Spy Mom (47 page)

A whistle blows and eight little kids in baggy uniforms huddle around their coach, who is passing on instructions not a single one of them will remember thirty seconds from now. Occasionally, these soccer games come to a screeching halt because a lone butterfly will flit across the field. All it takes is one player to spy the butterfly and off goes the team, en masse, chasing after the poor thing with a focus we thought they lacked.

“You're both crazy,” Sam says. “My daughter-in-law is crazy. This city is crazy. And if we keep it up, all these kids are going to grow up crazy.”

“Oh, Sam,” says Avery, “don't be so cynical. These kids are great.” She gives him an affectionate punch in the arm. Avery will love you even if you insult her to her face while sitting on her blanket drinking her coffee. I'd like to be more like that. But who am I kidding? I'm not even a little like that.

Theo's team, in sky blue jerseys, races down the field looking as if they know what they're doing. The other team, dressed in red, does exactly the same thing. Somewhere in the middle they pass each other and just keep on going. The ball goes missing and one player sits down on top of the goal. Someone is crying. Another kid is taking off his shirt because it's itchy. Another child is pretending to be a robot.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a bright yellow Porsche pull into the crowded parking lot, a fresh lemon in a bowl of moldy fruit. Sam lets out a slow whistle.

“Nice ride,” he says.

“It's yellow,” I say. “Who buys a yellow car?”

The passenger door opens and a tall man in a custom-made black suit unfolds himself to standing. In his left ear, a wireless headset blinks a radiant blue, off and on and off and on, lending him an odd resemblance to a Borg. He puts one delicate Italian leather shoe onto the fog-damp grass and I'm sure I see a small shiver run the length of him.

“Suit on a Saturday? Lawyer?” Avery suggests.

“No question,” Sam answers. “And not the nice Save the Whales kind.”

The man in the expensive suit makes his way over to the sidelines of the abbreviated field, not acknowledging a soul, and takes up a position about four feet from our blanket. There he stands with a slightly hostile look on his clean-shaven face. I sneak a quick peek at his hands. Manicured and perfect. I decide I hate him and that I'd better keep a close eye on him.

“Madeleine,” he barks suddenly, his voice deep and harsh. Next to me, Avery jumps. “Faster. The point is to kick the ball, not have a conversation with it.” He immediately turns his attention back to his phone, thumbs flying.

Out on the field, a little girl with two spiky brown ponytails sticking straight out of her head comes to a dead stop. She turns slowly toward the voice and when she sees the man she doesn't smile. In fact, I would swear she shrinks an inch right there in front of us. A middle-aged Hispanic woman comes running up to him.

“Mr. Colby, you're here. She is playing good. You'll see.” She keeps her head down as if preparing for the verbal blow sure to be coming her way.

Mr. Colby turns his gaze on her and his eyes remind me of a shark, empty and dark.

“Are you her coach? Her personal trainer? No? You're just the nanny.” He says “nanny” with a sneer and turns his attention back toward the phone. The woman, head still down, backs away.

By now, the kids are having a jolly time kicking each other in the shins and tripping over cleats that are purposefully two sizes too big.

“Madeleine!” Mr. Colby gestures toward her with the phone. “Pay attention! Get up! Are you useless? God, you're worse than your mother.”

And there it is, that small twitch in the corner of my eye. It's the same twitch that shows up when Theo won't put on his shoes or eat breakfast or insists on taking all the forks out of the drawer and relocating them to the living room because he's playing “sorting,” whatever that is. I rest two fingers gently on my eyelid and try to stop the frantic motion. But Colby won't quit.

“You're such a girl! Madeleine, kick the ball! Don't be so weak!”

Everyone stares at him but no one says anything. On the field, Madeleine is about to go fetal.

“Excuse me,” I say, not bothering to get up off the blanket. “Can you maybe stop shouting? I think it's distracting the kids.”

Mr. Colby looks down at me as if I am nothing more than a cockroach that just happened to crawl over his fine Italian loafer.

“And why would I care what you think?” he asks, a tight look on his sharp thin face.

