“Can I help you?” I ask. Giving me a flat smile, the faux UPS man takes in the scene: average-looking woman with messy hair, slightly grungy jeans, and flannel slippers with a hole in the toe. Ultimately, he decides I’m no threat. It’s not the first time I’ve been dismissed in this way.
“Special delivery,” he says, handing me a small box wrapped in brown paper. My name, with no address, is scrawled across the front in black Sharpie. Seeing the wide, loopy handwriting has roughly the same impact on me as falling through thin ice might. My lips move but no sound escapes, my arms move around with no apparent purpose. I lean against the doorjamb for support.
The man’s flat smile widens. I remind myself that fainting like Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind is no guarantee that the package will go away. If it were, believe me, I would already be in a heap on the floor, hoping for a rescue and some iced tea.
“What if I don’t want a special delivery?” I say finally, still propped up against the door.
“It’s kind of an offer you can’t refuse,” he says.
“I’ve heard that before,” I say. He passes me the package and I take it.
“Thanks,” I say. “I guess.”
“Good luck,” he says with a smirk. Down on the street, a black government-issue sedan awaits his return.
“That face isn’t necessary,” I say. “I was having a nice morning and now I’m not. Why don’t you go before I do something I can’t take back?” He gives me a small salute, jumps down all five front steps in one leap, and vanishes into the car. Theo appears at my elbow.
“Who was that?” he asks. “Hey, a package? Can I open it? Is it for me?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s for me. And no, you can’t open it.”
“You never let me do anything.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m an awful mother.”
Standing in the hallway, I peel back the paper from the package. Theo watches with great anticipation because, after all, a package is a package. Underneath the paper is a plain white box; inside the box is a black cell phone, with no screen and only a single button, nestled in a bed of crumpled up Washington Post. A note in the same loopy handwriting reads “Call me. Let’s have coffee.” I can almost hear him laughing.
I start to sweat.
“That’s not very cool, whatever it is,” Theo says, peering into the box.
“I don’t think it’s meant to be cool, Theo,” I say.
In fact, it is meant for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to connect me directly and securely to the mother ship. Now, if I were James Bond, this boring plastic phone would do much more, like simultaneously wash my sports car, fix me a nice cold martini (shaken, not stirred, of course), and bloodlessly dispatch the bad guy. But in real life, spy gear tends to be much more practical. And I should know. I used to be one.
A spy, that is.
2
On the surface, I look like your average stay-at-home mom. My jeans always bear some evidence of what we had for breakfast and I could certainly benefit from more frequent showering. But I wasn’t always like this. I used to carry a small handbag with room only for a fake passport, a ChapStick, and a small stack of foreign currency.
Now I carry an oversized shoulder bag stuffed full of anti-bacterial wipes, water bottles, crackers, a bulging wallet with VIP cards for every supermarket in a twenty-mile radius, and that same ChapStick, except I really have no hope of finding it once it sinks to the bottom of the bag. My doctor has recommended physical therapy for the damage the bag has wrought upon my innocent right shoulder. Some days it is hard to distinguish me from Quasimodo.
My name is Lucy Parks Hamilton, mother to Theo and wife to William Wilton Hamilton III. Right around the time we met, my husband started a green-energy investment fund that has done surprisingly well in the robust environment of guilt in which we live. Will is known for speaking with a hushed reverence about geothermal energy, solar cells, and a variety of recycling methods. Lately, it seems his commitment to saving the world is rubbing off on our child.
“Mom!” Theo will wail. “You put the newspaper in the garbage again. The planet loves you. You have to love it back!”
With that he will dramatically collapse on the floor, exhausted from having to manage my inability to properly recycle with his five-year-old vocabulary. My pleas for leniency fall on deaf ears. I’m trying to do better, to remember that today’s garbage might be tomorrow’s egg carton, but Theo does not give points for effort.
We live in a carbon-neutral household. My husband claims it’s a matter of credibility.
“I cannot preach the green gospel,” he says, “if I do not practice it.”
We have planted approximately five thousand trees in an effort to offset the carbon footprint of Will’s air travel. And I do my part by forgetting to wash the sheets for weeks at a time. When Will caught wind of it being polar bear week at Theo’s preschool, he sat Theo down and gave him a lecture on why polar bears were soon going to be extinct and why it was our fault, after which Theo cried hysterically for a solid hour. Will is very committed. Sometimes to a fault.
I run the continuous stay-at-home mom loop that includes the following stops: breakfast, playground, soccer, preschool, lunch, grocery store, snacks, laundry, dinner, more snacks, more laundry, books, complex LEGO towers and so on. The stops don’t necessarily occur in that order or, in fact, any order at all.
In the background, a soundtrack of low-level parent anxiety plays. Where should I send Theo for kindergarten? Is he eating enough vegetables? Will he be an early reader? Am I pushing him enough? Is he being tormented on the playground? Is he tormenting others on the playground? Are those gummy vitamins going to rot his teeth? How mad is he going to be that I didn’t wash his favorite Star Wars T-shirt so he can wear it for the fifth time this week, and how much do I care?
As you might expect, there are occasional seasonal variations to the soundtrack but the idea remains reliably constant.
