Becoming Meghan

As Sirenuse stood in the doorway of their bedroom, holding her I’d rather be drinking wine coffee cup and watching her new husband sleep, she thought for the millionth time how much she would like to kill him. Not that he was a bad guy. He was great, as sweet as could be. This whole place was sweet as a peach, but dear god was it boring. And even after a year and a half of sincerely trying, Sirenuse still had no idea how to do boring.

She had no idea how to be this Meghan character she had created, either.

Mostly because Meghan, the fictitious woman she was now pretending to be, was, hands down, the most tedious legend she had ever assumed in her career. In the past, if she needed a different identity to get a job done, she would create something she could step in and out of easily; something that her personal background, interests, and hours of focused study would have prepared her for. Investment banker from Vienna. Content creator from Budapest. Boutique owner from Paris. She had even passed herself off as an NGO administrator in southern Turkey for two weeks. And each time, she was able to slip in, delete her target, and exfil without causing so much as a ruffle or leaving a trace because she just was the character each time. 

But this country bumpkin stuff was nothing like anything Sirenuse had ever done before. Meghan was someone she had carefully created as a way to stay off the radar of those who sought to stop the heartbeat she was so fond of. Because someone like Meghan would not attract international attention. She was someone who lived in a small yellow house in rural Oregon’s wine country. She baked strawberry muffins each week for the old people at church. She grew wilted produce to sell for a few dollars at the farmer’s market. She married Murray The High School English Teacher, effectively crushing the dreams of all seven of the other thirty-somethings in town. 

And the worst part about building this life for herself, of becoming Meghan, was that it was forever. This was her present and her future. 

And every time Sirenuse thought about it, she wanted to shoot someone.

Lost in thought, she jumped a little when Murray’s phone buzzed and chimed on the bedside table. He stirred, moaning slightly. Meghan stared at him for another long moment then took a large swallow of her scalding hot coffee and backed out of the doorway quietly. She knew how these things worked. Once Murray’s eyes started to open and he saw her, he would pat the empty spot next to him in the bed and murmur something like, come back to bed, hot stuff.  

She wandered into the kitchen and pulled the eggs out of the refrigerator and turned the burner on underneath the cast-iron skillet on the stove. At the sound of the water running in the bathroom, Sirenuse noticed her shoulders began to relax almost instantly. She vaguely wondered why, if she really did miss the action so much, she always worked so hard to avoid fighting with Murray. 

God, I’ve become a legit housewife.

As Sirenuse put two pieces of bread into the toaster and pressed the lever down, she tried to remember the famous saying about life’s tendency to pull the rug out from under one’s feet, knowing it would take at least a full minute before the coils in her husband’s piece-of-shit toaster started to glow. 

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Sirenuse sighed and refilled her coffee cup. 

Not too long ago she had been one of the top three assassins in the world. And as a woman in a male-dominated field, that was no small feat. Sirenuse had worked her ass off to get to that particular pinnacle in her career and, at 35 years old, she had not retired by choice.

But, as it turns out, killing the playboy-douchebag son in the Rojas crime family and stealing his prized 137-carat diamond will get you targeted quite nicely in this current revenge-based world. And it wasn’t just daddy Rojas that sicced all his South American goons on Sirenuse; even her own client joined in the game. 

Even now, Sirenuse had to admit she hadn’t seen that one coming. Hassan al-Abadi, while being a ruthless businessman, had always been a fair and honest client for Sirenuse. He paid well and on time, and that was exactly the reason she didn’t see the set-up coming a mile away. That, and the massive payday Hassan promised the Rojas job was going to bring her. Enough to retire if she wanted, which would actually be necessary since killing Franco Rojas was going to get a lot of people fired up. Fortunately, Hassan assured her that he would extend his protection to wherever she decided to go afterward to count her money. 

Except he didn’t.

He hung Sirenuse out to dry, sent his guns after her, and spread the word that she had carried out an unauthorized kill. 

At the memory, Sirenuse set her jaw and poured olive oil onto the hot skillet, receiving a loud sizzle in return. She wrapped a dish towel around the handle and lifted the pan off the burner, appreciating the weight of the pan as she tipped it from side to side, spreading the oil around. Murray preferred his eggs cooked in vegetable oil, but Sirenuse somehow always ‘forgot’ to buy the stuff. It was a trivial thing, but she loved olive oil and was determined to keep at least something of herself alive in this new life.

