Gene carried his tea into the dining room. “So they’ve found us.” He sat down, took a sip of his tea, then got up and pulled down all the window shades, even though it was still light outside. That was the first sign I had that he was disturbed. He peered around the drawn shade. “Did you say a blue car?”
My heart jumped. “Are they out there?”
“No … no … just the usual traffic.” He looked at me. “This morning?” he said, as if he were only now beginning to understand. He sat down close to me and whispered, as if Miner and Beckman were crouched under the plank table, taking down every word. “I used to worry about it all the time, that they’d connect me to Laura, come for you … I knew it was an advantage that I had a different last name than Laura, but still I worried. Do you think they knew all along and were just waiting … but for what? Why now? Jesus. What are they going to do, come around and grill us all? Me, Martha—”
“Martha doesn’t know anything, she doesn’t know about me.”
“That’s right, she’s not involved. And for that matter, what could they find out from me? I know nothing about Laura and Hal’s politics except what I read in the paper, the same as anybody else.”
He got up and started walking around. “I still remember reading about that explosion in the lab and thinking it was just one of those awful things, a tragedy, a freak accident … that’s what the newspapers said at first. And then later that day or the next day the news came out, a bomb had been planted and two people—”
I pushed away from the table, scraping the chair legs across the floor. “Why bring this up now? What good is that? We have to think, not chew over the past like a couple of cows.”
“So it just happened this morning?” he said again. And then, going back to the past, driving me mad with his meanderings, he said in that same melancholy, perplexed voice, “When you first came to me, every time a stranger walked into the office, I thought, Uh huh! Here we go. I knew just what I was going to say to them. ‘Look, I don’t know anything about my sister’s politics. That’s not my thing in life.’ I had an entire speech. I used to practice—gestures, everything. But no one bothered us. And a year passed and another year, and I thought, Okay, that’s it. Right. They’re not coming.” He frowned. “Pete, are you sure they were who they said they were?”
“Who else would they be? Who else would know my real name? Pax, they said. Pax Connors.”
“Did you have a good look at their identification?”
“No,” I said reluctantly. Frank Miner had flashed his card in front of my eyes—now you see it, now you don’t—and I hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask to look at his ID again. “He opened his wallet or card case, whatever it was, showed it to me, and put it away before I could check it out.”
“Just like TV,” Gene said. “Just like TV.” For some reason, the way he said it struck both our funny bones. We started laughing, laughing so hard we couldn’t stop. Every time our eyes met, we started all over again.
“Now I mean it this time,” Gene said sternly. “I am stopping. This is no laughing matter.” We pounded our fists on the table and laughed as hysterically as two little kids.
Twenty-two
Early the next morning, Gene came into my room and sat down on the edge of the bed. He was still in his pajamas. I had been lying in bed, half awake, for a long time. “Tell me again what happened with those two guys,” Gene said.
Yawning, I leaned up on my elbow. Last night, after our laughing fit, we had talked for hours but, oddly, not about the agents at all. Somehow I got going on my love of history and, to my surprise, Gene had been really enthusiastic. In two seconds he’d had me through college and in graduate school, working for a combined master’s and doctorate.
“Did I tell you I thought I’d seen their car before?” I yawned again, my eyes tearing. “Last week, a few times—only I thought I was being paranoid.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I got out of bed and pulled on my jeans. “If I told you all the times I thought someone was watching me—” I picked up my notebook, hesitated for a moment, then handed it to him. “This is a record I’ve kept of of license plates and cars—”
Gene flipped through the notebook. “Good Lord, Pete. I had no idea you’d been worrying about these things.”
“What difference would it have made, Gene? I’m a little crazy anyway, I don’t think you can change that.”
“But that you’ve felt so insecure … and I didn’t have a clue. Are there other things like this you’ve kept to yourself?”
What if I told him about the dreams of headless bodies … the White Terror … waking up in a panic … I leaned into the mirror and that dizzying white nothingness touched me. With an effort, I pulled myself out of the swaying moment of sickness. “I’m hungry,” I said. “You making breakfast this morning?”
We went downstairs. Gene decided to make oatmeal. “I need something hot this morning. Pete, do you think anybody saw you with those men?”
I spooned peanut butter out of the jar. “There’s not that many people out that early around here.”
“I didn’t sleep half the night thinking about this business.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Oh …” Gene sighed, then busied himself punching holes in his cereal. When he had enough holes, he sprinkled in raisins, poured in milk and pushed each raisin into a puddle of milk to plump it up. When I was little, I used to love watching him fix his hot cereal.
“I didn’t think anything startling,” he said finally, “but I came to some conclusions. Number one.” He held up one finger. “Okay, so they know you’re here. Nothing we can do about that. Number two.” Up went another finger. “We shouldn’t panic. They obviously want information about Laura and Hal, but what can either of us possibly tell them? You’ve lived here for eight years. You’ve hardly seen your folks. You can’t give these guys information you don’t have and neither can I.”
“Wait a second, wait a second,” I said, putting my milk down so abruptly it slopped onto the table. “Even if I did have information, do you think I’d tell it to them? They’re gunning for my parents. I already made a big mistake answering any of their questions. I shouldn’t have talked to them at all. I didn’t have to say anything to them, and in the future, believe me, I’m not going to.”
