Who would have thought my ugly and empty apartment could actually be a turn-on? We spent the next forty-eight hours in bed, ordering out for food and bottles of wine. When Monday rolled around Will went back to California and I got on a plane for London to meet with a contact who swore he had mind-blowing information for me that could only be delivered in person. I didn’t want to go. For the first time, my heart wasn’t in it. I was doodling Mrs. William Hamilton on my cocktail napkin all the way across the Atlantic. And it didn’t help that my source was more interested in shooting me than in giving me valuable information.
“Focus, Sally,” Simon berated me afterward. “Do you want to wake up dead tomorrow? You walked right into his trap like an amateur.”
“But you are the one who set up the meeting,” I pointed out.
“Who cares about the details? You were sloppy.”
I called Will the minute my plane touched the ground back in Washington.
“God, Lucy, I thought you vanished or decided you hated me. Didn’t you get any of my messages? I didn’t know what to do.”
“I missed you too,” I said and actually meant it. “I really did.”
“Come to California.”
“I might be able to get out there for a few days next week. How does that sound?”
“No, I mean come to California forever. I think I’m in love with you.”
Well, that stopped me dead in my tracks. Saying it out loud made it real. It also made for a fine mess.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes. Lucy, come to California, move into my house, and marry me. If you don’t I think I might die.”
“You shouldn’t kid around like that. I might take you seriously.”
“I am serious, Lucy,” he said. “I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
The next day I met Simon Still at yet another crowded coffee shop. I wanted to ask him why not a nice Italian place or maybe sushi? But I didn’t think the timing was the best.
“I can’t keep doing this forever, can I?” I asked. “At some point I need to have a real life. Maybe this is that time.” Lately it seemed like I spent most of my time dodging bullets. My luck was running out. My karma was compromised. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted to die just yet.
“Why not?” Simon asked. “I intend to do it until someone kills me. If I’m old when that happens, great, if not, oh well.”
I sat back with my piping hot coffee and stared at Simon. He looked a little ragged around the edges, tired, but it was hard to remember a time when he didn’t look that way. Having the safety of the world in your hands is hard work. Other than the fact that he was born in the West, I knew nothing about him. Did he have parents, siblings, a cat? Did he sleep with men or women or whomever happened to be free when he blew into town? And what town was that, where did he live? Who washed his socks? What did he do for fun? Did he know how to have fun? And I knew suddenly, sitting there, that I didn’t want to be Simon Still. I didn’t want to find myself twenty years down the road in the same sad empty apartment with no friends, no family, nothing but a history of crazy stories that I could never tell anyone anyway. I took his hands in mine.
“I feel like I’ve known you forever,” I said, “so I think you’ll understand that I’m serious when I say this. I want out.”
He pulled his hands back as if I had burned him, put on his sunglasses, and pushed back from the table.
“The one thing you never understood,” he said, “is that in order to save humanity, you cannot be a part of it. Consider yourself out.” Then he stood up and walked away without even a glance back.
And it was almost that easy. When your job doesn’t exist, quitting it is not that complicated. I met with two men I’d never seen before and they gave me the ground rules for being an ex-USAWMD agent.
You were never here.
We were never here.
We’re still not here.
During this period you worked for USAWMD Analyst Bureau. There are tax records, etc., to back up your story, if you should need them.
Hand in your passports, all of them. You will be given a clean U.S. passport with whatever name you intend to use printed on it. We recommend you don’t return to the one you started with.
Watch your back. You never know when someone might recognize you.
But they weren’t done yet. There was a number seven, kind of quietly added on at the end. We reserve the right to call on you if your expertise is required. And if we do, you must call back. I agreed. It wasn’t as if any of this was really up for debate.
So Theo is tossing his car off the table and I’m standing at the sink rinsing out dish towels covered in applesauce. It makes a sticky, paste-like substance that has now migrated up my forearms. My hair hangs in my face, but I don’t dare tuck it behind my ears. Adding the applesauce slop to it would surely not improve my situation.
