Spy Mom (63 page)

“Why are you following me?” I whispered into her ear. “Who do you work for?” She grunted and squirmed. I squeezed tighter and she went still.

“Who sent you?” I asked again.

“Serendipity,” she gurgled. Which was not exactly the answer I expected from her. In the pocket of her coat was a small vial of what I assumed must be chloroform. She wanted me alive.

“‘Serendipity' implies a random occurrence that's happy in nature,” I said, dangling the vial in front of her. “Are you happy? Because right now I'm not feeling that happy.”

She laughed, digging her fingernails into the sleeve of my coat. “There's not enough in there to kill you,” she said. “Just enough to make you sleep.”

“It doesn't take much, you know,” I said. “People miscalculate all the time and then you've got all sorts of problems. I'll ask you one more time, who sent you?”

“No one,” she said. “But that same no one will be infinitely grateful I stumbled upon you in the Louvre. Sally Sin is supposed to be dead, after all.”

“She
is
dead,” I said. “Who are you?”

Now that the woman had stopped struggling, she was simply heavy. I leaned against the wall to prevent us both from falling into the toilet.

“I accept death first,” she said, almost with relish.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You're not a guy. No need for the macho bullshit. Can't we just have a conversation? Aren't women supposed to be good at that?”

In response, she pressed her lips into a stubborn thin line and I knew I would get nothing from her, especially tucked away in a bathroom stall at the Louvre.

“I was having a pretty nice day,” I said, taking a wad of toilet paper and the chloroform vial in a single hand. With a quick tap on the bathroom wall, the vial cracked and the chloroform leaked onto the tissue.

“Hope you got the measurements right,” I said as I held it over her mouth and nose. Her feet kicked frantically for a few seconds and finally went still. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she went completely limp. Not without effort, I propped her up on the closed toilet seat, leaning against the wall, hands folded neatly in her lap. She would wake up in about thirty minutes with the headache of a lifetime and no memory of where she was. If anyone happened upon her in the meantime, she'd be dismissed as a young woman who'd had one too many over lunch and was passing the hours in a warm museum bathroom.

As I washed my hands and straightened out my clothes, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. And there was Sally Sin, looking back at me.

Will was walking around Room C with his hands clasped behind his back like an absentminded professor.

“I can see why you love these, Lucy,” he said. “I've never seen them before except in pictures.”

“Let's go,” I said.

“But we just got here. What about the Degas?”

I ran a hand down his chest. “I was thinking it might be time for a siesta,” I said, subtle as a truck. “Back at the hotel.”

Will gave me a slow smile, the one that still turns my knees to Jell-O.

“I like the way you think,” he said. We walked, arms wrapped around each other, out of the room and right past the bathroom door, behind which my mysterious stalker slept off the hit of anesthesia meant for me.

It was the middle of the night and a rhythmic rain fell outside our hotel windows. Drenched with sweat, my heart pounding in my chest, I climbed out of bed and stood looking at the dark shadow of the Eiffel Tower. I'd made a terrible mistake believing I could live a normal life, that I could come and go like any other citizen of the world. I could not. I was not.

But now it was too late.

Sometime around 2
A.M
., I hear Will's key in the door downstairs. Or at least I hope it's Will's key. I'm too tired to deal with any more intruders. Whoever it is, he's welcome to steal all our stuff as long as after he's done, he leaves quietly. Will drops his suitcase in the hallway and takes off his shoes. I can barely hear his footsteps on the stairs as he comes closer. I pretend to be asleep because that's what most people do in the middle of the night. Will strips off his clothes, dropping them in a heap on the floor, where they will remain indefinitely, and slides under the sheets next to me. His body is warm but his hands are freezing. I recoil from their touch.

“Sorry I'm late,” he whispers, clearly not convinced by my imitation of sleep. “We got hung up in Idaho. Weather.”

“Weather,” I mumble. “You don't smell so good.”