Gene reached over to the sink for the sponge. “It’s okay to be principled,” he said slowly, sponging up the milk. “I understand what you’re saying and I sympathize. You certainly don’t want to be put in the position of saying anything that could hurt your parents.” He wrung the sponge out in the sink and sat down again. “However, as far as I’m concerned, if they come to me, what’s the harm in saying, ‘I don’t know anything. I have no information for you guys—’”
“But, Gene,” I interrupted, “that’s not exactly true. What about that time I saw Laura and Hal in North Carolina? And what about when Marti came for me? What if they know about that stuff? What if they ask you about all that? If you’re saying you’d talk if you knew anything, then the logic is that you do have to tell what you know. And once you start telling even a little bit, where do you stop?”
Gene flushed. “I hardly spoke to that Marti character, I wasn’t impressed with him. As for the other time—all I did was take you to the drive-in and then leave the car.”
“But someone must have gotten in touch with you. We went on that vacation all of a sudden. It wasn’t even a school vacation.”
Gene pushed aside his cereal bowl. “We had a good time, didn’t we? Remember the drive down?”
“No. What I remember is the priest or whatever he was coming for me at the intermission. Now, that was a setup, wasn’t it?”
Gene nodded. “A woman came into the office for an eye examination, just someone off the street. She said she was worried because glaucoma ran in her family and she’d never been tested. You know how we ask if anybody recommended the person? She said no, no one, she wasn’t
even staying in Winston long, just visiting some relatives. So I tested her for glaucoma—her pressure was fine, normal. She thanked me, and then she asked if I’d ever thought of going to North Carolina for a vacation. I thought it was just chitchat and I said, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve been there. The beaches are excellent.’” Gene stopped. “Did I ever tell you this story?”
“No. Go on—what happened?”
“Well, then she said, ‘Laura sent me.’ I acted dumb. ‘Who?’ ‘Your sister,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. But she told me something that convinced me Laura had sent her. And after that, I just—”
“No, wait, don’t go so fast. What did she say about my mother, what was the thing she told you?”
Gene paused in the middle of clearing the table. “My old pet name for Laura. Lala.”
“Lala! I never heard that.”
“Oh, it’s from so far back. Our childhood. You know your mother’s ten years younger than I am … and when she was born, I was just crazy about her from the first moment. She was such a cute little kid, always dancing and happy, always up on her toes, so I used to tease her, call her Lala the Famous Dancer.… Nobody knows that but Laura and me. Yeah, Lala the Famous Dancer. She was like that until she was sixteen, seventeen, then she changed. Very bright girl. She went to college and I remember seeing her once, after she’d met your father. No more dreams of being a dancer. She gave that up entirely, now it was all—the world. Save the world. We’re five minutes from midnight, we can’t live our lives just for selfish reasons, that sort of thing. She was pregnant then, and I thought, Well, having a baby’s going to settle her down.” He stopped.
“What got me going on that? Oh, the woman, yes. Well, after she said, ‘Your sister, Lala,’ I believed her. She had to have that information from Laura, so I agreed to take you down to North Carolina so you could see your parents. I just followed directions. If you asked me now what that woman looked like I couldn’t tell you. I probably couldn’t have told you the next day. She was just ordinary.”
“I never knew any of that.”
“Yes, well …” Gene wiped his hand across his mouth. “Let me tell you, I was damn nervous when I left you alone in the car at that drive-in. But I’ll tell you something else, Pete. I didn’t follow their directions to the letter. I got myself in a place where I could watch our car and when that priest came and got you, I went right along. I didn’t trust them that much. How did I really know they were bringing you to Laura? I watched you get in that car,” he said, leaning across the table to me. “You never knew that, did you? I kept my eye on that car and if they’d tried anything—”
“What would you have done?” My sober uncle lurking in the bushes playing “I Spy?” It was my first laugh of the morning.
“I don’t know,” Gene confessed. “I don’t know if I could have done anything.”
Twenty-three
For days I couldn’t walk to school or leave it without feeling eyes on me, couldn’t go into a store or out of the house without looking around nervously for the two agents and wondering where they were. In a car? In an office building? Loitering in the crowded downtown streets? I saw the two of them everywhere. Even at night, asleep, I wasn’t safe from them. Toward the end of the week, as I was walking home from school, I crossed the boulevard and saw the blue car with the two agents in the front seat. There it was—there they were—parked boldly in front of a gas station. Suddenly I was enraged and ran toward them, shouting. “Why are you watching me? What do you want? I have nothing to tell you!” I rapped on the back of the car, rapped on the window.
A man I’d never seen before gave me a frightened glance. In the passenger seat, the other “agent,” a golden-haired retriever sitting tall, thumped its tail.
‘Sorry,” I mumbled. “Sorry … a mistake.”
That sorry incident told me I had to pull myself together. I was OD’ing on paranoia. Sunday morning, after breakfast, I phoned Cary. “Do you want to do something today? I do.”
“I’m taking Kim to the park.”
