Spy Mom

by Beth McMullen

  We never actually had the cocktail.

  Later, wrapped only in the Egyptian cotton sheets of my fancy hotel bed, listening to the waves crashing on the beach, Will told me about growing up rich and privileged in Los Angeles, the son of a television producer.

  “It was basically the best childhood that money could buy. I was the only kid, with older parents, and they could not give me enough. Surf lessons, golf lessons, private schools, skiing in Zermatt, sailing in the British Virgin Islands. You know, the list goes on.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Doesn’t it? Except it sucked. Because it was all to keep me out of their hair. They basically wanted to sit on the beach and occasionally wave to me as I went off with yet another instructor or babysitter or whatever. They wanted me to look good at dinner but not to say too much. And if I was going to have opinions, it would be better if they lined up nicely with their own.”

  “So it felt kind of empty?” I asked, thinking that sounded like the right thing to say.

  “Completely. The pathetic part is I kept right on doing what they wanted me to do until not that long ago. Then everything changed. I saw the garbage.”

  When he asked me what I did, I told him about my dull desk job as a nuclear analyst for the United States Agency for Weapons of Mass Destruction. I could see his eyes glaze over as I dazzled him with statistics about how many nuclear warheads were actually unaccounted for at the time. I’ll give him credit though. He did try.

  “That sounds really interesting,” he said, stifling a yawn.

  Yes. Thrilling. Really. “It’s not bad. It pays the bills and I like to read.”

  “And writing, too. You must do some writing.”

  “Yes. Some.” There was a long pause.

  “So do you think you might want to go diving again tomorrow?”

  The next morning, before the sun was up, as William Hamilton slept soundly at my side, I called Simon Still.

  “I’ve been doing this for nine years,” I said quietly into the phone. “I’m tired, Simon.”

  “You’re tired?” He didn’t even try to hide his disgust. “Take a nap then, Sally.”

  “No. I mean tired as in my soul is tired. Does that make any sense?”

  “None whatsoever. Get your soul a prescription and let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  “I think I want to quit.” There was a long pause.

  “Quitting,” Simon said, “is not always as easy as it sounds.”

  “I think I want a normal life.”

  “You are assuming, my dear Sally, that there is such a thing as a normal life.”

  I glanced over at Will, his blond hair covering his eyes, snoring slightly. From the dark recesses of my mind, a voice echoed. What makes you think he wants you, Sally? What makes you think you will ever see him again? My only answer was that I had no idea. But it didn’t matter. I had already started down the road.

  “I think there is,” I said.

  “What name did you give him, Sally? Lucy, Maggie, Susan, Elizabeth, Allison? Don’t think you can run from it. It will always find you.”

  He didn’t have to add the last part. I got it. But still.

  “Lucy,” I said. “Lucy Parks.”

  “Well, I always kind of liked that one. We’ll talk about this when you get back to the office.” He didn’t ask me if I was going to finish the job. He knew I would. Simon Still knew me better than anyone at that time in my life. It is a point in my favor that I no longer believe that to be true.

  I climbed out of bed, pulled on the thick hotel robe, slipped into the fuzzy hotel slippers, and padded a few steps down the hallway to room 437. In the pocket of the robe was a key card for that very room, exactly as I’d arranged. A little money goes a long way with those making minimum wage and being forced to wear horrible uniforms.

  Inside, the occupant, known to us at the Agency as Conan the Rastafarian, slept soundly next to a very young woman I knew not to be his wife. Conan was not a bad guy really, but he’d gotten a little too ambitious for our comfort level lately. He wanted to be the boss, and we, the Agency, did not want that to happen. So, to curb his career ambitions, we would simply turn his friends into his enemies and let nature take its course.

  I was looking for a catalog of sorts of the weapons Conan was peddling, things like FIM-9 Stinger Missiles and HIMARS truck-mounted, multiple rocket launchers, mostly behind the backs of his partners. I’d been told he carried the catalog on a memory stick attached to his key chain.

