First Daughter (22 page)

That a portion of the community—so tight-knit, it was incestuous—reviled Barkley only endeared him to Alli. He was a misfit just like her; she could relate to his being marginalized. After dinner, they took walks in the long cobalt twilight, hanging at the edge of the softball field or on the sloping muddy shoulder of the lake. Often they stared as one at the raft moored in the center of the lake. They sat close together, but they never brushed shoulders, let alone held hands. And yet
a certain magnetism, plucked out of the droning summer air, drew them, caused them perhaps to feel the same longing, an ache deep down in a place they could not identify. Once, they spoke about the raft in an argot they understood better than anyone else at camp—as Oz, Neverland, the other end of the White Rabbit's hole, heavily romanticized worlds that were home to Others, the people so special or different, they didn't belong in Kansas or London or the English countryside.

That night they spoke while the last smears of color faded under the onslaught of darkness. The air grew chill and damp, and still they did not move. Their talking had come to an end; there seemed nothing left to say. It was difficult for Alli to remember who began to strip first. In any event, there came a time when they stood in their underwear side by side, feet in the cool, still water. They heard a bullfrog out on the lake, saw water spiders skimming the surface. All the lights were behind them, up the hill where the buildings were situated. Here their own world began, and Alli, with a shiver of intent, pushed aside her anxiety about her nude body as she slipped out of undershorts and bra.

Wading into the water, arms held high, they lay down in the deliciously cool water, as if it were a bed. Alli did an excellent crawl out to the raft, arrived there seconds before Barkley. She hauled herself, dripping, from the water; he was right behind her.

At first they lay on their stomachs, out of modesty perhaps or because this was the way most children slept. They were still more children than adults, knew it, clung to its safety.

As a certain fear flooded her mind, Alli said, "I don't want to do anything. You know that."

Barkley, head on folded forearms, smiled slowly. "Neither do I. We're just here, right? Just us. We've left all the knuckleheads behind."

Alli laughed softly at how sweetly he used words that were so,
well, dorky. It occurred to her that his very unhipness was another reason she liked him. Preening boys, showing off their cool in the most obvious and ostentatious manner, had a tendency to buzz around her because they wanted something from her father, if only to bask in the penumbra of his celebrity. Proximity to power was a potent aphrodisiac for boys of that age, and would be, until they had gathered their own. Later in life, it would be the women who'd be buzzing around these boys' moneyed hives.

They lay side by side on their softly rocking island, silent, listening to the slap of rope against the raft's pontoons, the lap of water, and in the humming night the occasional bellow of the bullfrog, the call of a skimming loon on its way to nest for the night, the eerie hoot of an owl high overhead. Who turned first? Alli couldn't recall, but all at once they were lying on their backs, their eyes focused on the spangled blackness of the sky, not on the pale flesh beside them, a blobby blur in the corners of their eyes.

"I wish we were up there," Barkley said, "on a spaceship heading for another planet."

He was a sci-fi nut, reading Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl. Alli had read them also, saw through them. They were men from the dying pulp-magazine world—men with amazing ideas, granted, but they weren't writers, not when you compared them with her current favorites, Melville, Hugo, Steinbeck.

"But the planets have no breathable atmosphere," Alli said. "What would we do when we got there?"

"We'd find a way to survive," Barkley said in a very grown-up tone of voice. "Humans always do." He turned his head, looked at her. "Don't we?"

Alli, mute, felt paralyzed beneath his serious gaze. Trying to put herself in his head, she wondered what he thought of the body stretched out before him. She herself had not looked at his.

He rose up on his side to face her, head propped on the heel of one
hand. His hair was golden, his skin glowing. All of him seemed golden. "Don't you want to fly far, far away, Alli?"

A moment ago, she would have said yes, but now, forced to make a decision, she didn't know what she wanted. She thought she'd miss her family, no matter how annoying and stifling they sometimes could be. She didn't want to be without them, and then the revelation hit her: She was a conventional girl, after all. The thought depressed her momentarily.

"I want to go back."