The move itself is easy enough if you're positioned properly. It's actually one Simon Still taught me on a slow day down in the Underground. We were in the circular center of our offices where there was no furniture and an inch of industrial gray carpeting covered in twenty years of dirt because no one was allowed down there to clean. One minute I was walking beside him and the next I was flat on my back, examining the ceiling tiles.

“What the hell?” I wheezed, the air all but gone from my lungs. Simon stood over me.

“When someone isn't paying attention, that's when you take them to the ground. As you can see.”

“Thanks for sharing that,” I said, not moving. The world spun in fast, lopsided circles. “Maybe next time you could send a memo?”

“Get up, Sally,” he commanded. I stood, my arms straight out for balance. As soon as I was upright, Simon stuck his left leg between mine and pulled. As I was going down, he fired his forearm into my throat. And there I was, back on the floor again.

“Okay,” I sputtered. “I get it. If you do that again, I'll murder you in your sleep.”

“Ha,” he laughed, “my bedroom is booby trapped in so many ways even I sometimes sleep on the couch.” I stayed right there flat on the ground until another a man I'd never seen before came wandering by.

“What's wrong with you, Sally?” this stranger asked, peering down on me with abstract concern, as if I were a rare species on the verge of extinction. I groaned and a look of understanding flashed across the guy's face. “Simon got you with the ol' scissor, didn't he? Can't believe you fell for that shit.” Then he stepped over me and vanished into an open office.

I don't even need to stand up. From my position on the blanket, I simply shoot one of my legs out, lodge it between his, and jerk it forward. Mr. Colby goes down hard. A small scream escapes from his thin lips, the kind of scream he'll be embarrassed about when he tries to recreate events later on in his head. His headset bounces away into the wet grass, where it continues to blink on and off as though nothing has happened. Play on the field stops and several of the parents come rushing over.

Colby is moaning now, either from shock or humiliation. It's hard to say which.

“I'm a doctor,” says one of the parents. Of course she is. This is San Francisco.

“He just collapsed,” I say, innocently. “Maybe a heart attack?”

With the words heart attack, at least ten people pull out their cell phones and start dialing 9-1-1. Colby continues to gasp for air. I clutch his hand tightly in my own, the perfect picture of concern. He looks at me with frightened eyes.

“Don't worry,” I say. “An ambulance is on the way. You'll be fine.”

“You. You,” he squeaks. “You can't get away …”

I lean in closer so my lips brush the soft flesh of his ear. “I asked you nicely to stop shouting,” I whisper. “Next time I might break your neck.”

He starts to gurgle something. I sit back up. “Shhhh,” I say. “Better to be quiet now.” Colby closes his eyes, probably wondering how a guy who drives a yellow Porsche can get beat up by a girl.

Moments later, two EMTs load Mr. Colby onto a stretcher and cart him off to the waiting ambulance. Madeleine, still on the field, wears a strange little smile as she watches her father go. She doesn't make any move to follow him. The kids resume the madness of the game.

“What a jerk, but poor guy,” Avery says. “It was nice you held his hand, Lucy. I bet that helped.”

“I hope so,” I say. Sam gives me a curious smile.

“That car was really over the top,” he says.

I nod in agreement. “Definitely couldn't fit a booster seat in that sucker.”

“Well, you know how it is,” Sam says, “you can't choose your family. At least she didn't inherit his beady little eyes. You see those eyes? That would have been awful. To have him as a father and get stuck with those beady little eyes too.”

Sam's casual words rain down on me. It's all in the eyes. It always is. They tell you everything you need to know. Is the person going to pull the trigger or is he bluffing? Does he love you or are you merely today's entertainment? The eyes can't hide the truth.

Out on the field, a little girl scores a goal. There is shouting and clapping but I'm barely aware of it. Although no one can tell, I'm slowly suffocating to death right here in front of the soccer moms and dads, in front of my friends, in front of the world. Somewhere out there, Blackford laughs and laughs. The whistle blows, ending the game, and the kids come running over.

