His eyebrows were up to his hairline with curiosity, but she begged off. “When it’s over, I’ll take you to lunch, Simon, and then I’ll tell you everything. Literally, everything.”
Back upstairs, she called Angelica. Since it was apparent Benita might be outed at any moment, during the journey she had decided to tell her daughter the truth about the intermediary.
Angelica, of course, already knew, because she’d seen the news conference after the committee hearing. She had a hundred questions, which Benita answered, and a hundred more, which she couldn’t.
When told that Carlos had been taken to Pistach-home and left there, she cried, “Mother! You left him there!”
“He’s a hostage. Frankly, Angelica, it’s difficult to think of any other role he could play as well. It doesn’t require him to do anything, not even to be pleasant, and he would complain no matter where he was. What my . . . colleagues and I have to do in the next few days is extremely sensitive, and Carlos is in as disruptive mood as I’ve ever seen. The girl who was kidnapped with him, by the way, was his girlfriend. A Miss Sonia Bigg.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not in a jovial mood. Actually, it’s fortunate the Pistach accepted him as a hostage, rather than insisting on one of the other of us. They won’t hurt him, not at all, and we’ll get him back as soon as the envoys go home.”
“They’re going home?” She seemed shocked by this.
“Well, not right away. Maybe soon.”
“Oh,no, Mom, they’ve gotto stay. They’ve got to get rid of those predators, and you have no idea how much things have improved. At the school! At the housing development by the bus stop! People keep talking about it! They want them to stay.”
“That’s what the president told me, too. I don’t have time to explain just now, because we’re terribly busy. I wanted you to know I’m all right because you may not hear from me for a while.”
“Did you see Dad on TV?” she demanded.
“Yes. Just before I left,” Benita said, flushing. “He was claiming I was a sex slave to the ET’s.”
“He is so stupid! It’s embarrassing!”
“Those men you mentioned to me, Angelica? The ones who were hanging around out there? They’re part of a group made up of political opponents of the president. They will do literally anything to bring him down, including making an alliance with the predators, or the Devil, if it came to that! Your father was only a minor bargaining chip in the process, a way of getting at me, and it didn’t work out the way they planned. So, either they were paying him to spread around dirty misinformation, or they were paying the predators to plant ideas in his head.”
“I think it’s rotten. Will you call me back when you know something? And you’re telling me the truth about Carlos? I don’t have to worry about him? He’s all right where he is?”
“He’s perfectly all right where he is.”
“I just … I think about him all the time. When we were little, you know, and you were at work, he was sort of my responsibility. Sometimes he was nice.”
Benita took a deep breath. “Angelica, I wasn’t going to mention this to you, but when you and Carlos left home, I went into sort of a funk. Depression, I guess. You know that Goose and Marsh paid for good health insurance for our family, so I decided to use it and go to a shrink. We had just a few sessions.”
“You never told me . . .”
“I’m telling you now. Just listen. This psychologist asked me to visualize my trying to save someone who was drowning. She said to visualize the drowning person pulling my head under. She said to imagine that I struggled, and struggled, getting my head up just enough to gulp some air, but every time I did, the drowning person pulled my head under again.
“She said living with someone like your dad is like trying to save someone from drowning when what the person really wants is to drown you with him. He wants to go, but he doesn’t want to go alone. She said the drowner’s strongest motivation is to ‘miserate his companions,’ to pull your head under, over and over until all your strength is gone and you die.”