Spy Mom

by Beth McMullen

  “The last time I asked you to pick up something at the dry cleaners,” Will says, “you told me to fuck off. You said that you would raise my child, cook my meals, do my laundry, and make my bed, but you were never going to pick up my dry cleaning come hell or nuclear holocaust. Those were your exact words. Believe me, I remember. So why don’t you tell me what is going on?” I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. I squeeze Theo a little tighter. Pauline is behind me, completely still. I feel a small trickle of blood run from my nose.

  “My God, Lucy. You’re bleeding. What the hell is going on?” Will clenches his fists. The muscles along his arms ripple under his shirt.

  From here, it could go like this.

  I could stand up as tall as possible, fill my lungs like I’m in a yoga class, and on the exhale tell Will that I was a spy for the United States Agency for Weapons of Mass Destruction for nine years. I could tell him my real name, the one I have not heard since I walked through the doors of the USAWMD underground. I could tell him other things, too, things like how it feels to run for your life or to kill someone. I could tell him that the only two people worth living for are right here in this room, and I would do anything to protect them. And I do mean anything.

  My confession would most likely be followed by a dark silence. A small, strange smile would flicker across Will’s face, one that I have seen before. His eyes would dance and jump, unable to meet mine.

  In that pause, that silence, my life would slip away. There would be nothing left but the wreckage.

  But it doesn’t go like that. Not today anyway. Instead, it goes something like this.

  “We went to the playground after I talked to you,” I say finally, wiping the blood on my sleeve. “I took one of those metal swings right on the bridge of my nose. Pauline here was kind enough to drive us home. I was a little dizzy.” Pauline nods vigorously in agreement.

  Will looks at me and I force myself to meet his gaze. It’s not easy. He knows I am lying, but I don’t avert my eyes. Neither of us move. The only sound comes from Theo’s muffled snores.

  “Well, then,” Will says, dropping his eyes, surrendering the round, “why don’t you give me the boy and get some ice for your nose? Pauline, it was nice meeting you.”

  Will takes Theo from my arms and sweeps by both of us toward the stairs. I can feel the chill trailing him as he moves away.

  Pauline puts her arm on my shoulder. I shrug it off. I don’t need sympathy. These have all been my choices.

  “It will never end,” I whisper, not necessarily to Pauline.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I’ll get you an ice pack.”

  Maybe the icy fist closing around my heart is enough.

  40

  I have been sitting on the steps since midnight, wearing the same clothes I almost died in earlier, the blood on my sleeve now brown like dirt. It’s a dark night but clear, and I can see the stars twinkling overhead. I pull my down jacket tighter around me and I wait.

  A black Mercedes sedan the size of a city block pulls up to the curb. A liveried driver slides from behind the wheel and opens the rear passenger door. Like royalty, Blackford steps out.

  “You’re waiting,” he says.

  “I thought you might decide to double-check whether or not it was the real lily,” I say. “It was.” We both understand the magnitude of what happened on the bridge. The muscles in his face tighten almost imperceptibly. The lily is gone.

  “I’m glad you got out of the spy thing, Sally,” he says finally, giving me a cynical smile. “You still have so much hope for humanity.”

  And the way he says it, it’s like a slap in the face.

  “The professor?” I ask.

  “His job was to synthesize the lily in the lab,” Blackford says, his voice flat. “He failed. I no longer needed him.”

  I close my eyes. Malcolm is dead. I will spend the next week combing the papers for the story, but there will be nothing more than a single line in the missing persons section.

  “Before I go, a parting gift,” Blackford says, reaching into his jacket pocket and producing a white envelope, unsealed, which he hands to me. I don’t want to take it, but in the end I can’t help myself. I pull it open, enough to see a single faded Polaroid and a sheet of paper. There are three people in the photo. Two men and a woman, arms wrapped around each other, laughing at some unknown joke. It is summertime and they are wearing shorts and T-shirts and tennis shoes with no socks. The photograph is yellowed and worn but they still seem to glow with the power of possibility, of an unwritten future.

