Woke Up Lonely A Novel

V. In which some women bat their eyes, others sit down and write. Guided by voices. The inconsolable child.

V. In which some women bat their eyes, others sit down and write. Guided by voices. The inconsolable child.





ESME WAS CONCUSSED AND LOCKED IN A HOTEL BATHROOM. There was dusk out the window, bullfrogs in one ear—no, both—and a bellows whumping through her brain at three-second intervals. She’d been passed out the entire afternoon, and, for the girth of the swell atop her skull, she guessed Jim had whacked her hard. The irony of getting knocked in the head while giving head was not lost on her, though it was also not top on her list of ignominies that needed undoing.

Jim had left her bag but no wallet or phone. No one was likely to come up to this room uninvited. The window was too small to get through, and even if she could, it was eight floors up. The lock had been jacked; she would be in this bathroom until Martin got a clue. Tick-tock.

She rinsed her face and showdowned with the loony in the mirror. By now, she knew, the siege was being broadcast worldwide. The thinking: We need to appear as though we’re doing everything in our power to get our people released and to hold accountable the delinquent who sent them there. We. Ha. There was no we. There was just her and her madness and a break from the certainty that had floated her for years: that she would figure this out, hatch a plan, marshal the weaponry at her disposal against the anomie of love. The anomie of love! Who still pines for the same man nine years later?

One of her pupils was bigger than the other, as though to render the distribution of wherewithal that characterized her inner life. Much passion, no hope. Bold moves, no endgame, though the sequence of events that had gotten her here had been nothing if not a great match ranged across the board.

She sat on the floor. The tile was cool under skin. Even if she got to Cincinnati in time, what could she make happen? A guy who detains four federal employees has no intention of coming out alive. So for starters, her job would be to change intent. What she needed was a rhetoric of persuasion. How to spellbind in five minutes, because that was about all the patience the feds had left for this. Frank Spearman, who tried to talk down Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, wrote out what he was going to say on index cards. So that’s what she would do.

She found a pen in her bag. Checked her watch. She numbered her pages. She wrote:

1. Lo, if I’m reading this out loud, it’s because you still haven’t come out and time is not on your side. But I’m not sure what to say. You think you screwed up? Is that the problem? Let me tell you about screwing up. Maybe it will help.

2. I am an eavesdropper and a snoop. This you know. But what you don’t know is how it all started for me. It started when I was a kid. My dad had been in the Arctic in ’58, so I read everything about the International Geophysical Year and also a Time magazine article about a daring rescue—twenty scientists stuck on Drift Station Alpha as it broke apart, this mile-long ice floe, maybe 150 feet deep, that meandered around the North Pole while guys like my dad took notes on zooplankton and also on what the Russians were saying to each other from one submarine to the next. In ’58, six years after the NSA came to life and eight years after its predecessor failed to predict the Korean War or the PRC’s intervention, no one was messing around. SIGINT, COMINT, ELINT, were the order of the day, and so my dad spent months adrift in the Arctic Ocean, where there is no horizon, no color threshold between earth and sky, just the white-ice pageantry of one lonely day kissing its way into the next.

3. Some families have a swing set in their yard; we had an octoloop. A giant antenna, looked like a stop sign, three-quarter-inch copper pipe and telephone cable with gimbaled support beam through the middle, used to snatch VLF sound waves from the universe. Schumann resonances. Tweeks, whistlers, sferics—the low-frequency din life makes beneath our capacity to hear it. The physicist Schumann, who predicted the resonance of lightning emissions, was not related to the German composer of the same name, but I find it no small coincidence, the one a conjuror of some of the most arresting melodies on earth and the other sensitive to music of the earth’s devising. My dad used to amplify what came through the loop—think fat in a hot skillet—and listen to it like opera while I did my homework on the carpet. Our soundtrack? The world’s underbreath, one breath at a time.

From there it was easy to augment my fixation with voice. Voices in code, voices out loud, voices in whose timbre were hints of regret for everything the speaker hadn’t done or said now that it was too late. Who wouldn’t want to listen to that?

4. After the air force, my dad worked for Disneyland, which you probably remember. Back then, I was at the age when everything your parents do seems lame, but I didn’t mind the Horseshoe Revue and even got to like it after I spied my dad with Slue Foot Sue, costar of the revue, with her breast poised above his mouth, and him on his knees, going for it like a circus seal.

I watched the scene play out. And realized, with some measure of shock, that I would not tell my mother or confront my father, but that I wouldn’t suffer the isolation secrecy brings it its wake, either. Quite the opposite. I felt closer to my dad for knowing he was in pain. I also felt closer to knowing what I wanted to do with my life.

5. Maybe I’m not doing a good job of this. But how can I explain my choices without explaining it all? God knows I didn’t tell you much when we were married. So, first my dad had an affair; then came my brother’s surfing accident. About that part, my family’s grief was private, even as its furnishings were hard to miss. We never spoke his name. I don’t know how it happened, but from one day to the next, his name was taboo. His photos vanished from the fridge, his trophies and gear, and all were deposited in his room, whose door stayed locked. I figured my parents had fondled each item and packed it gently in a box while I was at school. But no, they had hired a moving company to shove it all in a few plastic crates and pile them in the boy’s closet. That’s what it said on the order form I saw tacked to the fridge—The boy’s closet. After that, I figured they crept into his room at night, or maybe while I was at school, to go through his stuff and whisper his name. I tied a length of thread from the doorknob to the frame so that if it opened even an inch, the thread would break. Then I checked this thread, which never broke, every day for five years.

My mom took up with someone who worked at Disney’s rival amusement venue, Knott’s Berry Farm, while my dad kept on with Slue Foot. I bought books about satellites and radio waves. My dad lost his arm to a crossbeam in the theater where he worked; Disney paid him millions. My mom left Knott’s, and then it was like a contaminant had settled in the house. Something dark and horrible that confined us to our own lives and made it impossible for us to talk to each other ever again.

6. Any idea how hard it is to get security clearance when you have no fingerprints? It took months, and in those months I could have gone to grad school, changed paths, started fresh. Instead, it was three years of Korean and a year’s worth of NSA interviews, whose gist ranged from scenario to psych. A thousand questions. A thousand million. Your boyfriend threatens to break up with you unless you tell him what you did today; how do you respond? Do you think that family is more important than work, and if so, would you compromise your work to protect them? Already, these people seemed to know the grim stuff of my ambition.

7. My first job: Middle of nowhere, Australia. Eight hours a day listening to the North Koreans. Most tracking stations are remote, for the obvious reasons of privacy and uncluttered airspace, but what really matters is being within the footprint of a satellite’s broadcast range. Hence: Nowhere, Australia, under Intelsat 2, stationed over the Pacific Ocean and handling the equivalent of 1,100,000 pages of text per second. It was grueling work, and peculiar for its mix of boredom and anxiety, both of which verged on the unbearable.

8. When you eavesdrop, you have to probe what you hear for nuance and sarcasm, doublespeak and lies. You have to wonder if they know you’re listening. You don’t have the pressure of an analyst, who has to slog through what you’ve translated and decide what’s important, but you do have the problem of making sure you transcribe accurately the intent of what you hear. Old friends and colleagues share a language no one can fathom without initiation. It took me three years of listening to North Korea’s vice foreign minister before I could diagnose the timbres of his voice, because the man never said what he meant, and I mean never.

9. There are so many ways to die, it boggles the mind. But the thing that’s really going to get us, and what people don’t talk much about since the end of the Cold War, is nuclear proliferation. I was sixteen when The Day After aired; it wrecked me for months. Me and everyone else, though apparently the movie’s premise—that there would actually be a day after nuclear holocaust—was supposed to gladden our response to the prospect. It didn’t. In 1983, the Non-Proliferation Treaty was thirteen years old. Its gist: countries that have weapons should not help countries that don’t to acquire them, but if you do help, not much harm will come to you, because the NPT has no teeth. Join the NPT regime and you can leave anytime without consequence. If it’s in the interest of Consarc, Hewlett-Packard, and Honeywell to sell “dual use” nuclear equipment to the highest bidder, go right ahead. The International Atomic Energy Agency can inspect only nuclear facilities that declare themselves, and need permission from the host country to inspect anything else, and, on the crazy chance anyone gets upset about the nine thousand ways you have violated the treaty, it doesn’t matter, because the UN will not vote to impose sanctions for fear of reprisal. In short, Iran, Libya, Algeria, North Korea, Pakistan, India, South Africa, Israel, and Iraq—not to mention all the states that tumbled out of the Soviet Union—either had the bomb and weren’t talking about it or were getting there quick. There were some successes—Libya and South Africa, for instance—but all it takes is one North Korean twink with pompadour, and wham: the day after.

10. In 1994, things got hot in North Korea. That was the year they’d defuel the core of their reactor at Yongbyon, unload enough plutonium for about five nuclear bombs, and threaten war if the UN Security Council imposed sanctions. It was looking very bad, very scary, and all of us on the line were listening hard. And getting nervous.

11. Need some context for all this? I’ll give it to you. Two years before, things were on the up: North and South Korea were about to sign a denuclearization agreement for the peninsula. The North had agreed to the IAEA’s safeguard protocols; the South had agreed to suspend Team Spirit (which is, ridiculously, a series of war games between the South and the U.S., designed to flaunt their ordnance). The U.S. withdrew all nuclear weaponry from the region and had gotten past the flirting stage and into the first high-level talks with the North in forty years. An accord seemed likely.

But no. Delicate are the overtures between nations that hate each other. Suddenly, the South wanted access to all of the North’s nuclear facilities. The North balked. The South threatened to reinstate Team Spirit; the North balked. The IAEA insisted on special inspections of two undeclared sites; the North balked. Team Spirit went on as scheduled, the North announced plans to withdraw from the NPT, and everyone was screwed. What did North Korea want? Were they bluffing? Maybe the thing to do was to let them drop out of the NPT, because, though they had signed on in 1985, they didn’t seem to have much regard for the international condemnation that ensues when you are found in flagrante. Also, they were making the NPT look weak and setting a bad precedent for other countries inclined to violate the regime on the sly. Possibly they were just stalling while they worked on their weapons program. Maybe they were just testing the lengths to which the U.S. would go to keep them in line.

