together. The kids seemed to have forgiven her, though mornings like this made her realize that they hadn’t entirely. Those months of absence still clawed. She wished she could talk about her guilt with Brian, but the only time she’d tried he’d nodded and said, “I have this right? I’m supposed to feel bad that you spent four months at scout camp while I took care of the kids?”
Scout camp was clever, she had to admit. Plus… from any reasonable point of view… he was right. She just wished he could see she’d paid a price too.
* * *
She’d been near the top of her class from the beginning of training, so she’d known she was likely to have her pick of jobs. Agents rarely received New York or Washington for first assignments. Otherwise, the country was open. Brian had suggested somewhere in the West, ideally San Diego or Denver. He’d seemed surprised she wanted Birmingham.
“Alabama summers are even more miserable than this.” A sultry Saturday night, Philly in August. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a row house east of Center City. The place was cheap and had been an easy walk to work for Rebecca, but in the summer even the walls seemed to sweat.
“I’ve always wondered about the South.”
“Charlottesville’s not the South?”
“The Deep South. Growing up, everybody I knew treated that part of the country like it barely had electricity. Hookworms and Confederates.”
“Don’t you think the FBI thing proved you aren’t your mom? Now we have to move to Alabama?”
“Plus the cost of living is nothing down there, we can finish paying back my loans.”
She had another reason, too. Word at Quantico was, small offices were best for first postings. Every new agent got thrown on scut work like background checks. But the little offices offered a better chance for a real role on cases. And the Birmingham office was known for being aggressive about probing Alabama’s political corruption.
Neither of them liked Philadelphia. The city was a tattier version of Boston, filled with the same pointless loathing for New York. And Brian had had a hard time finding work. Small businesses here didn’t care much about the Internet. The big law firms and financial services companies downtown wanted their tech staffers to be full-time employees with college degrees. Brian was stuck in the middle. I’d be better off somewhere people aren’t so afraid of computers. Thus his preference for the West Coast.
Though Brian hadn’t had much chance to work anyway. Someone had to take care of the kids, and Rebecca’s maternity leave for Kira had ended after four months. Then she worked sixty-hour weeks at Poynter. She’d been exhausted even before she got pregnant again. And Tony had been a difficult pregnancy. During her first trimester she’d thrown up so often that she tore blood vessels around her eyes, like a late-stage alcoholic. Morning sickness didn’t begin to describe the feeling. She survived on Gatorade, crackers, and gummy vitamins. But she made up for all those missed meals later. By the time Tony mercifully emerged, she’d gained seventy-two pounds.
But who was counting, ha ha.
Four months later, she was back at work. Again. Sixty-hour weeks. Again. And when she wasn’t, her life was changing diapers and shopping for store-brand groceries, saving a few bucks to pay down her loans. She tried not to think about her Wesleyan friends, who all seemed to hopscotch from Tokyo to Budapest before landing in Williamsburg to work as set designers. (How they paid the bills was a question everyone was too polite to ask, at least out loud.)
Rebecca knew that as far as misery went hers was mild. Her kids were healthy. She worked in an air-conditioned office, not a sweatshop. Even so, she couldn’t escape the sense that she’d gotten old fast, that somehow she’d cheated herself.
But she’d chosen this path, no one had made her. And for her these years of pain had a point, an endgame. Quantico. The Federal Bureau of Investigation.
What about her lawfully wedded husband? What was the point for him? She didn’t know whether Brian had understood what their lives would become after her graduation. She felt almost afraid to ask. Between her days writing memos and her nights breast-feeding, she didn’t have the emotional energy for a conversation about their lives and roles. When Brian would have a chance to collect on the chits