Woke Up Lonely (19 page)

The blanket had fallen to the floor. In lieu of parquet, they had dusted the concrete with wood shavings, which cleaved to the wool. Never mind. Thurlow just wanted to sit and regroup. He took note of the hostages, who had watched the foregoing play out in silence.

These people had names. Their lives were sui generis.

Outside, it had started to snow, maybe to hail. The feds had just cut electricity to the house. It took a minute for the generator to kick on, and in this minute, Thurlow heard ice pelt the roof. Also a voice, one of the hostages, saying, “Mr. Dan? We’re sorry to bother you, but is there any chance we can talk this over?”

He buzzed for Norman, and when he got Norman’s voicemail—where
was
everyone?—he told him to reinstate the hoods and find a few dishrags, bandannas, whatever, because apparently the hostages had things they wanted to say. Also, he was afraid to leave the commissary without escort. Then again, he hated to be there with them. How bad was it when your only companionship was the four people you’d kidnapped?
Bride of Frankenstein
came to mind.

He left the commissary through a back door. Slipped through a walk-in closet and into a guest room with a trundle bed and tinted glass doors that overlooked a lawn tombed in snow. Dust congested in the monocle of a surveillance lens overhead. He swiped it with a Kleenex. Cleared his throat. Sat on the carpet, looked at the camera, and emptied his face of anything that was not love.

“Hi, little one,” he said. “My little Ida. I guess it’s time I should be addressing myself to no one else but you. So here is what I expect: Mistakes will be made. In the ferreting out of Helix staff, the wrong people will get hurt. Whoever is out there will scan the house for heat signatures and kill one another in the process. There will be hearings in D.C. and a passing of the buck, and I won’t make it, and you’ll never know.”

It was probably five degrees outside. But with his dreams hanging off him like dead leaves and the winter of his unhappiness so cold it inured the body to minor pain but did nothing for the big stuff, he opened a window. And let the freeze rush in.

THE
SUN
HAD
BEEN
UP
FOR
TWENTY
MINUTES; the phone had been ringing nonstop. Esme was in the greenhouse: Jim Bach was calling. This early, he might be calling as her lover, DoD liaison, or both. She considered answering, considered not.

It had been many hours since her team last checked in from the Helix House. Too many for anyone to think all was well. She had their dossiers open on the table.

“What?” she said and yawned into the line.

“Crap,” he said. “I gotta take this call. Hold on.
Don’t hang up.
”

Her daughter’s voice through the intercom—“Mohhhhhhhhm!”—shrill and urgent, stout with need. Where are you, Mom? Are you here for me, Mom? What about tomorrow and the day after that? Ida was asking for the peanut butter. The kitchen staff had offered up a smooth and creamy variety that irked her preference for texture, and she was wondering why Esme had not come through for her in the execution of this simple task, the acquisition of a peanut spread to her liking, though what she was really asking was, Why didn’t her mom know her? Esme addressed the intercom—“Check the cupboard above the fridge”—because, while it was true she didn’t know what Ida liked, she did know there was hope in variety. One of Ida’s classmates had seventy-two sweatshirts, and where once Esme looked down on parents who plied their kids with stuff, now she understood: if these parents knew their daughter’s favorite color and bias for hoodies with a pink—not purple!—velvet band across the front—not the back!—they would have bought her just one sweatshirt, the most perfect one on earth. So maybe she had a more nuanced take on what it meant to be rich and buy your child’s love.

“Natural?” Ida said. “Where’s the natural kind?”

She would show up at the greenhouse in two minutes, which meant Esme had two minutes to put on her mom face. She hated to think it, but some part of her envied the stork. This bearer of child who got to skip town after. She had never asked for motherhood or the captivity of its dogma: no matter what, you will always be a mother. Your child dies, hates you, runs off—you are still a mother, stuck with this name, and hugged for life to the amazing little ID sprung from your own.

Jim back on the line. “You still there?” Esme was looking at the plants, how they soldiered on.

“I’m here,” she said. “It’s early.”

