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femgenficathonTitle: Losing Laura Bristow
Fandom: Alias
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ygrawn
Fandom: Alias
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JJ Abrams
Quote: 115) Risk-taking, trust, and serendipity are key ingredients of joy. Without risk, nothing new ever happens. Without trust, fear creeps in. Without serendipity, there are no surprises. —Rita Golden Gelman.
Summary: Killing people is what she was trained to do, and whilst she would never call it easy, is it her work, and she is good at it. Being a mother is both foreign and difficult to Laura and she doesn’t believe it will ever feel natural.
A/N: Well, yes, ahem, I'm late. Sorry!
********
Sydney is wearing her red cashmere coat, so Laura can see her daughter the moment she emerges from her classroom. The coat makes Sydney more visible than Laura would like any child of hers to be, because she’s never been able to shake the feeling, from the moment Sydney arrived in this world, slick, red and screaming, that her daughter was in danger.
Sydney is swinging her satchel in an idle rhythm, kicking her feet out as she follows the tide of her classmates out of the building. The braids that Laura weaved so neatly in Sydney’s fine, silky hair over breakfast this morning are falling out in a becoming fashion. The loose strands swirl around her daughter’s face and curl errantly down her narrow back. Sydney rubs her left eye and waits for Jimmy McCarthy to stop flinging his yo-yo back and forth so she can make her way down the steps.
At some point during the day, Sydney managed to get a smear of purple paint on her forehead.
Laura is tired and wired and there is a pear-shaped bruise forming rapidly below her heart. She came close to ruining everything this morning, which led to a tense, depressing debrief with her sanctimonious handler, and all she wants to do is go home, take a bath in the dark, drink a bottle of red wine and listen to Dvorak until she falls asleep, alone, in crisp, clean bed sheets.
But she has to finish writing her mid-term reports, cook dinner, deal with the relentless pile of ironing, remember to write a cheque for Sydney’s piano lesson, and replace the lost button onto Jack’s navy blue overcoat before he flies to London tomorrow afternoon.
More demanding than any of those tasks is the fact that Sydney will be bursting with news from her day and will feel compelled to share all of it, the amusing and mundane, the irritating and nonsensical, with her mother. She will be full of energy and excitement and she will want Laura’s full attention.
Laura braces herself for this, the hardest part of the life she leads. Killing people – like the man at the Chandler Hotel today – is what she was trained to do, and whilst she would never call it easy, is it her work, and she is good at it. Being a mother is both foreign and difficult to Laura and she doesn’t believe it will ever feel natural.
Sydney’s bright red, verging-on-vermillion, pure cashmere wool coat was a present from Jack, purchased three months ago from a boutique in the Place du Vendome in Paris after a particularly difficult mission. Laura isn’t supposed to know that her husband destroyed the large, Paris-based KGB cell – he told her he was doing some routine information gathering. It turns out there are things that Jack still does not tell her, missions he does keep secret, and the spy in Laura admires his occasional discretion.
But her handler, Micah, told Laura what Jack had done, so she knew why her husband returned from France so pleased with himself, so overly affectionate, so unusually ebullient. There was the coat for Sydney and pearl earrings for Laura and a surprisingly passionate kiss when he came home, and when Jack had pressed her against the front door and wrapped his hands around the curve of her hips she’d forgotten for a moment that one of her compatriots had been working in Paris and was now, undoubtedly, dead.
Sydney had been asleep for two hours by the time Jack walked through the door, so he’d crept into her room and left the tissue-wrapped coat on the end of the bed, with no note or card, confident that Sydney would know who the gift was from.
At six o’clock that morning Sydney woke Laura and Jack up when she sprinted into their room and jumped up onto their bed, wearing her pink-and-purple striped pyjamas, the red coat and a smile of startling proportions.
“Daddy, you’re home!” she’d shrieked, crawling up the bed to loop her arms around her father’s neck. Sydney’s hair had spooled across Jack’s pillow and tickled Laura’s nose.
Jack had woken up the instant Sydney entered the room – as had Laura – but his daughter’s affection, as always, caught him by surprise, and he paused awkwardly before pulling Sydney across his chest into a more comfortable position.
It occurred to Laura, as she watched Sydney delicately kiss Jack’s nose, that as much as their daughter loved the extravagant and colourful coat, her father’s return home after a ten-day absence was the better gift.
Sydney is a slender, lithe girl with a heart-shaped face, small but expressive eyes, and the pale skin and sharp cheekbones of her mother’s lineage. Tiny, charming freckles are scattered across her upturned nose.
She is a serious-looking child who can be light and buoyant when the mood takes her. Sydney is a girl who smiles more than she frowns, and when she does smile every head in the room turns to look. She doesn’t always stand out amongst other children, and yet, she has Jack’s ability to be noticed when she chooses or hide in plain sight when she wants.
For a six-year-old it’s a remarkable talent.
Laura knows her daughter can be overly-sensitive and quick to take umbrage. She is more solitary than other girls her age, and she has a terrible competitive streak. But she can own her arrogance because she is intelligent and her parents have taught her to value that. She excels in English, sport and drama. Sydney is thoughtful and generous and generally obedient. And she is loyal and faithful and compassionate and always full of hope and optimism.
Laura knows those quality are not hers.
Sydney catches sight of her mother and bounds in Laura’s direction, neatly ducking around Jimmy’s yo-yo. She flings her arms around her mother’s waist and begins to breathlessly tell Laura about the upcoming Thanksgiving pageant, the story they read in library today, which is somehow connected with the death of the class fish after lunch and isn’t purple a nice colour, Mommy?
Laura forces a smile to her face and asks about the class pet’s unfortunate demise as though she really cares. Sydney reports the death in great detail. Laura reaches out to smooth down Sydney’s fringe, hoping that these gestures, this regular routine will take the edge off her restlessness. She always feels like this after a kill. Venturing out into the real world makes it harder to return to this: permission slips and dinner parties, class pets and homework, curriculum meetings and term papers.
It always sets her teeth on edge to come back.
Sydney screws up her nose and pulls away. “Mommy, your hands smell strange.”
“Like antiseptic,” Laura tells her automatically. They do smell of antiseptic, but only because she had to wash the smell of gunpowder off her skin. “I had a doctor’s appointment.”
But Sydney is now talking about Cathy Alderson’s new puppy, a Dalmatian. “He doesn’t have spots yet because he’s only a puppy. They get their spots later. Mrs. Alderson bought him into class this morning to show us.”
“What’s his name?”
“Spotty.” Sydney rolls her eyes. “That’s such a stupid name for a Dalmatian. Hey, Mommy…”
Laura knows the question before it comes. Parenting is six-tenths predictability.
“…can we get a dog?”
“Why don’t you ask your father when he comes home tonight?”
“Okay. Do you think Daddy will say yes?”
“Why don’t think of some good reasons why we should get a dog? Maybe you can convince Daddy.”
“Well, a dog would be a friend for me, because I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
That is Sydney’s six-year-old, passive aggressive way of letting her mother know that she’s not happy about being an only child. Since the age of three Sydney has been asking for a sibling.
“Laura!”
Sydney and Laura look to the source of the voice – Mandy Purcell, the unofficial but powerful dictator of the first-grade mothers.
Blonde, pastel-happy and perennially cheerful, Mandy Purcell is everything Laura hates. She cannot afford to show her loathing, but derives great pleasure from the fact that Mandy’s husband, an overpaid, boorish, materialistic middle-management jerk, hit on Laura at the Purcell’s last cocktail party, a Fifties-themed soiree which bored Jack as much as Laura.
“Mandy,” Laura says, spreading a smile across her face as Mandy skirts around the enormous McCarthy brood. Seven redheaded children, with another on the way. “How was your trip?”
“Oh, wonderful, Laura, just so relaxing. Have you ever been to New York? You really should – you can’t call yourself a proper American without a visit to the Big Apple.”
Subtlety isn’t a word Mandy could spell, so it’s no surprise the woman can’t employ it. Mandy Purcell and the other mothers from Sydney’s class are icily aloof around Laura. Adept at reading people, Laura has always known why most women dislike her. But she’d never enjoyed their frostiness until the night she and Jack got home from that nightmare cocktail party.
Jack had been unzipping her dress when he’d told Laura he’d noticed how jealous other women were around her. He told it was because their husbands turned at the sound of her voice, restlessly seeking the source. It was the mystery in her vowels, the husky promise in her sibilants, the dancing foreign eyes and enchanting bone structure. It was her aura, which suggested she had seen more than other women, that she understood men better.
“You’re like Madame Olenska,” he’d said, pulling her hair out of its knot and letting it fall.
“You’ve read The Age of Innocence?”
“Try not to sound too surprised,” Jack murmured, kissing her shoulder through the tumble of hair.
“But I am. Wharton is hardly your style.”
“No. But Madame Olenska is.”
And the cocktail dress was still a white, silky puddle on the floor the next morning when Laura got out of bed to make breakfast and finish marking her tenth-grader’s papers on To Kill a Mocking-Bird. She’d smiled to herself all day, strangely pleased at Jack’s observance, at the pride hovering in the back of his voice when he talked about other men wanting her.
Laura now widens her smile at Mandy. “Perhaps we’ll take Sydney to New York in the summer.”
“You should – you and Jack should travel more often.”
Sydney pipes up. “My Daddy travels all the time for business. He bought me this coat from Paris.”
Mandy glanced down at Sydney. “Paris? Aren’t you a lucky girl?”
“He bought Mommy pearl earrings,” Sydney adds absently. “They go with her necklace.”
“Well, Jack keeps his generosity well hidden,” Mandy comments, almost caustically.
“Mm.” Laura shrugs her shoulders ambiguously. “We should let you go, Mandy. I’m sure you have to get home.”
“I just wanted to ask if you and Jack are still coming to our dinner party on Saturday. I’m sure you said you could make it.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll just have to make sure the sitter can look after Sydney.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Mandy flaps her hand. “Bring her with you – our nanny can mind her.” She bends down to peer at Sydney with what she no doubt assumes is a friendly expression. “You’ll have fun with Katie and James, won’t you, Sydney?”
Sydney nods gravely. “Yes, Mrs Purcell.”
“Aren’t you a delight? You look so much like your Mommy.”
“Daddy says that’s a good thing. He says Mommy is the most beautiful woman in the world.” Sydney casts a glance up at Laura. “I hope I still look like her when I grow up.”
“I’m sure you will.” Mandy straightens and pats Sydney on the head. Twice. “We’ll see you on Saturday then, Laura. You and your handsome husband.”
That’s the other thing of course. Women wonder how Laura – foreign, bookish, arrogantly regal Laura Petrovic – managed to net the good-looking, clever, capable, powerful, ambitious, charming but discreet, all-American Jack Bristow. And all this during the Cold War.
It’s all Laura can do not to laugh when she sees women fawn over Jack.
Mandy heads off to accost Annie McCarthy, the mother of the redheaded band. Laura grabs hold of Sydney’s hand and begins to march towards the car, determined to get home without another interruption.
“Is everything okay, Mommy?”
Laura forces herself to slow down. “Of course, sweetheart. I’m just tired. I had a hard day at work.”
Sydney skips every second or third step as they cross the road. “Mrs Purcell and Mrs Alderson don’t work. And Minnie McCarthy’s Mommy doesn’t either.”
“Annie McCarthy has nearly eight children. That’s more than enough work for any woman.”
“You don’t have to have seven brothers and sisters for me, Mommy,” Sydney offers earnestly. “One would be enough.”
They reach the car. “Does it bother you that I work, Sydney?” Laura asks with genuine curiosity. Sydney has never said very much about her mother’s job.
Sydney inherited her shrug from Jack. She doesn’t lift her shoulders, and yet she somehow coveys the indifference of that gesture. She does it now.
“Oh, I don’t know Mommy.” Her daughter climbs into the front seat and reaches for her seat-belt. “A dog would be a good guard for the house. When Daddy goes away we would be safe.”
Laura climbs into the driver’s seat. “I’m at home when your father goes away. You’re always safe, Sydney.”
“But Daddies keep their families safe.”
“Mommies do that, too.”
Laura pulls out into traffic. She has the insane, fleeting desire to get onto the freeway and drive out of Los Angeles, to keep driving if only to prove that she can. To prove that there are no fences in her life besides the ones that she chooses. She has to remind herself more frequently these days that she did choose this mission, this life, these fences.
“But who keeps you safe when Daddy’s not home?” Sydney asks.
