Spy Mom (19 page)

All the heads bobbed up and down, except for the leader, who was starting to look frantic.

“So let's do the math here. Five seats, eight criminals. What does that leave us?”

“Three criminals with no seats!” the youngest boy, hidden in the back, shouted out.

“Very good. So three of you are going to have to run because you won't fit in the car. And running very fast in those pants, well, we all know how that goes.”

Silence. “You're fucking with us,” the leader said. “Now get out of the way so we can take the car.”

He stepped forward, sliding his fingers under the handle of the rear passenger door, behind which my baby continued to sleep peacefully.

“Get your hands off my car,” I said quietly. He laughed, a cynical, sad laugh.

“Or what?” he said. I took a step forward, eye to eye with this boy.

“Step away from the car and we'll call it good.” But even as the words left my lips I knew this was going to end badly for this kid. He couldn't back off now, not in front of his boys. If he did, he would lose their respect and be relegated back to the rank and file, which I knew he'd worked hard to rise above. I almost felt bad for him. Almost.

“Please,” I said, tossing him a last chance, “take the tiger and head on out.”

“No one tells me what to do in my 'hood,” he replied with his most intimidating snarl.

The moves came with ease, sort of like riding a bike. The tire iron connected with the soft flesh of his throat with such force that he immediately dropped to the ground, gasping for air. To help him out, I grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, straightening out his windpipe and letting him take a breath. One of the boys in the group had, by now, pulled out his gun and, although his hand was trembling, he aimed it at me the best he could.

“Put that thing away,” I said, pointing at him with the tire iron. That seemed to be enough. The ringleader was still sucking wind at my feet. “Take your friend here to a hospital. He needs treatment.”

The boy with the gun nodded.

“Yeah, hospital,” he repeated.

“Now,” I said. “And give me that Glock. You're going to hurt someone.” The boy, still shaking, handed me the gun. I dropped the clip and ejected the remaining bullet from the chamber. As it fell, I caught it in the air and simultaneously pushed the button to the side of the safety that released the slide from the body of the gun. With that, the entire thing fell into ten pieces on the ground. I kicked them to the curb for emphasis.

The boys stood watching, dumbfounded.

“Your friend here doesn't feel so well,” I reminded them, pointing to the ringleader now flat on his face in the dust. “Hospital. Now.”

I went back to the trunk to take out my spare tire. The boys gathered up their friend. But they found it hard to hold up their pants and hold up their friend at the same time. There was some internal discussion about how to manage this situation and still look cool. Two of the boys rolled the tops of their pants over a few times so now they almost fit correctly. Finally they scooped up their leader, whose skin grew more ashen by the second.

“What do we tell them at the hospital?” one of the junior thugs asked, looking a little sheepish. “They always ask, you know, when there is blood and stuff.”

“Well, what do you usually tell them?”

The boy shrugged. “Gang stuff.”

“Why don't you try telling them the truth?”

The boy's eyes opened wide. “I don't know about that.”

“Well then why are you asking me? I'm busy here. Have to change the tire that you boys ruined. Now go.”

They nodded their heads and started toting their wheezing leader down the street to an old Honda Accord, probably stolen right here, arguing amongst themselves about what to tell the hospital.

I finished changing my tire and went home, ready to tuck the incident away in the catacombs of my memory.

Two days later, there is a tiny mention of it in the paper, something about a woman with a flat tire and beating up a local gang member and how police were looking to question her. Will didn't say anything, but he did cut the piece out and leave it on the kitchen table, under the salt shaker. Did he mean it as a cautionary tale, an indication that I should probably stick to the main routes nowadays? Did he think it was me the police were looking for? Either way, I crumpled it up and tossed it into the recycle bin, hoping that would be the end of it.

But would I have told him the truth if he asked me directly? And why didn't he ask? There is a part of me that believes Will doesn't want to know the truth, whatever it is. Because then he and I and this whole world we've created comes crashing down around us and all the king's horses and all the king's men would not be able to put it back together again.

When I married Will, I was more concerned about when I would have another opportunity to rip his clothes off and less about what normal married life actually looks like. I could not conceive a life with a house, a car, a couple of kids, roast beef on Sundays, and the like. I didn't think there was any way a girl like me could live like that.

And Will hadn't exactly planned on a girl like me either. There were times when I would catch him staring at me and I swear I could read his mind. It went something like this: “Maybe I have taken this rebellion against my parents one step too far. Maybe I didn't actually have to go for the gold and ask her to marry me.”

Soon after I moved into Will's condo, his ex-girlfriend Laura paid me a visit. As it turned out, I wasn't that busy, having no friends to meet, no job to go to, and no belongings to unpack. She didn't knock or ring the bell; instead, using her old key, she barged right in and found me sitting on the floor reading magazines. At first, I thought she was there to kill me, for thinking I could retire from the Agency or something crazy like that. But after a second I recognized her from the photos Will had discreetly hidden away when I first arrived.

“So you're it,” she sneered. I can't be sure, but I'd put money on her having had a few martinis for breakfast. She looked around the place with distaste.

“This place looks like shit,” she continued.

“I'm Lucy,” I said, standing up.

“I know that,” she hissed. “Everyone knows that. But I had to see the competition in person.”

Competition? This was getting scary.

“I will get him back,” she slurred. “No, that's not exactly right. He will come crawling back. You'll see. I mean, look at you, what are you really? Who are you? You're nobody. William would not be so stupid as to marry someone who isn't really anyone.”

How right you are, I wanted to say. But instead I stood there, quietly, waiting for her to finish.

Her tirade was obviously exhausting because before I knew it she was passed out on the couch. I called Will at the office.

