Milla rolled away until her forehead touched the wall. “Mom’s high.”
“She’s drunk.”
“She got pills from Bill,” Milla said. “I saw her.”
“She met Bill in rehab.”
“I guess she’s not cured,” said Milla and rolled back to her, watching, waiting, polite.
Natalia sat down. “Already?” She’d had a feeling that this time it would last longer.
Milla pressed her forehead to Natalia’s thigh. “What should we do?”
Natalia was still, then she crawled to the foot of the mattress and found Milla’s soccer shorts. “Put these on. We’re leaving.”
“We are?”
Natalia went to the door then turned. “Stay here. I’ll be back.”
She padded out into the blue sheen of TV. Bill, their mother’s new boyfriend, was slack-jawed in the sagging armchair. Maybe a man like him had a gun she might need. She checked the drawers, but in his kitchen thick with trash, she only found his keys. Through the open bedroom door, she could see her mother’s feet, something sticky gone black smashed to one heel.
Back in the bedroom, locking the door behind her, she opened the window, hoisting Milla out and lowering her onto the ticking grass.
In the trapped heat of Bill’s car, Milla kicked off her sandals, bouncing. “You think you can drive this?”
“I think so,” Natalia said, pinching her bottom lip, staring into the now cryptic black of the country road.
“But you’ve only done parking lots with Daddy.”
“When I start it, I’ll have to go fast.”
“You think they’ll call the police on us?”
“They’re on drugs,” Natalia said, thinking of the gun she didn’t have, of ways to get home, of how when their mother picked them up that morning she’d been the mother they couldn’t remember but had always wanted. Natalia found the lights and slid in the key. “Seat belt,” she said.
THE KALAHARI DESERT, 2002
Why do it to her? Why do it so fast? During her training, Natalia begged him to be patient. To teach her to wait without waiting. “Again?” she asked. “Okay. I’m ready.”
God, she was sore. All of inside. She was urine and sweat, but still she longed for water.
Better to be back in the box. Better the water dripping through the cloth over her face. At least then she had her clothes and wasn’t spread-eagle on a mattress. “Again?” she asked without ever seeing who she was asking. “Okay, hurry. I’m ready.”
When she was little, she always got cold in the ocean. Her lips would turn purple, but still she refused to get out. Because she loved to swim, to feel the force of something bigger all around. “Again?” she asked, or at least made that shape with her mouth.
Erik put a hand on her forehead. “I don’t want to hurt you. But this way nobody can.”
LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA, 2001
“Well, I’m not gonna pretend this is not the most bullshit thing—” The pause in this tirade was merely in order to wipe a fleck of melting butter from her pearls. Then their mother raised her knife, holding it up like a spear, eyeing both her daughters with something approaching dislike. “Why do you have to be so extreme, girl?” Waiting for no answer, their mother pointed with an oleaginous finger, “You like these? George gave them to me. Aren’t they gorgeous?” These pearls were then dangled over Natalia’s unmarred hollandaise. “Your father doesn’t seem to buy you anything chic so I have no idea what you’d wear them with but they’d sure look pretty on you, honey.”
Natalia stared mutely down at three strips of bacon unbroken on her gilt-edged plate, another present from George, who had more money than Bill, than Lon, than even Daddy.
“Talia, I know we’re all God’s creatures, but can’t you at least eat the yoke? It’s protein.”
“Mom, you know Natalia doesn’t eat meat,” Milla said.
“But look at those legs—like two strings hanging from your shorts.”
“I notice, Mother dearest, that you didn’t eat your yoke,” said Milla, eating everything but her crusts.
“I’m on a new diet. Now I don’t know but I’m not sure those refugees’ll have eggs in Kag . . . Kang?”
Natalia looked out the window.
“Kangwa. They’ll have eggs,” said Milla, unsure.
“Let your sister talk. They won’t have chickens cause they’re starving for the Lord’s sake. Honey. Talia. Look at me, honey. Look at me and not the dead pig.”
Milla reached across the table. “I’ll eat them.”
