Life Undercover Read online

  The light’s pretty dim down there, filtered through dusty subterranean windows, so we use my plastic glowworm as a lantern, which means leaving him in the sunlit garden every second day to charge. From time to time, Mom comes down to do the washing, but other than that, our kingdom is pretty impervious to the world beyond.

  I wear roller skates and my brother builds houses out of Lincoln Logs, dwarfed by our giant cardboard spookhouse. “We have to protect the villagers,” he says. We stage action figures around the cabins and keep Ben’s plastic vampire bat inside the haunted castle, in case maybe it scares them. “Snowy will defend them,” I croon, brushing the old dog’s wiry fur as he sleeps on the floor. Sometimes Ben’s old teddy bear Chester comes down to sit beside him, lumpy and lopsided.

  We’re down in that basement one day, fending off spaceship attacks, when my mother pads down the stairs to tell us that Ben’s letter has come. It’s his acceptance to Wicken Park, the English boarding school he’s supposed to attend before Eton.

  “What if he doesn’t like it?” I ask. “What if they’re mean to him?” My mother sits down on the bottom step.

  “Well, then he can write to tell us,” she says gently. “And we’ll take him away.” She turns to Ben. “The teachers will probably read your letters, though, so we’ll need a code word. One that wouldn’t be used in normal letter writing, so you don’t use it by mistake.”

  It’s confusing, why we’re sending Ben somewhere he might need a code word to escape. I don’t even know what Wicken Park looks like, can’t picture the place that’s stealing my brother in my mind. I glance at the cartoon monsters on the side of the spookhouse. One of them has a jagged blank face where the tape’s pulled off the ink. It’s the most frightening.

  “What about ‘haunted house’?” I ask.

  “Perfect,” Mom says and gives us both a tight squeeze.

  * * *

  —

  We treat every day of the hot, sticky summer that follows like numbered jewels, noting every time an activity might be our last—the last time we pick mulberry leaves for Ben’s silkworms in our quest to produce a parachute; the last time we walk the wooden locks across the Georgetown canals, playing brave sailors atop the evil pirates’ plank; the last time we sit in the way back of our parents’ station wagon on our way to the John Brown Wax Museum, with its muskets and its freedom fighters and its hooded hangman’s rope.

  In the midst of those last months, my mother’s belly begins to swell like the popcorn frying pan on the stove and our parents tell us we’re going to have a sister.

  The news doesn’t really register until we both come down with chicken pox and Mom has to move to a hotel to protect the growing baby. We howl for her, demanding that she read us stories over the phone, then declaring crossly that it isn’t the same. Our dad does his best to distract us. He plays Carl Sagan lectures on the record player. We join in when Carl says “billions” in his magic, echoey voice. But it’s not as much fun the third or fourth time, so he switches it to Billy Crystal and we all shout, “You look marvelous!” even though we’re covered with welts.

  When the records run out, Dad breaks out the big guns. He teaches us to make a Mobius strip. Loop a strip of paper into a circle, add a twist in the middle, tape the ends together, and “ta-da,” he says, “you’ve made eternity.” I look at him like he’s crazy, but then he tells me to draw a line along the surface without taking my pen off the paper and it ends up going all the way around, one long, continuous streak that marks both sides, like magic.

  “I think it’s probably worth getting chicken pox to learn how to make eternity,” Ben says to me. “Don’t you think?” Then my grandmother arrives to help, and our delicious, stolen sliver of Dad’s attention slips away, like sunlight under a closed cupboard door.

  That Fourth of July, Ben and I stand on the crumbling brick wall overlooking the Potomac docks as the fireworks crash-boom through the sky. “Imagine that’s the sound of the British approaching,” Ben says. I close my eyes and imagine hard. An army is coming to kill our family. With every crash, they get closer. I start to cry. And for the first time, I understand that fireworks aren’t always for fun.

  The next week, Antonia is born. She’s only a baby, though, and doesn’t make up for the fact that Ben is going to be gone. Mom takes to sleeping under her crib because she cries so much in the night. Then, at summer’s end, she comes with us, in her soft, pink clothes, to deliver Ben to school across the sea.

