After Amanda's outburst, she sat in numb silence staring at the file in front of her. Lee finally looked her direction and at seeing her blank stare, he could guess what she was thinking. She only got that quiet when she was deeply worried. He thought of how much Jennie was like her, when she was scared or nervous, she would chatter endlessly, but when she was worried, she was eerily silent. He knew that look on Amanda's face all too well; while she wasn't saying anything, a thousand thoughts were running through her head. He closed his eyes as he fought the urge to bolt out of his seat and wrap her in a comforting embrace as his mind drifted back to another time that he'd seen her this quiet.
Friday, August 23, 1991
Pouring sweat, Lee heaved a deep sigh as he set down the heavy box in his arms. "There, that's the last of it," He panted as he tried to catch his breath.
"Thanks, Lee," Phillip answered with a smile toward his stepfather, equally out of breath as he was setting down the box in his own arms. He looked around his new dorm room.
"Anytime, Chief." Lee smiled back. Lee followed Phillip's gaze to where Amanda was sitting at the desk against one wall idly flipping through a folder of paperwork.
Amanda caught his gaze, fidgeted nervously and said with an awkward chuckle, "I tell you the freshman housing hasn't improved much since I was here."
"Mom," Phillip replied soothingly knowing what she really meant by her comment. "I won't be gone forever. I'll be home for Christmas break, you know."
"I know, I know," Amanda nodded, but her sadness was evident in her voice. She reached for her son and hugged him tightly. "The house just won't be the same without you." She squeezed him tighter, and then pulled back to look at her young man and in a more upbeat tone added, "I want you to know that I am so proud of you."
"Thanks, Mom."
Amanda glanced around the room at the piles of boxes that they'd carried in and when her eyes fell back on the folder sitting on Phillip's desk, she picked it up and began reading, "Now, don't forget, you've got your meeting with your academic advisor this afternoon, then you've got your Freshman orientation tomorrow at eleven, then you've got to get your student ID..." She flipped through the folder and continued, "...In here you've got your class schedule, a campus map so you don't get lost, 'cause you know it's a big place..."
Lee glanced at his wife, knowing that while she was trying to be encouraging to Phillip, she was screaming on the inside. He glanced at her neat appearance compared to his sloppy one and tried to lighten the mood by teasing her, "Why do I look so messy and you look so good?" Amanda shrugged and just smiled at her husband. Lee pointed around the room and quipped, "Have you done anything?"
"Of course I have," Amanda fired back with a half-hearted chuckle and then turned her attention back to her son. "Your bed is made. Your dressier clothes I hung up for you so they wouldn't get wrinkled because I know how hard it is to find time to iron when you're a busy college student." She glanced to the corner of Phillip's half of the room to a miniature fridge that Lee had set up there when they first began unloading Phillip's things. "And there's food in the fridge for you, some sandwiches, sodas and some fresh fruit. I even made you some of your favorite brownies, but make sure you don't just eat the brownies, okay? Try to eat something healthy once in a while. I know how the dining hall can be and I just wanted to...you know...give you...I don't know...a little taste of home...Your freshman year, when you first start out, you can get a little homesick and-"
"Do you want us to stick around to help you unpack?" Lee asked Phillip, cutting off Amanda's nervous ramble before it could build up any more steam.
"No, thanks," Phillip answered. "I think I wanna' do that part on my own." He grinned at his mother, "If I know Mom, she'd be telling me where to put everything and I kinda' wanna' find my own style."
"Hey!" Amanda cried. "You know, there's a proper way to organize things so that you can always find them." She glanced at Lee. "Isn't there, Sweetheart." Lee just shrugged in response as he recalled all the times that they'd argued over the way he kept his half of their shared office.
"I know, I know," Phillip said and he lightly hugged his mother. "But, Mom, just let me do it, okay?"
Amanda nodded as she blinked back the tears that had begun to form. "Just...uh...try to be a little neater than you were at home. You don't want to give your roommate the wrong impression right out of the gate and have him thinking you're a slob. I remember my first roommate when I was in college and we didn't get along at all. She was the kind that once she got out on her own, she just let everything go. I'll never forget one day that we had this horrible fight and she called me an obsessive neat freak and-"
"You know, Amanda," Lee broke in to her ramble again, "If we're gonna' get home before the other kids kill each other, we should probably get going. We don't want your mom having a nervous breakdown with trying to corral them since Jamie's with his friends this weekend doing their end-of-summer beach party thing and not at home to help her." He paused for a moment and added, "If you want my opinion though, I think he planned it this way just so he wouldn't have to help his brother move.
Amanda smiled slightly, but then nodded sadly and replied, "Yeah." She hugged Phillip once more and whispered, "I love you, Phillip." She pulled back to look at him once more, affectionately stroked his hair and mused, "Why'd you have to go and grow up so fast on me?"