  It is easy to pick out my parents, although I cannot remember ever seeing them so carefree. They are frozen in time, their shine not yet tarnished by the hard work of living.

  The third person stoops down beside them, his bony knees bent to ensure his head isn’t chopped off in the picture. Without his heavy overcoat covered in new snow, I barely recognize the man at the door, the one I was not supposed to talk to. But as he comes into focus, the pieces start to fall around me like hail. How could I have been so blind? The tall man is Director Gray.

  And suddenly I understand that Blackford is not here to kill me because this, what he has just done, is so much more fun.

  “Maybe we are not so different after all,” he says, watching my face, waiting to see what it will reveal. But I give him nothing. He will get no satisfaction from my shock.

  “Good-bye,” Blackford says. “For now.” As he disappears into the darkness of the car, he murmurs my real name, the one I was born with, over and over like a prayer. I want to shout after him. I want to understand him, but in the end he is simply shades of gray.

  And, anyway, it is time for me to go back inside.

  Acknowledgments

  There are so many people who contribute to the creation of a book, directly and indirectly, that it seems an impossible task to thank them all. But I’m going to try anyway.

  First, thank you to my agent, Leigh Feldman, for reading this manuscript instead of watching the Super Bowl, and agreeing to take it on. Everything flows from that.

  A profound thank you to my editor, Barbara Jones, at Hyperion, for her carefully considered ideas and suggestions, all of which made this book infinitely better. I’m indebted to the team at Hyperion for their enthusiasm, experience, and overall brilliance. They have made this process a pleasure on so many levels.

  This book never would have seen the light of day without the four degrees of separation of Sheri Belafsky and Emily Birenbaum, and for that I am eternally grateful. I also owe a big thank you to my first readers, Debbie Anderson, Sheri Belafsky, and Peter Belafsky, for being kind and not telling me to go out and get a real job.

  Thank you to my parents, Henry and Eva Von Ancken, for a love of storytelling in all its forms, and to my brother, David Von Ancken, for always going first and making the scenes of mayhem far more realistic.

  I also have to acknowledge the folks at Peet’s Coffee for letting me stay longer than I should and never looking at me like I was crazy for swatting at the flies with my flip-flop.

  And of course, thank you to Max and Katie for keeping my feet on the ground and reminding me that a book deal, while very cool, does not excuse me from making lunch and playing Legos. And to Mike, without whom there would be no book and no point. Let’s just keep walking through this world and see what happens.

  Finally, to my readers out there, I have had so much fun living in this world. I hope you have fun here, too, because in the end that is what it is all about.

  DEDICATION

  To my parents,

  Henry and Eva Von Ancken

  Prologue

  The memory is framed in the fog of dreams, as if it has no true beginning and no end. I want to reach out and grab her, the little girl with the long hair, snarled and knotted, and the bright blue eyes. I want to make her safe but I can’t close the distance. For now, I can do nothing but watch.

  She wears a
hand-me-down parka that was probably red in its prime but has turned the color of dishwater. It is many sizes too big and her three-year-old body almost disappears in the folds of fabric. In her lap she holds a brown paper sack containing the most important of her worldly possessions.

  “She can take only what fits in that bag,” the tall man said, casting a quick glance around the single room that was her home. “Everything else stays behind.”

  In the sack, there is a yellow teddy bear with a limp purple bow around his neck, an illegal translation of The Cat in the Hat, worn at the spine and water stained, and a pink hairbrush that at one time had rhinestones imbedded in the handle. But like so many things in her short life, the rhinestones are by now lost to history. She clutches this sack with such ferocity that others on the train notice her white knuckles and wonder what might be hidden inside it.

  Sitting next to her, on this overnight train from Norilsk, is the tall man. He wears a dark wool overcoat that smells faintly of wet dog. It is January and they waited for the train in a heavy but ordinary snow. She thought he might pick her up, lift her out of the wet Russian snow, but he was no better than a statue standing beside her while her little shoes soaked through. It will be days before she can feel her toes again.

