Jane Halpern - Fiction

Embassy

by Jane Halpern

From a distance, the building is stacked like a deck of playing cards.

It is longer and wider than it is tall, and it looks, in the uniform way federal buildings do, flimsy. It is mainly stucco and concrete, and you know just by looking at it that the framework holding up this massive edifice of very heavy material amounts to little more than chicken wire and two-by-fours.

It is the American embassy in Kudesh, the capital of a country little known to Americans except as a source of cheap oil, which means of course that it is a country of extreme importance to America. The Embassy was rebuilt only four years ago, but it already has the smeared, dingy look of a building that has been around for decades.

Chunks of pink stucco and concrete occasionally fall off the front of the building and land with a crumbly thud on the hoods of the embassy workers' cars, which tend to be about ten years old and dinged up already. When the workers come out at five or six and see their cars, they just cluck their tongues, lift the chunks of weak concrete off their dented hoods, brush the crumbs and dust away, and go on to start their cars (assuming their cars will start) and drive home as though nothing had happened. These are very patient people, these embassy workers, uniformly possessed of a very relaxed, laid-back manner. They are almost like dentists-- used to seeing so much nervousness in those around them that they have developed an almost preternatural calm.

One of these workers' names was Elle St. Cloud, called Ellie by friends and family. She was about forty-two years old, married, with one son, Nathan. She dressed in the manner of most of the female embassy workers -- long, rayon or nylon skirts in floral patterns, and white t-shirts. She had long, blond hair, pale blue eyes, and carried blue notebooks and purple folders out of the building every evening after work. She drove an old blue Volvo with a ented front fender and a windshield wiper that didn't work; but it started right up when she turned the key. She taught English to the children of Kudeshi ambassadors and any others who wished to learn and could afford the tuition. She worked with children on about a sixth-grade level, though it varied with student performance. She liked her work, most of the children she taught, and her colleagues. She was well liked among the teachers because she was soft-spoken, brought terrific food to office parties, and did not gossip too much. She was not too stuck up, however, to roll her eyes and say "Don't I know it," when the other teachers and secretaries were complaining about some universally disliked aspect of the job, such as the bureaucracy or the pollution of the office air. She was, essentially, a very easy person to get along with.

Perhaps, though she was a little too easy to get along with. For she put up for nineteen years with a marriage that, while it yielded a son, also had elements of neglect none of her brasher and louder-mouthed friends would have put up with. David was a journalist who saw nothing important enough in his marriage or his wife to rival the importance of the border war he was covering most of the year. He would come home after two or three months of absence, kiss her perfunctorily on the mouth, shovel in the chicken and rice she had made for dinner, then ask if Nathan was doing his homework on time every night. The presumption of this bothered her, as did the fact that in his articles (which were perfectly written and garnered many awards) he constantly decried the loss of fathers due to the border war. David had an overblown sense of his importance in his son's life, and an underblown idea of the needs of his wife. She was, to him, fine going for months at a stretch without seeing her husband; the idea that she might be lonely, or desire some of the company or conversation they had had so much of when they were dating, never occurred to him.

They had arguments over this subject, she in her soft toned voice saying "David I just-", he in his trumpeting voice shouting out the earth-shaking importance of the war he was covering compared to her trivial and frivolous concerns. He would then trot out the spectre of Nathan, supposedly slaving away over his homework up in his room.

"He needs a father figure!" David would say. "Are you going to take away the only father figure he has?" Apparently to David, the sheer nobility of his work would impress Nathan to such an extent that the child would be driven by a need to live up to the standards of such a legend. The fact of his paternity was to be clear to Nathan despite no evidence of it. "Fine," David would say a moment after his rant was finished. "Well, if that's all, I guess we can go to bed." He would get up from the table, look around at the dishes he had left and make a slight "get rid of all this mess" gesture before wiping his lips with his napkin and heading upstairs to bed, turning at the landing and giving his wife an impatient look as if to say "Well, are you coming?" To him, everything had been decided, and his wife, grateful that her confusion had been cleared up, would now gladly tuck him in after a hard month's assignment. Ellie, too flabbergasted and soft-spoken to come up with any sort of response, would meekly follow.

By the time she had managed to formulate a reply, it was usually the next morning, when David was sitting down to the conquering hero's well deserved scrambled eggs.

"So, Nathan," he'd say, "How have your academics been coming?"

"Fine, Dad," Nathan would say in a dead voice, and David would be off and running.