And just like that, the phone rings. Not my cell phone or any of Will’s three work lines. Not the fax machine. But the regular old landline. It is not my natural inclination to answer it because no one I know actually ever calls me on that phone. I’m not even sure why we have it. But now it is ringing. On this beautiful San Francisco morning, my house phone is ringing.
“Hello,” I say, “Hamilton residence.”
“Hello there, Sally,” comes down the line. I’m not exactly surprised to hear Simon Still on the other end. But that doesn’t mean I don’t almost choke at the sound of his voice.
“Hello, Simon,” I say. “Where are you? Have you been in my backyard recently?”
“I can’t say, you know that.”
“Of course,” I say, remembering the long list of things a USAWMD agent can’t do.
“How can I help you?” I ask.
“Coffee, three o’clock, that place you always go to in your neighborhood.”
You see? I’m not paranoid. They really are watching me.
“I can’t. I have the baby.”
“He’s not a baby anymore, Lucy. He’s three,” Simon says impatiently. “Bring him.”
“What is this about?” I ask.
“A simple chat,” he answers and hangs up on me with no further details.
I hold the phone in my hand. It feels a little hot, but that is probably because I am sweating. Theo clings to my jeans. I fight the urge to swat him away like a mosquito.
“Mommy,” he says, “pick me up, pick me up, pick me up.” I hoist him up and he wraps his arms around my neck, buries his face in my hair, and starts chewing. Theo likes to chew on my hair. When I ask him why, he rolls his eyes and gives me a long “Mommy.” It’s my hair. How could I possibly not know?
“Who was on the phone? Daddy?”
Definitely not Daddy. If Daddy knew who was on the phone, he’d blow a fuse.
“No. It was an old friend of Mommy’s,” I say. The idea of Simon Still and Theo occupying the same space for even the length of a cup of coffee makes my mouth dry.
In the beginning, I thought about filling Will full of martinis and confessing all. I would tell him about Sally Sin and the long nights I spent in the Cambodian jungle, stepping carefully between land mines, hoping like hell not to make a mistake. I’d tell him about Budapest and a man I almost fell in love with who turned out to be oh so very bad. I’d tell him about train rides through Vietnam that seemed to last forever, the lonely endless days traveling from place to place to place, blending in and disappearing, pretending I didn’t exist. I’d tell him about the fear that each day might very well be my last. I had a keen sense of wanting to stay alive even if I had no idea what for. I might even tell him about Ian Blackford.
But as time slipped by, the possibility of confessing my multitude of sins became more remote. And here I was four years later, and telling him was no longer an option. I couldn’t risk ruining Theo’s life for secrets I could silently continue to keep.
Simon Still calling me on the house phone, however, made things more complicated. I put Theo back on the flo
or, with a mouthful of my hair.
“I want to go on the swing in the park on the hill. I want to go fast. I want to go high,” he chants, bouncing up and down.
I want to run away. I want to go fast. I want to go far.
“Okay, playground it is,” I say, distracted. “Let’s get ready.”
Theo tears down the hallway. Getting ready for him means collecting about one hundred of his favorite toys and dragging them all into the car and to the park. For me, it includes sippy cups of juice, snack packs of crackers, blueberry yogurt, bananas, napkins, water, jackets, sunscreen, hats, wipes, extra kid shirt and pants, cell phone, wallet, car keys, stroller, and finally travel coffee mug, full. This is all to go two miles down the road to play in the sand and swing on the swings. I used to travel for twelve months at a stretch with nothing more than a toothbrush and a change of underwear.
Theo comes toward me hauling today’s spoils. We have tractors, sticker books, a bucket, two shovels, a stuffed pumpkin, and the puzzle people, as we call them, which are really the set of beautifully crafted Matryoshka dolls that I was using as a weapon earlier. The littlest doll in this set has a small rattle inside that Theo adores. I shake the big doll and hear the rattle inside.
