September 4, 2001

"Ahh -- Bristow, Sydney V.? Could you come up here before you go?"

Sydney, surprised, made her way to Professor Diamond's desk through the throng of departing students. He was staring at her over the top of his glasses in a way that made her uneasy. "Is there a problem, Professor?"

"With your paper?" He gestured at the pages still in her hand, marked at the top with a bright red A. "Absolutely not. It's extremely good work - and I suspect you know that."

The high-fives and cheering would come later. For now, Syd kept her outer reaction to a polite smile. "I liked the subject."

"Ah, yes. 'The Role of Destiny in Anna Karenina.' You raised some interesting issues." Diamond shook his head. "Every semester, I have students foolhardy enough to criticize Tolstoy, but you're one of the very few who's ever been convincing."

"I don't mean to be dismissive. Tolstoy's my favorite author," Sydney replied. "But his reliance on 'destiny' - well - you've read my arguments."

"You're not a destiny fan, are you? Well, nothing wrong with that. I tend to consider 'fate' a weak literary device myself." Diamond scratched his gray head and smiled. "But, Miss Bristow, for the sake of your sanity and my bifocals prescription, remember: When I ask for a three-page paper, I want a three-page paper. Not fifteen pages."

"Sorry, Professor Diamond. Sometimes I have a tendency to take things to the extreme."

"God forbid I should ever give a student the idea that enthusiasm isn't welcome. It is. Just -- pace yourself."

She nodded and turned to go, giving him a quick wave as she went out the door. Her mood, already good, began to soar up into something like elation - born of a dozen different reasons and no reason at all, just the perfect balance and tenor of the day. Jogging down the steps, she pushed up the sleeves of her rainbow-striped sweater and took a deep breath. Perfect, sunny day, just warm enough for comfort; an A on her first paper in Russian literature; a good time waiting for her at Bud's Broilers: Everything was just the way it ought to be.

If I believed in astrology, she thought, I'd say the stars were all aligned. Next thing you know, I'll be wearing a turban and calling myself Miss Cleo.

Laughing, she began her journey across the quad, dodging floating Frisbees in the air and lovestruck couples sprawled on the grass below.  When she went through the door of Bud's Broilers, the comforting smells of pizza and beer greeted her, as did the jingle bells tied to the handle. As one, the people at the far table by the Mortal Kombat machine turned their heads and grinned.

"Where have you been?" Francie said, gesturing at her watch. "Your class has been out for, like, two minutes. Maybe two and a half. We can't have you dragging ass over here."

Syd rolled her eyes in mock annoyance. "Wolves. I was attacked by wolves."

"I hate it when that happens." Will punched his straw through the lid of his strawberry milkshake. "Man, L.A. - first it's the traffic, then it's the crime, and then it's the packs of wolves."

"We should declare the wolves a gang." Charlie lifted his head from his bar-review books only long enough to smile a greeting at Sydney. "Then the other gangs would take 'em out."

"Use the crime problem to solve the wolf problem." Will nodded and gestured emphatically with a fry. "Good thinking, Charlie."

"Saved you a seat." Danny smiled up at her, and as ever, she couldn't help smiling back. "What do you want to eat? I'll get it."

"Nothing," Syd said, taking a fry from Danny's plate as she sat down. "I've got dinner plans. I don't want to be too full."

"So you're eating nothing except MY food."

"Listen," Francie explained, "there are three kinds of food that have no calories. The first is any food you eat on a trip more than 100 miles from your home. The second is anything consumed on Thanksgiving, Christmas or your birthday. The third is any French fry you take from somebody else's plate. So you can't fill up on those. My life is food. I know these things. Trust me."

"Then I'll have one of Will's fries instead," Danny decided. "Will, get Syd to order a plate, and then those will be for you."

"Take it away, man." Will was suddenly awkward - as he often was around Danny. Syd often wished she could smooth over his uneasiness somehow, but the only way she'd ever accomplish that would be by breaking up with Danny and going out with him. And that was -

- she gave Danny a sidelong grin, which he returned, his blue eyes bright -

-never going to happen.

She and Francie shared glances across the table, and Francie quickly changed the subject. "So, whatcha got there?"

"My first Russian lit paper. Got an A."

"No surprise there, my brilliant girl." Danny glanced at the title. "Destiny and Anna Karenina, hmm?"

Charlie shook his head. "That sounds like rough going."

"Not really. Besides I have my secret weapon." Syd waggled her eyebrows.

"What are you doing with your eyebrows?" Will asked.

"Waggling. I was waggling. You know, like a supervillain. Ming the Merciless, maybe." Syd tried it again.

Will laughed. "It looks more like a twitch. You gotta stop that." Francie nodded her agreement.

Charlie put a napkin in his book to mark his place and finally gave Syd his full attention. "Okay, I'll bite. What secret weapon?"

