The Summer House (4 page)

With a fast, forget-about-it sigh, BeBe sat up straight and buzzed Claire. There was no point dwelling on the stuff of the past. Not when there were millions to be made and work to be done.

Chapter 3

He hated being there. He hated the way his mother bowed down to his grandfather and the way his father acted like he didn’t notice and the way his Uncle Roger juggled everyone and everything, a computer in one hand, a cell phone in the other. He hated the way his Aunt Evelyn paraded her martyred, “look at poor me, my husband is gay” self in front of the family, despite the fact that she would not agree to a divorce and lose her “status” (her word, not theirs) in life. Danny hated these things, just as he hated it that he couldn’t even go down to the lobby for fear of a tabloid reporter and a pop-flashing camera. And he hated it that they were all as imprisoned in this hotel as he was in his chair.

Then again, Danny reasoned as he wheeled to the window and looked out across the skyline of copper and black glass and silver-fronted Atlantic City casinos, he hated most things these days.

He sighed. It was almost six o’clock. He’d already spent three hours online chatting the chat, and he did not want to join his brother and sister for a predictable
what if
session about the election outcome:
What if
they won’t
let us have our friends come to the White House?
What if
we want to have dates? Will the Secret Service come, too? Danny wanted to ask,
What if
by some miracle he suddenly was healed? Would they have to hide him until after the election because they’d lose too many sympathy votes? He supposed it was a tacky question. He did not want to be accused of feeling sorry for himself.

Besides, he had been taught that as the eldest child of Michael and Elizabeth (aka Ken and Barbie) Barton, he had to set an example. Doing that these days was tough, especially when he no longer gave a shit about much of anything, had not given a shit in the last three years, not since he’d looked at the world—and everyone in it—below the waist, no longer eye to eye, but eye to crotch. Danny recognized that few people were comfortable looking him square in the eye, anyway. Instead, they shifted from one foot to the other, trying not to drop their gaze to his dead legs, obviously relieved when they were able to move on.

From the other side of the wall came the sounds of his sister Mags’s high-pitched, girlish laughter. Danny smiled. He had always wanted to be more like Magsie, more carefree and clever, more like Aunt BeBe. Instead, Danny guessed he was more like his mother, Liz, which was maybe why he got so upset when he saw her trying so hard to make everyone’s life perfect, especially Gramps’s.

The door burst open. “Hey, mon,” said Clay, Danny’s never-too-far-away nurse, “time to come out and play.”

“A knock would have been nice.” Danny spun his wheelchair around. “What if I was entertaining a young lady?”

Clay twirled a dreadlock around one finger. “If you was entertaining a young lady, I would have stood and applauded. But seeing you’re not, how about if we work on some handstand push-ups?”

As part of his indefatigable quest to keep Danny in shape, or at least the top half of Danny in shape, Clay had developed a way to flip him upside down, lean him against a wall, and actually have him do push-ups as if he were in training for the U.S. men’s gymnastics team. Danny had accused him of watching too much ESPN. Clay had ignored him, and in the end, Danny learned how.

“Not today, Clay. I’m tired.”

“Tired my ass,” the long-legged man called out as he loped across the room. “You’re lazy, that’s what. How do you expect to get to the White House if you’re lazy?”

“I expect to be driven there in a big limousine by someone who’s paid by the federal government.”

“Oy!” Clay bellowed. “Remind me not to vote for you.”

“Remind me not to run,” Danny replied, then added, “No, never mind. You won’t have to remind me.” He looked around the room. “Three more days in this place?”

“It’s what the mon said. You have to wait here until the last night, until your father is nominated. Your grandfather said no one can see the family until then.”

“Jesus, you’d think we were getting married. The blushing bride not allowed to see the groom.”

“Yeah, well, it’s been a long time since you blushed, Danny boy. Now come on, let’s get against the wall and give me ten.”

“No, man …”

But Clay’s hands were on the back of the wheelchair and he was steering it toward the wall. “I can’t hear you,” the nurse cried in singsonging jest.

Then, in what seemed like only an instant, Clay stopped the chair, tugged down Danny’s shoulders, and flipped him against the wall. The blood flooded to
Danny’s face; his legs were braced by his nurse who now chanted “Give me
one
 …”

“Oh, Christ,” Danny muttered. For a moment he refused to perform, and decided that among everything and everyone else, he now hated Clay as well. But as he stood there or hung there or whatever it was he was doing, Danny was reminded that without Clay he was pretty much helpless, that without him, he might just hang there forever or at least until he turned purple and blood came out his eyes and his nose and his ears. And oh, what a tabloid shot that would make.

Yeah, he depended on Clay. Then again, Clay had a pretty good job. A little PT, a little cleanup, a huge salary paid by a grateful Gramps—hell, Danny thought, Clay needed him as much as he needed Clay.

That’s when he had an idea. “Clayman,” he said, “I’m going to make you a deal.”

“Your face is turning purple,” Clay responded.

Danny smiled upside down. “I’ll give you ten if you get me out of here. Just for a little while. A couple of days.”

“No, mon, I can’t …”

“Yes you can. I want to see the boardwalk. I want to see Atlantic City.”

“And I want to see my next birthday. Have you seen the size of those Secret Service guys?”

“Keith and Joe? You could do them in a heartbeat.”

“I’d rather not find out.”

Danny wondered why he was feeling light-headed, when the blood was rushing up to his brain, not down from it. “We can go in disguise,” he continued. “I’ll leave my mother a note. Not even the Secret Service would do anything to upset my mother, and she never gets angry with me. Besides,” he added, lowering himself on his hands, “if you don’t help me, I’ll see that you’re fired.”

“Bullshit,” Clay said.

Danny let his arms collapse. The weight of his body followed.

