Woke Up Lonely (32 page)

The light from Ida’s entertainment console was enough to write by, but it still
felt
dark. Like flying at night when yours is the only light in the cabin, everyone else asleep, snoring. It was, Esme thought, a shit way to be.

“Hey, Jack,” she said. She could see his eyes in the rearview, and they were closing. “Hey, Jack!” She poked him in the shoulder.

“It’s Noah,” he said.
“Nouh.”

“Sleeping Beauty’s more like it. Let me drive.”

“And stuff me in the trunk. Sounds like a plan.”

“We’ve gone ten miles in the last hour. Who can fall asleep like this?”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m Sneezy, how do.”

Their eyes met in the rearview. He was not amused, but at least he was awake. And talking. In almost any situation, talking is like doing squats in your tight jeans—it gives you room to breathe.

“So,” she said, and by now she had made use of the swivel part of her swivel chair. She was faced forward and square with the tension of this drive—the snow, the wind. She said, “How’d you end up with this job, anyway? You work for Jim?”

“Thurlow Dan is a terrorist,” he said. “A sociopath. And for once being married to you, this taints you. And your kid. So just go back to her and stop talking to me.”

Esme U-turned quick, but it was okay: Ida was passed out, lips parted and chapped because she was congested. Esme could hear laughter—the audio had been leaking from Ida’s headphones all night—which meant Ida couldn’t know what had been said outside the soap in her ears. Esme was about to turn off the TV, except perhaps this was the noise Ida needed to sleep, and in no galaxy did she want to wake her up. Who knew what that shitbird up front would say next.

The snow had picked up. Noah had his face near pressed to the windshield. Wiping the view with his hand, as though the frost were what stood between him and Mexico. They fishtailed once. Twice. Three times a heyday, only what happened here was Ida waking up green. Esme could actually see the green overrun her cheeks as she said, “My stomach hurts.” What could Esme do? She tossed her the bucket. It thumped her chest.

“Pull over!” Esme said, and it was done. He killed the engine, and what was left was a gale that rocked their luxury caravan and a child who was retching and crying into the pail. Esme unlocked her seatbelt and made for Ida’s chair. Tried to rub her neck and pull back her hair, and also to hear what she was saying besides “I want to go home,” because Esme could hear a word mewled among the rest, and this word was not
home
or even
Mom
but more beat-up, like a worry stone or blankie, the thing you’ve handled, clutched, cuddled so much it’s barely what it was, except—for you—it is that much more.

Every two seconds, a big rig rolled by with almost zero clearance. But if it was frightful outside, it was worse in the car.

Esme said, “Soon, buttercup, we’ll be going home really soon.” And when this seemed to make Ida cry worse, and when Esme could not produce tissues and instead offered up her sleeve, which was already drizzled in tears, she said, “Honey bun, what can I do? Just say the word.”

They were long past the upflue of pie, which meant this retching wasn’t about a biological intolerance to cars so much as the expulsion of childhood from her daughter’s life. How could you stay a child through this? Esme could barely watch. Heave, retch, weep. Face obliterated in afterdamp. “Anything you want,” she said. “Just tell me.”

“I want your phone”—and when it seemed like Esme was game for this, the crying rolled back, sobs were snuffles. Esme ransacked her bag and pockets.

Ida dialed fast and crammed the phone to her ear as though they were at the rodeo but she must be heard. Esme did not think who she was calling in the middle of the night; she was too spent with release from the dread that her daughter would cry this way for life.

It was ringing—no one was home—but as Esme reached for the phone, voicemail picked up and she heard her mother’s voice, and in this voice Esme apprehended the word Ida had been mumbling throughout. She’d been asking for her ma. Not Esme Ma, but Linda Ma.

If Esme had seen her green, no doubt Ida could see her blanch. She had forgotten to disconnect her parents’ phone? This should have come as no surprise, since she had not done anything apropos of their death except to mourn, and she had barely done that.

She did not listen to Ida’s message, but when Ida was done, she clammed the phone shut. “I keep calling,” Ida said. “Maybe their voicemail’s broken?”

