… Watches History Repeat Itself

The Buick is the only car in the lot. The guard has abandoned his booth. But Maxine sits in the dark, using her newly restored phone to call Rosa. Zach hasn’t committed any crimes. Unless getting his girlfriend pregnant is illegal. But she was right to suspect her former student has become a terrorist. And Zach quite possibly knows where the man is hiding. The FBI is questioning him now. The agents will be holding him overnight.

“Jesus,” Rosa says. “You must be going out of your mind. Try to stay calm. Mick found you the legal equivalent of Muhammad Ali. You remember Stuart Greenglass? He defended everybody from the White Panthers and the Chicago Seven to Angela Davis and Daniel Ellsberg.”

Maxine reminds Rosa her son isn’t exactly Abbie Hoffman. The FBI might associate this Stuart Greenglass—and therefore Zach—with those earlier and more notorious radicals. But the idea of such a prominent lawyer working on her son’s behalf silences her objections. Rosa gives her the lawyer’s number. “Thanks,” Maxine says. “I feel so alone in all this.” She starts to tear up—from gratitude, from exhaustion.

“By the way,” Rosa says, “congratulations on becoming a grandmother. Isn’t that something? You and I are both going to be raising grandkids. That should give us something to look forward to, don’t you think?”

To be honest, this is nothing Maxine feels cause to celebrate. She sees herself pushing a swaddled, faceless lump in one of those swings that resembles a rubberized diaper. She will be caring for her grandchild so her son and his wife can get on with their future. Her own future will be in the past.

She doesn’t say any of this to Rosa. She thanks her again for arranging the meeting with Stuart Greenglass. She hates to ask, but while the government is searching her house, can she spend the night at Rosa’s? When Rosa says yes, of course, Maxine hangs up and calls the lawyer. He sounds distant. Gruff. No doubt she interrupted his dinner. But once he understands the case involves the serial bomber whose manifesto was printed in The New York Times, he says, “Yes! I see!” And his voice becomes the voice of a man hanging on her every word. He will get right down to the FBI’s offices in Ann Arbor. If all goes well, he may have Zach out in a few hours. Depends on what Zach is telling them. If they want, the agency can just keep moving the kid around until Greenglass manages to get to a judge. Unless Zach invokes his right to counsel, in which case Greenglass will sit there with him all night while he’s being questioned. “I’ll keep you apprised of the situation,” Greenglass promises, and then, when she hears him disconnect, Maxine hangs up, reluctantly, because now she has nothing to do but worry.

She gets on the highway to Ann Arbor. It is after rush hour, but there must have been some tie-up because no one is rushing anywhere. When the traffic on I-94 clogs to a halt, Maxine lays her forehead against the steering wheel and closes her eyes.

The car behind her honks. Has she been asleep? She opens the window and drives as fast as she can. When she makes it to Ypsilanti, she finds Rosa’s house, knocks, and collapses in Rosa’s arms. After dinner, she asks if she can take a bath, then strips off her wrinkled skirt, her fetid blouse, her disgusting underwear, and plunges gratefully into the hottest water her skin will tolerate. She scrubs every square inch. Lathers her scalp. Slides beneath the surface and holds her breath. When she comes up, she is as surprised by her breasts as if two soft, aquatic creatures had found their way into the tub. When was the last time she saw them? The last time she enjoyed an orgasm, even one she supplied herself? The skin on her chest is developing that wrinkly crepe that always made her think a woman was truly old. How little time is left before she is ashamed to take off her clothes? She remembers Sam going down on her, the whirlpool of thinning hair at the very top of his head, which she otherwise never saw. Then it is Thaddy between her legs, not for her own pleasure, but so she can instruct him on how to please a woman of his own. She replaces the image with Jackson Sparrow, who seems to be showing off, demonstrating that age can be not a liability but an advantage.

Maybe Jackson is right. If we survive to a trans-human age, won’t we mourn the loss of our organic bodies? Maybe our digitally enhanced skin will simulate such exquisite sensation our enjoyment of sex will be off the scale. But that only makes her more desperate to enjoy her body while she has it.

