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Authors: Chris Pavone

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BOOK: The Expats
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And now apparently they’d be discussing nonevents. “I’ve never been to Sarajevo,” she answered.

“Not once?”

“No.”

“But your husband has. Recently.” Evan looked up from his own yellow pad, filled with scribbles and underlines, big X’s and arrows. “Why?”

Nobody wants to admit to being ignorant of a spouse’s comings and goings, habits and proclivities. Kate didn’t want to talk about Dexter’s trips abroad. She couldn’t see how they were at all relevant to her career.

“I don’t know,” she said, trying to sound—trying to be—dismissive.

“Work.”

MAIL STARTED TO arrive; the address change and mail forwarding had kicked in. Kate opened an envelope from the U.S. government, a check to compensate her for unused vacation; she’d need to send this slip of paper back across the ocean to deposit the dollars. The fully executed lease for their D.C. house, finally, which they unfortunately were renting for slightly less than their mortgage payment. Some junk mail: a suburban Virginia health-club pitch, a solicitation for a book club—did book clubs really still exist?

There had still not been any mail from Dexter’s bank, from which she was hoping to learn his employer. But there probably shouldn’t be: he was an independent contractor, not an employee. He had an office address where he’d receive business-to-business correspondence. She was mildly suspicious—who wouldn’t be?—but reminded herself, once again, of her own private clause in their wedding vows: to never investigate her husband.

Because of course she’d investigated Dexter, before they were married. Exhaustively, and more than once. The first time had been right after they’d met, at the Dupont Circle farmers’ market, both reaching across a box of produce from opposite sides. It was a beautiful summer morning, a friendly time of day; both of them were on natural endorphin highs from early-morning exercise—this was back when Dexter was a runner, and Kate biked regularly, a short-lived passion—so they were both uncharacteristically outgoing. They went for coffee at the bookstore up the street, laden with bags of fruits and vegetables, on their way to their apartments, which turned out to be just a few blocks apart. It was a wholesome meeting; almost too wholesome.

Kate wondered if it was a setup. She sat at her computer in the bay window on the top floor of the yellow-brick house, amid the muffled sounds of the newborn crying in the apartment downstairs. She logged onto the secure server and perused the various Dexter Moores of America until she identified the one who interested her. She followed the trail of his Social Security number across one database after another, college and the District’s DMV and the Arkansas Department of Education, his
father’s police record—aggravated assault in Memphis—and his older brother’s military history, killed in Bosnia.

After an hour, she was satisfied: this Dexter Moore was an upstanding citizen. She picked up the telephone and dialed, and asked him to the movies. Later in the week, she’d be leaving town for a month—maybe more—in Guatemala, most of it up north in the jungle.

Two years later she delved even deeper, pulling phone records and bank statements, surreptitiously capturing a full set of fingerprints that she used to check against the CIA’s database. She confirmed again that Dexter was who he claimed to be, perfectly straightforward and undeniably respectable.

She’d already said yes.

That was six years ago. That was when she’d been able to suspend her normal state of disbelief about people, to renew her faith in life’s innocence. A faith she’d lost far earlier, in her teens, with the onset of her family’s string of disasters.

So then she’d believed—she’d wanted to believe, she’d
needed
to believe—that she could put aside her cynicism to marry this man, to lead a semblance of a normal life. After she’d investigated him to her full satisfaction, she promised herself that she’d never do it again.

She realized, even at the time, that this may have been an act of willful ignorance; she may have conspired to deceive herself, all these years.

“Ben,” she said, flagging down her youngest as he ran on his way to emergency-play.

“What?”

“Come here.” She opened her arms, and the boy leaned in, wrapped his wiry arms around her thighs. “I love you,” she said.

“Me too Mommy but I have to go now so bye-bye I love you bye-bye.”

It may have been self-deception. But it was what she’d needed, to get this.

KATE COULDN’T HELP herself. She rifled through the file cabinet, thumbing quickly through credit-card statements and insurance policies and old utility bills. Nothing. Then she took another pass, slower, removing one file at a time from the top drawer, paging through every piece of paper, fanning out the user’s manuals to routers and external drives and a stereo system that she knew for certain had been left behind in Washington.

She poured herself a fresh cup of coffee, and returned to the bottom
drawer, starting at the rear. She came across an old manila file with a creased and torn tab that read
MORTGAGE REFINANCE.
Inside, behind the uniform residential loan application and in front of the verification of assets, she finally found it: a bare-bones contract for services between Dexter Moore and the Continental European Bank.