He nuzzles my ear. His hands grow warmer, stealing my heat. “You should see my shoes.”

“What are you doing here anyway?” I groan, pulling a pillow over my head. “The calendar doesn't have you back until tomorrow.” Or that's what I expect the calendar would say if I actually ever looked at it. I'm suddenly overcome with gratitude I didn't try to hide Yoder in the guest bedroom based on my sketchy memory of the calendar.

“I wanted to be here for Theo's interview tomorrow, otherwise I'd have just stayed over in Idaho.” His answer causes a sharp, small ache right in the middle of my chest that catches me off guard. He used to rush home from New York or Washington or Boston because he couldn't wait to be back in San Francisco with me. But our priorities have shifted. Children will do that to you.

“I missed you,” I whisper, curling myself into him. He doesn't hear me because he's already snoring lightly in my ear but I'm wide awake now, thinking, for some reason, about Ian Blackford with his shirt off.

In the beginning of my relationship with Will, there were not enough hours in the day. We couldn't get out of bed without having sex and we couldn't have dinner without having sex and we couldn't watch TV without having sex. There were times when we had to run home from a restaurant because we were sure dropping to the floor and doing it right there in front of everyone would get us arrested. Overall, it was a pretty satisfying way to live.

If Will was on the road for more than a day, I experienced his absence as pure agony, as if some important part of my body had been ripped off and nothing could staunch the bleeding. I was in a new city with no job and no friends and I would wander around looking stoned, wanting nothing more than for the hours to pass and for Will to come back to me. There were moments when he was gone that I doubted his very existence. Was any of this real? Had I finally lost my marbles, as Simon Still liked to say?

But if San Francisco and the fog and my new husband were all part of a larger nervous breakdown, it was not altogether unpleasant. I thought I could just keep on going in this manner for quite some time.

Eventually, in a marriage, things have to slow down if you ever plan on getting anything done in life. And I do mean anything. It's hard to concentrate on something as basic as reading the newspaper when you're busy pining away for someone who crawled out of your bed not ten minutes earlier.

One way to slow down the twenty-four-hour sexual buffet is to get pregnant and have a baby. Yes sir, that works very well to bring things to a screeching halt.

At first, Will treated me like I was dying, opening doors, helping me out of the car, not letting me walk on the outside of the sidewalk. He brought home a stack of baby books I couldn't have finished reading even if the gestation period for a human baby were closer to that of an elephant. The books led to conversations I wouldn't have expected to have if Will and I were locked in a room together for a million years and forced to talk to one another for the entire time.

“Did you know in some cultures they practice placentophagia? That's when the new parents eat the placenta,” Will would say.

“No. Why on earth would I know that? I don't even want to know that now. Please take it back.”

Meanwhile, I watched with horror as the body I had grown accustomed to living in stretched and strained in ways utterly alien to me. I was used to a body that did as it was told. When I said run, it ran. When I said hide, it hid. When I said duck, it hit the deck as if life depended on it, which it usually did. But now I struggled simply to get my shoes on. I kept bumping into doorjambs and almost setting myself on fire on the stove. A man actually gave me his seat on the bus and I was so grateful I almost wept. If this was what life felt like being a whale, I was extremely happy to have been born a human. I was no good at being a whale.

“It's such a remarkable experience,” Will would say, resting a hand on my enormous stomach. “I'm just in awe of it.”

“If you think it's so amazing then why don't you carry him around with you for a while?” I'd suggest. And Will would laugh because it was easy to marvel at pregnancy from the male side of the gender divide when there was absolutely no risk of being forced to take it up yourself.

Toward the end, I didn't want to stray very far from the house. The unnamed baby was sitting on my bladder and every six minutes I had to run off and find a bathroom. And while my doctor assured me this was perfectly normal and happened all the time, it didn't make it any more dignified.