“I keep myself safe,” Laura replies. “And when you grow up, I’ll teach you to look after yourself, too.”
“That would be fun.”
Laura indicates a left-hand turn and props, waiting for the traffic to clear. She glances over at Sydney and says, “Did your father really say that about me? About being beautiful?”
“Mm-hmm.” Sydney is fiddling with the third button on her coat. “I asked him why you got married and Daddy said that when he met you he thought you were the most beautiful woman in the whole world and that he had to have you. And then he said that I looked just like you, and when I grow up, I’ll be beautiful too.”
“Really?”
She giggles. “And then he said that people would never know I was his daughter because he’s not beautiful at all.”
Laura laughs. It’s not really funny, but it is, because she can hear Jack saying it with his dry humour. “No, Daddy isn’t beautiful. But people will know you’re his daughter. You have his eyes and his forehead.”
“Daddy says it’s good I don’t have his ears.” Sydney grins. “Daddy’s ears stick right out.”
“They do,” Laura agrees, and this time her laugh is genuine. Jack is quite sensitive about his ears – it’s the only vanity he’s ever revealed.
“Did you think he was handsome, Mommy, when you met him?”
“Yes,” Laura answers. “I thought he was very handsome. And very strong. People can tell that about your Daddy as soon as they meet him.”
“Daddy is super-strong,” Sydney agrees. “And super-smart. And you’re super-pretty.”
The traffic wanes and Laura turns, and Sydney returns to fiddling with the shiny button.
Apparently, Sydney was paying attention earlier, because as they pull into their tree-lined street she suddenly asks, “How come your work made you tired today, Mommy?”
“Oh, I had one of those jobs that just didn’t go right and when I had to fix it I got grumpy and tired.”
“Poor Mommy.” Sydney pats her mother’s elbows, and then leans across the handbrake to press her forehead against Laura’s shoulder. “Poor little Mommy.”
They pull into the driveway.
********
Sydney takes her coat off and drops it in the middle of the hallway, already racing towards the kitchen for her afternoon snack. She spills her glass of milk across the kitchen bench and yesterday’s mail when reaching for another piece of apple.
She goes to the bathroom to wash her hands and yells out to her mother that she can’t turn the tap on because it’s twisted too tight. When Laura doesn’t immediately respond – she’s busy trying to salvage the soggy mail – Sydney starts repeatedly yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy”, until Laura appears and loosens the faucet.
Sydney’s attempts to help her mother start dinner – chicken pie and chocolate pudding for dessert – are more successful. Sydney can usually be trusted to wash vegetables and stir sauces without making a mess. Her daughter’s prattle washes over Laura as they work. Sydney talks constantly, something that Laura puts down to being an only child.
On two occasions Sydney’s commentary penetrates the self-imposed, defensive fog that all mothers develop over time.
The first is when she is says, whilst sifting flour, “I don’t mind that you work. Your work is interesting. You always have funny stories about your students. And you know lots of things because you’re a teacher. Katie’s Mommy is boring.”
Laura hides her smile. “Don’t say that, Sydney. Mrs Purcell isn’t boring.”
Sydney corrects Laura with her father’s bent for truth. “Yes she is. Even James thinks so and she’s his Mommy.”
“Then just don’t say it in front of Mrs Purcell. It’s not very nice. And even if she is boring, she’s trustworthy and she’s our friend.”
“Daddy says I should be careful not to trust people too much.” Sydney blows a strand of hair out of her face. “But I’m a good girl – I don’t talk to strangers.”
“You are a good girl,” Laura agrees.
Laura is chopping onions, ten minutes later, when Sydney says, “Why did you go to the doctor, Mommy?”
It takes her too long to respond and she knows she has to be careful tonight. She feels reckless and heedless, tired and almost defeated, and there’s a migraine building behind her right eye. She cannot do this much longer. Eight years – with six as a mother – is the longest any KGB agent has ever maintained a deep cover operation.
There are days when she doesn’t just believe she’s Laura. She is Laura.
“Mommy?” Sydney prods.
“Oh, it was just a routine check-up. To make sure there’s nothing wrong with me.”
Her daughter twists up her face. “I thought you might be having a baby.”
“No.” And Laura moves hurriedly to distract Sydney from her longest-running cause. “No, it was just a check-up. The doctor poked me and prodded me, and looked down my throat and into my ears with funny instruments. He listened to my heart beat and he took my blood-pressure. He told me I was very healthy.
“And then he asked me, ‘Mrs. Bristow do you have any children?’ I said ‘Yes, I have a six-year-old daughter called Sydney’. The doctor said, ‘I knew it! Happy people are healthy people. And you look like you have a daughter who makes you very happy’.”
Sydney’s eyes shine with pride. “I make you happy, Mommy?”
She cups Sydney’s face in her hands and says, “Sydney, you make me very happy.”
“And Daddy makes you happy, too?”
“Of course.” She kisses Sydney’s forehead.
Sydney screws up her face and says, “Mommy, your hands smell funny again.”
And it’s no lie this time, when Laura says, “It’s the onions, sweetheart.”
Whilst Sydney starts talking again, Laura searches for some aspirin. Her migraine is slowly migrating across her head. By the time she puts the pie in her oven it has settled above her right ear and beats a steady, merciless tattoo.
Sydney continues to come up with reasons why they should get a dog. From the sensible – “It would teach me responsibility” – to the inane – “Dogs would eat all the leftover food we have.” She starts to choose a place to put the dog’s food bowl, and when Laura gently cautions her not to get her hopes up, she sulks for half an hour.
When she eventually snaps out of her mood, the sky is beginning to dissolve from day into night. Sydney races into her parent’s bedroom to jump on their bed, which keeps her occupied until Laura, halfway through writing a blistering mid-semester report about Conrad Mikhalsen’s inability to employ grammar of any kind, hears a crash. The kind of crash only made by human bodies when they collide with immoveable objects.
And then there is silence.
“Sydney?” she asks, already halfway out of her seat.
She drops her papers on the floor and sprints down the hallway. Laura is rounding the corner into the bedroom when Sydney begins to scream. Her daughter is in a sickening, unnatural heap at the foot of the bed. When Laura kneels and starts checking for injuries she shifts and sits up, but she continues to scream.
Sydney pauses for breath and that’s when the crying starts. Noisy, gulping sobs fill Laura and Jack’s bedroom.
“Oh, darling, did you fall?” Sydney nods as she tries to crawl into her mother’s lap. “Hold on, sweetheart, where does it hurt?”
“Shoulder,” Sydney manages, pointing and crying. “Fell on my shoulder.”
“Oh, my little girl.” Laura rotates Sydney’s shoulder carefully. Sydney’s sobs grow louder, but her movement is unimpeded. “You haven’t broken anything, Sydney.”
This doesn’t appease her daughter, who has managed to hook her legs around Laura’s waist. Her crying seems to be mostly caused by shock: Sydney is more surprised that she has fallen than she is hurt.
Jack appears suddenly in the doorway, obviously confused to find them there. “Laura, where are you –” He pauses. “What happened?”
“Daddy!” Sydney sobs, reaching out desperately for him. She doesn’t uncurl herself from her mother, though. “I fell,” she cries, the two words broken into four syllables by her tears.
Jack puts down his briefcase and sits on the end of the disarrayed bed. He hooks his hands under Sydney’s shoulders as if to pick her up and she flinches sharply.
“She fell on her shoulder,” Laura says quickly.
So Jack kneels awkwardly behind Laura and reaches out hesitantly to touch the top of Sydney’s head. Their daughter throws her arms around Jack’s neck, which pulls his body flush against Laura’s.
Squashed between her daughter and husband, Laura’s migraine begins to dance the tarantella. Sydney’s howls don’t help.
Jack, surprisingly, takes over the soothing duty. He whispers in Sydney’s ear and wraps his large hand around her neck, cradling her head into his shoulder. He curls his other arm around Laura’s waist, until his hand rests at the small of Sydney’s back. His murmurs don’t make any sense, but after a few minutes, Sydney’s sobs turn into sniffles.
Jack suddenly collapses his body into a sitting position, pulling both Laura and Sydney into his lap. He leans up against the bed. “Sorry,” he says. “I was uncomfortable.”
And now Laura is. She’s too close to Jack and Sydney. She feels stuck in Jack’s lap, trapped between his and Sydney’s limbs. But she has trained her body too well to let it tense up. She focuses on relaxing, inhaling the combined scent of Sydney’s strawberry shampoo and Jack’s musky aftershave.
By the time she has fooled herself into being comfortable, Sydney has stopped crying altogether. Her breath hitches on every second inhale, but she exhales with a noise of pleasure and burrows tighter into her parents’ bodies.
“You were a silly girl for jumping on our bed,” Jack says softly.
The statement doesn’t have much sting to it.
Jack is generally a strict disciplinarian. He doesn’t indulge Sydney’s nonsense. When she rambles he doesn’t just ignore her but asks her to stop. On the rare occasions when she has thrown a tantrum in public Jack’s fury has quickly quelled Sydney’s pettishness.
But when his daughter is upset, when she has hurt herself, every element of hardness in Jack disappears. He is, at those times, softer than Laura, more comforting and kind. Every time she witnesses that side of him, Laura is surprised. She has given her husband so few opportunities to show his tenderness to her. If Laura was to be honest, there is a strange jealousy that overtakes her when she sees Jack’s softness for Sydney.
When Sydney has been hurt by someone else Jack is just terrifying.
Sydney sniffs. “I know, Daddy.”
Laura slightly shifts Sydney across her lap, easing the pressure against the bruise on her chest. “You haven’t broken anything,” she says again. “You’ll just have a big bruise tomorrow morning.”
“I’m sorry for messing up your bed,” Sydney says.
“It doesn’t matter,” Laura tells her. “We can fix it later.”
“Can I stay here for a minute?” Sydney asks. She turns her head until her mouth is pressed against Jack’s neck. “You’re warm.”
Jack squeezes Laura’s thigh. “How are you?”
“Mommy’s tired,” Sydney says. “She had a bad day at work.”
“Report-writing time,” Laura offers. “And I got hit by a flying football.”
“What?”
Laura had invented the story earlier, knowing that Jack would undoubtedly notice the bruise later tonight or tomorrow morning. Perhaps that is what makes her so angry about her sub-par work this morning. She has always killed her targets quickly and efficiently so there was never any need to hide injuries from Jack. Elaborate subterfuge seems to be a reflection of a serious failure on her part.
“I was walking beside the playing fields on the way to a meeting during lunchtime practice and I wasn’t looking and the next thing I knew, I was flat on my back. Their substitute quarterback was playing and his ball went wide. I got hit right in the solar plexus.”
“Second-string quarterback,” Jack corrects, just like she knew he would. “I hope you put the fear of Laura Bristow into the idiot who threw the ball.”
“After I got my breath back,” Laura laughs. “So, I have a bruise too, darling. We’ll match, like twins.”
Sydney rubs her nose in Laura’s hair. “But you’re old, Mommy. And I’m little. How can we be twins?”
“Your mother isn’t old,” Jack says.
“She’s older than me,” Sydney points out.
“That makes her older. Not old.”
“I guess.” Sydney runs her forefinger along Jack’s jaw. “Scratchy,” she giggles.
Jack opens his mouth as if to bite Sydney’s finger off. She snatches her hand back and her giggle turns into a laugh. Her body vibrates against Laura’s stomach. It’s a game now and Sydney presses her finger against Jack’s nose, into the corner of his mouth, the cleft of his chin, daring him to bite her finger.
Jack plays along until Sydney loses interest. Her breathing is completely even now.
“How was your day?” Laura asks her husband.
“It was good.” Jack blows a piece of Sydney’s hair away from his mouth. “Emily came in and had lunch with Arvin. She invited us for dinner on Saturday. I said I’d check with you.”
Laura makes a noise of convincing disappointment. “We’re going to the Purcells for a dinner party. Why don’t we invite Arvin and Emily for dinner on Friday? I’ll call Emily tonight.”
“Can I stay up late with the adults?” Sydney asks.
“We’ll see,” Laura and Jack say in unison.
Their daughter sighs. “That means no.”
Even with her back turned Laura knows that Jack’s smile of amusement matches her own.
********
Laura’s migraine doesn’t disappear.
It makes its presence known throughout dinner and for the next hour whilst she finishes writing reports. Her right arm aches from when Sanders wrenched it and her knee throbs because she was sloppy this morning.
Stupid, really.