“Now you don’t need them, Milla! Girl, you are getting on my last nerve.” Their mother rearranged the bracelets down her arm, spacing them neatly. “Nossir, I am not lending my blessing to this saintly crusade.”
“She wants to help people,” said Milla, taking the pearls and winding them until they pinched around her wrist.
“She wants to be a martyr,” said their mother.
“I believe that qualifies as Jesusy.”
“Why don’t you just stay here? Didn’t you say you’d like to volunteer at a women’s shelter? There’s one in Lynchburg. One in Charlottesville too.” She elegantly sucked butter off the outside of her palm. “I have a hard time believing that your father of all people thinks this Kang-wah is safe. But then we are speaking of a diplomat that’s never successfully brokered a peace. Y’all think he’s a saint, but that man only thinks with one of his heads and it doesn’t have a cerebral cortex.”
Milla spat out her eggs. Natalia frowned at her, saying, “You know it’s too early to leave.”
“And I want y’all to meet George,” said their mother. “He’ll be back from work any minute. Look, if you want to travel we could go to Paris. Would you like that? That’s where George took me on our honeymoon. Just like Lon and your daddy. Talia, make eye contact. People are gonna take you for an Asperger’s. I am certain they got people in need in France.”
“A Saturday and he’s at work?” Milla said. “Have you ever wondered if he’s having an affair? With his intern mayhaps? I’m not saying for definite, but you’d be stupid to rule it out. I mean, Exhibit A, Dad.”
Natalia pushed away from the table and stood. “You win. I’m calling us a cab.”
On the train from Charlottesville to D.C., Milla picked her cuticles bloody. “I have decided to pawn Mom’s pearls. Yo quiero un new bike. How much do you think I’ll get?”
“We were supposed to take the three P.M. It’s only eleven. Now Daddy’s going to want to know why we’re home early.”
“He shouldn’t have made us come,” Milla said.
“It’s her birthday.” Natalia took their tickets from her backpack. “I guess I’ll tell him I felt sick.”
“Are you proposing you lie? Thou? What kind of dastardly—”
“Did you steal her Valium?” asked Natalia.
Milla held up a vial. “You perhaps refer to this? Did thou not witnesseth that they give her the shakes? I call it an act of grace.”
“What do they do to you?” Natalia tried to grab it.
“Fuck off.” Milla sat on the vial. “They make my scalp hot. Occasionally. If Mom does any more she’s gonna be in eternal pause.”
“Let me look at your hands. They’re bleeding. Milla, fine, I’m not going to take it.”
Milla held out her hands and Natalia wiped them off with the underside of her T-shirt.
“Maybe you’ll save some hot refugee’s soul.”
Natalia showed the passing train conductor their tickets. “They’re already Christian, dumbass.”
“But are they Faith Redeemers we ask ourselves?”
“Ask the pastor,” said Natalia.
“I don’t talk to that wolf in sheep’s clothing, that charlatan, that—”
“—Machiavel?” Natalia finished.
“I hope you know,” said Milla, “that I’m not ever going to Mom’s without you. She’ll have to wait till you come back.”
“It’s only for a year.” Na
talia leaned back against the hum of her seat, watching a tattoo of waves rippling around the bicep of a man in a bleached tank top weaving down the aisle, steadying himself on the headrests. “Maybe she’ll be sober when I get back.”
“I’ve never told you don’t go, did I? Nope, because I’m not like her. I would never do that. You sure you don’t want these?” asked Milla, whipping the pearls in Natalia’s face.
“Stop.”
“If you don’t want them I’m going to go between the train cars and throw them out. Because I don’t want them. Unless you want them?”
“Stop, Milla.”
“Do you want them?”
“Get out of my face.” Natalia snatched the pearls from Milla.
“See, you wanted them.”
WASHINGTON, D.C., 2001
The morning she was leaving for Kangwa, Daddy made her milk drowned over sugared coffee. It was in the dining room, before the sun before the airport before the refugee camp before the massacre before she was kidnapped recruited trained before she knew snipers before she knew checkpoints, Daddy lifted the heat-heavy hair off her forehead and asked if she was ready saying We aren’t going to wait because Milla is not coming down to say good-bye.
