Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  Charlie’s first words when he entered the house were predictable: “Where’s Mom?”

  Adam’s response was to drop his bag and wrap him in a hug, as if the expression of one parent’s love could make up for the other’s absence. It was futile. Charlie was trying to be brave, but his huge blue eyes, magnified by his spectacles, were wet with tears. Adam ruffled his tousled hair. He could feel a struggle going on inside his son’s ribcage. He was fighting the urge to sob.

  Aimee too was upset. She had always been hyperactive, her personality a baffling mixture of exceptional maturity and intelligence combined with an inability to deal with setbacks, and her relationship with her mother had long been vexed. But though she showed it in a different way, she was also missing her.

  “But Dad, you promised, you promised! You said she’d be here in time to get me from soccer but instead Mila came, and she even gave us lunch. Where is she?”

  “Sweetie, she’s just a little late. I’m sure she’s on her way …” Adam was doing his best to appear reassuring, but Aimee was as sharp as she was difficult, and she cut him off before he could finish his sentence.

  “You don’t actually know, do you, Dad? Jeez! Just what kind of husband are you?”

  Adam’s tone was harsh. “I will not be spoken to in that manner, and it’s time you remembered it!” Then he softened. “Aimee, please, try to be patient. I’m sure she’ll be home tomorrow.”

  “How can you say that when you don’t know where she is?”

  “Look, she flew to Israel. You know that. She was due to fly back from Tel Aviv last night. Maybe she got bumped by the airline: it happens all the time.” He held out his arms. “Come on. Give me a hug.”

  Charlie was listening to Adam’s exchange with his sister white-faced and open-mouthed. Adam sensed he had about three seconds to distract them before facing an emotional meltdown: “Hey, what say we all go to the bowling alley?”

  Mila was hovering, anxious not to miss her seminar. “If you need me tomorrow, Adam, call me later. Now I must go—bye-bye Aimee, bye-bye Charlie!”

  Getting into the car, the children still looked glum, but once at the alley, their competitive instincts took over. They played three games, and in the third, Aimee scored 138 points—“my personal best,” she reminded Adam and Charlie several times, each requiring an enthusiastic round of high fives.

  Adam had kept his cell phone with him, but the only call he got was a query about a document from the office. Twice, when he was able to slip away to buy sodas and to make an unnecessary visit to the restroom, he tried to call Morgan, but each time it went straight to her voicemail. On the second occasion, he left a message, trying to sound calmer than he felt: “Hi darling, it’s me. Our time it’s Monday afternoon. Please let us know what’s happening. We miss you. Bye for now.”

  Returning home from bowling, Adam directed the children to the deep, scruffy sofa in front of the TV set and went to his workroom. He checked his computer: as he expected, Morgan had sent no email. But as he came back down the stairs, he noticed that the light on the landline answering machine was blinking. The message had been left hours earlier, at nine o’clock that morning, when Mila would have been driving Aimee to her soccer practice.

  “Hello? Hello?” The caller, a female Israeli, had initially failed to realize she was talking to a machine. “This is Shoshana Gershon at the Cinema Hotel in Tel Aviv. I am looking for Ms. Morgan Cooper. Please call me back.” The number followed. Adam felt a tremor in his hand as he punched it out. In Israel, it was nearly midnight.

  “Hello? This is Adam Cooper in America. I received a message earlier from you. I think it is about my wife, Morgan Cooper. She is one of your guests.”

  “Mr. Cooper. Hold on please, let me see.” There was a pause, and Adam held his breath. “Yes, the message, it is about your wife. She left here last Thursday, saying she would be gone three nights, and she asked us to keep her room open. But until now she didn’t come back. Tonight is the first night of Passover and we are very busy, fully booked, so we had to close the room. We are putting her things in her luggage and the concierge has them safe. Did she come back to the United States already?”

  “No, she didn’t,” Adam said weakly. He swallowed. “Do you know where she went?”

  “I’m sorry sir, I have been on the night desk for these last days and I didn’t meet her. I am reading a note on her file on the computer. Please can you call in the morning?”

