Eleven Days (2 page)

*

The path is becoming slippery with rain; at least she has a hat. Last year the neighbors invited her to help them enlarge their garden. Perhaps they felt sorry for her. She had said yes, and she had planted all the “green things.” The neighbor took a picture of her covered in dirt and said, “Sara, you look good in brown.” The picture found a place alongside all the other pictures in the
house of young men wearing brown—in deserts, on beaches, and under tarps. Planting had been an exercise in humility and precision since she had never really done it before. The neighbors were forgiving, and they invited her to come daily and monitor her progress. She had not gone in some time.

She can see the young lettuces starting to poke through now. And the green beans, and the broccoli. She slows to a walk and stops to check the radishes. Radishes need rain.
The Zucchinis grow so fast
, she thinks. Like a child. If you do not watch them, they disappear into something else before your eyes. A novice can overgrow a zucchini to the size of a watermelon through benign neglect. The meat inside remains edible, but tough. It takes a very sharp knife to slice.

*

Jason was eight when his father died. She had been torn about whether to tell him because at that point they had not seen his father in over two years. Some part of her knew that not telling him would only increase her son’s curiosity later. And it did. Eventually, friends of his father’s felt it was their role—their duty—to tell the boy about things his father had done. “He helped make this country safer,” one of them said, sitting on his porch in Virginia. It disgusted her because she was certain it was a lie. David had done what pleased David, and David had gone where he had the most fun. But then, why ruin a fantasy for a child? It was David, after all, who had given her boy to her.

May 2001 was the birthday when Jason’s Washington godfather brought him the photograph: a picture of David standing on an old tank, in a desert (or backed by sand dunes), holding a tiny teddy bear. Sara never knew he had stood on any tank, ever, and
her last memory of that bear was that Jason had lost it years ago, at camp. She never knew David had ever been anywhere near a desert. He always said he was calling from somewhere glamorous and urban, like Paris, and those calls always made her angry because she’d only been to France once (with him). Yet here was hard evidence: the father of her child had carried his son’s teddy bear around the world with him. Maybe he had carried it to remind himself of who he was working to protect. Maybe he simply carried it to seduce young girls. She would grant him the former, but suspected the latter was more likely.

Being born out of wedlock might not seem the most auspicious start, but the first hours of Jason’s life were perfect. Everyone was present at the hospital that day: one senator, two ambassadors, three surgeons (they knew a lot of people at the hospital), and all four future godfathers—a diplomat, a journalist, a congressional aide, and a law professor. It was a suitably male crew for a baby boy. For those hours at least, they felt like a family. David held the baby and beamed. Sara later thanked him for giving her her own private liberal media elite. She hadn’t been consulted on the selection of godparents, but she loved them, every one. She was a kid; what did she know. They would each in their own way help raise the boy, one of them, in particular, over time. None of them believed in God, but no one seemed to mind, or cared to address that irony.

Then he left. He promised to send money, and to write letters, and to come and visit. There was no diamond ring, no allusion to any future, no remorse, and no romance. No one ever even clarified what word would be used to describe his relationship with Jason although “Daddy” felt only slightly less libelous than “Uncle.” Having limited family and few close friends (it went with the job, apparently), it was easy to say “The child was an
accident.” Or, “a happy product of a lazy one-night stand.” But people around the office knew there had been, at least briefly, love involved. They joked that the boy was named after Jason and the Argonauts, given his father’s self-celebrated faux-pacifism. David never hid his reverence for “brass,” especially when walking the E-ring with generals. But in truth the boy was named after her father, whom she had also lost too early.

There was a lot of talk, and a lot of speculation, and a lot of work. She couldn’t sustain her office life and an illusion of ambition when all she wanted was to be home, but the reputation earned working from home in that town was rough. So when Jason turned four—not long after discovering his first set of spoons—she decided to leave. She would take him far away from people who felt church on Sunday mornings was a conflict with
Meet the Press
. She would take him to live in America.

Pennsylvania didn’t seem that different from Virginia to a child. But the people he met there were very different. His classmates, no longer the sons and daughters of diplomats who knew the names of senators because they’d dined in their homes, were mostly Republicans. They played ice hockey. They would go on to be investment bankers or corporate lawyers or (in the cases of the really wealthy ones) organic farmers and hops brewers. Kids in this new place were kids: they talked about sports and sugared cereals and apple picking. They didn’t study Mandarin or think of “Justice” as a place, with an address. Things felt, for a while, very quiet. And though the local mothers murmured about who the new girl was, Sara didn’t care. They said she’d lost her husband in a foreign war. Or they said she’d never been married because she was a Communist—or was it
commune
-ist? But in general people were kind. They were not competitive or ambitious enough to be too nosy or too critical—at least not at first.

*

The “main road” is what the two-lane is called around here, and the relief on her knees as she hits the asphalt after running on the wet grass is visceral. Feeling very little pain, she decides to just keep running since she has nothing to go home to but the endless waiting, and even the best books or worst television no longer provide distraction. Sometimes, when Jason was in his first weeks of training, she would run twice a day on this road. It made her feel more connected to what he was going through. But her runs always ended with rest, and dreams. Where did his runs end?

She reaches that point where her breathing evens, and when she knows she can go for a good long while. Her heart beats very slowly, like an athlete’s. It had always given her doctors the impression she was calm; it now gives that illusion to everyone else.

*

Sara told her son that his father died of a heart attack. He was traveling for work. And that work, according to him, was so important that he had had to choose it over being a more traditional dad. She always told Jason that his father worked for an embassy in Europe, because that was her understanding. First it had been France, then Spain; in the last years of his life, it was Sweden. But thinking back to a time before cell phones and e-mail, God only knows where he was and what he did. She was so mired in the process of caring for a little child and, when he slept, patching together work, that over time she didn’t even ask anymore where David was or what he was doing. She had no illusion he cared for her or would one day be coming home and sitting at a table for meals with the two of them. She would hear rumors from friends about where he was but people
didn’t ask anymore if she minded. More often they wanted to know how she minded being alone. Didn’t she want to marry?

