Eleven Days (21 page)

Yes
, she would think.
That’s the kind of girl I’m going to grow up to be
. Within a year she’d be pregnant and in love with a man who could never commit and who, moreover, was in no position to support her.

She liked the War Rooms not because she liked war but because she liked stories, and she was always so struck by how an entire government had just, as it were, gone to ground in that time of crisis, arranging dinner parties and strategy sessions several levels below English streets. She loved seeing Churchill’s bedside ashtrays overflowing with his fat cigar ash. Those speeches, so central to a nation’s psyche, were composed largely by a prime minister while in his bed.

She had always planned to take Jason on trips, but then she never felt she could spend the money or take the time. Later, he never wanted her to spend the money, and he never had the time. She hated herself in some ways for the provincial path she had chosen for him. She had believed it would be more honest, but perhaps if she’d raised him somewhere else, they’d be in London right now, touring the Tate, talking about his work in the City, at a bank, with a desk, pushing important papers and assessing vast estate investments, or the price of engagement rings.

Rather, now she is speeding toward a place where she does not speak the language, and while she knows the names of its various political parties and a bit of its history, she possesses no desire to know more. She wishes the place they were heading toward could be Athens, with Jason waiting in jeans and a map of the Acropolis. Why is her son in Jeddah? What was he doing? What did they do to him, and
who are they
? She is not thinking clearly. She is thinking about her grown man as a little boy and praying as any mother would, in a moment like this, that he is all right. She is remembering the story she used to read to him to help him fall asleep at night—because he struggled with sleep—the one he practically begged for night after night, all the way up until he was in junior high and too proud to beg:
Jason and the Argonauts
. Who
was
Jason, and what was the Golden Fleece? Whatever happened to Jason’s select team of highly trained seafaring heroes?

Thinking on it now, the story seems to her more than anything a metaphor for the futility of sending sons out into the world to achieve. Wasn’t Jason sent after the fleece straight into sure slaughter? Yes: Jason was sent to recover the fleece by the king, his uncle, the king who had been told that Jason would overthrow his reign and overtake his kingdom. So the king sent the boy on a mission from which he was certain Jason would never return—an Odyssean voyage in reverse, where each chapter brought new trials in the shapes of women or beasts or angry gods and goddesses. Even in the presence of a team of “heroes,” Jason’s chances were slim. But he embraced them. He was clear that his right to the throne was secure. He had good men. And nothing, not even falling in love or the eventual destruction of that love, would keep him from fulfilling his mission. God, she thinks, it doesn’t sound like a bedtime story.

Sara thinks about the boy, Sam, back at her house, now watching over things. What was it about Sam that had seduced her to trust him so completely and so quickly? She was usually slow to trust, critical of new people—reserved, even in the face of goodness. But with Sam she had felt immediately at ease, and it might have had less to do with his knowledge of her son than it did with what she knew he had been through. It was the eye. It was his casual happiness in spite of the truth of his history: this is what made him so appealing. It will be good to cook with Sam and Jason, she thinks. She will tease her son about the all the loves he has not shared with her. She thinks about his wedding, what she might say that night and what she might wear.

“We’re taking off,” the godfather says. As he slips his cell phone into his breast pocket, she sees he has his shirts monogrammed now.

“I can’t do my seatbelt,” she says, tearing up a bit.

“Jesus, Sara, you don’t have to put on your seatbelt,” he says.

“Help me,” she says. And he knows she’s not talking about the belt. He’ll hold her hand as the plane rises, sharply and abruptly, through the rain.

*

When she was almost five months pregnant, she had visited—for the first time—Arlington National Cemetery. She was back at Georgetown, if halfheartedly, and one of her teachers had given the class the assignment of visiting the Washington monument they were “least interested in,” with the aim of revising their view. An essay was required. The southerners in the class all chose Lincoln, cheekily; the northerners then piled on with plans for Jefferson.
And the foreign students split up the remaining mall icons. Sara was alone in selecting Arlington. Typical. What kind of good American girl wouldn’t possess an interest in the war dead?

