The Summer House (21 page)

There had been Jodie, the fourteen-year-old who had more hormones raging than Danny, which was pretty unusual considering he was fifteen and thought of little else. Jodie went to Cambridge Academy, just across the Charles River from Harkness Prep. And Danny’s mother would have killed him if she’d known that the son of the governor was banging a fourteen-year-old on the banks of the river every chance he got, which was pretty much
daily, sometimes twice a day depending on their class schedules. It had lasted just a little more than four months, when Jodie’s parents got a divorce and she was sent home to the West Coast to live with her mother fulltime. Danny spent the rest of that year incredibly horny, missing their frenetic, amateur lovemaking and his daily sprints across the bridge. It was because of Jodie, however, that he’d developed a love of crew, having watched the long, flat boats skim through the water for Harvard or BU or BC. If he’d stuck to crew and forgotten about football, he wouldn’t be in the wheelchair now. Jodie, however, would probably have gotten pregnant because they didn’t always use protection, because there wasn’t always time to buy contraceptives, and Jodie said her mother would freak if she went on the pill.

After Jodie, he spent the better part of two years either going into or just coming out of the blissful, yet lonely, state of masturbation, the
Commonwealth
of Masturbation, the boys at Harkness Prep called it, because they, after all, were the crème de la crème of the
Commonwealth
of Massachusetts, and were relegated (for the most part) to shooting their sperm into wads of tissue or into a warm bath, where the little buggers trailed through the water like long, white streamers of egg drop soup.

Then there had been LeeAnn, the tanned, long-legged island girl, whom Danny had known along with her brother, Reggie, during Vineyard summers practically all of his life. They’d been friends—summertime pals—until Danny started college and he chartered their catamaran to Cuttyhunk Island for a day. A dozen guys from Danny’s environmental biology class had gone down to the Vineyard under the guise of studying the remains of Penikese Island—the neighbor of Cuttyhunk that had once housed the state’s, or rather, the
commonwealth’s
, infamous leper colony. In reality, the
excursion resulted in more beer drinking than remains studying. When Danny returned to the boat the following day to clean up the mess, he’d run into LeeAnn and somehow they’d wound up in bed, or rather, in bunk, since they’d made love on the boat, safely tucked inside one of the pontoons that bobbed up and down with the rhythm of the waves and the rise and fall of their bodies.

For years they’d been friends and suddenly they were lovers.

LeeAnn was a perfect physical match for Danny; unfortunately, she was four years older and an islander. At the end of that summer, it had actually been Aunt BeBe who’d convinced him it was a match that was best left to memory. She said she’d “been there and done that” and that islanders and mainlanders simply did not mix for long. Danny was not sure if he and LeeAnn split up because they decided it would not work, or because Aunt BeBe’s words had startled him. She had not elaborated. LeeAnn must have known, too, for though they had gone their separate ways, they’d returned to being friends. She and Reggie had even come to see him in the hospital in Boston right after the accident. Right after his world had fallen apart.

So there had been Jodie and there had been LeeAnn and the third, whom he guessed he shouldn’t even count, was Anna. Anna with whom he had never consummated anything beyond manually manipulated leg lifts.

He studied his penis as it sagged in his hand and mourned the fact that he was the son of a famous man and therefore had been unable to be as sexually frivolous as most of his friends, or at least that was how Danny had perceived the responsibility to the Adams name back when he had a choice.

Now he wished to hell he had screwed everything in a skirt, long or short.

“Danny?” His mother’s voice made him jump. Quickly, Danny tried to pull up the comforter. But he could not grasp it with his leg: it clumsily slid to the floor. He sat there, genitally naked for all the world—and worse, his mother—to see.

She moved forward, then stopped. He sensed her eyes fall to his lap. “Oh,” she said. “Well. I … ah.… later. I’ll come back …”

He squeezed his eyes shut. His chest grew heavy, the ache of a thousand humiliations not greater than this. “Yes, Mom,” he replied, dropping his hands to his lap.

But his mother didn’t leave. She cleared her throat. “Danny,” she said, “it’s okay.”