She puts on the sweatshirt and sweatpants Rosa left by the tub—her son Jamal’s castoffs. Rosa has made up the bed in Jamal’s old room. As worn out as she is, Maxine can’t believe she will be able to sleep. Not with Zach in custody. But when she is awakened by the chirping of her phone, it’s seven-thirty.

“I didn’t manage to see him,” Greenglass says. “But they agreed not to charge him.”

“Charge him! What would they charge him with!”

Greenglass calms her. Zach ought to be arriving home in another hour. He should have just enough time for a shower and a hot meal before he needs to return to Detroit for further questioning.

She hangs up, thanks Rosa, hurries home. The lock on the front door is intact—Zach used his key to let in the agents. And very little in the living room or kitchen has been disturbed; except for some muddy footprints, she barely would have noticed the intrusion. Upstairs is a different story. The ancient Dell PC from her bedroom is gone, as is the equally obsolete Gateway from Zach’s room. Good luck getting either machine to boot up. Her cabinets and drawers have been rifled through. There are gaping spaces on her son’s bookshelves; no doubt the agents confiscated his Howard Zinn, among other incendiary volumes. The video games and board games—some of them designed by Norm—have been thoroughly ransacked. But the disruption seems less severe than she expected.

She hears a commotion outside. From the upstairs window she can see Zach and Angelina climb from the back seat of a black Ford Bronco. A second black car pulls up behind the first.

Maxine runs down and opens the door. “Are you okay? They didn’t hurt you, did they?”

“Sorry, Mom,” Zach apologizes. “I didn’t mean to put you through all this,” as if she is the one who spent the night being questioned. He nods to the cars at the curb. “For our protection, they said. But it’s more like house arrest. One of the agents—that beefy guy with the black hair that comes to a point on his forehead?—he said he promised you he would have us home by morning. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure we would still be there.”

The “we” makes Maxine remember Angelina. Maxine helps carry their bags up to Zach’s bedroom. Following behind, she sees how badly Angelina wobbles—from the stress, the lack of sleep. She swings her left leg and left crutch to the side before she plants these on the step above. Then she repeats this with the other crutch and the other leg. Maxine hovers behind in case she misses her footing and tumbles backward. This must be how protective Sam felt toward Maxine, all those years ago, hovering behind her as she limped up the three flights to her apartment. But of course Angelina is an experienced stair-climber and doesn’t fall. Zach ushers his girlfriend into his boyhood room, with its slanted stucco ceiling and the childish paintings tacked to the walls with dried-out putty. His posters of Pokémon characters. The cartographer’s map of the world his father gave him so Zach could follow his travels.

Angelina picks Zach’s yearbook off a shelf and begins to leaf through it. “Oh, Zach! Everyone else in this photo is laughing, and there you are, scowling. Didn’t you have any fun in high school? What about kindergarten? Are there photographs of you scowling in elementary school?”

Watching the two of them giggle and nudge each other, Maxine wonders if she should offer to let them stay in her room. Zach is six feet three inches tall. His fiancée is seven months pregnant. How will they both fit in Zach’s childhood bed? Thinking this, she can’t help but picture her slim, handsome son making love to his big-bellied, big-breasted fiancée. The image is so novel she allows it to linger longer than she should. Every child tries to keep from imagining his parents having sex. And every parent—at least the ones who aren’t monsters—tries equally hard not to imagine his or her child making love. Which means every generation misses out on imagining the people they love best at the moment they are the happiest.

She leaves them sitting on Zach’s bed, laughing at his yearbook, and goes downstairs to call Greenglass to update him. Later, she listens to make sure she won’t be interrupting anything, then summons Zach and Angelina down to eat. She allows Zach to set the table, then watches the two of them scarf down the English muffins and cheese omelets she has prepared—the calcium in the cheese will be good for the baby’s bones. She feels like Job, getting back, if not her original family, then a new one. Zach and Angelina and the baby will come to dinner often. Maxine will drive to Detroit to babysit. Her son and his wife will spend Christmas and Easter with Angelina’s parents. But Maxine will hold Thanksgiving and Passover in Ann Arbor. If everyone lived forever, would children experience the same incentive to spend holidays with their parents? Would they bother visiting their parents at all? She considers blogging this idea on www.professorofimmortality.com, then remembers she shut down the site.