  When he arrived at the tiny house to get her the day before, he looked her up and down as if he were considering a purchase. Then, without a word, he sat down at the scarred wooden table and accepted a chilled glass of vodka from the men who had come before him.

  The girl noticed his hands shook as he lifted the glass to his cold lips. She wanted to cry but knew her mother would be disappointed if she did, so instead she simply sat in the corner, holding on to the bag for dear life. It was all she had left.

  They ride on through the night. She sleeps fitfully, sometimes waking up with her cheek pressed up against the man’s coat. It is scratchy against her young skin. Once when she opens her eyes, the man is staring at her. He immediately looks away, but she sees something in his eyes—something her young mind can’t place. She has the sense that he doesn’t quite know what to do with her. He ignores her when they are awake, but in the night he takes off his overcoat and wraps it snugly around her. He whispers her name over and over while she’s asleep. It sounds wrong falling from his lips, tainted by his unusual accent. When her mother says her name, it is a song.

  In the morning, the guards come through demanding papers. As the man hands them two blue passports, she catches a glimpse of a photograph of a little girl. It could be her but it is not. She stays very still and quiet until the guards return the documents and continue down the train aisle.

  Sometimes, as they slice through the empty countryside, the man passes her dry crackers and cups of water. She is not hungry but eats the crackers and drinks the water because after she does, the man looks satisfied. It is better than the other look he has which is vacant, as if someone reached into his chest and yanked out his heart and he can’t understand why his body is still going on.

  After a while, they depart the train and climb into an old waiting Jeep. The rugged terrain rattles the girl around in the backseat. She is aware that over the past few days she has become nothing more than a bag of loosely tied bones. She is hollow, the space in between the words.

  Once, during the ride, she reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out a photograph of a ballerina standing at the barre in pointe shoes and a pale pink tutu. Her long swanlike neck tilted slightly to the right to reveal muscles most people don’t have, she does not smile. The girl holds the photograph close to her face on the off chance that she might somehow absorb the woman right into herself that way. After a few seconds, she hides it back in her pocket.

  They park in front of a farmhouse. It is winter but two horses are out in the pasture, looking forlorn in ankle-deep snow. A young woman wrapped in a heavy coat waves from the front porch. Her husband joins her. They are smiling. The woman runs to the Jeep, sweeps the girl out of the backseat and into arms that are strong and warm. She smells of vanilla.

  “She’s yours now,” the man says to the woman. “For as long as we can.”

  The woman locks eyes with the man as he ducks back into the Jeep. As it pulls away, the girl remembers the paper sack, still in the backseat. She feels a scream crawling up her throat, the tears threatening to spill. But she pushes them back down. Her mother told her not to cry, never to cry, and she won’t. Maybe not ever again.

  I wake in a puddle of sweat, my hand clamped over my mouth to keep the scream from escaping. Beside me, Will sleeps peacefully. I hear Theo’s soft snores coming from his room down the hall. He is perfect, safe, but I need to see him with my own eyes, just to be sure. As I stumble down the dark hallway, remnants of the memory cling to me as if I walked through the sticky web of a black widow. The threat of the scream lingers in my throat. The dream used to show up once in a while, infrequently enough that I could write it off as an aberration. But now she comes all the time, the lost little girl in her red parka who will spend her life wondering who she really is and where she came from.

  And I know this, because she is me.

  1

  I stand in the middle of my postage stamp–sized backyard and spin in a slow circle. If you didn’t know better, you might think I was reliving the glory days of a Grateful Dead concert, strains of “Touch of Grey” playing in my head, eyes closed in a semi-hypnotic state.

  But things are not always as they appear. I am really quite busy. As I turn, I examine the perimeter of the fence, the roofline, the little space under the stairs that is always infested with spiders. I inventory the flowers and trees and shrubs. I study the plastic baseball bat tossed haphazardly on the grass, the small wooden play structure, the empty water table. I continue to spin.