I can speak extensively on a variety of useless mom topics, such as whether the lining of your soup can is going to kill you or how much Omega-3 fatty acid exists in the average cage-free egg. I search out wild-caught Alaskan salmon and organic blueberries and have been known to drive all over town looking for humanely raised free-range pork chops. It’s not entirely lost upon me that the humanely raised pig is still cut into little pieces and wrapped in plastic.
I’m proud to say I’m no longer intimidated by the prospect of having three or four of Theo’s friends in my house all at the same time. Had you suggested to me eight years ago that I’d be baking chocolate cupcakes with a bunch of sticky five-year-old hands in the batter, I’m not sure what would have shocked me more, the kids or the cupcakes. But then, I’m a long way from where I used to be.
Which was Nepal, Hong Kong, Morocco, Romania, Pakistan, a number of places that seemed to be comprised entirely of sand, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and several other members of the Stan family, and even the South Pole. Although the South Pole thing was more about punishment, specifically mine. Even now, ice cubes clinking merrily in a glass make me shudder and not in a good way. Once in a while, I went to exotic locations like tiny secluded islands in the South Pacific or in the Caribbean. But usually once I arrived, there was shooting and that took the fun out of it.
As it turns out, people shoot at you when you’re a spy. Maybe if I’d known I would have gone in for something a little less painful, like being a Walmart greeter perhaps—but it’s not as if they tell you about the shooting part up front. By the time I figured it out, it was too late. And for nine years, there I was, Agent 26, aka Sally Sin, a covert agent for the United States Agency for Weapons of Mass Destruction.
As you probably already know if you watch the news, read the papers, or Google “the end of the world,” the USAWMD is comprised of a bunch of white-shirted, loafer-wearing analysts sitting around trying to figure out who has the biggest ill-gotten nuclear arsenal and when they plan on using i
t. Or selling it. It’s not an easy job. Terrorists are fickle, changing their minds as often as a teenage girl changes her clothes.
What they aren’t telling you in the news is that buried under all those conservatively dressed analysts is a small group of covert agents who, if you ask anyone directly, don’t exist. These are the people trained to ferret out elusive information, the name you need to bring down the house of cards. Their work is not always pretty. Sometimes it’s just a big fucking disaster.
However, the important thing to remember is the covert agents of the USAWMD are always out there trying to stop our global march toward annihilation. When it works, no one knows. When it doesn’t, it’s always very loud.
I was recruited out of college because I have a unique gift for languages. Give me two weeks and a couple of Berlitz books and I can basically master any language you throw my way. When I was five years old, a young Brazilian man worked for a summer painting our house and barn. He loved to tell jokes while up on his ladder and by August, I could speak Portuguese as well as I could speak English. My parents’ discovery of this was followed by many whispered conversations after I was thought to be in bed. Eventually, we all agreed it would be better if I kept this gift to myself.
Or they agreed. I just kept soaking up the words. While the other kids were reading books overflowing with preteen angst, I would be under the covers with a flashlight and the Swahili-English dictionary. To this day, I have yet to meet an esoteric dialect I could not decode. The words are water and I am the tap.
Simon Still was my boss at the Agency and his main goal in life, after trying to save the world, seemed to be sending me into situations where I was sure to come home in a body bag. It was the sort of thing that made it hard for us to build a lasting friendship. Simon was peculiar in a number of ways. Although he was perfectly at home in a room full of lunatics with twitchy trigger fingers, at the sight of blood he would turn so pale you might confuse him with the undead.
“Sally, you’re bleeding,” he said to me once on a dark, deserted street in Sofia.
“I know, Simon,” I said, squeezing my arm tightly through my jacket, the warm blood running down the inside of my sleeve. “That’s because there’s a bullet in my arm. Remember?”
“I know. It’s dreadful,” he said, turning his back so I could bleed to death in private. No one ever accused Simon of possessing a good bedside manner.
I’ve seen Simon in the jungle where it’s one hundred degrees and humid, looking as if he just walked off a photo shoot for Icelandic Airlines. I’m not sure how he does it. Actually, I’m not sure about anything when it comes to Simon. Because although we spent long stretches of time together over many years, I still know next to nothing about him. Except that he will do anything in the name of his country and he does not send me presents unless he wants something. And it usually isn’t coffee.
Nobody knows about Sally Sin, including my husband, child, and closest friends. That was part of the deal I made when I joined up. Of course, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, a secret identity seemed kind of cool and not that big of a deal. I’m sure somewhere in the fine print it mentioned that my commitment was, technically, forever in nature, but who reads the fine print? There are too many other fun things to do than bother with the details.
Also nestled in the fine print was the Agency’s right to call me back into service whenever they felt it necessary. The last time they activated me was two years ago and I made such a mess of things I secretly hoped they wouldn’t dare try it again. Maintaining a secret identity in real life is hard and I’m not sure the secret part of it would survive another activation. But the Agency doesn’t care about that. They just want me to be quiet and do as I’m told, like I said I would. So I do. I have no interest in finding out what happens if I don’t.
There are other reasons for keeping quiet too. Being a spy is not like being a surgeon or an airline pilot, professions you might brag about while waiting around for preschool pick-up.
