The Secret Agent by Francine Mathews Page A

his bow across the strings.
    A viola contracts in extreme cold, and the sound it makes is warped and distorted. A chord sang out from the shrinking wood, and then another—melancholy, haunting, a paean to the dying moon. It was as though the mountains themselves were bewitched to speech. And the stories they told were of a sort to terrify children.
    Take good care
of your mother, pal.
The strong right hand felt like a heavy weight on his shoulder and there was a burning in his nose as though he might sneeze or cry, sohe leaned into his dad’s trousers and buried his face in the dress poplin. The whole Navy was watching from the pier, women holding babies and little kids dropping pebbles into the flat black water, the aircraft carrier’s reflection wavering and dissolving with each
plunk! plunk!
as though it were insubstantial as air. Coronado, a breathless July morning, 1965.
    You’re the man of the house now, Maxie Max. I’m depending on you to keep Mom safe. You’ll be in first grade soon, so once you know how to write I’ll expect a letter every week, telling me how things are. Your house log for the S.S.
Roderick.
Got that?
    He nodded up into his father’s face, arms still clutching his trouser leg, but the sun behind Rory’s head blotted out his features. The hand lifted from his shoulder, cupped his mother’s chin—
    Take good care of y our mother, pal.
    He had tried his best, using sheet after sheet of grade-school paper, his eraser tearing dimples in the flimsy stuff. He’d written about trips to Evanston and the big old house by the lake his grandparents still owned and the pounding rain on his bedroom eaves. He’d written about the dead snake he’d discovered in the cellar and the road trip he and his mom took to Lake Tahoe and how he’d seen a deer beneath Half Dome in his first Yosemite hike.
    It was not the first time his father had been away on carrier duty. Max was used to living alone with his mother for months, used to the circle of closeness they pulled in like a tent flap against the lurking beasts beyond the doors, but this was the most dangerous tour his dad had pulled. At times his mother’s expression grew distant, she took to ironing clothes relentlessly during the long winter afternoons. After one of these bouts when he was six, she drove Max into the hills and rented him skis.
    There were hurried patches of leave during the two long years his father was gone, unexpected as Christmas. Phone calls knifed with static. Trinkets that arrived in crushed cardboard boxes covered with strange ink seals. TV footage of downed planes that Anne hurriedly switched off whenever Max entered the room.
    Take good care of your mother.
    When his father’s A-4 fell out of the sky that January morning half a world away, he knew nothing about it until he found her lying in a stuttering coma, drunk as a lord, on the kitchen floor of the San Francisco apartment. By April, when they knew Dad was dead and no body was coming home, Anne began walking the streets at all hours, an old raincoat of his father’s wrapped around her emaciated body. She burned incense and hung beads from the door frames and sang phrases of half-remembered songs under her breath, and when she looked at Max he was convinced she saw through him.
    Take good care of your mother.
    One night at three A.M. , on his way to the bathroom, he tripped over her body in the dark. What he could not say to Stefani Fogg—what he could not find the words to tell anyone—was that thirty years later, as he’d stared at the expression of horror in the eyes of a dead Thai hooker, it was his mother’s face he’d seen.
    He awoke at dawn and drank his coffee in front of the living room’s wall of glass. Snow had fallen sometime after he propped the viola back in its place and returned to bed. There would be a foot of powder in the glades, but most of the tourists would grab the tram to Saulire. The backcountry would be empty and quiet on this Friday,