"You know, when I was your age, I used to dream about setting off on some adventure like this one, seeing new and interesting places, meeting new people and learning their customs, becoming a real man of the world, you know? I dreamt about setting sail on pirate ships, that was when I was really young, heh-heh, and I would have killed for an opportunity just like you have right now. (Nathan at the time was ten and would have killed for a Nintendo.) You know what? I'm going to make you an offer. How'd you like to come along with me on my next assignment, after this one of course. I bet you'd like that, huh? Well, if you do all your homework and do just what your mother here tells you to do, I might let you come--"

"David." Ellie would try to get his attention.

"Wait a minute sweetheart, I'm trying to explain something to David here. Do you realize how few kids are as privileged as you, not to be in that mind numbingly boring sausage factory called suburbia? (Nathan: "Yes, dad.") I--"

"David."

"Yes dear?" He would look up at her with a puzzled expression. Why is this woman interrupting my breakfast?

"David, I think we should talk. About how long you're away."

A mildly irritated look would pass over his face, but then he would say, with infinite patience, "Oh, sweetie, I thought we settled this yesterday. Anyway, I've got a flight to catch. We'll talk about it next time." He was like a game show host-- "I'm sorry, we're out of time."

"Keep it real, Nathan. Obey your mother. Think about that trip I told you about." He winked. "See ya."

Nathan would push his eggs around his plate, then look up at Ellie with an attempt at cheer.

"Well, maybe he'll take us both on that trip."

"Maybe," Ellie would say. "Nathan, could you go clean up your room?"

"Sure." He would get up swiftly, kiss his mother on the forehead, and go to clean his already spotless room, while Ellie pushed eggs around on her plate with a fork until she sighed, then got up and scraped the dishes into a sink while she tried to put it out of her mind.

It wasn't always like that. Ellie would be glum and Nathan would be quiet for a couple of days after David had been home, but then they would both perk up and do something themselves. They would go deep into the heart of the city (the embassy and most of the houses of it's employees were on the outskirts) in search of an adventure. They would go shopping a lot in the marketplace, Nathan dragging his mother by the hand from stall to stall and insisting she try on the most outlandish pieces of jewelry, hold the brightest pieces of fabric up to her. "Mom, you'd look great in this," he'd insist, and she'd laugh and deny it.

Nathan especially loved the bird market. There were toucans and parrots perched in long rows on sticks, their right feet tied down with bits of reed. Sparrows and pigeons hopped around underfoot and picked up the bits of food the messy parrots dropped. Ellie thought the bird market stunk, but Nathan liked it so much she would usually go there just for him.

They would eat lunch anywhere that had an outdoor table so they could watch the people go by. The they would catch a movie, usually either an action movie David would have deemed "commercialized Hollywood crap", or a Woody Allen. They were both big Woody Allen fans, and fortunately most of Kudesh was too. "Manhattan" was always playing somewhere.

Whether the movie was an action flick or "Annie Hall", they would always come out of the theater the same way. Nathan would be mugging, imitating the main character or repeating the funniest lines in accents that made them even funnier, and Ellie would be near tears with laughter.

Nathan was a born clown. He could do dead on impersonations, and came up with routines; Mick Jagger in a Big Bird suit; George Bush in a wind tunnel; Houdini stuck in the elevator. He could throw his voice, walk on his hands, and imitate almost every animal he'd ever heard. He could make his hamsters, Vernon and Ethel, argue over who was tracking all the wood chips into the cage. He could mime a man working on a three billion piece jigsaw puzzle. (He would fit the second to the last piece firmly into place with a look of great satisfaction, reach into the box to retrieve the last piece, reach around, feeling nothing, turn the box upside down and shake it, becoming gradually more and more alarmed, and proceed to rip the imaginary house apart looking for the missing piece. In the end he would become have a fit, stalk off, and come back with an imaginary chainsaw with which he would saw the fictional puzzle table in half. He would elegantly and with great ceremony light a match and set fire to the wreckage. Then he would find the missing piece.)

Their friends were also embassy workers, and they had someone over for dinner, or ate dinner at someone else's house, once or twice every week. Nathan was friends with almost all the kids, and would play in the backyard while the parents talked. The backyards were uniformly square, small, and dusty, with a high clay wall around them and chalk marks drawn out for games. Usually a basketball court and a baseball diamond were superimposed over each other, one drawn in blue chalk and the other in white on the hardened ground. Soccer was played with two laundry baskets and whatever rectangular room was available.