“Okay, I’ll come over.”
“If you want to.”
Why did she sound so cool? I thought of that rainy afternoon in my room the week before. We’d kissed … and kissed … then she’d pushed me away, been close to anger. How about me? How about what I want? I’d been afraid she’d go away and I’d never see her again, and I’d said, My parents … my parents are in hiding.… I’d been on the verge of saying everything; instead I’d mumbled, chewed up the words.
“I want to see you, Cary.”
“Fine.” She hung up.
It was a hot, sunny day and the park was crowded. I found Cary pushing Kim on a swing. “Hi!” I was glad to see her.
“Hello.” She had on her aloof Princess face.
“Hi, Kimmer.”
“Hello, big feet.”
“Moi?” I glanced at Cary. Not even a hint of a smile. I watched her intently for a few minutes. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Yes, something is. I can tell.”
She shrugged. “I’m just wondering why you condescended to come over here this morning. Didn’t have anything better to do?”
“Cary, you’re not making any sense to me. What are you talking about?”
“Our so-called friendship.”
“So-called!”
“Real friends care about each other.”
“I care about you. I don’t understand.”
She glanced at Kim and lowered her voice. “I don’t think caring about someone is just a little grabbing and groping—”
That hurt. “Is that all you think I—No, you’re wrong.”
“You haven’t phoned once this week. You haven’t stopped in the shop for one moment, even just to say hello.”
I fought back. “You could have called me.”
“You know how my mother feels about girls calling boys. I want to know just one thing, Pete. Did you stay away because I made it clear I wasn’t going to go as far as you wanted?”
“No! No, Cary, that has nothing to do with it.”
“Guys don’t like it when you say, ‘Okay, this far and no farther.’ What makes you so different?”
“Maybe I’m not, but I wouldn’t not see you because of that. I was just—I’ve been in a really foul mood. Sort of depressed and … you know. I didn’t want to dump it on you.”
“I want to believe you. I’ve been thinking the worst things—”
“I should have called, I just—I was so tense and—”
“Did you just get into a blue mood, or what?”
I wanted to hang on to her sympathy. “Something happened. Something bad.”
“What was it?”
A line of girls roller-skated by on the walkway, shouting above the clicking of their skates. I stared at them as if they could give me the answer to give Cary. I couldn’t tell her about the agents, not without telling her everything. My mind blurred, I felt tired, very tired, and I sat down on a swing.
The chains creaked, a kid yelled, and all at once I was back in a summer afternoon in a park with my mother.
In the middle of the park, there’s a stone animal, a rhinoceros. I run up to it, I want to climb on its back, but my mother says children aren’t allowed.… Anyway, we’re playing Hide-and-Seek, it’s her turn to hide, and I can’t find her.… Where ARE you? I yell. I’m furious, it’s not fair for her to hide so long. I yell again, if you don’t come back right away, I might get really angry, Laura! Then I hear her laugh, I look all around, and suddenly I find her, lying flat on her belly behind the stone animal. I found you, I win, I win, I shout, and she lets me climb all over her.
Abruptly I hopped off the swing and walked away. I circled the park, waiting for the heat of the memory to cool. When I got back, Cary was sitting on the rim of the sandbox, watching Kim digging. I sat down next to her. “Cary—” I touched her arm and heard myself saying, “The reason I didn’t call you has to do with som
e things I’ve never told anyone.”
I had one cautionary thought—stop—and then I went ahead anyway. “It’s about my parents. They—they’re not dead.”
“What?” She stared at me.
“They’re not dead. They’re in hiding.”
“I don’t understand. I thought they were dead, you said so. You told me that.”
“I know. I had to say it, because of what they did. They bombed a lab, but let me tell you why. It was a protest, a symbolic protest.” The words, the images, the ideas, the explanations spurted out, just as I’d imagined and feared, like water flowing irresistibly from an underground spring. Once started, impossible to stem the flow. I couldn’t tell what Cary was thinking, I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to.
I told her everything. About Laura’s and Hal’s concern for the earth, and how they’d protested nuclear research and the arms race for years. “They used to go on marches, and demonstrate in front of the White House and the Pentagon, stuff like that. At their graduation from college, when I was just a little kid, they walked out because some general came to speak. They did all sorts of things for years, just kept doing this and that, once they raised a flag on the Statue of Liberty—just to get people to think! It didn’t matter what they did, everything kept going on, wars, weapons, the arms race, bombs. They felt things were getting too close to the edge, you know what they say, ‘we’re five minutes from midnight.’ They had to do something that would arouse people, something more than raising banners or symbolically spilling blood.”
I knew the phrases by heart. My parents’ words. I had grown up with them. But even if I had forgotten them, I had found them again in the library, peppered throughout the newspaper and magazine articles about Laura and Hal. For years these phrases, my parents’ words and reasons, had been locked away in my head. Now I was sending them out into the air, into Cary’s ear, into the wind. My voice was controlled, neither loud nor soft, but my hands flew apart, I stood up, paced around and sat down again. And all the time, I was also somewhere outside myself, hovering near the swings or perched on the limb of a tree. Pax observing Pete observing Pax spouting off.
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