All of Us and Everything (13 page)

Liv stared at her mother. “Wait. You had three children with this man. Not just one or two but
three
full children.”

Augusta sighed. “It's a long story. You don't have to understand it. In fact, I don't expect anyone to ever understand it.”

Esme pounded the table. “Ru! What happened? What
really
happened?”

Ru lined up the salt and pepper shakers. “I asked him to leave my life alone.”

“What do you mean—leave your life alone?” Liv asked.

“He'd abandoned us,” Esme said, and then she knew why she'd decided he didn't really exist. If her mother had invented a fake father for them—a supposed spy, no less!—she didn't have to deal with the fact that either one or three men had, in fact, abandoned the Rockwell girls. In her personal narrative, Esme's mother had, most likely, seduced men from good stock, gotten pregnant, and never informed the fathers. Esme's abandonment issues were pristine—it was as if they'd been there all along, just like this box of letters that bobbed up from some basement during the hurricane—and now someone was taking off the lid. She could feel herself reprocessing being abandoned by her husband—as if it hadn't been painful enough. The problem wasn't that her mother was delusional or simply that her husband had some sort of breakdown. It was that she, Esme, was
ultimately
abandonable. “Our father had already clearly left our lives alone!” She rubbed her ears. Her own voice sounded muffled in her head. “Am I shrieking?”

Ru wasn't sure what her mother knew, what she was willing to admit, how far this conversation was going to go. “It's your turn,” she said to her mother.

Augusta tried to smile. She lifted one hand as if about to offer a benediction. “It turns out, your father never really abandoned you girls at all. He's been very…involved in your lives.” Her expression shifted then. The smile faded. Her voice tightened. “Your lives aren't completely your own.”

Over the course of Ru Rockwell's sixteenth summer, she devoted herself to learning the outdated communication methods of spies. If her father was a spy—and that's really all she knew about him, true or false, so she had to begin there—and he had, in fact, sired three children with the same woman, Augusta Rockwell—who may or may not have had intimacy issues (only Esme seemed to give a crap about that)—then her father and her mother had to have stayed in touch, in some manner, for at least fifteen years. If the first child was conceived in the spring of 1969, as indicated by Esme's date of birth, then that's when the spy would have set up some method of communication that Augusta would have learned to put into practice.

At sixteen, Ru was leggy and tan. Doing touristy things was thought beneath most of the year-rounders and the Rockwells in particular—but she was a secret beach reader. She flopped on her towel in her bikini, hauling her books to the beach in a cooler, to keep them from collecting too much sand.

By this point, Esme was already married to Doug, and Liv was pretending to be a socialite in New York City while generally snorting too much coke. Ru was the only one left at home with Augusta, who was distracted with her peculiar buckshot brand of activism. They were both lonesome, Augusta and Ru, but they were also wary of bonding too much at this point; Ru would be off at college in two short years. What was the point?

Ru bailed on field hockey summer camp with her team—where she was the highest-scoring forward—claiming shin splints. This allowed her to spend her days in the dusty stacks of the Ocean City Public Library and haul said books to the beach in her cooler.

She wasn't sure if her mother had gotten involved with an old spy or a young spy, but in any case, any spy of her mother's generation likely would have been involved in Vietnam, if not having been embedded at some point early in his career. William Colby, who would become the infamous head of the CIA post-Watergate and mid–CIA scandal—oh, the wiretapping of US citizens, assassinations, hidden prisons for suspected double agents, mind-control experiments on unwitting test subjects, et cetera—was already living in Vietnam by 1959 and out by 1962, at which point he oversaw the war from afar. In 1961, the year her mother first arrived in Washington, DC, and the earliest moment she likely would have met a young, even still-aspiring spy, things were about to get very messy, and by 1969, during Esme's conception, things had only gotten worse.

At one point, on the beach, Ru looked up from her book to see some children putting crackers on the bare pink chest of their father who was dead asleep. The kids then backed away and, as the seagulls swooped in, batting around the man's head, eating the crackers from his chest, the man woke up, terrified, flailing wildly, and screaming.

