Alone

Here
are some facts I learned from my dad, back when I still had a dad.

1. Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. A bad enough hurricane will snap a suspension bridge right in half.

So what I'm wondering is, does that mean fact three is, Every person has their breaking point? And if that's true, where's mine?

I guess it's obvious by now that I'm not exactly fond of my status as scientific freak and government pawn. My whole childhood was spent being trained, not raised, by my dad, the big hero who disappeared the minute my mom was killed. I was left behind with ridiculously overdeveloped muscles, an excess of useless “knowledge,” and about a billion questions that nobody can answer.

The only time I use my uncanny knack for foreign languages is when I'm ordering an
empanada
at San Loco.

I get passed around from family to family. People I love get killed left and right. I hook up with the love of my life, lose my virginity to him, and he almost gets his head splattered across the sidewalk as a direct result. Then my father shows up—oh, no, wait! Now I've got two identical guys claiming to be my dad, each warning me about the other. And with all this knowledge, with all these instincts, with all the roundhouse kicks and karate chops in the world, I can't figure out what the real deal is.

Here's the bitch of it: When I'm fighting, I know where I stand. A kick delivered to a solar plexus has a different effect from one aimed at the knee or, my personal favorite, the crotch. Thanks to my absent fear gene, I feel steely cool, in control, and smooth.

The minute the fight is over and I recover from the strain, nothing makes sense anymore. I try to sleep at night, and questions
scuttle around in my brain like water bugs in a subway tunnel. My mom is dead, my dad is missing, and I have to pretend to hate my boyfriend (that is, if he even
is
my boyfriend) just to save his frigging life. I hate this. I absolutely hate the crap I deal with on a daily basis.

It reminds me of this scene in
Moby Dick.
This guy is left behind in a little boat while his whaling ship takes off without him. He watches the ship disappear and he's left for three days out there, just him, the water, the sky, and an unbroken horizon. He goes completely crazy from the loneliness.

That's how I feel. Inside, there's just flat, brackish water as far as the eye can see, and there's not a ship in sight to pick me up and show me where to go next.

Something's got to give or I swear, I'll reach my boiling point, I'll snap, and anything I say will be lunchtime fodder for the head shrink at your friendly neighborhood insane asylum.

GAIA STEPPED OUT OF THE DANK
subway station and into an equally dank, overcast morning just typical for late March on the East Coast. She strode downtown-on Lexington, the sidewalk cluttered with strollers, nannies, and purebred dogs. It was early in the morning, but they were already out in full force: the perfect people, spending wads of money on
Lexus strollers and canine cologne.

Downtown, where Gaia used to live, the buildings were smaller and the people a little more on the ball. Within blocks of her brownstone were immigrant neighborhoods whose streets brimmed with personality. Exotic smells drifted out of shops whose signs were handwritten in different languages. Chinatown. Little Italy. Up here, everything looked as bland and generic as a J. Crew catalog, and Gaia had given it her own name: Little Connecticut.

She had a job to do this morning, and she wasn't looking forward to it. When she'd first gotten parked in the superfancy digs of Natasha and her daughter, Tatiana, she'd been pretty peeved. Her dad had a habit of ditching her in the well-appointed apartments of his friends while he indulged his five-year-old habit of totally ignoring her existence. But what had started out as annoyance at the two Russian women's insistence on interfering with her life had become decidedly more sinister.

It was bad enough
Russkie the Younger
(that
would be Tatiana) had her eye on Gaia's would-be boyfriend, Ed. Russkie the Elder (the lovely Natasha, for those of you playing along at home) was not only digging her enameled nails into Tom Moore's heart, she was betraying his every stupid, lovesick move to Tom's evil twin brother, Loki.

Gaia didn't want to believe it. She would have much preferred to be one of the world's trusting idiots, a blissful moron convinced of the basic goodness of humanity. But there was optimism, and then there was reality. Gaia had learned, once and for all, not to hope for the best when the worst was, invariably, about to smack her upside the head.

The only thing she could do now was confront Natasha and get her the hell away from her dad.

Of course, there was the nagging question of why she owed Tom anything. Thanks to Oliver's surprise visit to the apartment the night before, Gaia wasn't even sure that he was her actual dad. Oliver, otherwise known as Loki, was his identical twin, and he claimed to be Gaia's dad, too, and neither one had done much of a job of convincing her.