 Over the years, Sirenuse had become quite used to being viewed as a disposable player by powerful men, and she wondered now if that was the real reason she put her foot down about the olive oil. She chuckled softly. It was most certainly the reason she had selected the tiny city-state of Monaco for the diamond hand-off. 

Sirenuse knew Hassan would send his best Moroccan gunmen, even though their intense mixture of angry entitlement and heightened testosterone made them utterly worthless as covert operatives in a crowd of relaxed, wealthy Europeans. And since Monaco enjoys the highest police-to-citizen ratio in the world, Sirenuse also knew a meet there would mean a sniper’s bullet would be out of the question, and would leave them with no option but to quietly make their capture in town and then shuffle her offshore and onto a yacht, before putting a bullet between her eyes. 

So the second Sirenuse spotted two of Hassan’s shooters trying to look like casual shoppers at the outdoor flower market, she took off. 

That was the day her life ended.

Turning down the burner’s heat slightly, Sirenuse cracked four eggs into the spitting pan. With a frown, she picked a tiny feather off of one of the spent egg shells that Murray insisted they save for compost.

582 days ago Sirenuse was gazing out at the glittering Mediterranean from her villa perched high above the rocky shoreline. Now, she was a brilliant ex-assassin living on Sherman Street in the apple-pie-American countryside, making eggs for her husband and calling herself Meghan Bowers. With seven high-quality passports, an abandoned French villa, an apartment in Berlin, and a dry box filled with weapons buried in the backyard near the stubby magnolia tree, Meghan’s quiet life was starting to feel decidedly rocky around the edges. 

And then there was the husband she was still trying to get used to.

And the priceless diamond that never found its way to Hassan, now stashed in plain sight in her craft box surrounded by Swarovski crystals, glitter, and tacky glue.

Just then, Murray joined Sirenuse in the sunny kitchen. His kind face was freshly shaved, his dark hair still damp. He wrapped his arms around her and nuzzled her neck, and she rested her cheek on the rough wool sweater he wore.

“What are my girls going to do today?” he asked. He planted a quick kiss on Sirenuse’s forehead and went to pour hot coffee into the travel mug she had washed and left ready for him.

Sirenuse rubbed her swollen belly and smiled. “Oh, you know, nothing special. Thought maybe I’d drive into McMinnville to look at cribs.”

He screwed the lid on his cup and frowned.  “I was hoping we could go together to do that this weekend.”

She smiled brightly. “Sure. I can wait.”

Murray put the strap of his satchel over his shoulder and balanced a piece of toast on top of his travel mug. “You can just have a relaxing day. Soon enough you’ll wish life was this slow when there’s a baby crawling all over the place.”

Fuck.

“See you tonight.” Another kissy face from Murray and he was out the door, his eggs forgotten. 

Two hours later, Sirenuse was on her third cup of coffee, flipping through the morning shows on TV that all the women from her prenatal group expected her to be able to speak about breathlessly, when there was a hard knock at the door. 

Cocking her head to the side, she muted the television.

It came again, and this time Sirenuse was certain. She moved quietly into the bathroom, opened the doors of the cabinet under the sink, and took out the jumbo-sized box of tampons that had sat there untouched for over six months. She dumped the tampons onto the brown linoleum floor and retrieved the six-inch fixed-blade knife from the bottom of the box. When Sirenuse stepped into the hallway, the knock came again. More insistent this time. 

Moving quickly, she turned on the light in the bathroom. The water in the shower. Sirenuse closed the bathroom door from the outside and moved across the hall, knowing they would now check the bathroom first. She positioned herself behind the bedroom door, wishing her growing belly wasn’t keeping it propped open quite so far.

There she waited for the door-kick she knew was coming.

Because while Sirenuse was quite aware that she didn’t know a damn thing about how to enjoy a life of playing bingo and eating chicken casserole, she sure as shit knew the sound of someone knocking on a door with the barrel of their pistol.

With her knife firmly in hand, she noticed her breathing was more relaxed than it had been in months. She smiled and placed her other hand on her belly.

Sirenuse heard the sound of the front door splintering into pieces, crashing open against the wall. 

She whispered, “Assieds-toi bien, mon chérie.” Sit tight, my dear. “Mama’s got company.”