The shades of his face must have shot up the scale from flesh tone to pink to beet red. Beneath his fingers he could feel the puttylike remnants and knew he was not—would never be—one of the forty percent, able to be a loving human being. “Please, Mom,” he said. “This is embarrassing.”

She nodded and, thank God, did not let her eyes drop to his lap again. She began to say something else, then stopped, and quietly backed out of his room.

When the door closed behind her, Danny put his hands to his face. “Fuck,” he mumbled into them.

She felt as if she were going to be sick. Sick for Danny, that he would live an empty, childless life, without intimacy, without loving or letting himself be loved. She felt sick for Danny, her firstborn. And she felt sick for herself, that she had walked in on his private moment, that she had witnessed his failure and that he knew it.

Liz curled her feet underneath her on the swing on the back porch and sunk her teeth into her fist. Life, it seemed, was dealing one blow after another. Until now, she had been able to handle things. Or maybe reality was
that, until now, she had kept herself so busy she had not noticed the pain, not let herself stop and feel the hurt. She had leapt from one campaign stop to another, one charity breakfast to one political luncheon to one fund-raising dinner to one whatever—anything to keep the dream in focus and the goal within reach. The trouble was, her own feelings had not played into the Day-Timer. There were meetings and “To Do’s” all over the place, but no time for feelings, no time to … cry.

She wondered how often Danny cried. Did he weep every night before he went to sleep? Did he cry when he was alone in his room, when he tried to feel some sort of pleasure but instead had none? Did he sob into his pillow when he thought of his brother and sister and how healthy and whole they were and wonder why he no longer was?

The day that it happened had been the worst. The worst nightmare of a parent, the worst day of her life.

Liz and Michael were, of course, on the road. They were in Detroit, Michigan, of all places, at a governor’s conference, it said on the news, but in actuality it was a conference to highlight Michael’s state education agenda, which was being touted as a model for a national program. In short, it was just one more inch toward the White House.

She had worn a terra-cotta silk suit, trimmed in chocolate satin, which she would remember as well as she remembered the photo after photo of Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink suit that Liz had seen when she was only a young girl and John Kennedy had been killed.

And though Liz was not Jackie and Danny was hardly the president (though Will might have had plans for him, too), the suit became a symbol of pain so great she did not think she would survive.

The call had come during the after-dinner speeches. A maître d’ approached Michael and whispered something
Liz could not overhear from where she was sitting across the round table, in the politically correct mix-’n’-match dinner-partner style.

Michael’s face grew as white as the linen banquet tablecloth. His eyes went to Liz. His mouth dropped open. He quickly stood up, threw his napkin on the table, spun on one heel, and left the hall in the middle of the governor of California’s speech.

Liz did not have to be told something was wrong. She was right behind her husband, as if knowing that something tragic had happened. She did not want to believe it had happened to one of the children.

On the plane, he held her close. “I’ll be okay, honey,” Michael kept reassuring—her or himself, she was not clear whom.

But the words that played over and over in her mind were those she had heard at the airport: “Your father is with him. He had to sign the papers for surgery. They have to release the pressure on his spine.”

Surgery.

His spine.

“He’ll need several transfusions,” Michael continued. “I wish we were there to give blood.”

Blood.

Liz had frozen then. Gone into a seemingly semiconscious state of numbness, a place of shock, as if braced for the next bit of information that would assault her. She had clenched her hands together on the lap of the terra-cotta suit and tried to make it all the way to Boston without thinking or flinching or breathing.

“Oh, God,” she moaned now, through her teeth, into her fist.

“Mrs. Barton?” a voice asked.

She blinked. The voice belonged to Keith, the Secret Service agent. She realized she had moaned. “It’s all right,” she said, standing up. “I’m fine.” She smoothed
the front of her shirt, thinking that she was glad she had thrown the terra-cotta suit in the trash.

“That’s good,” the agent said. “Because you have a visitor.”

Liz scowled. “A visitor?” She did not need a visitor right now.

“We didn’t know if you wanted to see him or not.”

“Him?” Liz asked. “Who?”

