The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Page 18
I’m not sure what Charlie thought of his wife’s unmistakable hostility towards me but by the time he left to go back to work, I was no longer interested in finding out because I was ready to get the hell out of Northridge for good myself.
I was tired of being Baker’s domestic slave and tired of having to be on my best behaviour at all times. I was tired of tasting muddy grass because of Ethel’s gunshots and I was a hundred percent ready to go back to being the person I was before some stupid part of my brain convinced me trying out a normal life would be a fun, curious and, perhaps, educational, experience to have.
Oh, it was educational all right but it certainly hadn’t been all that fun. I pulled out a large knapsack from behind a drawer of towels then went around Baker’s house filling it with all the objects he never knew I had hidden around. I had those objects stuffed underneath floorboards, at the back of cupboards and drawers, and mostly around the laundry room where he seldom, and perhaps never, ventured into.
Then, when everything I owned without Baker’s knowledge had been collected, I went to our bedroom window with the knapsack on my back and stood there for a full hour formulating my next moves.
When I was sure of everything I wanted to do next, I climbed onto the window sill, held on to the sides of the window frame for support, then I…
…let go.
I let myself fall face-down towards the ground.
Chapter 32
4 August 1975, Monday
I flew in the air like a bird, with my arms outstretched and flapping periodically and my body pushing through the air in the manner of a dolphin pushing through water. By moving extremely quickly like that, I was able to thrust myself through air and keep myself there long enough to go all the way past America’s Southeastern California border and right into Los Algodones, a tiny Mexican town that also bordered Southwestern Arizona.
Travelling at top speed, I got there in five hours, about as fast as a normal person would have taken to drive there, faster if you consider I didn’t have to waste time going through immigration. I was ten feet up in the air, weaving in and out of clouds so that none of the cars or human beings below would spot me.
Once in Los Algodones, I went right for a small, quaint, Spanish-style motor hotel just a couple of blocks away from the main street and let myself drop on its red roofs in a semi-crouched position, as lightly and quietly as a bird. The two-storied motel had a view of the mountains, white walls surrounded by palm trees and huge, brightly red bush plants. It would have been perfect for a postcard had I not been on it.
There was no one around, it being late afternoon on a Monday, in a tourist town that was mostly frequented by cross-border tourists on weekends. The staff were inside, where they had shade and fans and reprieve from the scorching afternoon heat, and I knew there were no tourists present because each of the rooms had a parking lot in front of its door and none of those lots were occupied.
I took a minute to catch my breath and wipe sweat off my brows. Four hundred kilometres wasn’t the furthest I’d ever flown at a go but it wasn’t exactly a piece of cake either. My muscles ached and demanded rest the way a normal person’s muscles would after a marathon but I wasn’t too bothered by it. I knew I’d be fine again, eventually. I’d been in such a state enough times to know.
When I was feeling a tad less breathless, I jumped off the roof and flew through the open window that had been under me. It led into a very yellow bedroom with a King-sized bed in the middle.
Once I was in the room, all I could think of was the word ‘yellow’. Eighty percent of the room was some shade of yellow—the bed covers, the cushions, the chairs, the lampshades, the carpet, the wallpaper, everything was yellow. Even the ceiling was yellow. The other twenty percent of the room was either a deep wooden brown or white. Brown headrest, brown desk, brown legs of chairs, brown dresser, white stripes on the carpet and on the walls, white dangling bauble lamp hanging over the desk... Lilly would have loved the room, I knew. It was a tad over dramatic, exactly her style.
I went to one of the two brown doors within the room, let myself out and found myself in a smallish, yellow living room next.
It had a sofa sleeper at one corner, a fireplace and a colour TV in others, and a coffee table in the middle—all the things you’d expect to have in a motel suite. There was a smallish kitchen connected to it, complete with a stove, microwave and dish cloths, and two other brown doors that had been left closed. Two other bedrooms, likely very yellow too.
I put my thumb and index finger into my mouth and blew the strange tune Lilly composed one night, out of the blue, years before.
In less than thirty seconds, three young female human beings just over the age of twenty appeared in front of me. A person who didn’t know any better would have presumed they materialised out of thin air but I wasn’t that person. I knew better. I knew they had simply moved faster than the speed of light, too fast for the naked eye to notice, just as I always did when flying anywhere.
Two of them looked exactly as they had when I last saw them. Aimee, a head shorter than the other two, with black hair and narrow eyes in the shape of slits, looked as eastern Asian as ever. Fern, the tallest of the three, with brown hair, was still covered in freckles from head to toe. Blue, the redhead with startling blue eyes, was the only one who looked somewhat different that day. Her normally pale skin was oddly reddish and she was hunched over and holding on to her protruding, watermelon-sized belly as if she were having some sort of cramp. Looking at her made the whooshing of wind appear in my ears so I knew she was feeling somewhat sick. Both Aimee and Fern were stroking her on the back, as if trying to comfort her.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked them all.