“Try to get some sleep, tulip. I know this doesn’t seem like much of a vacation, but just you wait, tomorrow is going to be fun. You’ll see.”

“Will you spend the day with me?”

Esme looked out the window. The snow was piling up around the car. They would be iglooed in an hour. Her guess? Noah’s attempt to get her to the site was so low-fi, there couldn’t be anyone else besides Jim calling the shots. If this had been on a bigger dime, someone would have pulled in for rescue and transport. A better car. A motorcade.

“Let’s talk in the morning,” she said. “We’re going to be here for a while, and Mommy has some work to do.”

Ida settled in. If her body had taken over the rendering of grief in her life, it was too tired to play on. Esme watched her close her eyes, then looked at the index cards she had written so far. Her story was almost done.

39. Lo, this is getting impossible. Our daughter scares me. What have we done to her? I guess I just didn’t try very hard when I had the chance. Sure, we left New Paltz, but to understand what happened next, you’ll need some sense drummed into you. For one, let’s be frank: No way were we going to recruit defector POWs in North Korea. Too risky, too hard, too cruel. If our guys out there wanted to come home, we wouldn’t be able to help; if they wanted to stay, we wouldn’t be able to flip them without exerting pressure of the kind no one’s proud of later. I knew this—I think we all knew this—which is why they took me off Yul the second a more interesting, albeit improbable, contact came along. A guy—let’s call him J.T.—who owned a cake shop in Queens. He was a baker, once ran with the mob. He wore a Brylcreem pompadour that hadn’t moved in twelve years, and was connected to the feds, who leaned on him for news every now and then. But he wanted more out of life. He had issues, among them the sense that no one cared enough about U.S. POWs. And so, North Korea, which probably had some explaining to do re: our guys MIA from the war. Unlikely as it sounds, this baker had already made nice with the Vietnamese U.N. mission—he’d gotten them hooked on shortcake—so they facilitated contact, and soon enough, North Korea’s ambassador to the U.N. was eating red velvet cream pies at J.T.’s place.

40. Not long after, I started going there, too. And you know how it is when you’re a new mom and your husband’s sleeping with other women and you feel fat because you are fat, and unwanted because you are unwanted, and all the love that child and husband have taken from your vault is so accessorized with hurt, it barely looks like love—you know how that constellates into adulterous behavior of your own? So, yes, one second you are eating vanilla sponge cake with lychee buttercream, and the next you are panty-ankled on the stove top. So, yes, I went to Corona. I met J.T. I went once, twice, many times after that. And it wasn’t like you noticed, because how much were you home?

41. The bakery was by Shea Stadium, where it’s all chop shops and drug fronts. It had stone-wall siding and a shingled mansard roof. A cupcake weather vane and a big old American flag twenty feet up. Inside were framed photos of J.T. with Important Asians and with the relief pitching rotation for the Mets. He had been to North Korea with various businessmen. When he got there, they’d loaded him in the rear with sodium pentothal. Years later, when I heard tell of your plans to go—I intercepted an email Isolde sent her mom:
Look, Mom, one woman’s cult is another’s Fulbright
—I knew they’d do the same to you if not worse.

42. You might be wondering what the Baker has to do with anything. I’ll tell you. In 1996, when a submarine ran aground at Kangnung and released almost thirty North Korean commandos whose mission might be to terrorize Seoul; when the North needed to apologize for the incident because they had been busted, though they absolutely did no want to apologize; when the Agreed Framework between the North and the U.S. to denuclearize this most volatile and strange state was under threat; the navigating of these parlous waters somehow fell to J.T., who let it be known that the North might possibly have seven American POWs they might possibly be willing to send home, provided everyone forgot about the sub/commando incident. Seven POWs? Three of whom might be my soldiers?