The agent looked puzzled. “Well, ma’am, it’s the other one. Mr. Miller.”

She steadied herself against the swing. She closed her eyes.

“He wants to see you.”

She had no courage to leave, and no strength to protest. Slowly, she opened her eyes and simply said, “Bring him out to the porch.”

“I’m sorry about your father,” Josh said once they had settled on the swing and convinced the Secret Service agents—numbering an absurd four now, two for each—to leave them alone, that neither was going to maim, kidnap, or kill the other.

Liz nodded and stared off across the dunes. She did not trust herself to speak out loud; she did not trust herself to look at him, at his tender, sensual face that she’d seen slowly mature in newspaper and magazine photos, on the national and international news. Josh Miller, the timeless reminder of earlier times, of lust-filled days and heated nights.

“I wanted to come to the funeral,” he said, “but it seemed inappropriate. Besides, I didn’t want … well, you know …”

Yes, of course she knew. Josh didn’t want to turn Will Adams’s funeral into a media circus any more than it already was.

Liz stole a look at him, the man who had once swept her off her feet. BeBe had once told her it was hormonal. If so, those same hormones were still there. She tucked her hair behind her ears and wondered if she looked different to Josh, and if the difference was good or bad.

He moved the swing. The sudden motion caught her off guard, and she gripped the seat.

“Your father was important to me in ways he will never know,” Josh continued. “I used to be so envious of you kids. You were the ones with the guaranteed futures, with no obstacles before you. I guess I was angry about that. That you kids had it all and I … well, I couldn’t even have the girl I wanted. Anyway, I think I set out to prove something to your father. And now look at us.” He stopped the swing and placed his hand on hers. The warmth of it seeped into her skin. She stared down at his large knuckles, his thick, straight fingers, the tanned tracks of veins. “Who ever would have thought we’d be on opposite sides of the fence, Liz?” he asked. “On opposite sides, at the top of the heap?”

She forced another smile.

He looked down at her hand. Her eyes followed his. With the lightest, gentlest touch, he traced the lines of her fingers, the curve of her nails.

“You must miss your father,” Josh said quietly.

“Yes,” she said softly.

“Did he ever mention me? I mean, about the election. Did he ever … say anything?”

Liz smiled again, an image of scowling Father coming to mind. “Yes,” she replied. “He said you were a sneaky bastard who should stick to your own kind.”

Josh looked at her. Then he grinned. The tension dissolved and they laughed. He lifted his hand from hers and ran it through his hair, through his still-dark, still-thick hair. Liz tried to pretend that the back of her hand did
not feel cool and abandoned and not as complete as it had felt when his palm rested there. Then he said, “God, he really hated me, didn’t he?”

“Hate is just another word for fear,” Liz said. “And for the record, as I remember, your family wouldn’t have been thrilled to have me in your life before you … left.”

His eyebrows raised. “So it was
my
family that stopped us? You mean your father would have let you … date me?”

She grinned a soft, childlike grin. “No,” she replied. “Of course not.”

“Romeo and Juliet,” he said. “Destined to be apart.”

The ropes of the old porch swing creaked.

“I’m sorry about your wife,” Liz said suddenly, remembering that his wife had died, that he’d had his share of heartbreak, like most everyone their age.

“Me, too,” he replied. “She was a good woman.”

She pushed down a twinge of childish jealousy.

Josh laughed again. “God, that sounds provincial, doesn’t it? She was my wife for twelve years. What else would I say? That we didn’t always have the same parenting skills? That there were times I’d wished she’d been less domestic and more interested in the world?”

He shook his head a little, deep in thought.

Josh the thinker versus Michael the listener. For a brief second, Liz actually wished she could be an objective outsider, one who could judge the two candidates and decide which she preferred. She breathed a long breath of Vineyard fresh air. “It must be difficult for your daughters.”

The swing creaked again as if in affirmative reply.

“What about your wife, Josh? What was she like?”

He paused and lowered his head. “She really was a good woman, Liz. She was the best.”

Liz nodded, but this time she could not stop the tiny ache that had formed in her heart.