GUANAJUATO, 2005
In a night of steam, Natalia walked into the grim cantina and bought a Coke. Outside, dust swept over the road and the people were slick with heat. Her tank top, already sticking to her back, sagged under the haze of the cantina’s red and teal Christmas lights. She counted five men inside. They had a careless menace.
Erik was sitting at a sodden bar wide enough for three. In Copenhagen, he’d been in a tux, but here he was dressed in a T-shirt and khaki shorts stained above the knees. His blond hair was long and he’d grown a thick beard. He had come as Christien.
She walked by him, choosing one of the plastic tables facing the entrance and smoothing down her short hair. Immediately, he swaggered over with two tequilas.
“May I join you?” His blue eyes had gone small in the lean red bloat of his face.
“Of course, yes,” she said in Spanish.
“What is your name?”
“Anastasia, but everybody calls me Ana.”
They drank—the smell of meat frying on their skin—until the cantina emptied to the bartender and waitress. Uneasy, she’d been careful to pour most of the tequilas under the table and into the dark.
“Why don’t you come here.” He patted his lap.
She sat on him and he tipped her chin, looking into her eyes. “You must remain Ana.”
It was her first assignment alone. She had been living in a seedy hotel for days, constipated and unable to eat. Mosquitoes preyed on her, waking her every hour because she slept with the light on.
“I am,” she said, annoyed. From over his shoulder, she saw the bartender looking at her, a different bartender, she thought, than the one before.
“Ana is not Natalia. Cut contact with Arturo.”
She liked Arturo. “Okay.”
“Two blocks west is your new hotel. Room eleven. There is a key in your pocket. A nine-millimeter under the mattress. Do not leave the room until you hear from Victor.”
“Who’s Victor? It’s raining.”
“Your new source. Arturo is dead. You will have to run or get soaked.”
“What happened?” she asked though the death was as distant to her as if it had been committed centuries ago.
“He was beheaded,” Erik said. He looked like he hadn’t slept either. “You see why I tell you that you must be careful to remain Ana?”
Arturo had said he had a girlfriend who was pregnant. “Was it the cartel?” Now the baby had no father. “Who told them he was talking to us?” She swallowed a mouthful of tequila.
He shook his head, dismissive. “We will deal with them later. Give it no thought. Concentrate on the task at hand.”
But she was trying to remember Arturo’s girlfriend’s name. Luz? Liliana? It was a name she liked. The waitress was watching her.
He tilted back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “It’s getting late. You’re lingering.”
But like a child from its mother, she didn’t want to be parted.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m never far.”
“Why are you Christien?” she whispered into her tequila.
Erik’s laugh was coarse, amplified, detached.
“Mitt hjärta,”—two fingers traced Natalia’s spine—“he’s the one who puts them on the rack.”
BEIRUT, 2011
Natalia was nothing but a faceless body of about medium height stumbling toward the agents through the ruins of drooping concrete. A bad fit in a men’s oversized sweatshirt. Blood browning where there might have been a nose.
When the hood was removed and the hair from her eyes and the gag from her mouth, she produced a smile, which revealed that either in the explosion, or perhaps during the beatings, she had lost more than one tooth.
“Natalia Edwards?” asked the suit guiding her into the backseat.
She hesitated then nodded, her eyes watering. It had been so long since she’d heard an American accent; it sounded like a banjo. The driver was older, anonymous, monitoring both her and the road. The agent was young and sandy-haired, his scalp showing pink through his hair’s part.
He handed her a bottle of water and the van began to move away, perhaps toward the embassy. She closed her eyes, feeling him looking. She felt no real interest in the agent, even if he was saving her from the blandly unbearable pain of the police.
“Does my family know I’m alive?” she asked.
“The State Department has contacted your father,” he said. “Are you cold? We’ve got blankets in the back.”
She drank more water, swishing it around, tasting the dank iron of old blood, trying not to ask about Erik. “Is he coming to get me?”