  It remained just possible that Morgan was already on her way back, but he could conceive of no circumstances in which she would have caught the plane without picking up her luggage. That meant she was almost certainly still in Gaza. A few clicks of the mouse and his computer soon told him that the Erez crossing was now closed for Passover, and would not reopen until Thursday. The best he could hope was that she would be home by Friday—by which time the Supreme Court oral argument in United States vs. Mahmoud would be fading into legal history. What the hell was he going to do? To lose half a day was one thing, but more would be disastrous. As if on cue, the phone started ringing. Adam looked at the caller ID: his co-counsel, Professor Bright.

  “Hey Joe. How’s it going?” Adam tried to sound his usual, breezy self.

  “I’m just fine. But how are you? I called the office and Estelle said you’d had to go home. Is everything okay?”

  “Sure it is, Joe. Everything is copacetic.”

  “Well, I really think we must get together for a final session. Could you spare a few hours tomorrow afternoon? Shall we say one thirty?”

  “No problem, Joe. I’ll see you there.” Somehow he would have to manage it.

  Adam’s working schedule had never been more hectic. Once he was done with Ahmad Mahmoud, he was set to plunge straight into a case about detainees at Guantanamo. But the kids weren’t due to restart school until the Tuesday of the following week, because spring break ran straight into Easter. He wondered whether to call Morgan’s mother. But although he was sure she would book her ticket as soon as he put the phone down, the thought of her wafting aromatically through the house in her silks and caftans made him wince. In any case, he told himself, he was panicking unnecessarily. This wasn’t the first time Morgan had vanished without trace on one of her furtive little business trips, and it wouldn’t be the last. She would almost certainly be home by the weekend, but “once he let Sherry ensconce herself” in their spare bedroom, she was likely to stay for weeks, cooking tasteless vegetarian meals and filling the kids’ heads with half-baked New Age mysticism.

  First he had to sort out the next few mornings. Adam picked up the phone and called Mila. To judge from the laughter and music at the other end, she was either at a bar or a cocktail party.

  “Hey, Mila, it’s Adam. Morgan’s still not back, and it’s not looking likely that she will be much before the end of the week. Is there any chance you could do some more filling in?”

  “I know, Adam. You have Supreme Court. I know how important that is.” She sounded giddy, maybe a little drunk. “Excuse me. I invite my friends here after the seminar. Don’t worry, Adam. I’m there tomorrow seven thirty.”

  Adam realized with a start that Aimee was standing in front of him.

  “Daddy? Are you really sure Mom’s okay?”

  “Yes honey, I’m certain.”

  “Where Mom is, there’s a lot of bad people, right?”

  Adam tried to stick to the politically progressive script that had sustained him for so many years. “They’re not bad, sweetie. They might disagree with America, but history is complicated, and they feel that in the past, we’ve treated them unjustly. Of course, that doesn’t make all Americans bad, either—even if some of us have been misguided.”

  “Dad. I’m ten. I’ve read the Washington Post. But sometimes the people who live where Mom’s been working do cruel, mean things, and I just want to be sure they haven’t been doing them to her.”

  Adam’s throat was tightening. “So do I, Aimee. So do I. But honestly,
sweetie, I’m sure she’s fine. Just busy.”

  “Anyhow, Dad, we should have been at Sarah and Ben’s house ages ago.”

  Adam looked longingly at the digital clock on his computer screen. It didn’t seem likely he would even start to look at Mahmoud’s case again until both the kids were asleep.

  Ronit Wasserman lived less than five minutes’ drive away, in a spacious split-level home that was almost a mansion. Her son, Ben, and daughter, Sarah, were the same age as Charlie and Aimee, and went to the same school. Ronnie, as her friends always called her, was a year older than Morgan, but though like Adam she was also a qualified lawyer, the only career she had pursued lately was that of homemaker. For the past five years, she had borne the burden of raising her kids alone. Her husband, Theo, twenty years older than her, had been chief litigation partner at Adam’s law firm. But Adam never knew him. A year before Aimee and Sarah started school, Theo Wasserman had died from a bleed inside his brain after being mugged while out jogging in one of the remoter sections of Rock Creek Park. His assailants were never captured. Thankfully, he had been well-insured.