The day she went, it was snowing. The climb uphill to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (formerly Robert E. Lee’s plantation, a fact she’d guessed most of the southern schools had skipped in their history books) wasn’t easy, and especially not easy in the snow four months pregnant. But the air wasn’t too cold, and in the late afternoon everything was quiet and still. Pin-dropping still. When she stopped to ask the guide at the information center the best approach to walking the grounds, the guard had said, “If you walk quickly, you’ll make the changing of the guard.” So she had skipped the eternal flame and gone straight to the top of the hill, to the vast marble domed structure with its Corinthian columns and its amphitheater. She had sat, breathless, only to be told to stand for the changing of the guard. The ceremony was introduced. On the tomb it says,
Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God
. The whole thing was as close as Sara had ever come to experiencing a formal religious service. But here, God (the object of worship) was never named. Taps was played.

Sara walked around the back of the building and stared out over the amphitheater. Looking up, she saw the words on the inside edge of the white half-dome:
When we assumed the soldier we did not lay aside the citizen
. General George Washington said that. General Washington was awarded a sixth star, posthumously. General of the Armies Pershing had been given six for his work, so someone felt it necessary to afford Washington the same rank. David had taught her that; he’d pointed it out on showing her Pershing’s portrait at the Pentagon. When Washington crossed
the Delaware, did he dream that one day we’d cross broken-down doorways of private homes to preserve our freedoms?

*

On the plane, finally, she sleeps. When she wakes, Jason’s godfather takes her hand in his. “It will be fine,” he tells her. “You’re such a liar,” she says. The table has bits of mirror inlaid across its top; the mirrored bits form a mosaic, but she cannot tell what the image is. She leans closer, trying to see just how horrible she looks. She rarely looked this closely.

“What are you doing?” He laughs.

“Looking at my hair.”

“Women are so crazy.”

“Well, we’re capable of holding two opposing ideas in our minds at once, without going mad.”

“Someone said that.”

“Yes. It’s a sign of intelligence.”

“What are your two opposing ideas?”

“That my hair is a mess. And that I wish David were here right now.”

“What’s oppositional about that?”

“Hair, self-preservation. David, self-destruction.”

“Ah.”

The godfather stands up, stretches, and goes to talk to the pilot. She can hear murmuring but not what they’re saying. She can hear a phone ring.

When he comes back, he sits beside her. “Remember the monks and the river?”

“The monks?”

“Do you remember the monks and the river—the parable.”

“Remind me?”

“Two monks. An older monk and a younger monk. They meet a woman, weeping at the river. A beautiful woman.”

“Of course.”

“And the beautiful woman asks them for help crossing to the other side. And so the elder monk, without hesitation, takes her on his back and swims across. And the woman goes on her way, and the monks go on their way.”

“But the younger monk is angry,” Sara says.

“You remember.”

“The younger monk is angry.”

“And so the elder monk says, after some time has passed, ‘Why are you so angry?’ ”

“And the younger monk says, ‘Because it is a sin to touch a woman, and you carried that woman on your back across the river, and that is a sin.’ ”

“And the older monk says—”

“ ‘But my son, you’ve been carrying her around ever since.’ ”

“Correct.”

“And I’m carrying David.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Well, I’m not a monk.”

“Excellent point.”

Out the window, she can see nothing but white. She wonders whether this plane has a hatch that could open, out of which she could parachute in case of emergency.

“Did he ever talk to you about what he did in the war?” She’s giving him a look that says,
No more parables, please
.

“What war?”

“Vietnam.”

“Right. I always forget about that one.”

“Well, he was there.” Sara is picking at her nails, an old habit her son has since inherited. “I know,” she says, “I know he was—wasn’t he doing something for the
Times
?” She says this carefully, without raising her eyes, as if she doesn’t really care about the answer, as if she knows nothing more specific.

