Love Over Matter (19 page)

“
Probably taking a baseball
bat to something,” I say, a huff escaping my pursed
lips.

His toes tap against mine under the
table. “We should go back.”

“
And do what?”

“
Act normal,” he proposes.
“Or confront him.”

He’s right. It’s weak of us (or, well,
me mostly) to run away. I circle the table and give him a friendly
peck on the . . . eyebrow? “Meet you there?”

He agrees with a snappy nod. “Right
behind ya.”

* * *

Aleks and Rosie are on the porch,
nonchalantly shooting the breeze, when the Love Machine rolls into
the driveway, pinning the Bunny Mobile in place. I push my
sunglasses over the bridge of my nose and straighten my cap, not to
mention my vertebrae.

Ian waltzes into the yard ahead of me.
“What’s up?” he’s asking Aleks as I approach.

I shoot a glance next door, wondering
how long it will take the Brookses to discover that their home has
been violated.

Rosie answers instead of Aleks. “Just
about to get started,” she says, giving her mop bucket a shivering
kick. She jangles a giant key ring in the air and smiles. (With all
those keys, she looks like a prison warden, which isn’t such a bad
thing at the moment. I mean, if she had the power of the law, she
could haul Aleks off to the clink and be done with it.)

“
I’ll give you a hand,”
Aleks says, springing to his feet and saving the bucket from
Rosie’s wrath.

I hate DNA. Why does this boy have to
be so much like George, down to the way his eyes crinkle at the
corners in the sun and his biceps stretch against the soft cotton
of his tee? “Ian can get that,” I say, grabbing the other side of
the bucket. “Right, Ian?”

Ian freezes me with a
warning glare. I answer with a look that, I hope, says:
I know what I’m doing here. Chill.
Finally, he relents. “Yeah, sure,” he says,
getting his own hold on the bucket. I let go and, pretty quickly,
Aleks does too.

Rosie just shrugs. “Nice seeing you,”
she tells Aleks, unlocking the door and starting inside.

Once Ian is gone, I decide to get
risky. “Are you . . . okay?” I ask Aleks.

He shifts around on his feet. “Wanna
go for a ride?”

“
Like, on your motorcycle?”
I reply, my numbskull showing.

Without bothering to answer, he peels
off for the garage, where he has an easy time wheeling the bike
out, even though Rosie and Ian’s vehicles are clogging the
driveway. “I don’t usually carry passengers,” he tells me, sounding
a bit reluctant. “’Cause my dad, uh, gets nervous.”

If he only knew how
panicked
my
father
would be if, instead of manning the grill at The Moondancer, he was
a fly on the wall—or, well, in the air—of this conversation. “Where
are we going?” I ask, my trust in George irrationally trumping my
unease about his brother.

He leans over and cranks up the
motorcycle, giving me a start. “You tell me,” he says with a
mischievous grin. “I don’t exactly know the lay of the land around
here.”

A little half helmet is secured to the
motorcycle’s seat with a bungee net. “Here,” he says, tugging it
out and passing it to me.

He’s chivalrous like George too? No
fair. “Um, thanks,” I say with a nervous chuckle. I remove my cap,
fumble with the helmet’s strap until I get it undone, then plunk
the thing on my head. To my amazement, it fits pretty
well.

And Aleks seems to like it. “Hop on,”
he tells me, once he’s swung his leg over the gas tank and planted
a foot on one of the rubberized pegs.

I’ve never ridden on a motorcycle
before, and I doubt I should start now, but . . . I
shimmy onto the springy passenger cushion, my thighs pressing
involuntarily into Aleks’s hips. The bike rumbles beneath us like
our own personal earthquake. I strap my arms around his midsection
and, over his shoulder, say, “We’re clear for takeoff.”

He knocks the kickstand back and gets
us rolling. It’s hot outside, or as hot as it gets in our part of
Vermont—low eighties, stark blue sky, a ball of fire bearing down
on us. But as we zoom for the escape hatch of Willow Crest, the
breeze we’re creating wicks the dampness from my skin. “Which way?”
Aleks shouts, his voice struggling to overcome the roar of the
engine.

