Spy Mom

by Beth McMullen

  But would I have told him the truth if he asked me directly? And why didn’t he ask? There is a part of me that believes Will doesn’t want to know the truth, whatever it is. Because then he and I and this whole world we’ve created comes crashing down around us and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not be able to put it back together again.

  16

  When I married Will, I was more concerned about when I would have another opportunity to rip his clothes off and less about what normal married life actually looks like. I could not conceive a life with a house, a car, a couple of kids, roast beef on Sundays, and the like. I didn’t think there was any way a girl like me could live like that.

  And Will hadn’t exactly planned on a girl like me either. There were times when I would catch him staring at me and I swear I could read his mind. It went something like this: “Maybe I have taken this rebellion against my parents one step too far. Maybe I didn’t actually have to go for the gold and ask her to marry me.”

  Soon after I moved into Will’s condo, his ex-girlfriend Laura paid me a visit. As it turned out, I wasn’t that busy, having no friends to meet, no job to go to, and no belongings to unpack. She didn’t knock or ring the bell; instead, using her old key, she barged right in and found me sitting on the floor reading magazines. At first, I thought she was there to kill me, for thinking I could retire from the Agency or something crazy like that. But after a second I recognized her from the photos Will had discreetly hidden away when I first arrived.

  “So you’re it,” she sneered. I can’t be sure, but I’d put money on her having had a few martinis for breakfast. She looked around the place with distaste.

  “This place looks like shit,” she continued.

  “I’m Lucy,” I said, standing up.

  “I know that,” she hissed. “Everyone knows that. But I had to see the competition in person.”

  Competition? This was getting scary.

  “I will get him back,” she slurred. “No, that’s not exactly right. He will come crawling back. You’ll see. I mean, look at you, what are you really? Who are you? You’re nobody. William would not be so stupid as to marry someone who isn’t really anyone.”

  How right you are, I wanted to say. But instead I stood there, quietly, waiting for her to finish.

  Her tirade was obviously exhausting because before I knew it she was passed out on the couch. I called Will at the office.

  “Your ex-girlfriend is passed out on the couch,” I said.

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Do I sound like I’m kidding? Here, you can listen to her snoring.” I held the phone up to Laura’s slightly sagging mouth. “See? I’m not kidding. Is there a protocol I should follow for this situation?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Okay. I’m on my way.”

  I almost volunteered to take care of Laura myself, but I got the feeling that Will’s definition of taking care of someone and mine were vastly different. He arrived home thirty minutes later, but Laura still hadn’t moved an inch.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said, standing over her. “I thought we could deal with this as adults, but obviously I was wrong. What is she doing here? Did she say?”

  “She came over to check out the competition or something like that. Basically, I think she wanted to see who took her place in your bed. Morbid fascination maybe?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Will said, rubbing his temples as if the whole episode was giving him a splitting headache.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I said suddenly.

  “No, she obviously can’t stay here, but we have to wait for her to wake up.”

  “No,” I said, “I mean this, you and I, this isn’t going to work. I have no business being here. This is her house, her life. I don’t belong here.”

  Will rubbed more vigorously at his temples. All that rubbing made the hair on the sides of his head stick straight out.

  “God, Laura, you always were good at making things complicated,” he said.

  “And you,” he continued, taking me firmly by the shoulders, “I love you. I look forward to waking up now because I know the first thing I’ll see will be your face. I think about you all the time, every moment of the day, every second. Everything in my life is brighter, better, and that is because you are in it. Does that make sense? You belong here. With me. There is no question in my mind that we met on that dive boat in Hawaii because we were supposed to. We are meant to be together. That’s a fact.” Then he put those lips to mine and I thought maybe I could believe him, that maybe the doubt I sometimes saw in his eyes was all in my head.

  The next day the condo was on the market and Will put a bid on the place that I now call home. I still run into Laura on occasion. We both pretend not to notice one another, and life goes on without incident.

  Will and I make a good pair. He is calm, efficient, logical, and yet hopelessly romantic. He never lets the practical get in the way of the desirable. The truth is my experience with men before him was limited mostly to those I met while masquerading as someone else. In the occasional honest throes of physical passion, I had to work hard to remember what language I was supposed to be speaking. These relationships were doomed from the start. You cannot build a lasting foundation with someone if you cannot tell him your address.

  But on the flip side, this small fact made these relationships, if you can even call them that, very straightforward. There were no romantic entanglements to distract me, no obligations that I could not possibly meet. These men came in and out of my life, leaving nothing but the vague sense of having lost some time and the knowledge that on some level this was not the way it was meant to be.

  The first time I saw Will, his slow smile and the outline of his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, I felt something in me give. It started small like a ripple on a pond and grew, within the course of our morning dive, into a tidal wave. It was desire but not just the primal kind. It was the desire to read a magazine in my own bathtub with my own towels in my own house, and climb into my own bed with my own sheets, and pull my own comforter up to my ears, and sleep without the fear of waking up dead. It was a deep and suddenly painful longing for normal, even if I had no idea what that looked like. And for reasons beyond my understanding, it all centered on the man standing next to me, his wetsuit unzipped to the waist. I knew I was sunk.