Do we reward misconduct with high-level talks? Isn’t that like negotiating with terrorists? Do we ask for help from the international community and watch it defang every resolution that comes out of the UN? What is the point of asking for things nicely? What is the point of making threats? If I were leading the free world, I would blow my brains out for indecision.

12. By early ’94, forget accord—now it looked like war was imminent. A year’s worth of talks down the drain. The South running hot and cold, the North swathed in the most useful ambiguity I have ever seen, and the U.S. quartered by the hawks and skeptics, the people who thought Pyongyang had the bomb and the people who didn’t. Meantime, the IAEA’s director general was making noise about more safeguards being broken and was told, essentially, to can it, because at this point, bad news was not helping. The director was nonplussed, but how do I know for sure? Because we eavesdropped on him, too. The director general of the IAEA, and we were listening. I guess every diplomat knows he is being spied on—that his privacy is not inviolate, no matter the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations or the UN’s Convention on Privileges and Immunities—but I was shocked. Was there anyone we weren’t listening to? As a matter of fact, yes. No one was listening to me.

13. At the base, when you weren’t prodding the sky for news of vital international importance, there was nothing to do but drink and f*ck. Or so I’d been told, since I’d yet to see the salacious component of our tenure. The guys on duty for the three-month siege at Waco? They drag-raced their tanks from sniper hive to home base at the end of each shift. It sounds appalling, but I get it. In boredom, you will turn to anything. Me, I just doubled down on my work.

One day, I spent hours listening to the DPRK’s negotiator, who was scheduled to meet former president Carter for a last-chance dance. The man liked to talk to himself. He was ripped with stress and grieving the loss of his mistress, who had fled to South Korea. Mostly he was shocked. Did he really want to send in the goons to haul her back? Was he really so unappetizing that she’d crossed the border to escape? Bound up in this self-pity were plaints about the negotiations. He resented his new orders—if he’d been a better man and more expert in snatching advantage from the enemy, he would have never gotten the orders—only I couldn’t tell what the orders were without listening several times over, the words coming out muffled and broken, possibly because he was speaking them into a pillow. I’d listened to him well into the evening. When my shift was over, I passed on what I knew to the next guy and called it quits.

14. I went to the pub. I took a stool at the bar and ordered a beer, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the negotiator. What was he talking about? Why so down on the new orders? Why so emasculated? I decided to flush my mind with the night air and get ready to listen again. I would block out everything I’d translated already, home in on the rest, and find meaning in the carnage of this guy’s self-esteem.

I went to the cave, which is what we called a mostly neglected listening room in the basement. You went there primarily to do what I had in mind, which was to recue a tape and try again.

15. The door was unlocked, and inside were four cryptanalysts I’d seen around but never talked to. They were gathered at a work-station-turned-bar and were playing cards. I said I had some reviewing to do and not to mind me, though I was glad for the company. It’s true I kept to myself and that I liked reclusion, but this did not militate against the loneliness of just breathing in and out and all the other fundamentals you do alone each day.

I sat with my back to the room, put on my headphones, and cued up. Okay, now pay attention. I listened once just to get back into the zone, twice to access my guy’s headspace, and a third time to parse content from emotion. By the sixth listen, I had completely tuned out his whimpers and clamor of self-disgust, but I still could not make sense of the rest. I pressed my headphones into my ears and thought: Listen.

16. Meantime, the others were kissing. I’ll just say it: they were kissing. Not that the card game had escalated into strip poker or spin-the-bottle, just that the four had tired of one pursuit and moved on to another. I went back to the tape. I knew that this was important and that if I missed something big, I’d get fired, and that I was running out of time. And so, wouldn’t you know it, the tension that should have spurred me on to greater facility instead began to manifest in a libidinal stir whose accomplice was the knob of denim pressed against my vulva. Under the circumstances, orgasm didn’t seem like the worst idea, albeit rough, given the knob of denim and on this occasion it being the cave at a tracking base in the middle of the desert, where—what do you know—two of the four, the two who were boys, had found their way to each other.

17. I’d seen this on TV, the phenomenon that is boys kissing, and felt then that my interest was anthropological. Here, too, minus the part where I could stare without offense. I was unclear if in the dawn of an orgy—because I was pretty sure that was what I was looking at—staring is ever met with offense, but what did I know? I tried to get back to work. I tried to listen to my Korean guy, in whose mewling hung the balance of war with the U.S., and to silence my screaming vulva, because the boys had moved on to the girl—her name was Morgan, and since when does a girl named Morgan let two boys touch her at once? And frankly, why was no one touching me? I was wearing a Disneyland sweatshirt with Tinker Bell in flight over the castle, jeans with an elastic waist, and clogs. Nothing says I am a frozen bread loaf better than clogs, but come on, was this a discerning orgy?

Well, fine. If I got orgied, I’d also get an STD, so lucky for me no one was noticing me panting across the cave. Why couldn’t I understand what the negotiator was saying? Why couldn’t I penetrate his wounded feelings? If I got fired and had to go home, I’d hang myself from the showerhead, never mind the war that would be my albatross for life. Where was the justice in that? I was just some girl from Anaheim with a crush on her parents, a brother in a coma, and no talent for intimacy with anyone who mattered.

18. That night was a lesson learned: there’s the erotics of a woman who feels so miserable and wrecked and anxious and sad that she will get on her knees and let four people have at her with varying degrees of rupture and bliss, and then there’s everything else. I unplugged my headphones and let the tape feed through the wall speakers. None of them minded the Korean, and so it was as though his voice kept my head in quarantine while the rest of me went to town. Who took off my clothes? Had I ever kissed a girl? Were ministrations lavished with judicious regard for people’s feelings and self-esteem? Are these the questions that spring to mind? We were five; it was exhausting. Labor intensive. You gave up what you got, were debased and exalted, and also profligate in the disport of your limbs so that they might land anywhere and on anything, and sometimes on the volume button of your listening console, so that just as one guy cums (and on your forehead, because you are not, after all, a porn star and can’t even catch rain in a storm), you suddenly understand loud and clear what your Korean negotiator is saying: “I am not a man, my shame is paramount”—in short, the DPRK will bow its head and freeze its nuclear program in exchange for light water reactors.

19. A major concession. If the U.S. knew this ahead of time, they could call off Carter—Carter, who was making the administration look impotent and ridiculous, calling in an ex-president to negotiate for them. God, I felt good. Alive. And I was slick with the proof. My thighs were wet, my lips and hands, so that when I went for the tape, hit Eject, I don’t know, my finger slipped and the tape jammed. Got caught halfway. Worse, I had done the horrible but corner-cutting thing of using the original tape—a dupe took days—which meant the only way to recoup the information was to keep hitting Eject until the button jammed as well. I knew that we shredded transcripts and that we had an entire building filled with tubs of acid to dissolve paper, but also that maybe we were not above dissolving the linguist who screwed up big-time.

20. Morgan was threading her legs through spandex, snatching her accoutrements—bra, earrings, pink panties—and bolting for the door. The others almost clotted in the doorway for how fast they were trying to get out. I put on my clothes. Things in my body felt misplaced, but there was no time to get cleaned up. I went to my boss’s quarters and briefed him on what I knew. Did I have the tape? Sort of. The cave reeked of jizz and sweat, the smell defying what meager perfumes I’d levied against it. My boss snapped the tape trying to get it out, and I was redeployed.

21. Back in the States, I knew a few CIA guys and went to them for help. The help was not forthcoming. They said I’d have to start from the bottom. Apply. Spend a year at the farm, which was a training center in Virginia, and after that, who knew, maybe I’d get assigned to a country of note, like South Korea or China, but just as easily I could end up translating again, and this time at Meade, in that horrible glass box south of Baltimore. So forget that. Communications intelligence had its limits; I wanted to be on the ground.

22. So: no work, though I did keep up with the news. The Agreed Framework brokered by the Carter meeting—which went off okay, I guess—would get signed soon enough, though the agreement would not last long, the North refusing to accept light water reactors from the South under the aegis of—who knows?—the bad karma of furnishing your house with the enemy’s loveseat. Also, like anyone believed the North would actually abandon its nuclear pursuits. The upshot? Kim Il-sung almost dead, his pansy son ready to go, and me working in Anaheim at a Korean bar just to keep up with the vernacular. What kind of career trajectory was this? Sigint to dive bar?

23. I didn’t take any money from my parents until years later when I had to care for Ida on my own. Instead, I just lived with them. It was not a good time. I had come back from Australia changed. Still secretive and cross, but training these qualities to serve new goals. Because, one thing I noticed at the bar? The white guys who came in for karaoke were actually coming in for me. To chat me up and take me home. The meaner I was to them, the more solicitous they got. And I liked it.

24. For six months, all I did was have sex. If a week went by without action, I’d find myself staring at people on the street, men or women, and imagining them bent over or me just nuzzling my way up their thighs. I had no profession, no friends, and at twenty-seven, my greatest ambition was to wedge my body into places it had never been before. Every day, to work, the store, the mall, I wore crotchless thongs and shelf bras. Neither served a purpose—I had no breasts, and if I was manifesting arousal in the way some women do, crotchless panties were no kind of basin—and so these garments were all about alerting my skin to possibility. Know why I couldn’t save enough money for a security deposit on an apartment? I blew it all on toys. And gear. Leather is expensive. A PVC slave harness costs $200, and this without the cuffs or chains. Take that, Vicki—I was raw in my day.

Still, I could abuse a guy for hours or get put in the stockade myself, but neither defined my needs. Femmes, doms, tops, bottoms, I wanted to be them all. But I was not confused. The psychology of my behavior was too glaring and trite for me to be confused. When you grow up neglected by the people you love most, it tramples your self-esteem, and when you are adult enough to stop blaming them, you end up blaming yourself, which means, wamu! even less self-esteem. And so, two models of conduct: (1) I lorded over men because I wanted to recover what self-regard was taken from me, and in this model, all men were the same man; (2) I wanted to be misused because this treatment squared with my self-regard, and sometimes it’s just good to harmonize what you deserve with what you get. In the grammar of both models, low self-esteem ranked as subject and verb, and so I guess I knew exactly what I was: a woman with no self-esteem.