She’d dropped Sydney off at school, taken the car home and caught the downtown bus to a pre-arranged location, where a car, her weapons and a change of clothes were waiting. She’d been forced to change in a department-store bathroom, the kind that was softly lit and decorated in peach tones and gold trimming.
On the way out, she’d noticed a sale on children’s clothing and admired a blue, short-sleeved linen dress on display. Laura had idly wondered if they had it in Sydney’s size.
The hotel was familiar from another assignment and she’d used the same ingress strategy – straight through the front lobby to the elevators. Hotels were a security nightmare, particularly a place like the Chandler, which had convention centres and restaurants and shops that could be accessed through the lobby, creating a constant and useful stream of people going in every direction.
And Laura knew how to hide herself as well as Jack or Sydney.
The seventh floor was almost deserted at ten-thirty in the morning, the tourists and businessmen already out for the day. She passed a couple who were engaged in a vicious argument. To say they barely noticed her would be a lie – they didn’t see her at all.
“Once a week is not regularly,” the man fiercely argued. “We fight more often than that.”
“And having more sex would stop us from arguing?” the woman asked, sceptically, apparently unaware that she was in a public place. “And it’s more than once a week. Don’t exaggerate.”
“I understand when we’re at home, honey. But we’re on vacation. The kids are with your parents. We’ve only got four days left.”
They passed out of earshot. Laura smiled cynically to herself.
When she reached Room 717 her face was smooth again. A skeleton key gained her access – her gun entered the room before she did.
The emptiness of the room, however, didn’t startle Laura. Until her brain kicked in and she realized that this room wasn’t supposed to empty. It was the correct room – her handler had assured her that their contact in the Agency had confirmed the details from an official document only that morning.
She was aiming her gun at a lampshade, looking for a suitcase, a book, a newspaper, anything, when she was kneed in the back. The bathroom, she thought, mentally berating herself. He was in the bathroom.
Laura swayed precariously and her attacker grabbed her arm and wrenched it into an unnatural position. She spun herself around with that momentum. The closeness of the body behind her rendered her useless for too many seconds and when his fist slammed into her stomach she didn’t see it coming. He followed up with a vicious kick to the ribs her gun fell from her hands.
The fight was untidy and disorganised in the cramped hotel room, far less graceful than Laura’s usual style. They were forced to use the weapons at hand; he swung a bedside lamp at her head and missed badly; Laura retaliated with the Gideon Bible, which broke his nose. She tried to retrieve her gun from near the TV; he slammed his elbow into her solar plexus and she flew backwards.
She crashed into the coffee table, which despite her weight, didn’t break. But it offered her no mercy and her eyes blurred from the sudden pain of the sharp corners digging into her back and thighs. She could sense rather than see the man reaching for his gun on the end of his bed.
Laura had been trained in the rain and the snow. She had been starved for weeks at a time, the KGB had injected her with every drug known to man so she could build up a resistance, they had sleep-deprived her, over-fed her, humiliated her, electrocuted her, doused her in water, forced her to walk barefoot for miles in the snow, convinced her that her family had died, that the Party had betrayed her, left her temporarily blind and deaf for days on end, and enacted every form of physical torture upon her body without going far enough to leave scars. They did everything but rape her and even now she’s not sure that they didn’t.
So no coffee table was ever going to be the undoing of Irina Derevko.
She kicked her legs up and out, tripping up her attacker, who was obviously stupid enough to believe that because she was on the ground she was unable to fight back or inflict any pain upon him. Only a man would think like that.
Reaching out desperately, Laura’s fingers found her gun. She rolled away, already guiding the barrel into position, as her target took his turn to crash into the coffee table. This time the wood broke with a sickening crunch, sending splinters into the air and an echo around the room. The silenced bullet that pierced the back of the man’s head a second later wasn’t nearly as loud.
Laura lay on the ground at an awkward angle for half a minute, trying to control the adrenaline racing through her body. She had to calm down and act carefully, cautiously, because this was the time when most people made mistakes.
Thirty seconds, if not less, had passed since the target had surprised her, but it had been so long since Laura had been in a real fight or deviated from her tactical plan that it took her a long moment to relax.
Gingerly, Laura stood up. When she straightened her back she involuntarily let out a moan of pain. Her solar plexus was not happy and neither were her lungs. She perversely took deep breaths and used the sharp, biting pain to clear her head.
The disarray of the room was annoying, but hardly cause for alarm, Laura quickly decided. It wouldn’t indicate to the investigating agents anything other than a brief struggle. She’d worn gloves, so her presence wouldn’t be discovered, and she doubted anybody had heard anything.
Laura took another deep breath, returned her gun to its concealed holster, hung the Do Not Disturb sing on the doorhandle, and exited the room.
She decided, halfway to her rendezvous point with her handler, that she would buy that dress for Sydney, and two hours after a dressing-down from Micah, she went back and put it on the credit card.
********
Jack always does bath-time duty after dinner. Unless he’s travelling Jack makes it a point to always be home in time to give Sydney her bath and tuck her into bed.
Tonight, Laura listens to them from the kitchen bench, hearing Sydney’s high-pitched voice occasionally broken by Jack’s soft, short replies. It is a familiar musical interlude of her day.
Sydney likes to talk to her father and doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the fact that he doesn’t often respond. When he does reply, she listens carefully and Laura can imagine Sydney now, sitting in the bath, her hair a soapy white nest, trailing patterns in the cooling water with her fingers, listening intently to her father as if he is the font of all wisdom.
The sucking sound of draining water irritates Laura beyond measure. And Sydney’s giggles – caused no doubt by the rough, jocular way Jack dries his daughter’s hair with her towel – make the fillings in her mouth sour and curl up.
“Carry me, Daddy,” Sydney commands and Laura knows that Jack will carry his daughter into her bedroom. He will tickle the soles of her feet and Sydney will giggle again, and when she tells her father to stop, he will pretend he has no idea what she’s talking about.
That Jack is predictable is a given. Laura wouldn’t still have this job if he wasn’t. And Sydney is six: her life is about the routine and structure her parents have created for her, Laura more consistently than Jack, because creating order helps her stay focused on her mission. But today, she can’t stand Jack and Sydney’s ritual. She can’t concentrate through her anger and irritation.
Sydney appears in the kitchen a few minutes later, wearing her favourite pink pyjamas and a pout on her face. “Daddy said he’s going away tomorrow.”
“Yes, he is,” Laura replies, absently.
The pout deepens and her voice turns shrill. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Didn’t I?” Laura tries for innocence and achieves it, of course. “I must have forgotten.”
“Mommy!” her daughter wails. “You can’t forget. You have to tell me, so I can draw a picture for Daddy. You know that.”
“You’ve got enough time before bed,” Laura reasons. “Where are your markers?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they in your bedroom? Why don’t you go and check?” Sydney stands still. “Sydney?”
“You go and get them. I’m too tired.”
“Excuse me?”
“I want you to go and get them for me.”
Laura puts her pen down slowly and stares at Sydney with a tight mouth. “You go and find your markers now, or you won’t be able to draw a picture for Daddy,” she warns.
“Fine. I’m going.”
Sydney stomps off with that flair for drama that only six-year-old girls possess. She returns with a large box full of markers, crayons and pencils. Laura would usually smile at this child-like behaviour. Tonight she has to bite her tongue hard to stop her anger from seeping out into her expression.
Sydney sits up at the bench and sets her markers out in order of darkest shade to the lightest. The bottoms of the markers are in perfect alignment. She carefully places the blank piece of paper at right angles to the edge of the bench.
Inhaling deeply, Sydney selects a red marker and begins to draw confidently, with straight, bold lines.
Laura finishes up the last of her reports and realizes that tonight’s dishes are still in the sink. It won’t occur to Jack to do the chore, so if Laura doesn’t do them now they’ll sit there until she does. She sighs and moves wearily towards the sink.
Sydney hums under her breath as she draws; an aimless, pointless tune. Laura watches the water cascade from the faucet into the sink. She still has to sew that button onto Jack’s coat. He’ll want it done soon, so he can pack for his trip.
“I wish Daddy didn’t have to go away,” Sydney comments.
“Mm.” Laura reaches for the detergent, squeezes the bottle, and watches the bubbles form.
“Don’t you wish Daddy could stay?”
“Yes. Yes,” she repeats, twisting the tap off sharply. “But Daddy’s work is very important.”
“Oh, I know. But I’m important too. And I miss Daddy.”
“Daddy misses us too, when he travels.”
Sydney reaches for a yellow marker. Laura begins to scrub the Pyrex dish she used to bake the chicken pie.
She’s so tired, and she feels it keenly at this moment. Laura hates it here. She hates her life, this mission. She hates that most days this mission has nothing to do with the cause. She hates Jack and Sydney for loving her; she hates herself for loving them.
Jack enters the room and asks, “Laura, have you fixed that button on my jacket?”
Laura doesn’t turn. “No. I’m just doing the dishes. I’ll do it when I’ve finished.”
“Okay, I want to pack soon.”
“I know you do.” Laura adds more hot water to the sink. “Of course I know, Jack. How could I possibly forget?” Passive aggression isn’t her style; it words hang heavily in the air.
“Laura, are you…” he begins.
“Daddy, don’t look at the picture!” Sydney exclaims. “It’s not ready yet.”
“I’m not looking,” Jack assures his daughter, mildly.
“Daddy, do you have to go away?”
“We’ve talked about this, Sydney. It’s part of my job.”
“Mommy’s job doesn’t make her go away.”
“Your mother has a different kind of job. And she needs to stay here with you.”
“You need to stay here with me too,” Sydney whines. “Mommy doesn’t do bath-time right. And she doesn’t make the voices when she reads to me at bedtime.”
Jack smiles. “I can’t braid your hair and choose your clothes, and help you practise piano, and do all of those things your mother does for you. And I’m a terrible cook. You’d die of food poisoning if I did the cooking.”
Sydney ignores this and says, “Do you miss me when you go away?”
Jack seems surprised and says, vehemently, “Of course I do, my sweetheart.” He rests his hand on her head and his voice is surprisingly emotional. “I think about you all the time I’m away.”
“I bet you miss me more than you miss Mommy, because you had all that time with Mommy before I was born.”
It is a strange, childish thing to say, and Sydney says it with no malice, but Laura is instantly furious. Who is Sydney to say that Jack misses her more? It is a perfect illustration of her daughter’s selfishness, her constant demands, and her thoughtlessness. She drops her clothes on the floor, never bothers to tidy up her messes, and assumes that her mother will always be here.
Worst of all – and it makes Laura’s throat tight with anger – Sydney thinks constantly about her father, and talks about his intelligence, his strength, and his absences. Sydney loves her father more than she loves her mother.
It turns out that Laura has risked everything, that her heart has betrayed her, that it has unclenched and laid itself open for a man who wants a button sewn back on his coat, and a little girl who idolises her father.
“I miss you both equally,” Jack says in a soft voice. Laura turns to look at him, and Sydney’s head snaps up.
“Don’t look, Daddy!”
“I’m not looking.” He’s not – he’s looking over Sydney’s head at his wife with almost perfect understanding.
Sydney begins to hum again, only this time she adds in tuneless la-di-das. Laura’s migraine flares again, and she can’t bear to see the softness in Jack’s eyes, so she turns back to the sink and starts scrubbing her silver serving spoon. It’s part of a set – a wedding present from Jack’s boss at the CIA.
Jack’s gaze still bores into the back of her neck and Sydney is still humming.
Laura lifts the spoon out of the water to see if it’s clean, and then, because Sydney lets loose one more la-la, she hurls the spoon back into the water. It clangs against a saucepan. Water fountains into the air and splashes against the bench, against the window, against Laura’s shirt.
“Sydney, would you stop that damn humming?” Laura yells. She whirls around and her voice rises with every word. Anger and vitriol sharpen her accent. “Stop it! Just stop! Don’t you care that I have a headache? Don’t you care that I have other things to do beside tidy up after you? You never stop needing, do you? You demand and you take…”
But by the word ‘take’ she has automatically swallowed her yell, has automatically pulled the anger back into her body. Laura Bristow doesn’t yell. Laura Bristow never gets angry. Horrified, she presses the back of her trembling hand to her mouth and leans heavily against the sink-top.
Sydney’s eyes are wide and wet. Her mouth wobbles. “M-Mommy?” she stutters.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Jack says quickly. “Mommy’s just tired.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Sydney says in a choked voice. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Sydney,” Jack tells her.
“I’m sorry for humming, Mommy.” Tears spill out of her eye. “Mommy? I’m sorry. I won’t do it anymore.”