She was about to finger the aspidistra but thought again. She had a killer’s touch; this was not the time.

“Damn right it’s early,” Jim said. “So imagine me a couple hours ago getting a phone call. That early, I’m thinking it’s you from downstairs in nothing but a teddy. Maybe Price Waterhouse calling with the good news. But no, it’s the lovely and charming Erin Bach. Screaming. Any idea why my wife would be screaming at me at 6 a.m.?”

“Maybe because you’re having an affair,” she said, and she opened Olgo’s file.

“Cute. Any other guesses? No? Then maybe I should enlighten you. At 6 a.m., my wife calls me up to say her dad’s gone to Cincinnati on some strange work assignment that she thinks has something to do with the Helix, and what do I know about it? She says he hates the Helix, and what kind of monster am I to send him there?”

“Oh,” Esme said. “That.”

“So you know what I say? I say I know nothing. No clue what she’s talking about.”

“Good for you,” Esme said. “You know nothing, check.”

“Exactly,” he said, and she could tell he was rethinking the anger. Sometimes his only job was to preserve maximum deniability. Other times, he was just too pissed off to care. “So, what the fuck, Esme? My father-in-law? Have you lost your mind?”

“I know what I’m doing,” she said. If it came to it, she would tell Jim his father-in-law had an emotional rapport with the team’s assignment that the others did not. She pressed the phone into the side of her face. “I gotta go,” she said, and hung up.

Ten minutes later, Jim was at the door. He was in snow pants and sweater, like the ski lift had gone up without him. He walked so fast, it took Esme a second to hear the squall issuing from his boots, scraped across the flagstone. Like crampons were fanged to his soles.

“Sexy,” he said, and he pointed at her slippers. One had a hole at the toe.

He held a cappuccino in a travel mug, which seemed like it would diminish the pleasure of this drink, except he uncapped the mug and routed the foam with a straw, which he used to point at the files on her table. “May I?”

She gathered them up in a stack on her lap.

“What do you want, Jim? Everything’s fine.”

He laughed. “Fine, huh?” And here his face started to clench in prelude to a release of venom she had seen before. The night his wife swore to win custody of their daughter and never let him see her again. The minute after his boss told him to nail Thurlow Dan this week or resign.

He leaned back in his chair. Eased the front legs off the ground. Gripped his chin. Appeared to be choosing his words, then gave up. “You fucking cunt,” he said, sitting forward. “I find out this is some roundabout shit my wife hired you for, I’m going to kill you both. I ask for final intel on the Helix House, and you send in my father-in-law? Surely you know that if anything happens to him, I will not get custody of my daughter. That if he can connect me to this thing in any way, I won’t get custody
of my daughter.
”

He stood. Swiped at Ida’s christmas cactus, knocked it to the floor.

“I want you to call them in right now,” he said. “After that, you’re done.”

She looked at the broken pot and waited for him to catch up with her thoughts. What they had, after all, was mutually assured destruction. A plan to assault the private residence of a man who had committed no crime anyone could prove—a plan to observe this man, wiretap his phones, bug his house—was hardly the kind of activity divorce court smiled upon, let alone criminal court. Esme knew this much. Jim was screwed.

He caught up to her thinking and toed the plant. “Fuck,” he said. He would buy her a new one.

“Just trust me.” And she stood to square the neck of his sweater. They were still lovers. She slipped her hand around his waist and pressed into his hip.

“Mohhhhhhhhhhhhhm!” Now Ida was at the door, hands pressed against the frame like it might crush her otherwise. Esme said, “Tulip, let’s talk,” and pointed at the chaise longue next to hers. Ida padded the stone and left prints. Her feet were wet. Esme had promised they’d go ice-skating. Ida had been cleaning her guards in the tub.