25. Hurt, hurt. When you sign up for hurt, hurt is what you get. I’d promise myself to stop. Every day, I’d promise. And then I’d go to work, watch the corn cheese resolve under my fingernails, and five hours later wake up with one guy down my throat and another up the rear. Roofies? Course not. Just a campaign of self-destruction, deaf, dumb, and blind.

We all do this, right? Blame ourselves for the wrong thing? My brother? The coma? Our fight not two minutes before he cracked his head on a fiberglass plate?

The bar got busy. More and more, guys started coming in from the poles. Guys with wedding bands. Guys with pregnant wives, first kid, second, third. Guys who worked for people who worked for other people who were not so keen on the consolidating ethic of a young man I used to know as a kid. According to these people, the country was given over to a liberal agenda that had colonized the White House for way too long. This young man from Anaheim was an affront. And considerably easier to take out. Need a job, Esme? Tired of your body’s trade in extremities? Yes? Then go bring me something on this man. His name is Thurlow Dan.

26. It was not a chance encounter, a left turn when I should have gone right; it was exactly as planned, the guy I’d crushed on for five minutes in elementary school, sort of awkward and sad, biggest virgin I ever saw, Thurlow Dan, the pudgy kid, standing on the corner. Only you weren’t so pudgy anymore—a study in alchemy if I ever saw one—but the memory was still there. A funicular over Disneyland. A camping trip in the Angeles National Forest. Glowworms in the leaf litter and a boy silhouetted against the sky, telling stories. Little moments nostalgia does not have to extol, because they were already nice to begin with.

27. I had a plan, and it was this: Do your job, do not have sex. For this plan, I wore a light blue sweater with white plastic buttons down the front, enough to make tedious any effort to undo them, and Keds. White leather Keds. I came to a stop sign. You were at the post. Svelte, almost gangly, and so awkward in your bearing, it was hard to take. In the movies, women like me pity the inexperienced and see in the vanilla putty of lust something to mold and color and fashion. But it’s not really like that. Boys who paw all over you or wait to be told what to do, who cannot find your better parts or your any parts, they are ages twelve to twenty; they are sweet and certainly sweeter than the monsters they often become, but they are not for me. So I was certain that I would not have sex that day, and maybe, on one’s day’s abstinence, I could build another. And from there rebuild a life worth having.

28. We drove into town; I don’t think you said anything the whole way. You sat in my car with hands clutched in your lap. I remember strings of hair playing across your face when I downed the windows. I remember you closing your eyes when the sun came in and squinting when it didn’t.

At the restaurant, we sat outside on a patio under a sun umbrella. It had a wedge pattern, yellow and mint green, and the table wobbled for need of a matchbook you stuffed underfoot. Even now I have to ask why I remember these details—as though I already knew then that this dreamy boy would compass all the unhappy days of my life to come.

And that’s how I still think of you. The boy who dreams.

29. I tried to play catch-up. What had you been doing all these years? You skipped the details, went right for the pitch. From the look of it, the way you were pulled out from the table and sitting with legs crossed at the knee, there was little chance you were addressing me. But I was rapt. The day was getting on, and it seemed that all around you was light, warm and flattering. You said you were so alone. That we all were. And, just listening to you, I was bowed down to the candor of people in pain. To people in solitude—imperious and urgent—and to your claim that we get so few chances to tender empathy as consolation for the trials of our epoch, but that you were looking for these chances every day.

30. I called for the waiter. We ordered gourmet pizzas—all white for you, shrimp and goat cheese for me—but as I ate, I felt my cheeks flush and wizen. My throat, too. Even my teeth started to parch. There was the water in my glass and yours, and three glasses after that, and still it was like trying to wet steel. You figured I was allergic to shellfish, and wanted to call an ambulance because people died from this allergy, it was worse than peanuts. And remember I said no, that I was fine? But the look on your face was tragic, and in your eyes was the desuetude of a life without me. I know it’s strange, but already I could see the wasteland you saw for yourself, more comprehensive than anywhere I’d thought it possible for a man’s loss to take hold.

I settled down. Went to the bathroom and doused my arms and legs with water supplied by the attendant. She was an older woman, from Mexico maybe, who probably issued naysaying prophecies to every girl who stumbled in drunk or high. Only it was daytime, so why was she eight-balling me? I pressed a damp paper towel to my forehead and the back of my neck and just tried to breathe, when this spooky woman spoke a pronouncement just vague enough to seem right on. “Eh, guera,” she said. “You’ve got it bad.”

31. I could not drive. I was exhausted and dizzy. But I wanted to see your place. I remember you lived with two other guys, but they were not there. I took mental notes. No posters or collegiate wall hangings. No incriminating pamphlets or volatile mix of paint thinner, alcohol, and toilet bowl cleaner. Just a couple books about healthy eating, and a navy blue duvet.

You were obviously nervous to have me there. “Want something to drink? Juice or soda? Water? Seltzer? I don’t have any seltzer, but there’s a bodega just down the street.”

I decided to lie down. I slipped off my sneakers, and because I was still warm, and because it was disconcerting to watch you watch me with those giant, incredulous eyes, I did the simple thing of taking off my clothes. I undressed like a child getting ready for bed. And when you asked if I wanted a nap, who wouldn’t have laughed? You were actually willing to turn off the light and let me sleep and probably to stand guard outside. I said, “Shut the door, but come sit here,” and I tapped the mattress.

32. There was something platonic about the way you looked at me. Touched me. No one had ever cupped my elbow. My knees. And then the way you told me a little about your mom, who’d died. Your dad and stepmom. This wasn’t seduction. It was intimate. And then you were back to the loneliness. And how maybe it was not so unassailable after all. And throughout, more and more, I just needed you to stop talking like that. I reached for you, and the rest was what I knew best.

I did not consider the chance I’d get pregnant. It never even crossed my mind. You, the young socialist, were my way back in. The ears of government awaited. I had many years to architect my life before a child would factor into the design, if ever.

33. Naturally, once I found out, I had the same thought every morning: Today I will make the appointment. And after I failed to get money for the procedure, I said: Today I will ask my parents for the money to make the appointment. And then the days went by. I had scruples about abortion unknown to me until then. Or maybe I didn’t have scruples but just would not terminate this cell of a child that was ours. So you see, per usual, my body knew things that I did not. If it’s any consolation, I swear I told my contacts you were clean. And I swear I thought that would be the end of it. I moved to D.C. and kept news of the baby to myself. And when it was impossible to hide, my luck changed. I was pregnant; I spoke Korean. The CIA had just picked up word of an OB and his wife who were newly escaped from the North, settled in New Paltz, and wanting to work for the U.S. government, though they didn’t know it yet. I was the most suitable candidate to recruit the pair.

34. I made contact. Yul and wife appeared willing, though mostly for fear of being returned to North Korea. I got bigger. And in my head, I accorded the growth of my body with the success of my labors. For those first few months, I just didn’t seem to notice I was pregnant at all. I guess I was so terrorized, I couldn’t let out my fear. Not in secret, not in guise. I went about my business, studied photos of the American GIs who’d defected to the North, and deaf-dumbed my way through Yul’s prognoses: Only ten weeks to go, you’re doing great!

35. What can I say about us? When you showed up in New Paltz, I didn’t know what to do. I had no experience with feelings. All I knew was my job, so I called it in. The socialist returns. They said you were good cover and still a person of interest. Stay on him, they said. And I did.

But it was hard going.

You counted calories at every meal. I should have been annoyed. Instead, I found in displays of your self-hate compassion for my own.

You made love not as a man who wants to be hurt but as a man whose tenderness dredges the sex of whatever psychic drama I could bring to bear on the event. It was sweet and loving. It was safe.

You’d stretch your arms overhead and loop them round my waist on the way down so that I could not move, could not breathe in anything but you.

You’d complain about your heart but never go to the doctor. And then I’d worry about your heart.

You’d complain about my litany of gripes against you but never leave. We had a baby. You said, Let’s not wreck this baby the way we have been wrecked, and then we went ahead and wrecked everything.

We had one year, twelve weeks, and three days together. The more you struggled to be a good man, the more I believed you were. And then, disastrously—gloriously—I loved you.

36. And so, yes, when I found out about the other women, I was shocked. Less that I had been betrayed, but that I had chosen this for myself. That somewhere along the way, I had decided to protect and love and believe in a person designed to betray me. What a horror. I shut down completely. As ironies go, when I did have a thought of even modest refinement, it was about how to absolve you. This crisis in my life had me groping for the person in whose betrayal this crisis was born. Who else did I have to talk to? I went to a professional. The professional said: You need to stop loving this person. You have to want to stop loving this person. I was thunderstruck. Why should I stop loving someone who is lovable? A dreamer, a sufferer, a guy who’s all heart? Because he treated me badly? I hadn’t treated him especially well, either, though he did not know it. I was confused. I had so many questions. Do we love people for how they treat us or for who they are? Is there a difference? I’d address these thoughts to the professional and she’d say: Enough with the horseshit. You need to stop loving this man and move out.

And I did. I could not do my job. I’d stopped providing information on you months before, and so, already, I was compromised. And now this. Also, some part of me understood that the next girl in line whose heart you were likely to assault was our daughter. I executed a maternal instinct, perhaps my last.

37. Lo, if I ever do find a way to tell Ida, and I will have to soon, what should I say? How am I to explain my part in this? And yours? Does she really need to know there are people out there who cannot help but destroy each other? Or that, for all my efforts to forget you, replace you, bury you, I have failed on all counts? I have been with many people since we split but have abandoned myself to none of them. Not even for a second. But I want our daughter to know different. I want her to think life is full of chances, not just one.

