The Summer House (13 page)

“No, sometimes there aren’t such happy endings.”

They sat quietly, Liz wishing he would kiss her, wishing he would do more than just stare off toward the sea and up at the sky.

“Do you suppose Anastasia is looking up at the stars right now?” she asked.

Josh chuckled. “Who knows. She might still be alive. But what’s more important is that the stars are still here. And the stars are still there.”

Liz was quiet a moment, then she asked, “Why are you telling me this, Josh?”

His arm tightened around her. “I’m not going back to Harvard in the fall,” he said. “I’m joining the military.”

Her heart sank. “No,” she said. “Not you, too.”

“It’s not the same as Daniel. I won’t be going to Vietnam.”

“Not yet, maybe. But sooner or later, everyone goes …”

“I won’t,” Josh said firmly. “I’ve joined the Israeli military.”

She thought she must have heard him wrong. “What?”

“The Israeli military. I’ve already joined.”

He did not look in her eyes as he spoke, but kept his eyes fixed on the sky.

“Why?”

“Because I am Jewish, Liz. You know that. It is my duty to fight for Israel.”

“You’re an American. You were born here, weren’t you?”

“Yes. But in my blood, I am a Jew. I tried to explain that to you. I must fight for my ancestors. And for generations to come. Can you understand that?”

No, Liz did not understand at all. She could only think of one more question. “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning,” he replied. “Tomorrow night, I will look up at the stars. And I will think of you looking up at them, too.”

She wondered if this was what it felt like to die.

Liz lay on her bed three days later—the bed she had barely left since Josh had gone—and stared at the ceiling and decided that death must be more peaceful than this, less painful than feeling as if there were only vacant tomorrows ahead, vacant tomorrows and an empty, long, outstretched highway of nothingness, pure nothingness.

She had even refused to look up at the stars because Josh had no right to leave her and she was not going to let him think that she cared. Not that he’d know if she’d looked at them or not.

Damn him.

Besides, it was hard to do much of anything but think about the ache in her stomach and the tears in her eyes.

She wished she were pregnant. If only she had gotten pregnant that one time they’d made love. But her period had started and erased any chance of that. But, damn, she thought, if she had gotten pregnant there would have been no way he’d have left.

Now, of course, it was too late. Because Roger and Evelyn had caught them and they’d not made love again, and now Josh was gone, like Daniel and BeBe and everyone who ever mattered in her whole life.

She told Mother she must have the flu. So Mother made chicken soup as was expected of mothers, and said
she would phone the doctor if Liz spent one more day under the covers.

Only Roger seemed to know what was really going on.

“You’ll feel better soon,” he said in that awkward brotherly way that boys used to address cramps or girl things in general. He had come into her room, delivering more soup.

Liz did not reply, but turned her face from the bowl on the wooden bed tray that had carried countless bowls of chicken soup and ice cream and hot toddies to four children over the years.

He sat on the edge of the bed. He smelled of dampness and fresh earth, of things real and honest. She briefly wondered why he was spending so much time with Evelyn, and if, in Daniel’s absence, Evelyn had been allowing Roger, the other brother, to make love to her.

The thought made Liz’s stomach roll. She turned from her brother.

“I know it’s hard right now,” Roger was saying. “But it will get better. Soon, you will have forgotten all about this mess of a summer. You’ll see.”

She didn’t respond. In a little while, Roger gave up and left the room. Liz did not think that anything so bad could ever be forgotten, or that anything could possibly be worse.

She was wrong.

The next morning, as she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, Liz heard the sounds of too many voices coming from downstairs; too many voices colliding with one another in short choppy sentences she could not make out.

She slid out of bed and went to the top of the stairs.

“It’s bullshit,” Father shouted below. “Pure bullshit.”
Something slammed against something else. Something broke. “Bull-fucking-shit.” Another crash, this one of glass.

“No!” The scream came from, of all people, Roger. “Father, stop it.
Stop it
.”

Something else slammed. Something else broke.

Liz’s body went numb with dull fear. Her mouth went dry. She crept down the first few stairs to listen more closely. That’s when she saw her mother, cowered in a corner, her face in her hands, sobbing.

“Mother?” Liz called out, but Mother could not hear above the sounds of Father’s crashing and slamming and shouting “Bullshit” all over the kitchen.

Liz moved down the stairs and into sight of her family, the remnants of her family surrounded by strangers, three men in gray suits.

Gray suits.

Oh, God.

“Mr. Adams,” one of them said as he tried to hold Father back; but Father swung his arm and clipped the man on the shoulder, sending him reeling into the fireplace and down to the floor.

And that’s when Liz knew. She didn’t know in an instant, no, not quite that fast. But a big bowling ball grew in her stomach, as if her stomach knew first and then took its sweet time sending the information along to her brain. And that’s when she knew her world was about to take one last leap around one last corner and leave innocence behind. Forever.

Roger spotted Liz on the stairs. He walked toward her in the slow, heavy motion of a dream. He walked toward her, the look on his face one that Liz wanted to erase, to rub from his eyes, to blot from his mouth.

“Lizzie,” he said in the same slow motion.

