Spies and Prejudice Read Online Free PDF Page A

expression stays blank. Part of me can’t help wondering if she knows why I always ask to see the same two days of the
San Diego Union
from eight years ago. She probably thinks it’s for a school project. Worst case, she knows what’s on the disk and thinks I’ve got some weird obsession with my mother’s death. So what? It’s kind of true.
    I find a desk in the farthest corner, popping the CD into the drive of an ancient computer. Dust clings to the monitor. Thick particles hang in the air, coating my lungs as my breath comes faster.
    I know what’s coming and that somehow makes it worse. I click on May 15. The day after. The front page flashes on-screen. I skip right past it. What I’m looking for is on page B-2 of the Metro section.
    There are two pictures. The first is a professional photograph of my mom wearing a dark business suit. The second is of a car being pulled from the San Diego harbor on a giant hook.
    The woman in the picture has long brown hair and a slightly crooked smile. She looks exactly like I remember, but I can’t tell if it’s because she really looked like this or because all I have now are the pictures. It’s as though all my memories are two-dimensional.
    The second picture is the one that makes my stomach fold in on itself, crushing my insides until I want to double over. I spent every morning of the second grade crawling into the backseat of that white sports car, setting my purple backpack in the small seat next to me. I can still recall the smell of the gray leather, always stronger when it was warm. I know exactly how my neighborhood looks through the small triangular back window, bigger and prettier than it really is.
    In the picture, the little car is suspended by giant wires, water pouring from its doors. The front right corner is smashed, the windshield cracked. I wipe my cheek with my palm and mentally focus. I feel like I can’t breathe, which only makes me guilty, because of course I can. It was the car that drowned. Taking my mother with it.
    I read the article once, then slow down and read it again. She was driving back from a lunch meeting at the Hotel Del with some soda magnate that she was helping with field tests on a new energy drink. A woman saw the car accelerate into the turn, but then never even try to make it, launching itself at full speed at the guardrail. The right front wheel hit the corner of the steel rail, flipping it at an angle, right over the guardrail and into the bay below. The car was recovered. A body was not. The end.I write down the witness’s name even though I memorized it years ago. Heather Marrone. Writing her name down at least makes me feel like I’m doing something. The paper calls the whole thing an accident, and I read the article a few more times as if doing so will make it true. An accident means she didn’t leave me on purpose.
    I finally flip ahead to a date three days later, to the write-up announcing my mom’s funeral service, which basically consisted of three hours of fending off sympathetic stares from my parents’ friends and relatives. I’ve seen the same expression a million times since, from teachers, neighbors, even my dad. The memorial was the first time people treated me like I was the one who plunged off the Coronado Bridge.
    I suck in a breath. Still here. Still breathing.
    So Mr. Moss has a piece of paper with my mom’s name on it. It doesn’t matter. It’s not like she wrote it yesterday. Have I learned nothing from my dad’s business? The truth is a dangerous thing. No one really wants their worst fears confirmed. They just think they do.
    She didn’t do it on purpose. It says right in the newspaper.
Accident
.
    The air is impossibly thicker. I can’t stay here any longer without choking on it.
    I take the CD out of the computer and return it to the woman at the counter as quickly as I can. I race down the hall.
    I am going to let this go. I have to. Dad always says we already know the truth. We know it in