“You’re being really nice to me.”
“Don’t worry. There’s something in it for me, too. Do you see what it is?”
She shook her head.
“You’ll figure it out,” he said.
He must have given Willow another talking-to that afternoon. After ten days of coolness to Pip, she’d saved her a place at dinner and was eerily friendly to her again. In the evening, in the barn, she showed Pip a set of photographs deleted by a Facebook user but still retrievable, by the likes of Chen, from Facebook’s bowels. On the back of a pickup truck, at somebody’s party in Texas, was what appeared to be an operational nuclear warhead. It couldn’t possibly be a real one, but it looked exactly like the real ones Pip had seen in presentations at her study group in Oakland.
In the weeks that followed, she tried to teach herself journalism. With the help of a hacker boy, she friended the Facebook user who’d put up the pictures, but this went nowhere. She had no idea how to approach the Air Force or the weapons plant with questions, and, even if she had, she would have been calling without credentials on a Skype-like connection from Bolivia. This gave her new respect for real journalists but was personally discouraging. She might have given up if Andreas hadn’t then connected her with a Bay Area whistle-blower who had information about groundwater contamination at a Richmond landfill. Using the information, and making phone calls to less intimidating local authorities — she wasn’t afraid of cold-calling; she’d developed at least one usable skill at Renewable Solutions — she produced a story that then magically appeared online at the East Bay Express, whose editor was a fan of Andreas. The Express also ran her next piece, “Confessions of an Outreach Associate,” which Willow had helped her with by failing to laugh at it until she’d made it genuinely funny.
Early in January, after she’d written two further, shorter pieces for the Express, on subjects supplied by the editor and reportable by telephone, Andreas went for a walk with her and suggested that she apply to work as a research intern at an online magazine called Denver Independent. “It specializes in investigative journalism,” he said. “It wins prizes.”
“Why Denver?” she said.
“There’s a very good reason why.”
“East Bay Express seems to like me. I’d rather be closer to my mom.”
“Are you asking me to order you?”
It was three months since their morning at the Cortez, and she was still wishing he’d ordered her to go to bed with him.
“Denver’s just a name to me,” she said. “I don’t know anything about the place. But sure. Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”
“What I want?” He looked up at the sky. “I want you to like me. I want you never to leave me. I want to get old with you.”
“Oh!”
“I’m sorry. I had to say that once before you left.”
She wished she could believe him. He seemed to believe himself. But her inability to trust him was in her marrow; in her nerves.
“Anyway,” she said.
“Anyway, I’m not asking for much. If you get the job in Denver, which I think you will, I want you to open an attachment I’ll send you when you have an office email account. The editor and publisher is a man named Tom Aberant. All you really have to do is open the attachment. But if you want to keep your ears open, and get a sense of whether Denver Independent is coming after me, I’d be grateful for that, too.”
“He’s the other person who knows what you did. He’s the journalist.”
“Yes.”
“You want me to be your spy.”
“Whatever you feel comfortable with. If it’s nothing, so be it. The only thing I ask, besides opening the attachment, is that you not tell anyone that you were down here. You never left California. Telling Aberant you were here is the one thing that could actually harm me. Harm you, too, needless to say.”
A dark thought occurred to her.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I’m liking being a journalist. But is this person in Denver the real reason you suggested it?”
“The real reason? No. But part of the reason? Of course. It’s good for you and good for me. Do you have a problem with that?”
In the moment, it didn’t seem like much for him to ask. She’d withheld her heart and her body from him, and she remembered, from her experience with Stephen, the ache and desolation of being denied the heart and body you desired. She may not have trusted Andreas, but she had compassion for him, including his paranoia, and if a click of a mouse would suffice to make her less indebted to him, less guilty for hurting him, she was willing to click. She thought it might help close the books on her and him. And so she went to Denver.
* * *
When she returned to Tom and Leila’s house, very late, after a night of drinking with the Denver Independent interns, she was surprised to find Leila on the steps outside the kitchen, bundled in a thick fleece jacket, with cigarette smoke in the vicinity.
“Aha, you caught me,” Leila said.
“You smoke?”
“About five a year.” In a white cereal bowl next to Leila were four stubbed butts. She covered the bowl with her hand.
“What is it like to be so moderate?” Pip said.
“Oh, it’s just another thing to feel insecure about.” Leila gave a self-disliking laugh. “The interesting people are always immoderate.”
“Can I sit here with you?”
“It’s freezing. I was about to go inside.”
Following Leila into the house, Pip worried that she herself was the cause of Leila’s smoking. She’d sort of fallen in love with Leila, in the same way she had with Colleen in Bolivia, but ever since she’d moved in with her and Tom she’d had the sense that she was causing trouble between them. She was a little bit in love with Tom, too, because she could afford to be, because she wasn’t physically attracted to him — he was both older and safe—and Leila, of late, had been all too visibly jealous of one or both of them. Pip knew she should just move somewhere else. But it was hard to let go of the family she’d fallen into.
In the kitchen, Leila poured the butts and ashes onto a sheet of foil and balled it up. Aided by the four margaritas in her, Pip asked her if she could ask her something.
“Of course,” Leila said, taking coffee from the refrigerator.
“Would you rather I find my own place to live? Would that help?”
For a moment, Leila froze. She seemed pretty in a very particular way to Pip. Not irritating-pretty like the Sunlight Project interns; older-pretty; lovely in a way to be aspired to. She looked at the coffee can in her hand as if she didn’t know how it had got there. “Of course not,” she said. “Does it seem like I want you to?”
“Um. Well. Yeah. A little bit.”
“I’m sorry.” Leila moved briskly to the coffee maker. “You’re probably just picking up on insecurities that have nothing to do with you.”
“Why are you insecure? I admire you so much.”
The coffee can fell to the floor.
“This is what I get for smoking,” Leila said, bending down.
“Why are you smoking? Why are you making coffee at one thirty in the morning?”
“Because I know I’m not going to sleep anyway. I might as well work.”
“Leila,” Pip said plaintively.
Leila gave her a look worse than annoyed; a fierce look. “What?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No. Nothing.” Leila composed herself. “Did you get my text from Washington?”
“Yeah! It sounds like this is bigger than we thought.”
“Well, that’s all it is. I’m half out of my mind with fear that somebody’s ahead of us on the story.”