  But I know what you’re thinking. That while Will knows my address, he does not know my name. How good or real can a relationship be if you are not telling the truth, if you are leaving out significant pieces of information about your past? This is a very good question and one for which I have no answer. With every day that passes it becomes less likely that I can tell Will about Sally Sin. It becomes more likely that telling him would destroy us, taking down Theo, who has done nothing more than be born to one very nice parent and one complete idiot.

  So I go around and around and get no closer to figuring out how to fix what isn’t right. Would Will believe me if I suddenly blurted out that I was a spy in my former life? He might find it easier to digest if I had Playboy Bunny on my resume. At least that is something that people actually do. No one is actually a spy.

  And now this. I have put my family in danger by being me. Even if everything turns out fine, which it never does, I will never forgive myself for bringing us so close to the line.

  What I want now that I’m in this mess is to do something. Action has always been my drug of choice. During my first five years with the Agency, I was on the road twice as much as the next guy. I couldn’t sit still. I wanted only to keep going, keep up the momentum. Simon said that either I suffered from an obsessive-compulsive travel disorder or I was the most dedicated patriot he had met, on account of what I was willing to do for my country. Truth be told, it had nothing to do with my country. I liked it well enough. With the exception of a secluded beach in Thailand, I hadn’t been to any other places I actually wanted to live, but that wasn’t what drove me. I was running hard and fast. A
way from whom, I couldn’t say, and toward what, I had no idea. But the Agency provided the perfect way for me to barrel down the highway, bypassing the exits to introspection and self-evaluation.

  On September 11, 2001, I was drinking coffee at a sidewalk café in Rome, watching a young priest take his coffee several tables away. What I knew that no one else drinking coffee on this fine afternoon did was that the priest literally had state secrets up his voluminous sleeve. I was at that moment enjoying my coffee and contemplating how I was going to relieve him of those secrets. I had not come up with anything even remotely worthy of a plan when the whole square suddenly started to buzz. Information turns us into systems, and this system existed to funnel bits and scraps of the strangest things to my ears. Towers, planes, fire, falling, smoke, collapse. Everyone started rushing around going nowhere, and before I could stop him, my priest disappeared into the crowd. But I didn’t care. I could find him again later. After all, I knew where he lived. What I really needed to know was what the hell was going on. I stepped inside the café and inquired of the owner, who pointed to the television in time for me to watch the second tower collapse to the ground in a deadly rage of smoke and dust. I actually gasped out loud, a very English “Oh my God,” slipping from my lips. The café owner shot me a surprised look.

  “American?” he asked, curious and confused.

  “No,” I said and slipped out of the café without further conversation. On the street, the crowds were growing, people unsure of what to do taking solace in the fact that nobody else seemed to know what to do either. Starting to panic, I pulled out my phone and called Simon.

  “This is not a good development,” he said without preamble. And I felt my heart sink, heavy and fast.

  “Simon, how did no one see this coming?”

  “Well, that’s a fine question, Sal, and one we will all be called upon to answer, that I can assure you. What is going on there?”

  “Nothing,” I said, glancing around the crowded square. “Everyone is sort of mulling around looking freaked out. I lost the priest in the chaos. Where are you?”

  “New York,” he said, “Ground Zero actually. I left the building about twenty minutes before the planes hit.” Another wave of dread washed over me.

  “Simon,” I whispered, “what were you doing there?”

  “Nothing in particular, Sally. Sightseeing.”

  I could hear shouting and noise in the background, yet Simon sounded cool as ever. Three thousand miles away, I shivered in the fading afternoon sun.

  “We’re going to war over this. Are you ready to go to the desert, Sal?” I held the phone away from my ear, not wanting to hear what came next, and let the sounds of the square wash over me. I wish I were someone else, I chanted slowly to myself, like Dorothy in her ruby red slippers. Except I didn’t want to go home. Instead, I wanted to vanish forever into the body and life of any other person. Suddenly, I glimpsed my priest moving along the outer edge of the square, heading toward an alley.

  “Have to go, Simon. See you when I get back,” I said, flipping the phone shut and starting out after the priest.

  As I followed him down the quiet back alley, I wondered how it was we could have suffered such a breach in security. I wondered about Simon’s involvement. I wasn’t paying attention, moving along in a fog and thinking about the mess that was sure to be coming, when the priest stepped out from a recessed doorway and grabbed my arm. I wasn’t all that surprised. It seemed fitting that today, of all days, I’d fuck everything up royally.

  “Why are you following me?” he asked in broken Italian.

  “I think you know why,” I replied in Portuguese, which I took to be his native language. He almost smiled.

  “It would be better for you and everyone involved if you didn’t, you understand?”