38. I have to stop writing now; it’s time for me to go. I hear Martin at the door, at last.

It was time for Esme to go, and yet: more waiting. She had called her voicemail; there was a message from Ida: she and Crystal were ETA five minutes. Her child had been having fits all day, and now that Crystal was in the game, insofar as Esme’s name had been pucked across every news channel in town, Crystal had refused to bide Ida while Esme raced to Cincinnati.

“I need another pen,” she said.

Martin gave her two. He was her only ally left, though ally overstated the extent to which he would have her back if called to testify. No doubt a hearing was in the works.

“What?” she said, because he was looking at her.

“Nothing.” And then: “You’ve got rosacea.”

“It’s called crying.”

Martin said, “You don’t have much time. The people downstairs can ID you if anyone asks.”

“No one’s going to ask until I’m long gone.” She appraised herself in the mirror. “Did you bring your kit? I need work here and definitely here”—and she touched the skin girding her eyes. It was less swollen now but still pink and almost translucent.

Martin was at it in seconds.

“Just natural,” she said. “Like me, but not ruined. Like a mom who’s ecstatic to see her child and has no other care in the world but her.”

“Right.” He stepped away. These figments of joy were not anything he could heap on the expression she wore now and had, in fact, worn every minute since Thurlow Dan kidnapped her team and stopped responding to the lead negotiator. Also, science says people will recognize a happy face before a sad one, but only if the happy face is congruent with the emotional context these people have experienced to date. So if Ida was going to register the sparkle in her mother’s look (beta lenses that pooled with light) or the bow tie of crow’s feet at both eyes (to simulate motion of the orbicularis oculi muscle, which engages when you smile for real), if Ida was going to see in his work indices of happiness, she’d have to have known something of happiness, which she manifestly had not. She was nine years old with one foot in the grave.

Try and fail, try again. He crimped gelatin into wrinkle lines; Esme flocked her chin; and together, in haste, they produced a face that was, if not ebullient, not a billboard of despair, either.

He packed up his kit. Esme turned on the TV. Thurlow Dan had not been heard from in hours. There was rumor of a ransom tape—Just tell us what you want!—and, circling overhead, choppers with boys humping the skids and gunning for this cult leader of national import. The hostages had been identified, their families called. Jim’s name had not come up, but already he had put the whole thing on Esme: Anonymous sources close to the White House say this has been a rogue intervention. It will be resolved amicably. The parties responsible will be brought to justice. Where are these parties? Hard to say.

“You want the Weather Channel?” Martin asked.

A blizzard was rolling in. Great time to hit the road. Visibility nil. Or at least the nil of snow pelting the windshield like rice when your ship clicks into hyperdrive. Nine hours to Cincinnati, going on 10, 15, 40. Reagan National had just closed.

“Animal Planet?”

She looked up and it was cops, and kittens who needed to eat. “No.”

He continued to flip until his flipping got on her nerves, so she said, “Give it,” only she was out of range, the remote didn’t work, and where the hell were Crystal and Ida? Then, at last: a knock at the door that returned her to the state she was in.

“Should I go?” Martin said.

“No. You can stay.” Though what this meant was, Please stay, because the reproach bound up in every word that would fall from Crystal’s lips, mingled with Ida and her needs—the audacity and insistence of her needs—would undo what chance Esme had to disarm the blast of fate that said she was going to give up on everything; why not start now?

“Mom!” The voice a squall and the child barreling into the room, headed for her mother but stopped short by the sight of Martin, who made her blushy and knock-kneed. Here was a man of such intimacy with her mother, she might have begrudged him the time except that maybe, for this intimacy, he was also her dad.

“Hey, kiddo,” Martin said, and tousled her hair, which was clipped on either side with ruby barrettes and not remotely inviting of a tousle, but what did Martin know? He had six brothers and an affenpinscher named Joe.

“Hi, muffin,” Esme said, and she twirled her finger in the air to encourage Ida to show off the new coat Esme had left for her this morning. Snow leopard with hot-pink satin lining. “You like it?” she said. “You look ready for Hollywood.”

Ida smiled but took off the coat and tossed it on the bed as though she’d caught whiff of a bribe. She was in blue leggings tucked into snow boots, and a cable-knit zip hoodie whose sleeves were too long and balled in either fist. Apparently, this was a stay against anxiety newly added to an arsenal of thumb sucking, teeth grinding, and rationing of her stuffed animals into family groups of three.

Esme tried to roll up her sleeves, but Ida demurred. Said, “This place is creepy. Why are we in a hotel?”

Esme looked to Martin, who was suddenly married to the reorganizing of his kit, and then to Crystal, still by the door, who smiled horribly and said, “I told Ida you’d explain everything when we got here.”

But how much was left to explain? And what were the odds Ida still didn’t know? CNN had been breaking revelations about the miscreant Esme Haas every five seconds. Ida was out of school, which meant Esme could not palm off the responsibility on some bratty kid calling her names and spilling the beans, because it was all the talk at breakfast and at dinner, too. In theory this should have come as a relief, but no. Esme didn’t want to be the one to tell Ida. Tell her what? Your mother is going away for a long time.

“Yeah,” Ida said. “There’s news vans on our front lawn. It’s kinda weird.”

Esme took her by the wrist but got sweater sleeve instead. “Did you talk to anyone? Did anyone take your picture? This is important, Ida. Tell me. I won’t be mad.”

She let go of the sleeve. She worried the vibrato in her voice communicated panic.

“Just one,” Ida said. “He was nice.”

“A reporter, honey? What did he look like?”

But Ida had grown shy. She toed the carpet with her boot and said, “I dunno,” shrugging and balling her sweater.

Esme asked if Crystal saw the guy. She had not. She was, she said, too busy patronizing the Helix coffers with her allowance to notice, not that Esme knew anything about it. Okay, so she was not just angry but hurt. And maybe even confused. The Helix was her first adult passion, and now it was being tested, and because in the nascence of any passion there was not supposed to be doubt, she felt cheated.

“Well,” Esme said, and she gestured for Ida to come sit next to her on the bed. She needed to regroup and adopt a suitable interrogation technique. “What did you do today, turnip? After skating, I mean.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Because I left you some DVDs for when you got home. They were on the kitchen table.”

Ida paused to recall which movies and did the thing Esme was hoping for, which was to establish a baseline for truth telling from here on out: she looked right and snarled her upper lip, which was already too thin and blanched to rank as an asset. Esme smiled. Amazing how the second you objectify someone you love, she becomes at once less and more beautiful.

“They were boring,” she said. “I’ve seen them. ScoobyDoo is for babies, anyway.”

“There were some other movies, too,” Esme said. “But I guess the reporters were more interesting.” She added this last bit casually, even sighed a little, like: Oh well, this country’s romance with the press has been in evidence for centuries untold, no harm done.

Ida perked up slightly. “Yeah, they were nice to me.”

They. So before it was one; now it was many. The DoD had arms.

“So you talked to them through the gates, honey? That’s a long walk from the house, and it’s cold out!”

“Mo-om,” Ida said, annoyed. “Don’t you listen? They came up to the lawn. The back patio, too.”

Crystal popped a candy in her mouth. She said, “I guess it won’t surprise you to find out Rita fired me.”

Esme shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“You got fired?” Ida said. She was gauging the mood of the room, trying to decide if this was funny or not. It was not.

“Yes. Because when your boss’s husband gets abducted, sometimes your boss thinks it’s your fault. She fired me from her bed. How humiliating.”

“What’s abducted?” Ida said.

“What, indeed,” Crystal said. “Sometimes it means being stolen from your perfectly honest life in foster care and thrown in with people you don’t know at all.”

“Sometimes,” Martin said, getting into the spirit of things, “it’s like those alien movies, you’ve seen those, where people get invited to hang out on another planet for a while.”

“Invited,” Crystal said.

“Enough,” Esme said. “Can we just talk about the reporters, please?”—forgetting she was trying to finesse her daughter and blowing the effort because Ida gave up on the adult discourse and retrieved an activity book from her knapsack. Esme could not help but notice that not a single animal was colored solid or even coherently. Why couldn’t her daughter keep to the lines?

“Ida, you only just got here. Don’t you want to pay me a little attention?” Esme was being weighed against the Little Mermaid and found wanting. “Just for a second?”

Ida rolled her eyes and said, “Ohhhkay,” and then, without prelude, knocked her head against her mother’s shoulder. Not hard, but insistent.

“Turtle, it’s okay. It’s your birthday soon, maybe we’re going to take a vacation. Just us two. Maybe sooner, if you can tell me something about the reporter you talked to.”

“Can we visit Ma and Pop?”

Esme nodded, and the words came out before she could stop them. “Sure, honey bun. Sure. Your grandparents miss you a lot.”

She was glad to be pressing Ida’s forehead to her neck, because in no way could she make eye contact with her. Already Crystal was remonstrating with jaw open and lids drawn so far back in disbelief they looked ready to dip behind her eyeballs. Even Martin shook his head.

What was worse than manipulating your daughter? Than lying in ways for which she would never forgive you? What was worse was your unstable DoD contact come to snatch your kid as collateral lest you cough up his name to the press. Jim had already left Esme unconscious on the bathroom floor. Who knew what he’d do next.

“So, the reporter,” she said. “Was he fancy? Like, in a suit and tie? Did he know your name?”

But Crystal had had enough. She said, “No, okay? No. Just normal press guys.”

“Okay, good.” It was the answer Esme wanted, the tension chased from her body, the lights gone out, only Ida saw it wrong and so, pawing in the dark, she said, “Yeah, but you didn’t see the one guy talking to me. You can’t see everything I do!” followed by her storming the bathroom. Slam went the door, though it was broken already.

Esme stood. Tried to think. Were there any safe places left to send Ida? School was out; even the English-speaking lycée in Haiti was out, because that was where all the spook kids went. As for the few at the DoD who had been briefed on the Taskforce for the Infiltration and Dismantling of the Helix, they were smote with amnesia—Esme Haas? Never heard of her—and thus unavailing of protections in vogue among mafia turncoats and spies. So that was out. Only place she could think of was her parents’ cabin in North Carolina, though Ida could hardly stay there alone.

