Chapter 6 #2
* * *
Three times a week before the sun rose, John took her to the basement range. She grew accustomed to the feel of the gun in her hands, the shape, the weight, the recoil. He taught her to aim for body mass, to group her shots, to reload.
When she learned the trial had been delayed, she vented her frustration on the range.
On alternate days, Terry instructed her in self-defense. Liz learned how to use her opponent’s weight and balance to her advantage, how to break a hold, how to punch from the shoulder.
The nightmares still came, but not every night. And sometimes, in them, she won.
As the first month passed, her old life seemed less hers. She lived in the spare, two-story house with the high security fence, and slept each night with federal marshals on guard.
Lynda lent Elizabeth romance novels, mysteries, horror fiction out of her own collection. While summer burned through to August, Lynda cut Elizabeth’s hair again—with considerable more skill—and showed her how to retouch the roots. On long, quiet evenings, Bill taught her to play poker.
And the time dragged like eternity.
“I’d like to have some money,” she told John.
“You need a loan, kid?”
“No, but thank you. I’d like my own money. I have a savings account, and I want to withdraw some.”
“Taking you to the bank would involve unnecessary risk. If you need something, we’ll get it for you.”
“My mother could withdraw it. It’s like the gun.
It’s for security.” She’d thought it through.
She had time to think everything through.
“When I finally testify, and I’m relocated, I think it’ll happen quickly.
I’d like to have money—my own money—when it happens.
I want to know I can buy what I need and not feel obligated to ask. ”
“How much did you have in mind?”
“Five thousand.”
“That’s a lot of money, Liz.”
“Not really. I’m going to need a new computer, and other supplies. I want to think about tomorrow instead of today. Today just keeps being today.”
“It’s frustrating, I know, having to wait.”
“They’ll delay as long as they can, hoping to find me.
Or hoping I’ll lose courage. But they can’t delay forever.
I have to think about the rest of my life.
Wherever that is, whoever I’ll be. I want to go back to school.
I have a college fund that would have to be transferred. But there are other expenses.”
“Let me see what I can do.”
She smiled. “I like when you say that. With my mother, it’s always yes or no.
She rarely, if ever, says maybe, because maybe is indecisive.
You say you’ll see what you can do, which isn’t maybe, isn’t indecisive.
It means you’ll take some action. You’ll try.
It’s much better than no, and almost as good as yes. ”
“All that.” He hesitated a moment. “You never mention your father. I know he’s not in the picture, but under the circumstances—”
“I don’t know who he is. He was a donor.”
“A donor?”
“Yes. When my mother decided to have a child, to have that experience, she screened numerous donors, weighing their qualifications. Physical attributes, medical history, family history, intellect and so on. She selected the best candidate and arranged to be inseminated.”
She paused, looked down at her hands. “I know how it sounds.”
“Do you?” he murmured.
“I exceeded her expectations, intellectually. My health’s always been excellent. I’m physically strong and sound. But she wasn’t able to bond with me. That part of the process failed. She’s always provided me with the best care, nutrition, shelter, education possible. But she couldn’t love me.”
It made him sick in the gut, in the heart. “The lack’s in her.”
“Yes, it is. And knowing her part of the process failed makes it very difficult for her to feel or show any affection. I thought, for a long time, I was to blame. But I know that’s not true.
I knew when she left me. She left me because she could, because I made a choice that allowed her to walk away.
I could make her proud of me, proud of what she’d accomplished in me, but I could never make her love me. ”
He couldn’t help himself. He drew her against him, stroked her hair until she let out a long breath, leaned on him. “You’ll be all right, Liz.”
“I want to be.”
He met Terry’s eyes over her head, saw the sheen of tears and pity in them. It was good she’d heard, John thought. Because the kid had two people who cared about her, and would do whatever it took to make sure she was all right.
* * *
Sergei met with his brother and nephew, as well as Ilya and one of his most trusted brigadiers.
Children splashed in the pool under the watchful eyes of the women while others sat at long picnic tables already spread with a bounty of food.
Cold drinks nestled in wide, stainless-steel tubs of ice.
