The Summer House (34 page)

“One of those directions will probably be to Washington. Your father’s ahead in the polls, isn’t he?”

Danny hesitated, then nodded. And with his nod came the realization that if word about Danny did get out, it might clinch the election for Michael if everyone felt sorry for him. He hated to admit it, but for all the hiding he preferred to do, he really hoped his father … Michael … won. He deserved it, there was no doubt. As for Josh Miller … well, blood or not, Danny didn’t even know him beyond what the media said, and beyond the few minutes they’d spent in congenial conversation out on the porch, before Danny had known he should have been doing other things, like looking for similarities in the color of their eyes, the shape of their skulls.

He had little to go on in regard to Josh Miller, except for the media and Uncle Roger, whose job it was to dissect the opponent and see where they could fill in the gaps, take up the slack, capitalize on the weak spots, and on and on and on around the ever-turning gears of the political machine. “Let’s just say it’s going to be an interesting election,” he added. “In the meantime, I think we should stay here on Cuttyhunk. Far from civilization.”

“I can’t stay here,” LeeAnn said. “I go back to teaching next week. A girl can hardly make a living as a sailor.” She laughed, a light, carefree laugh, unencumbered by presidential elections and fathers who were not hers.

“Why didn’t we stay together, Lee?” Danny asked. “We had fun once, didn’t we?”

Her laughter stopped. “Sure we did, Danny. Some of the best days—and nights—of my life. But we’re too different, you and me …”

“We’re not so different,” he said. “Oh, sure, our day-to-day lives were different. But we’re just people, LeeAnn. Just two damn people who both probably get awful lonely sometimes.”

She smiled. “Why, Mr. Barton, are you making a pass at me?”

Danny laughed. “The last pass I made was in football and you can see where that got me.”

LeeAnn stood up and came to him. She set down her plate and put her arm around his neck. “I think where it got you is right here, right now, with me and with Reggie, wherever the hell he is, and with all these people who are strangers now but who I guarantee won’t be strangers by the time the storm has passed. That’s where I think it got you, Danny Barton. And I think it’s one fine place to be.”

Danny smiled. He straightened the blanket on his lap and wondered if, beneath it, the reflex muscle of his penis had kicked in. “Save the bullshit for someone it’ll work with,” he said. “Now, don’t they have any dessert in this crappy place?”

Chapter 30

They were trapped inside the house by the wind and the rain and the fact that years ago Will Adams had set into motion a legacy from which there had been no escape. They were as trapped, Liz realized, as Danny was, bound not by a wheelchair, but by decades of one man’s manipulation and misdirected expectation.

Liz had sequestered herself in the study, where she now sat on the leather swivel chair behind what would always, to her, be Will Adams’s desk, despite the addition of Danny’s computer. She wondered about the man who had controlled them all. Years ago she had asked why he wasn’t the one who had vied for political office: he’d responded with a wink by saying that there are directors and there are actors, and that the most important thing you can do for yourself is to figure out which one you are.

“You’re an actor, Lizzie,” he had said, sitting right in this chair where she was sitting now. “You belong on the stage, not behind it. Your brother Roger is a director.”

She had been about thirty, already the mother of three, and there was no question of the course of her life. “Daniel was an actor,” she’d said to Father.

He’d looked off toward the bookcases that displayed, between books, photos of Daniel here on the Vineyard, photos of Daniel at the Beacon Hill house, photos of Daniel in parade at West Point. And Liz’s favorite, the photo of Daniel twirling a skunk, the photo she’d taken the day he had left.

She remembered now that Father had not said whether he thought BeBe was a director or an actor. She remembered because it had bothered her, that he discounted her sister. Perhaps he’d thought BeBe was merely a member of the audience. A member who didn’t count, who simply bought her ticket to watch others perform.