Sydney wants her mother to hug her, to comfort and reassure her, because Laura has never randomly lost her temper at her daughter and Sydney is frightened. But Laura cannot move her body. She is frozen at the sink, unable to speak or move for fear that the truth will fall from her lips like the water from the tap, that it will spill out of her in a steady stream of tiredness, pain, self-hatred and loathing.
She has never been this close to losing Laura Bristow before.
“Mommy?”
Jack rounds the bench and lifts Sydney from the stool. She clings to him, fits her body into his crevices and planes, tucks her head into his shoulder and twines her arms around his neck.
“We’ll leave Mommy alone for a minute,” Jack says softly. “She’s not angry at you, Sydney. She’s just tired and she has a headache.”
Sydney’s foot is small, delicate, fine-boned and white against Jack’s hip. Laura watches Sydney’s foot ride Jack’s hip as he carries his daughter through the living area to the hallway. Sydney’s wet eyes fix on her mother until Jack turns the corner and the two of them disappear from sight.
After a moment, Laura turns back to the sink and finishes the dishes.
********
She sews the button back onto Jack’s coat, writes the cheque for Sydney’s piano lesson, and packs tomorrow’s lunch for her husband and daughter. She calls Emily and organizes dinner for Friday night. Laura will spend all night ignoring the looks Arvin sends her way. The two women chat for ten minutes, mostly about Sydney. Emily and Arvin adore Sydney.
By the time Laura wipes down the bench and turns off the kitchen light it is almost nine-thirty and Sydney has been in bed for over an hour. Jack has not sought her out and is probably working in his study.
In their bedroom, Jack’s suitcase is packed and standing near the door. Laura is carrying a piece of paper and she places it carefully atop of the suitcase. It is Sydney’s nearly complete picture. It is a lopsided reproduction of their house, the green front door half-coloured and the trees half-finished. Underneath, Sydney has already written, in well-formed letters, “Daddy, don’t forget our home, love Sweetheart.”
Sydney sometimes signs her cards and pictures to her father with Sweetheart. Jack uses that endearment more often than his daughter’s actual name, probably because Laura chose the name Sydney and Jack has never particularly liked it. He wanted to call her something Russian: Anya or Natasha, and was confused when Laura firmly disagreed.
But sweetheart is the endearment he’s used since Sydney was born, and given that he’s an unsentimental man, it’s strange how easily and often the word falls from his lips. Perhaps it is strange that he uses the same endearment for his wife and daughter, but Laura feels that the word suits Sydney better. As syrupy as it sounds, Sydney probably is the sweetest thing in Jack’s heart. Laura might be the most coveted, the most desired thing in his heart, but Sydney is undoubtedly the most adored.
Laura changes into a plain white silk nightgown and brushes her hair in the bathroom. The simple task, usually performed at the end of the day, nearly always makes Laura think of her mother. Brushing her daughters’ hair was the one time Tatiana Derevko seemed perfectly peaceful. She would sit on the bed the three girls shared and pull each daughter into her lap and use her ivory-backed hairbrush to untangle the snarls and knots of the day. Sometimes she would hum, or sing. If it was a good day, she’d tell them a story about their father.
The Derevko girls had tattered clothes and hungry eyes, and hard, cold hearts, but their hair always shone.
Tonight the memory of her prickly, desperately unhappy, often moody mother pinches and prods accusingly at Laura until she puts her brush down and silently pads down the hall to Sydney’s pink bedroom.
Sydney’s bedside lamp is on, casting soft yellow light across the room. She has kicked her sheets down the bed and her body is twisted into a contorted, uncomfortable position, her arms thrown over her face and the sheet trapped between her knees.
Laura nudges Sydney onto her back and tucks her daughter’s legs under the sheets. She sits on the edge of the bed and pushes Sydney’s hair away from her face. The little girl’s eyes flutter open. Laura smiles down at her and Sydney’s eyes close over again. She makes a noise of contentment in the back of her throat.
“I’m sorry.” Laura bends and traces the shape of Sydney’s ear with her mouth. “I’m sorry, darling,” she breathes.
Sydney lifts her knee and pushes against Laura’s thigh, obviously try to roll onto her stomach. Laura lets her and folds the sheets across Sydney’s shoulders. Sydney’s eyes open again.
Laura kisses Sydney’s temple. “I’m sorry,” she repeats.
“Mommy,” Sydney sighs. The word is thick and almost incoherent with her mouth pressed against the pillow.
She wraps her sweaty, warm hand around Laura’s fingers and slithers back into sleep. Laura stays and watches her daughter. Sydney smells clean and warm and the moonlight across her face makes her seem older.
Laura usually tries very hard not to think about who Sydney will be when she grows up, but tonight she allows herself to imagine that Sydney will be capable, beautiful, kind, and successful. She allows herself to pretend that her daughter will go to college, get a normal job, have a husband and children, maybe join a reading club or work in her garden on the weekends.
She allows herself to imagine that Sydney will be happy. She would choose happiness above all things for Sydney. The kind of blind, unassuming happiness that a simple, safe life brings.
Laura watches Sydney sleep until she hears Jack stir in his study. His light clicks off and he moves noiselessly down the hallway. As always, he stops briefly at Sydney’s door to check on her. He doesn’t seem particularly surprised to see Laura sitting on the bed.
Jack waits for Laura to let go of Sydney’s hand and turn off the bedside lamp. They walk down to their room in silence. Laura slips between their blue sheets while Jack changes. She is too tired to read tonight. Jack must sense that because he turns off the overhead light and despite the dark, makes his certain and steady way to their bed.
“I sewed that button back on your jacket,” Laura softly offers as Jack lifts the covers. “And left Sydney’s picture with your suitcase.”
“I saw. I don’t think our daughter will ever be an artist.”
“Everyone is an artist, Jack, even if they can’t draw or paint.”
“Mm.” Jack settles on his back, his voice as subtle as his movements. “I should only be away one night. Possibly two.”
“Is Arvin going with you?”
“Yes. We received a lead on Dieter Valoskov’s location. We think he’s planning another heist.”
Laura expertly draws information out of Jack over the next five minutes. She feels a brief temptation to let the comment go without chase. Dieter Valoskov might be her comrade, but he’s a bastard and a suspected paedophile, and Laura has never liked him. But he’s important to the KGB, so tomorrow she’ll pass everything along to Micah, who will no doubt use the opportunity to lecture her again.
Jack asks about her day; she tells him that Emily and Arvin can come for dinner on Friday night; he reminds her to reschedule his appointment with the dentist; they briefly reiterate the need to renovate their cramped and ugly bathroom.
“When I was putting Sydney to bed she asked if we could get a dog,” Jack mentions.
“Cathy Alderson brought in her Dalmatian puppy for show and tell today. I’d say it sparked an idea.”
“The Aldersons?” Jack queries with a blank voice.
“Pam and Steve. Their children are Steve Junior, Cathy who’s in Sydney’s class, and Bobby and Ed – they’re twins.”
“I still don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“He has buck teeth and bad breath. She got drunk at the McCarthy’s barbecue last summer and accidentally fell in your lap.” The acid in Laura’s voice infects the word accidentally.
“She was wearing an ugly green dress,” Jack recalls faintly. “And he persists in calling me buddy.”
“That’s the Aldersons,” Laura confirms. “I’m not sure if she really wants a dog or she’s just taken by the idea of it.”
“Perhaps.” He pauses. “She also asked me for a little sister.”
“Jack…”
“I’m just reporting what Sydney said.”
“I don’t think I could manage two children with you away so often.” She keeps her tone light, but the guilt trip does its work and Jack is perceptive enough to leave the topic alone.
“Why don’t we see if she keeps asking about the dog? If she does, we’ll know it’s serious.”
Laura is surprised. “You don’t have a problem with it?”
“I got a dog when I was a little older than Sydney. It was good company. Taught me responsibility.”
“You were born responsible, Jack,” she teases half-heartedly. “What was the dog’s name?”
He hesitates. “Missy.”
Laura rolls onto her hip, until her body is pressed against Jack’s. “Your dog was called Missy?”
“I called it Mister Connors, but my sister called it Missy. It stuck. And when Sarah died, I kept calling the dog Missy.”
“You had a boy dog called Missy?” Laura laugh is genuine as she slides her foot across Jack’s warm calves. “However did you live down the embarrassment?”
“With my usual aplomb,” Jack dryly returns.
She nudges Jack’s hip with her pelvis. “You don’t talk about Sarah.”
Jack correctly interprets Laura’s forays and pulls her into his arms. The silk of her nightgown sings against the sheets and Jack’s bare skin.
“It was a long time ago,” he offers. “I don’t feel the need to talk about her.”
She shifts slightly, rolling her head into Jack’s shoulder. It’s been a long time since she’s honestly wanted Jack to hold her, and the sensation is faintly embarrassing. That she might end up needing Jack was never something she considered about her mission.
“What happened to Missy?”
“He got old and died in his sleep. I was twenty-one and Missy was fourteen.”
“Did you cry?”
“What?”
She tilts her head to stare up at him. “Well, did you?”
Jack rolls his eyes. “What does it matter?”
“The idea of you crying over a dog is endearing, Jack. Romantic, even.”
“Then I definitely cried.” He drops a kiss on her shoulder, but neither of them is really in the mood for sex tonight.
Silence falls comfortably until Laura says, “I’m sorry about before. I don’t know what happened. I was tired. More than usual.”
Jack speaks carefully. “My absences are difficult. I know that.”
“It’s not that, Jack. Well, sometimes it is. But you’ve always gone away – your work is too important. I just feel…oh, I don’t know. There are days I feel locked in by my world.” She surprised to find her words are true. “I feel stuck.”
“Is it Sydney?”
“No,” she quickly replies. “No. She’s six, Jack. She’s a child. She’s supposed to depend on me. And she’s smart, and talkative and funny and so loving so I don’t resent her at all. I just…some days…”
Jack runs his finger back and forth along Laura’s left shoulder blade. “I could get some time off over summer. We could go away for a few weeks. Leave Sydney with my mother. They’d both love that.”
Laura exhales deeply. “Sounds nice. We could go to New York. Or Florida. Maybe Canada.”
Jack says, “Whatever you want, you can have.”
It is that which makes her cry.
Such a simple undoing, to realize that she never wanted any of this, has never chosen anything about her life, has built walls and ceilings and mazes in her brain and her heart, but none of that has stopped her from growing to desperately need Jack and Sydney.
And she cannot have them. Not for much longer. She will lose all of this soon, will never again greet Jack at the end of the day and complain about her busy schedule. She’ll never see Sydney fall in love for the first time, never see her graduate, never know if she keeps her hair long, she won’t see her at the breakfast table every day, or fight with her about curfew, or the thousand other things she feels entitled to experience.
Jack only holds her, and obviously chooses to believe that his wife is overworked, stressed and tired. Laura has made sure to cry at various points in their marriage, so Jack doesn’t know that crying has been a foreign response most of her life.
Now, she cries honestly, quickly and quietly, inwardly berating herself for such a ridiculous weakness.
The KGB never asked her to take on this mission; she is a soldier, and she was ordered to do it, but she always understood the risks, always knew that marrying Jack Bristow would be more dangerous than anything she’d ever done with a gun or a grenade. When she feel pregnant, so unexpectedly, when Jack’s joy surrounded her and trapped her, she knew there was a chance she’d lose her identity, her sanity, her self.
But Laura never once realised she was really risking her heart. Her foolish, hopeful heart that has betrayed her so completely. It is not annoying to have been so wrong; just sad.
When she stops crying, Jack does not say anything, and Laura is grateful for that. He rubs her back slowly and rhythmically until her breathing evens out, until her cheeks are dry, and it occurs to Laura that this is what he did for their daughter earlier this evening.
She falls asleep with sticky eyes and ache above her heart, which might be caused by her bruise but might not be.
When Sydney wakes her and Jack in the morning by jumping up onto their bed, Laura decides that she will not pass on that information about Dieter Valoskov, and that she and Sydney will go the pound after school and choose a dog.
She gets up to make breakfast, and just as she’s reaching for the milk, the phone rings, and it is Micah. He has never rung her at home before. The tone of his voice tells her everything: something has happened, something is wrong, and it should not be so, but his voice is saying that Laura Bristow is dead.
He says something about a car, about an accident, and she tries to listen, but the chatter of her family drifts down the hall and into the kitchen.
It is a ceaseless accompaniment to all that she does.