There were rules for any number of players, since you never knew how many kids there would be. For instance: in three-person baseball, one person would throw, one would bat, and one would catch until the batter got on base, at which point the catcher would become the new batter and have to retrieve his own strikes. If he got a hit before the runner had ran (usually stolen) all the bases, the pitcher would have to pitch to himself, straight up into the air, and then they would all run the bases because there was no one to toss them out. Then a new inning would start.

Three-person soccer was more competitive. Two would gang up against one, who had to play defense to his or her tipped-over laundry basket with no one to play offense. When the goal was finally made, (usually against the one-person team), one of the two-person team became the one-person team and had to fend for themselves.

Ping-pong and tetherball were two of the few blessedly minimalist games that would worked well with only two kids, along with pool and table hockey. They also made up elaborate obstacle races with seesaws made out of old pieces of plywood, walls and fences to be climbed, and lots of old tires. Rarely did a year go by that some kid didn't get tetanus running barefoot through these mazes and had to get a shot.

The adults always threatened to make them wear tennis shoes, but the kids' feet were already tougher than those slippery bottomed canvas rags. The shoes stayed off. And the kids darted on old indestructible dirt bikes through the dipping, curving pathways that wound between the walls other people's backyards, overshadowed by grape leaves.

The adults drank wine and talked about those subjects universally boring to all but the most cerebral of their children; weather and politics. Occasionally something juicy and amusing would be said about someone on the board of directors for the embassy school; but the majority of the conversation would have bored to tears any child not yet dull enough to enjoy ten minutes of speculation on the exact quality of the "mugginess" outside. No one under ten with any hopes that adulthood might be interesting should listen to the conversation of people who work in somewhat dangerous conditions. They live and work in very interesting circumstances; thus they become boring as a defense mechanism.

The reason we should pay attention to Ellie is this: she was not a boring person. While quiet and able to converse at an extraordinary length about the weather, Ellie was in fact an extremely terrific person, one who had the capacity to change her own circumstances quite easily if only she used her imagination. Of course, she did not know this. (Do you think she would have been hanging around with a clod of such colossal size as David if she did?) Ellie St. Cloud, sitting there dipping a piece of bread into the dish of olive oil on the table, had to date not done very much imagining, but as she inserted the bread into her mouth and chewed, you could see she was beginning to get an inkling.

It took her several more years to figure it out, years in which she said "Yes," to David more times than any human should have and let him walk over her more times than most humans could have. But the thing she figured out that night, chewing away on her oil-saturated bread, not really listening to the conversation of the people around her, was that she was bored. It was not such a large step from realizing boredom to deciding to do something about it. It was a good first step.

The second puzzle piece fell into place while she was making dinner one night, rice and bean curry. She was watching Nathan (who was now about seventeen) at the dining room table, bent over his homework, when she realized that if she did not want her son to grow up to be the exact humorless type that his father was, she had better do something about it, and fast. She flicked off the burner under the curry and went around to the table, slapping her hands together.

"Close those books," she ordered.

Nathan started and looked up from his papers. "Huh?"

"I said, clean up those books, we're going out." She reached for her coat and purse. "Come on."

"But Mom, we haven't even eaten dinner yet, and I..."

"We'll catch a bite to eat out there. Besides, you hate my curry."

"No I don't-"

"Yes you do. Now come on. I'm not going to wait all night."

"Well, all right." Nathan, unused to doing this, slowly put his books away in a new place so he would be sure to remember them when he got back.

"Nate, do you have a fake I.D.?" Ellie asked as she stepped out the door.

"Mom? I mean, No! I mean,"

"I'm not going to castigate you over it, Nathan, I'm just asking, do you have a fake I.D.?" She gave him an "it's okay" sort of look.

"Uhmmm, yeah. Okay. I have one."

"Do you have it on you?"

"No."

She stopped in the street. "Well, go back and get it, for God's sake.

What kid doesn't carry his I.D. in his wallet?"

Nathan's mouth opened and closed, and he turned around and went jogging back up the street to the house. As Ellie stood there in the street, she wondered how long it had been since she had had some fun.

She couldn't help being sort of scared. She had forgotten to turn off the burner light, hadn't she? And had she turned on the answering machine? And how long did it take a seventeen year old boy to find his fake I.D., anyway?

