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If this place did have a name, Zach didn’t know it. All he had to go on were coordinates for a small, unmarked cemetery just outside of D.C., miles from Arlington (it’s not like terrorists got to be buried near the patriots, after all).
He’d opted to keep his visit a secret, an almost shameful bubble popping up in his gut when he had told Cammie he was going to run errands while she finished up end-of-semester papers and studied for finals in their apartment.
There was no sign or grandiose wrought-iron gate welcoming you to a person’s forever resting place. Zach was honestly surprised there was even a guard this time of day, one who scanned his ID and looked him up and down as if wondering why a young man with such a high clearance was here, this close to Christmas.
Killing the engine, he just sat in the stillness of December, his gloved fingers still tightly clutching the steering wheel, a voice inside his head whispering You don’t have to do this.
But he was already here, and he had already lied to his girlfriend, his father, his father-figure, and himself, so damn it, he may as well see it through.
Slipping out of the driver’s seat, the bitter December cold hit him, seeping through his jacket and the beanie he had become fond of. It was the kind of bitter cold that made your lungs burn, and it was one he remembered from his childhood, huddling against his mother for warmth as they hopped on trains in foreign cities, always on the move from some unknown force.
It wasn’t the type of cemetery that saw flowers from guilty relatives sitting on headstones, or little American flags on every plot. There wasn’t even a bench, just the darkening sky of 4 p.m. in December in D.C. This was the final stop for people the CIA had no interest in honoring in any way, kept solely to see that their bodies truly were six feet under and no longer a threat to national security, a small plot in between an access road and a tree line.
But she was his mother.
Or, she had been his mother.
Catherine Goode had been dead for three and a half years, and it still felt like she was burning through his insides, even in the afterlife. As he descended upon the thirteenth row (a funny twist of fate, since she had always said her favorite number was 13), his steps slowed, and his breathing grew more labored amidst the cold and the sight he knew was waiting for him.
Her gravestone was simple, just a first and last name, and her dates of birth and death. They had even foregone her middle name, and Zach wondered if it was done on purpose, or if that information would die with him and a piece of paper deep in some higher-up’s files. Just like her favorite number or the way she had taken her tea, there were so many things that had made up the woman who lay below the snow and stone that would die out with him. Not everything, he knew, since the many things that had made her up lived on in his girlfriend and her family—in the faded slashes on her arms and down her torso that he always kissed his way past. In the empty grave in the Swiss Alps that held her father. In the way her mother and her best friends, and even he tensed up whenever they couldn’t see her.
No, a lot of things about Catherine Goode (namely, him) hadn’t died with her, but so many of the small things that had made her human had died in a fire in Roseville, Virginia. Maybe they had died beforehand, but he wasn’t sure, and no one besides him would ever care to know. Zach wondered if anyone would ever know that his mother had been afraid of spiders, despite being a psychopathic terrorist, or that she had taken her tea with milk and no sugar. It was hard to see Catherine as human when the CIA and her own actions had stripped her of the humanity so many people were afforded, but she had still been his mother.
She was his mother. Whatever that had meant, for better or worse, she had been his mother. Catherine Goode may have been a monster in almost every way that mattered, but the strings in his heart tugged when he remembered the woman who would always let him have the chocolate side of a swirl cone. He remembered the woman who would drape her jackets over him when he was little and cold, even if that meant she hadn’t had anything to protect her from the elements in every house they were in.
Catherine rarely cooked, but when she did, she used to hum as she stirred sauce, and sometimes, when he was really little, he’d dance with her in whatever kitchen they were using that night. He caught himself doing it with Cammie in their tiny Georgetown studio, before he realized and stopped himself so fast he’d burned his hand on the rim of the pot.
She had been his mother, and if things were fair and just, maybe she and his father would have stayed together, been as normal a spy couple as a spy couple could be. Holidays—maybe in a safe house instead of in the suburbs—but maybe he could have had a childhood like Cammie’s, trips to the fair with his dad and sticky fingers in cotton candy with mom, even if the two of them had to jet off to Budapest or Vienna or Buenos Aires afterwards for some top-secret mission.
But things weren’t fair or just, and Zach had stopped believing they were supposed to be around the same time he’d stopped believing his mother was a good person, which was earlier than anyone would probably guess.
He crouched down, brushing the thin layer of snow off the top of the stone, and his chest felt heavy, his throat feeling like it was closing up with smoke, or maybe tears. He hadn’t even cried when she’d died, the numbness of the fire and knowing everything was over taking away a lot of the feelings as he and Cammie had sat in Langley, waiting to be interrogated.
He’d cried once since, after a long chat with Joe where his father figure had pulled out a 6-pack of beer on the back porch of his and Rachel’s safe house of the summer, the two of them talking and talking like they hadn’t since he was a younger teenager, when some of his bigger problems had involved whether or not Cammie Morgan liked him back.
