Woke Up Lonely A Novel

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 f*ck, 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 f*cking 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. “F*ck,” 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.”

They sparred, Esme won, Crystal showed up in sweatpants and shirt. Sympathy clothes for Rita. She was chewing a straw; no drink.

“Your kid’s pissed off,” Crystal said. “I just saw her rip her skirt to shit.”

“Skort.”

“So you want to talk to her or something?”

“Actually, that’s why I called you in here. And she has a name by the way. It’s Ida.”

“Oh boy,” Crystal said, the straw flying into the larkspur and she settling into a chair. “Let me guess.”

“Please,” Esme said. “Something urgent has come up. It’ll just be a couple hours at the rink.”

“Have I mentioned she shredded her clothes?”

“How about I pay you?”

“Urgent like your nail broke, or like your colorist had to reschedule? Ugh, fine. For three hundred dollars, I will skate to Tibet and back.”

“Sold. But try to be nice. You’re her sister, you know.”

“Oh, please. That didn’t even work when I was fourteen.”

“Just be nice, okay?”

“Whatever”—and she extended her palm, knowing Esme had a roll of cash in her bathrobe pocket. Esme was, to her, a woman of leisure whose conduct sustained a notion that rich women were weird, rich women had money on them, rich women spent their days in such boredom, no one thought to ask and so no one ever knew.

Laptop open. So many windows, so many views, but Esme knew where the action was at. Ida, in her bathroom, spread-legged, with the contents of her Spa Science kit arrayed on the tile. Scented oils, a couple of pipettes, sea salt, test tubes, glycerin bar. The walls were tickered with strips of fabric that had been the skorts. Just now, she had oats in the coffee grinder and a yogurt-honey blend she’d mix and apply to her face with a tongue depressor. Esme liked that she was interested in science, or girl stuff that masqueraded as science, because it meant something of Esme’s father was alive in her, not to mention something of Esme, though she tried not to think about that part.

Crystal’s head popped into the bathroom, and when it seemed she was not getting thrown out, she made for the lip of the tub, which was more sill than lip, and more seat than sill, this being a water closet of excess, 15×20×10, if ceiling height mattered, which it did, come time to feel yourself dwarfed by the expression of money your parents had lavished on you.

Esme muted the volume on her computer because what she imagined they were saying was probably worse than how it went, and this was the punishment she deserved. Funny Bruce had mentioned Sunset Boulevard; it’s what came to mind now, Norma Desmond saying, “We didn’t need dialogue; we had faces.” It’s what Thurlow used to say on days they spent staring at their newborn. Ida on that play mat with the arches overhead, groping for toys, gumming the fur, and them on either side, on their stomachs, watching the world dilate in her eyes. Esme did not get to see this reaction much anymore, though she couldn’t know if it was because novelty no longer solicited at her child’s door or because, when it did, she just wasn’t there.

Ida retrieved rose petals from a dish of oil, and the only way Esme knew Crystal had broken the news Mom wasn’t skating was from a pause in Ida’s chemistry, just time enough for the love in her heart to freeze over.

Crystal appeared to laugh, and because this was not in the script, Esme upped the volume and heard her say, “I know, totally, and in those gross slippers, too. Just be glad you get to go with me instead,” and Ida saying, “I dunno, I kinda like those slippers,” so that Esme closed her computer, brought a hand across her mouth, and tasted the bile that had come up her throat because, despite all, her child continued to reenlist in the collapse of her hopes. Her child still loved, still loved her mom. And this, it turned out, was worse than being unloved, because with love comes expectation.

Practice: Ida, honey, there are things you should know. Your grandparents are dead? The people who raised you, who are the only real family you’ve ever known, died in a car accident? I probably won’t make any of your important events at school this year and might even miss your end-of-term play? Also, of some relevance, your father is wanted by the FBI for trucking in ideas that are anathema to the right wing’s divide-and-conquer brand of governance? Not to mention for consorting with enemy nations? Esme’s heart slammed against her rib cage, and it was like the bones would snap and jut from her chest, because these thoughts were not apropos of nothing. They were apropos of Jim, who was on the phone, yelling the news: “F*cking shit, Esme. Thurlow took them hostage.”

Breathe. Think. Relax. Permit dread of what you have done to paralyze you for ten minutes; then let this paralysis sell indulgences like the Pope. Do not rue your choices. No one could have predicted they’d amount to this. You are an eavesdropper, not a fortune-teller; you can make sense only of what people say, and when did Thurlow say he was going to do this? And how self-destructive can a person be? She felt so defeated. All that effort to protect him in North Korea. The risks she’d taken. And for what? He was in worse trouble now than before.

She held the phone tight. She said, “How long and what are his demands?”

“I don’t know. But I want you where I can see you. Be at the hotel in ten. F*cking shit, Esme. Be here in ten.”

A siege in Cincinnati. This would not end well. No major standoff since Fort Sumter could offer reassuring precedent. And Sumter hadn’t gone that well, either. The kids who had died at Beslan? The fatal vapor that blew through the draw at Nord-Ost? At best, the siege gone wrong provided empirical data. The stuff people were too stupid to figure out in a controlled environment. From Waco and Ruby Ridge: rubber bullets can kill; tear gas is flammable; when your rules of engagement permit deadly force, regardless of who’s in danger, people are going to die. Good lessons, but ones unlikely to preempt every fiasco brinked on a sniper’s mood or the Special Agent in Charge’s bow to pressure to get this thing resolved yesterday. In the crosshairs of a reticle, for a guy who had slept five hours in the last forty, and these in a bivouac tent pummeled by the snows of Cincinnati—for this sniper, whose thermal underwear was frozen with the drench of his labors, Thurlow Dan was a stag trophy and his ticket home.