She sat up, but Barkley put a hand on her forearm. "Hey, it's early yet. Don't get spooked, no one can see us, we're safe."

Reluctantly, she lay back down, but a subtle shift had occurred inside her, and she was unable to keep her thoughts at rest.

As if sensing her unease, Barkley wriggled up behind her, put one arm gently around her. "I'll just hold you close, I'll protect you, then we'll swim back, okay?"

She said nothing, but her body nestled back against his and she gave an involuntary sigh. Folding one arm beneath her cheek, she closed her eyes. Her thoughts, like fireflies, darted this way and that against the blackness of her lids. Eventually, though, she felt a warmth spread from Barkley to her, the fireflies dimmed, then vanished altogether as she fell into peaceful slumber.

She was awakened slowly, almost druggily, by a repeating rhythmic sound and a persistent sensation. Drawn fully out of sleep, she realized that it was pain she felt, pain and pressure in a localized area, the place between her buttocks. It was then that she realized that the rhythmic sound and the pressure were connected. Barkley, grunting, held her tight against him. Sweat slicked the surface of her back, spooned against his front, and a peculiar musky scent dilated her nostrils, roiled her insides.

"What are you doing?" Her voice was thick, still slurry with sleep.

His grunting became more intense.

All at once, she snapped fully awake. She felt something rubbing against her bare buttock.

"Have you lost your mind?"

For what seemed like an eternity, she struggled silently in the prison of his arms.

It was only later, in the relative safety of her bunk, that she began to realize that she had been the victim of violence. At the moment, she was defeated by shock and terror. Her little body shook and quivered with each masculine thrust. She wanted to curl up into a ball, a crushed and discarded paper bag. She wanted to cry, she wanted to beam herself to another planet like they did in
Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty
, she thought despairingly. But she remained locked in the sweaty embrace of this monstrous octopus that had risen up from the muck of the lake to entwine her in its tentacles.

Suspended time ticked away like taffy being pulled in slo-mo. She was no longer there, on the bucking raft, pinned to sun-beaten wooden slats. Pine trees on the shore ruffled; a sinister cloud, spreading like mist, masked the bone-white moon. An owl hooted, and a squadron of bats winged low over the water like Darth Vader's TIE fighters. But she was deaf and blind to the world around her. Her mind fled down pitch-black hallways that smelled of him, of them, of sweat and fear, of wood-rot and despair. But this place wouldn't do, so she went deeper, to a fortress her mind made impenetrable, and there she pulled up the drawbridge, locked herself away like a princess in a fairy tale, retired to the keep in the still center.

Without knowing how, she wormed her way to the edge of the raft. Perhaps Barkley was done and simply let her go. Rolling into the still, black water, she gasped, wept as she swam back to shore.

She never told her parents what had happened that night. In fact, she scarcely spoke a sentence to them in the aftermath, preferring to grunt or not to respond at all to their probes. In those months when
autumn strode confidently after summer, her mother badgered her about dating Barkley, who, she felt certain, was the perfect match for her daughter. In fact, Alli was boxed into going to dinner with Barkley and both their parents. What seemed to her in summer handsome was now in autumn reptilian. She felt her stomach heave at first sight of him, and when forced to sit beside him, all appetite fled her like a mouse at the pounce of a hungry cat. What followed was an excruciatingly awkward, secretly embarrassing evening. Over ashy coffee and cloying flourless chocolate cake, Barkley, his nose firmly up her father's ass, contrived to tell him a joke. At the same time, hidden beneath the table, he slithered his hand between her thighs. Alli leapt up and fled the restaurant, for which, later, she was severely reprimanded. She'd broken her mother's strict rules of social engagement, and that was that.

That might have bothered the old, proper Alli, her mother's clone, but that girl was dead, left at the mercy of the sweaty octopus on the raft. When she'd dropped into the lake, the black water closing over her head, swirling her hair across her face, there had come a breach. Her old self turned to misty cloud that masked the illumination of the moon. She left behind everything she had felt or believed. In the process, she shriveled, closed up like a clam inside its striated shell. But alone with herself she was safe.