Not surprisingly, then, I got a call: Go heavy with the Baker. At the time, Ida was just learning to talk. Though it wasn’t like she was saying either one of our names. Her first word was
Lou,
for the stuffed alligator she slept with. So the call could not have come at a better time; it gave me the chance to dwell on less hurtful things. We moved into the back room of J.T.’s shop. He knew I was Agency, but he didn’t much care. He went about his life. He would sit with the ambassador, the minister, and company, and since the banquette was bugged, I’d nurse Ida and listen in, and listen harder when they spoke Korean, which they often did, since the guys liked to keep J.T. insecure about how well he was trusted. I ate a lot of pie. And because J.T. didn’t really want us there—he was already seeing a woman in the kitchen who would strafe my arms with hot lard and go,
Oops!
—he put me on dish duty seven days a week. The composition of this food began to resolve in my veins. I had trouble waking up, I was tired all the time, and, for the way my breast milk started to taste, Ida deprived me of my one calorie-cutting exercise. She started to throw up my milk and then to refuse it altogether.

43. I did not have a new place to live, but only because I wasn’t ready to look. I’d have to start over. Send Ida to safety. Recommit to my work and stay away from you. If I went back, I’d have told you everything and put us all at risk. And I was done hurting. Enough.

But I was also running out of time. Ida was cranky or teething or maybe she just had heartburn. Whichever the case, she wailed with a frequency that, in the abstract, was admirable for its allegiance to habit but that began to annoy the Koreans, not to mention the other customers. The State Department had given the Korean mission a twenty-five-mile leash in any direction from Columbus Circle, but there were plenty of other bakeries to patronize, and also, my time there was not proving effective. The guys talked about hunting and baseball and sometimes about how to win respect from the West via the pluming of their nuclear capacity, but even this was more like jock talk than actionable intelligence. They never mentioned MIAs. They never mentioned my soldiers. So I had to produce something fast, which was when I came on the idea of posing as an orthopedic physician for the Mets and going with J.T. to North Korea. He’d already befriended the team’s pitching coach and once taken him to the North as a companion and wingman. He’d already taken the Koreans to many games, and to the dugout for autographs. The plan was feasible. A little crazy, but feasible. And anyway, I wanted out of that shit-hole kitchen. I wanted my passions released. I wanted to reclaim the protected intimacy of being thrust into a target’s life on the sly and for a limited time, and I wanted to escape the fear born of love for you and Ida—the fear that there were feelings in this world that could undo your resolve to live isolated from the trauma and wreckage that come in train of relations with other people.

44. Sure, my parents were not so keen to divorce their identities, but only on principle. And yes, they were not so keen to take Ida, but only in practice. In the end, something of their ideals and de facto needs got answered in the assumption of a new life in North Carolina.

As for me, I hired Martin. We worked up the face of a doctor any shortstop would trust. I studied tensegrity, contractile structures, capsular and noncapsular patterns of motion. The rig was up in a month; passable intelligence on the stuff of orthopedics took two, and so at the end of 1997, I took my first plunge into the most isolated, radically autonomous, and lonely community of millions on earth.

I never managed to get in touch with the defected soldiers. But I did make contacts on the inside and was able to pass on information about North Korea’s weapons program that seemed credible. I was doing my job and doing it well except that my life continued to feel elsewhere. It
was
elsewhere, since even as I was working North Korea, I never stopped working you.

So naturally when Jim got wind of your rapport with the North, it made all the sense in the world to give the job to me. And when you went ahead and accepted their money—
are you insane?
—I said I’d help shut you down. So long as the government came to me, I could protect you. So now you know: all along, I’ve been protecting you.

They were racing down the highway. Civilian traffic had been diverted and their jeep absorbed into a caravan of the policing authority. Ida had posed no questions about what was going on and did not appear in the least riled by the sirens or fanfare, but this did not mean she wouldn’t be soon enough. Esme, who had been working on what to tell her about Thurlow for ten minutes plus ten years, made a joke about them knowing how to make an entrance, and when this got no response, she said, “Ladies and gents, please welcome to Cincinnati the lovely, the talented, Ms. Ida Haas!” She ventured the play din of a crowd.

Ida said, “Stop it.” And, “No wonder Dad left you.”

Esme did not move; she was lock-eyed with the mongrel of feeling that had reared up in the car. The outrage (Thurlow left
her?
), the relief of seeing Ida blame Esme and not herself, the wilderness of her child’s mind (What else does she think she knows?), and then just the dread of having to set her straight. Because if they were going to get a moment together, all three of them, Esme wanted Ida to know enough to try to keep it with her for life.