"I read the book in the original Russian. When you compare that with the translation, no matter who the translator is or how good he might be, there are always some questions about word choice. Lots of questions about word choice. Professors Eat. That. Stuff. Up."

"You read Russian?" Charlie raised his eyebrows. "Color me impressed."

"It's not impressive! You did know that I am Russian, right?" When Charlie shook his head, Sydney smiled proudly. "Born in Moscow. I lived there until I was five."

Laughing, Charlie said, "You're kidding, right? Where's your accent?"

"It's history. But you should've heard me when I was seven or eight."

"How come I haven't heard about this before?"

Francie and Danny gave each other a look; they were the only two people Sydney had ever confided in, and she could tell they were about to swoop to the rescue with a change of subject. But no - she was too old to hide behind lies, and it was past time that Will knew. Time to speak. "I don't usually talk about it much. You see - my dad and I, we left Russia when my mother died." Syd took a deep breath and said the rest, proud of herself because it came out smoothly: "When my mother was killed."

Charlie's jaw dropped. Will whispered, "Holy shit. Are you serious?" Syd nodded. "Killed - by who, killed?"

"The KGB," Syd answered. Francie was now gripping the edge of the table with her hands, and Danny's arm was securely around her waist. They were bracing themselves, and her, for what they thought Syd would say next. But she realized - even if she was ready to talk about the rest, she wasn't ready to say in public that she'd actually had to hear her mother's murder.

Charlie said, "I don't want to pry - I guess it's too late for that, but - do you know why?"

"Not exactly," Syd said. "I was little when it happened, and my dad - he can't bear to talk about it. But I figure she was probably working with the dissident movement, and the KGB found out about it." The image of her mother had grown softer with time, but Sydney would never forget her dark eyes, her brilliant smile, or the way it had felt to be held in her arms.

"Your dad - was he a dissident too?" Will was leaning forward, alive with the desire for information.

Sydney forced herself back to the here and now. "I don't think so. I mean, he had to know about it, right? But I can't really see my dad being the revolutionary type. Can you?"

"Ah, no." Danny relaxed as he saw her good humor. "But then again - no."

Charlie still seemed to be stalled in disbelief. "Sydney is NOT a Russian name."

"I took an American name when we came to America. I used to be called Valentina; I use it as my middle name now."

Francie said, "I never got why you ditched your Russian name. I mean, Valentina, that's pretty, right? I would have kept Valentina. Not that anything's wrong with Sydney."

"I think my dad thought it would make things easier for me in the long run. It was a big transition - culture shock on a nuclear scale. The first time my dad took me in a real grocery store, I nearly went nuts. Dad says I wanted to walk out with about five cartons of ice cream in my arms." Sydney didn't recall that moment, but she did have a very funny memory of her dad apologizing profusely to an amused security guard.

Apparently done staring at his fries, Will asked, "Did you pick out your new name? Or was that your dad's idea?"

"Actually, the name was a suggestion from my dad's best friend."

Danny laughed. "Wait a minute - you got your name from Arvin Sloane?" Her boyfriend had been fond of Mr. Sloane ever since they'd first met, months ago; Mr. Sloane took an interest in him right away, unlike, well, some people.

Refusing to let her thoughts wander into a depressing area, Sydney continued, "Mr. Sloane's never said why he picked Sydney. But sometimes I think it's what he and Emily would've named a daughter, if they'd had one." They sometimes treated her as a daughter too, which meant a lot, given that she'd lost her mother and that her dad was - her dad. "Mr. Sloane even helped get us out of Russia. Greatest guy ever."

"That's so sweet," Francie sighed. "I wish one of my parents' friends could've suggested something better than 'Francie.' Eighty thousand names in the English language, and they picked THAT one."

"Don't go knocking your name, sugar." Charlie gave her a sound kiss on the cheek. "God knows it's better than 'Arvin.' Who looks down at a little baby and names it Arvin? That's just mean."

Will began gathering up his stuff. "I gotta get going. Gotta cover the school board meeting tonight. Syd - guys - catch you later, okay?"

"Hang on," Francie said. "We've got to get moving too. I have a golden-anniversary dinner tonight, and you do not know wrath until you've seen old people whose hors d'ouvres weren't served on time."

"I'll put angry parents up against the old people any day," Will said.

Charlie finished stuffing his backpack full of bar-review books. Quietly, he said, "Sydney, if I brought up some bad memories -"

"It's okay. Seriously. I'm glad you guys know."

Francie walked around the picnic-style table to give Syd a quick hug. "If you could leave something in the stove tonight, that would be great. I'm not going to get home until about 2 a.m., and guests always eat the last crumb."

"Can do," Syd promised as her three friends headed out the door. She took another of Danny's fries and shook her head. "Francie's such a trooper. I could never handle a job on top of school."