"I love you, Mom," Phillip said in reply to her rhetorical question.
"I'm just gonna'..." she gestured to the door. Phillip nodded and she walked toward the door, but at the last minute turned around and said, "Oh, and one more thing. I...um...I left you some rolls of quarters in your top desk drawer to do your laundry with...but...um...you don't have to use them...You can...you know...always bring your laundry home to do...if you want to, I mean..." Unable to control her emotions any longer, she made a hasty escape through the door before the tears that were threatening could fall.
When the two men were left alone, Lee pulled a manila envelope out of his pocket and handed it to Phillip. "What's this?" the younger man asked with a curious eyebrow as he peered inside.
"A little emergency money," Lee said with a nonchalant shrug as he tried to hide his own emotions. "Just in case...and a calling card. Make sure you use it to call your mother once in a while, just to let her know you're okay." He paused for a beat and then added, "you know that if you don't, she'll worry and if she worries too much, she'll drive the two and half hours to get here to hunt you down.'
Phillip laughed at that and concurred, "Yeah, you're not wrong about that."
"And she's a very skilled intelligence operative. She could do it too." Phillip and Lee shared a brief laugh.
"And these?" Phillip questioned with a slightly embarrassed smile as he pulled a box of condoms out of the envelope.
"You know that your mom and I have done our best over the years to keep you guys safe from what we do for a living. I...Um...I just want you to be safe in everything you do."
Phillip dropped the box back in the envelope and shifted a little awkwardly. "What makes you think I'll need them?"
Lee grinned at him, "Last fall, homecoming dance, Christie Milner, any of that ring a bell?"
Phillip's eyes widened in surprise. "You knew about that?"
"Your mom's not the only skilled intelligence operative. I taught her the business, remember?"
"Does...Uh...does Mom know?"
"Hard to say," Lee answered honestly. "I think she might, but if she does, she's not admitting it. I think she'd rather just stay in denial because that would mean that she has to accept that you're grown up now."
Phillip nodded in understanding. "I appreciate the thought Lee, but that's the last thing on my mind right now. Christie and I broke up after graduation because she's going off to UCLA and it would just be too..."
"Yeah, I know," Lee acknowledged. "But you never know what can happen. You might meet one of those wild sorority girls like your mom one of these days and...Well, things happen."
"Ugh, gross," Phillip blanched, a bit of the boy Lee remembered peering out behind the young man's face in front of him.
"What?"
"You and Mom and..." Phillip's voice trailed off, unable to complete his thought.
"Just make sure you watch out for those Kappa girls," Lee replied with a laugh. He became a bit more serious and said to his stepson, "Chief, I want you to know that I'm proud of you too, just like your mom is." He then hugged him tightly for a moment, pulled back and then continued with, "You just make sure you keep doing what you did to get you here. Don't do what I did and get yourself thrown out your first semester."
"I won't," Phillip promised.
"I...uh...I should go catch up with your mom," Lee pointed to the door and made his way toward it.
Phillip nodded. "Lee?" Lee turned back to look at his all-too grown-up stepson and when he did, Phillip said sincerely, "Thanks...for everything."
"My pleasure, Son," Lee smiled, but then hastily exited before the tears that had welled up in his own eyes could fall.
When he caught up to his wife, he found her leaning against the family's Dodge Grand Caravan silently staring at the dormitory she'd just vacated. There were no tears, just an eerie silence as her eyes remained fixed on Phillip's window. He took both of her hands in his and said softly, "Amanda?" When she finally tore her gaze from the building and looked at him, he added encouragingly, "He's got a good head on his shoulders. He's gonna' be fine." When she nodded numbly, he released her hands and leaned against the van beside her, draping an arm across her shoulders to comfort her. He glanced up to the window himself and then pointed with his free hand. "Look."
Amanda glanced up and couldn't help smiling at seeing their son poking his head out the window and waving at them with a broad grin on his face and then giving them two thumbs up. They both waved back and then Lee turned his attention back to her, saying, "See? He's fine. He's happy." Amanda nodded. "Come on. Let's go home. We may have moved Phillip out, but we've still got a full house waiting for us."
On the drive back to Arlington, Amanda was still silent which had Lee completely unnerved. As he drove, he kept stealing glances her way to make sure she was okay, throwing in an occasional, "Amanda?" to which she would just reply, "I'm fine."
Hours later when he finally pulled the van into their driveway, he noticed that she didn't immediately unfasten her seatbelt as she normally did, just still sat in the passenger seat in silence. "Amanda?" When he received no answer, he tried again. "Amanda..." He watched helplessly as she picked at her cuticles, sucked her lower lip in her mouth and still said nothing. "Amanda, Honey, talk to me." Still silence. He hauled himself from the driver's seat, quickly walked around to her side, opened the door, undid her seatbelt, knelt in front of her seat and took both of her hands in his again. "Amanda, look at me."