Crystal said, “I’d better take her home,” and motioned at the bathroom. They could all hear Ida crying. Esme shook her head; there was only one thing to do. “Why not let Martin take her to the mall first. Buy some new clothes. Toiletries, too. Pajamas are fun.” Then, raising her voice, “That sound good, Ida? How about we take that trip right now.”

The door opened a wedge, the child nodding, eyes floorward.

Esme squatted. “Now, listen,” she said. “I know things seem a little weird, but everything’s fine. Even if they don’t seem fine, they are. Also, I have a surprise for you. Martin will tell you in the car.” And as Ida looked warily at her mother and her mother at Martin and Martin at his phone, to make sure it was on for when Esme texted him instructions the second they left the hotel, an NPR commentator broadcast the news: the FBI had just issued Thurlow Dan an ultimatum. Come out or we’re coming in. And, by way of subtext: If the hostages die, it’s on you.

By now it was nighttime, which meant nothing would happen at the Helix House until dawn. Chances of a botched raid were high, higher still in the dark. The feds would wait.

When Esme saw Ida had fallen asleep, the release in her chest was awful. Had she really not been breathing? She was, quite obviously, afraid of her child. The child who was assiduous in the upgrading of her rage, so that by the time she got to Esme’s age, she would have rarefied her temper into a bid for the sublime. Already, it was bracing. In sleep, though, people forget themselves, or come into the selves they’ve spent most of their lives trying to repress. Ida was fetal, with knees and forehead sewn to Esme’s side. She had released the day’s hatred and said with the array of her body what she’d been feeling in secret: Mom, I need you; Mom, don’t leave. Her hair was in a twist, clutched in her palm. Esme checked her forehead, and, yes, she hoped it was warm, because whatever chance the world gave this mother to source her child’s problems elsewhere, she would take it. Ida mumbled and flung her arm around her mother’s waist. Esme felt Ida’s nails dent her skin and thought that if she could just break Ida of need in sleep, it would do wonders for her awake. Also, she could not write like this. She freed her hand from her hip and slipped out of bed. For a second, Ida cast about the mattress; then she rediscovered her hair.

In every life, an unraveling. Esme’s had started at her parents’ just a few weeks ago. Surprise! She had dropped in for a visit. She had taken a bus and ended up calling from the road. Her dad answered. He was hard of hearing, so it was: Who? Leslie? About what? And then her mother, who said, Hello, Esmeralda, though this name was not even on her birth certificate; it was simply what Linda called her when she was angry. Esme didn’t get a word in before she was hissing about Ida. Yes, of course they hadn’t told her about her father, because, duh, instructions from the butler—P.S. Don’t tell Ida she is cognate with a cult leader—were binding in every universe, except, Jesus, who taught Esme to parent like this? Because, as far as her mom knew, she’d done a good job with Esme, and her father had, too.

Their cabin was an hour afield of a sizable community in any direction. A two-bedroom in the woods. Esme understood wanting to live modestly despite their wealth, but she could never understand the privation of their lifestyle. Her dad drove an ’88 Chevy pickup. The clutch was shot; the truck wouldn’t go over forty or, who knew, might blow up if it did. When he got to the bus stop, it took him many tries just to get out of the cab. It had been months since her last visit, but he looked the same. When you are seventy-seven, what difference does the fluting of your skin make? She tried to give him a hug. One of his hands alit on the small of her back, while the other—and then she realized he wasn’t wearing his arm.

She’d asked, “Where’s the arm?”

He said, “I barely even need two arms nowadays.”

She got in the truck, in the driver’s seat, because technically her father was not supposed to get behind a wheel, with or without the prosthetic. Still, one had to wonder how he drove stick without it, maybe he used his shoulder to steer while he switched gears, and then she shuddered in fear for everyone else on the road.

Since she was always afraid to ask how were things at the house, she asked about his volunteer job. He was a docent at an astronomical research institute sited deep in the forest. A former NASA base—from there One small step for mankind was relayed to the world—that the DoD commandeered in ’81 for “listening.”

“Oh, they don’t need me much. It gets pretty dull at times.”

“What’s the big question these days?”

He looked at her wanly. “What is dark matter.”

Esme snorted. Five minutes together, and already they were negotiating the extent to which he was allowed to grouse now that his favorite pastime, the Internet, had been restricted by her mother. He’d been spending hours a day chatting with people online, and Linda didn’t like it.

He coughed into his fist. The road went up the mountain in christie curves, the locals taking them fast and Esme wending along like Grandma. Her dad hammered the dash because no heat was coming up through the one vent aimed his way, and said, “That’s some kid you’ve got,” before whacking the dash again. She had no idea what this meant, though it probably meant nothing. For her dad, the world was middling. How’s the weather? So-so. How’s your grandkid? Fine.

If it was the truth Esme wanted, she needed to ask her mother. Or just stand within one hundred feet and Linda would tell her.

They got to the house. It had snowed, and because her parents never departed from the path to the road, the snow was untrammeled but for deer tracks and wild turkeys and, beautifully, a snow angel. Her daughter lived here. She thought she even saw her face peering out the window from behind a curtain, though the second they got out of the truck, the curtain stopped rustling and all was quiet.

The Helix had been making news for years, but by now it was making headlines. Rumors and gossip. Her parents didn’t have a TV, but they read the papers, and there was always the Internet. And, while they had never met Thurlow, they knew who he was. Esme didn’t think it would be long before her mother took it upon herself to tell Ida everything. Her plan was to hope she didn’t.

“Mom? Ida?” She walked through the house. It had two floors and a porch that overlooked a valley and mountains in the distance. Half the trees had lost their leaves; the view was a mixed treat. She went to the kitchen and saw her dad by the fridge with an ice cream sandwich. He had taken off his jacket, and, since his sweater made prominent the empty sleeve hung by his side, she suddenly wondered if Ida was terrorized by the sight—if, despite the years she’d been living here, the arm creeped her out.

In the mudroom were sneakers but no boots, the boots put to better use on Ida’s feet as she and Linda played outside, the one making a snowman and the other taking photos, a million per second, one for each second Esme had missed seeing her child grow up. She had the idea her mom was making her a scrapbook, though none such had ever materialized.

She watched them through the window. Ida was wearing leggings that looked like neoprene and a bubble jacket she did not recognize, or recognized dimly; it was colored bark and had an HB Surf Series badge sewn into the arm. And then it hit her: these were her brother’s clothes. His steamer wet suit. His travel jacket for that one surfing trip off the coast of New Zealand when he was twelve. Esme was so floored by the evidence her parents had kept his stuff and even brought it with them to this place that it helped ease down the pill of her daughter ignoring her when she ran out of the cabin all smiles.

She hugged Ida anyway because the parent unloved is also undeterred. They had not seen each other in 3 months. Ida had been alive for 117 months, of which most of her last 1⁄39 Esme had been traveling. There were other 1⁄36s and 1⁄27s and even 1⁄18s for that half-year deployment to Diego Garcia, though maybe that was more like a 1⁄12 expedition, since Ida was only six at the time, which meant not even math could declaw Esme’s failings.

Next Esme greeted her mom, who did the scariest thing in her repertoire, which was to cock an eyebrow. The hairs there had shed long ago, so she’d taken to penciling them in with black liner. Every month, the curve got more pronounced and severe. It was a sickle, an arch, and, by now, a delta above each eye. When raised, the brow was lethal.

“Well, well,” Linda said, but without the scorn Esme had been readying herself for. In fact, the A brow was a red herring. She wasn’t mad anymore. Esme thought maybe she was fronting for Ida’s sake, but so what? She would take it. They hugged. And the hug was nice. She had never found in her parents a source of strength since Chris went down, and it was not like one hug was going to lade her coffers with the courage of heart to right her life, but it wasn’t hurting, either.

Linda said, “Ida and I were just finishing up this snowman,” and, to Ida, “What’s his name again?”

“Don.”

Esme was not sure she’d ever heard a name spoken with greater spite. Ida jammed a stick in his eye and looked at her mom. “Your clothes are ugly,” she said, and she marched back into the house.

“That went well,” Esme said. “Don? Who names her snowman Don?”

“She’s right, you know. If you’re going wear that nonsense, at least join the army. Be for real.”

Esme shrank a couple of feet. Her parents had only a vague sense of what she did, enough to know it screwed them up—New identities? Really?—but not enough to think it worth the trouble to find out more. Perhaps her father was more sympathetic, but she didn’t know; they didn’t talk.

She fixed the snowman’s eye. Apologized for his care.

“Not to worry,” Linda said. “He’s cold as ice,” and then she grinned, and to Esme this grin might have seemed stupid, except that nothing about her mother was ever stupid. She was too sharp and cagey to grin like that unless it was for sport or design. “Now, listen,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got news.”

Esme followed her through the snow. Her mother was the kind of woman who always liked to speak her beef with someone hungry for it.

“Is it Ida? She looks okay to me. Or, wait, is it school? Is she failing at school?”

Linda looked on her with what had to have been contempt, though maybe it was contempt plus pity, which is kind of like cherry Pepto—not so bad.

“It’s about your brother,” she said. “Chris.”

“Right, because I’ve actually forgotten his name.”

They were on the patio under porch lights. Esme sat at the table, her mom nearby.

“We got a call from the hospital,” Linda said.

The words sounded tense but happy, and since Esme still had no idea how her mother felt about Chris in a coma all these years, she assumed this meant he was dead. A twenty-four-year nap comes to an end, and her mother is released from the emotional vigil she’d been on or wanted to be on: both seemed exhausting.

Linda leaned forward, elbows on the table. She spoke the next part slow. “He said something. Out loud. A nurse just happened to be there.”

The news blew Esme well back into her chair. Her brother’s voice. She didn’t even know its sound. “Out of the blue?” she said. “He’s awake? What did he say?”

Linda picked up a bird carved out of wood, small as soap, and hopped it along the edge of the table. “The doctors said this could be prelude to waking up. But not to get excited.”

