We head toward the back where the stairs are located. I realize much too late that I’ve drawn us into a box. Not that I expect anything to go down here, but the only way out—the only public way—is back the way we came.
Which gives me pause, because if that’s the case, Blue Jeans wouldn’t have to come in after us. He could just wait outside, sit on a bench and act like he’s reading the Post until we appeared.
So why is he coming in?
We take the stairs to the second floor. I glance over the banister and see that Blue Jeans is just standing there in the lobby. I survey the rest of the lobby, all those people and kids, and then I spot a couple museum employees, at least one security guard.
“Okay, let’s go.”
We turn away from the stairs toward the closest bank of elevators. I can tell David wants to ask again where we’re going but he manages to keep silent. We wait along with two mothers and their strollers and then we all squeeze into the elevator.
The elevator lets us off on the first floor. A museum employee is standing nearby. I walk over and set Casey down, make her hold David’s hand again, then step closer.
“Excuse me. Can I talk to you for a minute?”
She nods.
“See that guy over there, the one in the Nationals hat?”
She nods again.
I lean in close and whisper, “My boy over there said that man was watching him while he was in the bathroom.”
The woman raises her eyebrows.
Now it’s me who nods, gravely, keeping a straight face.
The woman stares at me another moment, then glances at David, then turns her attention back to where Blue Jeans is standing in the lobby, all those kids running around him. She unclips a walkie-talkie from her belt, starts speaking into it.
I turn away and walk back to the kids. I pick Casey up and start toward the exit.
“Miss, you need to stay here,” the employee says.
“I can’t.”
“But—”
Up ahead, two male security guards have converged on Blue Jeans. They step up close to him. One of the guards even puts a hand on the guy’s arm.
“What’s this about?” Blue Jeans asks, looking back and forth at the guards. As we walk past his gaze shifts to meet mine. I smile and wink at him and then we’re headed through the exit doors.
I scope out the steps, the sidewalks, even the street. All looks well. But then we reach the sidewalk and I can see Suit farther down the block, on the corner of 12th and Madison. He has his hand to his ear, listening to something (probably the guards asking his partner why he was in the bathroom looking at boys), and then he spots us.
He starts forward immediately.
Still holding Casey, I tell David to move it and turn left and we start walking.
As we walk, David can’t help but look back over his shoulder. I don’t bother telling him not to.
“The guy in the suit?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“He’s coming pretty fast.”
I increase my speed. David does too. We reach the end of the block and turn left up 9th. Just after we make the turn I set Casey down and once again put her hand in David’s.
“Take your sister halfway up the block. Stop when you get there. And don’t turn around until I tell you to.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go, David.”
Casey starts crying. “Holly, what’s happening?”
“Go!”
David starts pulling his sister forward. She cries harder now and people are looking and David once again becoming the good big brother tries to pick her up and carry her.
I don’t see how far they get.
I don’t because I can hear Suit coming, his shoes slapping the sidewalk.
I don’t because I’m pushing myself up against the wall right next to the corner, flattening myself.
I start counting, going one two three four, and then he appears, jogging now, and I step forward, throw my elbow into his face. The briefcase hits the sidewalk a second before he does. Both hands fly to his face, holding in the blood. I pick up the briefcase, grip it in two hands, bring it down on his stomach.
“Stop,” he says, or tries to say.
I bring the briefcase down again. I don’t think about the people watching us, about David and Casey behind me. I think about this man and his partner and about what it is they want to do with the kids and how I’m not going to let that happen.
The man takes his hands away from his face. I’ve busted his nose and more blood squirts out. He holds one hand up to block another blow as he reaches into his suit jacket with his other hand.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” I shout.
The man tries speaking but blood streams into his mouth, goes down the back of his throat. He coughs and only manages to say, “Me-eye.”
“I will smash your face in with this,” I tell him, holding the briefcase up over my head, and the man pauses in trying to reach for whatever it is in his jacket.
He opens one eye, looks up at me. Coughs again and forcefully enunciates, “F—B—I.”
“What?”
“Me … and my partner … we’re FBI,” he says, and judging that I won’t smash his face in with the briefcase, he pulls out his badge and holds it up.
And yep, there it is in big blue letters: FB-fucking-I.
Twenty-Nine
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want a good goddamned reason.”
“And what makes you think you deserve one? They’re my children, Holly. Like I told you before you took this job, my kids are the most important thing in the world to me. I will never let anything harm them.”
“And all of a sudden I’m not good enough to watch them myself?”
Walter doesn’t answer, at least not immediately. A long moment of silence passes. I’m out in the driveway, the kids inside with Sylvia, and I’m pacing around my car, my cell phone to my ear, Walter off in whatever secret corner of Washington he’s hidden himself today.
“You said yourself you wanted out. Didn’t you?”
