Marta shrugged. “Not exactly.”
David ignored this. “The first thing you need to know is that David is still taking care of you. David will always take care of you. Trust me. OK?”
Her forehead prickled with heat, and she reached into the open mouth of her purse to tweeze the edge of the plastic bag she’d brought. If she threw up, she’d blame the nerves. But don’t throw up, she told herself.
“OK?” he repeated.
She nodded, closing her eyes against another wave of nausea.
“The second thing I want you to know, or think about, is this: I want you to see what you’re doing, what I’m asking of you, as something other than an exile. Don’t even see it as hiding out. It’s a mission. It’s a job you’re doing to help out your husband, for your sons’ sakes, and the implications of it could be huge for us.”
Marta licked her dry lips and swallowed. “OK,” she said.
“Now you’re just trying to placate me.” His light tone belied a strain of impatience. “I want you to really hear what I’m saying. This trip gets you out of town at a delicate time, and that’s good. But it also means that you can do an important job for me. I want you to watch Wes Feingold. I want you to come back and tell me what you think of him. His interests, his weaknesses. Whatever you can find out.”
She could have laughed. “You seem to think I have special skills,” she said. “First I’m some kind of great outdoorswoman, and now I’m a spy.”
“Well, you’re being silly now. Because you’re angry. And I understand that.” He was being nice. Studiously so. Marta had a sense, after almost thirty years, of how far she could push David without blowback, and she knew he wouldn’t want to start a fight with her now. Because he was so close to unloading her. Because he wanted something from her. “But you do have skills. You’re a warm person. People want to talk to you. Why do you think I bring you to all of these business dinners?”
“Because I’m your wife?”
David laughed. “Well, that’s no requirement. These guys bring girlfriends half the time, leave the wife at home.”
Marta saw the threat as well as the flattery in what he said. “You could bring Helle.”
“You think Helle’s my girlfriend?”
Marta shrugged again. They had left the city now, were rolling past the first ring of housing complexes—old subdivisions, with names like the Estates at Mercy Glade and Timber Ridge Homes, now chopped into multitenant units—that extended west of Greensboro until petering out about a hundred kilometers from the border. Any closer, and the vibrations off the Wall would rattle your dental fillings. Or so Marta had heard. She’d never experienced this herself, had never driven even this far west of the city, but she supposed she soon would.
“Helle has many gifts, but I wouldn’t count being warm and disarming among them. Also, she isn’t my girlfriend.”
“What a relief,” Marta said flatly.
He was silent, and she sneaked a glance his way. He’d set the tablet on his lap and was now giving her his full attention.
“You’re a smart woman, Marta. What is it you think I’ve been doing this year? What do you think has been happening?”
Marta pulled her hand from her purse, from the plastic bag she’d been tweezing, and picked at a nail. “You’ve set your sights on something. Something political.”
“Not just something. Everything.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t do things halfway,” David said. “David Perrone goes all in.”
A moment passed between them, one of those awkward moments where Marta thought and discarded as absurd the obvious thing, president, and then tried to think of what else might be “everything,” and as she did this mental work, and registered the expression on her husband’s face—this man she’d taken almost thirty years to unknow—she saw, finally, that president was it.
“But . . . why?”
“Because I want it,” David said. Then, almost as an afterthought: “I’d be good at it.”
“What do you even believe in?” Marta asked.
This question seemed to catch him off guard. He went back to his tablet, punched in a message with his thumbs, stabbed Send. “This would be good for us,” he said, still typing on his tablet. “For Sal and Enzo. I want them to inherit a legacy. Not just an estate. This is going to be it.”
Marta shook her head in wonder. President?
“So stick close to this Feingold kid. Be his friend. Be his mommy. Come back with something I can use, OK?”
—
It had been years since Marta had gone on a long drive, her childhood since she’d been on a bus, and she had forgotten the way it felt to be more than a few rows from the front seat, the gentle, almost imperceptible rocking of the cab, the bouncing of the shocks each time the bus topped even a gentle rise in the road. Then the vibration off the Wall, and the smell of the landfill, and the steady stream of chatter from Wes, who was a dear—really, she was happy to listen to his sorrows, David’s directive notwithstanding; flattered that he felt he could share them with her—but who was oblivious to her mounting nausea, so that Marta was almost grateful when that pop singer shamed him into silence with his silly song. The moment she was standing on solid ground again, she promised herself, she’d do better. But on the bus, sweat pricking at her temples and in the well of her clavicle, a finger of pain pressed into her sinuses, she wanted only silence.
So when the bus finally did pull into the parking lot outside the old restaurant, she told Wes to go on in without her—she’d follow when she had a moment to gather herself—bypassed Andy and Tia and their offerings of food and drink, and retreated behind the cover of the bus, where the newly laid blacktop stopped and the lawn (mown sometime in the not so distant past) began. Alone, finally, she started heaving, vomiting only water, then nothing, and then she sat back on her bottom, in the grass, and wiped her face with the sleeve of her microsuit, catching her breath.
A few minutes later, Wes found her. “Marta? You OK?”
She had rested her crossed arms on top of her knees, and her forehead against her forearms, and so she nodded down into the dark well her body had created. The gentle pressure of Wes’s palm resting on the crown of her head was soothing. “Just carsick,” she said. “I’m not off to a strong start, am I?”
“You need to rest and get something in your stomach,” Wes said gently. “I’m surprised I’m not down there yakking with you. I’m a yakker, if you haven’t noticed.”
She remembered, lips twitching into a small smile, his race out of the gymnasium that first day of their training. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t be wallowing down here on the ground.” She looked up and offered Wes her hand. “Give me a lift?”
He pulled her to a stand, and they walked together back to the open expanse of the parking lot. “I know that Andy had some bottled waters along with the juice. Do you want one?”
“Sure,” Marta said.