She imagined her own father—cool and collected—a man who had the foresight not to want to get married and raise a family as a spy. Despite the Cold War's supposed code of ethics not to kill a spy's family members, he might have opted not to have a secret profession kept from his family, but a secret family kept from his profession. This made sense to her.

Eventually, she uncovered the most likely method of communication for her father's era—the dead drop. It was a standard method by which two parties—not ever having to meet in person—could arrange for a letter of some sort to be dropped at a location. The place would have been agreed upon. A sign would go out that the communication was ready for pickup. The book gave specifics on the kind of signs that might work, one of which was a brightly colored towel draped over a balcony railing.

This, of course, made Ru think of the Rockwell flag. Her mother would clip it to the flagpole throughout Ru's early childhood with no seeming rhyme or reason. She might fly it during a rainstorm or the dead of winter.

And then she stopped flying the flag altogether.

Ru thought about when she might have last seen the flag. Her eidetic memory helped her isolate an approximate date—around Christmas 1984, just months before her mother founded The Personal Honesty Movement, which, for Ru, stood out as crucial—especially to a woman who had a husband of some sort whom she couldn't talk about, a woman forced to keep secrets. And after the movement's quick demise, there was that one summer day in 1985 when Augusta taught her daughters to conduct a storm—set to Berlioz's
Symphonie Fantastique
—and Esme accused her of sleeping with strangers. That was the last time Augusta ever spoke of their father. Her silence was read by Esme as vindication. Liv was more interested in the lives of other families than figuring out her own. But Ru held that strange argument in her mind forever. It couldn't be erased. It was loaded like a steamer trunk.

Sitting on the beach, Ru wondered what would happen if she flew the flag now.

Surely her father or his local sub-spy would have given up looking for it after seven long years.

Still, it was a valid question.

She also thought that there could be a dead-drop location packed full of communications that her mother refused to pick up.

And too, she was smart enough to consider that her father was dead.

She questioned Jessamine, of course, but the woman was a vault or knew nothing.

Ru asked her mother if she could fly the Rockwell flag for her upcoming birthday.

“Why on earth?” her mother said and then added, “It's lost. I haven't seen it in years.”

But while her mother was out one afternoon, Ru snooped through her mother's bedroom and found the flag in three minutes, folded neatly in a cedar chest at the foot of her mother's bed.

Ru left the flag there and walked to the third floor. She opened the window closest to the flagpole and leaned out into the salty wind. How many windows in other homes had a view of this flag? Her father had to have gone local with his pick for a go-between. In fact, using local culture to create alliances (and rout out the enemy) had been fundamental to the approach in the Vietnam War, as Ru had read.

She made a map of every house with a view of the flag, and then, one by one, she got to know the neighbors as well as she could.

It only took her two weeks—eating pastrami, playing canasta, gossiping, babysitting twin two-year-olds, applying eyedrops to an aged schnauzer—to zero in on Virgil Pedestro. He was the grown son of a widow who lived across the street and two doors down. The Pedestros were year-rounders, and, like the Rockwells, inheritors of their house on Asbury Avenue. Virgil was quiet and stoic. One eye was slightly droopy, and maybe this was what made him a bit shy. He might have been gay, but that could only be considered vaguely by Ru. Being gay was still relatively covert and remarkable back then. If one was not bold enough to make it to a big city, gayness might make one hole up in one's parents' home.

If her father had dirt on Virgil, he'd likely agree to almost anything.

Shortly thereafter, on a Thursday in early August, her mother went to put up flyers about her latest movement, The Inner Identity Movement, and Jessamine had gone to the butchers. Ru flew the flag.

Augusta didn't notice it on her return. But while trying to fall asleep with the windows open, she heard the rumpled rattling. She got out of bed, looked out the window, and stared at the flag. She stayed like that for a moment and then called Ru's name.

Ru shuffled in, pretending to have been asleep, but really she'd been watching the Pedestro home through a pair of binoculars.

“Did you put the flag out?” Augusta asked her.