“Well, that’s a little complicated, isn’t it, Ms. Edwards? Since you and your fellow consultants have been interfering with military operations.”
She turned back to the window, hiding her face, seeing what the sun had bleached.
“So of course,” the agent hurried on, “we have a few questions, before you see him, before we can let you back in the States, before—”
“—Before I get medical attention,” Natalia finished without turning.
She dropped the emptied water bottle. It rolled into the tip of the agent’s loafer. He gave a waspish, mechanical smile like an actor in a bad play.
PRESENT, WASHINGTON, D.C.
In the black-and-white picture, Daddy is squatting in the grass at the bottom of a green hill that photographed gray. His left arm is reaching to pet a monstrous cat. It is an unwanted advance. The sun has whited out his left side. Wite-Out, as in the corrective product, the pungent neon white paste that obscures but does not hide a mistake, and white out, the meteorological phenomenon where due to snow or sand the horizon is erased, no shadows are cast and one is blinded by white. Both of these are in effect.
In the future, depending on what artifacts remain, people might suppose him a saint, blessing the cat, absolving it of its sins in contrast to the grubby schoolgirl on his right, whose hand, also outstretched, is about to yank the cat’s head.
In this picture, Milla is little again. Her smile has more than a couple of gaps. She has a boy’s haircut: heavy bangs and shaved at the neck. The right side of her face, the side farthest away from Daddy, is in shadow.
Natalia’s not in it. But somehow she’s there. You just can’t see her.
BEIRUT, 2011
“Any other names, aliases?”
(Katya Durmashkina, Anastasia Ray, Lynn Feldman, Suheir Ali.)
“Do I need to repeat that?”
“Lawyer.” Natalia sat blindfolded and strapped to a chair.
“I apologize but I don’t think there’s any in town. Why were you tailing the boy? You might as well speak freely at this point. Your CEO, Erik Carlsson”—she heard the agent flipping through a file—“a
lias Viggo Hjort, Nils Tjader, Lucas Westerberg, Christien Thomsen, died in the explosion. Risk Control International has closed.”
“There he is,” Erik had said in her ear.
“Are you sure?” she’d asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Do it before he gets any closer to the building. Are you ready?”
Her neck ached as she’d leaned forward through the blown-out window. There was a place in her neck where she carried the day they’d met. A knot which sometimes slid to her shoulder. A hard, desert pain that would not be pushed out.
“Now,” her husband said.
All she had to do was shoot the boy with a bomb strapped to his back, the boy in the suicide vest. But she had not expected him to be beautiful. To be seventeen with God on his lips.
She went backward out of the room, down the stairs, through the front door until she was facing where the boy stood on the other side of the street. Through the traffic, the boy saw her, his eyes the color of the sea.
As she saw him going for the detonator, the dust bit and bled her ears. The scorched graffiti of the pocked buildings was eaten invisible. She’d crawled over a child’s bike and into a red arc of blood. The arm chewed off by the blast was not the boy’s, and she checked, not hers. She tried to radio Erik. Shouting his every name, and since no one could hear, the name for the father she’d once had.
The heavy steel door opened and a soldier stepped into the interrogation room. “Sir? We have a situation.”
The agent stood, scraping his chair back.
The door closed. Her forehead dropped to the table. Erik gone. Her husband. Her boss. Her man.
The door opened. She sat up. Katya’s hands folded in Ana’s lap; Suheir crying under her blindfold; Lynn’s burns starting to itch. She heard arguing.
“Daddy,” she said.
PRESENT, WASHINGTON, D.C.
The bed is too comfortable. She’s stripped the sheets. How can she sleep in this room where soccer shrines hang with the blue ribbons of state championships? Where a poster of Milla with her foot on the ball is signed at the bottom in black marker? Where her sister’s high school reading list lines the book shelf? Where all the objects of Milla are intact except the plastic white stars lining the ceiling that no longer light up when Natalia plugs them in? She is the wrong sister in the wrong room, the daughter who died but is still alive.
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead Page 6