“Are you sure you want to bring these? I don’t want you to lose them and be sad about it.”
“I have to bring them. They go on top of the sand mountain.” How is it a person this small can sound exasperated? The dolls go into the bag.
We load everything into the car, a Toyota Prius that any self-respecting spy would have exactly nothing to do with. It appeared one day in my garage, replacing my 350 horsepower silver Audi S6, the one indulgence I’d allowed myself post-agency. I kind of loved that car. After I drove it from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco I couldn’t resist cruising over the Bay Bridge and right into an aftermarket outfitter in Oakland. Used to servicing the hip-hop community, they couldn’t understand why I’d want Kevlar Second Chance panels in the doors and Chroma-Flex bullet resistant film in the windows.
“Someone trying to kill you, lady?” the mechanic asked.
“You never know,” I said, handing over my cash.
“What do you think?” Will asked, stroking the wee car parked in my spot.
“About what?” I asked, ignoring the obvious.
“Listen, I wasn’t feeling right about your car. It’s a gas guzzler, killing the planet. This one gets fifty miles to the gallon! Can you believe that?”
“What … did … you … do … with … my … car?” I thought seriously for a moment about beating him senseless. But that wouldn’t bring my car back.
“You’re mad, aren’t you? Okay, so I probably should have asked you before I traded it in, but this was the last one on the lot. Isn’t that great? A small fuel-efficient car that is actually flying out of the dealerships. I am so excited about this, Lucy. You have no idea.”
I tried to calm down. I counted backward from one hundred. I rolled my neck, popping out the kinks. I cracked all of my fingers, one by one.
“I liked my car,” I said slowly, deliberately.
“I know. It’s hard. But we all need to sacrifice for the good of the future, right?”
“No! Who cares about the future?” I kicked the wheel of the little car for emphasis. Will gasped.
“Lucy, no need to take out your anger like that. You might hurt it.”
“It’s a car, Will. It doesn’t have feelings.” I kicked it again to prove my point.
And the look on his face, one of sheer horror at my inability to grasp how important this was for the greater good, made me start to giggle. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. And neither could he. And then he did some things to me on the hood of that car that made me glad it couldn’t talk.
We head to the park. It’s a nice park, as parks go, with a playground funded by the local people who are all very rich. So the equipment is new and innovative and clever and you can be fairly confident that the swings aren’t going to suddenly detach from their chains and send your kid orbiting into outer space.
The usual crowd is assembled. It’s divided equally between nannies and moms. The nannies sit on one side speaking Spanish. The moms sit on the other side speaking Californian. They are an interesting group. There is Claire, an investment banker who, after going through four nannies, decided the only one who could raise Owen correctly was her. She has taken motherhood to a whole new level of intensity. Last Christmas, her gingerbread house had a master suite with a walk-in closet with fifteen tiny pairs of gingerbread shoes on a minuscule shelf. She never raises her voice or expresses any frustration with Owen. However, I think he subconsciously realizes that his mommy is a little scary and, in his case, good behavior is simply a form of self-preservation.
There is Belinda, who favors long, flowing skirts and Birkenstocks. Three-year-old Amanda has free will, Belinda has told us, so why shouldn’t she be allowed to act on it? Amanda, as a result, is a holy terror. She once held a boy facedown in the sand until he promised to give her all of his Halloween candy, and it was only July. Belinda used to be a suit-wearing, office-going editor of a weekly business journal. I have a hard time imagining it, but apparently it’s true.
There’s Sam, as in Samuel, grandfather of Carter and part-time child care provider. We have never met Carter’s mother or father. The park is obviously not their thing. Sam provides a much needed dose of testosterone in our den of estrogen. He does a good job keeping us from turning into a bunch of clucking hens, at least on the days that he and Carter join us in the park.
