Metro station are these signs that read, If You See Something, Say Something, and I had my fingers crossed that somebody would. Otherwise the day was going to involve a whole lot of waiting.
In Union Station I dropped all my letters in the mailbox and stopped at the Au Bon Pain to get coffee and a croissant and kill some time. Standing there in front of the bakery rack, looking at the chocolate croissants, I had this automatic thought that I ought to pick out something healthier. The irony—even in the midst of a plan to blow up a Senate building and off myself in the process, the fear of developing love handles was still as pure as ever. I got the plain croissant anyway just on principle of staying true to what I believed in, right down to the last minute, and went outside to sit on a planter and watch for signs of chaos. Dodge was circling the block, listening to the handheld police scanner for news to call me about, and every time his truck passed by I felt a little edgier. This was the plan: I’d walk over to the usual lunch spot and wait for Fielder to show up, act surprised to see him, tell him I was in town for a job interview, then mention I still had some of Bylina’s campaign binders in my car that I ought to give to him. That was the kind of stuff that needed to be locked up or shredded, so he’d want them back for sure. Once at the truck, Dodge would pull him in, and that would allow me to take his badge and get past security— they’d still recognize me, and so as long as I had the badge I could breeze through—and set off the chemical bombs packed in Coke bottles in my bag. They were powerful things, way more effective than anything Jill had seen me working on. Dodge and I had tested them down at the quarry last week, and those things went off like napalm.
But that was only the part of the plan Dodge knew. His job was to get rid of Fielder, and he still harbored this crazy fantasy that once this was finished we’d drive straight west and live off the grid somewhere in the deep woods of another state, most likely with some of his contacts in Montana. Eventually we’d bring our families out, and it would be cool because Jill knew how to live that way and liked it. He’d floated that idea during the planning stages and I hadn’t contradicted him, even though anybody who really knew me would have known I’d rather die than live in that kind of isolation, hiding from everybody and pretending not to be myself. What I knew was that, one way or another, I wasn’t going to make it out of this event alive. If I fled the building and made it back to the car, well, I had Elias’s gun under the passenger seat. Because once all of this was finished, it wasn’t only Elias who would be reckoned for. In a few days my letter would arrive at the Vogels’ house, and they would finally know that Candy had admitted it to me and Elias, that very night. How she watched Lindsay slip and then slide across that ice, crack and break through, and how the girl had reached her hands out toward her, met her eye, before she went under. And how Candy had just stood there for one minute, two, maybe as many as five, before she yelled to everyone else. Letting the seconds tick by, holding her own breath like a gauge. She told us in a voice so calm that we didn’t really believe her, not then. At the time I thought she was only trying to attach herself to the attention the whole sad story was getting, but I don’t think that anymore. I know her better than that now.
I don’t know what you do with knowledge like that as long as you’re living. You just carry it, I suppose. But if I was going down, I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave this world and take that with me. If this whole thing was about accountability, and Dodge agreed with me on that one, then so be it. Because Candy had her part in this, too, adding that burden to all the other ones Elias had to carry, stacking on her part of that crushing weight. Dodge would not be pleased, not one bit, but that wouldn’t affect me.
Now I could hear the sirens in the distance, plenty of them. I brushed the crumbs off my fingers and sauntered up to the curb to climb in when Dodge came by again. Back in the truck, he asked me, “You ready to do this thing?”
I popped one of the mints into my mouth. “‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,’” I told him. I was quoting Jefferson. “‘It is its natural manure.’”
“Just do it right the first time,” he said. He was driving slowly, scanning the street. “And don’t let it be any of your own blood. We don’t need any complications.”
It was twelve-thirty. I looked out the window and saw, right there, Fielder walking down the sidewalk in the sea of people leaving the building for lunch, hair flouncing up and down from his forehead. He had his laptop bag slung over his shoulder and was holding the strap with both hands. “Stop here,” I said, and as he swerved to the curb I felt that same gut feeling as when a plane is landing, the forward motion, the wheels suddenly grinding against the ground.
Chapter 32
I packed while Cade was in Maryland. Into the diaper bag I sorted the simplest and most necessary elements of what I had carried with me into the Olmstead house only the year before. Nearly everything was TJ’s—his toys and clothes, the blanket that Leela had crocheted, sized to fit around him in the laundry basket. On the surface of our dresser, in a modest display, rested the small tokens of my romance with Cade: the tickets from our first football game, a Valentine card he had given me, a pressed rose from our wedding day. All these things I left behind.
I zipped the bag and set it heavily on the bed. When Cade had first told me he was going to Maryland, a red flag had snapped up in my mind, but he had said he wouldn’t miss the surgery, and I believed him. No matter how angry he was about Elias or what he was plotting, Cade loved his son. Knowing that would add to my grief and guilt, a day from now, when I would call the police from the hospital and turn him in.
I wished I could call Leela, or see her one last time. Even though I couldn’t tell her that I was leaving, I wished I could hear her voice again, asking me how the garden was doing or chuckling over TJ’s baby mischief. She was a good woman. For a long time after I figured that out, I had puzzled over why a person as clear minded as her had tolerated a life with people like Dodge and the younger Eddy. But I couldn’t judge her; I had tolerated so much from Cade in the name of keeping the peace and hoping, through my faith in him, that things would turn around. I might have kept on doing that forever had Cade not lost sight of the difference between a patriot and a traitor. It reminded me that some lines might blur but others stand surely apart, and one can’t be a good mother and also a coward.
In the laundry basket, on top of a folded wool blanket, TJ slept. For the remainder of the day I could give him no food, only breast milk, in preparation for the next day’s surgery, and I dreaded the struggle when he awoke expecting dinner. I watched him from the corner of my eye, attuned to signs of wakefulness, as I quietly packed our bag. Gray shadows from the window fluttered against his chest, which rose and fell in a rhythm so drowsy and content that it soothed me, even in my agitated state. His cheeks moved to suckle, his fists clenched and loosened. The shape of his brow was just like Cade’s. I wondered if he would hate me one day, looking into the mirror through his own eyes and seeing his father’s reflected back at him.
I stepped into the hallway and then, with a tentative turn of the knob, into Elias’s room. The bed, stripped to its white sheet, lay stark along one wall; the blue desk with its hutch empty, its chair slightly askew to face me, seemed to expect a visitor. The air felt cooler than on the rest of the floor, and the stillness and silence of it gave it the feeling of a grotto. I ran my hand along the dresser; it was clean of dust. Candy must have been in recently. I wanted a memento of some kind to take with me, but saw none. In a way that seemed fitting.
I opened Elias’s dresser drawers and rooted around a little. His clothes were still there, folded neatly. They smelled like him, in a tidy, muted sort of way. Finding nothing else, I decided to brave a search through his old army duffel, slouched in the room’s far corner. But all it contained was a set of pressed BDUs, an old Bible with his name inscribed on the cover, an army-issue folding knife and a plastic wallet insert filled with photos of his family and a girl in a multicolored ski hat. No sign of the phone, not even a charger.