“Do you think someone else did it?” Ru countered.

Her mother stared at her sharply. “Why would I think that?” Ru was sure that her mother had, for a brief moment, wondered if her spy had somehow snuck in and done it himself.

“I don't know. Why
would
you think that?”

“I didn't!
You
did!” She pointed out the window. “Take it down.”

“Why? I like it. It shows pride in our ancestors.”

“It's a fake crest! They just made it up!”

“All crests are made up by someone at some point in time, though, right? They are man-made.”

“Take it down now!”

Ru obliged.

But the flag seemingly did the trick. Later that night, Virgil Pedestro walked out of his house wearing salmon shorts, a blue blazer, and boat shoes, and Ru followed him three blocks to the back door of a squat bungalow with its curtains drawn.

Ru wasn't sure what to do now. She'd expected Virgil to check a hiding place—somewhere nooky and private—where one could hide a letter, and that she'd never have to confront him at all. She'd brought a letter with her—one that she would plant in the hiding place later, after fishing around for letters from her father.

But then the drawn curtains of the bungalow lit up, just for an instant. It happened again and again, drawing Ru from her hiding spot, closer to the house. It was happening so quickly that Ru imagined her father was inside being tortured by electrocution. She'd read about such things. Of course, it couldn't be her father, but still she felt strangely responsible—as the sole witness—and so she ran to the back door, knocked loudly, then jerked the knob. The door was unlocked. It flew open.

And Ru found that she'd flung herself into a bedroom—a woman in a red satin teddy was on the bed, and Virgil, wearing
only
his blue blazer—the salmon shorts and polo shirt and boat shoes were stacked on a dresser—was standing behind a tripod with a camera, pointed at the bed.

This was the first live and in-person penis Ru had ever seen and the head of it reminded her, briefly, of the head of a Ken doll, possibly airless and surely rubbery.

“Good God!” Virgil shouted.

“I'm so sorry!” Ru said. “I thought this was about something else.”

“Aren't you one of the Rockwell girls?” Virgil asked.

“No!” Ru said. “I'm not a Rockwell.”

“You are too,” Virgil said.

“What's a Rockwell girl?” the nude woman said, as if insulted that she wasn't a Rockwell girl.

Ru turned and ran from the room stunned that she'd seen Virgil Pedestro's penis, standing at full attention.

She jogged home, but once she got to her street, she saw Virgil's mother pulling into the driveway. She'd been out and now she was back.

Ru watched Mrs. Pedestro scurry up the walkway to her house.

Mrs. Pedestro looked up at Ru, standing in the full glow of a streetlight. Mrs. Pedestro stopped, arms crossed on her thin ribs. She glanced at the empty flagpole and then back at Ru.

That was all it took. It wasn't Virgil. It was his mother.

Ru pulled the letter from her pocket, walked up to Mrs. Pedestro, and without a word she handed her the letter and then ran the rest of the way home.

The letter was bold in the way that sixteen-year-olds who are overly smart can be overly bold.

She addressed her father this way—Dear Father—and she announced that she was his daughter, Ru Rockwell, and that she knew about his secret life. She told him that she wanted to meet. She gave a date that was two weeks away and a location: the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Guadeloupe de Basse-Terre on the island of Guadeloupe.

Why?

Well, first of all, she had low expectations that she'd ever communicate with her father. She was also pretty sure he was dead. And if, by some miracle, she did get a message to him, she wanted to seem worldly. Why not offer to meet him in the French West Indies?

Her choice did have one thing going for it. Her friend Jenni Howell had gone on a Caribbean cruise, and because it began and ended in Atlantic City, no passport was necessary.

Two days after Ru gave her letter to Mrs. Pedestro while mainly trying to recover from the sight of Virgil Pedestro in nothing but a blue blazer, Mrs. Pedestro showed up at the door and asked Augusta if Ru could do some weeding for her.

Ru weeded for two and a half hours.

Mrs. Pedestro paid her a little over minimum wage for her efforts and, as she handed her the money, she simply said, “It is agreed.”