“Hi,” he said. His voice sounded strange out here, all alone and absorbed immediately by the snow and emptiness and nothing of winter. “Merry Christmas, I guess.”
Christmas had always been her favorite holiday, but Catherine Goode was silent.
What did someone say to a grave? In the movies, there were always tearful confessions from lovers, weeping parents over a child’s grave, but Zach doubted there was a movie starring a broken son at his terrorist mother’s grave. If there was, he’d have to check it out. His fingers brushed along the smooth limestone, the years of harsh D.C. weather already starting to cause chips and flakes in the grey.
“I just got promoted,” he blurted. He wasn’t sure where that had come from. He didn’t think his mother would care—nor was she listening, because neither of them had ever been the religious type to believe in an afterlife. Besides, he thought, if there was an afterlife, she certainly wasn’t going to the good one. “And Cam’s doing good. She has a semester left of school—not that you ever cared, I guess.”
He felt stupid. It was stupid to talk to his mother, to tell her about Cammie, the person he loved more than anyone else in the world, the woman his mother had tried to kill on multiple occasions. Updating her on Cammie’s well-being felt like some sick joke.
But the little boy inside him, the one with the six birthday candles and the G.I. Joe doll, remembered his mother asking him about a girl in one of his kindergarten classes, whom he had said was pretty. That version of his mother would have wanted to know what his girlfriend was up to, how she was doing. But that version of him, and that version of her, were both dead.
Zach wondered if things had turned out differently, whether he’d be sleeping under the snow with her, another stone in an unmarked cemetery, another person whose hopes, dreams, and loves would die out, never remembered.
He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until he saw spots, dizzying whites swimming in his vision as he tried to stop the tears trying to come out, and swallowed the lump in his throat that was threatening to burst, to make the only sound in an empty, unmarked cemetery right before Christmas.
Grief was a complex thing. He’d dealt with it a lot in his life. Grief about the father he’d never known (and then grief when he had known him). The gutwrenching, stabbing, deep grief he had felt the summer that the love of his life had run away, spurred by his words and his actions. The devastating grief of dragging his father figure out of the tombs at Blackthorne, the exasperation of his six-month coma, and grieving one of the only people who had cared for him the moment they met him.
The grief he felt with his mother, though, was different. He was grieving someone he was glad was gone. The world was certainly better off without her, and he (and Cammie and Joe, and even his father) were certainly better off without her. It was hard for the two feelings to coexist in him, both feeling glad that she couldn’t hurt anyone, but missing her in a shameful, hidden way.
He missed his mom. The real one, or maybe the one that he’d invented in his mind throughout the years, maybe as if to cope with the reality of what being her son had been like. He missed the version of the woman who had loved him so much, she’d done everything in her power to protect him, even when he’d made it clear he would stand against her every single time.
“I don’t forgive you,” he said, quietly, the words dissipating into the puff of breath he let out into the cold night. “But I do miss you. I just wanted you to know that, I guess.”
The wind rattled the branches of the nearby trees like bones, shaking the chain link fence along the perimeter of the cemetery, shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
“But I’m here, I guess. If I were a betting man, I’d say I’m the only person who’s come here and not spit on your grave or cursed you out. But believe me, I want to. So bad.”
He paused, waiting, as if Catherine Goode would magically rise from her plot of Earth, tossing her long, dark red hair behind her shoulder as she pressed her hand to his cheek and told him that she had raised him with better manners than that. But she didn’t, and he waited in silence, already forgetting what his mother’s voice had sounded like.
Zach stood, his knees aching from the cold. He felt stupid as he wiped his face with the back of his glove, rough and graceless, the kind of gesture that Madame Dabney would have chided him for. His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he wondered if it was Cammie, innocently texting him about their dinner plans, and another flash of guilt coursed through him.
They were due to fly to Nebraska tomorrow morning to visit her grandparents for the Christmas holidays. He hadn’t seen Joe and Rachel in over a month and was excited to relax (as much as a spy could) and eat all the delicious food Grandma Morgan always made. And yet, in an almost traitorous fashion, there he was crying at the grave of the woman who had killed her only son.
He slipped his right glove off, his bare fingers finding the top of the gravestone one more time. He let the tips of his fingers glide along it, feeling the rough stone under them. It reminded him of the tombs of Blackthorne, the haunted halls of that mountain, the smoke in the air as the tunnels burned, burning yet another version of his mother down with them.
“Goodbye, Mom.”
With one last burning hot tear, he turned and walked away, his boots crunching all the way to his car as the streetlamps started flickering, leaving the ghosts of Langley to another snowy night. He’d take the dreary cold over the burning smoke of tunnels any day, though.