********
End
Fandom: Alias
Author:
ygrawnFandom: Alias
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JJ Abrams
Quote: 115) Risk-taking, trust, and serendipity are key ingredients of joy. Without risk, nothing new ever happens. Without trust, fear creeps in. Without serendipity, there are no surprises. —Rita Golden Gelman.
Summary: Killing people is what she was trained to do, and whilst she would never call it easy, is it her work, and she is good at it. Being a mother is both foreign and difficult to Laura and she doesn’t believe it will ever feel natural.
A/N: Well, yes, ahem, I'm late. Sorry!
********
Sydney is wearing her red cashmere coat, so Laura can see her daughter the moment she emerges from her classroom. The coat makes Sydney more visible than Laura would like any child of hers to be, because she’s never been able to shake the feeling, from the moment Sydney arrived in this world, slick, red and screaming, that her daughter was in danger.
Sydney is swinging her satchel in an idle rhythm, kicking her feet out as she follows the tide of her classmates out of the building. The braids that Laura weaved so neatly in Sydney’s fine, silky hair over breakfast this morning are falling out in a becoming fashion. The loose strands swirl around her daughter’s face and curl errantly down her narrow back. Sydney rubs her left eye and waits for Jimmy McCarthy to stop flinging his yo-yo back and forth so she can make her way down the steps.
At some point during the day, Sydney managed to get a smear of purple paint on her forehead.
Laura is tired and wired and there is a pear-shaped bruise forming rapidly below her heart. She came close to ruining everything this morning, which led to a tense, depressing debrief with her sanctimonious handler, and all she wants to do is go home, take a bath in the dark, drink a bottle of red wine and listen to Dvorak until she falls asleep, alone, in crisp, clean bed sheets.
But she has to finish writing her mid-term reports, cook dinner, deal with the relentless pile of ironing, remember to write a cheque for Sydney’s piano lesson, and replace the lost button onto Jack’s navy blue overcoat before he flies to London tomorrow afternoon.
More demanding than any of those tasks is the fact that Sydney will be bursting with news from her day and will feel compelled to share all of it, the amusing and mundane, the irritating and nonsensical, with her mother. She will be full of energy and excitement and she will want Laura’s full attention.
Laura braces herself for this, the hardest part of the life she leads. Killing people – like the man at the Chandler Hotel today – is what she was trained to do, and whilst she would never call it easy, is it her work, and she is good at it. Being a mother is both foreign and difficult to Laura and she doesn’t believe it will ever feel natural.
Sydney’s bright red, verging-on-vermillion, pure cashmere wool coat was a present from Jack, purchased three months ago from a boutique in the Place du Vendome in Paris after a particularly difficult mission. Laura isn’t supposed to know that her husband destroyed the large, Paris-based KGB cell – he told her he was doing some routine information gathering. It turns out there are things that Jack still does not tell her, missions he does keep secret, and the spy in Laura admires his occasional discretion.
But her handler, Micah, told Laura what Jack had done, so she knew why her husband returned from France so pleased with himself, so overly affectionate, so unusually ebullient. There was the coat for Sydney and pearl earrings for Laura and a surprisingly passionate kiss when he came home, and when Jack had pressed her against the front door and wrapped his hands around the curve of her hips she’d forgotten for a moment that one of her compatriots had been working in Paris and was now, undoubtedly, dead.
Sydney had been asleep for two hours by the time Jack walked through the door, so he’d crept into her room and left the tissue-wrapped coat on the end of the bed, with no note or card, confident that Sydney would know who the gift was from.
At six o’clock that morning Sydney woke Laura and Jack up when she sprinted into their room and jumped up onto their bed, wearing her pink-and-purple striped pyjamas, the red coat and a smile of startling proportions.
“Daddy, you’re home!” she’d shrieked, crawling up the bed to loop her arms around her father’s neck. Sydney’s hair had spooled across Jack’s pillow and tickled Laura’s nose.
Jack had woken up the instant Sydney entered the room – as had Laura – but his daughter’s affection, as always, caught him by surprise, and he paused awkwardly before pulling Sydney across his chest into a more comfortable position.
It occurred to Laura, as she watched Sydney delicately kiss Jack’s nose, that as much as their daughter loved the extravagant and colourful coat, her father’s return home after a ten-day absence was the better gift.
Sydney is a slender, lithe girl with a heart-shaped face, small but expressive eyes, and the pale skin and sharp cheekbones of her mother’s lineage. Tiny, charming freckles are scattered across her upturned nose.
She is a serious-looking child who can be light and buoyant when the mood takes her. Sydney is a girl who smiles more than she frowns, and when she does smile every head in the room turns to look. She doesn’t always stand out amongst other children, and yet, she has Jack’s ability to be noticed when she chooses or hide in plain sight when she wants.
For a six-year-old it’s a remarkable talent.
Laura knows her daughter can be overly-sensitive and quick to take umbrage. She is more solitary than other girls her age, and she has a terrible competitive streak. But she can own her arrogance because she is intelligent and her parents have taught her to value that. She excels in English, sport and drama. Sydney is thoughtful and generous and generally obedient. And she is loyal and faithful and compassionate and always full of hope and optimism.
Laura knows those quality are not hers.
Sydney catches sight of her mother and bounds in Laura’s direction, neatly ducking around Jimmy’s yo-yo. She flings her arms around her mother’s waist and begins to breathlessly tell Laura about the upcoming Thanksgiving pageant, the story they read in library today, which is somehow connected with the death of the class fish after lunch and isn’t purple a nice colour, Mommy?
Laura forces a smile to her face and asks about the class pet’s unfortunate demise as though she really cares. Sydney reports the death in great detail. Laura reaches out to smooth down Sydney’s fringe, hoping that these gestures, this regular routine will take the edge off her restlessness. She always feels like this after a kill. Venturing out into the real world makes it harder to return to this: permission slips and dinner parties, class pets and homework, curriculum meetings and term papers.
It always sets her teeth on edge to come back.
Sydney screws up her nose and pulls away. “Mommy, your hands smell strange.”
“Like antiseptic,” Laura tells her automatically. They do smell of antiseptic, but only because she had to wash the smell of gunpowder off her skin. “I had a doctor’s appointment.”
But Sydney is now talking about Cathy Alderson’s new puppy, a Dalmatian. “He doesn’t have spots yet because he’s only a puppy. They get their spots later. Mrs. Alderson bought him into class this morning to show us.”
“What’s his name?”
“Spotty.” Sydney rolls her eyes. “That’s such a stupid name for a Dalmatian. Hey, Mommy…”
Laura knows the question before it comes. Parenting is six-tenths predictability.
“…can we get a dog?”
“Why don’t you ask your father when he comes home tonight?”
“Okay. Do you think Daddy will say yes?”
“Why don’t think of some good reasons why we should get a dog? Maybe you can convince Daddy.”
“Well, a dog would be a friend for me, because I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
That is Sydney’s six-year-old, passive aggressive way of letting her mother know that she’s not happy about being an only child. Since the age of three Sydney has been asking for a sibling.
“Laura!”
Sydney and Laura look to the source of the voice – Mandy Purcell, the unofficial but powerful dictator of the first-grade mothers.
Blonde, pastel-happy and perennially cheerful, Mandy Purcell is everything Laura hates. She cannot afford to show her loathing, but derives great pleasure from the fact that Mandy’s husband, an overpaid, boorish, materialistic middle-management jerk, hit on Laura at the Purcell’s last cocktail party, a Fifties-themed soiree which bored Jack as much as Laura.
“Mandy,” Laura says, spreading a smile across her face as Mandy skirts around the enormous McCarthy brood. Seven redheaded children, with another on the way. “How was your trip?”
“Oh, wonderful, Laura, just so relaxing. Have you ever been to New York? You really should – you can’t call yourself a proper American without a visit to the Big Apple.”
Subtlety isn’t a word Mandy could spell, so it’s no surprise the woman can’t employ it. Mandy Purcell and the other mothers from Sydney’s class are icily aloof around Laura. Adept at reading people, Laura has always known why most women dislike her. But she’d never enjoyed their frostiness until the night she and Jack got home from that nightmare cocktail party.
Jack had been unzipping her dress when he’d told Laura he’d noticed how jealous other women were around her. He told it was because their husbands turned at the sound of her voice, restlessly seeking the source. It was the mystery in her vowels, the husky promise in her sibilants, the dancing foreign eyes and enchanting bone structure. It was her aura, which suggested she had seen more than other women, that she understood men better.
“You’re like Madame Olenska,” he’d said, pulling her hair out of its knot and letting it fall.
“You’ve read The Age of Innocence?”
“Try not to sound too surprised,” Jack murmured, kissing her shoulder through the tumble of hair.
“But I am. Wharton is hardly your style.”
“No. But Madame Olenska is.”
And the cocktail dress was still a white, silky puddle on the floor the next morning when Laura got out of bed to make breakfast and finish marking her tenth-grader’s papers on To Kill a Mocking-Bird. She’d smiled to herself all day, strangely pleased at Jack’s observance, at the pride hovering in the back of his voice when he talked about other men wanting her.
Laura now widens her smile at Mandy. “Perhaps we’ll take Sydney to New York in the summer.”
“You should – you and Jack should travel more often.”
Sydney pipes up. “My Daddy travels all the time for business. He bought me this coat from Paris.”
Mandy glanced down at Sydney. “Paris? Aren’t you a lucky girl?”
“He bought Mommy pearl earrings,” Sydney adds absently. “They go with her necklace.”
“Well, Jack keeps his generosity well hidden,” Mandy comments, almost caustically.
“Mm.” Laura shrugs her shoulders ambiguously. “We should let you go, Mandy. I’m sure you have to get home.”
“I just wanted to ask if you and Jack are still coming to our dinner party on Saturday. I’m sure you said you could make it.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll just have to make sure the sitter can look after Sydney.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Mandy flaps her hand. “Bring her with you – our nanny can mind her.” She bends down to peer at Sydney with what she no doubt assumes is a friendly expression. “You’ll have fun with Katie and James, won’t you, Sydney?”
Sydney nods gravely. “Yes, Mrs Purcell.”
“Aren’t you a delight? You look so much like your Mommy.”
“Daddy says that’s a good thing. He says Mommy is the most beautiful woman in the world.” Sydney casts a glance up at Laura. “I hope I still look like her when I grow up.”
“I’m sure you will.” Mandy straightens and pats Sydney on the head. Twice. “We’ll see you on Saturday then, Laura. You and your handsome husband.”
That’s the other thing of course. Women wonder how Laura – foreign, bookish, arrogantly regal Laura Petrovic – managed to net the good-looking, clever, capable, powerful, ambitious, charming but discreet, all-American Jack Bristow. And all this during the Cold War.
It’s all Laura can do not to laugh when she sees women fawn over Jack.
Mandy heads off to accost Annie McCarthy, the mother of the redheaded band. Laura grabs hold of Sydney’s hand and begins to march towards the car, determined to get home without another interruption.
“Is everything okay, Mommy?”
Laura forces herself to slow down. “Of course, sweetheart. I’m just tired. I had a hard day at work.”
Sydney skips every second or third step as they cross the road. “Mrs Purcell and Mrs Alderson don’t work. And Minnie McCarthy’s Mommy doesn’t either.”
“Annie McCarthy has nearly eight children. That’s more than enough work for any woman.”
“You don’t have to have seven brothers and sisters for me, Mommy,” Sydney offers earnestly. “One would be enough.”
They reach the car. “Does it bother you that I work, Sydney?” Laura asks with genuine curiosity. Sydney has never said very much about her mother’s job.
Sydney inherited her shrug from Jack. She doesn’t lift her shoulders, and yet she somehow coveys the indifference of that gesture. She does it now.
“Oh, I don’t know Mommy.” Her daughter climbs into the front seat and reaches for her seat-belt. “A dog would be a good guard for the house. When Daddy goes away we would be safe.”
Laura climbs into the driver’s seat. “I’m at home when your father goes away. You’re always safe, Sydney.”
“But Daddies keep their families safe.”
“Mommies do that, too.”
Laura pulls out into traffic. She has the insane, fleeting desire to get onto the freeway and drive out of Los Angeles, to keep driving if only to prove that she can. To prove that there are no fences in her life besides the ones that she chooses. She has to remind herself more frequently these days that she did choose this mission, this life, these fences.
“But who keeps you safe when Daddy’s not home?” Sydney asks.