He stepped onto the stairs and took her into his arms. Over his shoulder she could see Father’s rage settling into
his deep purple face, and see Mother’s whimpers give way to pale immobility. Liz’s own legs grew heavy, her own heart already starting to ache before she heard the words she somehow knew Roger was going to say next:

“It’s Daniel,” he said. “He’s dead.”

Part III

Year 2000

Chapter 12

The worst part about being in a wheelchair was that you got parked in the damnedest places, facing in the direction that the person who parked you wanted you to face. Or didn’t want you to face. Or didn’t much think about at all.

Right now, Danny faced the wall. He knew he was perfectly capable of turning his chair around—he was, after all, only paralyzed from the waist down—but he didn’t much feel like staring at the black-veiled strangers filling the sanctuary, or the dark-suited politicians who’d come to pay their last respects to a man they either loved or hated, nowhere in between, or the stone-faced Secret Service agents who were only there because it was their job, a job that apparently did not include saving the life of an old man who had the misfortune of dying during a national presidential convention. Will Adams, Danny’s grandfather, had died of natural causes. As if anything about Will had ever been natural.

Suddenly Danny’s chair moved backwards, with the ghostlike motion he’d come to expect in the three years since his football injury.

“Why are you sitting over here?” came the voice of his sister, Mags, the mysterious chauffeur behind him.

“I guess Aunt Evelyn thought the congregation shouldn’t have to look at me.”

“Aunt Evelyn is wearing reinforced-toe pantyhose with sandals today. Which only proves what an asshole she is.” Mags spoke with a matter-of-factness that amused Danny, even though he knew it created an edge that irritated their mother and did little to endear his sister to some people she encountered except, of course, Aunt BeBe, who was a different story altogether and who at least couldn’t be stopped by asshole Aunt Evelyn from attending her own father’s funeral no matter how much she’d disliked him, too. Danny wondered if BeBe’s hair was still orange.

Mags wheeled him toward the side door of the small steepled church that had been built three hundred years ago and was probably not wired for the media presence today any more than the narrow white pews with the small wooden doors had been constructed to accommodate wheelchairs.

As Mags parked Danny under a stained glass window of John the Baptist, Danny wondered if their ancestors hadn’t needed to accommodate wheelchairs because if someone became handicapped, they simply hanged him. No longer able to toil in the fields or defend the colonies. No longer necessary. Simply a burden.

He surveyed the church’s white and maroon and mahogany decor that had not changed since the last time he’d been here, before the accident. Hell, it probably hadn’t changed since the Adamses’ ancestors arrived on Cape Cod in 1652 … or since the Bartons came a generation later. His mother, his father, families rooted so thick in New England soil that their tentacles shot downward to China instead of sprouting out toward the west, the wild, wild west. Pioneers, the Adamses and the Bartons
were not. They were Yankees, rock-rigid, Boston-deep Yankees. Who ate their young and hanged their weak. And never—ever—discussed it with anyone.

The organmeister—a shriveled old man who perhaps had served at the Second Congregational Church of Boston since soon after the ancestors had arrived—pumped the pedals, and the recently refurbished (with Will Adams’s money, of course) tall brass pipes came to life. “Amazing Grace,” the brass pipes bellowed. Danny was surprised that Will had not had the words changed to “Amazing Will” in honor of himself. Perhaps he would have, had he known he’d have a massive coronary the night before the biggest night of his life.

Moving his eyes from the pipes to the altar to the purple-velvet-draped pulpit, Danny asked Mags, “Where’s Mom?”

His sister leaned down, lips to his ears. “Uncle Roger said it would be better if she and Daddy came in last.”

A sardonic grin passed across Danny’s face. “A grand entrance at a funeral? Yeah,” he nodded, “I suppose old Will would have wanted that.”

Mags lightly slapped Danny’s arm, which he would not have felt if she’d swatted him anywhere below the waist.

Below the waist
. That mysterious place he once knew so well.

The organ music droned on.

Danny looked around at the dark suits and solemn dresses of the men and women of the funereal congregation. How many of them had taken a sidelong look at Will Adams’s grandson, wondering if he had any sensation
below the waist
—specifically (because though most of these stiff-upper-lipped folks wouldn’t admit it, what they really wanted was the
specifics
), could Danny get an erection and, if yes, could he feel it?

Danny would have given just about anything to be
able to crawl from his wheelchair, climb up to the pulpit, lean into the microphone, and shout:
The answer is no
.

Instead, he closed his eyes and tried to keep his mind from wandering to that long-ago, magical place of glorious sex, to that wondrous place of pulsing great hard-ons and panting hot heat, of newly grown coed breasts and wet places between legs.

How sweet the sound … that saved a wretch like me
 …

Danny’s thoughts drifted to Anna, the young physical therapist at the rehab clinic in Switzerland where he’d spent two hapless years of costly treatment that went nowhere, though not for lack of effort on Anna’s part. Especially when, just before he returned to the States, she’d sneaked into his room long after dark, stood by the side of his bed, watching him watch her as she stripped in the moonlight that leaked through the wood-shuttered windows, her lovely round breasts firm and eager for tasting, her taut thighs invitingly parted ever so slightly. Anna had tried, but in the end it had not worked.

“You will never feel complete until you feel it in your mind,” Anna said as she tried to prod him. “In your mind is the only place it really counts.”