“Hey, they fit great,” Esme said, because she’d had Martin get Ida skorts in every hue. If her daughter wanted to icecapade, she was not going to flash everyone doing it. The skort was a magical thing. The hybrid was a magical thing. This child she had with Thurlow: pure magic. Her hair was straight and butter blond, parted at the side and slanted down her face, so that half the time, half her face was gone. Her skin was colored almond milk and freckled along the ridge of her cheekbones; she had acorn eyes—not just in color but size—and in all but height she looked just like her dad.

“They’re okay,” Ida said. “But I wanted black. They cost a little more, but whatever,” and she swept her hand like a docent at work, here at Versailles, etc.

“If that’s what you want, buttercup, just tell Martin.”

Ida started to roll her eyes but stopped midway. What was the point? She was so accustomed to being palmed off, it was hard to muster the pique. “Can’t you call me Ida?” she said. “Even Ma and Pop call me Ida.”

Esme winced. These were not words she wanted to hear.
Ma and Pop.
Especially in the present tense.

“Okay, honey bun.
Ida.
”

“So when are we going?” Ida said, though she was not saying so much as whining. It was hard to know when the whine got telling of a developmental problem, but Esme was still pretty sure the distended vocals that sang her child’s needs were age appropriate. “There’ll be too many people if you take forever. Get dressed, Mom. Hurry
up.
”

Esme said, “Okay, okay. Should I wear a skort, too?”

“Don’t try to be cute. Just get dressed.”

And like that, and because her extracurriculars were no joke, Ida pivoted on the ball of her foot—she was all grace—and danced down the aisle. At the door, she said, “Can we call Ma and Pop after?”

And Esme, who had gotten no better at lying to her daughter in the three weeks since her parents had died, pretended not to have heard. For all Ida knew, they were still alive and missing her every day.

Esme shook her head. Tried not to see the big picture, though this was like squinting at the drive-in.

Olgo’s phone. Ned’s phone. Bruce’s and Anne-Janet’s. No one was answering, and still no update. From the wings of this mission, a creep of remorse. Surely they would resurface soon, report, and resume their lives at home. And for her trouble, Esme would have delivered a new day in a sequence that seemed to stretch without end back to that first day without her husband. She did not dwell on the years intervening. Or perhaps she just had the worst memory of anyone she knew. Episodes stood out, but mostly she moved forward as the great slab doors shut behind her. And maybe this was for the best. When people got married and trailed behind their car a mobile of cans whose clamor would follow them into their new life—what sort of metaphor was that? Sever the ties. Move on. Forget everything that had ever happened to you the second it was over.

She could not possibly go ice-skating with her daughter today. Too much work, other priorities. Crystal was the answer. Esme buzzed the garage attendant and told him to reroute her to the greenhouse. Poor Crystal. She was Helix, but on the fringe. Her and her thousand-plus friends. What absurdity that a movement for unity had a secessionist fringe. It was true the Helix had started well before the purloined election of 2000, but if ever people were going to feel disenfranchised and furious and wanting to sever from the body that had hitherto united them, it had been in this aftermath and dawn of a new century. And there he’d been, Thurlow Dan, plugging away. Why else would the North Koreans have taken an interest unless on the bent knee of the Helix demographic was a rocket of dissent? Only a man like Thurlow would see in their overture something peaceable and grand. She smiled with the thought, then moved on.

Esme had plucked Crystal out of foster care four years ago. Her thinking then: I am lonely without my own daughter but won’t have to mind a teenager half as much. But then Esme ended up barely minding Crystal at all. And so, for having lived in the mansion and seen so little of Esme, Crystal must have realized that her foster mom—whom she called Godmom because it sounded less tragic—was less keen on her than on having acquired her.

In their time together, Esme had only twice seen Crystal pursue a goal with vigor, the first being multiple attempts to escape this house after she got here, and the other, seditious unrest. Now that she was eighteen, she also went to work. She worked for Bruce’s wife, Rita—no coincidence there.

The attendant said Crystal wanted her car keys. That she would not come to the greenhouse; she was late already. Esme said, “Use the brain God gave you. Withhold the keys!” Crystal got on the intercom. She said, “Esme, I have to
go.
Some of us actually work for a living.”