He came back panting and out of breath. He was out of shape. She took a look at the card.

"This is good work. Where did you get this, anyway?"

"Some kid at school," he said guardedly. She didn't press. She handed it back to him.

"Nice." He put it uncomfortably in his wallet, as if he was hoping he didn't have to use it. She set off down the street and he followed like a puppy.

"Mom, where are we going?"

"Somewhere you'll need that, I guarantee you."

"Ohh, Mom, couldn't we just go to a movie?"

"Absolutely not."

They ended up in a fairly tame bar. Ellie felt a little bad that she hadn't managed to ferret out a slightly scungier place, but then she was a forty-year-old woman, and she couldn't have gone any deeper into the city without Nathan having a heart attack. They had a beer and ordered something unidentifiable and spicy.

They talked things over.

"You know, Nathan," she said, (she was slightly drunk), "I didn't even want to come to this country. Your father talked me into it. I thought it was going to be one of those super-oppressive places where they made you wear a veil. You know, Taliban regime?"

Nathan nodded. He was carefully watching over his mother's shoulder in case of any trouble.

"Don't do that."

"Do what."

"Watching out for me in case a local takes an interest. Your father does that and I hate it. It's sexist and condescending, not to mention thoroughly racist. You're acting like a tourist from the bloody States."

Nate grinned. "You're drunk, Mom."

"I know. Be good enough not to draw attention to it. And order me some more..."

"I think they're chicken."

"Okay. They're delicious, whatever they are." Nathan ordered another platter.

"So, Mom, if you don't mind my asking, what..."

"Are we doing here?"

"Something like that."

"Okay. Here's the deal. I want you to know everything I have to tell you that can possibly help you in your later life, and I want you to hear it straight from me, not in some memoirish way when I'm eighty and you've gotten yourself into a track where it won't make any difference." Nathan, she noticed, was sinking down in his seat as if to receive yet another of his father's "go on the straight and narrow path less taken by idle minds" speeches. She wondered if she was too late.

"First. I would suggest you forget all the crap your father has shoveled down your throat about how only the strong survive, only the Jedi live long and prosper, etcetera etcetera." Nathan was perking up, but it turned out he only wanted to correct her.

"Mom, 'live long and prosper' is Star Trek, not Star Wars."

She narrowed her eyes at him and he shut up. "As I was saying, I would suggest you learn how to be wily and a little mean, because all the nobility your father keeps rattling on about means less in the real world than a first cousin who is the editor of a major news magazine, which is what your father had."

"I thought Dad-"

"Started in the copy room and worked his way up? Not bloody likely."

"You say 'bloody' a lot when you're drunk."

"You know, your father always says he hates the sight of a woman drunk. I always hated the sight of a pompous jerk, myself."

"Your personality is just unfolding before my eyes."

"My drunken personality, Nathan. I'm trusting you to take me home when the time comes."

"In that case you're in trouble. I should have dragged you out of here an hour ago."

They laughed. "Oh, I could have killed your father when I first saw the place," Ellie remembered, leaning back. "I was so disappointed. I said, "on behalf of the child in my belly," that's you, "I will crawl out through the desert before I allow you to accept a position here." Of course, he already had."

"But you like it now, don't you?"

"Yes. Of course I like it. I have friends here, I know the streets, the shops, the smells. I like it. And every time I bring up America, David throws that in my face. "Well, you like it here, don't you?" And I have to answer yes, because I do. And he says, "Well there you go." But that's not the whole picture, you know? I have family in Michigan I haven't seen in years. I have old college friends I miss dearly, and they can't afford to come out here."

"Casey and Sam."

"Yep, those are the ones. And others. But David just says, "You can't have it all. You have to sacrifice if you want to change the world."

"Well, damnit, I do want it all! And frankly, I've been here for seventeen years, and I don't see that we've made much of a difference. The politics are still non-democratic. The war is still on. David says to be patient, but can't someone else come in and be patient in my place? I don't see where we're shaking the earth."

"We are making some progress," Nathan said neutrally.

"Like what? We've taught a bunch of rich diplomats' kids to speak English. We've sent hundreds of pictures back to a country that doesn't look at them. Frankly, I don't think we've done diddly that couldn't have been done by a mail order course and one smart reporter in a week."

"You're awfully cynical."

"David has exhausted my capacity for hope."

"Personally or professionally?"

"Both." They stared at each other for a moment across the table.

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know."