  Ronnie opened the door in jeans and a pink cashmere sweater, and the moment she did, all four children disappeared—Charlie and Ben to play computer games upstairs and the girls to kick a soccer ball in the Wassermans’ enormous garden. Ronnie gave Adam a warm, unforced hug: “So how’s my favorite crusading advocate today?”

  He returned her embrace in kind, noticing the fresh apple scent of Ronnie’s glossy, dark brown hair. “I’ve been better,” he said. “Morgan’s job has bowled me a bit of a googly.” In previous conversations with him, she had found affectedly English metaphors amusing. “Or as you say on this side of the Atlantic, a curveball.”

  As he had hoped, she led him into the kitchen, where she handed him a bottle of Chablis. “Open this,” she ordered. “The sun is almost over the yardarm. You can tell me about it while I cook.”

  Ronnie’s spacious kitchen had been extended into the garden, a homely jumble of potted palms and chef’s-standard pans hanging from hooks: a full-blown batterie de cuisine. While Adam perched on a stool with his wine, his elbow leaning on one of the Tuscan tiled work surfaces, she stood wrapped in an apron preparing spaghetti bolognese—not just any bolognese, but one made with meat and fresh tomatoes of such superior quality, and so intensely flavored, that no adult or child could resist it.

  In Washington’s so-called “mommy wars,” Ronnie and Morgan were on opposing teams, and Adam knew that Morgan disapproved of her. “For chrissakes, the girl went to Vassar and Stanford Law,” Morgan had exclaimed one evening, as she and Adam were getting ready for bed, “yet once she hooked up with Theo she seemed to lose all interest in paid work for the rest of her pampered life!”

  Adam knew he shouldn’t tell Ronnie anything about where Morgan was, nor encourage her to speculate as to why her return was delayed. At the same time, complaining to her about the inconvenient burden he now faced gave him a pleasurably disloyal frisson.

  “I’m sure it’s not her fault, and I know her work is important,” he said. “It’s important to me, too, and we always agreed that when the kids were a little older, she shouldn’t have to feel tied to an office in Washington. But I wish it didn’t have to be this week.” He sighed. “Anyhow, I just hope she makes a success of it.”

  Ronnie produced a terra-cotta bowl of perfect, plump green olives. “Here, help yourself. So how do the kids feel about her being away?”

  “Of course they miss her. But usually it’s fine: all her other recent trips have been when they’ve been at school. But to tell you the truth, this time I am a little worried about how they’re going to react—especially Aimee.”

  “I guess you have to tell her how sorry she is, and promise she’d be home if she could possibly help it,” Ronnie said gently. “And whatever we might think about the present US government, I guess it’s encouraging that part of it still takes human rights seriously. Where is she this time? Back in the Middle East?”

  Adam did his best not to sound evasive. “Yeah, I guess. Well, let’s hope her hotel is near to a place she can jog, or by the time she gets back she’ll be impossible.” He tried delicately to change the subject to his own contribution to the cause of human rights, aware that in this he faced an unqualified admirer. As he started to expand on the arguments he planned to deploy with the Supremes, the tension he had felt since taking Mila’s call that morning began to dissipate.

  Ronnie’s own legal background made her the perfect audience, and when she made a pithy observation drawn from a case from the Lincoln era when the Supremes’ distant predecessors had placed limits on a president’s power, Adam scribbled a note on a memo pad that happened to be next to the olives. At the same time, she shared his own righteous anger about the suffering Mahmoud’s incarceration had caused his family.

  “I mean he’s got kids under ten just like us, they were born in this country and never questioned their place here,” she said. “And then it all disappears—father, livelihood, finally their home: all gone. Sure we have to fight terrorism, but not like this. You’re a credit to the firm, Adam. I only wish you’d known Theo. He always said that this is the kind of work that makes us proud to be lawyers.”

  Finally she made the offer of assistance he had not felt able to request. “Look, I’m sure Morgan will be back soon. But you’re in a bind, and what you’re doing is simply too important. Why don’t I pick up Charlie and Aimee from Mila after lunch and look after them here for the next few days, we can go swimming, hiking, to the movies: whatever. It’ll be a blast.”

  Adam could have fallen to his knees and kissed her feet. “Ronnie, I don’t know what to say, but thank you. I owe you one.”

