Chapter Text
1985
Sometimes I wonder what being “normal” would be like.
Mom and Dad say that there is no such thing as normal, that we all play the stars of our own show, and that everyone’s life has something happening in it that an onlooker wouldn’t call “normal”, but I think they just say that to make me feel better about the fact that they go and do really cool, classified stuff that I can’t know about while my little sister and I stay behind.
I still don’t really know what I mean by “normal” but I imagine it involves something like Dad working in an office that isn’t protected by three separate biometric scanners, a mother who stays home and can maybe actually a cook, and a little sister who doesn’t speak four languages by the time she’s four years old.
I know there are families who eat dinner at the same table every night. Families where they go to things like softball practice or ballet recitals with a consistent dance studio (although Mom swore she would try and do better with that one). There are kids in families who don’t have to make up careers for their parents, since ‘ spy’ isn’t really a valid answer to tell Noemi in your second grade classroom when she asks. There are people who live in places long enough for dust to gather on the photo frames on the fireplace mantle, and places where kids and parents are no more than a ten minute drive from Grandma and Grandpa.
I don’t live in a house like that. I’ve never lived in a house like that. Mom and Dad don’t even call them houses. They’re safe houses, sure, but they’re usually apartments, hotels, a rundown motel here and there, and once, even an RV in South Dakota. Somewhere in Caracas, there’s an apartment with a chipped tile in the kitchen that I cracked after Cecilia and I had a fight and I threw a plate at her (that was not a fun grounding, let me tell you.)
In Lucerne, Switzerland, there’s a hotel where the front desk lady used to give CiCi and I jelly candies on Tuesdays and called me Schätzchen. I know normal girls probably go on normal vacations with their families all the time to places like Lucerne, but I’m sure those didn’t involve things like corner-clearing and whatever else Mom and Dad spoke about when they looked over their shoulder so many times. Dad had started teaching my sister and I these things as fun little games, patterns we could follow even though we’re not at school yet.
By school I don’t mean regular old public school. Trust me, my life would be way better if I didn’t have to wake up every day and learn about fractions or multiplication when I had started learning algebraic equations with Dad over the summer. By school, I meant spy school, or more specifically, the Gallagher Academy.
It was Mom’s alma mater, and assuming we did what we were told and studied hard enough, it was where my sister and I would go one day, too. I had dreamt about it my entire life, but I was still a solid four years before stepping foot there. I know normal families were legacies in normal school all the time, but mine seemed a little bit more out of place than others.
Of course, when your mother and father were personally responsible for the bombing and crash of the Cubana De Aviacion Flight 455 ( while she was six months pregnant with me), normal takes on a very, very different meaning. Mom always talks about how she and Dad do things for the greater good, how the little knights are meant to rise up and kill kings, and that she and Dad and the jobs they worked were to ensure that no singular government or people ever got too powerful.
Most of the time, I tried not to dwell too long on it, because my parents always said that it was their job to worry about making a world that was good for us girls to live in, and that little girls had no business worrying about governments and power and attempted terrorist attacks. Well, not to brag, but I would be eight in less than a week, so I didn’t really consider myself that little.
All I could feel at that moment were strong, soft, warm arms around me, and I feigned sleep for a little longer, even if I was almost certain that Dad knew that I was faking being asleep to be carried. I was at the age where he would gently rouse me from sleep (notably letting CiCi sleep), and tell me it was time to go, so I took the opportunity to be carried by my Dad as often as he would allow it.
I heard him whispering hurriedly to my mother in Turkish (a language my mother swears I’ll learn when I go to spy school), and I could sense that Mom was carrying CiCi in her arms, but as my father swept me in his arms, and I left the warmth of the full-size bed my sister and I had been sharing, I had no clue what my parents were up to now.
We were moving again. They always moved us under the cover of darkness, when the shadows were at their most useful, and always when we had run out of options. We had managed to make it three entire months in Huntsville, Alabama, and even though it was summer, I’d started to like the quiet and the sound of cicadas and playing with my sister in the creek behind the four acres of my parents’ safe house.