At first I don’t think he’s going to
stop at the sign, but then he does. “I dunno.” If I send him left,
there’s a chance we’ll end up passing Mom or Dad or someone else we
shouldn’t on the road. “Right, I guess,” I say, trying to recall
what’s on the outskirts of town in the direction we’ll soon be
traveling (mostly wilderness, I decide).

I let a few miles elapse between us
and home before suggesting, “There’s a picnic area up ahead.” I
know this only from a roadside sign, not from personal experience.
“We could pull over.”

When he nods, I feel his abdominal
muscles flex. “Okay,” I think he says, wind rushing in my ears and
washing away his words. Moments later, we come to a perfectly
executed stop in a dusty parking lot.

Aleks lets the kickstand down, kills
the engine and holds his hand out for the helmet, which I’m already
unstrapping. Without looking, I can tell that my hair is roughly in
the shape of a startled porcupine. “Geez, it’s buggy out here,” I
say, swatting a swarm of gnats away from my mouth. I slide off the
bike and shuffle over to a rustic log fence, the perfect hangout
since the sole picnic table is besieged by a rowdy family of
approximately nineteen.

I straddle the fence and
Aleks mimics me, triggering a flash of memory: the waterfall; the
downed tree; the raccoon; George and me.
Always
George and me. “I’m glad you
wanted to do this,” Aleks says.

I’m not quite sure what he means, but
I do have questions that need answering. “Yeah, sure.” I suck in a
heavy breath. “So what’s going on, Aleks?”

He doesn’t bother pretending to be
confused. “Sorry about that,” he says. “You weren’t supposed to
see.”

“
But what were you doing?”
Besides the obvious ransacking, I mean.

“
It’s
complicated.”

I can’t help treating him like he’s
George. “So?”

“
What do you know about the
Brookses?”

I shrug. “They’re kind of weird, if
that’s what you mean.”

“
Not exactly.” He gives a
sigh that strikes me as overwhelmingly sad. “Remember that Facebook
message you sent me? The one about George and our
mother?”

“
Ruth Dawson?”

He cringes. “Right. You know what
happened to her?”

“
She left the country?” I
say with a gulp.

“
That’s putting it
politely.”

A crazy notion hits me. “Do you know
her?”

“
In a way.”

Holy crap. A real lead on George’s
mysterious past? I twirl my hand through the air, encouraging him
to continue. “Okay . . . ?”

“
Listen, this is going to
sound crazy,” he warns, “but our mother worked for the government.
She was a Russian national. She was here in the United States—at
Columbia—on a mission.”

Mr. Rabinski’s warning comes to mind,
giving me a burst of edginess. I scan the trees and the faces of
that rambunctious family for potential threats. “I know,” I
say.

“
Who told you?”

“
An old neighbor of hers
from Queens,” I admit, without naming names.

“
Anyway,” he says, sounding
exhausted, “that’s only the beginning. When she, uh, found out
about us, she tried to quit.”

I think he means Ruth Dawson wanted
out of the spy game once she became pregnant by Dr. Smullen.
“Oh.”

“
The thing is, they
wouldn’t let her. So she turned herself in to the CIA.” He sighs.
“She thought they would protect her.”

“
How do you know all of
this?”

“
That’s not important. What
happened, though . . .” he trails off, suddenly
emotional. “They handed her back to Moscow to . . .
to . . .”

I whisper, “She was deported for
trying to save you guys?”

With a reluctant nod, he says,
“Basically.”

“
But how did
George . . . ?”

“
That’s why I’m here. Did
my brother ever say anything . . .
incriminating
about the
Brookses?”

He’s lost me now. “Like what?” I ask,
grimacing. The most I can picture George’s parents being guilty of
(besides having a matching pair of personality disorders, that is)
is fudging a few figures on their taxes. Not exactly hardcore
criminality.