In time, even her mother came to dimly realize that something was wrong. Since neither tough love nor punishment worked, she sent Alli to a psychologist, which made Alli retreat even further into her citadel of solitude. She was reduced to weaving lies in order to avoid being sucked into that cold, impersonal office furnished with psychobabble. She never once considered what the solemn man sitting across from her made of those lies; she didn't care. She had already developed a healthy cynicism about males, and as for trust, forget about it.

Within six weeks, unable to make any headway, the shrink recommended a meds psychiatrist, who met with Alli for twenty minutes.
Diagnosing her depression, he handed her a smile along with a prescription for Wellbutrin XL.

"We'll give the Wellbutrin several weeks. If it doesn't do the trick there's a whole galaxy of medications we can try," he said. "Worry not, we'll have you right as rain in no time."

She promptly threw the little cream-colored pills into a trash bin at the pharmacy.

In Alli's drugged mind, it was now three years later. She heard "Neon Bible" by Arcade Fire as if from a long distance away. Superimposed over it was the drone of a familiar voice, repeating instructions she found so rudimentary, a half-wit could follow them. Still, they were repeated to the cadence of "Neon Bible" until they became as much a part of her as her lungs or her heart.

Presently, on a cloud of memory, she drifted off again, into her past. She had met Emma McClure on her first day at Langley Fields, and from that moment on she knew she wanted Emma to be her roommate. The college had assigned her someone else—a blonde from Texas, whom she loathed on sight; her accent alone set Alli's teeth on edge, not to mention her obsessions with high-end clothes and imported beauty products. Alli lobbied for a switch, for she and Emma to be together, and finally the administration acceded to her request. It wasn't that she'd demanded they do as she asked; she didn't have to go that far, merely point out that she'd mention the "stressful" situation to her father. The headmistress didn't want Edward Carson on her case; no one would, not even the president.

There were reasons Alli liked Emma. Emma came from the wrong side of the tracks, from a family that had to take on debt to send her to Langley Fields. She was smart, funny, and, best of all, utterly without pretensions. Born into a family with, it seemed to her, nothing but pretensions, Alli lived in fear that this trait lay buried in her DNA, sealing her fate, would at any moment turn itself on like a geyser, humiliate her to tears. And when, at Emma's insistence, she read Hunter
S. Thompson's
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, she understood that Emma was a kind of talisman, her subversive bent a magic charm that could immunize Alli against her screwed-up hereditary disease.

Plus there was an edge, a toughness to Emma, the hardy scuff picked up in the street. She was fearless. Privilege, Alli had reason to understand, made you soft, vulnerable, fearful, as if your body had been turned inside out, pink and pulsing. It was a hateful disfigurement, one she felt powerless to reverse until Emma came into her life.

Then everything changed.

I
T'S A
total blackout," Chief Bennett said, "as if the Dark Car never crashed."

"What about the gunshots on Kirby Road?" Jack asked.

Bennett shook his head. "Only a small item about a milk truck that caught fire."

The two friends sat in Tysons Corner in a small coffee shop with a striped awning out front and bistro tables inside. From where Jack sat, he had a good view through the front window of the leafy side street and the occasional passing car. As soon as he had dropped a thoroughly rattled Armitage off at his office, he called Bennett. Then he ran every red light to get here. The pursuit by the Dark Car, the shooting, and its aftermath had shaken him more than he cared to admit. He felt as if he had entered a new and far more dangerous arena.

Bennett turned his coffee cup around and around as if something about its symmetry made him uncomfortable. "Someone very high up in the government food chain is spinning the news at a furious clip," Bennett said.

"According to your information, that would be the president, the
Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, or the National Security Advisor. Why in the world would any one of them want me dead?"

Bennett watched a middle-aged man enter, then slide into a booth where a young woman waited for him. She smiled, took his hand in hers. Bennett lost interest in them.

"I've been in this business thirty years," he said. "I've never run up against a brick wall like this. Jack, I've made a career of getting around the brick walls of various government agencies, but this one's different. None of my contacts can help me—or they won't."