“We won!” Theo shouts. “Did you see my goal?” He jumps up and down, his eyes full of the thrill of victory and the promise of more to come. They're the same eyes that look out at me from the faded Polaroid. They're the reason I cannot let go of Gray's kidnapping even when doing just that is the obvious choice. They are Charles Gray's eyes. Like a flower on a one-hundred-degree day, I feel myself wilt.

Charles Gray is my father.

Until I was eight years old, I lived on a farm in upstate New York with a woman and a man I called Mom and Dad. I had no memory of not happily being with them on the farm with the dogs and the fields and the cold dark winters. That parts of my life sat at odd angles to the lives of normal eight-year-olds was irrelevant because I was too young to have any perspective.

Once when I was in the third grade, my teacher, a young woman fresh out of school, caught me daydreaming and called on me to answer a question about the Civil War. I gave what I thought was a perfectly acceptable answer and didn't understand why she and all of my classmates stared at me as if I had been caught running naked through the hallways.

In reality, naked would've been a fine alternative. It took about five seconds for me to realize I had answered the question well enough but I had done so in Russian. I couldn't explain why I could speak fluent Russian when I had never even met anyone from Russia. Neither could I explain how all of my scariest dreams happened in Russian. So I just sat there, my cheeks glowing crimson, and prayed for time to speed up.

Eventually the class moved on but I never forgot that feeling. I was a farm kid like all the other farm kids, wasn't I? But from the looks on my classmates' faces, the answer to that question was clearly no. I was something else, something “other.” I was not like them.

On the night my parents died in a car crash on an icy stretch of the New York Turnpike, a state trooper arrived at the door of our farmhouse, hat in hand, to deliver the news. It was cold and dark outside and while he stood on the porch and spoke, all I could think was how the fat snowflakes looked like dandruff on the trooper's exposed head. My babysitter cried and cried, holding me, smoothing my hair, telling me it would all be okay. But I knew those were just words and meaningless, no matter what language I said them in. The next day my mother's sister and husband, who I had never met before, came and took me to live with them in Vermont and there I stayed until college.

An ordinary person might question the strangeness of these events but I didn't because I remembered that moment in the third grade. Outsiders were not afforded the same protections as those who belonged.

That sense of not belonging, of looking in the window but never entering the room, made me a good spy. I could be whoever I needed to be. If I disappeared in Nigeria for ten months at a time, no one would come looking for me. The assumption was I was doing my job. I was obligated only to my country and that somehow managed not to be too personal.

After Theo was born, everything changed. I found myself searching his face for a trace of the people I knew as my parents, hoping for evidence that maybe everything was exactly as it had seemed back then and that my feelings of being on the outside looking in were no more than the product of an overactive imagination.

Theo's blond hair and wide grin come directly from his father, the shape of his eyes from me. It's also possible I'm responsible for his desire to take inappropriate risks but I'm not willing to cop to that quite yet. His long fingers came from William II and his fashion sense from Rose Marie. The kid is a road map of those who have come before him and the map does not include the woman I remember swabbing my forehead when I had a fever or the man who read me storybooks at bedtime. The need to know who is responsible for my ugly feet and the slope of Theo's nose grows with each passing day. Yes, I know it's possible that Theo's nose is all his own, but in my experience, nothing stands in isolation. Everything is connected, even if that connection is fragile.

The one time I met Gray at the USAWMD, he sat in his office behind an enormous oak desk, examining me as if I were something necessary but inconvenient. He wanted to know about me only in so much as it related to Blackford. Maybe Gray really wanted a boy. Maybe he hated my mother. Maybe I was a mistake. Or maybe I was just not good enough for him to even consider.

But in the end, none of that matters. I can't let him die. He's the only one who can tell me where I come from because he was there, on that train, wearing the scratchy overcoat, taking me away from where it all began.

On the way home from the soccer game, I make a detour to the Java Luv. Theo's excited because it means chocolate milk for him and a chance to play with the burning incense, which Leonard sincerely believes hides the smell of other burning things.