Spy Mom (38 page)

“She can take only what fits in that bag,” the tall man said, casting a quick glance around the single room that was her home. “Everything else stays behind.”

In the sack, there is a yellow teddy bear with a limp purple bow around his neck, an illegal translation of
The Cat in the Hat
, worn at the spine and water stained, and a pink hairbrush that at one time had rhinestones imbedded in the handle. But like so many things in her short life, the rhinestones are by now lost to history. She clutches this sack with such ferocity that others on the train notice her white knuckles and wonder what might be hidden inside it.

Sitting next to her, on this overnight train from Norilsk, is the tall man. He wears a dark wool overcoat that smells faintly of wet dog. It is January and they waited for the train in a heavy but ordinary snow. She thought he might pick her up, lift her out of the wet Russian snow, but he was no better than a statue standing beside her while her little shoes soaked through. It will be days before she can feel her toes again.

When he arrived at the tiny house to get her the day before, he looked her up and down as if he were considering a purchase. Then, without a word, he sat down at the scarred wooden table and accepted a chilled glass of vodka from the men who had come before him.

The girl noticed his hands shook as he lifted the glass to his cold lips. She wanted to cry but knew her mother would be disappointed if she did, so instead she simply sat in the corner, holding on to the bag for dear life. It was all she had left.

They ride on through the night. She sleeps fitfully, sometimes waking up with her cheek pressed up against the man's coat. It is scratchy against her young skin. Once when she opens her eyes, the man is staring at her. He immediately looks away, but she sees something in his eyes—something her young mind can't place. She has the sense that he doesn't quite know what to do with her. He ignores her when they are awake, but in the night he takes off his overcoat and wraps it snugly around her. He whispers her name over and over while she's asleep. It sounds wrong falling from his lips, tainted by his unusual accent. When her mother says her name, it is a song.

In the morning, the guards come through demanding papers. As the man hands them two blue passports, she catches a glimpse of a photograph of a little girl. It could be her but it is not. She stays very still and quiet until the guards return the documents and continue down the train aisle.

Sometimes, as they slice through the empty countryside, the man passes her dry crackers and cups of water. She is not hungry but eats the crackers and drinks the water because after she does, the man looks satisfied. It is better than the other look he has which is vacant, as if someone reached into his chest and yanked out his heart and he can't understand why his body is still going on.

After a while, they depart the train and climb into an old waiting Jeep. The rugged terrain rattles the girl around in the backseat. She is aware that over the past few days she has become nothing more than a bag of loosely tied bones. She is hollow, the space in between the words.

Once, during the ride, she reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out a photograph of a ballerina standing at the barre in pointe shoes and a pale pink tutu. Her long swanlike neck tilted slightly to the right to reveal muscles most people don't have, she does not smile. The girl holds the photograph close to her face on the off chance that she might somehow absorb the woman right into herself that way. After a few seconds, she hides it back in her pocket.

They park in front of a farmhouse. It is winter but two horses are out in the pasture, looking forlorn in ankle-deep snow. A young woman wrapped in a heavy coat waves from the front porch. Her husband joins her. They are smiling. The woman runs to the Jeep, sweeps the girl out of the backseat and into arms that are strong and warm. She smells of vanilla.

“She's yours now,” the man says to the woman. “For as long as we can.”

The woman locks eyes with the man as he ducks back into the Jeep. As it pulls away, the girl remembers the paper sack, still in the backseat. She feels a scream crawling up her throat, the tears threatening to spill. But she pushes them back down. Her mother told her not to cry, never to cry, and she won't. Maybe not ever again.

I wake in a puddle of sweat, my hand clamped over my mouth to keep the scream from escaping. Beside me, Will sleeps peacefully. I hear Theo's soft snores coming from his room down the hall. He is perfect, safe, but I need to see him with my own eyes, just to be sure. As I stumble down the dark hallway, remnants of the memory cling to me as if I walked through the sticky web of a black widow. The threat of the scream lingers in my throat. The dream used to show up once in a while, infrequently enough that I could write it off as an aberration. But now she comes all the time, the lost little girl in her red parka who will spend her life wondering who she really is and where she came from.

