by Jamie Mason
The awkwardness of the announcement, the expense of the whole thing, then the naturally following concern that we were throwing money at a problem that didn’t have a solution for sale, it would set anyone on edge. That must be it. Any reasonable person would rehash the discussion and turn the scenario this way and that, in hopes that a new facet would catch the light and make some sense. I wasn’t being weird. It was normal, all this obsessing. And as “normal” usually did, this time it didn’t fix the worry even a little bit.
But like all ear-burrs, the nearly continuous playback of the argument rubbed off eventually. I stopped rewinding and replaying the conversation. I was able to blank daydream at stoplights again. The song faded away, but I would always know the lyrics by heart.
19
Friday
I’m trying to imagine the ride back down this road. Or more likely, I’m only stalling, still sitting here with the car idling the gas away. I twist the key and kill the engine and the silence rolls over me like syrup, rising into every space. My ears fill with quiet. It slides down my throat. I can’t breathe. I’m drowning. It’s so heavy. The conch shell roar of the blood in my veins takes over, a tidal sound. I’m not deaf. I’m not drowning. I’m treading water. I can do that. I’m an expert.
I’ll wait for my hands to feel more under my own direction and my heartbeat to steady out to a canter. I just need a little while longer. I’m a mess. But, I do wonder how I’ll be on the way out of this. Will it be in twenty minutes, empty-handed and none the wiser? Maybe an hour. Two? Or will all of this take so long that I’ll be wheeling these turns in the dark, head full of answers, heart full of . . . what? And will I be alone, barreling back to what I know, home and husband, on this road that will look just as alien going the other way as it does now?
I always watch my route carefully wherever I go. I never sleep on planes or in the passenger seat of car trips. For me, the travel isn’t a throwaway or a given. It’s the way back again if I ever wish to return, or it’s the route to avoid if I’ll never go back.
Patrick wasn’t wrong about my wanderlust. Of course, my mother’s journeys never came with photos to chronicle her stops, but the specific destinations didn’t matter. Because of her, I craved a headful of private travelogue, too—a whole world within, my own version of the world without.
Patrick and I had done some limited domestic touring, but vacations are expensive and there never seemed to be a good time. When I thought about where I wanted to go and what I wanted to see, I never admitted out loud that I most often imagined myself alone on Tower Bridge in London or peering through a screen of forest primeval from solitude in a deep green somewhere.
It’s not that I didn’t want to go places with Patrick. He was, or had been at some point, good company. It’s just that when I sketched out the daydreams, accidentally he wasn’t there, with no malice intended. The dream space to my left and right was open air, and my imaginary stride kept pace with no other legs.
Huh. Funny that. Thinking about not thinking of having someone with me has just twisted around on itself. I just imagined Buda Castle from Patrick’s travel brochures, the ones that should have thrilled me into planning mode, but had failed to do anything but worry me. The palace, flung long and looming along the Danube, is something I’ve always wanted to see from the Pest side of the river. I can summon the image at will. But this time there’s a ghostly outline next to me in my mind, a sketch of man, taller than my husband, wavy-haired. . . .
• • •
When I couldn’t make sense of Patrick, with his plans and his moods, my mind skipped tracks to the next man-puzzle within my reach. I typed in a string of Al Qaeda names culled from recent news articles and added in my mother’s name at the end. Then I put Brian Menary into the word soup for good measure. I hit Send to launch the search and got ready for work. At lunchtime, I took a book to the food court at the mall and waited.
“Don’t do that.”
I’d drifted deep into the plot of the novel in my hand, and Brian simply scared the hell out of me.
He took the chair across from mine, his starchy collar drawing a sharp, white line under his grimly set jaw. “It’s not funny.”
“I’m not laughing at that. I’m laughing at me. You scared me to death.”
“Do you know how much trouble that could have caused if your little summons had vaulted over my head?”
“Oh my God,” I said, trying for light mocking, hoping that it was somehow appropriate even though his face and his posture suggested otherwise. “Was my mother involved with Al Qaeda? Are you?”
“No. But linking all that up in an Internet search makes you sound crazy. It’s not just an algorithm, remember? It’s analysts, too. If they think you’re maybe just a little too curious about something, they send me. Curious is watchable. But crazy makes us have to do something, and if you’ll recall, I don’t do things anymore. A little weirder and you could have drawn down a different kind of surveillance altogether.”
“Oh, no. I didn’t think of it like that. I’m so sorry. I really—it won’t happen again.”
“It certainly won’t.” Brian slid a business card across the table.
“ ‘Hoyle’s Compounding Pharmacy and Alternative Medicine Center’?” I read from the card. “Huh?”
“Yeah, I’m an herb guru in my other life,” he deadpanned. “Either that or it’s a private voice mail that will route a message to my regular phone if, for some reason, you feel you need to reach me.” He shook his head at me. “Jesus, what happened that made you pull a stunt like that?”
“Nothing happened.” My cleverness had crumpled to mortification. “Shit, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to cause a problem.”