Passing her hand across the deep red leather desktop embedded into the centuries-old cherry, Liz realized that BeBe had not told Josh about Danny because she was vicious, but because she was angry at Josh, or angry at Liz, for what they had done. BeBe was angry because she did not understand what it was like to have lived a thousand years performing for Will Adams, never having the chance to have a mind or a life of one’s own. She did not understand what it was like to never have had the courage to stand up to Father and say, “Father, I want to do this,” or “Father, I do not want to do that,” to never have the courage to tell him she no longer wanted to be one of the actors, or even a director, but that all she wanted was a little bit of peace to live her life, however faulty or flawed it might be.

She opened the center drawer of the desk and poked through the contents: a fountain pen that had long ago dried up, a packet of sticky-back notepads, three business cards—one from a carpenter here on the island, one from a dentist that Liz remembered Father had needed when his front crown broke on an ear of fresh corn on the cob, one from the boatyard that had bought the sailboat he’d decided to sell after Danny’s injury. “I only bought the damn thing for your kids,” Will had sputtered. It had
been common knowledge among his own children that he did not like “the water,” that he was neither a sailor nor a fisherman and did not even like lobster, a sacrilege for an old Yankee if ever there was one.

“If you’re looking for Father, I doubt if he’s in there.” Roger said quietly from the doorway, resting his forehead against the woodwork.

Liz pulled the junk from the drawer and spread it on the desktop. “It’s odd, isn’t it, that a seventy-eight-year-old man’s life can be reduced to this—to bits of paper and trinkets and leftover paper clips that may or may not have meant anything to him, but surely mean nothing to anyone else.” She reached into the drawer again and fished out a small box that read “Ammunition—Colt .45.” She remembered the gun that Evelyn had given to Daniel, but did not know if it had ever been used.

Digging a little deeper, she removed two keys: one brass, one silver, linked together on a plastic ring with a fluorescent red tag that read “Christopher’s Wholesale Bait.” She put them on the desktop. “Take these keys, for instance. What do they open? Were they Father’s? And, if so, why are they on a key ring from a bait shop?”

Roger stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “There are pieces of all of us that no one will ever know about, Lizzie,” he said. “Even family.”

Liz nodded slowly, knowing that she would never invade the private moments of Roger’s unhappy life. She was oddly comforted, however, by the way he had begun calling her “Lizzie” again, as if she were a little girl again, as if she needed taking care of. Right now, that was not an unpleasant feeling.

“The Secret Service and the nurse are all out looking for Daniel,” Roger said, then quickly corrected himself. “Danny,” he said. “I mean, they’re looking for Danny.”

Liz half smiled. She had not caught the mistake. It was almost as if Daniel and Danny were sometimes one and
the same anyway, one having arrived so soon after the other had departed. She wondered—not for the first time—what Daniel would have thought if he’d known that his namesake was Josh’s, not Michael’s.

She slid her palm across the cool leather again, then over the keyboard of Danny’s computer, and asked, “Where’s Michael?”

Roger moved closer to the desk. He picked up a paperweight that sat on the top—a handblown glass “planet” crafted by an artist named Simpson, given to Father as a gift. Roger turned the planet over and over in his hands, gazing at the peaks and the valleys and the oceans and the land masses that emerged and then vanished. “Michael wanted to go with the others,” he said. “He wanted to go, but the agents would not let him.”

Liz nodded and tried to decide what it meant that Michael had not yet relinquished Danny as his own. Or maybe he was merely keeping up appearances, as would have been expected by Will Adams. She wondered why it was that sometimes Father seemed more like Michael’s father than hers.

“I know this sounds crazy, coming from me,” Roger continued, a small catch in his words, “but no matter what happens, I’m not going to abandon you, Lizzie.” He had a crack in his voice she had never heard. “But I just wanted you to know that I believe they’ll find Danny, and that everything will turn out okay.”

Liz found herself fixating on the glass globe as well, wondering what was behind Roger’s words.

