Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

That night, Esme fought with her parents. She promised to get it right with Ida; she bought herself more time. And then she left. And now the hospital where Chris was living called three times a day. And the morgue where her parents were called three times a day. They all wanted to know what arrangements to make. If Esme didn’t call back, they would dispose of the bodies and send her the bill. But it wasn’t as though she didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted her parents and Chris to reunite. They had died trying to make that happen; the least she could do was help. She knew she had heard this story before, about parents who died as they drove to be with an adult child who was himself dying. It turned out that when Chris spoke her name, it was the swan song he’d been trying to belt out for twenty-four years. Only in her parents’ unction for a miracle, or perhaps because one was stoned and the other disabled, they pitched off I-64 on the way to the hospital. The road was narrow and ascendant one hairpin at a time, there was no guardrail, and if you went over even halfway up, you would not survive the fall. Every time Esme thought about it, she wondered whether they had any last words, too, hurled from their lips as they said good-bye. And why not? People were crying out for each other all the time.

They were stopped at a diner off the freeway. Ida had to pee. It was two in the morning, but still, this was not the most advisable conduct. Esme’s face was mugged on every TV, on every channel. On the plus side, the coverage gave her a visual on the Helix House, and a sense of what people were saying.

On the downside, what people were saying was bad. For one, the feds had turned the site into a zoo. Tents, kitchen, helicopters, Bradley. Bradley s. Six tanks in a residential suburb. The team had to stump all the roadside trees just to accommodate their girth. She could tell they were M3s, though, because they had room only for five — driver, commander, gunner plus scouts — which meant this was the team’s concession to context or, more likely, the government’s attempt to look modulated but ready.

Ida insisted on cherry pie because she wanted an American experience, they being on the road and mingled with the people. At age nine, she was already sassy with expectation of what dreams the country would make true for her.

“Kinda late to be up!” the waitress said, and overflowed their water glasses.

“Mom,” Ida said, and she probed the cherry glue stuffing for a fruit item. “Mom, you’re on TV again.”

Esme was wearing a black and turquoise winter hat that had a panther on the cuff — Go Panthers! — a down ski jacket, and sunglasses. She’d had the difficult task of having to look recognizable to her daughter but foreign to everyone else. She’d made a point never to wear her rig around Ida or Crystal, so this was uncharted territory. And she had navigated it poorly. Ida had asked more than once if she fell on her face last night, it looked so swollen and pink and weird, and Esme swore the waitress, while bowling pie at her kid, also had a double take at her.

“I know, tulip. But you don’t have to believe what they’re saying.”

The menu was laminated and tacky with jam, and probably if she needed coverage in a storm, this vinyl would do, so broad was its wingspan. Every second item was waffles. Chicken and waffles. Ham and waffles. Biscuits and waffles. She ordered cheese and waffles to go.

“They’re saying you and that cult guy are like friends or something.”

“Tulip, just eat your pie. We have to go.”

“They’re saying ”—but she said it too loud, and because Esme didn’t want to silence her child with force, she did the next best thing and spilled water in her lap. Ida made a scene but at least now they were being noticed for a safer reason.

What was the government saying? That Esme had set this up; she was on her own. No one else would go down for this except maybe the few people who knew about her, though if it panned out disastrously, the buck would move up the chain of command and stop just two or three links south of the president, whose staff would say, Look, the Helix was in bed with North Korea; procurement of a reconnaissance effort had been in the hands of the same professional for years; her ties to the organization made her best suited to the work; how could we have forecast this outcome?

But only if it came to that. For now they had let slip, in case they killed anyone by accident, that secessionist activity with guns was not the joke everyone had taken it to be and that the Helix might have an arsenal that made the Chechen rebels look Care Bear.

Ida was in the bathroom. Esme could hear the electric hand dryer and imagined her trying to arch her back and high her lap in quest for the hot air. She expected it would be three more minutes before Ida showed, which meant the new guy sitting opposite her needed to hurry. He looked in no hurry. He even looked expansive — job well done; he had found Esme in less than three hours. He was DoD or CIA, FBI, whatever.

“What do you want?” Esme said. Her waffles arrived in a Styrofoam casket. The waitress looked at her replacement date and seemed to get an idea of what was going on here, which had Esme thinking about what sort of clientele this waitress called regular.

“Seems like you might be headed to the site,” he said. “Just guessing, of course.”

Esme rolled her eyes. This man looked about forty, too young to be for real with his noir affect but too old to find it humorous. He had frothy orange hair and tortoiseshell glasses with nose pads that were mismatched and uneven, so that the glasses sat slant on his face but not enough to be retarded. He gestured for the waitress and ordered a coffee. His suit was rumpled.

“I’m with my daughter,” she said, meaning either: Be nice, I’m with my child, or: I’m with my child, we’re going to the park, you must have me confused with someone else.

“I see that. She looks a lot like someone we’ve all come to know and love.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, what do you want?” She scanned the restaurant for a back door.

“It’s like this,” he said, and she noticed he had dry skin crisped along the rim of his ear. Both ears. And she thought: This is exactly the kind of thing a girlfriend or wife does not let you get away with. He’s not wearing a ring, probably he has no one, and if he weren’t so blowhard in the delivery of a threat I know is coming, I could pity him.

“You’re wanted at the site,” he said. “I’m here to make that happen.”

“A driver. How nice.”

“I get you there. You get him out.”

Since this had been her idea all along — at least for a couple of hours — she should have been pleased with their concord. But she was not pleased, which was like when your coin turns up heads and you are let down, apprised of feelings that were secret to yourself until then. Only it wasn’t feelings she had but terror.

“And after that?” Not that she didn’t know the answer or the spectrum from which an answer would present itself: immunity, a presidential pardon, or just her taking it in lieu of the fifty staffers who saw the Helix proliferate and did nothing precisely to hasten a crisis that would justify trawling nationwide for the last liberal drowning.

“Just get your daughter and let’s go,” he said, and when she didn’t get up he covered her hand with his own and squeezed until it hurt, which was when Ida erupted from the bathroom, saw this man pledged in affectionate consort with her mother, and skated down the lane for their table.

“Dad?” she said, and the glow on her face was colors a person was lucky to see once in her life.

They were in a van with a table in the back and a screen that dropped down from the roof. Ida was watching a soap opera about thirteen-year-olds that was, apparently, in vogue. Esme looked over her shoulder and said, “Hey, Jack, how many episodes you got?” Despite her negligence as a parent, or because she was well practiced in its art, she knew the value of a pacifier when she saw one. So did the escort, since he said they had enough to get them there. Still, she decided to test what was what. “Hey, Jack, what if Ida needs to be sick?” He said there was a bucket with a snap top and a deodorizing puck adhered to the underside. “Hey, Jack, what if we don’t get there in time?” He said, “In this weather, time rushes for no man.”