Spy Mom (52 page)

How did I get here? Did Simon know about Min? Why would Director Gray have someone following me? None of it made any sense but even then, I knew better than to ask Simon Still for clarification. I stood up, wobbly, dehydrated, shaking, and followed Simon from the silent white room into the seething airport terminal. As I joined the throngs of people on the move, I had no idea when the next round would come and, if it did, what I would do.

That is, until now.

The clock reads 7:30 when Theo starts jumping on me. Thankfully, today he's not wearing cleats. I am keenly aware that it is Monday morning for a number of reasons.

It has been three days since Simon Still made me call Righteous Liberty, which means that Yoder is probably no longer living the American dream. I'm 100 percent sure that, as soon as Simon left me in the coffee shop, his first move was to call in the order to pick up Yoder. By now Yoder's new address is probably a USAWMD holding cell buried under the ground in Washington. And there he'll stay until he tells Simon what he wants to know.

But just because they have Yoder doesn't mean I shouldn't go to his house and check it out. If you don't go looking for clues, it pretty much guarantees you'll never find any. Besides, every plan needs a first step, and visiting Yoder's residence will be mine. The fact that my plan doesn't include a second step or a single chart or map or graph would be troubling if flying by the seat of my pants wasn't something I inadvertently specialize in.

“Field trip!” Theo yells into my ear. His plastic dinosaur dances a jig on my head. I have a vague recollection of a discussion involving a field trip many weeks ago but beyond that, I cannot be sure.

“Field trip later,” I say, throwing my legs over the side of the bed. “Coffee now.”

“Mom, do you know how to spell ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex'? It's super long.”

“Yes.”

Maybe.

“How?”

“Can I brush my teeth before I try that one, honey?” I'm tired, weary, in a way I don't remember being a month ago. A bitter taste fills my mouth.

“Every opportunity is a learning opportunity,” Theo says. The word “opportunity” comes out with fifteen syllables. “Teacher Wendy says so.”

And Teacher Wendy is right but that doesn't mean I can't resent her perky smile and sweet purple chairs every now and then, does it?

“Mom, I'm hungry. Where's my spider T-shirt? I want some juice and I can't find my LEGO Darth Vader.”

Downstairs, Will is in the kitchen, wearing jeans and flip-flops, his back to the door. I'm about as likely to find my husband still at home at 7:30 on a weekday as I am to find a komodo dragon in my refrigerator.

“Are you sick?” I ask, as he hands me a full mug of coffee. “Did you get fired?” I smell the coffee and that nasty bitter taste fills my mouth again. I put it aside. Really, the plague would be very inconvenient right now. Or maybe it's something else entirely, the last bit of evidence in support of the theory that I've completely lost my edge. It's possible I am now just as susceptible to stress and anxiety as the next person. I think I would rather have the plague.

“Lucy, I own the company,” Will reminds me. “And remember, I'm going to Idaho in about two hours? It's on the calendar.”

“Idaho?”
Calendar?

“The biogas project? Capturing the methane from decomposing animal waste. We talked about it.”

“That sounds rude,” I say. “Theo, cover your ears.”

“It's not small potatoes,” Will says, laughing despite himself.

“Oh, that was awful.”

“I know. Apologies. The calendar, Lucy?”

Ah, back to the calendar, the one upon which I am supposed to record all the important dates and events related to our collective existence, like field trips, for example. While Will is meticulous about the family calendar, I have room for improvement. In fact, Will went so far as to threaten me with weekly staff meetings if I didn't get my act together. But I'm used to keeping everything important in my head. Anything written down can be used against me.

“Right,” I say. “Idaho. When are you back?”

“That's on the calendar, too. You don't remember any of it, do you?”

“I might. If you give me a clue.” There is a hint of exasperation in Will's tone, as though I remind him of a small, badly behaved child.

“Lucy, there's something else we need to talk about,” he says.

Why is it that when someone says “We need to talk,” it's never because they want to discuss the weather or what color to paint the bedroom or the fact that you just ran out of milk? It's used exclusively to start conversations one party would rather not be having and I get the sense I am that party in this situation. On the counter behind Will are several cardboard boxes full of plastic ziplock bags. Will picks up the snack-sized bags and holds them out to me.

Busted
.