Then again, Gaia had to admit, the letters Tom had given her—sheaves and sheaves of paper dating back to when she was twelve, detailing how much he loved her, missed her, and hated to have to leave her, neatly typed and hand signed every single day that they hadn't been together—were pretty convincing evidence that he, at
least, gave a crap where she woke up and who she hung out with, even if he had disappeared for most of her adolescence. The letters were way corny with emotion. Not to mention that other epistolary collection—the letters from Tom to that snake Natasha, detailing his hopes for his daughter, filled with such longing, it hurt to think about them. So Gaia had to figure that even if he wasn't her biological father, he at least had a stake in her well-being—despite the fact that it was Oliver who appeared, like magic, whenever she most needed him.

She stepped into the ornate foyer of the building, her sneakers squeaking on the marble floor, and hit the elevator button. She studied her reflection in the thin strip of brass behind the button. High forehead, dirty blond hair hanging to her waist, and an angry set to her jaw. This was the face that Tom thought about every day? Nothing like the so-called normal girls at the Village School. Gaia wasn't convinced—but she wasn't about to be taken for a ride by Natasha.

If getting to the bottom of the situation meant,
de facto,
helping her “father,” then so be it.

IT WAS AMAZING, TOM MOORE MUSED,
that you could be surrounded by so much
physical beauty and still be dealing with ugly, menacing danger. He stepped out on the terrace of his hotel room, scanning the white beach and turquoise water for any sign of spies or hit men but saw only frolicking tourists, and hotel employees, dressed in spanking-white tunics, carrying trays of umbrella-topped drinks and piles of fluffy white towels. For a moment he allowed himself to relax as Natasha came up behind him and wound her arms around his torso, caressing his chest as she kissed the very center of his back. Their first night together had been filled with more passion than he'd felt since Katia's death, followed by the first full night's sleep he'd had since then, too.

“You're up early,” he said.

“Not as early as you,” she responded in her lilting-Russian accent, running her fingernails up his chest.

“I suppose I have a touch of jet lag from my trip down from New York,” she added, pouring coffee from the tall silver decanter that room service had placed outside their door. “Anyway, we have work to do,” she said with a sigh.

Tom just gazed out the window.

“You are thinking about Gaia?” Natasha asked.

“She's so far away,” Tom said, stepping inside, leaving the sliding doors wide open so that the humid tropical air filled the room. He picked up the delicate
coffee cup in one hand and slugged down the rich black liquid. “I don't like being where I can't rush in if something happens to her.”

“But you're almost never near enough to her—physically, I mean—to do that,” Natasha pointed out as she stirred two lumps of sugar into her coffee and broke a biscotti in half. “It must be torment. I don't even like being away from Tatiana for a weekend.”

“It's been like having an arm cut off,” Tom agreed. “If I can just take care of Loki, I'll be able to be her father again—I won't have to worry that just by being near her, I'm putting her life in danger.”

“Then that's what we'll do,” Natasha said, with such conviction Tom believed they'd really do it this time.

“At least I know we're close,” he said. “Somehow that takes the edge off the stress. I don't remember when I've ever felt so. . .”

“Carefree?”

“Not exactly. But something approaching it.” He put down his coffee and stroked his finger softly along the delicate flesh that peeked from the top of Natasha's bathrobe.

Tom's Blackberry beeped. He jumped and broke away to see what the minicomputer had to say to him. “What is it?” Natasha asked, seeing a shadow cross his face.

“There's a delay,” he answered her. “The operative we're supposed to track isn't going to be here for another day.”

Tom felt the familiar clutch in his gut, telling him he could do nothing but lay low till someone, somewhere, did their job. Normally he hated downtime; action quieted the noise in his head. But this time? This time the agony of impatience was almost immediately replaced by relief—and even joy.

In the five years since his wife's murder, Tom had never allowed himself to get close to anyone. Sure, he had his colleagues at the Agency. And he could always depend on George Niven to give him honest, fatherly counsel when he needed it. But since he had been forced to distance himself from his daughter, it seemed that his heart, unable to shower its love on the one he most wanted to be with, had just hardened into a dull lump in his chest.

But now? Something had changed. He didn't know if it was just the passage of time, or Natasha's passing resemblance to Katia, or something else—like true love—but he was feeling his heart begin to beat again, and he began to actually believe there might be an end to these years of constant struggle.

Yes. Maybe this wasn't a waste of a day. Maybe his work here in the Cayman Islands wasn't the only thing he had to think about. Maybe for once he could stop being Tom Moore, government agent,
and just for a little while become Tom Moore, regular guy.