The Nearest Exit (12 page)

Milo’s lies (or, generously: omissions) might have been bearable had he confessed them on his own, but he hadn’t. Tina had learned the truth from strangers, and the humiliation had been too much for her.

Therefore, the fault was his, and reconciliation was something he did not deserve. He hadn’t needed a marriage counselor to tell him that.

Yet when, a little after five thirty, he spotted her trotting down those few front steps, phone to her ear, he had to stop himself from rushing forward to kidnap her. That was his Tourist side, demanding what he desired. He followed her around the corner to the car, where she hung up and got behind the wheel. He broke into a jog and appeared at her window. She was starting the engine, not looking at him, so he tapped the glass by her head. She turned and let out an involuntary shout.

Neither moved. The engine rumbled, and she stared at him, her green eyes comically widened in shock, her soft lips separated, one hand over her heart as if pledging allegiance. He wondered if he looked different to her, if the last three months had altered his features. He knew he’d lost weight, and in a rush of vanity he hoped it made him more attractive. He hoped—and the thought later struck him as ludicrous—that the man she saw through her window aroused her desire. The woman he saw aroused his.

She didn’t open the door, just rolled down the window—she wasn’t giving in yet. “Oh, shit.
Milo
.”

“Hey.”

“Well, what,” she said. “You’re in town?”

“Not really. Just a few hours. To see you.” When she didn’t answer, he thought that maybe he was taking too much control, being too forceful, so he added, “If that’s all right with you.”

“Well. Sure.”

“Are you picking up Stef?”

“Mom’s in town—she’s taking care of that.” She paused. “Were you wanting to see her?”

There was nothing he wanted more than to see his daughter, that single spark of Technicolor in his grayscale existence, but he shook his head. “Probably not a good idea. I have to leave again pretty quickly. I don’t want to upset her.”

He hoped she noticed how considerate he was being now. Not like last year when he’d demanded that they disappear with him.

He said, “Look, I don’t want to keep you.”

“Get in.” She pressed a button to unlock the doors. “I can drop you off on the way.”

He ran around to the passenger side before she could change her mind.

In the old days, he always drove. This was her seat, and behind them Stephanie would sit, asking inopportune questions. He realized that he had seldom watched her drive, and was impressed by how smoothly she pulled out of her parallel parking situation. She seemed to be doing just fine without him.

“How’s Little Miss?”

“She’s all right,” Tina began, then shook her head. “Not entirely. She’s been cracking her knuckles.”

“Who’d she pick that up from?”

“She doesn’t even know she’s doing it. It’s a nervous tic.”

Six-year-olds weren’t supposed to have nervous tics, Milo thought as he felt the desire for a pill. “She feels anxiety in the house,” he said.

“Because you’re not there? Maybe. The counselor says it’s common in divorced families.”

“We’re not divorced.”

“Maybe it’s something else. She’s been having nightmares.”

“Oh.”

Tina nodded at the road. “Did you hear about that kid in Germany? Adriana Something? Just another kidnapped girl, but it’s all over the news here. She had a nightmare about it last night. About being kidnapped.”

Milo really wanted that Dexedrine.

“She’ll get over it. Besides, it’s being replaced with Olympic fever,” she said to the road. “They’ve been talking it up at school, learning about the Greeks and Beijing. Stef’s crazy for the javelin throw—it’s really fired her imagination. Dana Pounds is her hero.”

“Dana Pounds?”

“One of our javelin throwers—or whatever you call them. Stef’s anxious about her upcoming trials.” She grinned. “Patrick keeps threatening to take us.”

“To Beijing?” he said, terrified of the image that provoked.

“That’s what he says,” she said, shrugging into a turn, “but you know him. When you’ve got him in front of you, he’ll do anything. Once he’s out the door, he’s really out the door.”

He said nothing at first, because he didn’t want to speak too quickly, too unthinkingly. He reassessed his terror. Though Patrick, Stephanie’s biological father, was hardly an ideal role model, the fact was that Milo couldn’t take her to the Olympics. Patrick was her only chance. And the Chinese themselves? The mole? According to Dzubenko, they knew about Milo Weaver’s family and could easily pick them out of a crowd of thousands, but that didn’t mean they would be in danger. Families were neutral ground in their trade. “I hope he follows through,” he admitted finally. “It’s something she’d never forget. Hell, you’d never forget it. You should call his bluff, let him catch you boning up on Mandarin.”

She laughed. “I just might do that.”

“Yevgeny said he’s come by a few times. Is that right?”

She nodded at the traffic ahead. “I think he does it just to see Stef. He’s nuts about her. Says she reminds him of his daughters. When they were little, at least.”

“And you? You like him?”

“He’s very . . .
European
, isn’t he?”

“I suppose so.”

“And he’s crazy about you. Reminds me of Tom, always making excuses for your shortcomings.”

He scratched at an itch on the back of his head. She seemed to be turning the conversation in a bleak direction. “Does he need to?”

“Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes I get pretty pissed off.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to get into that argument again, okay?”

“Okay.”

“We’ve been through all of it,” she continued, as if she actually did want to get into it again. “I still get angry sometimes, but it’s not because I don’t understand. I get it. You made it clear with Dr. Ray. You’d been living all your life with this secret side, and it never really occurred to you to share it with me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”

“And that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

He didn’t understand, so she explained. “You didn’t make a conscious decision to keep it a secret; the idea of sharing it simply never entered your mind.” She took a breath. “
That
makes it worse. It means that it’s hardwired into you. It’s something that’ll never change.”

“People can change. Remember? Dr. Ray said that, too.”

“Before you suddenly decided to return to the field without even running it by me? Or before she told you that you weren’t taking our sessions seriously enough?”

