Editor’s note: This column is part of a fictional weekly serial.
The land behind her grandfather’s house might have been a barnyard once, if with imagination one reconstructed the stone walls and weeded the garden. Cecilia had come outside to call Ian once she could be sure he would be at work and it would go straight to voicemail. Dusk encroached but she didn’t move from the uncomfortable deck chair, looking at the lawn, already looking to escape the people she’d come to visit. Whatever her grandfather had actually done with his life, she was only just beginning to be able to see him as a person instead of an abstraction, and she needed to romanticize his humanity before she could consider that he had had some other, hidden existence. She imagined him moving to the United States for college, a transition not dissimilar from the one she had made when she first left home. She imagined him standing on the edge of a party, feeling the thump and slam of music and bodies and desperately, desperately missing the farm, wanting to be back on the land. She didn’t know how a dance floor was supposed to compare to the hardened, tilled ground thawing from a November frost, or the food in the cafeterias to the comforting weight of a potato eased from the dirt with gentle fingers, or a bro’s handshake to the thrusting nuzzle of a cow’s warm nose at the end of the day.
Her mother whooshed onto the porch, the door banging against the siding and breaking Cecilia from her reverie. She pretended she’d been texting, feeling guilty and foolish. Alicia didn’t allow her any time for vulnerability, however.
“Ceel, that conversation obviously wasn’t how I wanted you to find out, but — I need you to trust me on this.” Ah, the t word. Did that ever work on anyone? “Your grandfather is harmless, don’t worry, but he was sent here for a reason. From what I hear he was never a particularly good spy, but he stumbled into the middle of an international syndicate and things got complicated... He doesn’t know it, but he wasn’t recalled by the government to protect him. The syndicate put him here so they could watch him. And now, for whatever reason, he’s decided it’s time to dig up those old messes. Only trouble is, he doesn’t know who he’s actually working for.”
“This whole thing is ridiculous, you know that?” Cecilia surprised even herself with her calm. “This is like my one vacation a year, I don’t have time for any of this.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything to stop him or help him or whatever. Just...run it by me first, before you do anything, okay?” Alicia waited for a response, and getting none she added gently, “I know what I’m doing here, sweetie. Let me take care of it.”
Her gravity was new, and her daughter felt that there was an angle (or five) being played here to which she wasn’t yet privy. Cecilia watched her mother go back into the house with the distinct, eerie feeling that in actuality she knew her mother only slightly better than she knew the grandfather she’d just met.
After Years: Chapter Five
