Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,105

back her hair, and also to hear what she was saying besides “I want to go home,” because Esme could hear a word mewled among the rest, and this word was not home or even Mom but more beat-up, like a worry stone or blankie, the thing you’ve handled, clutched, cuddled so much it’s barely what it was, except—for you—it is that much more.

Every two seconds, a big rig rolled by with almost zero clearance. But if it was frightful outside, it was worse in the car.

Esme said, “Soon, buttercup, we’ll be going home really soon.” And when this seemed to make Ida cry worse, and when Esme could not produce tissues and instead offered up her sleeve, which was already drizzled in tears, she said, “Honey bun, what can I do? Just say the word.”

They were long past the upflue of pie, which meant this retching wasn’t about a biological intolerance to cars so much as the expulsion of childhood from her daughter’s life. How could you stay a child through this? Esme could barely watch. Heave, retch, weep. Face obliterated in afterdamp. “Anything you want,” she said. “Just tell me.”

“I want your phone”—and when it seemed like Esme was game for this, the crying rolled back, sobs were snuffles. Esme ransacked her bag and pockets.

Ida dialed fast and crammed the phone to her ear as though they were at the rodeo but she must be heard. Esme did not think who she was calling in the middle of the night; she was too spent with release from the dread that her daughter would cry this way for life.

It was ringing—no one was home—but as Esme reached for the phone, voicemail picked up and she heard her mother’s voice, and in this voice Esme apprehended the word Ida had been mumbling throughout. She’d been asking for her ma. Not Esme Ma, but Linda Ma.

If Esme had seen her green, no doubt Ida could see her blanch. She had forgotten to disconnect her parents’ phone? This should have come as no surprise, since she had not done anything apropos of their death except to mourn, and she had barely done that.

She did not listen to Ida’s message, but when Ida was done, she clammed the phone shut. “I keep calling,” Ida said. “Maybe their voicemail’s broken?”

“Try to get some sleep, tulip. I know this doesn’t seem like much of a vacation, but just you wait, tomorrow is going to be fun. You’ll see.”

“Will you spend the day with me?”

Esme looked out the window. The snow was piling up around the car. They would be iglooed in an hour. Her guess? Noah’s attempt to get her to the site was so low-fi, there couldn’t be anyone else besides Jim calling the shots. If this had been on a bigger dime, someone would have pulled in for rescue and transport. A better car. A motorcade.

“Let’s talk in the morning,” she said. “We’re going to be here for a while, and Mommy has some work to do.”

Ida settled in. If her body had taken over the rendering of grief in her life, it was too tired to play on. Esme watched her close her eyes, then looked at the index cards she had written so far. Her story was almost done.

39. Lo, this is getting impossible. Our daughter scares me. What have we done to her? I guess I just didn’t try very hard when I had the chance. Sure, we left New Paltz, but to understand what happened next, you’ll need some sense drummed into you. For one, let’s be frank: No way were we going to recruit defector POWs in North Korea. Too risky, too hard, too cruel. If our guys out there wanted to come home, we wouldn’t be able to help; if they wanted to stay, we wouldn’t be able to flip them without exerting pressure of the kind no one’s proud of later. I knew this—I think we all knew this—which is why they took me off Yul the second a more interesting, albeit improbable, contact came along. A guy—let’s call him J.T.—who owned a cake shop in Queens. He was a baker, once ran with the mob. He wore a Brylcreem pompadour that hadn’t moved in twelve years, and was connected to the feds, who leaned on him for news every now and then. But he wanted more out of life. He had issues, among them the sense that no one cared enough about U.S. POWs. And