“I keep myself safe,” Laura replies. “And when you grow up, I’ll teach you to look after yourself, too.”
“That would be fun.”
Laura indicates a left-hand turn and props, waiting for the traffic to clear. She glances over at Sydney and says, “Did your father really say that about me? About being beautiful?”
“Mm-hmm.” Sydney is fiddling with the third button on her coat. “I asked him why you got married and Daddy said that when he met you he thought you were the most beautiful woman in the whole world and that he had to have you. And then he said that I looked just like you, and when I grow up, I’ll be beautiful too.”
“Really?”
She giggles. “And then he said that people would never know I was his daughter because he’s not beautiful at all.”
Laura laughs. It’s not really funny, but it is, because she can hear Jack saying it with his dry humour. “No, Daddy isn’t beautiful. But people will know you’re his daughter. You have his eyes and his forehead.”
“Daddy says it’s good I don’t have his ears.” Sydney grins. “Daddy’s ears stick right out.”
“They do,” Laura agrees, and this time her laugh is genuine. Jack is quite sensitive about his ears – it’s the only vanity he’s ever revealed.
“Did you think he was handsome, Mommy, when you met him?”
“Yes,” Laura answers. “I thought he was very handsome. And very strong. People can tell that about your Daddy as soon as they meet him.”
“Daddy is super-strong,” Sydney agrees. “And super-smart. And you’re super-pretty.”
The traffic wanes and Laura turns, and Sydney returns to fiddling with the shiny button.
Apparently, Sydney was paying attention earlier, because as they pull into their tree-lined street she suddenly asks, “How come your work made you tired today, Mommy?”
“Oh, I had one of those jobs that just didn’t go right and when I had to fix it I got grumpy and tired.”
“Poor Mommy.” Sydney pats her mother’s elbows, and then leans across the handbrake to press her forehead against Laura’s shoulder. “Poor little Mommy.”
They pull into the driveway.
********
Sydney takes her coat off and drops it in the middle of the hallway, already racing towards the kitchen for her afternoon snack. She spills her glass of milk across the kitchen bench and yesterday’s mail when reaching for another piece of apple.
She goes to the bathroom to wash her hands and yells out to her mother that she can’t turn the tap on because it’s twisted too tight. When Laura doesn’t immediately respond – she’s busy trying to salvage the soggy mail – Sydney starts repeatedly yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy”, until Laura appears and loosens the faucet.
Sydney’s attempts to help her mother start dinner – chicken pie and chocolate pudding for dessert – are more successful. Sydney can usually be trusted to wash vegetables and stir sauces without making a mess. Her daughter’s prattle washes over Laura as they work. Sydney talks constantly, something that Laura puts down to being an only child.
On two occasions Sydney’s commentary penetrates the self-imposed, defensive fog that all mothers develop over time.
The first is when she is says, whilst sifting flour, “I don’t mind that you work. Your work is interesting. You always have funny stories about your students. And you know lots of things because you’re a teacher. Katie’s Mommy is boring.”
Laura hides her smile. “Don’t say that, Sydney. Mrs Purcell isn’t boring.”
Sydney corrects Laura with her father’s bent for truth. “Yes she is. Even James thinks so and she’s his Mommy.”
“Then just don’t say it in front of Mrs Purcell. It’s not very nice. And even if she is boring, she’s trustworthy and she’s our friend.”
“Daddy says I should be careful not to trust people too much.” Sydney blows a strand of hair out of her face. “But I’m a good girl – I don’t talk to strangers.”
“You are a good girl,” Laura agrees.
Laura is chopping onions, ten minutes later, when Sydney says, “Why did you go to the doctor, Mommy?”
It takes her too long to respond and she knows she has to be careful tonight. She feels reckless and heedless, tired and almost defeated, and there’s a migraine building behind her right eye. She cannot do this much longer. Eight years – with six as a mother – is the longest any KGB agent has ever maintained a deep cover operation.
There are days when she doesn’t just believe she’s Laura. She is Laura.
“Mommy?” Sydney prods.
“Oh, it was just a routine check-up. To make sure there’s nothing wrong with me.”
Her daughter twists up her face. “I thought you might be having a baby.”
“No.” And Laura moves hurriedly to distract Sydney from her longest-running cause. “No, it was just a check-up. The doctor poked me and prodded me, and looked down my throat and into my ears with funny instruments. He listened to my heart beat and he took my blood-pressure. He told me I was very healthy.
“And then he asked me, ‘Mrs. Bristow do you have any children?’ I said ‘Yes, I have a six-year-old daughter called Sydney’. The doctor said, ‘I knew it! Happy people are healthy people. And you look like you have a daughter who makes you very happy’.”
Sydney’s eyes shine with pride. “I make you happy, Mommy?”
She cups Sydney’s face in her hands and says, “Sydney, you make me very happy.”
“And Daddy makes you happy, too?”
“Of course.” She kisses Sydney’s forehead.
Sydney screws up her face and says, “Mommy, your hands smell funny again.”
And it’s no lie this time, when Laura says, “It’s the onions, sweetheart.”
Whilst Sydney starts talking again, Laura searches for some aspirin. Her migraine is slowly migrating across her head. By the time she puts the pie in her oven it has settled above her right ear and beats a steady, merciless tattoo.
Sydney continues to come up with reasons why they should get a dog. From the sensible – “It would teach me responsibility” – to the inane – “Dogs would eat all the leftover food we have.” She starts to choose a place to put the dog’s food bowl, and when Laura gently cautions her not to get her hopes up, she sulks for half an hour.
When she eventually snaps out of her mood, the sky is beginning to dissolve from day into night. Sydney races into her parent’s bedroom to jump on their bed, which keeps her occupied until Laura, halfway through writing a blistering mid-semester report about Conrad Mikhalsen’s inability to employ grammar of any kind, hears a crash. The kind of crash only made by human bodies when they collide with immoveable objects.
And then there is silence.
“Sydney?” she asks, already halfway out of her seat.
She drops her papers on the floor and sprints down the hallway. Laura is rounding the corner into the bedroom when Sydney begins to scream. Her daughter is in a sickening, unnatural heap at the foot of the bed. When Laura kneels and starts checking for injuries she shifts and sits up, but she continues to scream.
Sydney pauses for breath and that’s when the crying starts. Noisy, gulping sobs fill Laura and Jack’s bedroom.
“Oh, darling, did you fall?” Sydney nods as she tries to crawl into her mother’s lap. “Hold on, sweetheart, where does it hurt?”
“Shoulder,” Sydney manages, pointing and crying. “Fell on my shoulder.”
“Oh, my little girl.” Laura rotates Sydney’s shoulder carefully. Sydney’s sobs grow louder, but her movement is unimpeded. “You haven’t broken anything, Sydney.”
This doesn’t appease her daughter, who has managed to hook her legs around Laura’s waist. Her crying seems to be mostly caused by shock: Sydney is more surprised that she has fallen than she is hurt.
Jack appears suddenly in the doorway, obviously confused to find them there. “Laura, where are you –” He pauses. “What happened?”
“Daddy!” Sydney sobs, reaching out desperately for him. She doesn’t uncurl herself from her mother, though. “I fell,” she cries, the two words broken into four syllables by her tears.
Jack puts down his briefcase and sits on the end of the disarrayed bed. He hooks his hands under Sydney’s shoulders as if to pick her up and she flinches sharply.
“She fell on her shoulder,” Laura says quickly.
So Jack kneels awkwardly behind Laura and reaches out hesitantly to touch the top of Sydney’s head. Their daughter throws her arms around Jack’s neck, which pulls his body flush against Laura’s.
Squashed between her daughter and husband, Laura’s migraine begins to dance the tarantella. Sydney’s howls don’t help.
Jack, surprisingly, takes over the soothing duty. He whispers in Sydney’s ear and wraps his large hand around her neck, cradling her head into his shoulder. He curls his other arm around Laura’s waist, until his hand rests at the small of Sydney’s back. His murmurs don’t make any sense, but after a few minutes, Sydney’s sobs turn into sniffles.
Jack suddenly collapses his body into a sitting position, pulling both Laura and Sydney into his lap. He leans up against the bed. “Sorry,” he says. “I was uncomfortable.”
And now Laura is. She’s too close to Jack and Sydney. She feels stuck in Jack’s lap, trapped between his and Sydney’s limbs. But she has trained her body too well to let it tense up. She focuses on relaxing, inhaling the combined scent of Sydney’s strawberry shampoo and Jack’s musky aftershave.
By the time she has fooled herself into being comfortable, Sydney has stopped crying altogether. Her breath hitches on every second inhale, but she exhales with a noise of pleasure and burrows tighter into her parents’ bodies.
“You were a silly girl for jumping on our bed,” Jack says softly.
The statement doesn’t have much sting to it.
Jack is generally a strict disciplinarian. He doesn’t indulge Sydney’s nonsense. When she rambles he doesn’t just ignore her but asks her to stop. On the rare occasions when she has thrown a tantrum in public Jack’s fury has quickly quelled Sydney’s pettishness.
But when his daughter is upset, when she has hurt herself, every element of hardness in Jack disappears. He is, at those times, softer than Laura, more comforting and kind. Every time she witnesses that side of him, Laura is surprised. She has given her husband so few opportunities to show his tenderness to her. If Laura was to be honest, there is a strange jealousy that overtakes her when she sees Jack’s softness for Sydney.
When Sydney has been hurt by someone else Jack is just terrifying.
Sydney sniffs. “I know, Daddy.”
Laura slightly shifts Sydney across her lap, easing the pressure against the bruise on her chest. “You haven’t broken anything,” she says again. “You’ll just have a big bruise tomorrow morning.”
“I’m sorry for messing up your bed,” Sydney says.
“It doesn’t matter,” Laura tells her. “We can fix it later.”
“Can I stay here for a minute?” Sydney asks. She turns her head until her mouth is pressed against Jack’s neck. “You’re warm.”
Jack squeezes Laura’s thigh. “How are you?”
“Mommy’s tired,” Sydney says. “She had a bad day at work.”
“Report-writing time,” Laura offers. “And I got hit by a flying football.”
“What?”
Laura had invented the story earlier, knowing that Jack would undoubtedly notice the bruise later tonight or tomorrow morning. Perhaps that is what makes her so angry about her sub-par work this morning. She has always killed her targets quickly and efficiently so there was never any need to hide injuries from Jack. Elaborate subterfuge seems to be a reflection of a serious failure on her part.
“I was walking beside the playing fields on the way to a meeting during lunchtime practice and I wasn’t looking and the next thing I knew, I was flat on my back. Their substitute quarterback was playing and his ball went wide. I got hit right in the solar plexus.”
“Second-string quarterback,” Jack corrects, just like she knew he would. “I hope you put the fear of Laura Bristow into the idiot who threw the ball.”
“After I got my breath back,” Laura laughs. “So, I have a bruise too, darling. We’ll match, like twins.”
Sydney rubs her nose in Laura’s hair. “But you’re old, Mommy. And I’m little. How can we be twins?”
“Your mother isn’t old,” Jack says.
“She’s older than me,” Sydney points out.
“That makes her older. Not old.”
“I guess.” Sydney runs her forefinger along Jack’s jaw. “Scratchy,” she giggles.
Jack opens his mouth as if to bite Sydney’s finger off. She snatches her hand back and her giggle turns into a laugh. Her body vibrates against Laura’s stomach. It’s a game now and Sydney presses her finger against Jack’s nose, into the corner of his mouth, the cleft of his chin, daring him to bite her finger.
Jack plays along until Sydney loses interest. Her breathing is completely even now.
“How was your day?” Laura asks her husband.
“It was good.” Jack blows a piece of Sydney’s hair away from his mouth. “Emily came in and had lunch with Arvin. She invited us for dinner on Saturday. I said I’d check with you.”
Laura makes a noise of convincing disappointment. “We’re going to the Purcells for a dinner party. Why don’t we invite Arvin and Emily for dinner on Friday? I’ll call Emily tonight.”
“Can I stay up late with the adults?” Sydney asks.
“We’ll see,” Laura and Jack say in unison.
Their daughter sighs. “That means no.”
Even with her back turned Laura knows that Jack’s smile of amusement matches her own.
********
Laura’s migraine doesn’t disappear.
It makes its presence known throughout dinner and for the next hour whilst she finishes writing reports. Her right arm aches from when Sanders wrenched it and her knee throbs because she was sloppy this morning.
Stupid, really.