Nathan laid his hands flat on the table. "Well, I think we've about used up the insight this place can offer us. Wanna go see a Woody Allen?"

"All right." Ellie slid her feet around to the floor and put one hand on the table, one hand on the back of her seat, in order to hoist herself out of the booth.

Nathan got up and offered her a hand. "Need a boost?"

"Sure."

They walked, leaning on each other, to the nearest movie theater. It was one they'd been in years before, and it showed one movie over and over again all night long. If you bought one ticket, you could sit there all night and watch it as many times as you liked. You could leave, get a bite to eat, come back, nobody cared. "Everybody Says I Love You" was playing.

"Just my luck," said Ellie as Nathan steered her inside, looking up at the sign. "A musical. I already feel like I'm back on Broadway." Ellie's dislike of musicals was well known.

The movie was not half bad. Ellie actually enjoyed it quite a lot. When it was over Nathan asked if she wanted to stay and watch it again.

"Sure, what the hell," said Ellie. If David called he could just leave a message. "But get us a snack, would you?" Nathan came back with pita bread sandwiches full of olives, bean curd, chicken, tomatoes, and onions. Ellie dripped tomato juice on her sweater and stared at the screen, leaning over to Nathan to say, "These are incredibly good. Where did you find these?"

"There's a guy out there with a cart," Nathan said. "I had to run to catch him, but they're good sandwiches, aren't they?"

"Very."

They watched the movie until dawn, three showings total. By the time the sky got blue outside, they were singing along with the songs as they came along. Ellie had developed a hopeless crush on Ed Norton, and Nathan was holding a pretty big blowtorch for Julia Roberts. They had eaten six packets of toasted almonds between them (Nate liked his sugared, Ellie preferred hers salted), and drank about two gallons of water to wash the almonds down. By the fifth round of snacks, the kid working at the refreshments counter had fallen asleep, and Nathan leaned over the counter to get the food himself, leaving the money underneath the sleeping kids' hand.

When they left, the sun was coming up and the bricks, clay, stucco, and smooth stones of the city of Kudesh were already gathering the heat which they would radiate throughout most of the following night. Pigeons whipstitched the air together with little sewing machine steps. The first daily call to prayer rattled through tinny loudspeakers, reminding Ellie of the PA system in her grade school back in Flint, Michigan.

They walked along the edge of the canal that ran through the city, a smooth square trough carved out of the ground hundreds of years ago. The walls of the canal had been covered with a layer of red clay two feet thick, pounded with the hands of thousands of slaves, and dried to a powdery, smooth shine in the sun. Soft green algae grew on the bottom of the canal and dried out at least once every year during the dry season. After the winter rains in the northern territories, the water could reach a depth of ten feet and race along at a dangerous pace.

During most of the year, though, the water ran about four feet deep and faithfully reproduced the blue of the skies in a narrow strip between the reflections of its walls. The canal ran through all the important districts of Kudesh, past the mosques, through the marketplace, and next to the airstrip where the Lear jets of visiting dignitaries landed and sent up a cloud of dust every year or so. Women washed laundry in it, even though laundromats existed. Boys went swimming in it, cannonballing in from the sides even when the water was dangerously thin. Birds drank from it.

Oysters attached themselves to its walls. Light barges made of thin slats of wood and tin navigated it, pushed by men standing in the back, holding an iron-tipped pole with which to grasp and move over the bottom. You could walk along its length in about an hour and forty-five minutes, crossing Kudesh diagonally in the process. It would take much longer to cross Kudesh by any other means, as the streets were so convoluted and confusing that even the best taxi-cab drivers did not know them well and had to rely on guesses and compasses. You could spend a week trying to walk across Kudesh, though it was not a large city. As a result, most people who had a short distance to walk followed the signs to the canal and used its sidewalks. Some of the gigantic stones that lined its edges were larger and older than those of the pyramids; some of the sidewalks were gray asphalt, built in the last three years. Sometimes you had to walk on a board where someone's house inconsiderately encroached upon the edge of the canal. Sometimes you actually walked over someone's tin roof. The sandstone blocks Nathan and Ellie were walking over were not quite as old as the pyramids, but they were close.

Sandstone glows red when the sun hits it, and Ellie's blond hair caught fire in the reflected light. They were in the marketplace section of downtown Kudesh, and the vendors were just beginning to open up. Nathan was making fun of one of the characters in the movie, and Ellie was leaning on his arm, screaming with laughter.