“Danny’s a bright boy,” Roger said. “And he can be very independent. You know better than to let his wheelchair fool you.”

“But he’s not the same, Roger. He’s not like he once was.”

“None of us is, Lizzie. Life changes us all.”

The wind suddenly whipped a tree limb across the
window, startling them both. “Oh God, Roger. This is really the hurricane, isn’t it?”

“Sheriff Talbot said the worst of it will hit land about two
A.M
.”

“What time is it now?”

“Midnight. You should try and get some rest.”

But Liz stayed in her father’s worn chair, not yet ready to go to the room she shared with Michael, not yet ready to face him again. She studied the paper clips and the pen and the trinkets and the box of ammunition, and wondered if that was what Michael was feeling right now, that he had never really known the intimate parts of his own wife, any more than she had known all the pieces of Father.

Evelyn sat in the corner of the living room and typed
www.JoshMillerPresident.com
into Roger’s laptop. The screen zigged and zagged and brought up a full color photo of the man who was her nephew’s real father. There was a bit of a resemblance, although, lucky for Liz and the secret she’d had to maintain, Danny had taken more after the Adams branch of the family tree. But now that tree was about to be uprooted and tossed out to sea, hurricane or no hurricane, polls or no polls, because, unlike Roger, Evelyn was tired of being second best.

She wondered if she should send Josh an e-mail to let him know that soon all would be well, that she had a plan and that, this time, she was going to succeed.

It would, of course, be much easier to pull off if Danny returned. Because the plan might just be ruined if Danny turned up dead.

She clicked the mouse on an icon marked “We want to know what you think,” and decided to let Josh know where Danny might be. And that she knew Danny was his son. The fact that she’d always paid attention to what
was going on around her was about to pay off. And though Evelyn hadn’t told anyone, she knew the Watsons the way she knew everyone and everyone’s business, and she knew their catamaran, and she’d bet her sweet Yankee blue blood that she knew where they’d gone, and that Josh would be forever grateful to find out.

He was on his third beer, compliments of Reggie, who claimed to always have a healthy stash on board the
Annabella
, and who had ventured out in the storm to go back to the marina and load up the golf cart between wind gusts.

He was on his third beer and grateful that LeeAnn, too, was on hers, and that she sat close beside him, because he’d explained about how quickly his bag would fill up and how he wouldn’t want to embarrass himself. Nor would he want to interrupt the others who were clustered in the room and were busy trading stories of hurricanes long past, seeming a bit pleased that they had someone new to listen, perhaps having told theirs and heard the others’ too many times as it was.

“They don’t have a clue who I am, do they?” he whispered to LeeAnn.

LeeAnn shrugged. “Who knows? But I’m sure it wouldn’t matter.”

He frowned and took another drink. “Why not?”

LeeAnn laughed. “What do you mean, ‘why not?’ What difference could it possibly make to them if you’re the son of the next president or the king of Siam?”

Danny blew his laugh into the foam of his beer. He wiped his lip with the back of his hand. “The king of Siam? Jesus, LeeAnn, there is no ‘Siam’ anymore, is there?”

“How the hell do I know? I’m just a sailor.”

“And a teacher.”

“Right. Mathematics, not geography.”

“And now if you’ll be so kind as to wheel me to a corner, I will teach you something: the proper way to empty the catheter of a paraplegic.”

She did not, however, wheel him into a corner. They went to the ladies’ room, together, and no one in the room seemed to give it a second thought.

For the first time since his accident, Danny felt good. Danny felt whole.

When Liz finally emerged from Father’s study, it seemed like the middle of the day, rather than the middle of the night, judging by the activity in the house.

Evelyn was playing with Roger’s laptop. A fire was still going in the fireplace and Roger sat in front of it, reading one of Father’s old
National Geographics
. Michael was on the phone. It could have been a picture of any time over the last twenty-some years, except for the absence of one sister who was being held for questioning in a murder case and one son who was missing out in the hurricane.