“Lucy, did you ever kill anyone?” the other moms would ask in that hushed tone usually reserved for inquiring if the disease is terminal.
“Yes,” I’d answer, “but only because they tried to kill me first.” At this point, my friends would resemble those drivers who rubberneck the fatal traffic accident, horrified but unable to turn away.
My job now, in what I’ve come to accept is a chaotic world, is to keep Theo safe, to help him grow and learn, and eventually break the news to him that the Star Wars saga is all made up. And call me crazy but I have a sneaking suspicion that pressing the single button on the black plastic cell phone is not going to improve my ability to do any of those things.
And yet, I’m about to do just that.
3
I let Theo push the single button on the phone. If Theo ever becomes president, they might consider changing that notorious button we always hear so much about to a switch or a lever or there is sure to be a nuclear war. Theo has never met a button he did not want to push.
“Just once,” I say. He does it and looks at me with anticipation.
“Now what?” he says.
“Nothing,” I say. “Maybe go and play a little.”
“That was not very fun,” he says, but he takes the box the phone came in and begins to fill it with LEGO guys. “This will be their ship!” So maybe not all is lost.
I hold the phone up to my ear. There is never any proper ringing with these phones. They click and buzz and whine and in the dead silence that follows you can assume you are connected.
“You guys are getting pretty fancy with your gadgets these days,” I say into the phone.
“It’s a difficult time,” a voice responds. “In case you haven’t noticed, the world has become a bit untidy.” The voice is the same one I hear in my own head, berating me when I’ve done something incredibly stupid, like run out of gas or spilled bleach on my favorite black sweater. It is the voice of Simon Still.
“If the world is really that much of a mess,” I say, “you might try baby wipes. Unscented, of course.”
There’s a silence during which I can see him shaking his head in dismay. What on earth happened to Sally Sin?
“Constant vigilance might prove more effective,” Simon says finally. “How did Agent 34 do with his delivery?”
I’ve always wondered if the Agency recycled numbers or if, once an agent died or went off the reservation, their number was retired, like in sports. Is there another Agent 26 running around out there right now getting shot at? If there is, I’m not sure how I feel about it.
“Agent 34 was dreadful,” I say. “You’re lucky I didn’t break his neck just for being annoying.”
“He’s actually quite talented,” Simon says.
“I don’t care,” I say. “What do you want?” “Mom!” Theo shouts from the living room. “How do you spell ‘LEGO Guys’?”
“L-E-G-O G-U-Y-S,” I shout back. “And it’s two words.”
“Excuse me?” says Simon.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Are you speaking in code?”
“If I were, I would never tell you,” I say. With my back against the refrigerator, I slide slowly to the floor. “Criss-cross-applesauce” dances inappropriately through my head as I fold my legs over one another.
“You cannot still be upset about the bridge,” Simon asks, “can you?”
“You tried to kill me,” I remind him. “Twice.”
“It was two years ago,” he says, “and, besides, it’s bad for your health to hold a grudge.”
“Your concern for my well-being is touching. Now tell me what’s going on,” I say, “or I’m throwing this thing in the toilet.”
“I don’t think you mean that,” Simon says. His absolute confidence makes me want to scream but there is no denying he’s right. If I didn’t call, Simon would simply have shown up at my front door, uninvited and about as welcome as the Ghost of Christmas Future. He’s just that kind of guy.
“I mi
ght mean it,” I say, with enough bravado to save face.
“It’s waterproof,” he says, “and more importantly, we have a situation.”
“Mom, how do you spell ‘Luke Skywalker’?” Theo shouts.
“Oh, wow,” I say. “That’s a long one. L-U-K-E S-K-Y-W-A-L-K-E-R.”
“Why do you keep doing that?” Simon asks. “Are you listening to me? We have a situation. S-I-T-U-A-T-I-O-N.”
I take a deep, calming yoga breath that does little to actually calm me. Whenever Simon Still says we have a situation, it’s never because something good has happened, like you won the lottery or a lifetime subscription to Reader’s Digest. By definition, his situations are always bad.
“I’m retired,” I say. “Remember?” “Retirement is something you do after a lengthy and full career,” he says. “You didn’t retire. You quit. There’s a difference.”
A harsh red flush rises on my cheeks. Simon remains mad at me for a number of reasons. Primary among them, I suspect, is the fact that I had the nerve to quit the Agency at all. Nobody quits the Agency. You die or they kick you out, but you never quit. My departure is an asterisk on my record, a scarlet letter. Wherever he is, Simon clears his throat, indicating he’s about to tell me why my morning has gone off the rails before breakfast.
“It appears that Righteous Liberty has kidnapped Director Gray,” he says. “And, oddly enough, they insist they will negotiate his release only with you.”
My heart jumps in my chest, as if it is playing a vigorous game of leapfrog with my stomach. Charles Gray was the director of the USAWMD before I joined and after I left. During the nine years I worked there, I met the man just once, and during that meeting he made it clear how little he thought of me. We were not friends, Gray and I, so the pounding in my chest can come only from the implications of this situation.
Spy Mom Page 30