“Blue thinks the baby’s coming,” Aimee said in that British accent she’d always had. She then yawned and asked if I brought food with me, then, without waiting for my reply, asked if she could organise another birthday party for herself sometime soon. “It’s not my fault the Americans ruined the last one,” she whined.
I sighed. After two months of living with Baker, I was thoroughly sick and tired of having to feed and attend to another person’s needs all of the time. I began to miss having Lilly around. When she had been with us, Aimee never asked me for anything, ever. Lilly handled all that time-consuming care-taking crap, not me. “No. You’re old enough to feed yourself and you—” I turned to Fern and immediately began hearing the siren of a fire truck when I saw the look on her face. “—didn’t I tell you to burn those photographs of us?”
“I... I did,” she said in an accent as British as Amy’s, as purple outlines of long ovals appeared over her eyes, hands, mouth and feet.
“Are you sure?”
She stared hard at me, gulped, made me hear drumbeats and eventually confessed that she hadn’t burnt the photographs at all. She merely hid it away in the floorboards at our La Paz home, thinking nobody—not me, not Lilly, not the CIA—would ever think to look there.
“Well, they did and they now know what the three of you look like, thanks to you.”
Fern turned her green eyes to the very yellow carpet and I immediately began hearing the scrubbing of rough brushes on a stone pavement.
“Yeah, you should be,” I said, speaking with my natural British accent for the first time since moving to Northridge. “Remember that the next time you think of doing the opposite of what I tell you. And you—”
Blue looked up at me with large, brown, scared eyes. She was panting a little and her lips were pale.
I sighed again when I heard the whooshing of wind in my ears becoming wilder. “Pay attention the next time I tell you birth control is important.”
“Not everybody wants to use birth control,” she said, unusually breathless. “We can’t help the way we love, remember? That’s what Lilly always said.”
“Lilly is not always correct, darling. Always, always, always use birth control, no matter what the boy says. This
is the last time I’m telling you that.”
I dropped my knapsack on the ground, opened it and fished out the stacks of passports of all colours and wads of money of all currencies I had stashed into it earlier on.
“Is Lilly still being punished?” Aimee asked as she watched me match passports with currencies, then yawned again, as if she hadn’t slept a wink the night before, like young people often did. “I really miss her. The house gets so messy without her. We had mould growing on all our plates back in La Paz because nobody wanted to do the dishes.”
“Well, lucky for you, I miss her too so I’m going to get her out now. Turns out, she wasn’t lying. She didn’t kill that American lady.”
“Why then does everyone think she did?” Fern said, softly, with red circles of equal sizes over each of her cheeks that told me she hadn’t quite gotten over her feelings of shame.
“Wanda framed her. I think.”
“Wanda?” all three girls said. “Wanda found her?”
“Yes. She goes by the name of Weslyn Jaeger now and she’s on to us, with the help of the U.S. military. I need to go get Lilly away from her, and you girls need to get as far as you can get from America as soon as you can. Split up. It’ll be harder to find you that way. New names for everybody. Again.”
I grabbed a Canadian passport and handed it to Fern along with the wads of Canadian dollars. “You’re going to Canada and you’ll be Canadian from now on. Aimee—”
I took the only British passport from the stack and handed it to her along with the wads of Hong Kong dollars. “—you’re going to Hong Kong. You’ll be a Hong Kong citizen from now on.”
In that moment, Blue winced and began groaning a little but none of us paid her much attention.
“Is Hong Kong near England?” Aimee asked, making her narrow eyes narrower than ever.
“No. It’s a British colony right next to China,” I said as I stacked the final wad of money along with a U.S. passport for Blue. “Many Chinese people live there. You’ll blend right in for once.”
“But I don’t even speak Chinese!”
“Learn. You’re grown up now, Aimee. Lilly and I can’t be holding your hand forever, you have to start realising that. And you—”
I sighed for the third time that day when I saw Blue with her face all scrunched up in pain, struggling to take hold of the passport and wads of money I was trying to give her. “—I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay in the U.S. for a while, until somebody allows you to take that baby on a plane. In the meantime, go to the most populous place you can get to, where you’ll be able to blend in. New York, for example. I’ve got U.S. birth certificates for you too, just in case you need it.”
I went back to my knapsack and pulled out the two birth certificates I made specially for her. “One for if it’s a boy and one for if it’s a girl.”
“Girl,” Fern said.
“Nu-uh. Boy,” Aimee interrupted.
“Girl!”
“I said nuh-uh! It’s going to be a boy!”
“Rocky Rafferty? Rose Rafferty?” Blue frowned as she took the certificates from me and took in the names on them. “What sort of ugly names are those?”
“You can change them later. Now, you don’t have a choice. Just focus on getting that baby out so you can get the hell out of here. Andele!” I threw the remaining passports and money I hadn’t given them back in my knapsack and closed it up as tightly as it would go. “Where’s Mick-mick and Nee-nee?”
Fern vanished in that instant and reappeared in front of me three seconds later with a cage of two white mice in her hands. “Mick-mick’s been eating most of their food. He’s gotten fatter and Nee-nee’s lost a bit of weight.”
