Monday's Lie (18 page)

“They didn't, Pat. No one enjoyed that.”

“So you don't want to go? Say the word and I'll cancel the tickets.”

The whir of the tires on the wet road played loudly into our silence.

“Why do you want to take this trip, Pat?”

“Probably for the same reason you wanted to book a spa weekend.”

It was an impossibly loaded answer, but whether that was engineered or organic, I could hardly ask.

“Don't worry about it, Dee. I'll just cancel it.”

“No, don't. That's not what I'm saying. It would be good for us, I think. It's an amazing present, Pat. It could be a wonderful trip, if we make it that way.”

“Well, you just think about it and let me know if you change your mind.”

•  •  •

The conversation looped in my head for days, stuck there like a snippet of song that has jammed its jingly way in without permission. It managed to erase every quiet moment.

I replayed our argument and couldn't find a hook to hang my preoccupation on. Patrick's trip was certainly more real than my little white lie of a spa-weekend getaway. But new money or no new money, Patrick wouldn't drop thousands of dollars to make a point that he'd caught me in a fib.

The folder from the travel agency was real enough—glossy and bulking with brochures for side excursions: history tours into Prague and castle-discovery rides through the Viennese countryside. There were travel advisories and pamphlets of packing tips, and our names and details bold-printed in every blank on the pages and pages of endless fine print. At the end of it all was Patrick's bold, left-slanting signature beneath an impressive dollar amount cheerfully stamped
PAID IN FULL
.

The awkwardness of the announcement, the expense of the whole thing, then the naturally following concern that we were throwing money at a problem that didn't have a solution for sale, it would set anyone on edge. That must be it. Any reasonable person would rehash the discussion and turn the scenario this way and that, in hopes that a new facet would catch the light and make some sense. I wasn't being weird. It was normal, all this obsessing. And as “normal” usually did, this time it didn't fix the worry even a little bit.

But like all ear-burrs, the nearly continuous playback of the argument rubbed off eventually. I stopped rewinding and replaying the conversation. I was able to blank daydream at stoplights again. The song faded away, but I would always know the lyrics by heart.

Friday

I
'm
trying to imagine the ride back down this road. Or more likely, I'm only stalling, still sitting here with the car idling the gas away. I twist the key and kill the engine and the silence rolls over me like syrup, rising into every space. My ears fill with quiet. It slides down my throat. I can't breathe. I'm drowning. It's so heavy. The conch shell roar of the blood in my veins takes over, a tidal sound. I'm not deaf. I'm not drowning. I'm treading water. I can do that. I'm an expert.

I'll wait for my hands to feel more under my own direction and my heartbeat to steady out to a canter. I just need a little while longer. I'm a mess. But, I do wonder how I'll be on the way out of this. Will it be in twenty minutes, empty-handed and none the wiser? Maybe an hour. Two? Or will all of this take so long that I'll be wheeling these turns in the dark, head full of answers, heart full of . . . what? And will I be alone, barreling back to what I know, home and husband, on this road that will look just as alien going the other way as it does now?

I always watch my route carefully wherever I go. I never sleep on planes or in the passenger seat of car trips. For me, the travel isn't a throwaway or a given. It's the way back again if I ever wish to return, or it's the route to avoid if I'll never go back.

Patrick wasn't wrong about my wanderlust. Of course, my mother's journeys never came with photos to chronicle her stops, but the specific destinations didn't matter. Because of her, I craved a headful of private travelogue, too—a whole world within, my own version of the world without.

Patrick and I had done some limited domestic touring, but vacations are expensive and there never seemed to be a good time. When I thought about where I wanted to go and what I wanted to see, I never admitted out loud that I most often imagined myself alone on Tower Bridge in London or peering through a screen of forest primeval from solitude in a deep green somewhere.