Suddenly, this transatlantic visit felt like a mistake. It was as if she were looking for reasons to reject him, milking them out of whatever new facts she had discovered. The truth, though, was that Milo still didn’t understand. “You need more time?” he asked.

“Time for what?” She glanced at him. “You’re working in Europe again. If we give the marriage another try, then what kind of marriage are we talking about? I’m still not interested in moving, you know. I like my job. I like the life I’ve got here. Stephanie’s in a great school.”

He rubbed his face. Despite the many times he’d planned and played this conversation in his head, she was irritating him. “Why
do I have to have all the answers? Why can’t we just play it by ear?”

“Because we have a
child
, Milo.”

All the air seemed to leave the car.

She gave him a quick look. “What did you think would happen here? Did you think we’d fall in love all over again and you’d return to your . . . I don’t know. Do you even have a home?”

He didn’t answer. It was out of his hands now.

“Maybe you think we can have some kind of satisfying long distance relationship. But tell me: Could we really depend on you showing up for birthdays and holidays? You’re not working a nine-to-five.” She stopped at a light. “Unless you’re quitting. Is that it?”

“Not yet,” he managed.

Silence followed, and after they’d gotten moving again she spoke more softly. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about things, and one thing I couldn’t understand was myself. Why didn’t I go with you back in July? My husband comes to me, tells me his life is in danger, and the only way we can all stay together is if we leave the country. You made it very clear, Milo. An idiot could have understood.”

He waited.

“I couldn’t understand why my ‘no’ had come so easily. There were plenty of practical reasons, but those weren’t enough. It was my unconscious making the decisions, and my unconscious knew that, even without all the melodrama, there was something wrong in the marriage. Maybe I’d never really trusted you in the first place. Maybe my love had its limits. I don’t know, and I still don’t. All I know is that if we got back together it couldn’t stay the way it was. It would take work. We’d have to work together to figure out what was wrong and then see if we can fix it. Not that one-sided therapy we were doing before, but real, engaged therapy we’re both committed to.”

She knew how to make him feel as if he’d lost control of a debate; all she had to do was use that word of hers, “unconscious.” It made her into the adult, standing alongside Dr. Ray; it made him into the child. And as if he were indeed a child, a swift fantasy took hold, a shallow reasoning: She was confused. She was confusing herself.
Their marriage had gone so well for six years, and now that a few problems had appeared she’d lost faith. Patrick—yes, her ex was obviously deluding her. So Milo would take control. He would get her to pull over and then overpower her. He would move her to a place where he had control, where he would have the time and means to convince her of her bad logic, because that’s all it was—bad logic. It left out love, and any logic that ignored love was flawed from the outset.

Then the fantasy left, as quickly as it had lumbered into his head, and he knew that this had been the problem all along—he’d been thinking like a Tourist. For Tourists, everything is possible; contradictions are minor inconveniences. Tourists, like children, believe the world is theirs. He hadn’t been like this before. The job had infantilized him.

She said, “I asked him. Yevgeny. I asked him if you could just leave your job and come back. Just like you, he said,
Not yet
. He said you needed more time.” She waited for him to dispute that. He didn’t. “Remember what I told you before? When we met, you were a field agent, but if you’d stayed one I wouldn’t have married you. I’m not the kind of wife who can take long absences, or worry that my husband won’t make it home at all. So, you know what I told Yevgeny? I told him that when you quit running around the world, when you finally fall back on the name you were born with, then you should come and see me. Did he tell you that?”

“No,” Milo said.

“Well, he should have. You wouldn’t have wasted a trip.”

She pulled up outside the Franklin Avenue A-train station in Brooklyn, from which he could ride to Howard Beach and take the AirTrain to JFK. For a full minute they sat in that awkward silence of farewell. He sat hating Yevgeny for offering him the unrealistic hope that is the lifeblood of the desperate.

Then, perhaps taking pity, Tina tugged on his sleeve, muttering, “Come here.” She pulled him close and kissed him hard on the mouth. She tasted of chewing gum. Though he knew that it was pity, he would take it in lieu of anything else. They lingered for a moment; then she pulled back. “I mean what I said. You get your life straight, come back home, and I’m willing to give it a try. But
here
, you understand? Not in some other country with fake names. And we
work
on it with Dr. Ray.”

“I understand.”

“I hope you do, mister.”

He grinned. She had offered him a plan. “Give Stef my love.”

“You sure about that?”

“Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. “I’ll give it to her myself when I can stay more than a few hours.”

A brief smile joined them; then Tina jolted. “Oh! Take this.” She popped open the glove compartment and fished out the iPod
he’d given her months before, with headphones and a car-lighter charger.

“No. It’s yours.”

“Please,” she insisted. “I never listen to the damned thing, and a few weeks ago I dropped it. Broke it. Pat got it fixed, but . . . look, all your music got wiped.”

“After Pat touched it?”

“Ha ha. He filled it before giving it back, but I still don’t listen. So, please, take it back. He filled it with seventies crap—you’d like it. Besides, I can’t really imagine you running around the world without it.”

He held it in his hand. “Thanks. I mean it. And don’t give up on the Olympics. The more I think of it, the better the idea sounds. Tell Pat to get those tickets before they sell out.”

“I’ll do that,” she said and let him kiss her again. Once he was standing on the wet sidewalk, she lowered the window. “One last thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Cut out the smoking, will you? You taste like an ashtray.” She winked and raised the window as she drove away.

He boarded a slow train, not worrying about the time. In the cool cloud of his hope—the better hope that she had offered him—he wasn’t in a hurry to do anything. There was always a chance, even for louts like himself. He would catch an outbound flight with his Tourist passport, and even hope that Drummond was keeping watch, and that this unscheduled visit with his wife would provoke his anger, and perhaps lead to a quick dismissal.