I opened the cage, reached in, pulled them out, one in each hand, and snuggled both of them to my cheek as the taste of marshmallows appeared in my mouth. “Is that what you’ve been doing you little greedy piggy?” I cooed, in that tone Gigi used to use all the time with baby Daniel. “Bullying your wife like a human husband does? Don’t let him do it, Nee-nee. Stand up for yourself like a feminist would, okay? Know your rights!” I kissed both mice gently on the top of their heads, told them how much I loved them in great detail and that I’d come get them when I was done doing everything I needed to do. I sighed for the fourth time when I placed them back in the cage and found myself, once again, missing my two furry-faced pets before we’d even parted.
“Smuggle them into Canada will you?” I said to Fern who had been watching me with a look that made me hear the buzz of static electricity while yawning like Aimee had been doing. “I’ll meet you there when I’m done. And—” I turned to Aimee and Blue. “I’ll catch up with the both of you after that.”
“With Lilly?” Blue said. “I miss her too, actually.”
“Yeah…” Aimee added.
“Yes. After I get her out, that is. You girls remember how to keep in contact?”
All three nodded.
“Que padre. I’ll see you soon. Stay low. Stay safe. Don’t forget every little thing I ever told you.”
Less than a minute later, I was out the window again.
Chapter 33
4 August 1975, Monday
Another five hours later, it was night and I was back on that unnamed mountain Ethel and I once stood on together to spy into Area 51.
I had the pair of binoculars we used on that trip over my eyes as I stared into the valley below. Ethel suggested I keep it after our expedition to Area 51 and I wouldn’t have tossed it for the world because it was now the only object I owned that belonged to the time Ethel and I were still on speaking terms. I brought it along with me in my knapsack when leaving Baker’s house.
The valley below was as dark as it had been the night we had been up there together but, when I strained my ears, I could hear the faint squeaking of wheels and the murmur of an engine revving into action so I could tell it wasn’t going to be dark for very much longer.
True enough, the revving increased in speed till it became a soft whirr and with time, it eventually became a more obvious deep, throbbing roar. Shortly after, a line of lights appeared on the dry lake bed miles below, flashing like a strobe. They ceased to appear the second the throbbing roar ceased to pound in my ears and suddenly, ten seconds after the night fell into silence again, a long, thin, almost neon, blue object appeared in the darkness some distance away from and above where I was standing.
It was exactly what Ethel and I had seen before and shaped exactly like a flying saucer but I knew it wasn’t anything like that. The long, almost neon blue light wasn’t even an object at all. It was a gas. Propane, to be specific. Propane coming out of a high-speed jet that had been painted black so it wouldn’t be seen in the dark of the night. It was the gas of a stealth plane—a spy vehicle created by Baker and colleagues: Charlie and also Lynda, May and Allison’s husbands—to travel at speeds and altitudes the radars of the day wouldn’t be able to detect. To cross international and military borders without being detected so that it could capture photographs of restricted military zones the U.S. Army couldn’t get into without looking like it was interested in war.
It didn’t look like a plane because the people who ordered it made didn’t want it looking like a plane. They didn’t want anyone suspecting what they were really up to.
It was still too dark to see below but I knew there were people moving about the dry lake bed Area 51 sat on now. Those people were operating by the light of the moon alone. They would be the engineers and technicians who had only just assisted the spy plane in taking off, who would also be more than used to operating in semi-darkness by now since they only ever worked at night. They were the ones who had triggered the lights on the lake bed earlier and the ones who’d slid open the doors of the shelter under which the spy plane had been hiding to let it out for its test flight. They were the ones who were piloting that very plane from the base too because it was pilotless technology they were presently testing.
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There would be guards around them of course. Patrolling the ground or observing from watch towers with assault rifles loaded and ready to be fired at any time. Those guards monitored the heat-sensitive sensors around the base too and would jump to action if any of those sensors so much as sounded once.
I knew of all this not because I could see in the dark but because Baker told me everything I needed to know about them.
He didn’t tell me this verbally, of course. Baker was the perfect military employee who had never, and would never, disobey what his employer told him to do. He didn’t question what he was not allowed to know because he loved his nice house and big pay check enough to not want to jeopardise it for any reason unrelated to career success. He was the third generation of Irish immigrants who had come to America seeking a better life so he had grown up believing improving one’s life was all that was important in the big scheme of things. Unfortunately for him, there was something else I never told anyone at Northridge and would have never told him about. It was, ironically, something he would have gotten a promotion for had he found out about it.
I can read memories from muscles. By just touching any part of a human being’s flesh with my bare hands.
When I touch people, I can access everything their muscles lived through, in chronological order, from their point of view. I can see everything they saw, hear everything they heard, smell everything they smelled and feel every sensation they felt on the surface of their skin.
That was the real reason I married Baker. I needed to know what the CIA was really doing with their ‘alien project’ at Area 51 and there was no better way of finding out than by seeing it through the eyes of an employee working on it. It would have been a lot easier if I could have simply posed as a prostitute but because none of the men on the project were into that, marriage had been the only way I could get that close to any of them. And since there was only one unmarried man among them, he had to do.