Esme was surprised the doctors would presume interest let alone enthusiasm in relatives who never came, never called, but then maybe to them family was just family; you can’t judge ’em all.

“Wow,” she said, because what else was there? Apparently, a lot. Linda got in close to the bird, as though talking to the bird. In fact she was talking to the bird; it sure as hell beat talking to Esme. She said, “Of all the things. Of all the times I imagined this happening.”

Now the bird was in her palm, eye to eye. “What’s that? You want to know what he said?” She faced the thing at Esme. “Go on, tell her,” and then, “Oh, fine, I’ll tell her. He said, you ready for this? He said Esme. Loud and clear, too. They were amazed. Not like he’d been asleep for a quarter of a century, not like he hadn’t used his lips in as long, but just like he was in the middle of a conversation. A heated one, too. They said he sounded mad.”

Esme had been shaking her head for a while. Her darling brother reliving their fight day after day, the anger still on his lips, with no sense of the years that had passed, him still fourteen years old. It is 1981. Ronald Reagan has just taken the oath. The president says, “We’re going to begin to act, beginning today,” and the next day, her brother’s life stops, and all because she let his friend ejaculate on her chest.

Linda continued to hop the bird across the table and even to chirp on its behalf, the stupid smile back on her face.

“Have you been to see him?” Esme said.

“He’s been screaming for a year, what do you think?”

“What screaming? He screams? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Are you serious?”

Esme had begun to take issue with the bird and to concentrate anger in the bird and to make the bird proxy for all the ways she did not love her brother, daughter, parents, enough, and so, yes, she snatched it from Linda’s hand and hurled it over the balustrade.

Linda stood. She seemed verged on the kind of laugh that sizes you down for life. But no, she just stood. Stood and stretched and said, “Ida and me made pineapple upside-down cake. Let’s eat.”

“Now? I want to talk to you.”

“I’m hungry.” And with that she slapped the table, and the laugh Esme had braced for came out. Her brother speaks for the first time in twenty-four years and her mother wants pineapple upside-down cake? Esme leaned forward and had a good look—at her mother’s face and mostly her eyes. The red tracery of veins fencing her pupils. The Windex shine in each lens. The part where her lids were barely half-open, in contrast to Esme’s mouth, which was hanging way open now that she realized her mother was stoned. Had been stoned this whole time.

Esme knew Linda had smoked in the sixties, was a big old hippie. But she was seventy-one, and how did someone her age even acquire marijuana? The nearest neighbor was a soldier just back from Iraq. Maybe he got high for having killed in a war without cause and maybe because he also tended chickens and harvested their eggs and brought her mother a dozen every week, he brought her a little something else, too.

Linda cleared her throat, and, with the firmness Esme had come to expect from her but which was no comfort now, she said, “I want cake.”

Fine. They went inside. Her dad was at the computer in the living room, under a bearskin nailed to the wall. Not just the bear but the head too, and an old-timey rifle captioned underneath, so it was hard to know which was displayed as the better prize. Her parents had bought the place furnished, but after ten years, if you’re still living with a dead bear on your wall, you’re doing so for a reason. Her dad was distraught; she watched him type. Most people of his generation finger-peck and get right up to the screen, but since he only had one arm and giant googly glasses, his deportment was in a school of its own.

“His friends,” Linda said, and snorted her way to the kitchen. “He gets one night a week. Let’s go, Bill!”

His hand fell on the keyboard like Play-Doh. He looked up at Esme and the look was bleak. She touched his arm, though it did no good. You can’t solace a man whose only friends are text.

Esme said, “Come on, Dad, we’re having cake.”

He pushed back his chair but didn’t get up. His empty sleeve hung over the armrest, and the awful thing was, you barely noticed for how slack the rest of his body was. He stared at the screen like the dead stare at us.

Esme made for the fridge.

Her dad trudged to the table when it was clear Linda would not stop calling his name. Esme sat next to Ida, though she still hadn’t said a word since Don. Her mother knifed the cake, but served only herself, a quarter wedge, huge. Her dad wasn’t hungry. Ida said it tasted gross, while Linda, who had retained her good cheer throughout, opened her mouth—her mouth was full—and said, “Now, Esmeralda, daughter mine, would you like to say something about Thurlow Dan and the Helix? Because I think maybe this little lady should know more of the world than she does.”

That night, Esme fought with her parents. She promised to get it right with Ida; she bought herself more time. And then she left. And now the hospital where Chris was living called three times a day. And the morgue where her parents were called three times a day. They all wanted to know what arrangements to make. If Esme didn’t call back, they would dispose of the bodies and send her the bill. But it wasn’t as though she didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted her parents and Chris to reunite. They had died trying to make that happen; the least she could do was help. She knew she had heard this story before, about parents who died as they drove to be with an adult child who was himself dying. It turned out that when Chris spoke her name, it was the swan song he’d been trying to belt out for twenty-four years. Only in her parents’ unction for a miracle, or perhaps because one was stoned and the other disabled, they pitched off I-64 on the way to the hospital. The road was narrow and ascendant one hairpin at a time, there was no guardrail, and if you went over even halfway up, you would not survive the fall. Every time Esme thought about it, she wondered whether they had any last words, too, hurled from their lips as they said good-bye. And why not? People were crying out for each other all the time.

They were stopped at a diner off the freeway. Ida had to pee. It was two in the morning, but still, this was not the most advisable conduct. Esme’s face was mugged on every TV, on every channel. On the plus side, the coverage gave her a visual on the Helix House, and a sense of what people were saying.

On the downside, what people were saying was bad. For one, the feds had turned the site into a zoo. Tents, kitchen, helicopters, Bradley. Bradleys. Six tanks in a residential suburb. The team had to stump all the roadside trees just to accommodate their girth. She could tell they were M3s, though, because they had room only for five—driver, commander, gunner plus scouts—which meant this was the team’s concession to context or, more likely, the government’s attempt to look modulated but ready.

Ida insisted on cherry pie because she wanted an American experience, they being on the road and mingled with the people. At age nine, she was already sassy with expectation of what dreams the country would make true for her.

“Kinda late to be up!” the waitress said, and overflowed their water glasses.

“Mom,” Ida said, and she probed the cherry glue stuffing for a fruit item. “Mom, you’re on TV again.”

Esme was wearing a black and turquoise winter hat that had a panther on the cuff—Go Panthers!—a down ski jacket, and sunglasses. She’d had the difficult task of having to look recognizable to her daughter but foreign to everyone else. She’d made a point never to wear her rig around Ida or Crystal, so this was uncharted territory. And she had navigated it poorly. Ida had asked more than once if she fell on her face last night, it looked so swollen and pink and weird, and Esme swore the waitress, while bowling pie at her kid, also had a double take at her.

“I know, tulip. But you don’t have to believe what they’re saying.”

The menu was laminated and tacky with jam, and probably if she needed coverage in a storm, this vinyl would do, so broad was its wingspan. Every second item was waffles. Chicken and waffles. Ham and waffles. Biscuits and waffles. She ordered cheese and waffles to go.

“They’re saying you and that cult guy are like friends or something.”

“Tulip, just eat your pie. We have to go.”

“They’re saying”—but she said it too loud, and because Esme didn’t want to silence her child with force, she did the next best thing and spilled water in her lap. Ida made a scene but at least now they were being noticed for a safer reason.

What was the government saying? That Esme had set this up; she was on her own. No one else would go down for this except maybe the few people who knew about her, though if it panned out disastrously, the buck would move up the chain of command and stop just two or three links south of the president, whose staff would say, Look, the Helix was in bed with North Korea; procurement of a reconnaissance effort had been in the hands of the same professional for years; her ties to the organization made her best suited to the work; how could we have forecast this outcome?

But only if it came to that. For now they had let slip, in case they killed anyone by accident, that secessionist activity with guns was not the joke everyone had taken it to be and that the Helix might have an arsenal that made the Chechen rebels look Care Bear.

Ida was in the bathroom. Esme could hear the electric hand dryer and imagined her trying to arch her back and high her lap in quest for the hot air. She expected it would be three more minutes before Ida showed, which meant the new guy sitting opposite her needed to hurry. He looked in no hurry. He even looked expansive—job well done; he had found Esme in less than three hours. He was DoD or CIA, FBI, whatever.

“What do you want?” Esme said. Her waffles arrived in a Styrofoam casket. The waitress looked at her replacement date and seemed to get an idea of what was going on here, which had Esme thinking about what sort of clientele this waitress called regular.

“Seems like you might be headed to the site,” he said. “Just guessing, of course.”

Esme rolled her eyes. This man looked about forty, too young to be for real with his noir affect but too old to find it humorous. He had frothy orange hair and tortoiseshell glasses with nose pads that were mismatched and uneven, so that the glasses sat slant on his face but not enough to be retarded. He gestured for the waitress and ordered a coffee. His suit was rumpled.

“I’m with my daughter,” she said, meaning either: Be nice, I’m with my child, or: I’m with my child, we’re going to the park, you must have me confused with someone else.

“I see that. She looks a lot like someone we’ve all come to know and love.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, what do you want?” She scanned the restaurant for a back door.

“It’s like this,” he said, and she noticed he had dry skin crisped along the rim of his ear. Both ears. And she thought: This is exactly the kind of thing a girlfriend or wife does not let you get away with. He’s not wearing a ring, probably he has no one, and if he weren’t so blowhard in the delivery of a threat I know is coming, I could pity him.

“You’re wanted at the site,” he said. “I’m here to make that happen.”

“A driver. How nice.”

“I get you there. You get him out.”

Since this had been her idea all along—at least for a couple of hours—she should have been pleased with their concord. But she was not pleased, which was like when your coin turns up heads and you are let down, apprised of feelings that were secret to yourself until then. Only it wasn’t feelings she had but terror.

“And after that?” Not that she didn’t know the answer or the spectrum from which an answer would present itself: immunity, a presidential pardon, or just her taking it in lieu of the fifty staffers who saw the Helix proliferate and did nothing precisely to hasten a crisis that would justify trawling nationwide for the last liberal drowning.