It's not that I didn't want to go places with Patrick. He was, or had been at some point, good company. It's just that when I sketched out the daydreams, accidentally he wasn't there, with no malice intended. The dream space to my left and right was open air, and my imaginary stride kept pace with no other legs.

Huh. Funny that. Thinking about not thinking of having someone with me has just twisted around on itself. I just imagined Buda Castle from Patrick's travel brochures, the ones that should have thrilled me into planning mode, but had failed to do anything but worry me. The palace, flung long and looming along the Danube, is something I've always wanted to see from the Pest side of the river. I can summon the image at will. But this time there's a ghostly outline next to me in my mind, a sketch of man, taller than my husband, wavy-haired. . . .

•  •  •

When I couldn't make sense of Patrick, with his plans and his moods, my mind skipped tracks to the next man-puzzle within my reach. I typed in a string of Al Qaeda names culled from recent news articles and added in my mother's name at the end. Then I put
Brian Menary
into the word soup for good measure. I hit Send to launch the search and got ready for work. At lunchtime, I took a book to the food court at the mall and waited.

“Don't do that.”

I'd drifted deep into the plot of the novel in my hand, and Brian simply scared the hell out of me.

He took the chair across from mine, his starchy collar drawing a sharp, white line under his grimly set jaw. “It's not funny.”

“I'm not laughing at that. I'm laughing at me. You scared me to death.”

“Do you know how much trouble that could have caused if your little summons had vaulted over my head?”

“Oh my God,” I said, trying for light mocking, hoping that it was somehow appropriate even though his face and his posture suggested otherwise. “Was my mother involved with Al Qaeda? Are you?”

“No. But linking all that up in an Internet search makes you sound crazy. It's not just an algorithm, remember? It's analysts, too. If they think you're maybe just a little too curious about something, they send me. Curious is watchable. But crazy makes us have to do something, and if you'll recall, I don't
do
things anymore. A little weirder and you could have drawn down a different kind of surveillance altogether.”

“Oh, no. I didn't think of it like that. I'm so sorry. I really—it won't happen again.”

“It certainly won't.” Brian slid a business card across the table.

“ ‘Hoyle's Compounding Pharmacy and Alternative Medicine Center'?” I read from the card. “Huh?”

“Yeah, I'm an herb guru in my other life,” he deadpanned. “Either that or it's a private voice mail that will route a message to my regular phone if, for some reason, you feel you need to reach me.” He shook his head at me. “Jesus, what happened that made you pull a stunt like that?”

“Nothing happened.” My cleverness had crumpled to mortification. “Shit, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to cause a problem.”

“You didn't. You could have, but you didn't. It's okay. They sent the memo to me, thank God, since I was still out this way. Maybe I was too flippant when we talked before. I was just trying to put you at ease. My job's not usually a big deal anymore, but it's not exactly a joke either.”

“Brian, I'm really sorry.”

“It's okay.” He sat back in his chair. “So, nothing happened, but you waved a red flag at the cyberbull to get my attention. Is this officially our first date, then?”

“What?”

“So that's a no.”

“I'm married.”

“Well, sure, but you know . . . ,” he teased, and earned only blinking from me in response. “Okay, so that's
no
, underlined. Right. Got it. What are we here for then?”

“Now I feel like an idiot. Let's never mind the whole thing. I'm so sorry.”

“After all that? ‘Never mind'? You can't be serious.”

I sighed. “Now it seems so wrong to ask you. It's just that I've been kicking myself since the other day after we talked. I chickened out.”

“You chickened out?” His smirk had returned, full simmer. “What did you want to ask me that you didn't have the courage to? Now I'm intrigued for sure. But I'm glad I already checked that this wasn't a date.”

“No. It's still not a date,” I said, unable to pry my eyes up off the tabletop. “I didn't ask you more about my mother. That's all. I just didn't know what to ask.”

“Ah. Probably because I said that I didn't know her very well. I've got nothing, really. I imagine you could tell me a lot more than I could tell you.”