She’d dropped Sydney off at school, taken the car home and caught the downtown bus to a pre-arranged location, where a car, her weapons and a change of clothes were waiting. She’d been forced to change in a department-store bathroom, the kind that was softly lit and decorated in peach tones and gold trimming.
On the way out, she’d noticed a sale on children’s clothing and admired a blue, short-sleeved linen dress on display. Laura had idly wondered if they had it in Sydney’s size.
The hotel was familiar from another assignment and she’d used the same ingress strategy – straight through the front lobby to the elevators. Hotels were a security nightmare, particularly a place like the Chandler, which had convention centres and restaurants and shops that could be accessed through the lobby, creating a constant and useful stream of people going in every direction.
And Laura knew how to hide herself as well as Jack or Sydney.
The seventh floor was almost deserted at ten-thirty in the morning, the tourists and businessmen already out for the day. She passed a couple who were engaged in a vicious argument. To say they barely noticed her would be a lie – they didn’t see her at all.
“Once a week is not regularly,” the man fiercely argued. “We fight more often than that.”
“And having more sex would stop us from arguing?” the woman asked, sceptically, apparently unaware that she was in a public place. “And it’s more than once a week. Don’t exaggerate.”
“I understand when we’re at home, honey. But we’re on vacation. The kids are with your parents. We’ve only got four days left.”
They passed out of earshot. Laura smiled cynically to herself.
When she reached Room 717 her face was smooth again. A skeleton key gained her access – her gun entered the room before she did.
The emptiness of the room, however, didn’t startle Laura. Until her brain kicked in and she realized that this room wasn’t supposed to empty. It was the correct room – her handler had assured her that their contact in the Agency had confirmed the details from an official document only that morning.
She was aiming her gun at a lampshade, looking for a suitcase, a book, a newspaper, anything, when she was kneed in the back. The bathroom, she thought, mentally berating herself. He was in the bathroom.
Laura swayed precariously and her attacker grabbed her arm and wrenched it into an unnatural position. She spun herself around with that momentum. The closeness of the body behind her rendered her useless for too many seconds and when his fist slammed into her stomach she didn’t see it coming. He followed up with a vicious kick to the ribs her gun fell from her hands.
The fight was untidy and disorganised in the cramped hotel room, far less graceful than Laura’s usual style. They were forced to use the weapons at hand; he swung a bedside lamp at her head and missed badly; Laura retaliated with the Gideon Bible, which broke his nose. She tried to retrieve her gun from near the TV; he slammed his elbow into her solar plexus and she flew backwards.
She crashed into the coffee table, which despite her weight, didn’t break. But it offered her no mercy and her eyes blurred from the sudden pain of the sharp corners digging into her back and thighs. She could sense rather than see the man reaching for his gun on the end of his bed.
Laura had been trained in the rain and the snow. She had been starved for weeks at a time, the KGB had injected her with every drug known to man so she could build up a resistance, they had sleep-deprived her, over-fed her, humiliated her, electrocuted her, doused her in water, forced her to walk barefoot for miles in the snow, convinced her that her family had died, that the Party had betrayed her, left her temporarily blind and deaf for days on end, and enacted every form of physical torture upon her body without going far enough to leave scars. They did everything but rape her and even now she’s not sure that they didn’t.
So no coffee table was ever going to be the undoing of Irina Derevko.
She kicked her legs up and out, tripping up her attacker, who was obviously stupid enough to believe that because she was on the ground she was unable to fight back or inflict any pain upon him. Only a man would think like that.
Reaching out desperately, Laura’s fingers found her gun. She rolled away, already guiding the barrel into position, as her target took his turn to crash into the coffee table. This time the wood broke with a sickening crunch, sending splinters into the air and an echo around the room. The silenced bullet that pierced the back of the man’s head a second later wasn’t nearly as loud.
Laura lay on the ground at an awkward angle for half a minute, trying to control the adrenaline racing through her body. She had to calm down and act carefully, cautiously, because this was the time when most people made mistakes.
Thirty seconds, if not less, had passed since the target had surprised her, but it had been so long since Laura had been in a real fight or deviated from her tactical plan that it took her a long moment to relax.
Gingerly, Laura stood up. When she straightened her back she involuntarily let out a moan of pain. Her solar plexus was not happy and neither were her lungs. She perversely took deep breaths and used the sharp, biting pain to clear her head.
The disarray of the room was annoying, but hardly cause for alarm, Laura quickly decided. It wouldn’t indicate to the investigating agents anything other than a brief struggle. She’d worn gloves, so her presence wouldn’t be discovered, and she doubted anybody had heard anything.
Laura took another deep breath, returned her gun to its concealed holster, hung the Do Not Disturb sing on the doorhandle, and exited the room.
She decided, halfway to her rendezvous point with her handler, that she would buy that dress for Sydney, and two hours after a dressing-down from Micah, she went back and put it on the credit card.
********
Jack always does bath-time duty after dinner. Unless he’s travelling Jack makes it a point to always be home in time to give Sydney her bath and tuck her into bed.
Tonight, Laura listens to them from the kitchen bench, hearing Sydney’s high-pitched voice occasionally broken by Jack’s soft, short replies. It is a familiar musical interlude of her day.
Sydney likes to talk to her father and doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the fact that he doesn’t often respond. When he does reply, she listens carefully and Laura can imagine Sydney now, sitting in the bath, her hair a soapy white nest, trailing patterns in the cooling water with her fingers, listening intently to her father as if he is the font of all wisdom.
The sucking sound of draining water irritates Laura beyond measure. And Sydney’s giggles – caused no doubt by the rough, jocular way Jack dries his daughter’s hair with her towel – make the fillings in her mouth sour and curl up.
“Carry me, Daddy,” Sydney commands and Laura knows that Jack will carry his daughter into her bedroom. He will tickle the soles of her feet and Sydney will giggle again, and when she tells her father to stop, he will pretend he has no idea what she’s talking about.
That Jack is predictable is a given. Laura wouldn’t still have this job if he wasn’t. And Sydney is six: her life is about the routine and structure her parents have created for her, Laura more consistently than Jack, because creating order helps her stay focused on her mission. But today, she can’t stand Jack and Sydney’s ritual. She can’t concentrate through her anger and irritation.
Sydney appears in the kitchen a few minutes later, wearing her favourite pink pyjamas and a pout on her face. “Daddy said he’s going away tomorrow.”
“Yes, he is,” Laura replies, absently.
The pout deepens and her voice turns shrill. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Didn’t I?” Laura tries for innocence and achieves it, of course. “I must have forgotten.”
“Mommy!” her daughter wails. “You can’t forget. You have to tell me, so I can draw a picture for Daddy. You know that.”
“You’ve got enough time before bed,” Laura reasons. “Where are your markers?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they in your bedroom? Why don’t you go and check?” Sydney stands still. “Sydney?”
“You go and get them. I’m too tired.”
“Excuse me?”
“I want you to go and get them for me.”
Laura puts her pen down slowly and stares at Sydney with a tight mouth. “You go and find your markers now, or you won’t be able to draw a picture for Daddy,” she warns.
“Fine. I’m going.”
Sydney stomps off with that flair for drama that only six-year-old girls possess. She returns with a large box full of markers, crayons and pencils. Laura would usually smile at this child-like behaviour. Tonight she has to bite her tongue hard to stop her anger from seeping out into her expression.
Sydney sits up at the bench and sets her markers out in order of darkest shade to the lightest. The bottoms of the markers are in perfect alignment. She carefully places the blank piece of paper at right angles to the edge of the bench.
Inhaling deeply, Sydney selects a red marker and begins to draw confidently, with straight, bold lines.
Laura finishes up the last of her reports and realizes that tonight’s dishes are still in the sink. It won’t occur to Jack to do the chore, so if Laura doesn’t do them now they’ll sit there until she does. She sighs and moves wearily towards the sink.
Sydney hums under her breath as she draws; an aimless, pointless tune. Laura watches the water cascade from the faucet into the sink. She still has to sew that button onto Jack’s coat. He’ll want it done soon, so he can pack for his trip.
“I wish Daddy didn’t have to go away,” Sydney comments.
“Mm.” Laura reaches for the detergent, squeezes the bottle, and watches the bubbles form.
“Don’t you wish Daddy could stay?”
“Yes. Yes,” she repeats, twisting the tap off sharply. “But Daddy’s work is very important.”
“Oh, I know. But I’m important too. And I miss Daddy.”
“Daddy misses us too, when he travels.”
Sydney reaches for a yellow marker. Laura begins to scrub the Pyrex dish she used to bake the chicken pie.
She’s so tired, and she feels it keenly at this moment. Laura hates it here. She hates her life, this mission. She hates that most days this mission has nothing to do with the cause. She hates Jack and Sydney for loving her; she hates herself for loving them.
Jack enters the room and asks, “Laura, have you fixed that button on my jacket?”
Laura doesn’t turn. “No. I’m just doing the dishes. I’ll do it when I’ve finished.”
“Okay, I want to pack soon.”
“I know you do.” Laura adds more hot water to the sink. “Of course I know, Jack. How could I possibly forget?” Passive aggression isn’t her style; it words hang heavily in the air.
“Laura, are you…” he begins.
“Daddy, don’t look at the picture!” Sydney exclaims. “It’s not ready yet.”
“I’m not looking,” Jack assures his daughter, mildly.
“Daddy, do you have to go away?”
“We’ve talked about this, Sydney. It’s part of my job.”
“Mommy’s job doesn’t make her go away.”
“Your mother has a different kind of job. And she needs to stay here with you.”
“You need to stay here with me too,” Sydney whines. “Mommy doesn’t do bath-time right. And she doesn’t make the voices when she reads to me at bedtime.”
Jack smiles. “I can’t braid your hair and choose your clothes, and help you practise piano, and do all of those things your mother does for you. And I’m a terrible cook. You’d die of food poisoning if I did the cooking.”
Sydney ignores this and says, “Do you miss me when you go away?”
Jack seems surprised and says, vehemently, “Of course I do, my sweetheart.” He rests his hand on her head and his voice is surprisingly emotional. “I think about you all the time I’m away.”
“I bet you miss me more than you miss Mommy, because you had all that time with Mommy before I was born.”
It is a strange, childish thing to say, and Sydney says it with no malice, but Laura is instantly furious. Who is Sydney to say that Jack misses her more? It is a perfect illustration of her daughter’s selfishness, her constant demands, and her thoughtlessness. She drops her clothes on the floor, never bothers to tidy up her messes, and assumes that her mother will always be here.
Worst of all – and it makes Laura’s throat tight with anger – Sydney thinks constantly about her father, and talks about his intelligence, his strength, and his absences. Sydney loves her father more than she loves her mother.
It turns out that Laura has risked everything, that her heart has betrayed her, that it has unclenched and laid itself open for a man who wants a button sewn back on his coat, and a little girl who idolises her father.
“I miss you both equally,” Jack says in a soft voice. Laura turns to look at him, and Sydney’s head snaps up.
“Don’t look, Daddy!”
“I’m not looking.” He’s not – he’s looking over Sydney’s head at his wife with almost perfect understanding.
Sydney begins to hum again, only this time she adds in tuneless la-di-das. Laura’s migraine flares again, and she can’t bear to see the softness in Jack’s eyes, so she turns back to the sink and starts scrubbing her silver serving spoon. It’s part of a set – a wedding present from Jack’s boss at the CIA.
Jack’s gaze still bores into the back of her neck and Sydney is still humming.
Laura lifts the spoon out of the water to see if it’s clean, and then, because Sydney lets loose one more la-la, she hurls the spoon back into the water. It clangs against a saucepan. Water fountains into the air and splashes against the bench, against the window, against Laura’s shirt.
“Sydney, would you stop that damn humming?” Laura yells. She whirls around and her voice rises with every word. Anger and vitriol sharpen her accent. “Stop it! Just stop! Don’t you care that I have a headache? Don’t you care that I have other things to do beside tidy up after you? You never stop needing, do you? You demand and you take…”
But by the word ‘take’ she has automatically swallowed her yell, has automatically pulled the anger back into her body. Laura Bristow doesn’t yell. Laura Bristow never gets angry. Horrified, she presses the back of her trembling hand to her mouth and leans heavily against the sink-top.
Sydney’s eyes are wide and wet. Her mouth wobbles. “M-Mommy?” she stutters.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Jack says quickly. “Mommy’s just tired.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Sydney says in a choked voice. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Sydney,” Jack tells her.
“I’m sorry for humming, Mommy.” Tears spill out of her eye. “Mommy? I’m sorry. I won’t do it anymore.”