And I know this, because she is me.

I stand in the middle of my postage stamp–sized backyard and spin in a slow circle. If you didn't know better, you might think I was reliving the glory days of a Grateful Dead concert, strains of “Touch of Grey” playing in my head, eyes closed in a semi-hypnotic state.

But things are not always as they appear. I am really quite busy. As I turn, I examine the perimeter of the fence, the roofline, the little space under the stairs that is always infested with spiders. I inventory the flowers and trees and shrubs. I study the plastic baseball bat tossed haphazardly on the grass, the small wooden play structure, the empty water table. I continue to spin.

After a minute, I have to admit there is nothing amiss. It's simply another lovely San Francisco morning, the sun is shining, the fog is rolling back toward the ocean, and everything appears to be perfectly fine.

But don't get me wrong. Just because I don't see anyone in my backyard does not mean they aren't there watching. They are always watching. I used to think I was paranoid but as it turned out I wasn't crazy, just right.

Five-year-old Theo appears in the open back door.

“Mom, I'm hungry. When's breakfast?” At the top of the stairs, he stands with his hands on his hips, looking down at me with disapproval.

“You didn't squish our castle, did you?” he says. “Me and Zach worked on it yesterday for, like, one hundred years.”

I look down to discover I'm standing in the middle of the sandbox, among a series of sliding sand ramparts decorated with twig and leaf flags, and manned by Lego guys with tiny plastic guns. In one hand, I hold a bag of garbage intended for the trash bin, the reason I came out here in the first place, and in the other, a blue sand pail, uncovered in the grass on my way to the bins. Throwing out the trash turned into tidying up the toys, which led to looking for suspicious characters lurking around in my backyard, and ended with me in the sandbox, spinning like a stoned and aging Deadhead.

“The castle is okay,” I say, hoping Theo is too far away to see the damage. “How about we get started on breakfast for you?”

Inside the house, stuck to the refrigerator with a Golden Gate Bridge magnet, is a list of Theo's morning responsibilities. Theo's preschool teacher told me that using the word “responsibilities” rather than “chores” to describe these tasks was better. I have no idea why and was afraid to ask for fear that any further conversation would reveal me to be hopelessly out of step with today's underlying educational theories.

Theo has three responsibilities. Number one—put on your clothes. Number two—brush your teeth. Number three—feed the cat. If he does all three, at the end of the week he gets two dollars. I think the list is reasonable, but Theo acts as if he is Sisyphus destined to push that damn rock up the hill every morning, just to be rewarded with it rolling back over his toes every afternoon. When I remind him of how many dollars he needs to save in order to buy that LEGO
Star Wars
set, the one with two Luke Skywalkers, he becomes much more focused.

By the time I reach the kitchen, Theo is hard at work on task number three. He very diligently measures out scoop after scoop after scoop of cat food and adds it to the dish until there is a mini Everest of kibble starting to avalanche every which way.

“I think that's probably enough cat food,” I say to the back of his blond head. He shakes me off, a cocky rookie pitcher to his veteran catcher.

“No,” he says. “I need to fill up the other bowl, too.” He is deliberate, on task. If he weren't making such a mess, I would commend him on his effort.

“But that bowl is for the cat's water,” I point out. “All living things need water to survive.” He turns, looking at me as if I am a complete idiot.

“I know that,” he says. “We learned that at the science table. But I'm making soup because Sprinkles likes soup. How do you spell soup?”

I could argue but there's no good way to win an argument with a five-year-old without someone ending up in tears, usually me. I spell “soup.”

“S-O-U-P.”

“S-O-U-P,” he parrots back to me.

“And you're responsible for cleaning up when you're done doing whatever it is that you're doing.”

“No I'm not,” he says with total confidence, “because Sprinkles is going to eat it all up.”