As they fork up the last of the omelets, Zach talks about their plans for the day. Angelina will rest while he and Maxine drive to Detroit to talk to the FBI, which Zach thinks won’t take more than another few hours and Maxine hopes won’t consume the rest of their lives. They talk about Angelina’s plans to call her parents. Until now, the Ruizes have welcomed Zach as an upstanding young man who treats their daughter with respect. Now, he will need to convince them he isn’t a terrible person for getting her pregnant and dragging her into this mess. Hopefully, they will be pleased at the couple’s decision to get married, their plans to start a business Angelina’s father can understand because, like his own, it involves growing and raising plants.

“Professor Sayers?” Angelina says. “You mustn’t think Zach is going to need to take care of me. I can do anything anyone else can do. If our plan doesn’t work out, I will help to support our family. You won’t ever need to be ashamed of having me for a daughter-in-law.”

“Ashamed!” That Angelina can even imagine such a possibility makes Maxine want to prostrate herself before her future daughter-in-law. Instead, she wraps her arms around Angelina’s bare shoulders—which feel much sturdier than they look. “Don’t even think such a thing! And please, if you can’t bring yourself to call me ‘Mom,’ could you at least try ‘Maxine’?”

Zach and Maxine drive to Detroit, followed by one of the two black sedans—the other remains behind, as if to protect Angelina, or make sure she doesn’t run off. They meet Greenglass in the lobby of the Federal Building. A compact man in his mid-seventies, with bright red reading glasses dangling from a leather cord around his neck, Greenglass is all business. He also is black, rather than the New York Jew Maxine expected from his name and flat, nasal intonations. (Later, she will learn Greenglass attended the Bronx High School of Science and CCNY before he moved to the Midwest to attend Wayne State Law School.) He shakes her hand, then shakes Zach’s hand, puts on his glasses, and inspects them both.

“Did you ever invoke your right to counsel last night?” the lawyer asks Zach.

Zach purses his lips. “I didn’t think I had anything to hide.”

Greenglass cackles. “If I laid end to end all the people who thought they had nothing to hide …” He slaps his palms against each other, as if rubbing off whatever damage might have accrued. “Done is done.” But Zach is finished talking to the cops until Greenglass has the chance to review the facts and evaluate his client’s potential jeopardy.

“I’m sorry,” Maxine says. “I can’t live through another day of this. I can’t have it on my conscience if the bomber sends out another bomb and another innocent person gets hurt or killed. If Zach and I were going to incriminate ourselves, we already did.”

But Greenglass refuses to represent either of them unless they spend at least a few hours discussing Zach’s testimony. He pulls out his phone and dials. “Shauntz? Greenglass. Give my boy a couple of hours. Can you do that?” He listens. Grunts. “We’ve got two hours,” he tells Maxine. “Assuming I have no reason to convince you not to show up at all.”

The appointment leaves little chance to get back to Greenglass’s office. The streets around the Federal Building are stark, with nowhere to eat except the Rosa Parks Transportation Center, a futuristic mess with sails and what appears to be a satellite antenna, as if a space station has spiraled to a crash landing in downtown Detroit. The People Mover floats above the station on its monorail, making endless circuits around the nearly empty city, the giant Michelin tire man plastered across its side like a grinning ghost.

The three of them cross the trash-strewn intersection and enter a bus station that, despite being named for the champion of integration, is so segregated that Maxine and Zach comprise one hundred percent of the Caucasians present. A sign forbids loitering, but many in the throng appear to have been waiting at the station for hours, if not weeks. Never mind the future; these Detroiters are waiting for amenities their fellow citizens have taken for granted for fifty years. They wait and wait, and no one sees fit to announce that the future they are waiting for isn’t coming.

Maxine excuses herself to use the restroom. A broken changing table dangles from the wall. The toilets in three of the stalls are fetid. After waiting to use the fourth, Maxine emerges to find the woman who used the stall before her waving her hands to dry them—the facility hasn’t been provided with paper towels or a working blower.