  She flashed him a smile. “Adam, for you and those kids of yours, it’s nothing but a pleasure. Now go call them. It’s time for dinner.”

  After the bolognese and homemade ice cream, it was time to go. On the doorstep, with the children already buckled up in the car, Ronnie put her hand to Adam’s cheek and looked into his eyes. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I promise you.” Withdrawing her hand, she chastely kissed the place where it had lain. Back home, he finally felt able to work. Aimee and Charlie put themselves to bed. When all was silent, Adam walked across the landing and found his son asleep with the light on, lying on his back, his thumb in his mouth, clutching the stuffed toy dog that had accompanied his every sleeping hour since the day of his birth. Adam kissed his forehead, then turned out the light.

  For the next four-and-a-half hours, he inhabited the Supreme Court jurisprudence of the fifth, sixth, and eighth amendments, and when he did decide to turn in, it wasn’t because he felt tired, but because he knew that if he left it any longer, he’d be exhausted the following morning.

  By the time the sandman came, it was almost three. He found himself almost immediately in a recurrent nightmare. He was back in the cave, a hole in northern England’s Yorkshire Dales into which he’d been led by an instructor during a high school trip. The entrance was literally a dustbin lid over a length of piping. Then came a flat-out squeeze over stones, half-submerged in muddy water. That was just the start of a vast, incomprehensible labyrinth that extended for miles beneath the hillside. Adam was panicking, he wanted out, to be back home with Morgan, but she wasn’t there and suddenly he knew he was trapped. He shouted: an unintelligible, guttural exclamation. Then his eyes blinked open and he heard the sound of his cell phone, impossible to ignore. He registered the time on his bedside clock: five forty-five in the morning.

  “What the fuck?” he said into the device.

  “Adam? Adam? You there?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded distant. “This is Mitchell. Eugene Mitchell. You remember me, right?”

  Of course Adam remembered him: a buttoned-up Yalie a few years older than Morgan who, he was convinced, had tried to hit on her when she was doing some kind of training course at the Farm, the CIA school in Virginia. The three of them had gone
out for beers a few weeks before his and Morgan’s wedding, an evening that came as close as any to making him wonder whether he really was doing the right thing in marrying her at all.

  “Adam, I’m in Tel Aviv. I’m really sorry to be calling you so early but Morgan was supposed to let me know she was safe before flying home on Sunday. I haven’t heard from her. At first I thought she was just held up, but I’ve made some inquiries with our own assets in Gaza, and it seems she never checked into her hotel there. You’ll be getting an official call from Langley later this morning, but I figured you deserve a heads-up. I’m sorry, buddy, but it doesn’t look too good.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Tuesday, April 3, and

  Wednesday, April 4, 2007

  The speaker was the one in the pressed twill trousers, blazer, and an open-necked white shirt, fifty-something and a little overweight, the one who called himself Gary. Adam was sure he had met him before, before Morgan went to the Balkans. “I realize that you, of all people, are going to find this difficult,” he was saying in his light Virginia drawl. “But if this is going to end well, you’re going to have to trust us.”

  It was noon. They were sitting in the airy coffee shop at the Hamilton Hotel, an old place downtown, which though now run by one of the chains had maintained an endearing period individuality. Nursing his third double espresso of the day, Adam struggled to attain the clarity he needed to cope with what Gary and his sidekick, “Mike,” a slim African American in a Brooks Brothers suit, were trying to communicate.

  Eugene Mitchell’s unsought wake-up call from Tel Aviv had ended any chance of sleep. Somehow he had managed to get himself and the children out of bed and into their clothes, and had handed them over to Mila. But everything else was a blank, his final preparations for United States vs. Mahmoud included.

  In an attempt to clear his head, he had walked ten blocks to the Metro, found a seat on the train, and stared at the Washington Post. But the words had danced in front of his eyes, seemingly bereft of meaning. Reaching the office, Adam had tried to appear normal, and to concentrate. He had managed to do neither. The call from Gary inviting him to the Hamilton had come as a relief, and when Adam left for their rendezvous shortly afterward, he could see the concern on Estelle’s face.