“That’s right.”
“And Grace.”
“Well, they did him in.” His choice of words is like a bump in the road.
She waits. Then asks, “What did they say?”
“A whole lot of nonsense.” He reaches for the mask.
“I always thought”—willing herself not to cry, her face feels like a balloon full of water—“thought I disappointed you that day.”
He juts his chin forward and his face darkens. “Let’s get one thing perfectly clear,” he says. “You have never — and I mean never, not once—disappointed me.” Do you read me? He takes another breath.
He’s fading. Don’t go, Dad. Returning to the shades. Wait. It will be too late to tell him. About the silence of the school after three. The smell of orange peels and pencil shavings. The empty corridor she walked afterwards, past our gracious Queen, running when she got outside to make a breeze to soothe the sting, it doesn’t hurt. I was so strong, I didn’t know that I was small. Dad, watch. She opens her mouth to tell him and hears him say—
“I waved.”
She blinks. Tears suspend. “What?”
“It was me. I saw Rick on the road that day. I waved.”
She sits, lips still parted with what she was going to say, but it’s gone.
“I was the one in the car.” He holds the clear mask up to his face, closes his eyes and inhales through his nose. Exhales, opens his eyes and looks at her. True blue.
She shakes her head slowly, waiting, as though for Novocaine to wear off. She sees the shape of a man behind a windshield, sun splintering off it, the outline of his hat, his hand. Dust in the wake of a blue car on a country road in spring….
“Why didn’t you say something?” she asks.
“I was doing my job.” And he tells her.
She leans her elbows on her knees, looks down at the white pile carpet between her feet and concentrates on breathing evenly. She slips her hands into her armpits to warm them. Something has fallen away. Quietly, with no fuss. The ground beneath her feet.
“… Oskar Fried, I don’t know what his real name …”
Uncle Simon and Mr. McCarroll
“… my number two …”
Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency
“… a drunken U.S. Marine officer arrested for espionage a few years later …”
NATO
“… the space race …”
NORAD
“… threat from Soviet missiles …”
USAF
“… Cuba on the brink …”
USAFE
“… Berlin set to blow …”
The Pentagon
“… one individual can’t possibly see the whole picture …”
The Moon
“She never would have been in Centralia,” says Madeleine.
“Who?”
The schoolyard
“Claire,” she answers.
His bad eye has begun to seep. He wipes it with his wrist. “That was a terrible tragedy.”
Madeleine stares at him. Who are you? is the logical next question. It lasts less than a second, the glimpse of the strange man in the gold recliner, freshly defined as though by the flash of a camera illuminating a previously unseen shape in the dark. Then he is her father again. Smaller than he used to be. A little lost in his golf shirt. His white tennis shoes looking too new, too substantial, the way old people’s new shoes do.
“‘Tragedy’ is a word people use when they don’t want the blame.” she says.
If Claire had never moved to Centralia, who would Mr. March have selected in her place? A little girl with a dark brown pixie cut….
“… imagine flying through a thick fog where you can’t tell what’s up or what’s down. In a case like that, you have to—”
“It didn’t make the world safer, Dad.”
“—trust your instruments. And it worked, we beat them.”
“Beat whom?”
“The Soviets. They’re crying uncle.” The expression on his face is obstinate. An old child.
She says, “Do you think the world’s going to be safer when the wall comes down?”
He leans toward her. “I’ll tell you a secret, old buddy, sometimes it’s hard to know what’s the right thing to do, but if you’re ever in doubt, just ask yourself, ‘What’s the hardest thing I could do right now?’”
“Mr. Froelich died.”
Jack sighs and reaches for a tissue to dab his eye. “I think he may have been killed.”
“Who killed him? Simon?”
“More likely someone Simon told.”
“… the CIA? Why, for the sake of Oskar Fried?”
“Presumably.”
“You told Simon about Mr. Froelich.”
“It was my job to tell him.”
Everything has become granular. She can feel her lips, her face, the air around her; she can see the coffee table, the fighting roosters, the Alps, the television, all of it turning to sand, set to disintegrate at the slam of a door.
“I’m not saying it was right,” says Jack. “I told Simon before I knew what could happen. That’s no excuse.”
She is struck dizzy by a jolt of memory — Maman dragging them to the car while Dad stood in the doorway, looking shell-shocked. The day after her testimony. Maman almost screeching at her to get in the car, main-te-nant! She got them out of there. Far from the place where a man lived who killed children.
“My involvement didn’t change the fact that, if the police had ever had a hope of catching the man who did it, they never would have looked at the Froelich kid in the first place. Whoever it was had to be long gone by then. Because there was never another similar murder in the area.” It’s his last-word-on-the-subject voice.
Is this the voice Mike always heard? Is this the father Mike had? What would she have done if she had had this father? Would she have found a gun and a jungle? Kill or be killed.
From the basement Maman calls, “Madeleine.”
“What?” she bellows back at the stairs.
“Come down here, I want to show you something.”
“In a minute!” She turns back to her father.
What did you do in the Cold War, Daddy?
“… we beat them in space …”
Why?
To keep the world safe for you kids.
Why?
To make sure there would be a world for you to inherit.
Why?
“Everything we did was for your sake.”
“Maybe you should have asked us for help,” she says.
“Asked who?”
“The kids. We were born into it. The world that could be destroyed in a matter of hours. We were tougher than you.”
“Look me in the eyes.” She does. “What I did was one tiny part of a much larger effort. There were countless operations like it, and many were much more costly. Some were genuinely effective. Others you’d have to write off as sunk cost. The point is not ‘Was what I did worth it in and of itself?’ Look at the Second World War, look at the Dieppe raid. That was a travesty.” His eyes narrow, along with his mouth, his voice — flinty. “A thousand Canadians killed, two thousand taken prisoner, for what? So the Brits could test out a bunch of tactical theories. But the bottom line is, we won, and no one’s calling Churchill a war criminal. If our leaders today had one-tenth his guts and brains…. He’d never have got mired in the likes of Vietnam….”
They are still for a while, their breathing audible. His lower lip is compressed against his upper one, lids drooping with every inhalation. On the TV, a new improved Mr. Clean visits two women in a toiletless bathroom.