Kate read through the two pages’ worth of legalese, twice. There was absolutely nothing remarkable.

Briefly, she was angry with Dexter for hiding the contract from her. But of course this is what he would have to do, if he wanted to keep the bank’s identity from her.

So she forgave him. And instead she berated herself for her suspicion, for her snooping. For the things she promised herself she wouldn’t do, the feelings she wouldn’t have.

Then she forgave herself also, and went to school, to pick up the children.

“MY PARENTS,” KATE said, “are both dead. We—my sister and I—buried them in back-to-back years.”

“My God,” Julia said. “Where’s your sister now?”

“Hartford, I think. Maybe New London. We’re not in touch.”

“Big fight?”

“Not exactly,” Kate said. “Emily is a drunk. Usually a junkie too.”

“Yikes.”

“When my parents were ill, there wasn’t a lot of attention to go around. Or for that matter money. My parents were too young for Medicare, and my dad’s plant had closed—an electronics manufacturer—so they both had part-time jobs, inadequate or nonexistent health insurance, when they got sick. They were screwed. It was inhumane, how they were treated.”

“Is that why you’ve moved abroad?”

“No. We’re here for the experience. But I guess I do carry some resentment. Or I don’t know if
resentment
is right. Disappointment? Don’t get me wrong: I love America. But not everything about it. So my sister, she slipped through the cracks of the disaster of our family. She became her own disaster.”

While Emily lost herself in alcohol and drugs, Kate buried herself in a tomb of numbness, unattached and unattachable, a lonely workaholic. She also began to develop one of the roles that would define her adulthood: martyr. The primary caregiver
and
a crucial wage-earner
and
the
person who did the housework. The sacrifices; the suffering. Kate had never realized, until its disappearance, that she’d relished that facet of herself.

“Eventually, I had to give up caring about Emily. She was beyond helping.”

“How do you stop talking to your sister?”

“She was never good about staying in touch. So once both our parents had died, and we weren’t close to any of the extended family, we didn’t
need
to communicate about anything. It was easy for me to simply stop calling her.”

This was not true. Kate had diligently stayed in touch with Emily for years after their parents were dead, all throughout Kate’s college and Emily’s slow descent into destitution. But when Kate joined the Company, maintaining a relationship with Emily became not just a personal trial but a professional handicap. A liability that could be used against her. Kate knew she had to rid herself of the compassion that she’d held on to, needed to strip it away, like ripped and soiled clothing, beyond cleaning or repair, directly into the trash.

She heard from Emily a few times over that first CIA year, messages that went unreturned. Then not again for a half-decade, when Emily needed to be bailed out of jail. But Kate, in El Salvador, couldn’t help. When she returned to the States, she wouldn’t.

“So then Dexter’s family,” Kate continued. “His mother, Louise, is dead, and his father has remarried a dreadful woman. His brother, also, is dead.”

“His brother? How awful.”

“His name was Daniel. He was a lot older than Dexter; he’d been born when Andre and Louise were just children, really. Daniel ended up joining the Marines, in the late eighties. A few years later, he found himself out of the Marines, officially, and in the Balkans, unofficially, as one of those so-called military advisers, who we’ve now renamed private contractors. But same as it ever was, Daniel was a mercenary.”

“Wow.”

“His body was found in an alley in Dubrovnik.”

“My God,” Julia said flatly. She seemed surprisingly unsurprised; or conversely she was so shocked she was stunned into numbness. Kate couldn’t tell which.

“Yes. So anyway”—shifting gears—“that was probably much more of a long-winded answer than you bargained for to the question ‘Do you miss your family?’ ”

AFTER KATE UNBURDENED her family saga, Julia told Kate the story of her meeting Bill. She’d been donating her design services to the silent auction portion of a fund-raiser, trying to kill a whole flock of birds—charity, networking, client-attracting, socializing—with one stone. And Bill was doing what young finance guys habitually did, which was spending excessive amounts of money on trying to attract the right type of woman, aka an unmarried socialite, which was the breed of twenty-something female that tended to populate five-hundred-dollar-a-head cocktail parties that benefited prep-school scholarships for inner-city kids.

Bill assumed that Julia was one such woman. By the time she disabused him of his misconception, three hours later, they were naked. This was a state of affairs that Julia had expedited, because she couldn’t believe her great good fortune at having this incredibly handsome man interested in her.

BOOK: The Expats
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ads

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