“You were the one that said I’ve been on a gradual decline.”
“Holly—”
“I would never let anything happen to your children. You know that.”
“Yes, I do know that. Consciously, you would never let anything happen to them. But unconsciously …”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Your heart’s not in it anymore.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Again, you told me you wanted out.”
“You made it sound like I didn’t have a choice.”
“The last couple days have been tense for all of us. We may have said things we didn’t mean.”
“Oh, so now you’re taking back what you said?”
“You’re going to Paris tonight.”
“You know what I mean.”
“One thing I’ve always asked of you is honesty.”
“I’ve never lied to you.”
“No? Then how was your job interview?”
I’ve been pacing, circling the car, but now I stop and just stand there. I don’t speak. I can’t speak.
“Remember, Holly, my family is the most important thing to me. I make it my mission to ensure their constant safety. And so yes, after our little spat the other day, I talked to one of my friends over at the FBI and requested a surveillance team be put on my children.”
“How did you know about my interview?”
“How do I know anything, Holly? How do I know when Islamic terrorists are planning to make a hit, or there’s a three-car pileup along an obscure highway just outside of Munich?”
“You have my phone tapped?”
“Holly, if you want to resign your position as my children’s nanny, that’s your choice. But I ask that you stay until we’ve found a suitable replacement.”
“What—another undercover assassin?”
“Fuck you, Walter. I’m more dedicated to those kids than you are. I love them like they’re my own.”
“That’s a little too overdramatic, even for you. Besides, what are you trying to say? Are you saying you love them so much you wouldn’t leave them alone with your sister while you went to a job interview at your brother-in-law’s firm?”
“They were in no danger and you know it.”
“No, Holly, what I know is that all of us are in danger. In one way or another, each and every one of us needs a guardian. And right now my focus is making sure my children do not lose theirs.”
“But you’re going to replace me.”
“If it comes to it.”
“So I’m fired?”
“It’s not that easy, Holly. Really, we should talk about this in person.”
“And what about Marilyn? What convenient lie will you tell her this time?”
“I’ve never lied to my wife. She knows about your background. She knows that’s the reason I picked you.”
I ask sardonically, “So she knows the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”
“She knows as much as she needs to know to be happy.” He pauses. “By the way, I’ve changed your flight for tonight.”
“What?”
“You’ll be hitching a ride on a cargo jet going to Europe. Completely under the radar. You won’t even need a passport.”
“Why so secretive?”
“Because after the trouble in Vegas I wouldn’t be surprised if Alayna Gramont now has your face on file. She’ll probably have a bulletin out at all the airports for a single Asian woman of your age flying alone.”
“You think she can actually do that?”
“You really have no idea how powerful Roland Delano was, do you?”
“Okay, so now what?”
“Now we terminate this call. I have a meeting in five minutes, and you need to ensure my children remain safe. Do you think you can handle that?”
Thirty
My mother doesn’t feel like cooking. She doesn’t feel like going out either, so we order pizza from a place nearby. Medium pie, half mushroom, half pepperoni. The mushrooms are for my mother; the pepperoni for me.
We sit at the kitchen table and eat our slices in silence. My mother doesn’t even turn on the stereo in the living room, which is odd. The only sounds besides our chewing are the clock ticking and the refrigerator occasionally kicking on and off.
Finally, after five minutes of this unnerving quiet, I say, “Go ahead and ask.”
“Ask what?”
“How the interview went.”
“How did it go?”
“Pretty sucky.”
My mother doesn’t respond. She continues working on her already half-eaten slice, holding it up to her mouth with two hands, taking almost petite bites. She has a thoughtful look on her face but doesn’t speak, doesn’t even look at me, until she’s finished the slice and sets the crust down on the side of her plate and then dabs her mouth with a napkin.
“I’m very proud of you, you know.”
“Mom, please don’t.”
“Why can’t a mother tell her daughter she’s proud of her?”
“For starters, the mother in question never once told her daughter that before.”
My mother’s expression is one I’d expect to see had I just slapped her across the face. “That is not true.”
“Oh really? Then when—when have you ever said those exact words to me?”
She stares at me for a long moment, just stares, and then slowly she lets her gaze fall to the table. In a soft voice, she says, “I never did tell you girls about the camps.”
Now it’s like I’ve been slapped—my entire body goes rigid for an instant, the blood draining from my face. In all my twenty-eight years my mother has never once talked about her time in the internment camps, even when Tina and I had begged her, because we felt it was something she should talk about, something to help exorcise those terrible demons.
I don’t speak and just watch her, listening to the clock ticking, to the refrigerator once again shutting itself off.
“You have to keep in mind I was just a child at the time, only two years old. I don’t even remember what it was like.”