“You didn’t. You could have, but you didn’t. It’s okay. They sent the memo to me, thank God, since I was still out this way. Maybe I was too flippant when we talked before. I was just trying to put you at ease. My job’s not usually a big deal anymore, but it’s not exactly a joke either.”
“Brian, I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He sat back in his chair. “So, nothing happened, but you waved a red flag at the cyberbull to get my attention. Is this officially our first date, then?”
“What?”
“So that’s a no.”
“I’m married.”
“Well, sure, but you know . . . ,” he teased, and earned only blinking from me in response. “Okay, so that’s no, underlined. Right. Got it. What are we here for then?”
“Now I feel like an idiot. Let’s never mind the whole thing. I’m so sorry.”
“After all that? ‘Never mind’? You can’t be serious.”
I sighed. “Now it seems so wrong to ask you. It’s just that I’ve been kicking myself since the other day after we talked. I chickened out.”
“You chickened out?” His smirk had returned, full simmer. “What did you want to ask me that you didn’t have the courage to? Now I’m intrigued for sure. But I’m glad I already checked that this wasn’t a date.”
“No. It’s still not a date,” I said, unable to pry my eyes up off the tabletop. “I didn’t ask you more about my mother. That’s all. I just didn’t know what to ask.”
“Ah. Probably because I said that I didn’t know her very well. I’ve got nothing, really. I imagine you could tell me a lot more than I could tell you.”
“I know, but you’d been very open about why you were here and how the whole system works and the Tag Site thing and whatnot. You were talking. I should have asked for more—you for more information.” I was stammering. I bit down on the tip of my clumsy tongue and drew in a breath. “I just wanted to ask you about that night at least, about what she did for all those months when you came to get her.”
“I wasn’t with her on the trip.”
“That’s not the same as you not knowing anything.”
“I was only a messenger and her driver that night. Like I said, it was my first real assignment. I drove and I messenged and
then I drove again.”
“That’s it?”
“Of course not. But now I’m a little concerned about setting you off on another Googling frenzy.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t need to, Dee. There’s nothing to find. But it would be a little too pointed right now, after all this.”
“I understand.”
“Hmmmm.” He stared into me unself-consciously. “You probably do. Okay. Let’s see. It goes back a ways. Anyway, once upon a time—”
“You start your stories like that? My mother always did, too. So does my brother.”
Brian smiled. “It’s a spook thing, I think. Occupational hazard of sounding like a goof. But it’s like breathing to me now. I can’t seem to help it. Anyway, once upon a time, there was a very young, very green man-boy who dropped out of college because he was bored and heartbroken. A very cruel coed had dumped him for an upperclassman, and it left him not interested in studying anymore. In fact, it left him uninterested in doing much of anything except sleeping until noon, eating his way through his tiny little bank account, drinking way too much beer, and watching whatever was next on TV. None of that stuff pays the rent very well.
“So, the young man joined the army because he had seen too many movies. The young man had really not taken into account exactly how much he hated being yelled at. Very foolish, all the not thinking that boy did. He wasn’t bright. But he did have a talent. This boy was almost completely immune to jet lag. And he could stay awake for several days with very little adverse effect on his coordination and concentration.”
“Really? That’s your superpower?”
“Hey, don’t knock it. Staying awake never paid so good.” Brian laughed. “But it’s a trick. Like all magic, it’s just sleight of hand. I really do sleep. It’s just that, for some reason, I can doze very deeply for a minute or two—sometimes only just a few seconds, even while standing up. I can nod off practically on command and most people can’t. It can be helpful. In school it meant I could stay up all night playing video games. And in the army, their sleep-deprivation tactics didn’t really zonk me out like it did the other guys. Then they heard about it and came to see the Amazing Wide-Awake Man-Boy. They asked me if I wanted out of the army. To which I replied, ‘Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Three bags full of yes, sir.’ And before you know it, I was sent places and taught things.
“Then one day, in a galaxy far, far away, someone in charge came up to me and told me that they’d gotten some information and that there was an important asset, which by that time I knew was super-secret-agent codespeak for ‘person,’ who was going to be needing some on-scene assistance, and that I had to get there faster than some other people who were already on their way.
“And the rest, you know.” He laid both hands on the table as if there had been some sort of conclusion.
“You’re kidding, right? I don’t know anything. You just told me about you, not about her.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”
I sucked in my cheeks to keep the corners of my mouth out of a smile, but there was no winning with my left eyebrow. It arced right over at Brian’s grinning command. “And why would you be hoping that?”
“Even if this isn’t a date, you can’t blame a guy for trying to see if he can still impress. It’s such a drag. I never get to tell my story.”
“So.” I straightened down my eyebrow and set my face to unreadable. “Am I impressed?”
“Shit. Finally get a chance to try my game and I pick Annette Vess’s daughter to run it on.”
“That’ll teach you. So you can’t tell me anything about that night? Or you won’t?”
