Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

She would need pants — a dress was absurd — maybe leather, but nothing standout. If she drove, she could be there in nine hours. She could jump on a plane, but there were only so many ways out of an airport, and she wanted to keep her options open. It was possible that too much info would leak before she got there, in which case she would be more white whale than white horse come time to figure out who could resolve this mess. If every U.S. marshal was after her, it was easier to get lost on the ground. Of course, there was always military transport, but then, those trips tended to make her sick. Commercial airliners got the quiet corridors, but for military flight, it was the vomit air from takeoff till landing. Her last trip in a C-17 was her and eight men in ghillie suits, which were, in terms of odor, bear shit in the mouth of summer, fungal feet, afterbirth. So, okay, no C-17, just Esme and the Hummer and fifty plates for fifty states.

Jim paced the room. He said, “Why hasn’t the whore checked in, either?”

Esme did not know. Perhaps it was because Vicki was a whore with a whorehead for brains, though she kept this explanation to herself.

They were in their hotel; they had been here before.

Esme stared out the window. She could see, well in the distance, the Capitol Columns — their hats, anyway — which stood out among the gibbets of winter trees in the Arboretum.

Make a plan, revise a plan — this was a gauge of fluency under fire. Reassess for best outcome under amended conditions. She knew the drill, but Jim did not. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said. Palms braced on the window, head dribbling against the glass. She let the sequence loop, then said, “Look, just let me get to the house. I will talk him down, and everything will be fine. Don’t you realize what’s happened here? You’ve got a federal case dumped in your lap. Open and shut.” She said this with brio, and for a second she saw Jim thrill to the prospect: Thurlow Dan, in jail, for life.

He flumped in an armchair upholstered in red-and-white gingham and kicked out his legs. He had on a suit, twilight blue, and a red silk tie.

“Don’t you see?” she said, and got on her knees, between his legs. “I just did you a big favor. We couldn’t prove North Korea. We haven’t turned up anything on weaponry or funding for it. So probably I just saved your job.”

Gears turning. “You must be kidding. You planned for this? You are insane. One, my father-in-law. Two, even if we do nail Dan for kidnapping, how are we supposed to explain having sent in these four morons to begin with? I don’t think sacrificial lamb is going to make us any new friends.”

“Just let me get to Cincinnati,” she said. “Once they’re free, no one will give a shit who they are or what they were doing there. Who even knows about ARDOR? Just call in some favors.”

He flapped his legs, clamped them round her ribs. He said, “No one’s heard from that asshole yet, just his fat-fuck number two.”

“Thurlow hasn’t asked for anything?”

“Nope. Maybe he’s done us all a favor and shot his brains out.”

Esme looked at the carpet. There was a limit to what equanimity she could impose on her features in the presence of talk like this.

He palmed her face like bookends. They were eye to eye. “This was all your doing,” he said. “You got no encouragement from me. I came to you for counsel, given your history, but I never sanctioned this operation. You understand? If you do right on this, I know you’ve got a kid who’s going to need some help down the road. I got a daughter, too, remember? I know how it is.” His legs vised tight so that breath became a priority for her. But the message came through: if she betrayed him, the harm would go to Ida.

She ran her hands up his quads and at his groin. It didn’t take a second; he unzipped and folded his arms behind his head.

“I understand,” she said. “But I can talk Thurlow out. And you’ll be a hero.”

There was no action there, so she had to work hard. He said, “You won’t even get close. Lockdown. Half the ops are probably in his bathtub already.” But then his body perked up, and with it his mood. He laughed and said, “Jim Bach, national hero,” which enlisted the perk for darker pleasures. He flanked her neck with his thumbs and dug in.

She had travel Kleenex in her hand already; the job was clean and then it was done. She expected to be in Cincinnati by the end of the day.

But Jim had other ideas. He picked up a glass cigar rest from the table and brought it down on her head. When it was clear she was still breathing, he dragged her to the bathroom and locked her in.

05:50:21:03: MY DARLING LITTLE GIRL. My beloved Ida. This tape might be the last you see of your dad. I’m sorry about some of the other stuff on here. Maybe you’ll understand when you’re older. I’m sorry, too, if I can’t finish the rest in time. But that’s okay. I have some time now.

I want you to know that I started to chase your mother the second she fled my apartment and that I’ve never really stopped. I called every hotel in the area. I spoke to the people who had moved into her parents’ house. Any clue where they went? No. Any forwarding address? No. In ’94, the Internet was hardly the resource it is today, but still, I made use of what I could. I put ads in local papers across the country. The response was overwhelming, and at first, I tracked down every lead. Bus, train, hitch, hobo. I went to every state in the continental U.S. and probably through at least half its small towns.

Eventually I got word she was living in New Paltz, in New York State. At the time, I was in Miami, but decided I could be in New Paltz in two days if I hitched nonstop. I remember the ride into town. A college kid picked me up, then asked me to drive while he toked on air freshener. Butane high.

There wasn’t a working stereo in the car, so this kid listened to his CD player. Sometimes, he’d slap the dash with his hands or sing along. But mostly he stared out the passenger window. I had driven long stretches of road before. I was accustomed to the populace of cars. The freeways. The solitude expressed by so many people en route together. But that day’s ride seemed especially grim. I was going to find Esme, and yet I was grim. Probably this should have set off alarm bells, but who has that kind of foresight in the moment? I felt alone, even more alone than usual, so that I began to tremble all over, with tremors you could actually see ten feet away. A paroxysm of loss for missing Esme but also, maybe, because of the loss we’re born into.

“I’m going to New Paltz to meet my girlfriend,” I said. I said it once, then louder, and finally I punched the kid in the leg. “She’s incredible.” Because, really, this shudder from within was too much. Sometimes hurt just likes a stage.

The kid took off his headphones just long enough to say, “That’s cool.”

“She was my first, you know. You always keep them close.”

“Look, I’m not much for talk,” he said, and he turned up the volume on his CD player.

We made it into town. A town cloned from other college towns. Head shops, bookstore, deli. The kid said this was as far as he went. He gave me his number, and after I wandered around New Paltz for an hour, as if I’d run into Esme just for being there, I called him up.

There was a line outside his dorm room. Students with liquor and chips; one with a dog on a leash. I tried to get by. I tripped over a glass bong the length of my arm, but no one was letting me past.

The kid, whose name was Reese, poked his head out the door. He reached for me and clapped me on the back. “You get in free, my friend.”