"You could do anything you wanted to, I think." Danny leaned one elbow on the table, the better to look into her face. "But I'm glad you have the free time to spend with certain exhausted residents - and their competition."

"Competition?" Syd felt her cheeks coloring. Was he going to bring up that movie she'd gone to see with Will last week? It had been entirely innocent - well, on her side, anyway, and it wasn't as though you got a chance to see "Stella Dallas" on the big screen every day --

"Big dinner plans tonight, I think you said?"

Relieved, she laughed. "With my DAD, you jealous freak. We always do Tuesdays when he's in town. You know this."

Danny hesitated before saying, "You two have the strangest relationship."

"Me and Dad? What do you mean?"

"It's just - he can be so demanding of your time. But when you're together, he doesn't ever really tell you anything about himself. You say he doesn't want to talk about your personal life either, even when I'm not around."

"Personal matters and my dad aren't the best combination," Syd admitted. "He's a difficult person to get along with; I know that better than anybody. I guess, maybe, you could say he was, well, stiff."

"You guess." Danny looked at her incredulously. "Maybe."

"Okay, he's a stiff. But he's my stiff."

"Come on, Syd, don't be angry with me." She had a weak spot for Danny's pleading; he did it very, very well. Now, for instance, he was putting his hands on her shoulders and doing that puppy-dog thing with his eyes. Sydney was a sucker for the puppy-dog thing. "Your dad created you, and that automatically puts him on my Top Ten List of favorite people ever. I just don't understand why he clings to you so tightly in some ways, and why he's so distant in others."

Syd stared down at the picnic table for a few moments, collecting her thoughts while she read the names scratched in its battered surface, ballpoint-ink tattoos of long-ago lovers. She traced the name "Jose" with one of her fingers, then said, "After what happened to my mom - Danny, he's never said this to me, but I've always known - Dad felt so guilty. I think he still does."

"Guilty? But why? It's not as though he could have stopped the KGB."

"It's not a rational reaction. It's just how he feels. Put yourself in his position: The woman he loved was murdered, and he couldn't save her. And they loved each other so much, Danny. When you're a kid, you don't realize what it means, that two people still light up every time they see each other, even after seven years of marriage. I thought every married couple was like that, back then. Now that I'm older, I know what they had - it was special." Sydney swallowed the lump in her throat. "That's how I learned what love was, watching them together. And then he lost her, in the most horrible way possible."

Quietly, Danny said, "I forget that sometimes. That life made your father the way he is. Everything he's been through."

"After she died, he had to take me halfway across the world from everything I'd ever known. For the longest time, I had such terrible nightmares. Worse than the ones now, and almost every night. I think, in my dad's mind, he believes he owes me for that. For not having saved Mama."

Danny smoothed her hair with one of his broad hands. "I'm sorry, darling." His English accent stroked the last word into dahhling, which always made Syd happy, even now. She rested her head on his broad shoulder, grateful to someplace safe and warm to revisit painful memories.

"For the first couple of years after she died, Dad mostly worked from home. So we were together, night and day, and I just clung to him. He was the only familiar face in the world." She would never forget how oppressively huge their house had seemed at first, how reluctant she'd been to ever be more than one room away from her father. He had learned to work with her literally lying beneath the desk, her arms sometimes wrapped around his ankles, for hours on end. "I think he realized there wasn't anything he could do for me except be there, you know?"

"You're stronger now. And you have been for a long time."

"Tell that to Dad. He still thinks I'm this fragile little girl who speaks terrible English and has bad dreams every night. That makes him want to watch out for me. It can't make him - warm, or easygoing, or anything else. Sometimes I wish he'd change, but he won't. Not ever." Weighing his reaction carefully, Sydney said, "You can handle that, right?"

"For you, I can handle anything."

"Good." Syd tried to be offhand. "I was kind of hoping you were going to stick around."

"You'd better believe it," Danny said, before he gave her a kiss that made every bad memory fly away.

**

Despite her best efforts to inject a little variety into their family dining experiences, Syd usually found herself at Jade Dragon every week. If she asked her father to eat Italian or Mexican or French or even - she'd tried it once to see if he'd react - Mongolian, he'd do it and act perfectly pleased. Then, next week, he'd just ask her to come back to Jade Dragon again. In the past year, Syd had begun to resign herself to a lifetime of the Number 5 special. Her father redefined the phrase "stuck in a rut."

Tonight, at least, they were eating in the main room for a welcome change. Her father normally requested one of the private rooms in the back; she didn't get why her father had such a weird aversion to sitting near windows, or with his back to a door. Francie said it was a sign he'd been assassinated in a past life, which in Sydney's opinion didn't answer the question. No matter what his reasons were, he didn't consider the change very welcome.

