The Summer House (28 page)

“You want to go to Cuttyhunk?” LeeAnn asked. “Are you nuts?”

He needed to think for only a second. Then he shook his head. “Not Cuttyhunk exactly. Penikese.”

“Nobody goes to Penikese, Danny. It’s uninhabited.”

“It was good enough for the lepers. I think it’s appropriate for me. Will you take me over?”

“And do what? Have a picnic?”

“Maybe leave me there.”

“You are crazy. Besides, it’ll be dark in a few hours. And I told you, there’s a hurricane coming.…”

“You said
maybe
there’s a hurricane coming. And it only takes forty-five minutes. An hour tops.”

“Maybe tomorrow, Danny. If it stops raining.”

“Why? Because you’re too chicken to go out in the rain? Reggie won’t be.”

Just then Reggie appeared, his long legs loping down the pier, his yellow slicker flapping behind him.

“Hey, Danny!” he shouted. “What brings you out on this fine day?”

“You,” Danny said. “I need you to take me to Penikese.”

Reggie laughed. “Gee, and I thought it was because you missed us.” He gave Danny a slap on the shoulder.

“He’s serious,” LeeAnn said. “He wants to go to Penikese.”

Reggie scowled. “Nobody goes there anymore, Danny.”

“So I’ve heard. I also remember that you have always enjoyed being the exception.”

“Except when it comes to Hurricane Carol. I just heard at the station. She’s on the way.”

“Will she be here by sundown?”

“Not until the wee hours.”

“Then we have plenty of time. I only want to go across the sound, not halfway around the fucking world.” He had no idea if he would want to return or not. He had no idea, and, right now, he did not care. “You can spend the time telling me what the hell you’ve been up to in the last few years.”

“That would only take ten minutes. Twenty, if we include the part about how many times we wrote to you and you never wrote back. Or how many times we called and you wouldn’t come to the phone.”

“I was busy,” Danny said.

“Yeah, sure,” Reggie said.

“Leave him alone, Reggie,” LeeAnn said, standing up. “Danny had better things to do than talk to us. He probably still does. But I’m not sure going to Penikese should be one of them. What if we get across and the seas are too rough to get back?”

Reggie scratched his one- or two-day-old beard growth. “LeeAnn’s right, Danny. It’s too risky.”

Danny threw back his head, opened his mouth, and caught some rain. “Then fuck you,” he said. “Fuck both of you.” He put the wheelchair into gear and started to leave. Reggie caught up with him.

“Jesus, Danny, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, goddammit. I just came over here to ask a favor of my friends and they don’t want to be bothered, that’s all. Well, like I said, fuck you.” He rolled back toward the bike ferry.

“Okay, okay,” Reggie called out. “We’ll take you over. God, you are such a spoiled brat.”

If Danny had felt better he might have smiled. Instead, he felt a small sense of relief. Just getting off this damn island would maybe give him a chance to think.

He went back to the boat, where LeeAnn and Reggie
had the pleasure of lifting him out of his wheelchair, lugging him onto the catamaran, and dumping him in the wheelhouse where they told him he was lucky to have them for his friends and he’d better stop being an asshole and remember that. It was the first time in a long time that Danny had smiled and felt good about it.

Chapter 25

“I thought he was with you,” Liz said to her sister, after BeBe had toweled off and changed into jeans and an old sweatshirt of Danny’s.

Warmly tucked into the gray and crimson Harvard attire, BeBe wished she was eighteen again instead of ninety-five like she felt. “I haven’t seen Danny since he brought us the iced tea,” she replied, then added, “Do you have any brandy around here?”

“Brandy? My son has disappeared. Am I the only one who is concerned?”

“He hasn’t disappeared, Liz,” BeBe said, her words laced with exasperation. “He’s obviously driven off somewhere in the van.” Her head was throbbing now, from the sun then the vodka then the implosion of her sinuses behind her eyes thanks to the damn rain. Not to mention the aftershock of meeting Josh and the realization of what she had said, what she had done. She rubbed her forehead and wondered how she could ask Liz to please just shut up.

“Alone?” Liz asked from between nearly closed teeth. “God, Beebs, he never even drove the van until today. Until he went to get you.”

“I thought you were the one who’d been hounding him to drive.”

Liz sucked in a breath. “You don’t understand. I’m worried about him.”

BeBe did not point out that perhaps Liz was worried about the wrong thing. “Maybe he went back to the airport. Maybe he went to pick up someone else. Your husband, for example.”

The color drained from Liz’s face. She kept her eyes fixed on BeBe and winced.

BeBe could not believe her big mouth. She remembered the old gun that Evelyn had given to Daniel. She wished she could dig it out of Father’s desk drawer, place it to her temple, and pull the trigger. It was the least she could do to spare her sister any more misery than she’d already created. “I’m sorry, Lizzie,” she said, approaching her kid sister to give her a hug like old times.