“
I don’t know for sure,” he
admits. “But there must be evidence. Fake passports? An old medical
ID badge with a different name on it? Secret documents from the
mission? It wouldn’t take much to get the ball rolling.”

I want to help him for George’s sake,
and because he seems so sincere and not the least bit threatening
like before, but . . . “Sorry if I’m being dumb,” I
say, “but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“
The Russian government
stole my brother,” he tells me in a low voice. “And then they
killed Ruth Dawson.”

Okay, back up the bus. “You’re
kidding.”

“
I wish I were,” he says,
shaking his head.

My brain is working overtime trying to
make two plus two equal four. “You think the Brookses were
involved?” I conclude warily.

“
More than involved,” he
says. “There’s no doubt. I just need proof.”

“
So what happened?” I ask.
“George’s parents were—
are
—spies? They abducted him, so they
could . . . so they’d be able
to . . . ?” I hit another brick wall of
logic.

For some reason, Aleks is grinning.
“They’re sleepers,” he says. “They infiltrate . . . well,
just about everything—government, industry, medicine,
education—from the inside. But they can only get so far without
natural U.S. citizenship. That’s where George came in.”

He’s pulling my leg, obviously.
“George was a secret agent?”

“
No. I don’t think so.” He
stares after the picnicking family as they pile into a minivan,
reverse and pull away. “They were grooming him. That’s how they do
it. He probably didn’t even realize, but eventually they would’ve
started making demands. Forcing him.”

This is all too much for my brain to
take. “Your mother’s dead?” I ask, circling back around to the real
bombshell.

“
Yes.”

“
And George wasn’t
adopted?”

“
Absolutely
not.”

“
My next door neighbors are
Russian spies?”

“
I know it’s hard to
believe, but . . .”

I lock eyes with him. “And you’re
. . . you’re trying to . . . What? Catch
them?”

He gives a shy nod that is all George.
“If you’ll help me.”

I have no other choice. “Just tell me
what to do.”

* * *

Cockamamie. That’s the best word to
describe Aleks’s plan for bringing down the Brookses. Or maybe
kooky. I can’t decide which. “Are you sure about this?” I whisper
to him across the breakfast table, my mother stuttering around the
kitchen like a confused bumblebee.

He nods with assurance.

“
More eggs?” Mom asks, not
bothering to wait for an answer before flopping a fresh pile of the
scrambled things onto Aleks’s plate.

He smiles graciously. “Thank
you.”

I hold my hand up and frown. “No,
thanks.”

“
Suit yourself,” Mom says.
She buzzes back to the stove, the pan clanging as it slaps down on
the burner. “You sleep all right?” she asks over her
shoulder.

I know she means Aleks,
but . . . “Awesome. Thanks for asking,” I
say.

She gives an exasperated huff, plants
a hand on her hip and struts right up to Aleks’s side. “The pullout
wasn’t too uncomfortable, was it?” she asks, referring to an
ancient sofa my parents keep in the basement, where Aleks has been
banished for sleeping purposes. “I wanted to give you the master
bedroom, but Cassie’s dad wouldn’t hear of it. Since my heart
attack, he’s gotten a little hypervigilant.”

“
I appreciate your letting
me stay here,” Aleks says, dodging the question. He sighs lightly
and hefts another forkful of eggs into his mouth.

Mom pats him on the shoulder. “Any
brother of George’s is a son of ours.”

I hope she means
son-
in-law
.
Otherwise, I’m feeling a bit incestuous.

Behind schedule, Haley wobbles in on
us. Her hair looks like the Bride of Frankenstein’s, minus the
crazy white streak. “What’s up?” she mutters, with the effort of
someone speaking under water.

I reflexively roll my eyes. “Morning,
sunshine.”

She kicks my shin on her way to the
fridge. Instead of retaliating, I focus on Aleks. His wide,
disarming eyes. The nick of a cleft in his chin. The sparks of
reddish blue dancing through his aura. When Mom ducks around the
corner for a fresh dish towel, I say, “If I do this, you’ve gotta
promise to do something for me too.”