"I wish they'd told me about the banquet," he said, for the second time. "We could have come tomorrow, when the back rooms were available."

"Tomorrow I have my research seminar," Syd corrected him. "So - carpe diem, okay? Or is it carpe noctem?"

Dad smiled; his smiles never lasted long enough, all the more reason Syd treasured them. "I'll stop complaining."

"Thanks. How's work?"

"Same old, same old." He always said that. Syd thought, in despair, that they could just tape-record one of their conversations and replay it for all future dinners. The man asked the same simple questions, gave the same flat answers, every time.

She frowned down at her still-conjoined chopsticks; her face frowned back up at her from the reflection in the black-lacquer table. Wasn't she as guilty as her father? Maybe he phoned in these dinner talks, but she let him get away with it. If they were ever going to have a better relationship - at least a more open one - it would be up to her to make it happen. "Same old, same old," she said slowly. "That's what you always said when you worked at Jennings Aerospace. I thought the bank might be more exciting." Of course, anything had to offer more thrills than exporting airplane parts.

"I'm not interested in excitement."

No kidding, Sydney thought. "At least you get to work with Mr. Sloane at the bank. That's got to be fun for you, right?"

Was it her imagination, or was Dad frowning? It must have been her imagination, because a moment later, he said, "Nothing makes banking fun. But it's good to have Arvin close by." After a short pause, he added, "By the way - he and Emily wanted to have you to dinner sometime soon. Maybe we could do that next week."

Syd nodded, happy at the thought of an evening spent with Mr. Sloane's excellent wine cellar and Emily's gourmet cooking. But she was still thinking about her earlier topic, the excitement in her dad's life, or more exactly the lack thereof. "I know you travel around a lot. Surely you don't spend all your free time at the hotel."

"You say 'all your free time' as though there were a lot of it," her father said. She suppressed a smile; though she could never say so, she liked her father's snarky side. "There isn't any of it. Arvin sees to that, trust me."

"I just want you to enjoy yourself a little more." Syd paused to smile at the waiter who brought her egg-drop soup. "You're still young. You ought to have some adventures."

He seemed to sigh before he began on his own soup. "Honestly, Sydney, adventure is the last thing I need."

Was this doomed to be yet another night of boredom? Was their relationship always going to wear deeper in the same groove? Probably, Sydney thought. If only something would happen - something bizarre, something strange, something completely out of the ordinary that even her father couldn't ignore -

Bizarre. Strange. These words called up one very specific memory for Sydney, and she seized on it. If she told Dad about THAT, surely that would liven up the evening.

Actually, she'd never told anybody about the incident, because they'd asked her not to. But that was seven years ago now. Surely it didn't matter anymore. And if she wanted her father to start telling her what was really important to him, shouldn't share be willing to share her own secrets?

Voice lowered, she asked, "Dad, did you know - one time - I was asked to become a spy?"

Her father's spoon clattered against his bowl, and he stared at her with his jaw slightly open. Syd felt strange; she'd never quite realized how rarely her father betrayed strong emotion. "Did you just say what I think you said?"

"Shhhhh!" Syd waved her napkin at him in what she hoped was some kind of semaphore code for being quiet.

Dad didn't look amused, or interested, or even confused. He looked mad as hell. "You were recruited -- by whom? And when?"

"The -" She glanced around, then whispered even more softly, "The CIA, of course. And it was seven years ago. My freshman year."

"What happened?"

"Some guy gave me a card. He said I fit a profile." Syd shrugged; this particular incident had always ranked as one of the more surreal in her life, and she didn't think she'd be able to make any better sense of it for her father than she had for herself. "I thought about calling the number, but I didn't. About a month later, the guy found me again, asked me if I was sure. I said I was. That was the end of it."

"Do you swear to me that nothing else happened?" Her father's face was as gray and hard as stone. 

"I told you, I said no. Freshman year was crazy enough. Besides, being a spy, I realize it's not all adventure, but still, I'd guess that's dangerous work. And -- I wouldn't do that to you, Dad." That, more than anything, had been her real reason: She couldn't bear the idea of her father losing someone else and being completely alone. Maybe he was awkward and distant, but there was a time when he had been all she had in the world - and Sydney knew she was still all he had in the world, or would ever have again.

He simply turned back to his soup. "You made the right decision, Sydney. Don't ever doubt that."

"I don't." In truth, she'd wondered about her choice from time to time, but she was happy where she was, and besides, it wasn't like anybody would ever ask her again. Better to steer the conversation into safer waters - boring, but safer. "I'm looking forward to dinner at the Sloanes'. Is Emily still thinking about the marathon?"

"She decided to do it."

"Oh, good for her! She's so amazing," Syd said. "And I can't wait to talk to Mr. Sloane again."

"Neither can I."

**

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