Back in the lobby, she follows Greenglass up a set of metal stairs to what a hand-lettered sign advertises as the FOOD COURT. An old man naps with his head on one of the three steel tables. A second table is festooned with a pair of soiled green undershorts. The only functioning eatery offers Louisiana Creole takeout; the décor consists of a painted wooden alligator on a serving cart, as if the staff might be preparing to carve up the scaly beast for the lunchtime crowd. Greenglass makes a trip to the counter and brings back a sack of biscuits and three cups of coffee. He removes his overcoat. Takes out a pen. Asks Maxine to repeat, from the very beginning, everything she told the FBI. She drags out copies of Thaddy’s papers. Greenglass takes copious notes. “Is that all?” he keeps asking. “Is there anything else?”

When she finishes, he looks Zach hard in the eyes. “All right, young man. I want every single detail, no matter how minute, about your interactions with this Thaddeus Rapaczynski.”

Zach puts his palms to the table, scowls, and moves his lips, as if, should he say what he has to say, his words might lay waste to all around him. (“Look out,” Sam used to whisper. “He’s making his Ralph Nader face again.”) Her son’s only crime is being overly earnest in the pursuit of purity. But the lawyer might get the impression Zach is a rageful young man who has something to hide.

Zach scowls a while longer. Then he stammers an explanation of his relationship to his mother’s former student. First as an adolescent. Then as an undergraduate at MIT, where Thaddy wrote him letters. Later still, as an employee at the company where Zach worked until Thaddy showed up and insisted on camping on the sofa in Zach’s apartment. For a week. Maybe it was ten days. Maybe longer.

“He stayed a week?” Maxine says. Her impression had been that Thaddy put in a brief appearance before his failed attempt to persuade Zach to run off with him to Montana.

“I shouldn’t have let him hang around that long,” Zach says. “My roommates were totally pissed. Thaddy got in this really ugly argument with my friend Jordan,” Jordan being Zach’s African-American roommate from MIT, who also had found a job in Silicon Valley. “Jordan is already pretty high up at Facebook, and Thaddy went on and on about how the company is keeping tabs on everything we buy or click on and is selling the data to corporations and to the government. Thaddy hammered Jordan that he shouldn’t let himself get co-opted into becoming a slave to the new technology. Thaddy thinks liberals are only facilitating the transformation of the black and Hispanic underclass into capitalist drones.” Unexpectedly, Zach laughs. “Thaddy kept trying to act all cool and hip with Jordan, but it was pretty painful to watch. ‘Man,’ Thaddy said, ‘you’re too human to let yourself become a cog in the white man’s machine. Man, you’ve got too much soul for that.’ Jordan just rolled his eyes. Then Thaddy got under his skin and Jordan really let Thaddy have it. That’s when I told Thaddy he had to go.”

Maybe Greenglass will like her son more now that he knows Zach had a black roommate. Maybe he will see Zach as less humorless, less stiff. But Greenglass closes one eye and stares sideways at Zach. “Are you sure you’re the one who asked Rapaczynski to leave? It wasn’t this roommate of yours, this Jordan? And you asked him to leave because of political or ideological differences in your points of view?”

Which leads Maxine to wonder, if not for this nominal difference in their ideologies, would Zach have run off with Thaddy?

And the answer is yes. How could she have been so dense? As alienated as Zach was from his job in Silicon Valley. As impressionable as he has always been. As inclined to the hermit-martyr’s withdrawal from society. Zach would have been appalled when he discovered what Thaddy was doing in that cabin. When Thaddy asked for help in designing a better bomb. But would Zach have ratted Thaddy out? Yes, Maxine thinks. Of course. Trying to convince herself that he would have.

“It wasn’t only the politics,” Zach says. “He was furious I was even thinking of getting married. He made some awful comment about how Angelina only loves me because she’s a cripple and no other man would have her. If you want the truth, that’s as much why I asked him to leave as he was driving Jordan nuts.”

What he doesn’t say is that this is also why he has been avoiding his mother—because, like Thaddy, she once implied the only reason Zach would be dating the woman he loves is that he pities her.