When the bomb went off, the initial shockwave and the shaking of the sidewalk they were standing on almost tipped them off their feet, and they both looked in the direction of the marketplace. When a second later the rubble came shooting at them in a cloud of concrete dust, Nathan had time to grab Ellie and push her into the canal in front of him. They hit the bottom as the debris reached the place they had been standing, and when they came back up, gasping for air, thousands of pebbles and flaming fragments of rubble came raining down on them.

Nathan got hit with a piece of corrugated tin such as is commonly used for roofing, and started bleeding from the scalp, right above his hairline.

He was holding onto Ellie so tightly she could barely expand her lungs to breathe. The air she did get was full of concrete dust. She started to choke and cough, and could not see for all the dust and water in her eyes. Nathan heard her sputtering, and, lifting her arm over his neck, began to slog through the waist-deep water, pulling her along with him, going downstream.

The bomb had been set off by a terrorist organization with links to the neighboring country and loyalty to the conservative president ousted by the majority of that country's citizens in a democratic election several years ago. This politician was trying to make a comeback in Kudesh and liked making a forceful first impression.

No Ellie knew was killed in the explosion.

David, on the border of this neighboring country, suddenly had a lot of very dramatic pictures to take. Strings of ammunition around the necks of civilians, young boys enlisted to fight in the rapidly escalating war between the countries, and old men painting symbols and slogans on the sides of tanks. When he found out his wife and boy had themselves been near the site of a bombing, he dropped his camera and ran to the nearest military communications station, where he nearly broke a translators' neck when the information was slow. When he found out they were okay, though, he ordered a telegram sent reading "HONEY GREAT YOUR OK. WILL BE BACK SOON AS ASSIGNMENT ALLOWS. GREAT PICTURES. GIVE HUG TO NATHAN."

Ellie, sitting in a hospital bed next to Nathan's and drinking some cooling nutritional sludge through a straw, read the telegram once before folding the thin yellow paper, setting it down on the bedside, and reaching out to stroke Nathan's hair away from his forehead.

When David got back he embraced Ellie and Nathan as though he had rushed straight home instead of waiting for a week to get the perfect portfolio of pictures to send back to Washington.

"Oh, honey," he said, kissing her on the forehead. "It's so good to see you. I'm so glad you're all right." He hugged her feverishly, and she could feel his heart beating fast underneath his shirt. She wondered idly if he had run the last block and a half to get his pulse up to a concerned level.

"So, how was it, tell me all about it," David said, grabbing himself an egg salad sandwich. He sat down and listened attentively as Nathan described jumping into the canal and showed his father his scar, hidden in his hair. He was glad to hear his son had acted like a hero, and grinned as though being told a good war story.

Ellie felt disgusted. She got up and got her coat.

"I'm going for a walk," she said.

"Okay," David said, not really noticing.

As she left the house, she heard David clap his hands together and say to Nathan, "Well, I guess it's just you and me, huh tiger?"

She walked that night alone in the purple and orange streetlights of Kudesh, one hand in her jeans pocket, the other swinging at her side. She took steps and drew the free, cool, velvety air deep into her lungs. She felt as though she was getting everything she needed from that air, and the streaks of sunset left at the far edge of the sky were pink like the inside creases on the joint of a finger.

She got home and David was waiting. She got silently undressed and got into bed. He got in beside her and she rolled over to face the ceiling. The fan slowly rotated in an undetectable breeze. She did not want to have an argument, so she did not start out with a question.

"David," she said, "Our marriage is ending."

It took him long enough to get it. He argued, said "I refuse to listen to this", rolled over and feigned sleep. He went on long assignments and hoped she'd feel better when he got back. She hired a lawyer back in Flint whom her sister had recommended, and faxed papers back and forth to him at great expense, getting her end of the bargain all sealed away before David would even look at papers. Finally one day she decided she had had enough stonewalling, left a note explaining her absence for Nathan to find on the refrigerator door, and hitched a ride on a military Jeep with a soldier who was heading out to David's general area. She brought the papers clutched in her hand. She had highlighted the portions requiring his signature and brought a very inky pen so he couldn't say he had nothing to sign with. The soldier was very pleasant and insisted on driving her, out of his way, to David's exact location, in fact right up to the rock on which David was sitting, taking pictures of tanks lined up with soldiers eating their lunches on them. Ellie thanked her driver profusely, he said it had been no problem and a pleasure, and she hopped out.