“Just get your daughter and let’s go,” he said, and when she didn’t get up he covered her hand with his own and squeezed until it hurt, which was when Ida erupted from the bathroom, saw this man pledged in affectionate consort with her mother, and skated down the lane for their table.

“Dad?” she said, and the glow on her face was colors a person was lucky to see once in her life.

They were in a van with a table in the back and a screen that dropped down from the roof. Ida was watching a soap opera about thirteen-year-olds that was, apparently, in vogue. Esme looked over her shoulder and said, “Hey, Jack, how many episodes you got?” Despite her negligence as a parent, or because she was well practiced in its art, she knew the value of a pacifier when she saw one. So did the escort, since he said they had enough to get them there. Still, she decided to test what was what. “Hey, Jack, what if Ida needs to be sick?” He said there was a bucket with a snap top and a deodorizing puck adhered to the underside. “Hey, Jack, what if we don’t get there in time?” He said, “In this weather, time rushes for no man.”

The light from Ida’s entertainment console was enough to write by, but it still felt dark. Like flying at night when yours is the only light in the cabin, everyone else asleep, snoring. It was, Esme thought, a shit way to be.

“Hey, Jack,” she said. She could see his eyes in the rearview, and they were closing. “Hey, Jack!” She poked him in the shoulder.

“It’s Noah,” he said. “Nouh.”

“Sleeping Beauty’s more like it. Let me drive.”

“And stuff me in the trunk. Sounds like a plan.”

“We’ve gone ten miles in the last hour. Who can fall asleep like this?”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m Sneezy, how do.”

Their eyes met in the rearview. He was not amused, but at least he was awake. And talking. In almost any situation, talking is like doing squats in your tight jeans—it gives you room to breathe.

“So,” she said, and by now she had made use of the swivel part of her swivel chair. She was faced forward and square with the tension of this drive—the snow, the wind. She said, “How’d you end up with this job, anyway? You work for Jim?”

“Thurlow Dan is a terrorist,” he said. “A sociopath. And for once being married to you, this taints you. And your kid. So just go back to her and stop talking to me.”

Esme U-turned quick, but it was okay: Ida was passed out, lips parted and chapped because she was congested. Esme could hear laughter—the audio had been leaking from Ida’s headphones all night—which meant Ida couldn’t know what had been said outside the soap in her ears. Esme was about to turn off the TV, except perhaps this was the noise Ida needed to sleep, and in no galaxy did she want to wake her up. Who knew what that shitbird up front would say next.

The snow had picked up. Noah had his face near pressed to the windshield. Wiping the view with his hand, as though the frost were what stood between him and Mexico. They fishtailed once. Twice. Three times a heyday, only what happened here was Ida waking up green. Esme could actually see the green overrun her cheeks as she said, “My stomach hurts.” What could Esme do? She tossed her the bucket. It thumped her chest.

“Pull over!” Esme said, and it was done. He killed the engine, and what was left was a gale that rocked their luxury caravan and a child who was retching and crying into the pail. Esme unlocked her seatbelt and made for Ida’s chair. Tried to rub her neck and pull back her hair, and also to hear what she was saying besides “I want to go home,” because Esme could hear a word mewled among the rest, and this word was not home or even Mom but more beat-up, like a worry stone or blankie, the thing you’ve handled, clutched, cuddled so much it’s barely what it was, except—for you—it is that much more.

Every two seconds, a big rig rolled by with almost zero clearance. But if it was frightful outside, it was worse in the car.

Esme said, “Soon, buttercup, we’ll be going home really soon.” And when this seemed to make Ida cry worse, and when Esme could not produce tissues and instead offered up her sleeve, which was already drizzled in tears, she said, “Honey bun, what can I do? Just say the word.”

They were long past the upflue of pie, which meant this retching wasn’t about a biological intolerance to cars so much as the expulsion of childhood from her daughter’s life. How could you stay a child through this? Esme could barely watch. Heave, retch, weep. Face obliterated in afterdamp. “Anything you want,” she said. “Just tell me.”

“I want your phone”—and when it seemed like Esme was game for this, the crying rolled back, sobs were snuffles. Esme ransacked her bag and pockets.

Ida dialed fast and crammed the phone to her ear as though they were at the rodeo but she must be heard. Esme did not think who she was calling in the middle of the night; she was too spent with release from the dread that her daughter would cry this way for life.

It was ringing—no one was home—but as Esme reached for the phone, voicemail picked up and she heard her mother’s voice, and in this voice Esme apprehended the word Ida had been mumbling throughout. She’d been asking for her ma. Not Esme Ma, but Linda Ma.

If Esme had seen her green, no doubt Ida could see her blanch. She had forgotten to disconnect her parents’ phone? This should have come as no surprise, since she had not done anything apropos of their death except to mourn, and she had barely done that.

She did not listen to Ida’s message, but when Ida was done, she clammed the phone shut. “I keep calling,” Ida said. “Maybe their voicemail’s broken?”

“Try to get some sleep, tulip. I know this doesn’t seem like much of a vacation, but just you wait, tomorrow is going to be fun. You’ll see.”

“Will you spend the day with me?”

Esme looked out the window. The snow was piling up around the car. They would be iglooed in an hour. Her guess? Noah’s attempt to get her to the site was so low-fi, there couldn’t be anyone else besides Jim calling the shots. If this had been on a bigger dime, someone would have pulled in for rescue and transport. A better car. A motorcade.

“Let’s talk in the morning,” she said. “We’re going to be here for a while, and Mommy has some work to do.”

Ida settled in. If her body had taken over the rendering of grief in her life, it was too tired to play on. Esme watched her close her eyes, then looked at the index cards she had written so far. Her story was almost done.

39. Lo, this is getting impossible. Our daughter scares me. What have we done to her? I guess I just didn’t try very hard when I had the chance. Sure, we left New Paltz, but to understand what happened next, you’ll need some sense drummed into you. For one, let’s be frank: No way were we going to recruit defector POWs in North Korea. Too risky, too hard, too cruel. If our guys out there wanted to come home, we wouldn’t be able to help; if they wanted to stay, we wouldn’t be able to flip them without exerting pressure of the kind no one’s proud of later. I knew this—I think we all knew this—which is why they took me off Yul the second a more interesting, albeit improbable, contact came along. A guy—let’s call him J.T.—who owned a cake shop in Queens. He was a baker, once ran with the mob. He wore a Brylcreem pompadour that hadn’t moved in twelve years, and was connected to the feds, who leaned on him for news every now and then. But he wanted more out of life. He had issues, among them the sense that no one cared enough about U.S. POWs. And so, North Korea, which probably had some explaining to do re: our guys MIA from the war. Unlikely as it sounds, this baker had already made nice with the Vietnamese U.N. mission—he’d gotten them hooked on shortcake—so they facilitated contact, and soon enough, North Korea’s ambassador to the U.N. was eating red velvet cream pies at J.T.’s place.

40. Not long after, I started going there, too. And you know how it is when you’re a new mom and your husband’s sleeping with other women and you feel fat because you are fat, and unwanted because you are unwanted, and all the love that child and husband have taken from your vault is so accessorized with hurt, it barely looks like love—you know how that constellates into adulterous behavior of your own? So, yes, one second you are eating vanilla sponge cake with lychee buttercream, and the next you are panty-ankled on the stove top. So, yes, I went to Corona. I met J.T. I went once, twice, many times after that. And it wasn’t like you noticed, because how much were you home?

41. The bakery was by Shea Stadium, where it’s all chop shops and drug fronts. It had stone-wall siding and a shingled mansard roof. A cupcake weather vane and a big old American flag twenty feet up. Inside were framed photos of J.T. with Important Asians and with the relief pitching rotation for the Mets. He had been to North Korea with various businessmen. When he got there, they’d loaded him in the rear with sodium pentothal. Years later, when I heard tell of your plans to go—I intercepted an email Isolde sent her mom: Look, Mom, one woman’s cult is another’s Fulbright—I knew they’d do the same to you if not worse.

42. You might be wondering what the Baker has to do with anything. I’ll tell you. In 1996, when a submarine ran aground at Kangnung and released almost thirty North Korean commandos whose mission might be to terrorize Seoul; when the North needed to apologize for the incident because they had been busted, though they absolutely did no want to apologize; when the Agreed Framework between the North and the U.S. to denuclearize this most volatile and strange state was under threat; the navigating of these parlous waters somehow fell to J.T., who let it be known that the North might possibly have seven American POWs they might possibly be willing to send home, provided everyone forgot about the sub/commando incident. Seven POWs? Three of whom might be my soldiers?

Not surprisingly, then, I got a call: Go heavy with the Baker. At the time, Ida was just learning to talk. Though it wasn’t like she was saying either one of our names. Her first word was Lou, for the stuffed alligator she slept with. So the call could not have come at a better time; it gave me the chance to dwell on less hurtful things. We moved into the back room of J.T.’s shop. He knew I was Agency, but he didn’t much care. He went about his life. He would sit with the ambassador, the minister, and company, and since the banquette was bugged, I’d nurse Ida and listen in, and listen harder when they spoke Korean, which they often did, since the guys liked to keep J.T. insecure about how well he was trusted. I ate a lot of pie. And because J.T. didn’t really want us there—he was already seeing a woman in the kitchen who would strafe my arms with hot lard and go, Oops!—he put me on dish duty seven days a week. The composition of this food began to resolve in my veins. I had trouble waking up, I was tired all the time, and, for the way my breast milk started to taste, Ida deprived me of my one calorie-cutting exercise. She started to throw up my milk and then to refuse it altogether.

43. I did not have a new place to live, but only because I wasn’t ready to look. I’d have to start over. Send Ida to safety. Recommit to my work and stay away from you. If I went back, I’d have told you everything and put us all at risk. And I was done hurting. Enough.