“I know, but you'd been very open about why you were here and how the whole system works and the Tag Site thing and whatnot. You were talking. I should have asked for more—you for more information.” I was stammering. I bit down on the tip of my clumsy tongue and drew in a breath. “I just wanted to ask you about that night at least, about what she did for all those months when you came to get her.”

“I wasn't with her on the trip.”

“That's not the same as you not knowing anything.”

“I was only a messenger and her driver that night. Like I said, it was my first real assignment. I drove and I messenged and then I drove again.”

“That's it?”

“Of course not. But now I'm a little concerned about setting you off on another Googling frenzy.”

“I won't.”

“You don't need to, Dee. There's nothing to find. But it would be a little too pointed right now, after all this.”

“I understand.”

“Hmmmm.” He stared into me unself-consciously. “You probably do. Okay. Let's see. It goes back a ways. Anyway, once upon a time—”

“You start your stories like that? My mother always did, too. So does my brother.”

Brian smiled. “It's a spook thing, I think. Occupational hazard of sounding like a goof. But it's like breathing to me now. I can't seem to help it. Anyway, once upon a time, there was a very young, very green man-boy who dropped out of college because he was bored and heartbroken. A very cruel coed had dumped him for an upperclassman, and it left him not interested in studying anymore. In fact, it left him uninterested in doing much of anything except sleeping until noon, eating his way through his tiny little bank account, drinking way too much beer, and watching whatever was next on TV. None of that stuff pays the rent very well.

“So, the young man joined the army because he had seen too many movies. The young man had really not taken into account exactly how much he hated being yelled at. Very foolish, all the
not
thinking that boy did. He wasn't bright. But he did have a talent. This boy was almost completely immune to jet lag. And he could stay awake for several days with very little adverse effect on his coordination and concentration.”

“Really? That's your superpower?”

“Hey, don't knock it. Staying awake never paid so good.” Brian laughed. “But it's a trick. Like all magic, it's just sleight of hand. I really do sleep. It's just that, for some reason, I can doze very deeply for a minute or two—sometimes only just a few seconds, even while standing up. I can nod off practically on command and most people can't. It can be helpful. In school it meant I could stay up all night playing video games. And in the army, their sleep-deprivation tactics didn't really zonk me out like it did the other guys. Then
they
heard about it and came to see the Amazing Wide-Awake Man-Boy. They asked me if I wanted out of the army. To which I replied, ‘Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Three bags full of
yes, sir
.' And before you know it, I was sent places and taught things.

“Then one day, in a galaxy far, far away, someone in charge came up to me and told me that they'd gotten some information and that there was an important
asset
, which by that time I knew was super-secret-agent codespeak for ‘person,' who was going to be needing some on-scene assistance, and that I had to get there faster than some other people who were already on their way.

“And the rest, you know.” He laid both hands on the table as if there had been some sort of conclusion.

“You're kidding, right? I don't know anything. You just told me about you, not about her.”

“I was hoping you wouldn't notice.”

I sucked in my cheeks to keep the corners of my mouth out of a smile, but there was no winning with my left eyebrow. It arced right over at Brian's grinning command. “And why would you be hoping that?”

“Even if this isn't a date, you can't blame a guy for trying to see if he can still impress. It's such a drag. I never get to tell my story.”

“So.” I straightened down my eyebrow and set my face to unreadable. “Am I impressed?”

“Shit. Finally get a chance to try my game and I pick Annette Vess's daughter to run it on.”

“That'll teach you. So you can't tell me anything about that night? Or you won't?”

“Well, there's not much to tell, really. I mean, I came to the house. I got there just ahead of who they were worried about, so that was good. And for a short, crazy while I helped out in any way I could. Which mostly meant cleaning up after she kicked a solid bit of ass. Then I put her bags in the car. She wouldn't let me anywhere near you and your brother. I hardly did anything. And still I was thrilled. She was a legend.”