  After a minute, I have to admit there is nothing amiss. It’s simply another lovely San Francisco morning, the sun is shining, the fog is rolling back toward the ocean, and everything appears to be perfectly fine.

  But don’t get me wrong. Just because I don’t see anyone in my backyard does not mean they aren’t there watching. They are always watching. I used to think I was paranoid but as it turned out I wasn’t crazy, just right.

  Five-year-old Theo appears in the open back door.

  “Mom, I’m hungry. When’s breakfast?” At the top of the stairs, he stands with his hands on his hips, looking down at me with disapproval.

  “You didn’t squish our castle, did you?” he says. “Me and Zach worked on it yesterday for, like, one hundred years.”

  I look down to discover I’m standing in the middle of the sandbox, among a series of sliding sand ramparts decorated with twig and leaf flags, and manned by Lego guys with tiny plastic guns. In one hand, I hold a bag of garbage intended for the trash bin, the reason I came out here in the first place, and in the other, a blue sand pail, uncovered in the grass on my way to the bins. Throwing out the trash turned into tidying up the toys, which led to looking for suspicious characters lurking around in my backyard, and ended with me in the sandbox, spinning like a stoned and aging Deadhead.

  “The castle is okay,” I say, hoping Theo is too far away to see the damage. “How about we get started on breakfast for you?”

  Inside the house, stuck to the refrigerator with a Golden Gate Bridge magnet, is a list of Theo’s morning responsibilities. Theo’s preschool teacher told me that using the word “responsibilities” rather than “chores” to describe these tasks was better. I have no idea why and was afraid to ask for fear that any further conversation would reveal me to be hopelessly out of step with today’s underlying educational theories.

  Theo has three responsibilities. Number one—put on your clothes. Number two—brush your teeth. Number three—feed the cat. If he does all three, at the end of the week he gets two dollars. I think the list is reasonable, but Theo acts as if he is Sisyphus destined to push that damn rock up the hill every morning, just to be rewarded with it rolling back over his toes every afternoon. When I remind him o
f how many dollars he needs to save in order to buy that LEGO Star Wars set, the one with two Luke Skywalkers, he becomes much more focused.

  By the time I reach the kitchen, Theo is hard at work on task number three. He very diligently measures out scoop after scoop after scoop of cat food and adds it to the dish until there is a mini Everest of kibble starting to avalanche every which way.

  “I think that’s probably enough cat food,” I say to the back of his blond head. He shakes me off, a cocky rookie pitcher to his veteran catcher.

  “No,” he says. “I need to fill up the other bowl, too.” He is deliberate, on task. If he weren’t making such a mess, I would commend him on his effort.

  “But that bowl is for the cat’s water,” I point out. “All living things need water to survive.” He turns, looking at me as if I am a complete idiot.

  “I know that,” he says. “We learned that at the science table. But I’m making soup because Sprinkles likes soup. How do you spell soup?”

  I could argue but there’s no good way to win an argument with a five-year-old without someone ending up in tears, usually me. I spell “soup.”

  “S-O-U-P.”

  “S-O-U-P,” he parrots back to me.

  “And you’re responsible for cleaning up when you’re done doing whatever it is that you’re doing.”

  “No I’m not,” he says with total confidence, “because Sprinkles is going to eat it all up.”

  After which Sprinkles is going to build a rocket out of household appliances and fly to Mars. I mean, what are the chances? Outside the kitchen window, trees sway in the breeze. Theo continues to make a soggy brown concoction in Sprinkles’ water bowl. Sprinkles sits nearby, looking depressed.

  A brisk knock at the front door draws my attention. Out on the porch stands a UPS man, his face obscured by his trademark brown cap. As I open the door, I realize that while his cap is indeed the right color, it lacks a logo of any kind. A bolt of electricity shoots the length of my body as if I stuck a metal fork in the toaster.