Sydney wants her mother to hug her, to comfort and reassure her, because Laura has never randomly lost her temper at her daughter and Sydney is frightened. But Laura cannot move her body. She is frozen at the sink, unable to speak or move for fear that the truth will fall from her lips like the water from the tap, that it will spill out of her in a steady stream of tiredness, pain, self-hatred and loathing.
She has never been this close to losing Laura Bristow before.
“Mommy?”
Jack rounds the bench and lifts Sydney from the stool. She clings to him, fits her body into his crevices and planes, tucks her head into his shoulder and twines her arms around his neck.
“We’ll leave Mommy alone for a minute,” Jack says softly. “She’s not angry at you, Sydney. She’s just tired and she has a headache.”
Sydney’s foot is small, delicate, fine-boned and white against Jack’s hip. Laura watches Sydney’s foot ride Jack’s hip as he carries his daughter through the living area to the hallway. Sydney’s wet eyes fix on her mother until Jack turns the corner and the two of them disappear from sight.
After a moment, Laura turns back to the sink and finishes the dishes.
********
She sews the button back onto Jack’s coat, writes the cheque for Sydney’s piano lesson, and packs tomorrow’s lunch for her husband and daughter. She calls Emily and organizes dinner for Friday night. Laura will spend all night ignoring the looks Arvin sends her way. The two women chat for ten minutes, mostly about Sydney. Emily and Arvin adore Sydney.
By the time Laura wipes down the bench and turns off the kitchen light it is almost nine-thirty and Sydney has been in bed for over an hour. Jack has not sought her out and is probably working in his study.
In their bedroom, Jack’s suitcase is packed and standing near the door. Laura is carrying a piece of paper and she places it carefully atop of the suitcase. It is Sydney’s nearly complete picture. It is a lopsided reproduction of their house, the green front door half-coloured and the trees half-finished. Underneath, Sydney has already written, in well-formed letters, “Daddy, don’t forget our home, love Sweetheart.”
Sydney sometimes signs her cards and pictures to her father with Sweetheart. Jack uses that endearment more often than his daughter’s actual name, probably because Laura chose the name Sydney and Jack has never particularly liked it. He wanted to call her something Russian: Anya or Natasha, and was confused when Laura firmly disagreed.
But sweetheart is the endearment he’s used since Sydney was born, and given that he’s an unsentimental man, it’s strange how easily and often the word falls from his lips. Perhaps it is strange that he uses the same endearment for his wife and daughter, but Laura feels that the word suits Sydney better. As syrupy as it sounds, Sydney probably is the sweetest thing in Jack’s heart. Laura might be the most coveted, the most desired thing in his heart, but Sydney is undoubtedly the most adored.
Laura changes into a plain white silk nightgown and brushes her hair in the bathroom. The simple task, usually performed at the end of the day, nearly always makes Laura think of her mother. Brushing her daughters’ hair was the one time Tatiana Derevko seemed perfectly peaceful. She would sit on the bed the three girls shared and pull each daughter into her lap and use her ivory-backed hairbrush to untangle the snarls and knots of the day. Sometimes she would hum, or sing. If it was a good day, she’d tell them a story about their father.
The Derevko girls had tattered clothes and hungry eyes, and hard, cold hearts, but their hair always shone.
Tonight the memory of her prickly, desperately unhappy, often moody mother pinches and prods accusingly at Laura until she puts her brush down and silently pads down the hall to Sydney’s pink bedroom.
Sydney’s bedside lamp is on, casting soft yellow light across the room. She has kicked her sheets down the bed and her body is twisted into a contorted, uncomfortable position, her arms thrown over her face and the sheet trapped between her knees.
Laura nudges Sydney onto her back and tucks her daughter’s legs under the sheets. She sits on the edge of the bed and pushes Sydney’s hair away from her face. The little girl’s eyes flutter open. Laura smiles down at her and Sydney’s eyes close over again. She makes a noise of contentment in the back of her throat.
“I’m sorry.” Laura bends and traces the shape of Sydney’s ear with her mouth. “I’m sorry, darling,” she breathes.
Sydney lifts her knee and pushes against Laura’s thigh, obviously try to roll onto her stomach. Laura lets her and folds the sheets across Sydney’s shoulders. Sydney’s eyes open again.
Laura kisses Sydney’s temple. “I’m sorry,” she repeats.
“Mommy,” Sydney sighs. The word is thick and almost incoherent with her mouth pressed against the pillow.
She wraps her sweaty, warm hand around Laura’s fingers and slithers back into sleep. Laura stays and watches her daughter. Sydney smells clean and warm and the moonlight across her face makes her seem older.
Laura usually tries very hard not to think about who Sydney will be when she grows up, but tonight she allows herself to imagine that Sydney will be capable, beautiful, kind, and successful. She allows herself to pretend that her daughter will go to college, get a normal job, have a husband and children, maybe join a reading club or work in her garden on the weekends.
She allows herself to imagine that Sydney will be happy. She would choose happiness above all things for Sydney. The kind of blind, unassuming happiness that a simple, safe life brings.
Laura watches Sydney sleep until she hears Jack stir in his study. His light clicks off and he moves noiselessly down the hallway. As always, he stops briefly at Sydney’s door to check on her. He doesn’t seem particularly surprised to see Laura sitting on the bed.
Jack waits for Laura to let go of Sydney’s hand and turn off the bedside lamp. They walk down to their room in silence. Laura slips between their blue sheets while Jack changes. She is too tired to read tonight. Jack must sense that because he turns off the overhead light and despite the dark, makes his certain and steady way to their bed.
“I sewed that button back on your jacket,” Laura softly offers as Jack lifts the covers. “And left Sydney’s picture with your suitcase.”
“I saw. I don’t think our daughter will ever be an artist.”
“Everyone is an artist, Jack, even if they can’t draw or paint.”
“Mm.” Jack settles on his back, his voice as subtle as his movements. “I should only be away one night. Possibly two.”
“Is Arvin going with you?”
“Yes. We received a lead on Dieter Valoskov’s location. We think he’s planning another heist.”
Laura expertly draws information out of Jack over the next five minutes. She feels a brief temptation to let the comment go without chase. Dieter Valoskov might be her comrade, but he’s a bastard and a suspected paedophile, and Laura has never liked him. But he’s important to the KGB, so tomorrow she’ll pass everything along to Micah, who will no doubt use the opportunity to lecture her again.
Jack asks about her day; she tells him that Emily and Arvin can come for dinner on Friday night; he reminds her to reschedule his appointment with the dentist; they briefly reiterate the need to renovate their cramped and ugly bathroom.
“When I was putting Sydney to bed she asked if we could get a dog,” Jack mentions.
“Cathy Alderson brought in her Dalmatian puppy for show and tell today. I’d say it sparked an idea.”
“The Aldersons?” Jack queries with a blank voice.
“Pam and Steve. Their children are Steve Junior, Cathy who’s in Sydney’s class, and Bobby and Ed – they’re twins.”
“I still don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“He has buck teeth and bad breath. She got drunk at the McCarthy’s barbecue last summer and accidentally fell in your lap.” The acid in Laura’s voice infects the word accidentally.
“She was wearing an ugly green dress,” Jack recalls faintly. “And he persists in calling me buddy.”
“That’s the Aldersons,” Laura confirms. “I’m not sure if she really wants a dog or she’s just taken by the idea of it.”
“Perhaps.” He pauses. “She also asked me for a little sister.”
“Jack…”
“I’m just reporting what Sydney said.”
“I don’t think I could manage two children with you away so often.” She keeps her tone light, but the guilt trip does its work and Jack is perceptive enough to leave the topic alone.
“Why don’t we see if she keeps asking about the dog? If she does, we’ll know it’s serious.”
Laura is surprised. “You don’t have a problem with it?”
“I got a dog when I was a little older than Sydney. It was good company. Taught me responsibility.”
“You were born responsible, Jack,” she teases half-heartedly. “What was the dog’s name?”
He hesitates. “Missy.”
Laura rolls onto her hip, until her body is pressed against Jack’s. “Your dog was called Missy?”
“I called it Mister Connors, but my sister called it Missy. It stuck. And when Sarah died, I kept calling the dog Missy.”
“You had a boy dog called Missy?” Laura laugh is genuine as she slides her foot across Jack’s warm calves. “However did you live down the embarrassment?”
“With my usual aplomb,” Jack dryly returns.
She nudges Jack’s hip with her pelvis. “You don’t talk about Sarah.”
Jack correctly interprets Laura’s forays and pulls her into his arms. The silk of her nightgown sings against the sheets and Jack’s bare skin.
“It was a long time ago,” he offers. “I don’t feel the need to talk about her.”
She shifts slightly, rolling her head into Jack’s shoulder. It’s been a long time since she’s honestly wanted Jack to hold her, and the sensation is faintly embarrassing. That she might end up needing Jack was never something she considered about her mission.
“What happened to Missy?”
“He got old and died in his sleep. I was twenty-one and Missy was fourteen.”
“Did you cry?”
“What?”
She tilts her head to stare up at him. “Well, did you?”
Jack rolls his eyes. “What does it matter?”
“The idea of you crying over a dog is endearing, Jack. Romantic, even.”
“Then I definitely cried.” He drops a kiss on her shoulder, but neither of them is really in the mood for sex tonight.
Silence falls comfortably until Laura says, “I’m sorry about before. I don’t know what happened. I was tired. More than usual.”
Jack speaks carefully. “My absences are difficult. I know that.”
“It’s not that, Jack. Well, sometimes it is. But you’ve always gone away – your work is too important. I just feel…oh, I don’t know. There are days I feel locked in by my world.” She surprised to find her words are true. “I feel stuck.”
“Is it Sydney?”
“No,” she quickly replies. “No. She’s six, Jack. She’s a child. She’s supposed to depend on me. And she’s smart, and talkative and funny and so loving so I don’t resent her at all. I just…some days…”
Jack runs his finger back and forth along Laura’s left shoulder blade. “I could get some time off over summer. We could go away for a few weeks. Leave Sydney with my mother. They’d both love that.”
Laura exhales deeply. “Sounds nice. We could go to New York. Or Florida. Maybe Canada.”
Jack says, “Whatever you want, you can have.”
It is that which makes her cry.
Such a simple undoing, to realize that she never wanted any of this, has never chosen anything about her life, has built walls and ceilings and mazes in her brain and her heart, but none of that has stopped her from growing to desperately need Jack and Sydney.
And she cannot have them. Not for much longer. She will lose all of this soon, will never again greet Jack at the end of the day and complain about her busy schedule. She’ll never see Sydney fall in love for the first time, never see her graduate, never know if she keeps her hair long, she won’t see her at the breakfast table every day, or fight with her about curfew, or the thousand other things she feels entitled to experience.
Jack only holds her, and obviously chooses to believe that his wife is overworked, stressed and tired. Laura has made sure to cry at various points in their marriage, so Jack doesn’t know that crying has been a foreign response most of her life.
Now, she cries honestly, quickly and quietly, inwardly berating herself for such a ridiculous weakness.
The KGB never asked her to take on this mission; she is a soldier, and she was ordered to do it, but she always understood the risks, always knew that marrying Jack Bristow would be more dangerous than anything she’d ever done with a gun or a grenade. When she feel pregnant, so unexpectedly, when Jack’s joy surrounded her and trapped her, she knew there was a chance she’d lose her identity, her sanity, her self.
But Laura never once realised she was really risking her heart. Her foolish, hopeful heart that has betrayed her so completely. It is not annoying to have been so wrong; just sad.
When she stops crying, Jack does not say anything, and Laura is grateful for that. He rubs her back slowly and rhythmically until her breathing evens out, until her cheeks are dry, and it occurs to Laura that this is what he did for their daughter earlier this evening.
She falls asleep with sticky eyes and ache above her heart, which might be caused by her bruise but might not be.
When Sydney wakes her and Jack in the morning by jumping up onto their bed, Laura decides that she will not pass on that information about Dieter Valoskov, and that she and Sydney will go the pound after school and choose a dog.
She gets up to make breakfast, and just as she’s reaching for the milk, the phone rings, and it is Micah. He has never rung her at home before. The tone of his voice tells her everything: something has happened, something is wrong, and it should not be so, but his voice is saying that Laura Bristow is dead.
He says something about a car, about an accident, and she tries to listen, but the chatter of her family drifts down the hall and into the kitchen.
It is a ceaseless accompaniment to all that she does.
********
End
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