On the lawn some of the older children played boccie or volleyball while their music banged out an incessant beat.
Little pleased Sergei more than a loud, crowded party with family and friends.
He captained the enormous grill his oldest daughter and son-in-law had given him for his birthday, appreciating this American tradition.
His gold Rolex and the crucifix hanging around his neck gleamed in the brutal summer sun, while over his cotton shirt and pants he wore a bright red bib apron that invited everyone to kiss the cook.
As the grill smoked, he turned fat burgers, all-meat franks and long skewers of vegetables brushed with his secret marinade.
“The mother goes to the hospital,” Sergei’s nephew Misha said.
“She is there many hours every day, often through the night. She has dinner maybe once a week with the man she sleeps with. Four times each week, she goes to the fancy gym where she has a trainer. She goes to the beauty parlor for her hair, her fingernails. She lives her life like she has no daughter.”
Sergei merely nodded as he transferred the vegetables to a platter.
“I went through her house,” the brigadier told him. “I checked her phone. Calls to the hospital, to her boyfriend, to another doctor, to the salon for her hair. There are none to the police, to the marshals, to the FBI.”
“She must see the girl,” Mikhail insisted. He was more rounded than his brother, and his hair was going white in wide streaks. “She is the mother.” He looked over to the pool, where his own wife sat laughing with their daughter while their grandchildren played in the pool.
“I think they aren’t close.” Ilya sipped at his beer.
“A mother is a mother,” Mikhail insisted. “She would know where her daughter is.”
“We can take her,” Misha suggested. “On her way to the hospital. We can…persuade her to tell us where the girl is.”
“If the mother is a mother, she will not tell.” Sergei began arranging burgers on another platter.
“She will die before. If she is not such a mother, and my information is she is not, she may not know. We take her, they move the girl, add more guards. So, we watch the mother who is not such a mother.”
“In the house,” the brigadier said, “there’s nothing of the daughter’s outside the bedroom. And there’s not much there. What is, is boxed. Like storage.”
“So you see.” Sergei nodded. “I have a different way, one that ends this and leaves nothing of us behind. Tell Yakov to be patient a little longer, Misha. The next time we have a party, it will be to celebrate his return. But now”—he lifted the platter, stacked with burgers and dogs—“we eat.”
* * *
When the summer dragged on, Elizabeth reminded herself that if she were home, she would have given in—most likely—and would be enduring the summer program at the hospital. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have done anything all that different from what she did now.
Study, read. Except now she listened to music, watched movies on DVD or television. Through summer reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she believed she’d begun to learn contemporary slang.
When she was able to go back to college, she might know more of the language, might fit in better.
To continue her quest for security, she went to the practice range. She’d learned self-defense and poker.
Nothing could bring Julie back, and playing what-if was a useless process. It made more sense to look at the advantages of her summer confinement.
She would never be a surgeon.
At some point, she’d take on a new identity, a new life, and find some way to make the best of it.
She could study whatever she wanted. She had a feeling joining the FBI was no longer an option, but she didn’t ask.
It might have been foolish, but not knowing a definitive answer left a sliver of hope.
She embraced the routine, grew comfortable with it.
Her birthday didn’t change routine. It just meant that today she was seventeen.
She didn’t feel any different, or look any different.
This year there would be no birthday dinner—prime rib with roasted vegetables followed by carrot cake—or any possibility of the car her mother had promised.
Contingent on her academic achievements and deportment, of course.
It was just another day, one day closer to her court appearance and what she thought of as freedom.
As neither Terry nor John mentioned her birthday, she assumed they’d forgotten. After all, why should they remember? She gave herself the gift of a day off from studying, and decided she’d make a special dinner—not prime rib—as a personal celebration.
It rained, drenching and thunderous. She told herself it made the kitchen only homier. She considered baking a cake, but that seemed self-serving. And she hadn’t yet tried her hand at real baking. Preparing spaghetti and meatballs from scratch seemed challenging enough.
“God, that smells fabulous.” Terry paused in the center of the kitchen, inhaled deeply. “You almost make me think about learning how to make something besides mac and cheese.”