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Sam tipped his head to the side, his eyes curious behind those round glasses. He sat with a zen kind of stillness, but with an edge now. “There are many things I do not know, things I have wondered about you but was not free to ask.”
“Such as?”
“What led you to this line of work?”
It had been so long since she made the decision, sometimes she couldn’t remember either. She toyed with a bead bracelet Khaali had made in art class and given to her as a gift. “How does anyone land a job? You pursue what you want to do with your life.”
“You just walked up to the CIA and asked to be an operative?”
Memories started flooding back. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about these things in so long. In the beginning, it had been a matter of survival. Eventually, it had become habit.
“Freelancer. Off the books.” At first, but once she’d gotten a taste, she wanted in deeper, envisioned herself changing the world. “I was already active in the area. The aide work was real, not a cover, not in the beginning. After my husband and I graduated from college, we joined the Peace Corps. When our oldest son was born, we tried to keep up the lifestyle, the work. And we managed pretty well even through the birth of our second child—both were born here in Africa.”
Her heart ached with memories—the visions of their infant faces, the smell of baby shampoo, the feel of a tiny cheek resting against her chest. She’d tried so hard to be a good mother in spite of feeling ripped in two by a call to action against injustice.
“We had only been back in the States for a few months when the CIA approached us, just a short-term freelancing assignment. My parents helped with the children. And God, we enjoyed it, the adrenaline rush of making a difference in what felt like an even bigger way.” Although in the end she’d felt like such a fool for not realizing the mammoth gift of a sticky hug from her child. She’d learned too late to appreciate what she’d lost.
“What changed?” he asked, even though he had to know from her file.
Still, it felt good to talk about the past, not to guard every word out of her mouth. “We found out I was pregnant again. My husband said he wasn’t into the whole ‘Kumbaya’ lifestyle anymore. He wanted a regular roof over our heads and meals at a family table.”
“So you relocated back to the States permanently.”
“We did. I went back to work in the classroom, had another child, our only girl. And I tried, I really tried to tell myself I could wait until the children grew up to help over here…”
An air crewman walked by on his way to the back and she paused until he passed.
“Until one day,” she continued, “during a parent-teacher conference, I was talking to a student’s mother and she mentioned her husband’s work overseas. He was in the Army. For weeks I thought about that father fulfilling his call to serve, and I couldn’t deny the strong desire I felt to go back again. I needed to make a difference in the world.”
“What did your… husband say?”
She tried not to read too much into the way he seemed to stumble over the word husband. She was overanalyzing, just wishful thinking.
“He told me I was being selfish. That I was screwing up our family, that I was breaking the agreement we’d made when we got married.” That awful argument, the rage in his voice, the pain she’d caused, all came back to her as real as if she’d just walked out the door of their little red brick house. “We’d promised each other we were a team. Where one went, the other would go.”
“Yet you left anyway.”
After all the angry—but logical words—he’d shouted at her, it was the strangled pain in his final question that haunted her most to this day. Who the fuck’s gonna braid Stella’s hair?
“Freelancing was our compromise.” A brittle peace settled between them. “I wouldn’t take it on as a full-time job.”
“He was not happy.”
Not by a long shot. “Neither of us was, but we made it work until Stella was fifteen.”
“And then you ‘died.’”
There was an implied question in his tone she couldn’t miss. How did Sam manage to get her to share so much so quickly when by all rights she should still be reeling from the hurt of how he’d played her? Maybe a part of her believed she deserved any and every bad thing that came her way as retribution for the pain she’d caused her family.
“You’re wondering if I used my faked death as an out to abandon my family.”
“I did not say that.” But still the hint of a question remained.
Although oddly, she found no condemnation. Either he really didn’t blame her—or he was that good of an actor. With nothing to lose anymore, she kept on talking, needing to pour out the words she’d kept bottled inside for so many years.
“But you’re thinking it. Believe me, I’ve questioned myself on that more times than I can count. In my head I know I didn’t have a choice. My identity had been compromised in a major way in southern Africa, and I needed to assume a new life to keep my family safe.”
She’d opted to stay in Africa for two reasons. She wanted to minimize the temptation to seek out her family anyway, even for a glimpse. And she still wanted to help. Funny how in the end she’d found returning to her roots in more of a teaching and aide manner brought her far more satisfaction than any large-scale mission.