She assumed David did well as the size of the checks he sent began to rise. This meant she could send Jason to good schools, so she forgave the fact that she had no idea what kind of work generated them. She forgave the fact that they came with no letter, no return address. She knew who had sent them. And almost always he would call soon after. “Did you get the cash?” The calls felt cold and transactional, like a drug deal. She quickly stopped caring. She was rational and pragmatic.
Romance is vastly overrated
, she thought.

Jason was a senior in high school when she dropped him off that day in early September ten years ago. As she did on most days, she dropped him off and then returned home to take a nap. She wasn’t sleeping well, and the insomnia had worsened as the anniversary—December—of David’s death approached. Usually she didn’t fall asleep; she just lay in bed, stared at the ceiling, took deep breaths and then made herself get up. When she was ready, she would sit down at her computer and do her work: editing interminably dull research papers written by former colleagues of David’s. They all had books, and in the nearer term they had articles, white papers, and always possibly revolutionary essays to be submitted to prize-winning policy journals. They all had editors, too. At first they began giving her work because they felt sorry for her, but then when they saw she was good they would ask her again and again, until the relationship became a dependency, enough of one that they were willing to pay very well for her input. She had a healthy sense of humor about the fact that the content of much of what she worked on was foreign to her; she just tracked the value of the lines by their rhythm and let the politics stand “on author.”

It was easy to forget about everything else once she was lost in her work, even as she was filled with mild self-loathing each time she sat down to it. It seemed so odd that she had ended up here, in the “middle of nowhere,” poring over details in documents that only a very few people would ever read, and in which most people would fail to see any relevance. But then she would remember she was the mother of an extraordinary boy and she would think,
That’s enough
.

Her real job was simply biding her time until school let out. This was perhaps the one reason she had not let Jason have a car. She knew these were the last few months she would have with him. They were already consumed with college applications, and in nine months he would move out. Then there would be marriage, she was sure of it. Jason wanted a “whole” family. When he left, her real work would be taken away. Or, at least, shifted. Being with him was all she had known her entire adult life: she’d become a mother when she was not much older than he was now. Two years older, to be exact.

*

But that September day was different. By nine o’clock, her phone was ringing off the hook. At first, seeing the 202 area code and assuming it was one of her Washington friends calling (“What are you doing with yourself these days?” Or “Have you had time to work on the piece?”), she didn’t answer. But then the numbers changed: 202 became 917 and she saw it was Jason’s cell, which he almost never used. He was meant to be in math class now. She knew that because he had moaned and groaned about it all the way through egg and cheese sandwiches that morning.

“What’s the use of math?”

She tried to argue its practicality.

“Mommy, math never saved anyone’s life.”

“It might save yours if it gets you into Harvard,” she said. Harvard was not out of his reach.

She picked up the phone. Her son was crying. She had not heard him cry in a long time. He possessed a remarkable, almost inhuman gift for tolerating pain, something she’d always attributed to losing a father—not once but twice: as an infant, and then again as a very young boy. To lose the father you never even really had in the first place was a unique tragedy, she knew; it promised a long tail of processing and forgiveness. Yet Jason was stoic. Physical pain didn’t affect him at all. The day he’d dislocated his shoulder on the football field he didn’t shed a tear. He was the quarterback. He had never been injured in six seasons of play. But that day she was there, and she saw him go down. When he stood up, his arm hung slant from the socket. While they waited for the EMT, the coach said to her, “Miss, I’ve seen three-hundred-pound linemen weep when this happens. Your boy is tough.”

She knew that. This was a kid whose father, while brilliant and very funny, was no model in the morals—or the courage—department. His father played tennis and chess. Jason liked contact. He was an excellent experiment for scientists studying nature versus nurture, or tiger mothers keen to divine the special sauce for making great men, because the template was there was no template. There were genes. She’d done nothing but love him unconditionally. She had loved him and treated him with respect. She had tried to discipline him, but he disciplined himself. Sometimes at night she’d hear him running sprints around the house.

But that September day when he called, he was shaken. He was begging her to come to school and collect him. So she did, and in the car on the radio she heard the news. When they got
home, they sat in front of the television, liked two stoned Deadheads post-show. Realizing it was almost nine o’clock, Sara went to make dinner.

“Forget Harvard,” Jason said. He was standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

They ate in silence until Sara said, “What do mean, ‘Forget Harvard’?”

“I’m not going there,” he said. “I’m going to apply to the Naval Academy.”

And she looked at her little philosopher with his steaming-hot shepherd’s pie, and she knew the argument was over.

“I know what I want,” he said.

This phrase took her breath away. Sara had never said those words.
He’s still in shock
, she remembers thinking. We all are. This will pass.

*

There are not many cars out, and she keeps heading to a traffic light she has designated as her turnaround point. If she makes it to the light, she will have gone five miles, and so ten by the time she is home. She plans to slow her pace, putting off the return. She knows the house will be clean. She has never had help and it is strange to have it now. Someone from the town sent—and paid for—two housecleaners. They were invisible and meticulous; she rarely saw them but she knew they were there. There was always mess, because her home had become a fort, and a retreat. It had become a base for all those who felt called to protect her.

After years of nights alone, there were so many others around all the time now. They were all good people. She has become close with the local cops; she has their numbers, and they all want
to help. One of them offered to move in, too, but she thinks that is overkill. No one is out to hurt her. People only want her story. At the traffic light she stops, and bends over, and takes some very deep breaths.