In a way, I was grateful Simon Still wasn't able to see me in this condition. Because even though his job was to protect the roughly 7 billion human inhabitants here on earth from mass destruction, he didn't really like people very much, and pregnant women held a special place in his mental ranking of things that disgusted him.

Nothing was normal. The smell of my husband made me sick to my stomach. I could no longer even enter my favorite coffee shop and it wasn't solely because the doorway was shrinking. I kept meeting women who talked about the glowing and the empowerment and how they appreciated themselves in a whole new way. They munched on nutritious snacks and carried bottles of filtered water around with them everywhere they went. They read parenting magazines and talked about baby gear with an intensity I had thought was reserved for trying to make peace in the Middle East. I marveled at their ability to shut out the world and all evidence that suggested it was going completely to hell.

I tried to follow their example and not think about the world but the world wasn't willing to cooperate. In every direction, I was confronted with the downward spiral. In New York, two heroin-addled parents locked their two-year-old in a bathroom with scalding hot water running in the tub. They couldn't hear his screams through their drug-induced haze. In Detroit, a six-year-old girl was traded to a child pornographer for drugs. When they found her, it was almost as if she had been turned inside out. In Los Angeles, a four-year-old boy was removed from his teenage mother and her boyfriend after they'd insisted upon using him as an ashtray. The detective on that case broke down and cried on the local news station. The reporter didn't know what to do.

There was no shortage of bad in the world and that didn't even take into account things like the nuclear warheads no one seemed to be able to keep track of. It was hard to believe you weren't committing crimes against humanity simply by perpetuating its existence.

In the last month of pregnancy, when I weighed almost as much as my husband and had taken to wearing his T-shirts, I declared I was never doing this again.

“If you want another baby,” I announced, “you'd better find a different wife or work it out mail-order somehow.”

“But you're doing so great,” Will said. It really is impossible to empathize with a whale so I shouldn't have been so hard on him. “I picked up some things you might need today.”

What he was doing cruising the baby aisles at CVS rather than sitting in his office contemplating trash was beyond me. But I didn't have time to ask because my eyes came to rest on a tube of nipple cream and I could no longer speak. I picked up the purple tube and held it in front of Will's face.

“Apparently, nursing mothers sometimes need this stuff. That's what the lady said at the drugstore.” He shrugged. After all, he wasn't the one who invented the human body. Maybe if he had, he would have done women the world over a great service and made nipples out of titanium.

“So, I'm to understand that this baby is going to suck the nipples right off my body?”

“Something like that,” Will said. “You should read the books.”

I
did
read the books, at least what I considered a fairly aggressive assortment of them, and not one mentioned the need for nipple balm. They were holding out on me like a critical asset who wants more money. I started to sweat, which seemed to happen with alarming frequency. My internal thermostat was desperately in need of a tune-up.

“I don't think I can do this,” I said. “Really. I mean it.”

“Of course you can. There is nothing to worry about. It's all going to be fine.”

Nothing to worry about? There were melting ice caps, dying coral reefs, droughts, floods, tsunamis, terrorists, mad scientists, angry man-eating ants, and a variety of nipple creams for sale at the local drugstore. In my opinion, nothing good could come from any of it. Seeing the panic in my eyes, Will sat me down on the couch.

“Listen, our job is to keep this child safe, to make a happy home for him, to help him to grow into a passionate, responsible adult. That's our mission. And we're going to be good at it. It's all going to be okay.”

There was something about the way he phrased it that calmed me. There was a goal and that was something I could get my head around. I could carry out the mission of keeping this baby healthy, happy, and safe. Two weeks later, Theo was born and I found I had nothing near the energy to contemplate my potential failure as a parent. I was in survival mode and deep thinking suddenly seemed a luxury I could no longer afford.

Will, whose life didn't seem to change quite as dramatically as mine, kept careful track of the passing days. Part of it was to marvel at how quickly our little lump of red flesh turned into something resembling a baby boy and part of it was to know exactly when he could get back in the saddle and to be ready when that day rolled around.