WITSEC

I hope you enjoy the sequel to “Cherries & Bitters.” Madness & Mayhem Day 12 was to write a journal entry as one of our characters, and I had been asked for a sequel to this piece, so, here’s WITSEC.

Dear Diary,

When we squeezed into the back of the Fed’s car last month, laughing and afraid, I expected a lot of surprises - after all, I hadn’t even known for sure that Jason (I’m not allowed to say his real name, Rob, anymore) was doing anything illegal.  I had my suspicions, sure, but I also knew he wasn’t reading me in because he was trying to protect me, so the only way I might ever learn anything is if I went along and acted like I already knew it.  I did not expect, however, to end up in the Witness Protection Program.  That’s Jason, right? Go big or go home. And we can’t go home. Ever.  So here we are, in Nowhere, North Dakota, getting trained on our new lives.  I’m now Laura.  We are allowed to keep some details, like how we met (mutual friends from college) and where we went on our first date (a carnival). But everything else - our families, our travels, our jobs - it’s like we were cancelled.  And we were.  When we pass all the tests - as in, when we become pro liars - then, we can have a home again.  But not our families.

He didn’t have as much to lose as I did.  He never knew when his dad would show up, needing money, showing off a new woman, or both.  His mom was gone.  Well, for all practical purposes anyway.  He still feels in charge of his brother but at our ages and stages, that’s a little misplaced. And now, with Jason gone, at least maybe Junior will finally grow up.

But me?  I’m a daddy’s girl.  And a mommy’s girl.  And this is probably going to kill them.  And that’s my biggest fear.  They wanted me to stay in the lane they created for me.  To be a good girl - as long as I was good, I’d have everything.

Is it any wonder I fell for a bad boy?  But, Jason isn’t bad.  Sure, he seemed exciting and dangerous when we were kids, with his motorcycle and tattoo.  Though, mom and dad should NOT know where that artwork swirls!  

They accepted Jason, sure, they were always appropriate, of course.  And they know how happy we are together; they love the laughter.  But now, it will be like everything they feared, everything they warned me about, will have come true - because they can never know the truth. 

Though, the truth isn’t so great, either.  It would upset them, too.  They’d be furious, in fact.  But, in the truth, I’m alive and they still could have grand babies.  In the WITSEC myth, I’m dead.

I am already trying to figure out how my ghost can contact them.  But I also can’t jeopardize Jason’s safety.  And if he weren’t fake dead, he’d be real dead.  

God, what a fucking mess.

I am so angry with him for getting us into this.  Why couldn’t he just have paid the Vig instead of getting pulled into the mob?  I don’t even know what any of this means; I just read a lot of spy and mystery books in winter.  Why did he have to prove he made it?  I would have been ok in a small house; we could have saved for fewer kids.

Can we have kids now? Is that legal?  Is it moral?  Their lives would be a lie.  They couldn’t know their grandparents or uncle or cousins.  We could not plant a family tree.  They would have anxiety disorders from living with my stress.  Damn it, Ro—I mean Jason - how could you do this to us?

And how would we explain their looks.  We don’t look like us anymore.  They will look like our genes, not like what we look like as Jason and Laura.   I now have straight black hair in a bob; not cascades of blond curls.  Tinted contacts make my eyes brown in the morning but I go to bed with green eyes.  I had an athletic build, now, I have padding. And Jason has gained like 40 pounds and is bald now.  He has a soul patch.  I swear I only recognize him by the tattoo.  But we’ve been too stressed for me to see much of that, either.  And the sad thing is, we don’t want to.  

That is the biggest problem right there.  It’s the laughter that’s gone.  That was always the fuel to our fire.  It’s not that we don’t look like ourselves, it’s that we don’t recognize each other.  We don’t recognize us.  Jason and Laura don’t have an us.  How we lost Rob and Nancy’s us I don’t know; I thought we would be fine because we always had been.  We knew each other so well.  We were best friends.  We were each other’s world.   And if Jason and Laura are going to survive this next chapter, they are going to need the love and laughter, trust and respect, that Rob and Nancy always had.  

How the fuck are we supposed to get that back when everything around us is a lie?!

Maybe the Marshals will let “Jason” and me make a couple of cherry old fashioneds….

Yours,
”Laura”