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They hold hard gazes until Connor backs down. “If you want to joust over Risa, now’s not the time. Right now we all need to be friends.”
“Allies don’t gotta be friends,” Grace points out. “Take World War II. We couldn’t a’ won it without Russia, even though we hated each other’s guts then.”
“Point taken,” says Cam, once more impressed by Grace’s unexpected wisdom. “For now, let’s agree that Risa is off-limits. A demilitarized zone.”
“You’re mixin’ your wars,” Grace says. “The Demilitarized Zone was Korea.”
“She’s a person, not a zone,” says Connor. Then he goes over and plays with Dierdre, putting an end to all negotiations.
“You’re forgetting,” Cam says to Grace, who also noted the documentaries that so absorbed her at the motel, “that the United States and Russia almost nuked each other to smithereens after World War II.”
“I’m not forgettin’ nothin’,” Grace says, returning to her candies. “When the two of you really go at it, I expect I’ll build myself a bomb shelter.”
62 • Connor
This changes everything.
Connor’s initial thrill at seeing Risa is quickly crushed under the weight of the reality. Not the reality of Cam, but the reality of their situation. Now that Risa is with them, she’s no longer out of harm’s way. Connor had longed for her—there is no question about that. For all these months, he has ached to hear her voice and to be comforted by her words. He longed to massage her legs even though he knew she was no longer paralyzed. His feelings for her have not changed. Even when he thought she had betrayed the cause and had become a public voice in favor of unwinding, he knew deep down she could not be doing it of her own accord.
Then, when she came on live television to reveal it was a sham and thoroughly slapped down Proactive Citizenry, he loved her even more. After that, she vanished into hiding, just as completely as Connor had—and there was comfort in that. He could look out into the night and know she was out there somewhere, using her formidable wits to keep herself safe.
Connor, however, is anything but a safe harbor now. With what they mean to expose about Proactive Citizenry—and what he might potentially learn from Sonia—she is in much greater danger in his company than not. His journey is now into the flames, not away from them—and of course she’ll want to go with him. And Cam’s words still echo in his mind.
“I’m the better man because I was made to be.”
For all of his handpicked intelligence, Cam is an imbecile to think jealousy is what this is all about. Yes, Connor admits that a certain amount of jealousy is there to cloud things, but competing for Risa’s affections feels like a petty endeavor compared to Connor’s need to protect her from both himself and from Cam.
As Connor plays with Dierdre on the living room floor, he tries to let his anger dissipate. It won’t help the situation. Giving into his jealousy will only distract him.
Dierdre lies back and puts her feet in Connor’s face.
“Tricker treat! Smell my feet!”
Her feet smell like the baby food she must have stepped in, orange globs of sweet potato marring the pattern of ducklings swimming all over her socks.
“Nice socks,” Connor says, still amazed that this was the same baby he took from the doorstep of the fat, beady-eyed woman and her fat, beady-eyed son.
“Ducky socks!” says Dierdre happily. “Fishy arm!” She touches the shark on his arm with a sticky index finger. “Fishy arm. Army fish!” And she giggles. The giggle opens an escape valve in Connor; his frustration is soothed by Dierdre.
“It’s a shark,” he tells Dierdre.
“Shark!” repeats Dierdre. “Shark shark shark!” Dierdre snaps a woman’s plastic head on a little plastic body of a firefighter. “Your mommy see the shark there? She mad at it?”
Connor sighs. Little kids, he’s decided, are like cats. They always like to hop in the laps of people who are allergic. Connor wonders if Dierdre has any clue that the topic she just put in his lap is enough to make him break out in hives.
“No,” he tells her. “My mommy doesn’t know about the shark.”
“You’ll get in trouble?”
“No worries,” Connor says.
“No worries,” Dierdre repeats, and snaps a tire on top of the little plastic figure’s head, making it look like an oversized Russian hat.
Dierdre doesn’t know that there’s a letter in a trunk in Sonia’s back room. There are actually hundreds of letters. All written by AWOLs, all written to the parents who gave them over for unwinding. From the moment Connor saw the trunk earlier that day, he’s been imagining what it would be like to hand deliver that letter and watch from a hidden location as his parents read it. Just thinking about it now causes Roland’s arm to tighten into a fist. He imagines punching through a windowpane, grabbing the letter back from them before they can read it—but he chases the thought away, consciously releases his fingers and directs the hand to get back to the business of preschool play.
all sit spaced apart on a sectional sofa and the two chairs facing it, trying to keep this from feeling as awkward as it is. Grace is the only one who doesn’t sit yet. She wanders around the room, seemingly immune to the tension, examining photographs and knickknacks and digging her hand into a jar of Jolly Ranchers on a shelf too high for Dierdre to get at.
Cam wishes he could dig into at least one part of himself that retains that much innocence. Not even the tithes he has residing within him are naive enough to feel safe in Hannah’s comfortable living room. The memory bits of his tithes are more about feeling superior, so all he can dredge forth from them is aloofness. That’s not going to endear him to Risa.