“Sheeeeet,”
Clay said, trying to gather the crumpled parts of his patient.

With his face mashed into the thin hotel carpet, Danny asked, “Change your mind?”

“Okay, okay, mon,” he said, sliding Danny up into the wheelchair. “You’re a crazy man, but I’ll try and figure something out.”

Danny grinned.

In the note Danny left for his mother the next morning, he explained that he had to get out of there for a couple of days. “I promise, absolutely, double-deal promise to be back before the nomination,” he had written on the back of a piece of hotel stationery. The “double-deal promise” was reminiscent of when he was in second grade, and he’d learned that a promise sometimes had to be broken (such as Dad “promising” to show up at his soccer game, but having to fly off somewhere instead). He decided then that the only way to be sure that a promise was kept was to make it, then double it, twice as solid, twice as apt to not come apart. It had made sense to a seven-year-old, and had tugged at his mother’s heartstrings. Now, he was counting on its nostalgia to do that again.

So his mother was going to have to make excuses for him to his father and grandfather, not to mention Mags and Greg, who’d be pissed that he’d abandoned them in hotelsville. He adjusted the brim of the Yankees cap Clay had bought him and steered his chair toward the railing overlooking the beach, knowing that he did not could not would not let himself feel guilty. He and Clay would be back tomorrow night with a day to spare
before the nomination: there would be plenty of time for remorse then.

“Are you happy now, Danny boy?”

Through his oversized, not-exactly-rose-colored sunglasses, Danny smiled. “Happy enough, mon,” he said, watching two girls with bigger buns than bikinis bounce by in front of them, a much lovelier sight than his computer or room service, and a much more pleasurable pastime than doing ten for Clay. They had come almost all the way down to Ocean City: Clay said there were no rooms closer to Atlantic City because of the convention, but Danny suspected his nurse had wanted to get Danny as far from the place and the Secret Service as possible, yet still close enough for a quick return.

“For punishment,” Clay said, “I think I will make you drive back.”

Danny squinted against the sun’s glare off the water. “Then I think I really
will
have you fired. I’ll say this was all your idea.”

Clay shrugged. “One can’t blame a body for trying.”

No, Danny supposed, one could not. Everyone in their own way—some subtle, some not—had been unsuccessfully trying to get Danny to drive the van that Gramps had ordered, the fully equipped, handicapped kid’s set of big wheels. He shook off his annoyance. “Right now, what I want is a burger smothered in fried onions and ketchup,” he said. “In fact, I want two. And a fat chocolate shake.”

“Not good for the digestive tract.”

“Tough.”

“Why does it feel like you’re holding me hostage?” Clay asked.

Danny smiled, then turned from the water. “After my burgers I want to stroll down the boardwalk and feed popcorn to the seagulls and play video games in the arcade and maybe even have the lumps in my skull
read by a phrenologist with big, dangly earrings and a crystal ball. I want to be anonymous, Clay. Before the world becomes my permanent parasite, I want to have fun.”

Clay smiled back. “You ask a lot for a man in a wheelchair.”

Danny gave him the finger and headed for the hamburger stand.

He had a blast. They went down to Cape May—to the zoo and the lighthouse—then back to the beach for more lazy girl-watching. They cruised the boardwalk that evening, where the phrenologist told him he would have seven children. He won a half-dozen fake Beanie Babies playing old-fashioned Skee-Ball, ate two ice-cream cones and a cheese dog on a stick. Then he and Clay spent the night in a seedy motel where his mattress was springy and Clay’s sagged in the middle and no one would have expected to see the son of a president. Which of course he wasn’t yet.

It was all great, rebellious fun.

The next day began blisteringly hot. Clay let Danny forgo his morning exercise regimen and they set off on an ecotour of Great Egg Harbor. The only difficult part was loading Danny onto the pontoon boat. Amazingly, no one recognized him.

At four o’clock, Clay announced that no matter what threats Danny used, it was time to go back. “Tomorrow’s the nomination,” he said, which was no news to Danny. “Your father’s big day.”

They were riding along the beach road when it happened. Danny was in the back, gazing out the window, feeling the feel-good glow of adventure fade more and more as the miles shrank toward the convention center, toward his reality.

As if sensing Danny’s mood, Clay snapped on the radio and scanned for a station. Between hard rock and country, they heard the announcement.

“About an hour ago at the Atlantic City Convention Center …”

The tuner skipped to the next station, where an oldies song played. But some kind of sixth sense had caught Danny’s attention. “Go back,” he said. “To that news thing.”

Clay fiddled with the buttons, trying to find it.

“Come on, man,” Danny pleaded. “Hurry up.”

Clay flicked through the stations unsuccessfully and started to steam. “This is your goddamn van,” he said, pushing another wrong button. “If you’d learn to drive it …”

And then, the announcer’s somber voice was back.

“A seventh-generation American,” the voice was saying, “he was instrumental in shaping much of the political scene as it is known today.”

Danny would have sworn the chill that he felt dropped from his heart to his spine, into his dead butt and down his numb legs.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Pull over.”

Clay yanked the wheel and pointed it at the soft, sandy shoulder. The van slid to a stop.

Danny kept his eyes fixed out the window, out at the water, as the announcer continued. “It is not known how this will effect tomorrow night’s nomination process. As of now, funeral arrangements are incomplete, but it is expected that William Woodman Adams will be buried in his hometown of Boston.”

“
Sheeeet
,” Clay whispered.

Danny put his face in his hands. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck.”

They sat there awhile on the side of the road, the silent nurse and his patient, the runaway grandson, who
was too stunned to wonder how Gramps had died or where or when. He only knew one thing, and he said it out loud. “This is going to kill my mother,” he told Clay, as if Clay didn’t know. “This is absolutely going to fucking kill my poor mother.”

Part II