My mother’s parents came to the United States in 1939. My mother was born just a year later, making her a legal American citizen. This little I know.
“But my parents remembered. They could never force themselves to forget. Growing up, it was one of those things I knew they thought about but would refuse to speak of.”
After World War II, my grandparents wanted to change my mother’s name to something more American. But by that time my mother was eight, still a only child but at an age where she could make her own decisions, and she stubbornly made them keep it. This little I also know.
“The War may have been over, but people didn’t forget. People … they never forget. Even though everything was over, even though I was an American, they treated us like … like trash. They treated us like we were …”
“Less than human?”
She looks up at me, like she’s surprised I’m still here in the kitchen with her. Her eyes have begun to water. She stares at me and then nods.
“Yes, like we were less than human. It’s not an easy thing to live through, especially as a little girl. And though the years passed and people supposedly forgave and forgot, I could still see it in their eyes. Not every person, mind you, but walking down the street, or standing on line at the grocery store, there would be this flicker behind some people’s eyes, like they … they didn’t trust me. Like they thought I was still the enemy. I know your father felt the same way, even though he hadn’t been alive then.”
My father had been eleven years younger than my mother. Tina and I had always speculated the reason why but had never learned the truth.
“You still miss him, don’t you?”
“Of course,” my mother says. “Every day. Don’t you?”
I think of him shooting Zane, the darkness in his eyes when he pulled the trigger. I think about shooting him and then him staring up at me, waiting for me to finish him off.
“Yes,” I whisper. “I miss him too.”
“I always felt my life had no meaning, that it was … purposeless, until your father. He … he somehow made me forget the distrust in other people. He made me … happy.”
“Why did you and Dad get married so late in life?”
My mother looks at me again, her face at first blank, then filling with a mischievous sort of grin. “If I tell you this, you must swear to never tell your sister. Do I have your word?”
“Yes.”
“I was previously married before your father. To a white man. He was half-Irish, half-German. He worked as a mechanic. I was a senior in high school. It was such a foolish thing for me to do, but I started seeing him behind my parents’ back. They wanted me to only date and eventually marry a man from Japan. But then I got pregnant and, well, we had no choice but to get married. I had just turned eighteen three months before. We went away for a while, found an apartment in Chicago. We lived there for seven weeks before we were forced to come back home, face the music as they say, and as you can imagine my parents wanted nothing to do with me. Even when I told them I was pregnant with their grandchild, they turned their backs.”
“Do I have another sibling?”
My mother shakes her head slowly, her eyes brimming now with tears. “No, dear, I had a miscarriage. And, well, that pregnancy was the only thing keeping us together. After the miscarriage, our marriage crumbled. We didn’t even last six months. I had no choice but to return to my parents.”
“And they took you back?”
“My father didn’t want to, but my mother persuaded him. He … he called me a few names I’m sure you can imagine. But as the years passed he seemed to welcome me back as his daughter. Other men, however, other suitors, would not come near
me. They had heard what happened. They knew I was … tainted.”
The tears have finally sprung free; a few race down her cheeks. She wipes them away, shakes her head even more slowly.
“I tried killing myself once. I took an entire bottle of pills. My mother found me in time and I was rushed to the hospital. I spent two weeks there. And after I came out I needed a job, something to fill my time. But it was difficult finding a respectable job without a high school diploma. First I had to return to high school and finish my classes. Even then many places told me they weren’t hiring. But apparently the Army would hire almost anyone. I didn’t enlist, of course, but was hired as a civilian. It was there that I met your father, who was a soldier. Yes, he was eleven years younger than me, and he was Chinese, which obviously would not go over well with my parents, but … well, he asked me out and I accepted and here you and I are today.”
She wipes a few more tears away, grabs a new napkin to blow her nose.
“Your father, he was just so sweet. He brought me a rose every time he came to see me. He wanted to marry me, but then the Vietnam War broke out and he had to go fight in that … it was hard waiting, you know? Thinking that every day that passed was the day he would die. It tore me up inside. But he would write letters, sometimes even poems. He served three tours of duty, and after the last one we got married.”
From what I know of my father it’s hard to picture him as a man who brought roses and wrote poetry. From what I know of my father I see him slitting throats and breaking necks.
“Did he know about your first husband?”
“Yes, he did. I confessed it to him the week before our wedding. I wanted him to know the truth and to understand I had been irresponsible then, almost reckless.”
I say, “When Tina started dating Ryan, did you …”
“Have reservations? No. I’d decided long ago that I wasn’t going to become my parents.”
A silence falls between us. My mother picks up another slice, eats two bites, sets it back down. I have a couple bites of my own slice and then glance at the clock. In less than two hours I’ll be taking off in a cargo jet headed across the Atlantic.
[Holly Lin 01.0] No Shelter Page 11