  I didn’t worry about Conan and his date waking up. I’d also arranged for their room service to have a little something extra in it, something to help them sleep.

  I quickly got to it, digging through his bags, his briefcase, the heels of his shoes. I found the keys and the memory stick in the room’s safe, along with some photographs of the beautiful young woman that she’d probably regret when she finally woke up. I slipped the stick into Conan’s laptop to verify it was what I wanted, stopping briefly to download all of his contact information onto it just for kicks. You never knew who might turn up on such a list. For example, in Conan’s contacts I saw a senator from the Midwest who would surely be supporting the USAWMD the next time the director went to Capitol Hill to ask for funding. While I was pondering what that conversation might sound like, a thickly muscled and thoroughly tattooed arm wrapped around my neck.

  “I need a double dose, missy,” Conan growled into my ear. “You should know that by now.” He tightened his grip on my neck. Usually these sorts of turns for the worse served only to focus me. But at that moment all I could see was Will’s sleeping face a few doors down.

  “Shit,” I squeaked out, with what little air I had left.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said ‘shit.’ Is it possible that I could fall in love with someone? Me?”

  “I’m trying to kill you and you’re talking about love? What sort of fucked-up outfit do you work for?”

  It was a good question, but not one I had time to answer. While Conan proceeded to strangle me, I grabbed his laptop with two hands and swung it with as much force as I could muster up over my head. When it met his skull it made a sickening crunching sound, which I hoped was his head, not just the machine. He moaned, releasing me for long enough that I was able to turn. One knee up, hard, in the groin, and down went Conan. I rolled him on his stomach and pulled both his arms up behind his back with the intention of handcuffing him.

  But he was heavy, strong, and not all that interested in going down quietly. He bucked me off of his back. I slammed into the media center and watched the hotel flat-screen wobble precariously above my head. As I scrambled away from the falling TV, Conan got back on his feet. He then proceeded to run at me, shoulders down, like a really angry football player. To this day, I think his intention was to ram me right through the plate glass window and on into eternity. He had speed. He was mad. After all, I’d drugged him. But in the end I simply stepped aside and watched as Conan the Rastafarian flew right out his window like a baby albatross taking its first flight. I did not look down to see what sailing out of a twentieth-story window looked like on the other end. But I can tell you it made a very unpleasant sound.

  Quickly, I dug the memory stick out of what remained of the laptop and slipped out of the room. There would be a commotion. I wanted to be tucked into my bed by the time it started.

  Back in my room, I kicked off my slippers and climbed in beside a still sleeping Will. He rolled over and flung an arm across my waist.

  “Did you go somewhere?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. I didn’t mention that I had just killed somebody. Not on purpose, but I didn’t think that mattered. Simon was going to be mad.

  “Mmm,” Will gurgled, falling back to sleep. I giggled, feeling all of a sudden high and reckless.

  By the time I got back to Washington and my small, sparsely furnished apartment, I was halfway out the door of the USAWMD. Simon Still tried to convince me otherwise.
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  “Does this guy know that while he was sleeping you pushed a perfectly nice thug out of a hotel window?” he asked, not looking up from my report on Hawaii.

  “No, sir. Of course not. And he wasn’t nice. And I didn’t push him.”

  “Any relationship you enter under false pretenses is doomed to failure. And your whole life is pretense.”

  “Thanks for pointing that out.”

  “What are you going to do without the Agency?” he asked. “Have tea parties? Pick out paint and tiles for the bathroom? Take your soul out for restorative walks along the beach?”

  “No,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go and see a movie, subscribe to a magazine, cook a meal, have only one passport. Maybe I’ll get a goldfish.”

  “A pet?” he laughed, unable to hide his bitterness. “Let’s be honest here, Sally. You won’t like being a private citizen. It’s a lot harder than it looks.”