I was tempted to stay awake as I felt Dad put me into the small, beige beater car they were driving these days, trying to see if I could steal a little more conversation from them in a language I at least sort of understood, but as soon as Dad had buckled me in, I felt sleep overtake me.
I woke up because my neck was hurting, and I could hear my annoying little sister saying, “ Cat, Catie, Catie! Do you want a Sunkist or a Pepsi?”
I opened my eyes (and ears) to the familiar white noise of airplane turbulence, and I blinked once to see my sister poking me on the side, a flight attendant smiling beside her with a drink cart. I think I said Sunkist, but I can’t be sure, honestly, since I was still trying to figure out why we were on a plane.
My eyes shifted towards the window I was sitting next to, and I saw the bright blue expanse of ocean. I couldn’t help but panic just a little at the thought of being trapped in a metal box above the ocean, knowing we could just plummet down at any second. I wasn’t a huge fan of the endless view of the ocean on the horizon, the deep blues and dark depths humanity had yet to explore. It meant I could never count houses or fields on farms or try and guess the cities based on the skylines. When you stared at something as big and expansive as the ocean, your mind couldn’t be preoccupied with anything but the feeling of sinking and drowning.
I really, really didn’t like flying over bodies of water.
There was a bright orange soda in front of me now, and I saw that Cecilia had downed what I presumed had once been a Pepsi in the cup in front of her, and she was basically bouncing in her chair as she talked. She was four, and although I don’t remember too much about being four (other than my dad being really, really proud I cracked my first NSA Sapphire Series 3)
“Where are we?” I asked my sister, taking a drink out of the unnaturally orange soda that had been placed before me. I was never huge on carbonated drinks, and on instinct I stuck my tongue out at the bubbly static filling my mouth as Cecilia giggled at my discomfort.
She shrugged, then pointed at Mom and Dad. “Mommy said we’re moving again, but she didn’t tell me where,” she whispered conspiratorially, sliding into German, one of the languages we both knew besides English. It was then that I noticed the small duffel bag at my feet, slid under my seat, and reached for it, digging through until I found a book that bore the title Planets Through The Ages , but was really a copy of The Art of Intelligence , my current favorite book (besides The Boxcar Children, so it brought me great joy when I discovered Dad had also packed two of those books for me.)
My parents still hadn’t come over to tell us anything, other than Mom getting up to go to the bathroom, asking us if we were doing okay, then hurrying off to where she and Dad sat before I got the opportunity to ask any questions.
Note to self: Asking questions is a lot easier if adults stop cutting you off before you ask your questions.
We must have been flying for a while before my sister and I had woken up, because it only took my three books, and two games of tic-tac-toe on the airplane napkins from our snack before I saw land. Miles of beaches and houses in cities and towns dotted the landscape, and I started reeling back through what I knew to be true as the question that had been bothering me all day reeled through my mind: Where were my parents taking us?
I had guessed we were in Europe, although I wasn’t really sure what part. I had counted the red roofs as we flew above mountain ranges and seaside towns, and although I could point out what London or Barcelona looked like from the air, I had never been this far east, and my parents weren’t answering any questions–not that I ever got to ask them.
It must have been hours later, after we had been flying for what felt like years when the plane had started descending, and the sick feeling in my stomach only grew as I started to play with the threads on my ratty sweatshirt. One of them frayed into three separate strands, and I cringed at the thought of having to ask my mother to sew yet another sweater for me. I hadn’t even realized I was doing it until my fingers started to hurt.
There was a crackle on the intercom and a voice started, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have just started our descent, and we expect to land at Valancia Regal Airport in about 15 minutes. The weather in Valancia is cloudy with a temperature of 15 degrees Celsius. Thank you for flying with us on this lovely day, and we hope to see you again soon.”
In fifteen minutes there were exactly 900 seconds, and I started to count each one in my head, the clock in my head ticking as I wondered why my mother and father had taken us out of the United States, and to a city I didn’t recognize in a country I didn’t know.
It wasn’t until my father had wrapped his arm around my shoulders as we groggily walked out into the airport, that I read the sign in the terminal, just as my father said, “Welcome to Adria, girls.”
