

  Erica grabs the top of the nearest sea
t and then sits down in it, absorbing the words. She was expecting evidence that Oil Field Solutions, the Bellamys’ company, was violating environmental laws. But this? A ballistic missile?

  “Detective, can we talk confidentially?”

  “Of course. And call me Chester.”

  “Do you know how I came into this scrap of a photograph?”

  “Yes, Moira Connelly told me. Ugly murder. Of course, it’s hard to find a pretty one.”

  “Joan Marcus was trying to tell me something. Something about a . . . missile.”

  “I think the next step, Erica, is to try and track down this missile. If we can discern the identifying marks, we’ll be well on our way.”

  “It must be in North Dakota, don’t you think?”

  “Probable, but by no means definite.”

  Chester Yuan is both matter-of-fact and dynamic, and talking to him is just what Erica needs. “Do you have any thoughts on how I could trace the missile?”

  “I have a couple of contacts in the Pentagon. Let me see what I can do.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

  “This is a big story, Erica, and a dangerous one. If this missile has fallen into the wrong hands . . .”

  Something occurs to Erica, and it sends a fear rat scurrying up her spine. “Do you think this missile is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead?”

  There’s a pause before Chester Yuan says, “Yes, I do.”

  CHAPTER 49

  ERICA SITS IN THE BOOTH at the IHOP (what is an IHOP doing in the middle of Harvard Square?) watching Jenny and Susan devour their stacks of pancakes, chattering away, trading bites. Erica feels a little like a third wheel. But this wheel is turning a million miles an hour trying to make sense of what she learned from Chester Yuan. A missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. This story is darker—far darker—than she imagined, and sitting in a restaurant that seems to be constructed entirely of plastic that serves food guaranteed to send you into sugar shock, she feels herself falling into the grip of paranoia. There have already been five murders. She is obviously in their sights, whoever they are.