  But I did mean it. I was done wandering around the globe looking for people who A) wanted to blow up the United States, B) wanted to blow up friends of the United States, or C) my personal favorite, people who wanted to blow me up directly.

  By my thirty-third birthday I was married to Will and the mother of Theo. When he was born I received an e-mail from Simon Still, the first communication we’d had since I left the Agency eighteen months earlier.

  “Good luck,” it read. “You thought Cambodia was hard …”

  I’d like to say he was wrong, but there are days when I clearly remember the Cambodian jungle as a cakewalk.

  4

  Overall, I like to think I’m not bad at being a regular person, a mom, someone whose opinion in the grand scheme of things is not given much value. I try to keep my mouth shut because Lucy Parks Hamilton has no background and I really would prefer it if no one goes digging around trying to find out who I am.

  But once in a while I screw up. For example, The Green Fund’s annual Christmas party. One of Will’s wiseass investors, who can’t possibly be more than eighteen years old from the looks of him, says I have a great ass. But he says it in Hungarian because who the hell speaks Hungarian? Even the Hungarians don’t want to speak Hungarian because there are way too many letters.

  “You should keep those thoughts to yourself,” I say back to him in Hungarian, with a wink. “I could kill you in seven different ways using only my hands.”

  He is so surprised he drops his champagne glass. I pluck it out of the air a second before it hits the fashionable concrete floor. I smile demurely when Will asks me what is going on. “Nothing,” I say. “I’m having a lovely chat with this fine young gentleman here.”

  “How did you do that?” the man asks, as I hand him back his glass.

  “What? Speak Hungarian?”

  “No. The glass. Yes. The Hungarian.” He blushes. “I’m sorry. I think I’ve had too much to drink.”

  “I don’t speak Hungarian. I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “But I … didn’t you … you caught my glass though, right?”

  “Yes, but in English.”

  The man looks bewildered. I stare at him blankly. He wanders off, muttering to himself, clutching the half-full glass like a baby bottle.

  I like my life. I’d be the first to admit that sometimes the repetition makes me start to doubt my sanity. But at the end of the day it makes sense to me. I get up in the morning to the sounds of Theo singing about the space shuttle or trains or his windup shark bathtub toy. We have breakfast: coffee for me, juice for him, oatmeal for everyone and all over the place. We play with toys, build giant towers out of blocks and knock them down, maybe read a few books. We go out to the park, to the zoo, to the ocean. Theo likes the beach and the zoo the best so we spend a lot of time there. He tells me he is ready to surf. I tell him the water is really cold and he really ought to learn how to swim first. He gives me that look like I’m a complete idiot. I’ve thought about dropping Simon Still an e-mail suggesting he study why children are impervious to cold. It is a skill that could be useful for stints in Siberia.

  We take music classes, swimming classes, art classes. Theo does great but I spend my time checking out the other moms and nannies, convinced that my clothes are all wrong. Clearly my years of mucking around in foreign relations left me with little or no fashion sense.

  Theo has a big heart. He is constantly on the lookout for signs of pain and discomfort in other creatures.

  “Mommy,” he says, staring into the lion cage at the zoo, “that lion is hungry. Can he come for ice cream?” The lion stands back beyond the protective moat. I pull Theo a little closer. The lion licks his lips, slowly, patiently. I can see him thinking, calculating, planning. I’ve seen that same look in the eyes of certain individuals with less than my best interests at heart.

  I begin to lead Theo toward the penguins, benign and small. “I’m sure he is hungry,” I say, “but the zookeepers will be by shortly to feed him. Besides, I don’t think lions like ice cream.”

  Theo ponders this. “How would he hold the cone? And rainbow sprinkles or chocolate? Too hard for the lion maybe.”

  I nod in agreement, casting one last look back at the hungry lion, and we continue our tour.

