22Roses
Sarah looked down the barrel of her pistol, sights aligned, smoke rising from the silencer.
The terrorist leader was on the ground, red blood gathering around his body as if it were coming from a well in the ground beneath him and not the hole, small and neat on one end, his chest, large and ragged (she knew) on the other, his back. Entrance and exit.
Entrance and exit.
This was what she did. Enter and exit. A bullet. Leaving wounds.
She had left wounds in Burbank. Mortal wounds to Chuck, but serious wounds enough to Ellie and to Devon and to Morgan. She had abandoned them all. The asymmetry of being known to them and unknown to herself had rent her in two — the rending worse than the self-enforced rending of her life undercover, pretending to be someone she wasn't.
After Quinn, she had been pretending to be someone she was. It had been maddening. To be so loved, so loved that Chuck would have given the world for her, and to be so unsure that she barely recognized her husband as Chuck, much less as her husband.
Maddening too the physical, emotional pain of it all. To feel the surge of warmth and affection and desire she felt for a man who she did not know, and who knew her so well. It had been too much, too complete a disconnect between a head that was empty and a heart that was full. She could not get her head and heart together.
So she had gone back. Back to Langley and back into the field. Back to a life of self-division she understood, even if she hated it. A life in which her forgetfulness was deliberate, not enforced. She stopped thinking about what she was doing except in the narrowest, most pragmatic terms, the way she must have thought about it in the years before Burbank. She stopped thinking about good and evil and pretended those terms had either no meanings, or were coined and defined in Langley, the definitions settled by her mission assignment.
She was an assassin again often, as she had been for Langston Graham. She worked for another Director now, but the officeholder did not matter, just the office. She did what the office said. She accepted her assignments. Asked no questions. Kept herself numb. Her future existed only in perspective, where the converging lines of perspective were the mission parameters themselves. They met at a point and indicated her horizon. Burbank was far, far beyond that horizon and far, far beyond her thoughts. Her feelings.
Except that it was not. Her memories had not returned, not in earnest, although bits and pieces had come back to her, the ragged outline of five years of challenge and change. And she had come to know that she was desperately in love with a man she could not remember but who she somehow knew, and knew to be important to her past understanding, important in a way that she had not known any person could be important to another.
And so she had worked for six months, successful as ever, trying to deny what was undeniable. She was Chuck's wife. It was not just her legal status — she had called him once and they had talked about divorce, but he told her she would have to choose that, if it were chosen. He would comply with her choice if she insisted, but he would never concur in the choice. He had faxed her a copy of a prenup, handwritten, later that evening. Both their signatures were affixed at the bottom.
Affixed.
She had talked to a lawyer but never actually engaged her. She stayed married. She was his wife, not just legally but metaphysically.
Affixed.
How could her heart be affixed to a man who she believed a stranger? How could she belong in a life that she believed alien to her?
It was like she had awakened to be told she was from another planet, although she did not know it, and then finding that despite the utter unfamiliarity of her supposed homeworld, Planet Burbank, she could breathe there, move there, thrive there in ways that she could not on the planet she had taken to be her homeworld, Planet CIA.
She finally stowed her gun beneath her jacket, in her shoulder holster. As she did, a wave of homesickness for Chuck, for Burbank, hit her so viscerally and so violently she sank to her knees.
The sound of a powerful engine brought her out of visions of her husband, their home. A powerful sedan. Still in the distance, but coming. The bodyguards. She had lured the leader out but they were going to miss him soon enough. Now.
She got up and started running, cutting off the street and into a tiny alleyway. Doorways into squalid rooms lined the walls. Two men were hunched over a trash can, a fire lit inside it, trying to fight back the chill. She sprinted toward them and lept over them, hearing their gasp as she soared over their heads. Adrenaline filled her; she ran, faster and faster. She crossed the next street and continued in the alleyway, splashing through muddy, gray water emptied from the squalid rooms into the alleyway.
The car engine was still audible, but less close.
She crossed another street and turned up it, running toward her hotel. She ran one block more, then slowed as the sidewalk turned from deserted to more and more populous. She forced herself to match the pace of the other pedestrians. She got to her hotel and ducked inside. She could not hear the car anymore. She hurried through the lobby without running and onto the elevator.
A moment later, she was in her room, leaning against the closed door, gasping and sweaty. She wiped her face and waited for her breathing to slow. All her nerves were alive, ready. But she heard nothing out of the ordinary.
Her breathing less labored, she turned on the light. On the bed, empty when she left, was a bouquet of red roses. She pulled her gun, holding it in both hands, and she checked the room. No one was there.
She walked to the bed and thrust the gun into the bouquet. The scent of roses rose to her, sweet, delicate and lovely. There was a card.
She turned to the door. It was shut. She listened. No strange sounds.
The scent of roses encircled her, seemed to fill the room. She put her gun down just beside the bouquet and picked up the card. Her name was typed on the outside. Sarah.
She checked the card carefully, then bent down and pulled a knife from the sheath around her ankle. Working deftly but carefully, she slit the edge of the card. She leaned back as she opened it, extending her arms at the same time, distancing herself from the contents. Inside was nothing but a picture. She put her knife down — by her pistol — by the flowers. She put two fingers in the envelope and pulled the picture out.
It was a picture of Chuck. He was seated on brick steps that led up to a red door, the door framing him in the photo. He was holding a bouquet of flowers. Their red replicated the red of the door.
She turned it over. On the back, in Chuck's small, block print, were these words:
I found a way to buy it. The white house with the red door. Not the original one, but much the same. Better than the original. I've sent you the door's color, preserved for a time, in the shape of roses.
Come home to me, Sarah, my valentine. Come home to us. Our new home.
She stood there staring at the picture, hands shaking. — How had he done it? She did not know but it was so...Chuck. She still did not know the man in the photo as he knew her. But she thought she loved him as he loved her. Running had not changed that. Missions had not changed that. Hardening herself enough to perform assassinations again had not changed that — because the hardening would not become permanent. As soon as she thought of home, of Chuck, she went soft again.
As she had earlier, — after she pulled the trigger and sank to her knees. Some part of her had known the date, known it all day long.
February 14.
Entrance and exit. Chuck had entered her heart and would not exit. Her head could not show him out. Out the door. The red door of her heart.
He had made it his home. His was hers.
Her heart was affixed — and it did not give one goddamn where her head or her body was.
She went to her suitcase and grabbed her passport and her plane tickets to DC, a stack of cash. She called the desk for a taxi to the airport. Then she called and made arrangements for a flight from DC to Burbank. She could be there before the holiday was done, just barely. She texted the Director her words of resignation.
She picked up the roses and inhaled, leaving the pistol and the knife on the bed, and she left the suitcase behind too.
On the elevator, she tucked the roses in one arm and sent Chuck the first text she had sent him in weeks. She felt guilt and joy rise in her and she let the joy win.
What's the address? — S.
Happy Valentine's Day, if you are celebrating!