“You might be some sort of master of deception, Lucy, but I know what you've been up to,” Will says.

Oh, but you really have no idea.

“So no trial,” I say, “I go right to the guillotine? How medieval.”

“We agreed we would try to go bag free,” he says. He uses the word “we,” but what he means is “me.” Will would not use a brand-new plastic bag if he was told that the only way he could save the planet was to stuff Theo's free-range celery sticks into one immediately. To him, such an act would be the first step toward an insatiable need. If pot is the entry drug that inevitably leads to you snorting cocaine off a prostitute's naked ass, then the plastic bag can only end in a 10,000-square-foot house with a Lamborghini Murciélago parked in the driveway. A slippery plastic slope.

And to give Will credit, he's not completely off the mark. I'm a total plastic-bag junkie. It's infinitely satisfying to pop some carrot sticks or pretzels into one and zip it closed with a swift pull of the thumb and forefinger. And for organizing things in a suitcase or a diaper bag, there's simply nothing better. I've searched the world over for a suitable alternative to the lowly plastic bag but have yet to come up with something that gets the job done with quite the same understated finesse.

I understand that plastic bags are bad. They go straight into the landfill and take one thousand years to biodegrade. Sea turtles choke on them and they strangle birds and things. But I'm like your garden-variety crackhead. I want to stop, I really do, and yet I keep going back for more.

“Americans throw away 380 billion plastic bags a year,” Will says, waving my contraband snack bags in the air. “Less than five percent of those get recycled.”

“I know,” I say, “but those reusable containers, they pop open, they spill, they crack, they're way too big. I can't take it.”

Will puts his arms around me. “I'll find you better ones,” he says. “I promise.”

This man really loves me. And he really hates plastic bags. If we had a battle to the death, the bags and me, I wonder who Will would root for?

“Okay,” I say. “If you find good containers, I'll try them.”

But even as the words leave my lips, I'm thinking that the back of my closet is an excellent hiding place for plastic bags. Maybe behind the big box of maternity clothes in the safe with the money and the stolen cell phones?

“Can I ask any more than that?” Will says.

I shake my head. You could, but it might not be the best idea.

“So,” I say, changing the subject, “how about you blow off Idaho and all that cow poop and take twenty preschoolers to a Giants game today instead?”

Because even though I didn't put it on the calendar, this morning I'm scheduled to head across town and do a little breaking and entering. Will looks at me as if I'm insane, which clearly I am, but not for the reasons he thinks. He puts a hand on my shoulder.

“Lucy, you know I would love to, but cow poop waits for no man.” He gets that faraway gleam in his eye that always appears when he talks about any kind of recycling and I know on some level all those books about coparenting are complete bullshit. In the real world, Mom does the heavy lifting.

“Are you okay?” he asks. “You look a little pale.” He keeps saying that.

“I think I'm dying of the plague,” I say. “Or maybe malaria. It really could be malaria.”

Will laughs. He thinks I'm kidding but I'm not. Tropical diseases are no laughing matter and I say that with an authority I'd rather not have.

For reasons I still don't care to examine too closely, I ended up in the jungle far more frequently than Agents 1 through 25 did. Down in the Underground, they got to calling me Jungle Jane. I had grown weary of the Agency's fondness for alliteration so while there was not much I could do about Sally Sin, I put a stop to that Jungle Jane nonsense with some carefully placed WWII hand grenades I'd stolen out of a locker in Moscow.

As a result of my jungle frolicking, I suffered from a whole host of illnesses with frightening names, such as dengue fever, malaria, Japanese encephalitis, and leptospirosis. I even had to do a round of rabies vaccinations, thanks to a pissed-off sewer rat. Please don't ask for specifics on that one. My mental health depends on pretending it never happened.

Once, during the rainy season, Simon and I were in a dreadful jungle in Guinea where it seemed everyone had dengue fever. Even now, I can't remember exactly why we were there but it started with a man claiming to have information about a stockpile of plutonium 239. And it ended when the meeting turned out to be a setup and Simon shot the man, which, in turn, made some people very unhappy.

My cheap plastic Timex glowed midnight when Simon sat up on his straw mat and started swatting frantically at the mosquito netting. I could see his face glistening with sweat in the faint light, a deranged look in his eyes.