  I’m friendly with other moms, but not so friendly that we’re spilling our guts to each other over double-shot lattes at the Java Luv. I want my life to stay peaceful, which means making sure no one gets overly curious about me. Will says I’m too introverted, but the truth is I’m scared. Now I have something to lose.

  Today is a day like any other, except for the imaginary person in the backyard and my brain feeling like it is on fast-forward. The sun is warm, the sky blue. Theo is on the floor playing with a battery-free windup bamboo toy car while I scrub the applesauce from the floors and walls.

  “Can you play with me?” he asks.

  “No, I’m cleaning the applesauce.”

  “Can you play with me?” he asks again. I marvel at his selective deafness.

  “No, I can’t. When I am done cleaning I can play with you.” The eyelid starts to twitch again. It feels like a butterfly has hatched in there right on my eyeball.

  “Why are you cleaning? Why?”

  “Because you put applesauce on the walls. Remember?”

  “Oh. Well, when you are done, okay?”

  I agree to the terms. Theo turns his attention back to the car in question. He especially likes to send it crashing off the dining room table onto the heirloom Oriental rug, a wedding gift from Will’s parents. I’ve been told in agonizing detail of the rug’s provenance, its long journey from places in China that my father-in-law finds difficult to pronounce. I don’t have the heart to tell him that the story that came with his rug is most likely false. I’ve been to these places. They are nothing like he describes.

  But Theo loves it. Every time his car hits the rug and explodes in spinning tires and smashing glory, he yells out, “Oh man, look at that,” and I can’t help but laugh.

  My husband leaves the house at 6 A.M. every weekday and occasionally on weekends too. He comes home twelve hours later looking as energized as when he left, bursting with stories about solar farms and wind turbines. I, on the other hand, look like I’ve been run over by a bus, my reserve of nurturance sucked completely dry.

  There are times when Will comes bouncing through that doorway and I want nothing more than to hurl a sustainably farmed cantaloupe melon at his head because it has to be his fault. It has to be his fault that I have spent my day picking up Cheerios and wiping noses and making inane conversation about fuzzy red monsters and dump trucks. And yet other times my heart leaps at the very sight of him. Now I can’t say for sure if that feeling is the result of still being in love with him or panic at what I have done to my life. Perhaps a little of both.

  Will travels a lot. He doesn’t like it, he says. It’s hard for him to be away from us. Plus air travel really kills his carbon footprint. I can’t tell you exactly how many trees have been planted in an attempt to make ours a carbo
n-neutral household, but suffice it to say it’s a lot. Sometimes, late at night, I catch him looking at me curiously, like there is something he wants to ask but he can’t quite put his finger on it.

  Our affair was fast and furious, undertaken with the same lack of respect for consequences that landed me with the Agency in the first place. Will tracked me down in D.C. two weeks after we left Hawaii with promises to see each other again soon, which I’d naturally assumed were false. I’d wanted to believe I could fall in love with this man and he could fall in love with me and we could live happily ever after. But the fact that not a single active USAWMD agent had a personal life was not entirely lost on me. It was a Friday night and Will called my personal cell phone, on which I’d received possibly one call ever, every five minutes until I finally relented and picked up.

  “I’m here in your city with no friends and no plans, so I really could use your help,” he said. He claimed the reason for his visit was business, but I’m inclined to believe he made up the business part of it. Something was happening and neither of us could deny it.

  I met him for dinner and, after a few cocktails, I couldn’t come up with a convincing enough reason not to let him into my apartment. I didn’t tell him that he was maybe the second person to step foot through the door. Will wanted to say something nice about my place, but I could see he was shocked by its sparseness. For the first time, I was embarrassed by where I lived, by the bare walls and the dead cactus.

  “I travel a lot for work,” I said with a shrug. “I’m, um, not usually home.”

  He nodded. “Of course,” he said. “You travel.” He rallied to the cause. “You are a minimalist. Not addicted to the constant acquisition of more stuff. I love it. You are anti-materialistic. So rare.”