At last, a legitimate reason to go to Cincinnati. Get dressed, get dressed! She had an emergency bag, of course. Jeans, sneakers, and BDU, which covered most of the bases in a pinch except when you wanted to look presentable, and God forbid a fractal pattern in olive should complement her skin tone. At least, she wanted to look better than her contact on the inside. She had never seen Vicki, but she certainly knew what this Vicki sounded like; she sounded like a donkeywhoreface in whore heels and thong. The microphone up her molars was highly sensitive. GSM technology, an itty-bitty mic plus logic board concealed in the same square of plastic a dentist uses for X-rays. Actually, it was smaller. She could keep it flush against her cheek, so that when it called Esme’s phone—the apparatus was programmed to activate in the presence of what it thought were voices—it was often at a moment of climax, when this braying donkeywhoreface finished her work on Thurlow. Esme was supposed to compete with that? She could have, in her day.

She would need pants—a dress was absurd—maybe leather, but nothing standout. If she drove, she could be there in nine hours. She could jump on a plane, but there were only so many ways out of an airport, and she wanted to keep her options open. It was possible that too much info would leak before she got there, in which case she would be more white whale than white horse come time to figure out who could resolve this mess. If every U.S. marshal was after her, it was easier to get lost on the ground. Of course, there was always military transport, but then, those trips tended to make her sick. Commercial airliners got the quiet corridors, but for military flight, it was the vomit air from takeoff till landing. Her last trip in a C-17 was her and eight men in ghillie suits, which were, in terms of odor, bear shit in the mouth of summer, fungal feet, afterbirth. So, okay, no C-17, just Esme and the Hummer and fifty plates for fifty states.

Jim paced the room. He said, “Why hasn’t the whore checked in, either?”

Esme did not know. Perhaps it was because Vicki was a whore with a whorehead for brains, though she kept this explanation to herself.

They were in their hotel; they had been here before.

Esme stared out the window. She could see, well in the distance, the Capitol Columns—their hats, anyway—which stood out among the gibbets of winter trees in the Arboretum.

Make a plan, revise a plan—this was a gauge of fluency under fire. Reassess for best outcome under amended conditions. She knew the drill, but Jim did not. “F*ck, f*ck, f*ck,” he said. Palms braced on the window, head dribbling against the glass. She let the sequence loop, then said, “Look, just let me get to the house. I will talk him down, and everything will be fine. Don’t you realize what’s happened here? You’ve got a federal case dumped in your lap. Open and shut.” She said this with brio, and for a second she saw Jim thrill to the prospect: Thurlow Dan, in jail, for life.

He flumped in an armchair upholstered in red-and-white gingham and kicked out his legs. He had on a suit, twilight blue, and a red silk tie.

“Don’t you see?” she said, and got on her knees, between his legs. “I just did you a big favor. We couldn’t prove North Korea. We haven’t turned up anything on weaponry or funding for it. So probably I just saved your job.”

Gears turning. “You must be kidding. You planned for this? You are insane. One, my father-in-law. Two, even if we do nail Dan for kidnapping, how are we supposed to explain having sent in these four morons to begin with? I don’t think sacrificial lamb is going to make us any new friends.”

“Just let me get to Cincinnati,” she said. “Once they’re free, no one will give a shit who they are or what they were doing there. Who even knows about ARDOR? Just call in some favors.”

He flapped his legs, clamped them round her ribs. He said, “No one’s heard from that a*shole yet, just his fat-f*ck number two.”

“Thurlow hasn’t asked for anything?”

“Nope. Maybe he’s done us all a favor and shot his brains out.”

Esme looked at the carpet. There was a limit to what equanimity she could impose on her features in the presence of talk like this.

He palmed her face like bookends. They were eye to eye. “This was all your doing,” he said. “You got no encouragement from me. I came to you for counsel, given your history, but I never sanctioned this operation. You understand? If you do right on this, I know you’ve got a kid who’s going to need some help down the road. I got a daughter, too, remember? I know how it is.” His legs vised tight so that breath became a priority for her. But the message came through: if she betrayed him, the harm would go to Ida.

She ran her hands up his quads and at his groin. It didn’t take a second; he unzipped and folded his arms behind his head.

“I understand,” she said. “But I can talk Thurlow out. And you’ll be a hero.”

There was no action there, so she had to work hard. He said, “You won’t even get close. Lockdown. Half the ops are probably in his bathtub already.” But then his body perked up, and with it his mood. He laughed and said, “Jim Bach, national hero,” which enlisted the perk for darker pleasures. He flanked her neck with his thumbs and dug in.

She had travel Kleenex in her hand already; the job was clean and then it was done. She expected to be in Cincinnati by the end of the day.

But Jim had other ideas. He picked up a glass cigar rest from the table and brought it down on her head. When it was clear she was still breathing, he dragged her to the bathroom and locked her in.