When she finally turned and looked at him, Lee was startled to hear her blurt out, "I wanna' have another baby."
"What?" He replied in astonishment. He took a deep breath, slid one hand from hers and caressed her face softly. "No...You don't," he said matter-of-factly. You're just reacting to Phillip leaving home."
"No," she denied with a shake of her head.
"Amanda, come on, think about it. We talked about this over two years ago and we agreed that six children between the two of us was more than enough."
"I know, but it's not that crazy, you know? I mean, we're only forty-one. We're still young enough. There are people out there older than us that are just starting families."
"You're right, there are, but those couples are also going to be in their sixties by the time their kids graduate high school. Do you wanna' be that mom?" When she only shrugged, he added, "Besides, this conversation's a moot point anyway. We took care of business after Em was born."
"Yes, but that kind of surgery can be reversed these days," Amanda pointed out.
"Do you really wanna' put me through that? Or for that matter, do you wanna' put yourself through another difficult pregnancy? You had a hard enough time with Emily." When Amanda didn't reply, he said, "Amanda, please, put that logical mind of yours to work for me. I think you should stop and think about this very seriously, sleep on it for a couple of days once you've had time to get used to the idea of Phillip being gone and then we'll talk about it again, okay?"
Amanda nodded, "I...Um...I..." she sighed as she often did when she couldn't quite form the words that she wanted to say.
She never got a chance as they were interrupted by childish shouts coming from the direction of their front door, followed by Dotty's cries of "Slow down before you fall!"
"Mommy, Daddy!" almost nine-year-old Leah cried excitedly, trailed by her by Matt and Jennie running toward their parents while two and half-year-old Emily toddled behind them.
"See?" Lee stood and scooped Emily up into his arms. "We've still got babies who need us," he said pointedly.
"Yeah, we do," Amanda replied as she finally extracted herself from the van, smiled brightly and greeted her children. Lee let out a sigh of relief at seeing her acting normally again, hoping that their other children would provide the necessary distraction to get her mind off of how much she was going to miss their eldest child. As she enveloped their middle children in a tight group hug she said to them in a scolding tone, "Now, don't you guys grow up too soon, you hear me?"
Lee was snapped out of his memories by Billy's booming voice saying, "Amanda, are you with us?" Lee looked around. He'd been so lost in his own thoughts solely of Amanda that he had completely tuned out the chatter in the room at the bomb that had just exploded.
Amie hissed gleefully in his ear, "So, I guess you don't have the perfect family, after all, huh?"
Bitch! He thought, but quickly tamped that thought down, knowing that if he didn't play his cover to perfection, it could cost Amanda her life.
Francine, who was sitting beside Amanda, tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention and said sharply, "Amanda, snap out of it!"
Amanda shook her head and said, "I'm fine." She then turned to Billy. "I've got this," she answered him with much more confidence than she felt. She glanced across the table to her husband.
At seeing the pleading look in his wife's eyes, Lee hastily looked away before her intuitive mind could interpret his own expression. He couldn't let her see what was in his heart or he'd never be able to complete his mission and they'd never be able to get back to normal. Normal, he thought bitterly. At knowing how much worse things were likely to get, he wondered how they'd ever be able to get back to normal again. He whispered to Amie, "You know, the family life is not all it's cracked up to be."
Amanda watched in silence feeling a painful tightening in her chest while Billy stood, held up a hand to silence the buzz in the room and handed out the rest of the assignments, but Amanda was no longer listening as she watched the man she loved whispering and giggling with the woman she loathed. She wondered just what was going on with him and why he was acting the way that he was. She'd heard the gossip in the bullpen when she'd returned from the ladies room that it had finally happened as predicted and that Scarecrow had at last tired of being tied down to the simple housewife.
She let a deep sigh escape her. She knew, she just knew, that there was more to it than that. There had to be a logical explanation for his behavior. What had caused him to slip out of their bed before the crack of dawn? What had happened at his early morning meeting? Who was it with? Was he on a top-secret undercover assignment as he'd been several years ago when pretending to be burnt out? Or...a horrible thought stuck her...Was it real burn-out this time? Had he been brainwashed again like the time with that stupid duck? Had he been drugged as Candice had done to him years ago to conceive Leah? As soon as she thought that, it occurred to her that Amie and Candice were cut from the same cloth. She'd often heard the office grapevine referring to her as the male equivalent of Scarecrow back in his wilder days, and she'd been after Lee since the day she'd first arrived in DC. But just how far would she go to get what she wanted? She thought too of the report that she'd turned in to the Justice Department about some questionable things she'd inadvertently found in Amie's records over the weekend. Had anyone at Justice taken her seriously? She'd never heard back from them. She was so lost in her thoughts, that she didn't register at all what Billy was saying or that the meeting was breaking up until she heard his voice grow a bit sterner as he said, "Scarecrow, Amanda, my office, now!"