Greenglass tilts his pen toward Zach. “Something fishy is going on. I think you became more involved with your house-guest than you are willing to admit. Maybe you went with him to his cabin. Where was it, in Montana? And that’s why you know the name of the town. Maybe these were plans you and he made together. To wage a campaign of fear against those you regarded as despoiling the environment. For you, those plans were mostly fanciful. Once you realized your partner was actually carrying out those plans, you developed cold feet.”

On he goes, needling Zach, trying to satisfy himself that his client isn’t hiding some involvement in the bombings. Or to make sure Zach can refrain from losing his composure under the aggressive questioning that will come after the agents have analyzed the sleep-starved statements he gave them last night.

The coffee grows cold. The biscuits have left greasy blotches on the cardboard plates. Greenglass emphasizes that both of them need to tell the truth. The agency will want them to remain available for any follow-up. They mustn’t discuss the case—not with a best friend, not with a cousin, not with a nosey neighbor, not with a sympathetic girlfriend. Above all, they mustn’t speak to anyone from the press. “Neither of you seems the type to go calling Oprah, but I don’t care if it’s what’s-her-name, Nina Totenberg from NPR, you say, ‘I’m very sorry, but I am not at liberty to comment right now.’ And you hang up or you shut the door.”

Greenglass caps his pen and clips it to his pad. He rises from his seat and puts on his coat. Then he says, “Tell me again, Professor Sayers, why you didn’t go directly to the FBI. Why you drove all those many hundreds of miles, way up north, to your family’s cabin. It wasn’t because you suspected someone else might be up there, hiding with your son?” Before she can answer, Greenglass zips his coat. “No. Of course that wasn’t the case. You waited because you wanted Zachary here to corroborate your suspicions. You didn’t want to go off half-cocked and get your former student in trouble if your suspicions might prove incorrect.” Greenglass nods at his own assessment. “Yes. That account makes perfect sense. As I have advised you both, whatever you are asked, you tell the truth. I don’t think the government is going to look to bring charges against the persons who help them solve a series of crimes they have been attempting to solve without success for, what, six or seven years? But here’s the deal: You don’t lie. You never have to talk to an officer of the law. But lying to one is a felony.”

He cups Maxine’s elbow and leads her to the steel staircase, motioning Zach to go down before them. “You will have my retainer agreement this afternoon,” he tells Maxine. “I want you both to sign it. I promise to go as easy on you as I can, but I am going to need a check for ten thousand dollars by tomorrow afternoon. As a down payment. Can you do that for me?”

Ten thousand dollars? And that’s only the beginning. “I can do that,” she says. If he asked her to drain her retirement account and sell her house, she would answer in the affirmative.

They are only a few minutes late arriving at the Federal Building, but Shauntz and three men Maxine doesn’t recognize already seem impatient. Shauntz and Greenglass shake hands. Then Shauntz extends his hand to Zach, who regards it as if it were a grenade that might go off before he shakes it carefully. They pass through security. Shauntz and the other agents lead Zach to the offices beyond the door. Maxine wants badly to go in with them, the way she did when Zach had an appointment with his pediatrician, until kindly Dr. Harutyunyan suggested Zach was old enough to go through his checkup without his mother. And Zach, all of eleven, said, “Yeah, Mom. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but even last year, I would rather have gone in alone.” To which she lied and said, “My feelings aren’t hurt. Of course you should go in without me.”

At least Greenglass is allowed to enter. What can she do but trust Zach’s essential goodness will shine through his overly serious exterior? Trust her son will realize he no longer has any loyalty to a childhood friend who has been mailing explosives to innocent victims, one of whom was Zach’s professor at MIT?

She hasn’t brought a book. She wouldn’t have been able to concentrate anyway. A cue-ball-headed white man shares the waiting area; when he gets up to go inside, he offers her his copy of the Free Press. She searches for any mention of the bomber. Government officials are quoted as saying as many as twenty thousand tips have poured in on various hotlines. The authorities are pursuing leads they are confident will pay off soon. As she reads, Maxine feels her throat constrict, as if the authorities are closing in on her rather than on Thaddy. On the op-ed page, a reader disputes the decision to give a national platform to the bomber’s rant, but a columnist expresses his view that as much as he deplores the bomber’s violence, society needs to examine the ways technology is robbing us of our privacy. The bomber, this columnist writes, has tapped into a larger malaise in which citizens are “consumed with widespread feelings of helplessness and inferiority, beaten down by an excessive expectation of conformity to societal rules and norms, living lives far too abstract and complex and divorced from nature and reality to be satisfying.” The truth, this columnist writes, is that “there is a little of the Technobomber in each and every one of us.”