And there is Avery, my best mom friend. I didn’t actually know people could be this nice. In my experience, the nice people were always after something. Even in states of extreme sleep deprivation, I’ve never heard Avery say an unkind word about anyone. Her daughter is the most refined three-year-old I’ve ever met. She meets us at the playground gate.
“Hello, Mrs. Hamilton,” she says.
“Hello, Sophie,” I answer.
“Come on, Theo,” she says, taking my little boy by the hand and leading him off into the mess of kids rolling around in the sand like puppies.
Avery is sitting on a bench. She waves me over and I join her.
“I think Sophie is going to grow up to be a cruise director or a CEO. She likes to boss people around,” she says.
“At least she is polite about it so you don’t resent that you are being told what to do. Besides, Theo will go with anyone, provided she or he has long hair and doesn’t object to him taking the occasional bite of it.”
Avery laughs. “So what’s new?”
Well, I want to say, I just got this phone call from my old boss, from back when I used to be a spy, see? It seems he wants to have a chat. Now, that would be all well and good except members of the USAWMD don’t pay social calls. They generally have no friends and no lives, so social calls aren’t necessary. Anyway, I’m retired but now he wants to see me and I don’t know why, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going to like it.
Instead, I say nothing is new. Things are quiet. The usual. We watch the kids play. They are building a tower out of sand and water, and Theo’s recycled plastic adventure people and the Matryoshka dolls are BASE jumping from the top.
Sometimes I have flashbacks. Normally, in my memory, I’m pretty good at keeping my nine years with the USAWMD down to a constant yet dull hum. But sometimes a certain smell, say the exhaust from a passing bus or the way someone is walking down the street, will bring it all back into razor-sharp focus. Watching Theo and Sophie and Owen, I remember Simon Still bleeding in a back alley in Budapest.
“I’m going to die,” he said. I knelt over him, covering his wounds as best I could with my knockoff designer scarf. “You know what to do when an agent dies, don’t you?”
“I didn’t read that part of the manual, Simon. Sorry. So I guess I’m going to have to leave you here on the street, let the rats have at you.”
He smiled through his pain. “Bitch,” he said.
“I might really die.”
“Stop being a baby,” I said, his blood soaking through my fingers. “Nobody dies from a gunshot wound.”
“I can’t even laugh at that,” he said.
“Who wants to kill you?” I asked, tossing aside the bloody scarf. I pulled off my jacket, covered the bullet holes, and leaned on the whole mess as hard as I dared. Simon groaned.
“Everyone.”
“But no one knows we’re here. We’re not even supposed to be here,” I said. I tried to ignore the blood soaking through my jacket, forming little pools around my hands. “We’re supposed to be in Madrid.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Simon said through gritted teeth. “Get used to it.”
I called for an ambulance and got Simon to a local hospital. They wanted an explanation. I shouted at them hysterically in French until they couldn’t stand it anymore and gave up. After they patched him up, the doctor, very slowly in very elegant French, explained to me that they needed to keep him for several days on account of the large bullet holes in his chest, but that was out of the question. In the end, I simply wheeled him out the back door when no one was paying attention and onto a transport back to the States.
When I finally came home after a useless three weeks in Budapest, Simon was back to work, still a little pale and moving slowly.
“We were not even supposed to be there,” I reminded him again. I’d had a lot of time to think about what happened while I was wandering around Budapest eating cucumber salad and accomplishing nothing. “We were supposed to be in Madrid.”
Simon ignored me, rearranging the yellow and pink Post-it notes on his desk. Now, a smart person would have accepted his silence on the matter and moved on. But not me. No. I had to keep at it.
“Do you think there is a rat?” I asked, which turned out to be the wrong question altogether.
Simon made that clear by sending me to Yemen for the worst assignment I’d ever had. Sand reminds me of Africa. Hostile acts, like throwing innocent recycled plastic adventure people and cute Russian dolls off of sand towers, remind me of Africa.
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