But I was also running out of time. Ida was cranky or teething or maybe she just had heartburn. Whichever the case, she wailed with a frequency that, in the abstract, was admirable for its allegiance to habit but that began to annoy the Koreans, not to mention the other customers. The State Department had given the Korean mission a twenty-five-mile leash in any direction from Columbus Circle, but there were plenty of other bakeries to patronize, and also, my time there was not proving effective. The guys talked about hunting and baseball and sometimes about how to win respect from the West via the pluming of their nuclear capacity, but even this was more like jock talk than actionable intelligence. They never mentioned MIAs. They never mentioned my soldiers. So I had to produce something fast, which was when I came on the idea of posing as an orthopedic physician for the Mets and going with J.T. to North Korea. He’d already befriended the team’s pitching coach and once taken him to the North as a companion and wingman. He’d already taken the Koreans to many games, and to the dugout for autographs. The plan was feasible. A little crazy, but feasible. And anyway, I wanted out of that shit-hole kitchen. I wanted my passions released. I wanted to reclaim the protected intimacy of being thrust into a target’s life on the sly and for a limited time, and I wanted to escape the fear born of love for you and Ida—the fear that there were feelings in this world that could undo your resolve to live isolated from the trauma and wreckage that come in train of relations with other people.

44. Sure, my parents were not so keen to divorce their identities, but only on principle. And yes, they were not so keen to take Ida, but only in practice. In the end, something of their ideals and de facto needs got answered in the assumption of a new life in North Carolina.

As for me, I hired Martin. We worked up the face of a doctor any shortstop would trust. I studied tensegrity, contractile structures, capsular and noncapsular patterns of motion. The rig was up in a month; passable intelligence on the stuff of orthopedics took two, and so at the end of 1997, I took my first plunge into the most isolated, radically autonomous, and lonely community of millions on earth.

I never managed to get in touch with the defected soldiers. But I did make contacts on the inside and was able to pass on information about North Korea’s weapons program that seemed credible. I was doing my job and doing it well except that my life continued to feel elsewhere. It was elsewhere, since even as I was working North Korea, I never stopped working you.

So naturally when Jim got wind of your rapport with the North, it made all the sense in the world to give the job to me. And when you went ahead and accepted their money—are you insane?—I said I’d help shut you down. So long as the government came to me, I could protect you. So now you know: all along, I’ve been protecting you.

They were racing down the highway. Civilian traffic had been diverted and their jeep absorbed into a caravan of the policing authority. Ida had posed no questions about what was going on and did not appear in the least riled by the sirens or fanfare, but this did not mean she wouldn’t be soon enough. Esme, who had been working on what to tell her about Thurlow for ten minutes plus ten years, made a joke about them knowing how to make an entrance, and when this got no response, she said, “Ladies and gents, please welcome to Cincinnati the lovely, the talented, Ms. Ida Haas!” She ventured the play din of a crowd.

Ida said, “Stop it.” And, “No wonder Dad left you.”

Esme did not move; she was lock-eyed with the mongrel of feeling that had reared up in the car. The outrage (Thurlow left her?), the relief of seeing Ida blame Esme and not herself, the wilderness of her child’s mind (What else does she think she knows?), and then just the dread of having to set her straight. Because if they were going to get a moment together, all three of them, Esme wanted Ida to know enough to try to keep it with her for life.

No traffic, no people, herewith: Cincinnati. The river blue, molared with ice, the wind patrolling the city street by street; this place was bleak like Pyongyang but without the excuse, which meant it was actually bleaker. They rolled through downtown and then doubled back, and in the way you can sense a water mass well before you see it, so it is with the ambience of a crisis in play. Sirens and floodlights might beacon the news, but it’s the sublimated chaos—chaos in hand—that radiates for miles.

A tony neighborhood. Mansions. Many architectural dogmas in effect. Tudors, castles, Victorians, and there, up a hill, the stone square presidio Thurlow Dan called home.

The cordon site was like a fern whose pot was entirely too small. It had proliferated well beyond the road—a two-way lane, but barely—up neighboring lawns, and into a Tudor opposite the Helix House, whose family had been moved to the Marriot and given plane tickets to Puerto Rico in thanks. On scene: special ops, National Guard, local police, Men in Charge. Women, too, but no matter, just people whose job was to revise, at a clip, how best to storm the castle.

The road was a gauntlet of authority vehicles. Paper cups in the gutter, caskets of four-way chili swept curbside. Two loudspeakers rigged to gaslights. A pumper truck with coffee on the grill; three ambulances up a lawn and the rest parked at a golf course nearby.

There was no way to drive through this mess, so they had to park and wend, which was no picnic. Noah had Esme’s arm in a pinch. Ida refused to take her hand, so Esme tried to keep her one step ahead, which meant treading her heels and getting nasty looks for it. It was freezing, and since no one knew how to talk to one another despite the headgear and mics and direct connect, they got stopped every two feet.

At first Noah just flashed his badge and passed them through, but as they got closer, and the barring command got more imposing, the badge no longer cut it. What was needed at this point was a badge plus an extraordinarily compelling reason to bother the assistant special agent in charge—so what, exactly, was their business here?

“It’s the ex-wife,” Noah said. “That good enough?”

He said it loud; there was no way Ida had missed it. And so, there it was. Esme died a thousand times over. And based on the Moses part that opened up before them, the information must have struck the ops with similar intensity, likewise the news choppers overhead, which nearly clipped each other for best vantage of the freedom given this mother and child. Who were they that the way was clear?

Not that Esme had moved. To have had the work of disclosure done for her, without fuss or warning—she was exhilarated and traumatized, though both fell short of the flowered comprehension in her daughter’s face, upturned and saying with unmistakable clarity: Yep, now is the moment when the tropism of my attachments could go this way or that. Now is your chance to shine on me the torch you’ve been carrying for my dad, and we can be a family whether we get to him or not.

Esme knelt so they were eye level. She didn’t know where to begin. But Ida had it figured out; she turned away and headed straight for the Helix House.

Ran for the house, so that when a cop scooped her up, it was a tantrum like no other. She bit his arm. Drew blood. Esme did not expect her to listen, but she said, “Sweetie, stop, I’ll explain everything, I swear,” and like that, Ida was calm. She walked back and pressed her whole body into Esme like she was the dunce and Mom was the corner. It was Ida’s first kindness in days and maybe her first ever apropos the labor of forgiving your parents, and so when she whispered, having pulled her mom in close, “Can you help Dad?” Esme didn’t have it in her to say no.

The special agent in charge came out the Tactical Operations Center to greet them and share the latest: You took too long. The feds are done talking. They were done hours ago, but now they are really done. Thurlow’s dad was back in the house against orders, Norman had cut off all communication, the hostages were probably still in the den, there were guards straggled throughout the compound, and unless Esme had a better idea, it was T minus five.

The team had set up in the living room of the Tudor house across the street. Persian rug, mahogany hutch, and, above the fireplace, a mantel of framed days in the life of the family displaced by this operation. Kid in Little League, missing teeth. Kid in hockey helmet, missing teeth. Girl plus trophy held high. And it wasn’t that these photos had seized for posterity special moments in time so much as the feeling inspired by these moments: You are a marvel, you are forever.

Esme looked at Ida, who sat recessed in a loveseat, hands in a clump between her legs, chin to chest. And without warning, it happened: Esme felt the right thing at exactly the right time.

She had compulsions, hangups, fear, but she also had clarity. Her parents were dead. Her brother had died with her name behind it. She and Ida had no one left; they barely had each other. But what they did have with Thurlow was a dynamic, and in this arrangement of lives vectored to and from each other, whole universes were given home. Isn’t that what people mean when they talk about family? The unspoken, unseen, but eminently felt?

She told the SAC that she did have a better idea, yes. And after she laid it out, he extended his arms as though readying for a catch. She could see his palms—the skin was thick and dense like beeswax—and understood anew the expression The whole world in his hands.

The math was easy. Risk Esme, who was trained and largely responsible for this situation, or risk the hostages, because, without credible intel, anyone caught with so much as a hot dog in hand would get shot. If Esme got taken or hurt, HRT was going to assault the compound anyway; if she could end this thing without bloodshed, all the better, job well done.

The SAC said: “If you’re not out in ten, we won’t wait.” Esme understood. She asked for a second with Ida, but when they went to the other room, she didn’t have to tell her much. Ida was on board—she was brave, a natural—and fleeing the house within five minutes of the bustle grown up around Esme as they fit her with a camera. Her plan? To rendezvous with Ida at Reading and McMillan, at a manhole the city opened last week. Ida would find it easily—just walk south and walk fast, and if Esme wasn’t there in an hour, call Martin.

At last, Esme was in the Helix House. In the first-floor pantry, where hostages might have been but weren’t. Same for the den and the other rooms. Her team of four was gone. Unclear where, though she suspected they were scattered throughout the underground of Cincinnati. No problem; she’d pick them up later. In any case, they were not here, and that was good, and Wayne agreed. She’d found him toting his wife and bird down the hall. Under the circumstances, he should have been pleased to see her, but no, the look on his face was all hate. He said no one else was left in the house but Thurlow, and then he kept walking.

Esme knew she had to get to Thurlow ASAP, but instead she dwelled on the stuff around her. The pens he’d held. The pillows he’d touched. She disconnected her headcam. So long as SWAT thought the place was rigged and manned, they had time. Ten minutes wasn’t much, but it would do. That, a few cans of gas, accelerant, and a lighter.

She paused outside Thurlow’s door and rested her hand on the knob. They had been happy once. Since then it had been x days, months, years, and she still missed him with a degree of agony that would have sent most people running back to him a long time ago. But not Esme. Instead, she had ignored the need, boxed it up, put it away, acquired new experiences to box and pile until her tower had grown nine thousand boxes high and there was no chance she could feel that first box on the bottom, right? Princess and the pea. Such a deranged moral to offer a child. The more sensitive you are to pain welled deep in your psyche, the more noble your spirit? It was better to be noble than happy? She pressed her ear to the wood. And the weeping she heard inside needed no interpretation. It’s true that when your subject weeps and so do you, it is hard to tell your hurt from his. For a person who listens, rare are the moments you don’t have to.