  We drive through the deep of the English countryside to Wicken Park, an imposing stone manor house straight out of a Dickensian movie set. Ben and I stand side by side in the circular drive, watching the other boys arrive with their big trunks and foppish hair. The palm of Ben’s hand is pressed into mine, and I can feel it shaking. The school looks like our cardboard spookhouse. Well, we picked the right code word, I think. But I don’t say that out loud. Instead, I go for “Pretty good kingdom to protect from the pirates!” and he nods with so much courage, it’s hard for me to swallow. Finally, the tears spill out of him.

  “Crying like a little girl,” one of the foppish boys crows. “Boo-hoo. Better stay home and play with your sister.” I drop Ben’s hand to protect him from their teasing. Then suddenly he is gone, swept up by the brusque matron and hustled through the doors. I can still feel the warmth of his fear in my palm.

  We stand for a while, looking at the windows, in case he should find one and wave, but their panes just reflect the chill of the evening sky.

  * * *

  —

  Almost as soon as we get home, the furniture in our house begins to find its way into packing boxes. My dad tells me we’re moving to England, too. Not to the countryside, like Ben, but to London, where he’s going to advise Maggie Thatcher’s government on what to do with the coal industry. I watch through the window as my parents hand Snowy to a couple who pulls up in a VW van. I go downstairs and sit in the spookhouse alone.

  When we arrive in London, I claim the top-floor bedroom. It has a sloped ceiling, tucked under the eaves, and a window I take to climbing through, once my mom’s read me a story, kissed my hair, and turned out the lights. I sit there most nights, balanced on the roof shingles, my feet tucked under my nightgown, watching Big Ben strike ten. The clock’s a few blocks away, its giant face hanging in the night like a lost moon among the chimneys. And floating up there with it, I feel both small and vast.

  Every month, Ben comes to London for the weekend to see us and we pad around Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, doing brass rubbings and making up stories about the poets and kings whose graves line the walls like chilly apartments. When we get home, baby Antonia is usually asleep and Mom has left a sign on the door, pleading with us to be as quiet as mice. We never tire of bursting inside, squeaking our loudest rodent impressions and collapsing into gales of laughter.

  At the end of each visit, Ben gives me a hug and lets me believe he doesn’t mind going back. I catch glimpses of the sorrow he’s hiding. Little exchanges that end with a look asking me not to push further.

  “How’s Chester?”

  “He’s not around anymore.”

  “What happened to your head?”

  “Fell.”

  “Who’s your best friend?”

  “Matron, I guess.”

  I wish he’d use the code word. Then Mom would pull him out and he’d be home and everything would go back to how it was. But he doesn’t. He just gets quieter and taller, and soon even when he’s home, he feels far away.

  I start at the American School in St. John’s Wood. There are cool kids there. I’m not one of them. I take refuge in two other outcasts, Lisa and Laura. When the cool girls start a club called the Pink Ladies and won’t let us join, we start our own club, the Cool Cucumbers, and spend recess sweeping the playground to help out the custodian. When it rains, we build robots from discarded cardboar
d boxes. Peter the Postman is our masterpiece. A mailman robot, as tall as we are, with a locked box in his belly in which to leave secret notes.

  Lisa and I get invited to a Pink Ladies sleepover. A girl named Cassie’s birthday. Feeling well out of our depth, we try to act grown-up, then promptly fall asleep. We’re awoken in the middle of the night and put on trial for disturbing Cassie’s mom. Cassie sits on a pile of pillows to act as the judge, and when the kangaroo court is finished, she sentences us to a night in her bedroom closet. We get locked in there together, amid Cassie’s shoes and sparkly sequined dresses, until our mothers come to liberate us in the morning.