Maybe Thaddy has hit a nerve. Maybe he has sparked an outbreak of dissatisfaction. But one op-ed piece does not a revolution make. As she pages through the paper, she guesses most Detroiters are more concerned with the Red Wings’ chances of staying alive in the playoffs, or the wild fluctuations in that spring’s temperatures, or even Ted Nugent’s threat that if Obama gets reelected he, Ted Nugent, will either be dead or in jail, presumably because he gunned down the president.

By three, her son has yet to reappear. She forces herself to read an article in the business section about a project to employ recovering addicts by hiring them to raise fish in fiberglass tanks in a vacant industrial lot—surely, Zach and Angelina will be interested. In Norway, a right-wing terrorist proudly proclaims that if time allowed, he would have gunned down more than the seventy-seven teenagers he managed to execute at their summer camp. In Iraq, a suicide bomber has blown up another thirty civilians. Next to these cold-blooded mass-murderers, what is Thaddy but a posturing intellectual?

Still no Zach. In the obituary section, she reads that an Ann Arborite two years her junior has died of a heart attack; she never met the man, but she knows his wife. On the comics page, she is shocked to discover that Beetle Bailey, Sergeant Snorkel, and Miss Buxley are still carrying on in ways Maxine didn’t find funny even when her father explained the jokes.

Finally, the men come out—without Zach. Maxine jumps up—it’s as if Dr. Harutyunyan had come back to the waiting room not with her son but with a team of surgeons and oncologists. “What’s wrong? Where’s Zach?” But Greenglass avoids her gaze. Given that she is paying his fees, shouldn’t he report what went on?

Shauntz motions her inside. Greenglass follows. She expects Shauntz to lead her to Zach. But the room is empty except for Burdock. Greenglass takes a seat and motions Maxine to do the same. Then Shauntz asks her to repeat and clarify certain aspects of her statements from the day before. Did Rapaczynski grow close to any other professor on campus? Does she have reason to suspect he was a homosexual? No? Did he ever mention a girlfriend? Any other females with whom he might have engaged in a sexual relationship? Shauntz’s persistence makes her think he suspects she and Thaddy engaged in some sort of romance. She still hasn’t told anyone but Rosa about Thaddy’s screwed-up plan to become a woman. If she manages to convey how starved he was for female companionship, how he was driven to despair by the sounds of his neighbors’ lovemaking, that might save him from the death penalty. More likely, any such revelation will cause Thaddy to curse her. Who will represent him? Might she ask Greenglass to act as Thaddy’s counsel? But who would pay the fee?

No, she tells Shauntz. They weren’t romantically involved, but she doubts any professor had a closer friendship with Thaddy than she did. She repeats the story about the Korean graduate student Thaddy followed to Ypsilanti. The agents quiz her endlessly about the details of that encounter. Then, abruptly, Shauntz asks if she has any reason to believe Rapaczynski and her son were, at any point, lovers.

“Excuse me? My son was fourteen. If anything sexual happened between them, you can’t believe my son …”

Shauntz makes a lowering motion with his hands. “Not when he was fourteen. When your son was an undergraduate at MIT.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Maxine says. “When Zach was at MIT, Thaddy was a professor at Berkeley. Or he was living in Montana. As far as I know, Thaddy was never in Massachusetts. At least not after he graduated from Harvard.”

Greenglass sighs. “I’m afraid Zach just gave us some additional information. Something he forgot to mention last night. Apparently, he spent the entire summer between his freshman and sophomore years living in Montana. With Mr. Rapaczynski.”

Maxine feels the floor give way. “But that was the summer Zach had his internship with his adviser!”