“What’s that?” came my sister’s bleary voice, her body not used to the jet lag and the time changes and the everything that came with frequent air travel. She was small enough that my parents didn’t often bring her–or me–whenever they set off across the globe, but I was at the age where Mom said I was starting to ask too many questions when they did bring me along, so I was just as confused.
“For the foreseeable future, girls, it’s home base.”
I don’t know what my parents really do. I don’t know what training they have, or what they do when they leave my sister and I with our grandparents, or even alone in the various places I’ve called home throughout my life. I don’t know many things, but I have been told that I am great at reading between the lines, and if there was ever a line to read between, it was that one.
As we got in a taxi and my parents spoke a language I’d never heard before, I felt my sister cuddle against me. The driver was an older man with a brown mustache and cap who winked at Cecilia and I before we took off along the pothole-riddled streets.
The houses were tightly packed together and painted in bright shades of reds, yellows and pale greens, and the streets were so narrow, I felt like the mirrors of our taxi would brush into the old stone homes. I knew we were in Europe, and we were further past the places I knew and could recognize from 35,000 feet in the air, but anything besides that was a mystery.
With my sister’s head on my shoulder, I took a deep breath, and started to count the number of houses we passed. Maybe that would keep the feelings of a loud, clapping thunderstorm in my head at bay.
By the time I got to four-fifty we had made at least 4 turns, and two loop-arounds, which had really messed with my counting, but I got back on track. When the old car finally shuddered to a stop, and my mother started rousing my sister and I, I finally took a second to really look at my surroundings.
A row of big, fancy buildings with every flag I had ever seen, and then some, flying atop each gigantic structure, some dark and brutalist, some medieval with brown trim, and some gold and marbled. Once I hopped out of the car, I heard the rush of waves crashing against a shore, and could almost taste the salty sea air as my eyes dug through my memory at the flag that was flying two hundred feet directly above my head.
“Hello,” greeted a woman at the door, snapping me out of my trance. Her voice was warm, but it had a tone to it that made me want to stand up straighter, and her English was careful, as if it wasn’t her first language. Then, genius that I was, I realized it almost certainly wasn’t. She was definitely older than my parents, and she was wearing a long black coat, a cream-colored scarf tucked neatly around her hair. “You are the Goode family?”
“Yes,” my father said quickly, stepping forward, his voice tight in that way it always got when we were somewhere I wasn’t supposed to ask questions (and where I was liable to do exactly that).
The woman’s eyes lingered on each of us as though she were memorizing our faces, her eyes soft and brown and reminding me so much of my father’s. They paused the longest on me and Cecilia.
“You have traveled far,” she said, her gaze softening just a little. “Valancia is…quiet. But you will find it can be safe. We have been keeping diplomatic enough relations with the others on Embassy Row, no matter the current climate. The Islamic Republic of Iran holds itself to a higher standard globally than others.”
I wasn’t sure why she had said that, and my brain immediately went to start digging for a thread, or a clue as to what she was really trying to say. My mother nodded once and smiled at the woman, a tight and unfamiliar gesture on a mother like mine. She smiled often enough, sure, but I could count on one hand the number of times I’d genuinely seen Mom beam. For all her incredible traits, it seemed smiling was the one she never got the hang of.
“We appreciate it,” she said, reaching for my shoulder, steering me forward as Dad picked up the few bags we’d brought with us on the long plane across the Atlantic. I hoped my journal was still in there. Cecilia was already holding tight to her other hand, her sleepy eyes darting at the enormous carved doors.
The woman stepped aside to let us in, but before she closed the doors behind us, she leaned just slightly toward my parents, speaking in what I presumed was Arabic. At one point, she gestured her head towards my sister and I, and my mother shook her head. I took it to mean she was confirming her nosy-but-well-meaning daughters didn’t understand what they were saying.
And they didn’t, but learning Arabic had just shot to the top of my mental to-do list, if this were really as long-term a housing solution my parents had made it out to be.
I didn’t know why the guards at the gate had stared so hard, or why the flags hanging above us snapped so loud in the wind, or why every step we took inside that big embassy seemed to echo against the marble floors.
I just knew that this wasn’t home. But really, would I ever know the feeling of home?
And as the doors shut behind us with a heavy clang, I had the strangest feeling that whatever this was, it was only the beginning.