The Summer House (16 page)

Danny tried to act ponderous, then nodded at Clay. “Clayman,” he asked, “ever been to the Vineyard?”

“No, mon. Not once in my life.”

“Then get out your flippers,” he said. “and I’ll teach you to swim.”

Chapter 14

http://www.rogerdodger.com

Uncle Roger had made Danny memorize the Web site address as if he were an idiot as well as a cripple, as if he did not have only thirty semester hours left to get his degree in pre-med and biochemistry if he ever decided to go back to college, as if he had not already been accepted at the top three medical schools in the country, accepted on his grades, not on his father’s or his grandfather’s name.

He stared at the screen of the computer he’d set up in Gramps’s old Vineyard study—and wondered what he was supposed to write to Uncle Roger.

“You must keep me posted on your mother,” Roger had said when he’d cornered Danny at the house on Beacon Hill yesterday. “I’ll be watching the polls, and if they begin to dip, we’re going to have to get her off the island and back on the campaign trail, fast. In the meantime, I’m depending on you to monitor her progress.”

Progress?
Danny thought now. Roger made it sound as if his mother had retreated to the island to knit an afghan or to paint the house.
She’s on the right sleeve, roger-dodger, he could report
. Or:
She’s done with the dormers and is working her way to the roof
.

Tangible goals, tangible progress.

But grief? How does one
progress
through grief? A psychiatrist at the rehab center in Switzerland had told Danny that he needed to grieve, that the loss of the function of his lower body was, in many ways, similar to bearing the death of a loved one. The doctor had also said that Danny would not begin to heal
—mentally
, of course, because no one talked
physically
—until he’d put closure on the accident and could begin to walk (no pun was intended, Danny was sure) through the stages of grief.

He had been sitting in his wheelchair on the patio overlooking Lake Lucerne, staring at the picture-postcard landscape of the snow-capped Alps, and listening to the harmony of the bells of the cows grazing in the mountainside meadows. He had been sitting and watching and listening. Then he stared at the deep denim-blue water—“indigo,” Ralph Lauren, the guy who made macho jeans for the machoest men, might have called it—and said, “Oh, sure, Dr. Weggis. I loved my legs all right. I loved my dick, too. Shall we have a funeral tomorrow so I can get on with my grief?”

Dr. Weggis had not been amused. But then, unlike Danny, Dr. Weggis was able to get up and walk back inside, and prepare himself a bowl of muesli with fresh cream instead of waiting for someone to serve him. He was also able to crawl into bed with his wife or his lover or whomever at night and do the things that one did when one had all working parts.

Arrived safely on the S.S. Steamship Authority
, Danny typed now, watching each letter pop erratically onto the screen, wondering why a boy with 1548 on his SATs had never mastered the art of typing.
Subject in question appears normal. Is presently sitting on back porch drinking iced tea, probably trying to ignore baby-sitters. More later. Over and out
.

He had already decided he was not going to share with rogerdodger the fact that his mother had wept silently on the ferry, that she had held his hand when they were disembarking or that when safely out of earshot of Moe and Curly (Danny’s nicknames for the Secret Service “baby-sitters” assigned to rob them of their last bit of privacy) and Clay, of course, she had asked how Danny would feel if they lost the election and if he’d blame her. He did not share these things with his uncle because he felt it was none of Uncle Roger’s damn business.

Besides, Danny wouldn’t have minded at all if “they” lost the election. Maybe then there would be a chance for them to be together as some kind of family, to actually have time to do things together—things that had not been organized by a team of spin doctors, things beyond listening to speeches and posing for pictures.

London, for example. Danny had always wanted to go there, to see for himself the places he’d seen so often on television and in films—Big Ben and the Tower and Madame Tussaud’s—maybe to find the cemetery plot of the last Adams to die there before their descendants bailed out for America. It seemed a bit preposterous that they’d never been. Then again, Adams/Barton family vacations had always consisted of summers on the Vineyard in this damp, gray-shingled old house, which for some stupid reason every one of them loved, where Dad and Gramps conducted politics in polo shirts instead of suits.

He wondered how much would change now that Gramps was out of the picture. For the first time, Danny wondered if his father really had the stuff to be president without the old man directing his every move. And if maybe—just maybe—his father was scared.

There had been a fleeting look in the eyes of the candidate
after the funeral, a stare into space, a moment of blankness, then a blink back to reality and all that it meant. It had been just a brief look, but Danny had seen it, in the way his senses had grown more acute since his injury, as if the death of his legs had resulted in the birth of his eyes. It was a kind of “knowing” that he didn’t always find comforting.

Danny shut off the computer, wheeled himself to the window, and looked onto the back porch where the subject of his e-mail indeed appeared normal. He folded his hands in his lap and decided that this wasn’t so bad: at least he and his mother would have some time alone, at least he didn’t have to face those god-awful cameras for a while.

The wheelchair whirred again as he rolled over to the French doors. He sat there a moment, surveying the porch. Moe and Curly (“Please call them Keith and Joe,” his mother had asked)—so, all right, Keith and Joe—were stationed at the wicker table playing chess; Clay sat nearby wearing oversized headsets, tapping his foot, and reading a book on the occult. Closer inspection of his mother’s iced tea revealed that the ice had melted long ago and that she’d probably not had more than one sip. Danny watched as she stood up, gazed out at the sea, then descended the steps toward the path to the dunes, her long legs moving mechanically, her head downcast, looking very much like any unhappy woman, not the one destined to become the next First Lady of America.