Shauntz puts on the universal expression of anyone who has ever raised a teenager. “I hate to say this, but young men have been known to lie to their mothers about their whereabouts. And your son seems to have been extremely unhappy his first few terms of college. He was put off by how many of his professors were working for the military. How little concern anyone showed for the sorts of projects he thought scientists of their caliber ought to be turning their minds to. He was especially outraged at Professor Hertz for his work on facial-recognition software. They argued. The professor failed your son. As you might recall, this is the same Gordon Hertz who was the most recent recipient of a package from your son’s friend. All this while, Mr. Rapaczynski was hectoring your son with letters and phone calls, describing the life they might be living out there in his rural utopia. Your son hitchhiked west and joined him.”

Maxine tries to take this in. That was the summer Zach told her his professor had invited him to spend six weeks on the Navajo reservation, collecting data from an array of solar panels constructed from some new material. She has the postcards Zach sent, one showing the Grand Canyon, another the rock formations at Monument Valley, with Zach’s childish printing on the back assuring her that his experiments were going well. Then again, he could have found those postcards anywhere.

Her heart pounds in her throat. Zach didn’t have any knowledge of Thaddy’s activities. Did he? Had Thaddy been building bombs even then? Six weeks was a long time to keep an activity like that hidden. In a cabin that small. No, she thinks. The two of them hunted and fished and toasted marshmallows until Zach grew tired of living in the woods and returned to MIT. She wants to ask Greenglass exactly what Zach confessed to. But she is afraid to open her mouth. She is balanced on the thinnest precipice, and if she takes a single wrong step, she is going to topple into a bottomless chasm, and take Zach and Thaddy with her.

She looks at Greenglass for a clue, but his face betrays nothing. Greenglass is probably furious at Zach for lying to him. For allowing him to be bushwhacked by his client in the presence of the FBI. Will Greenglass give up on them? This can’t be the first time a client hasn’t told him the entire truth. But if Greenglass washes his hands of them, who will she find to represent her son, now that he truly needs representing?

“Are you arresting him?” she says. Crazily, she tries to come up with a way to implicate herself. To get thrown in prison instead of her son, or with him. “Are you keeping him for further questioning?”

Shauntz clears his throat. Their eyes meet. She refuses to turn away.

“No,” he says. “I’m trusting my instincts here. Your son seems to have a propensity to … well, you’re his mother. There’s nothing I can tell you about your son you don’t already know.”

Does she? Know her son? Does any mother? He has a propensity to do what? Lie? Run away? Maybe what he has is a propensity to run towards. Where others sit and talk about the injustices of the world, her son rushes off to right them. And yes, he lies. But is that so unusual for a boy his age? Except, at twenty-four, he no longer is a boy. Maybe she is deluded, but she can’t help thinking he is lying to protect her. To protect Thaddy. To protect everyone but himself.

“I’m not sure I can trust your son,” Shauntz says. “But I am going to trust you. To not let him run off. Or lie to us. Again. Or hide what he knows.”

She nods. She says she promises.

And, strangely, that’s all it takes. Greenglass looks at Shauntz. Shauntz nods. All four of them, including Burdock, get to their feet. Shauntz accompanies Maxine to the waiting room and repeats what Greenglass told her earlier: stay in town; remain available; no talking to the press; no talking to anyone except your lawyer. He tells her that his agents will be keeping an eye on her house. Greenglass is deciding whether the FBI can tap her phone, screen her mail, monitor her and Zach’s use of the Internet, or whether he will require the government to obtain a warrant.

“Oh,” Shauntz says. “One more thing.” He lowers his voice, although Greenglass no doubt can hear him. “You may want to kill your son but please don’t. We need him. I’m sorry if we were more aggressive in our interactions than we needed to be. We are very appreciative that you and your son have come forward. I’ll be in touch. One way or the other.”

He lifts his meaty hand and salutes her in a gesture she finds corny and endearing. Just before she follows Greenglass to the lobby, where, she has been told, Zach will be waiting, she turns and sees Shauntz lift one corner of his mouth, wink, and make that clucking sound detectives like Humphrey Bogart used to make to signal to a dame they liked her. What she doesn’t know, not actually being gifted with the ability to predict the future, is this will be the last time she sees Supervisory Special Agent Roland Shauntz, and from now on, every time she thinks of him, which will happen at least once a day for the remainder of her life, she will remember that wink, and again hear him make that ridiculous clucking sound with his mouth.