  Somehow, the camaraderie outweighs the injury and we only grow closer. Laura and I write a dictionary for our own language and mock the cool kids in our new foreign tongue. Lisa shows me how to make a spiderweb of string all over my bedroom and hang bells on it to detect ghosts while we sleep. For three months, we are happy. Then the day after Christmas, my mother sits me down to tell me that Laura is dead. She was killed while flying home with her entire family, grandmother to infant brother, on the Pan Am flight bombed by Libyan terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland. I am eight.

  I fall quiet for long periods. I feel like my head is full of cotton. Feel sleepy and mute and numb. Finally, my dad teaches me to read the London Times. “You have to understand the forces that took her. It will seem less scary if you do.” I think of the faceless monster on the cardboard spookhouse and I know that he is right.

  Slowly my world is filled with a new cast of characters. Qaddafi and Thatcher and Reagan and Gorbachev. They sound like exotic fairy-tale people, wizards and witches and woodsmen living in distant magical forests. But their storybook showdowns can spill over into the real world, into my world, and steal my friends from the sky. So I have to pay attention.

  By June, I’m transfixed by images of a solitary student, standing his ground in front of a line of Chinese tanks in a place called Tiananmen Square. Tiananmen, the articles note, means Gate of Heavenly Peace. I stare at the pictures for a long time. He does look peaceful. Peaceful and powerful, making all those soldiers stand down.

  Other people see the man’s power, too. By November, they’re doing the same thing in Berlin, only this time they’re knocking down a wall. The newspaper says that more than a hundred people have been killed trying to get to the other side of that wall. The first was a woman named Ida, who tried to jump from her apartment window to get to her sister’s house. They’d always lived across from each other. Then overnight, the wall had appeared in the street between them and they hadn’t been allowed to pass. It reminds me of the wall that’s appeared between me and Laura. I root for the protesters as they hack it to pieces from on top of their cars.

  3

  We spend the summers at my mother’s parents’ house in the English countryside—a rambling old mansion with no proper heating, and mice in the cupboards. My grandfather is a British Raj sort of an antique who works in the city and is absent even when he’s home. My grandmother is a onetime athlete, banished to a wheelchair by polio at thirty-five. She’s funny and clever, so clever that she wrote all my grandfather’s papers when they met at the University of Edinburgh, and it gets under her skin when his pretty, young secretaries eye her crumpled legs and reference her in the third person, like a patient with dementia.

  “Does she need a blanket?” they ask, when they visit the house to take his dictation.

  “No, she does not,” my grandmother replies. “But she could use a gin and tonic.”

  My grandparents have adopted a son, Christian, from the Philippines, to keep them company now that their other children are grown. Christian and I are the same age, and my grandmother takes a sportswoman’s delight in setting us against each other in all manner of competitions. Going to collect the mail becomes a grand running race the length of the tree-lined drive. Card games become tests of memory when we’re challenged to recite the last twenty cards that were played, backward or by suit or rearranged into sequential order. Opening Christmas presents gets delayed until we’ve both swum the length of the pool under the ice that’s formed on its surface, diving in one hole and emerging, panicked and breathless, from the other, my grandmother clicking a stopwatch as soon as we roll out onto the cold concrete, panting in the frosty air. Summer vacations are punctuated by day trips, the grown-ups driving and Christian and me running to keep pace with the diesel station wagon as it winds its way toward town.

  As often as we can slip away; we bolt to the farthest corners of the grounds, where the gardeners haven’t cleared away the brush and we can play unburdened by the constant observation of the adults. We build worlds in those branches, full of righteous quests and storybook adventure. When it’s raining, we have to resort to hiding places in the house itself, up in the attic mainly, sifting through treasures from my grandfather’s travels. We love the mah-jongg set, with its ivory tiles covered in dragons and symbols. In one corner there’s a desk, with a typewriter and a ham radio. That’s our favorite place. The most sacred place. That’s where we spend wet summer days listening to static the way a gypsy peers at tea leaves, trying with all our might to decipher some distant message from the murk. Sometimes, we catch a word. Sometimes, even a sentence. Then we greedily try to respond, hungry to link hands across the current.

  “This is England. Over.”

  Static.

  “Do you copy? Over.”

