Monday's Lie (4 page)

My mother lost the little finger on her left hand in a knife fight, in a prison, in an undisclosed South American country. By today's standards, she wouldn't have been old enough to drink.

She had been called back into the field in the middle of the night. More accurately, as she always groused, Paul Rowland had summoned her from the dead center of a hard-earned sleep. She said she'd gone to bed at eleven and had ordered a wake-up call for six in the morning. She remembered vividly that the phone had rung at 3:32.

Fresh off a job well done and following the buzz-killing (and hours-long) debrief of what she'd accomplished, she had snuck off and checked into a hotel under an assumed name as a reward to herself. Her story always hinted at one of two motivations (or possibly a smidge from column A and a dose from column B) for good ol' Paul.

There was the irritable point driven home that she was always findable, and then there was his pride. The stories of my mother's earlier adventures always hinted at a possessiveness that Paul felt for her and for the work that she did under his direction. He couldn't wait to trot out his best triumph, his finest trick pony.

Literally couldn't wait, not even for dawn. She saw the sunrise from the tarmac of an airport runway, where the plane's touch-and-go stop would pluck her from her furlough.

That the prescribed errand had been cobbled together without enough information and foresight was readily apparent once my mother found herself relieved of her passport, a tad too thoroughly searched, and shackled at the wrists and ankles on a bench in a mossy cinder-block hut—and all of this before lunchtime.

Even more than coming home minus one digit, my mother had always seemed especially outraged that these things had happened after she'd been arrested under verifiable diplomatic immunity. She refused to leave out that tidbit of bureaucratic insight when she told this story, although most of her others steered around any mention at all of her employers.

She took care to describe the catalyst for the day's disaster—a filthy oscillating fan that blew humidity, but not much relief, around the room. Stirring away at the heavy air, it had also sent strands of her vacant-eyed benchmate's long, frazzled hair into my mother's face with each rusty pass of the blades, as the two of them waited for processing.

My mother's finger wasn't severed by the fan, but ultimately it was still sort of the fan's fault. The woman on the bench next to her had dozed off, chin on impressive chest, a shiny thread of drool feeding a growing wet spot on the forehead of the sunny smiley face that beamed up from her ragged T-shirt.

In the last important turn of the fan's slow circuit, the tepid whoosh plucked up its usual hank of hair from the woman's shoulder and twisted it through the air and, most unfortunately this time, through the drool. When the sodden strands connected with my mother's cheek, it put paid to the last of her patience.

When she swatted away the one offense, she accidentally lit the fuse on a new one. The chain on my mother's handcuffs snagged the full wisp of hair and plucked it, roots and all, straight out of Sleeping Beauty's head.

Where a dozy beast had been napping, in a flurry of cursing and rattling chains the Devil herself woke up. My mother managed to pin down the woman's thrashing arms, but took a volley of stout kicks to the shins and ankles until she had her wrapped, huffing and spitting, in the tangle of my mother's trained reach. She crooned soothing words and apologies in Spanish, well at odds with her iron grip, until the woman relaxed and relented. Mother let her go.

“Illuminada!” The guard came hustling from around his desk as Illuminada wrenched herself to the other end of the bench, to the full length of her shackles, and smoldered pure hatred back at my mother from as far away as she could get.

“Vaca estúpida!”
Stupid cow.
He laughed as he unlocked her feet and swatted her on the back of the head. He yanked her off her seat and taunted her with more barnyard insults as he relocated her to the opposite side of the room where there was no bench. He locked her hands to a low ring buried in the wall. The chain was too short to let her stand in even a parody of dignity, so she slumped defeated on the mildewed concrete floor.

My mother said that she stewed there for more than two hours after they had hauled Illuminada away, so it was less than a welcomed surprise to find them penned together again, unshackled, in a more general holding area later that same afternoon.

My mother said Illuminada had a light mustache that bristled with the sobriety that had bloomed in the intervening hours. The guards formed up around them in a jeering circle when the strung-out slab of a creature took up their quarrel with renewed vigor and an audience. The jumble of prisoners and jailers gasped and shuffled bets in colorful paper currency once the she-Hulk pulled the blade.