  “Yes, I do understand. But unfortunately, I can’t stop. You’ve been up to some nasty tricks for a man of God.”

  The priest snorted at that one. “Man of God, please. It is all hypocrisy. Me saying I speak for God. You passing moral judgment on my actions. The whole world is falling apart.”

  He had a point, but that did not make him any less of a thief.

  “I don’t care why you are the way you are,” I said. “Maybe your mother neglected you as a child. Maybe you were born this way. All I want is what you have stashed under those robes. I think you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Why do you care what I do with these documents?”

  “Because innocent people always end up dead when these sorts of documents are passed around like Life Savers.”

  “Life Savers? I don’t understand you.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Candy. Passed around like candy.”

  “Innocent people die anyway. Look around you. It is the way of the world.”

  “Forgive me, Father, but I don’t think you are in any position to be telling me about the ways of the world. You lost that right when you stole from your leader.”

  I am not a religious person. I don’t identify with any of the world’s major religions, or minor ones for that matter. In fact, I don’t understand religion at all and as far as I can see the only thing it does is hasten the slaughter of people who generally seem to be minding their own business. But I had to admit, standing in that alley with this very naughty priest, I felt bad for the Pope. If he can’t hire reliable people, well, who can, really?

  “Who do you work for?” the priest asked, still gripping my arm a little too tightly.

  “I can’t tell you that. That’s not how this works.”

  “How does it work?”

  “You tell me who you are working for. I like that better.”

  “I think you are being smart.”

  “How smart can I be when I just got jumped by a priest in a dark alley?” I ask.

  “Not very. Now how do we proceed?”

  “You give me the papers you stole, I will take them, and we will both go our separate ways. I will, of course, have to inform your people about your extracurricular activities, but you probably already knew that.”

  “And why would I let that happen?” he asked, his eyes black as coal, his mouth twisted into a strange smile.

  “Because,” I said, reaching around to the back of my pants, “I have a gun and you don’t. Or at least I don’t think you do.” He released my arm and we stood staring at each other. I let the gun dangle down at my thigh. There is something unsettling about aiming a gun at a priest, even if he is not a very good one.

  “Yes, I see that you do,” he said.

  “Now, slowly open your robes and hand over the papers.”

  “What difference does it make? I’ve already committed the information to memory. What is to stop me from telling my employers what I know?”

  “Why are we having this conversation? Okay, there is nothing to stop you really because even though I would be totally justified in leaving you here in a bloody heap, I don’t think I can actually do it. So the only thing that will stop you would be your conscience. If you still have one of those. Sometimes getting caught is a good first step toward redemption.”

  He thought about what I said for a few moments. “Perhaps you are right.”

  “Listen, Father. You’re clearly new to this espionage thing, and you’re not very good at it, so why not go back to fathering or whatever. Leave the bad behavior to those with more of an inclination for it, like the politicians.”

  He gave me a little laugh, reached up his sleeve, and handed me an envelope.

  “I will pray on this event,” he said.

  “Oh, please,” I said. “And what is that worth?” But he was already gone. I thought about informing the Vatican that they had a traitor living among them, but in the end I didn’t. My revenge against Christianity? Maybe. Or maybe on that day I just wanted to believe in second chances. And I’m hoping, when this is all over, that Will feels the same.

  17

  Agent Nanny shows up at my house the next morning at 9 A.M. sha
rp. Mary Poppins she is not, dressed stiffly in khakis, a white button-down shirt, and a blue blazer.

  “This is not the FBI,” I say by way of greeting. She looks hurt.

  “I don’t have kids myself,” she says meekly.

  “Of course you don’t.” Not compatible with the professional responsibilities of a USAWMD Agent. I give myself a mental kick in the ass. This is not her fault. I extend my hand.

  “Lucy Hamilton,” I say. “It’s nice to meet you.” I can tell from her eyes she knows Sally Sin and she is intimidated and, at the same time, surprised to find that Sally Sin is barefoot and wearing dirty jeans with her hair pulled up in a messy ponytail. It never occurred to me I should do anything to protect my reputation as a superspy, being as I didn’t know I had a reputation to protect.

  “Can I get you some coffee?” I offer, trying to make amends.

  “Yes, please,” she says, looking a little more relaxed.

  “Sit,” I command, and she quickly pulls out a kitchen chair and plants herself in it. “Tell me about yourself.” She pauses. I can tell she doesn’t know if she should tell me the real story or the fake one, whatever it is they cooked up for this assignment. I help her out.

  “The actual one, please, not some Agency bullshit authored by Simon.” I swear she almost smiles.

  “This is my second assignment. I did some work in Canada last winter but that’s been it. I’m grateful for the chance to help out in this situation and, of course, to meet you.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “No, I really am. We hear stories about Sally Sin,” she says and catches herself. “Sorry. Simon told me I was not to call you that under any circumstances.”

  Simon, I think, you still get off on scaring the kids, you sick old man.