  Usually more static. But now and then comes a voice from some far-flung corner of the globe.

  “England? Hello, England! Pretoria here.” Or São Paulo. Or Mumbai.

  We take turns, one of us on the radio dials and one of us typing notes, which we pull out of the typewriter at the end of each session and lay with ceremony on the pile from the days before. We cut out newspaper articles about each place we’ve contacted and tape them to the corresponding sheet. For the first time, I realize that I can actually communicate with the places in my father’s newspapers. For the first time, the storybook characters come within reach. It’s exhilarating to know that the outside world doesn’t just shake us, but we can also shake it. And it’s comforting to know that we’re not alone, especially when the adults call us downstairs and the games begin again.

  Who can do the most pull-ups, my grandmother challenges. Who can eat the most sausages? Christian hates sausages. He deposits one after the next in the fireplace behind us as we pretend to wolf them down. Then my grandmother’s eagle eye catches his sleight of hand and she demands that we eat the discarded links in double time, though they’re covered in splinters and ash.

  The one time my grandmother lets up is during our afternoon walks, when she shuffles from her regular wheelchair into a gigantic orange motorized version, affectionately called the Buggy. It looks like the space-walk chair astronauts use to maneuver around in the film at the Air and Space Museum. It has a joystick, like a Pac-Man machine, that controls little rubber tires with treads on them, like a moon rover. Every day, after lunchtime drinks and before evening cocktails, the grown-ups gather outside the mudroom for our afternoon walk. My grandmother leads the way, the MC of our parade atop her orange float, and Mom walks beside her, dropping bread for the ducks or pulling flowers from passing branches. Depending on who’s around, my uncles and aunts stroll with them, followed by we children, Ben and Christian and any other straggling cousins, surrounded by a pack of golden retrievers I pretend are lions.

  We make our way over fields and along the river, collecting tadpoles in jam jars and giving them to my grandmother to hold. There’s a train that runs along the ridge of the far hill, and we all stop and wave to it in the distance as it passes on its way to London. Sometimes we come across Trevor, the groundskeeper, piling leaves for a bonfire, and Christian and I stand so close we can feel the heat blistering against our cheeks and the smell of woodsmoke hangs in our hair till we get home. My grandmother never makes us run or recite or c
ompete on those walks. In the crisp country air, she is happy. And she lets us be happy, too.

  * * *

  —

  Christian and I are up in the attic one day, messing around on the radio, when we realize that downstairs is quiet. Nobody’s called us for hours. It’s tempting to just stay up there, but then again, silence might mean access to ice cream in the forbidden kitchen freezer. We pad down the back steps and find the grown-ups hushed in a semicircle around the television, watching a news report about the White House. Only it’s not the White House in Washington, D.C. It’s a different one. In Moscow. And it’s surrounded by tanks.

  The significance sets in. My dad is in Moscow. That’s why everyone’s quiet. Why they’re all squinting at the screen, like they might spot him in the crowd. He’s been working there these last few months, trying to change the law so people can own their own shops.

  “Does the government want its shops back?” I ask the adults. They shoo us away, but we plant ourselves in the corner and watch from the floor.

  Like all good news media showdowns, this one has heroes and villains. Hero Mikhail Gorbachev is locked in his house while villain Gennady Yanayev tries to steal control. Gorbachev has been giving people rights, and Dad’s been helping him. Yanayev wants to take all those right back. Along with the shops. And the money. And the country.

  My mother is trying my dad’s hotel, but the lines aren’t connecting.

  From our corner, we watch as Yanayev’s tanks close in on the capitol. The news is spilling into my real world again. Last time that happened, Laura died. I want to shout at the television, run upstairs to send a warning message out on the wire. Anything to change how this is unfolding.

  Then suddenly, live on TV, people begin to fill the streets. They wheel out their fruit carts and push empty streetcars into big metal zigzags. They block the path of Yanayev’s tanks. Just like the man in Tiananmen Square. They stand with arms linked for Gorbachev and their shops and their rights and my dad. They hold their ground. And the tanks stand down.