The looky-loos crowded in on the pair, dialing the arena down to a tight dance floor. Her opponent lunged, but stumbled, still a little woozy from whatever had mellowed her earlier. In the misstep, my mother lost out to a gift from dumb luck to the generally luckless Illuminada. It put her in place to catch my mother stranded off her position by a few inches and directly in front of someone clearly rooting for the home team, or at least for the novelty of some bloodshed.

My mother never saw who owned the strong hands that shoved her toward her attacker. Illuminada flailed in surprise more than she could ever be accused of finessing the knife. In the collision, my mother's pinkie was sheared off clean at the third knuckle. Cackling and taking all of the credit for a trick of fate and physics, Illuminada snatched the severed finger from the floor, gave it a prissy little kiss on the nail, and shoved it into the pocket of her baggy pants.

As the victor aped for the crowd, grinning and pumping her fists in the air, my bloodied mother crawled toward her on her hands and knees. The guards, not anxious to end the show, let her come on. At the last moment, Illuminada spied my mother's progress from the corner of her eye. The expression of stunned alarm bloomed to resolve on her rough face, lit by an ember of defiance from somewhere deep in Illuminada's wounded pride. She'd go another round. My mother saw that she'd go another ten rounds if need be to salvage her status as Queen Colossus of the Usual Suspects.

A fair fight wasn't to be had.

So my mother stopped, grinned, and shrugged a sheepish you-caught-me. Then, in the pause, she reached out and yanked down Illuminada's loose cotton trousers. All of the action stopped in a moment of slack-jawed tempo change before everyone, including the bare-butted and dangerously offended Illuminada and my own mother, burst out laughing at the slapstick turn.

Still laughing, my mother rose up into a crouch and took out Illuminada's knee with a sideways elbow. She snatched the shiv from where it had fallen on the floor during the grand tumble, and with her mangled hand, she pressed the blade to her unreliably vanquished foe's throat. With the other hand, and a pinning foot, she ripped the gory pocket from the pants that had puddled around the other woman's ankles.

My mother's knife hand rained blood from around her grip, but she stood up, smoothed back her hair with her cleaner hand, and demanded to be taken to a hospital.

Unfortunately, jungle climate being what it is and banana-republic jailers being notorious for their lack of empathy, it was too late to re­attach her finger by the time she was finally seen by a doctor.

•  •  •

So it went—stories of daring stunts in exotic backwaters and then, twenty minutes later, my mother helping me with my algebra. There were packages delivered by moonlight, English melting over the doormat into the rapid, gorgeous rhythms of other continents. There were the strictest warnings on never touching the phone in the den or any of the sealed envelopes and boxes on her desk. And then, all of a sudden as you do, it was movie night, or homemade soup when we were sick.

I had closed my fists around every trace of her that I could catch after she'd come home from the Long Trip. Sometimes I got nothing but smoke between my fingers, and sometimes I latched onto strings I could pull a little bit, to tug her off her purpose, if I dared.

She'd slept for two days straight and had a shower that lasted half the next morning. After that she was almost the same again, her crisp linen self. But I was different. I gritted my teeth down over anger and a sadness, ground them into a routine of headaches and upset stomachs that got my hair petted for hours over her first months back. Payback for her leaving me was my sulking head in her lap, her fingertips dragging chills over my scalp. I loved that she couldn't go to the sink to do the dishes or read a book, make a phone call or run an errand, pinned as she was under my malady. She was patient, though. We didn't talk, just the two of us, but she stroked her amends into my hair.

She'd set the rhythm back into our days as the first order of business. There wasn't much unpacking to do as she'd left with almost nothing and had come home with even less than that, wearing unfamiliar, travel-creased clothes that smelled of foreign, strong cigarettes. She would cover the phone and pull funny faces at us between repeatedly telling Paul to piss off whenever he'd call the house in those first few weeks.

We silently agreed that the Long Trip was a black hole in our little suburban opera. It dragged at the usual brightness all around us, and we fought its gravity together until the three of us pulled free of it as one. We reknit our relationships, even if I now trusted that my life not only could be, but
would
be, tipped over by chaos if I ever let my guard down against the odd and the offbeat.