“Your ex-girlfriend is passed out on the couch,” I said.

“You're kidding?”

“Do I sound like I'm kidding? Here, you can listen to her snoring.” I held the phone up to Laura's slightly sagging mouth. “See? I'm not kidding. Is there a protocol I should follow for this situation?”

“Oh, for God's sake. Okay. I'm on my way.”

I almost volunteered to take care of Laura myself, but I got the feeling that Will's definition of taking care of someone and mine were vastly different. He arrived home thirty minutes later, but Laura still hadn't moved an inch.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, standing over her. “I thought we could deal with this as adults, but obviously I was wrong. What is she doing here? Did she say?”

“She came over to check out the competition or something like that. Basically, I think she wanted to see who took her place in your bed. Morbid fascination maybe?”

“I'm so sorry,” Will said, rubbing his temples as if the whole episode was giving him a splitting headache.

“This isn't going to work,” I said suddenly.

“No, she obviously can't stay here, but we have to wait for her to wake up.”

“No,” I said, “I mean this, you and I, this isn't going to work. I have no business being here. This is her house, her life. I don't belong here.”

Will rubbed more vigorously at his temples. All that rubbing made the hair on the sides of his head stick straight out.

“God, Laura, you always were good at making things complicated,” he said.

“And you,” he continued, taking me firmly by the shoulders, “I love you. I look forward to waking up now because I know the first thing I'll see will be your face. I think about you all the time, every moment of the day, every second. Everything in my life is brighter, better, and that is because you are in it. Does that make sense? You belong here. With me. There is no question in my mind that we met on that dive boat in Hawaii because we were supposed to. We are meant to be together. That's a fact.” Then he put those lips to mine and I thought maybe I could believe him, that maybe the doubt I sometimes saw in his eyes was all in my head.

The next day the condo was on the market and Will put a bid on the place that I now call home. I still run into Laura on occasion. We both pretend not to notice one another, and life goes on without incident.

Will and I make a good pair. He is calm, efficient, logical, and yet hopelessly romantic. He never lets the practical get in the way of the desirable. The truth is my experience with men before him was limited mostly to those I met while masquerading as someone else. In the occasional honest throes of physical passion, I had to work hard to remember what language I was supposed to be speaking. These relationships were doomed from the start. You cannot build a lasting foundation with someone if you cannot tell him your address.

But on the flip side, this small fact made these relationships, if you can even call them that, very straightforward. There were no romantic entanglements to distract me, no obligations that I could not possibly meet. These men came in and out of my life, leaving nothing but the vague sense of having lost some time and the knowledge that on some level this was not the way it was meant to be.

The first time I saw Will, his slow smile and the outline of his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, I felt something in me give. It started small like a ripple on a pond and grew, within the course of our morning dive, into a tidal wave. It was desire but not just the primal kind. It was the desire to read a magazine in my own bathtub with my own towels in my own house, and climb into my own bed with my own sheets, and pull my own comforter up to my ears, and sleep without the fear of waking up dead. It was a deep and suddenly painful longing for normal, even if I had no idea what that looked like. And for reasons beyond my understanding, it all centered on the man standing next to me, his wetsuit unzipped to the waist. I knew I was sunk.

But I know what you're thinking. That while Will knows my address, he does not know my name. How good or real can a relationship be if you are not telling the truth, if you are leaving out significant pieces of information about your past? This is a very good question and one for which I have no answer. With every day that passes it becomes less likely that I can tell Will about Sally Sin. It becomes more likely that telling him would destroy us, taking down Theo, who has done nothing more than be born to one very nice parent and one complete idiot.

So I go around and around and get no closer to figuring out how to fix what isn't right. Would Will believe me if I suddenly blurted out that I was a spy in my former life? He might find it easier to digest if I had Playboy Bunny on my resume. At least that is something that people actually do. No one is actually a spy.

And now this. I have put my family in danger by being me. Even if everything turns out fine, which it never does, I will never forgive myself for bringing us so close to the line.

What I want now that I'm in this mess is to do something. Action has always been my drug of choice. During my first five years with the Agency, I was on the road twice as much as the next guy. I couldn't sit still. I wanted only to keep going, keep up the momentum. Simon said that either I suffered from an obsessive-compulsive travel disorder or I was the most dedicated patriot he had met, on account of what I was willing to do for my country. Truth be told, it had nothing to do with my country. I liked it well enough. With the exception of a secluded beach in Thailand, I hadn't been to any other places I actually wanted to live, but that wasn't what drove me. I was running hard and fast. Away from whom, I couldn't say, and toward what, I had no idea. But the Agency provided the perfect way for me to barrel down the highway, bypassing the exits to introspection and self-evaluation.

On September 11, 2001, I was drinking coffee at a sidewalk café in Rome, watching a young priest take his coffee several tables away. What I knew that no one else drinking coffee on this fine afternoon did was that the priest literally had state secrets up his voluminous sleeve. I was at that moment enjoying my coffee and contemplating how I was going to relieve him of those secrets. I had not come up with anything even remotely worthy of a plan when the whole square suddenly started to buzz. Information turns us into systems, and this system existed to funnel bits and scraps of the strangest things to my ears. Towers, planes, fire, falling, smoke, collapse. Everyone started rushing around going nowhere, and before I could stop him, my priest disappeared into the crowd. But I didn't care. I could find him again later. After all, I knew where he lived. What I really needed to know was what the hell was going on. I stepped inside the café and inquired of the owner, who pointed to the television in time for me to watch the second tower collapse to the ground in a deadly rage of smoke and dust. I actually gasped out loud, a very English “Oh my God,” slipping from my lips. The café owner shot me a surprised look.

“American?” he asked, curious and confused.