Just an ordinary day, rogerdodger
, Danny thought with chagrin.
Put that in your dot-com and smoke it
.

She marveled at how the human body could shut down into a state of numbness, at how long one could sit or walk and think or not think, at how the world could turn or not turn and that it was possible to fully, completely,
totally not care. Liz shoved her hands into the pockets of her cutoffs and stared at the sand that sifted through her toes.

It was good to have come. It was good to be in her old shorts, to be wrapped in one of Michael’s old T-shirts from Menemsha Blues, to be barefoot. The Vineyard house had always seemed like home to Liz—their summertime, carefree home, not snarled with the time schedules of the city. Life was always so busy during the school years, so filled with the scramble of comings and goings; the only time Liz felt settled was here, on the island, where the cry of the gulls was as familiar as the laughter of her children, where the warmth of the sand was as snug as a thick down comforter fluffed by the sun.

She was glad they had taken the ferry. It had been years since they’d had the time: usually the vehicles were brought over by “employees” of Michael’s or Father’s, while Liz, Michael, and the kids were whisked from one place to another in somebody’s borrowed jet.

Following the path, she stopped and looked at the clusters of Queen Anne’s lace. They were the same white, intricately webbed blossoms that had adorned her wedding, along with plump pink and lavender hydrangeas. They had been flowers suitable for a wedding between the Adamses and the Bartons, the Yankee bloodlines maintained, the royal road paved to the White House.

For some reason she thought of her mother now, how beautifully she’d been dressed at the wedding in powder blue chiffon and Great-grandmother’s pearls. For that one day, Mother had put aside the pain of Daniel’s death long enough for a champagne toast, long enough for a smile.

It had pleased Liz that the wedding had made Mother happy, if only for that one day.

She and Michael had married four years after Daniel was killed. Liz was barely twenty and Michael twenty-six,
but there had seemed no sense in waiting. The plans had been made, the future was set, the families were ecstatic.

So was Liz. Michael had been there at Daniel’s funeral. Indeed, Michael had been there ever since, sometimes in closed-door meetings in Father’s study, sometimes—though not often enough in recent years—walking the cobblestone streets of Back Bay with Liz, holding her hand, talking of life, of the world, of the future.

It had been, and still was, a good marriage, though not without compromise (as if any could be), not without frustration.
Overall contentment
was how Liz thought of their partnership, which like most things, she owed to Will Adams. Because Will had wanted their marriage. Will had expected it to succeed.

She closed her eyes and let the sun sink into her skin now, ignoring the footsteps behind her, footsteps that belonged to the Secret Service agents Keith and Joe.

“It’s for your own good,” Roger had told her when she protested having them follow her to the Vineyard, when she’d said she resented this intrusion into her own time, her own hurting time.

“You’d better get used to them,” Michael had added, with a wink that reminded her that Keith and Joe, or others just like them, might follow her the rest of her life.

She knew it was for her own good. She knew that every presidential candidate since Bobby Kennedy was automatically assigned a Secret Service contingent. But Liz did not think she’d ever get used to their constant presence. It made all her visible years as a governor’s wife seem private by comparison.

She walked across the sand. At least she was thinking again. At least she was focusing on something other than the image of Father lying gray on the floor, the commotion of Michael fruitlessly administering CPR, the EMTs
strapping Father to the gurney and covering him with the sheet, while Michael directed them so capably.

“You’re not afraid of anything,” Liz had once commented the summer after Daniel was killed, when they were so young, when they were walking along this same beach, groping with words and feelings, trying to see how—if—each of them fit with the other.

Michael had smiled. “Of course I’m afraid. I’m afraid of a few things.”

“Like what?” Liz persisted. “Snakes?”

Michael laughed. “No. Not snakes.”

“Bats?”

He shook his head.

“Skunks? No,” Liz answered herself, “you weren’t afraid that time when Daniel was twirling the skunk.”

They both became quiet, the mention of Daniel’s name still awkward on their lips, in their hearts.

“I was afraid,” Michael said finally. “But I didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Especially Daniel,” Liz whispered tentatively.

“And you,” he added. “I didn’t want you to think I was less brave than your brother.”

The way his voice cracked, the way he turned his face slightly from hers, had opened her heart and let him come in. Quietly, Liz took his hand. Should she tell him that she would never compare him with Daniel? Afraid to say the wrong thing, she kept silent.

They walked a few more steps, then Michael said, “I miss him so much, Liz. You think I am afraid of nothing, but sometimes I am afraid of that. I’m afraid of the fact that Daniel will never come back, and he’ll never know how much his friendship meant to me.”

It must have been then that Liz decided to marry Michael, to forgo the kind of schoolgirl passion she’d felt with Josh Miller for someone more acceptable, something
much safer, someone whose hand felt very strong as it rested in hers.

As the path to the cove came into her sight now, Liz decided to turn back. She was not ready to relive too much of her life—not today, anyway.

Heading back to the house, she passed the agents and gave them a quick smile. Then she saw in the distance the wheelchair on the porch—the wheelchair that was unable to traverse the sand well enough to get down to the beach. The eyes of the young man sitting there seemed fixed in her direction. They were eyes that belonged to the one person in the world who would depend on her forever, the one person for whom she must pull herself from this depression.

Liz raised an arm and waved at her son. She remembered it was peach season on the Vineyard. Peach pie had always been Danny’s favorite. As it had been of his Uncle Daniel before him.

Chapter 15

“I don’t want to go,” Danny said to his mother.