I really wasn’t sure what the rush was all about this time, but ever faithful, I made the drop and caught my flight.
Once I deplaned, I exited the airport like every other wearied traveler. I toted only the backpack Wallace had stuffed with the essentials: ID, new phone preloaded with accounts in my new name, address, the key to whatever new set of four walls would serve as my living quarters.
Would it kill him to pack me a snack?
The coffee cart near the exit caught my eye, and seeing I had no idea how far a drive it was to the rendezvous point, I decided to fuel up.
“Name?” the bouncy barista asked from behind the counter, pen hovering and ready to ink.
A tangle of identities pulsed and retracted inside my mind. My trained tongue patiently waited for permission to shape around the correct choice. I had gone to bed in New York as Vivian and arrived in California as someone else.
The fleeting moment in between I had spent as myself, when Wallace uttered my real name before ending our call, had stuck like a seed in my teeth. I wasn’t sure why he’d done it; maybe another reminder of the girl I once was, that day in the hotel and the choice I made. I couldn’t be sure, but hearing it was a haul back to memories that haunted my plane ride as I slipped in and out of consciousness. Promises, lies. The sweet smile my father trained me to wield as a weapon, which would ultimately lead to my downfall.
I shook the thoughts away and gave the barista a smile.
“Lauren,” I said, using the name on my new fake ID stuffed in the bag.
The double espresso scorched my tongue when I impatiently sipped it. I waited at the curb for my rideshare as a never-ending stream of cars passed like different shaped beads on a string. Wallace sent me to Silicon Valley, where the ratio of electric vehicles to standards was truly something to behold.
My own driver pulled up to collect me in a nondescript gray Prius and returned to the stream of curbside traffic as smoothly as a raindrop into a river. I gazed out the window as we navigated a complicated knot of freeways and exits. My knowledge of the local geography was basic at best, but I knew I was at the bottom of the bay, and San Francisco waited somewhere to the north with its foggy shores and impossible hills.
And just north of that, clung to a picturesque shoreline, was the prison housing my father. I hadn’t seen him since that hotel room ten years ago and had no intention of getting near, regardless of whatever reason Wallace had brought me to the area. Still, I could feel his presence pulsing like a wound in the distance.
Thankfully, we weren’t heading up the peninsula, but rather across the lower belly, down by where its appendix would be. After nearly an hour, my driver stopped on a street lined with more electric cars, hedgerows, and giant oaks swaying in the breeze. The trim lawns shone a deep shade of emerald and the flower borders popped like colorful confetti. We’d pulled up outside a small apartment complex sitting at the top of a T intersection, and diagonally across the street from some of the most beautiful houses I’d ever seen.
“Ma’am?” the driver awkwardly asked. “This the right spot?”
I caught myself gaping in a daze. I had no idea how long we had been idling at the curb.
“Yes, it is,” I said, trying to sound like Lauren, the woman who had been driven home from the airport and not like the informant in a hoodie who had landed in Pleasantville with afake name. “Thank you,” I told the driver. I climbed out into the air, which smelled like freshly clipped lawn and baking bread.
The driver pulled away as I spun in a slow circle, taking it all in.
It was a street from a storybook. Charming homes, each similar but unique, as if they came from the same cookie factory but had been stamped with a different cutter. Shiny cars, dogs on leashes, strollers, children’s laughter on the air. The apartments were spitting distance from the mansions, and yet seamlessly blended into the neighborhood.
It was a far cry from the places Wallace had sent me before. I’d seen dumps, hovels, crack houses with bullet-riddled walls. My last job landed me in the lap of Manhattan luxury, and I had been a few similar places before, but this place, this street, was like nowhere I had ever been. Standing on the sidewalk beneath a mighty oak felt like a warm, protected embrace, and I couldn’t imagine what lurked beneath that warranted Wallace sending me here.
I stopped spinning and matched the address in my file to the apartments. The boxy beige building was U-shaped with two stories, outdoor staircases, and front doors that opened to outside. Based on the apartment number in the file, I’d be living in the first-floor corner space. It was nothing like the Manhattan apartment I’d spent last night in, but it still looked upscale and welcoming.
The espresso in my veins and my lack of sleep had me jittery—more jittery than usual when I began a new job. I never knew what Wallace had in store for me, what file he would slap down on the table to lay out the plan: the targets, the stakes, the goal. It was my job to get information he couldn’t. I slipped into cracks where he didn’t fit.
We could help each other, he’d said to me that night so many years ago.
At the time, it sounded like a good deal: Go undercover or risk going to prison until I was forty. If only I had known how imbalanced theeach otherpart of that deal was. If only I had known how much more help I would be providing than receiving. Although Wallace had kept his word. I hadn’t ever seen the inside of a cell. But in exchange, I had become a nomad informant. A true specter in the wind.
The truth was, when he’d looked at me that night my father and I got caught, he not only saw someone desperate, but he also saw someone useful. A blond, doll-eyed key with a sweet smile who could fit into locks a middle-aged man with a mustache that screamedAuthoritycouldn’t.
Exploited, would be a proper description.
I followed the little sidewalk bisecting a trim green lawn and leading to the building, and pulled out my key. Right as I reached for the door to my new place, the neighboring door swung open.
A young woman stepped out backward, humming a soft tune and bouncing. She pulled her door shut, and turned to reveal a baby attached to her chest by a complicated tangle of fabric. Two pudgy brown legs sprouted from the bottom of the little sack, softly kicking against her abdomen.
“Oh!” She stopped short but instantly smiled a row of shockingly white teeth. “You must be the new neighbor!” Her cheeks pulled like rounded plums toward her dark eyes, setting her whole face aglow with welcome. She wore running leggings and a bright yellow band in her hair, which matched her sneakers. She marched over, managing not to break stride with the bouncing, and held out a determined hand. “I’m Alisha. I’m so happy to meet you!”
I spent enough time lying to know when people were telling the truth, and Alisha’s welcome was nothing but genuine.
“Hi. I’m … Lauren.”