“Well, there’s not much to tell, really. I mean, I came to the house. I got there just ahead of who they were worried about, so that was good. And for a short, crazy while I helped out in any way I could. Which mostly meant cleaning up after she kicked a solid bit of ass. Then I put her bags in the car. She wouldn’t let me anywhere near you and your brother. I hardly did anything. And still I was thrilled. She was a legend.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, that was my part of it. I can tell you that she was absolutely furious with Paul Rowland and miserable to be leaving her children.”
“The fight in the house. It was bad, wasn’t it?” Having her send us out into the rain was terrifying. But coming home to a house full of charged air and broken things was the first mile marker in the distance between my mother and me. “It was like I could feel it still echoing off the walls. Did she kill somebody that night?”
Brian hesitated. “She wasn’t an assassin.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“The simple answer is yes. The full answer is not as harsh as all that, but it’s more than I can go into.”
“I knew it. I swear to God, I always knew it.”
“She had to do it.”
“What about you? Where were you? Why didn’t you stop it? Or why didn’t you help her?”
“Dee, it was all over, start to finish, in less than three minutes. But it was a hell of a long three minutes. A lot happened and I’m not an assassin either. I can only tell you that she didn’t have a choice. Let’s just say that sometimes people hire someone to do something, but there’s no way to guarantee that the type of person who’ll do one thing for money might not be prone to do other things as well.”
“Someone hired out to kill her?”
“Not at all. That was the ‘other things’ I was talking about. It’s just kind of hard to trust people who will do stuff for money that other people won’t. They aren’t what you’d call ‘stable.’ ”
“Where did she go? What was the—I don’t even know what you people call it. Mission?”
“I don’t know where she was headed or what she ended up doing for all that time. But it’s always been that way. I’m more useful the less I know. I got over being offended by it a long time ago and made a career out of being a clueless errand boy. I’m about as in-the-know as a Swiss Army knife. What I can tell you is that her trip was fallout from a project from years before. A lot of that stuff is declassified now. You could probably read up on it yourself if you wanted to sift through a ton of bureaucracy first and then two tons of old paperwork after that.
“But I know it was some sort of loose end from her big show. It’s the one that made her famous. It was called Operation Little Miss Muffet.”
It stung. Of all that I knew of her and all that I suspected of her throughout the years, there was no doubt that my mother was a force. The reckoning kind, wickedly smart and endlessly capable. I welled up with a pride for her and a belated protectiveness, and a disgust for the rampant sexism that allowed them to tack a cute, dismissive tag on her best work.
“Unreal,” I said. “Were they really that small? Were they that threatened by her? It’s so petty. It’s disgusting is what it is.”
“Huh?”
“With as good as she was—and you know that she was—the code name they gave her was Little Miss Muffet? Really? You actually think that’s okay?”
“What? I don’t— Wait.” Then, Brian burst out laughing. “Oh, God. She wasn’t— Oh, no. That’s not what they called her. As if! No, no, no. Her handle was always Spider.”
Along came a spider who sat down beside her . . .
My chin dropped, and the perpetually thirteen-year-old girl inside me, the one stubbornly bereft for the mother who had tried so hard to prove that she was there all along, that girl swooned away.
My mother had always been particular about spiders. She’d sift a fly’s guts through the mesh of a swatter or squeeze a millipede into a crumpled Kleenex without fanfare. I even once saw her whip a wasp clean in two with the flick of a dish towel. The antennaed head and foresegment fell at her feet, and its striped, barbed back end, still throbbing, hit the linoleum a full two yards away at my feet as the whip snap echoed off the kitchen walls. She and I split a root beer in celebration of the coolness of that one.
“Freer than me,” she always said while sliding away the postcard she had clapped over the rim of the glass. The postcard was actually the Postcard; the one I had shown Patrick so recently from the stack of keepsakes in the spare room.
She kept it in between the cookbooks on the kitchen counter specifically for spider-wrangling. When called for, one of us would fetch a glass and the Postcard, a race that was always worth a point to the winner. Whichever of us hadn’t got the postcard ended up serving as doorman for the spider, hoping for a chance at a bonus point.
My mother would often say “freer than me” in one of the many languages she had learned the phrase. The point on offer was earned for correctly naming the language.
The summer Simon was ten, he packed cheerfully enough for two weeks away at Adventure Indian Camp. Five days in, a glossy postcard arrived in our mailbox. The picture was of the log-and-chinking camp store, authentically inauthentic with a split-rail perimeter, a carved wooden Indian chief, and a row of fiberglass canoes leaning against the sunlit wall. My brother’s widely spaced handwriting decorated the back—Freer Than Me was all he’d written.
My mother was not a crier, and by the time I found her howling and clutching Simon’s card, it was difficult to tell how much of the noise and the tears were from laughing and what percentage was just in sympathy and love for Simon. She was ruined and wrung-out at the end of the fit. She rescued him from camp the next day.
It became one of our little family codes then, another in-joke to bind us close. Wherever and whenever we traveled apart, all throughout our lives, we’d send home a freer than me postcard, regardless of whether the truth of the trip was that we were having a great time or slogging through a fraught disaster. Each postcard was slotted into place with the others, between the cookbooks, ready for the next rescue mission.