After which Sprinkles is going to build a rocket out of household appliances and fly to Mars. I mean, what are the chances? Outside the kitchen window, trees sway in the breeze. Theo continues to make a soggy brown concoction in Sprinkles' water bowl. Sprinkles sits nearby, looking depressed.

A brisk knock at the front door draws my attention. Out on the porch stands a UPS man, his face obscured by his trademark brown cap. As I open the door, I realize that while his cap is indeed the right color, it lacks a logo of any kind. A bolt of electricity shoots the length of my body as if I stuck a metal fork in the toaster.

“Can I help you?” I ask. Giving me a flat smile, the faux UPS man takes in the scene: average-looking woman with messy hair, slightly grungy jeans, and flannel slippers with a hole in the toe. Ultimately, he decides I'm no threat. It's not the first time I've been dismissed in this way.

“Special delivery,” he says, handing me a small box wrapped in brown paper. My name, with no address, is scrawled across the front in black Sharpie. Seeing the wide, loopy handwriting has roughly the same impact on me as falling through thin ice might. My lips move but no sound escapes, my arms move around with no apparent purpose. I lean against the doorjamb for support.

The man's flat smile widens. I remind myself that fainting like Vivien Leigh in
Gone with the Wind
is no guarantee that the package will go away. If it were, believe me, I would already be in a heap on the floor, hoping for a rescue and some iced tea.

“What if I don't want a special delivery?” I say finally, still propped up against the door.

“It's kind of an offer you can't refuse,” he says.

“I've heard that before,” I say. He passes me the package and I take it.

“Thanks,” I say. “I guess.”

“Good luck,” he says with a smirk. Down on the street, a black government-issue sedan awaits his return.

“That face isn't necessary,” I say. “I was having a nice morning and now I'm not. Why don't you go before I do something I can't take back?” He gives me a small salute, jumps down all five front steps in one leap, and vanishes into the car. Theo appears at my elbow.

“Who was that?” he asks. “Hey, a package? Can I open it? Is it for me?”

“I'm pretty sure it's for me. And no, you can't open it.”

“You never let me do anything.”

“I know,” I say. “I'm an awful mother.”

Standing in the hallway, I peel back the paper from the package. Theo watches with great anticipation because, after all, a package is a package. Underneath the paper is a plain white box; inside the box is a black cell phone, with no screen and only a single button, nestled in a bed of crumpled up
Washington Post
. A note in the same loopy handwriting reads “Call me. Let's have coffee.” I can almost hear him laughing.

I start to sweat.

“That's not very cool, whatever it is,” Theo says, peering into the box.

“I don't think it's meant to be cool, Theo,” I say.

In fact, it is meant for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to connect me directly and securely to the mother ship. Now, if I were James Bond, this boring plastic phone would do much more, like simultaneously wash my sports car, fix me a nice cold martini (shaken, not stirred, of course), and bloodlessly dispatch the bad guy. But in real life, spy gear tends to be much more practical. And I should know. I used to be one.

A spy, that is.

On the surface, I look like your average stay-at-home mom. My jeans always bear some evidence of what we had for breakfast and I could certainly benefit from more frequent showering. But I wasn't always like this. I used to carry a small handbag with room only for a fake passport, a ChapStick, and a small stack of foreign currency.

Now I carry an oversized shoulder bag stuffed full of anti-bacterial wipes, water bottles, crackers, a bulging wallet with VIP cards for every supermarket in a twenty-mile radius, and that same ChapStick, except I really have no hope of finding it once it sinks to the bottom of the bag. My doctor has recommended physical therapy for the damage the bag has wrought upon my innocent right shoulder. Some days it is hard to distinguish me from Quasimodo.

My name is Lucy Parks Hamilton, mother to Theo and wife to William Wilton Hamilton III. Right around the time we met, my husband started a green-energy investment fund that has done surprisingly well in the robust environment of guilt in which we live. Will is known for speaking with a hushed reverence about geothermal energy, solar cells, and a variety of recycling methods. Lately, it seems his commitment to saving the world is rubbing off on our child.