“Technically, he was there to try and write a story about MAC-V-SOG.”

“Technically. Mack the what?”

“MAC-V-SOG. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Studies and Observations Group.”

“The Agency is so artful with words.”

“Yeah, well. The SOG were a black-ops group. Overseen by CIA, yes, but they worked with a lot of the guys over there in that time—Rangers, Team guys.”

“Team guys?”

“Yes.”

“What did they do?”

“They … they cleaned things up.”

“Cleaned?”

“Cleaned. Examined. Interrogated. The blast-out area from one B-52 bomber stretched two blocks by a mile.
Two blocks by a mile
. David taught me that.”

“And the SOG teams excavated the—?”

“The damage.”

“Cleaned, examined, interrogated. Killed?”

“They were soldiers, Sara.”

“And David?”

“And David knew a guy—one of his close friends then—was a SOG Team one-zero. They called the Team leaders one-zeros. The guy had been at Yale with him, I think. I’m sure. Well, I think David said he was actually kicked out of Yale—”

“
Technically
.”

“Right,
technically
. But then he ended up over there, in the jungle, in this group. ‘In country,’ as the guys said. That was how David learned about SOG. That was how he was let in a little bit by those guys.”

“A guy got kicked out of Yale and went to run a black-ops group in the jungle?”

“Yeah, guess he preferred Fort Benning to Branford.”

“The snows of yesteryear.” And the godfather doesn’t say anything, so she prompts him, trying another tack. “So he knew some of the guys in the Teams at that time?”

“Yeah. And you know, that was sort of the birth of the modern-day Teams. It all started in Vietnam.”

“Right.” She remembers the letters.

“SOG recon casualties exceeded one hundred percent.”

“That sounds like a lot.”

“It’s the highest sustained U.S. loss rate since the Civil War. Casualty, and loss.”

“Wow.”

“And David, you know—he
hated
something that looked illogical.”

“He hated mess,” Sara corrects him.

“He hated the fact that what he saw over there contradicted what he thought he knew. He hated that we were sending ‘the best and brightest’ not into the Oval Office but into the jungles, to die. He worshipped those guys—the guys he knew then.”

“He never talked to me about any of that.”

And the godfather leans forward. “And he worshipped you, too.”

“He worshipped a sense of his own place in the world. When I fit into that, I absorbed some of the goodwill.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

When the plane hits turbulence, the pilot comes on the audio and assures them, “Just some light rain, folks. Nothing to worry about.”

“Excuse me,” Sara says, summoning the stewardess, “is there a shower on this plane?”

“Yes, ma’am, there is.” And Sara is shown to the shower, and she puts the water on as hot as she can stand it, and stays there for as long as she can bear. She changes back into her clothes, brushes her teeth—and her hair. She puts her makeup on. When she dims the lights, she thinks she does not look so horrible. She checks the time. Her hair will dry in time for landing. When she gets back to where the godfather is sitting, she takes a deep breath.

“All better now?” he says.

“Yes. Now tell me more about the Mac … trucks. Or whatever. Tell me.”

He tells her about David’s brief time as one of the “whiz kids” at the Pentagon, and he gives her a little history of the cultural changes that took place in the intelligence field between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, cultural changes that didn’t brook acceptance—or advancement—of the same types of people as in another era. These changes ultimately led to David’s needing to leave. He talked about how the “puzzle pieces” in the Middle East shifted, too, and how the places no one wanted to go then became the places David was increasingly interested in. As the Soviets moved out of Afghanistan and as the United States lost—it thought—the necessity of a strategic presence in that part of the world, David saw how our relationships with the Saudis and the Pakistanis would be newly crucial. He wanted to learn about those cultures. He wanted to learn
from
them. The politics
in D.C. became too torturous for him to stay; he knew he lacked the unsullied CV to be in line for DCI (“that’s DNI now”) and lacked the intellectual or cash assets to become a kingmaker, an ambassador, or a businessman.