She climbed the rock to where David sat snapping pictures. She sat down next to him.

"Here are the papers," she said, sliding them onto his knee underneath his bent steadying arm.

He let one hand go from the camera and felt around until he had the pen she offered. He took his eye from the viewfinder for a moment and looked down.

"You get the house here, and the car," she said. "Nathan and I get air fare home."

"What about the stuff in Flint?" he asked.

They tilted their heads towards each other as she pointed out the clauses.

"Here's the house, I'm going to live with my sister for a while anyway so that stays joint until you can come back and we can deal with it. The bank account gets split three ways. A third for you, third for me, and the other third goes into a college fund for Nathan. I was thinking these stocks for part of it..." and she showed him the list.

"Looks good to me," David said, running his finger down the list and tapping one. "Oh, oh, but this one, you don't want to do that. I've been hearing bad things about its management. Fortune."

"Okay," Ellie said. "The stuff in storage-"

"You can have the car there," David said quietly.

"... Thank you."

She showed him all the places to sign.

Ellie and Nathan, who was by then nineteen, arrived in Flint Michigan on November 8th, 1998. It was a cold gray day, and there was thick sleet, white as vanilla icing, covering the windows of all the unused planes parked on the tarmac where they landed. Ellie's sister, Louise, was there to meet them. She hugged Ellie, then Nathan. Nathan was taller than she was and twice as dark. Neither he nor his mother were dressed for the cold. Louise hustled them into her car, a little silver import made in the last two years. Nathan had not seen any of the new models of cars, and he stared raptly out the window, through the fog of his breath, as they moved down the highway towards Louise's house.

Louise talked and gestured, looking in the rearview mirror occasionally at Nathan. How did Ellie and David have such a tall handsome boy, she wondered, and sent Ellie in the passenger seat a small, subtle glance of congratulations. Ellie looked over her shoulder at him; then she nodded "Thank you, I think he worked out well too" back at Louise.

Louise told Ellie she didn't have to do anything for years, as far as she was concerned. After living in Kudesh and all, she was entitled to a break. Ellie said no, I like to work. She got a job in the federal building in Lansing. It was a long drive, but she had a carpool and the government would put you up in a room if the roads were too icy.

When Nathan went to college, he chose one in Flint and worked during the summer at the same building Ellie did, as a messenger. The secretaries loved him because he was fast, smart, and a joy to look at. Every day he passed Ellie's office door a few times and stuck his head in to see if she needed anything, more rubber bands or paper clips, a sandwich or a Diet Sprite from the vending machine. She would shake her head yes or no, and he would grin at her for a brief second, then disappear. Ellie spent most of her time filing, clipping and stapling papers together, filing things in bright neon color coordinated folders, and sending letters to various departments in the building. Once in a while she would be asked to type up a letter detailing her experience with phonics as opposed to word recognition as pertaining to the teaching of English as a second language.

Ellie did this sort of stuff all day, boring busy work which made her fingers ache and her neck stiff. She did not miss David or Kudesh, but she did not have very many interesting things happening in her life as it was. She did not read the news, talk about her experiences, or lobby against terrorism. She watched TV in her time off, read, learned to cook new recipes, and went to the movies.

After almost a year of this, Ellie agreed to go on a trip with her sister to see Mount Rushmore. While on the trip, they pulled over to a scenic overlook and got out to stretch their legs. Louise handed Ellie a camera and asked if she wanted to take a picture.

Ellie took the camera and stood, legs planted firmly on the ground in an upside-down "V", and raised the camera's viewfinder to her eye. She saw a songbird sitting on a shiny aluminum soft-drink can someone had thrown out their car window-- a picture dripping with irony, a picture David would have loved. She moved the camera over. She saw an eagle-- not a bald eagle, but an eagle nonetheless-- perched on a dead branch, looking fierce. Nope. Too sincere for Ellie's taste. Then she saw her sister. Louise was standing next to her shiny imported car, tucking a wispy strand of her brown hair behind her ear. She was not looking at Ellie or at the scenic over look. Instead, she was looking up the road to the curve where it disappeared behind the man-cut cliff, and you could not see it anymore. She was looking a bit worried, wondering if her little car was going to make it, and a tad impatient too, wondering how long it was going to take Ellie to take this picture of the damn scenic overlook anyway.

Ellie raised the camera to her face and released the shutter.