We never talked about the gash in the wall, which was fixed in her first week back. It's as if we knew, in a way that shimmered of almost posthypnotic suggestion, that we were not to bring up those first dark hours of the day she left.

My mother went back to work after a rest and an extended hide-and-chase with Paul that lasted through blatant rebuff, not-so-sly telephone tag, and two episodes of playing possum when he dropped by our house unannounced. Simon and I lay on her bed with her, the curtains pulled over the windows, all of us with a hand clapped over our mouth, holding in the giggles and going red in the face while Paul hung on the bell until the uselessness of cooling his heels on our welcome mat outraced his pointless ambition to speak to my mother when she didn't wish to be spoken to.

I fed and watered the hope that she'd hold out against him forever. But Paul's aim didn't need to be perfect when he never ran out of ammunition. He took out her resistance and her resolve over a series of growling arguments behind the closed den door, and then our life got back to what it had been, more
and
less, with the cup full of something extra that kept it from being normal.

There had always been random visits from black Bentleys in the middle of the night, delivering men with accents and poise to our door, or on the other hand, cars so plain vanilla they fairly shouted their undercover importance, but eventually and inevitably, I'd had enough.

I had never liked strangers popping in and annexing our living room for a makeshift boardroom. Everything would be in order, a quiet and perfectly normal Sunday, and suddenly I'd be evicted from the sofa to go read elsewhere when some fat cat in an Armani suit would congeal out of thin air and ring the doorbell. He (or very occasionally, she) would wait pointedly on my exit, all false patience, pursed lips, and pompous scowling brow.

But with age comes sass. When I came home from the senior prom to find four stocky men in camouflage and jackboots laughing and drinking Scotch with my mother, the sass bloomed like Vesuvius.

“Don't even tell me you all fit in that Beetle.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder toward the door and the toy car parked in the driveway beyond. The absurdity shone in high contrast: a princess in apricot satin taffeta glaring down an entire olive-drab, off-the-record powwow in the living room.

“Plucky, don't worry. They were just leaving.” My mother's voice was mellow with her customary confidence, but her eyes shone soft with sympathy.

“Like I even care.” I stomped a dramatic exit, but my inexperienced ankles wobbled on the spiky heels. I stumbled at the foot of the stairs, then hurled my corsage into the foyer as an exclamation point and pounded the rest of the way to my room in a blushing fury.

I'd only just flung myself across the bed when a subdued, all-business murmur drifted up from the front hall, just ahead of the closing of the door. The dead bolt clicked into place, then the insufficient car rattled to life and faded down the street. I could hear glasses clinking as my mother cleared them, knowing full well that her puttering was engineered to give my steam some time to blow itself out. Finally, the stairs creaked her intent to set us right.

I'd left the bedroom door ajar. I always did. Somehow, I never had the courage to shut her out completely. It seemed too big a bluff, one I always feared her self-assurance would call.

I lay on my side in a rumpled T-shirt and gym shorts, still the hair-sprayed and lipsticked debutante from the neck up. From deep in a force field of glower, I kept my smoldering face to the wall, my arms crossed against any conversation, while she rescued my gown from the closet floor and hung it on the rod. But I lost my battle with the knot in my throat as her weight pulled a valley into the mattress.

“Plucky.” She rubbed apologetic circles on my back.

“It's okay,” I croaked. My mother curled around me, stroking the heat from my cheek with her cool hand as I sobbed.

The slow unclutching of the apron strings began that night. I never told her that the worst part was in feeling forgiveness when I couldn't really pin a name on the fault in the first place.

S
imon
didn't remember our childhood as I did. It was a big deal to him to drive home the point whenever he could that our mother
wasn't
a big deal in the business, although it kind of left the question of why no one ever said what, exactly, the Business was. In fact, he loudly doubted that her government work had ever been anything other than low-level translation services, even if the occasional action-hero story could be embellished out of the memory of one of her back-in-the-day trips abroad. According to Simon, she was a good storyteller and that was all; an entertainer when she wasn't being slightly edgier than all the other work-from-home mothers we knew.