“Is this your daughter?” the woman asked sweetly.
“Yes.”
“What a beauty! She looks just like you! And what a smart exhibit! You probably helped her a little, I bet? Moms always want to help their children. It’s so hard to resist. I resisted, though. It’s the rules.”
“Aya did it all by herself.”
Bitch. Liar, the woman’s eyes accused. You cheated.
But she was wrong.
And even if the woman had been right, Chris would kill to protect Aya. Aya was more important than anything else in her life. This child had started in her belly. She’d cherished that life from the first, when she was seventeen, pregnant, refusing to ID Aya’s dad for her parents, not to protect the boy, but because she had no intention of marrying him. Why open that can of worms?
She’d never considered abortion, as her best friend suggested. She’d sat in the principal’s office, heart slamming as she was stripped of the valedictorian title, told that she’d ruined her life, warned that fornication violated scripture. But never once did her commitment to the baby flag; not when she put herself through college, working in a toxics clean-up crew for double pay… not when other women her age went on dates while Chris hit the books. Never once did she feel less than lucky.
Because I made a life.
She pushed the fear about Nevada away. She would focus on Aya for the next eighteen minutes. She remembered her mother saying, years back, on a porch in Alabama, “Put the baby up for adoption. You have no idea how hard motherhood is.”
“I guess I’ll find out.”
“It will be too late to change your mind. You’ll already have a child.”
“I have one now, in my belly.”
Spending those last two months of pregnancy in Sulfur Springs, stared at by neighbors and friends and churchgoers in the supermarket, Chris was a more popular form of local entertainment than the multiplex; hearing whispers in ladies’ rooms, giggles from other cheerleaders, warnings that she was a “bad influence” from friends who’d been ordered by their parents to keep away from her.
Stubborn then. Stubborn now, Dad told her these days. But at seventeen, the words had carried anger. When he said it now, from back in Alabama, it was with enormous pride.
Oh, Aya.
And then, after the birth, the terror when baby Aya had to be put on a respirator. The helplessness when Aya, age six, fell off a bike and broke her arm. The swelling feeling in her chest when the dental braces came off, and the teeth gleamed, white and straight. Aya was a straight-A kid now, popular, smart, a Web genius, and her phone rang at night with calls from boys who asked about more than homework. Aya going on group dates. Aya eyeing a Princeton University catalog last week. Aya saying, I want to be like you, Mom, and help people. I want to figure out genomes. But I can start now. You don’t have to be rich to do DNA research. A PCR costs only six hundred dollars.”
“PCR?”
Aya rolled her eyes, as in, You don’t know what it is? “It’s polymerase chain reaction, a way to heat up and cool down material. I know a guy at Genspace, the community lab in Anacostia? He built one with a lightbulb, an old computer fan, some PVC pipe, and an old Ardvino board.”
When did my daughter start speaking this new language?
Chris was awed. “Very impressive.”
Aya saying something else now, pivoting from one subject to another. Aya saying, “Are you going to go out with Joe Rush? You should.”
The heat flooded her face. She hoped she wasn’t blushing. How did the kid come up with this stuff? Chris was sure that she’d hidden her feelings, but the face looking up at her, heart-shaped, blue eyes, cute copper-colored freckles, was canny, teasing, bright.
“Aya, where did that question come from?”
“I heard you talking on the phone this morning to Mr. Burke. I wasn’t eavesdropping! I was just passing the kitchen and I heard you say Joe’s name.”
Joe. She called Dr. Rush Joe. She’d only met him once, when Chris brought her to Homeland Security on Parent-Kid Day. Aya glommed on to the guy. Even checked out Rush on the Net and somehow came up with a photo of his house in the woods and a group shot of soldiers in Afghanistan. The kid was an amazing researcher. But when it came to Rush, Chris would prefer that Aya laid off. Just the thought of Rush came with a flood of unwanted emotion, which she fought to keep off her face.
I’m in love with a man who kills people. And his background seems common enough knowledge at the top. Boy, I sure know how to pick them.
She wasn’t sure how the feeling for Rush had happened. She didn’t even see Rush that much, only in committee, a few hours every few months. Chemistry, that was easy to explain — the way her breath caught when he walked into a room, the way his shaving cream left a whiff of lime in his wake. The quiet way he moved and the way, when he was interested in something, he was razor focused. She’d spotted him alone one Sunday night during the Cherry Blossom Festival, 11 P.M., at the Jefferson Memorial, when she was showing out-of-town friends the sights, and he looked tormented and lonely, staring at the slogans cut into stone. The Lincoln Memorial was the famous one, the Parthenon of D.C., always shown in movies. But the Jefferson had always been her favorite, softer, almost hidden in trees, quiet, by the tidal pool. Joe had been staring at the words cut into white stone. I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively. Then he had spotted her and smiled, looked embarrassed, and his mask went back into place.
Rush emanated confidence when he knew other people were there. Yet something bleak and pained was inside.
Chris had never had a problem acknowledging her animal side, and her animal side wanted him. In meetings she’d been struck by the way Rush saw things from different angles, and the way he did not back down when he thought he was right. She was drawn to the maverick. She liked conviction. Her instinct told her, in spite of the terrible things she’d read about him, that he was kind, a sense bolstered by the loyalty that Major Nakamura and Admiral Galli and Galli’s wife, Cindy, had for Rush.
How can Rush be guilty of the things that Burke showed me in the file?
“Mom, are you listening?” asked Aya.
“One hundred percent, honey. I am so proud!”
“Is Joe Rush coming back to Washington today?”
“What?” She jerked. Chris hoped her daughter didn’t see the heat rising in her face, sense the warmth in her belly. “How do you know that?”
“You said so on the phone. You like Joe, don’t you? I do. Girls think he’s cute.”
“What girls?”
“That time you brought me to the office, the secretaries were, like, swooning over him.”
“Don’t say ‘like,’ I said. And I enjoy being with everyone on the committee, not just Dr. Rush.”
“That’s not true. You don’t like Burke.”
“He can be difficult, I admit. But he’s dedicated. Where do you get these ideas anyway?”
“Are you going to go out with Joe?” A giggle.
“You don’t date people you work with.”
“How come you get quiet when his name comes up?”
“Concentrate on your exhibit, young lady.”
“Whenever you call me ‘young lady,’ it means I’m right!”
Her physical reaction to Rush had started the first time she’d seen him, across a conference table. Bam! What was that expression from that old film? The Godfather? The thunderbolt? That was it. Over the head! And working with him had only deepened the feeling. She had dreams about him. Her breathing caught when he entered a room. One time on M Street she’d gotten excited just looking at a male mannequin in a shop window wearing the same pullover sweater that he did. Ridiculous! And last Christmas she’d been in the Macy’s Men’s Department, and some salesman had been spraying guys with Rush’s aftershave. The smell had hit her and… stupid!