“Sally,” he screamed. “They're in here with me! In my bed! Get them out!”

I scrambled from under my net and crawled over to him.

“Get them out,” he whispered, clutching the net as if he were a 175-pound baby with his favorite blankie. “Please.”

“There's no one here, Simon. Just me,” I said. “It's okay.” I slowly pulled the net over his head but let him continue to hold it. I laid my hand on his forehead as my mother had done when I was a kid. He was on fire. I pulled him into my lap.

“They're coming, you know. For me. For you. For all of us. Soon.”

“Shhh. We need to go to the hospital, Simon.”

At the suggestion of the hospital, Simon covered his face and howled.

“No! Are you trying to kill me? I would rather die than go to the hospital in this country. I'm freezing.”

He began to shake uncontrollably in my arms, his eyes rolling back in his head. It would be bad for my professional development if the boss died in my lap.

“Simon!” I turned him on his side as he proceeded to puke all over me. After having a child, being puked on is not that big a deal, but back then, in the Guinean jungle, it was still really gross.

I slid Simon, now completely limp, onto his stomach and crawled back over to my straw mat. I seemed to remember that in cases of dengue fever, Tylenol was about the only medical response. In my knapsack was a plastic bag of just that, or so said the guy on the street from whom I'd bought it. Could very well have turned out to be LSD for all I knew. But Simon was already hallucinating so he probably wouldn't have noticed if I accidentally fed him psychedelic drugs. I dumped a bunch of the pills into my hand, hoping the dose was at least in the ballpark, grabbed a bottle of water, and crawled back to Simon.

He was trembling now and I shook him hard.

“Simon, if you don't wake up I'm going to shoot you,” I shouted right in his ear. His eyes flew open.

“You can't do that!” As his mouth opened, I popped the pills in. He tried to spit but I held my hand firmly over his mouth until he choked them down, glaring at me as if I were the devil or, worse, Ian Blackford. I held the water bottle to his lips and tipped it. He sputtered and growled at me but swallowed everything. Then he collapsed back onto my lap in a shivering damp heap. Lovely.

It didn't take long for both of my legs to fall asleep and as I tried to shift Simon back onto his own mat, he woke up, momentarily lucid.

“The secrets,” he whispered. “They'll drive you mad. They'll make you crazy. But still you'll keep them. Secrets about you. About me. About him.”

What secrets? And who was “him”? He couldn't have delivered the lines better if he were auditioning for
Hamlet
.

“Close your eyes,” I said. “Go back to sleep.” Simon nodded his head and did as he was told.

The next morning, I called for reinforcements and two burly men I didn't know showed up to help me carry a moderately dead and severely bedraggled Simon out of the jungle and onto a plane to Germany, where they yelled at me for giving him so many unidentifiable pills. He never acknowledged our night in the Guinean jungle nor did he ever explain about all the secrets. And I, of course, never asked.

I dump my coffee down the sink and pour Theo a bowl of Cheerios. They smell pretty good so I fill another bowl for myself. I hear Theo kissing Will good-bye and extracting promises to build weapons of mass destruction out of LEGOS upon Daddy's return from frolicking around an Idaho dairy farm.

We eat our Cheerios side by side. Most of Theo's end up plastered to his pajama shirt.

“T-Y-R-A-N-N-O-S-A-U-R-U-S R-E-X,” I say. “Two words.”

Theo stops eating and grins. It's the smile that makes my heart flutter no matter how many times I see it. His eyes crinkle and his face is radiant and I forgive him all the dawdling and temper tantrums and lost shoes and beads up the nose. I just hope, when the time comes, he will forgive me for all the secrets.

I stare into my closet, the only place on earth that would surely benefit from a weapon of mass destruction. On one shelf, there are several pairs of jeans with holes in the knees from crawling around on the floor when Theo was a baby. Underneath is another shelf with long-sleeved T-shirts. Hanging are fleece vests, fleece jackets, fleece scarves. I'd buy fleece underwear if I thought I could get away with it. San Francisco is roughly sixty-five degrees, damp and windy every day of the year. And it's a cold wind, not happy until it works its way through to your bones. Occasionally, I find myself pining for the Sahara Desert but then I remember what it was like to be stuck there without a ride and the desire quickly passes.