Liz turned away.

BeBe pulled the long arms of the sweatshirt down over her hands and folded her arms. “Don’t you get it, Liz? You weren’t supposed to be like me. You weren’t supposed to be the one with the fucked-up life. Your life was supposed to be perfect, unharmed, without scars.”

Tears welled in Liz’s eyes. “I know that’s what everyone expected,” she said. “But I’m human, Beebs. We all screw up stuff. Nothing has ever been perfect in my life. Especially since Daniel was killed. I thought, of all people, you knew that.”

BeBe wondered if Liz could forgive her for telling Josh about Danny, by justifying that she, too, was human. “Yeah, well,” BeBe stammered, “I tried my best to make things perfect for you, kid. To keep the dream alive for at least one of us.”

Liz smiled. “It wasn’t your job to make my life perfect, Beebs. Maybe Mother should have, but she was too busy either making life grand for Daniel or wallowing in his
death. And Father was too busy with his own agenda, trying to get me to take Daniel’s place, to live out the life Father had always wanted for himself, but had never dared to go after.”

Never dared to go after?
BeBe did not understand what Liz meant. Did Liz think Will Adams had once wanted to be president? And if so, did she wonder what had stopped him? BeBe suddenly wondered whether Liz had been more aware of Father’s motives than she’d once thought, that maybe Liz, too, had learned that Father had not kept Daniel from getting orders for Vietnam, all for the sake of “credentials” to pave the road to Pennsylvania Avenue. But as BeBe looked into Liz’s hurt eyes, she knew her sister did not know, could not have known. And BeBe had revealed enough secrets for one day, perhaps for a lifetime.

“Okay, Lizzie,” she said, “so none of our lives has been perfect. Look at Danny’s. He’s stuck in a wheelchair. And now he’s found a way to gain a little freedom. Don’t take it away from him. And don’t, for godsake, worry about him.”

The tears dripped from Liz’s eyes and she turned to the window. “I just wish he hadn’t picked now to take off again.”

BeBe looked out at the rain. “A little rain won’t hurt him.”

With her eyes lowered, Liz admitted, “It’s not that. It’s that I need him here now. I need him with me. He is more of my strength than he knows.”

BeBe studied her sister a moment: her perfect sister, now standing there without makeup, without the help of hair stylists and wardrobe consultants, just a middle-aged woman out on the Vineyard, trying to make some sense of her life.

BeBe’s head felt ready to burst. She thought about the look on Josh’s face when BeBe told him that Danny was
his son. Maybe Liz didn’t need to know what she’d done so stupidly. Maybe Josh would keep it all to himself.

“Just be sure Danny doesn’t know how much you need him, Liz,” she quietly said. “Or you’ll do to him what Father did to Daniel and what he did to you.”

“You might want to ration that, in case the hurricane comes,” said one of the Secret Service agents—the older one, who had introduced himself as Keith. He had a gentle accent that might have been rooted somewhere in the South.

BeBe had retreated to Father’s study, and was pouring brandy into her glass. “Why?” she asked. “You can’t have any, can you? Aren’t you on duty?”

He laughed. It was a nice laugh, which she guessed might have softened from years on a job where he’d seen and heard more than maybe he’d wanted. She wondered how many family secrets—“first” family and otherwise—he held between his silver-gray temples.

“Wouldn’t drink even if I wasn’t on duty,” he replied. “My father did enough of that for both of us. He fell off a bar stool when I was twelve. Cracked his skull on the floor. No one knew he was dead until after last call.”

BeBe looked at her glass, then set it down. “Where are you from?”

“New Orleans. And before you ask, yes. The bar was on Bourbon Street.”

She’d only been once, but remembered the noise and the heat and the stench. She raised her glass. “Then here’s to fathers,” she said. “May they all rot in hell.”

Two hours later, Danny had still not returned. Liz had busied herself cleaning out closets, sorting through Father’s Vineyard flannel shirts and sweaters for the
Salvation Army, a task easier to tackle with her mind on Danny, not Father, on Danny’s life, not Father’s death.

But the closets were clean now, and Danny had not yet returned. She had moved to the living room and was sitting quite still, unable to speak to either Keith or Joe or even to Clay: she was upset that once again they had let him out of their sight, they had let her down. She half wanted to call Michael and have them all fired, but the thought of talking with her husband right now was far too disturbing, as if he would know by the sound of her voice that she’d been unfaithful. That she had made love not just with her body but also—more sinful, perhaps—she had made love with her heart.

BeBe was on her third or fourth glass of something, Liz did not know or care what, but her sister insisted on sitting out on the porch in the rain, staring off across the dunes, which were no longer visible on the foggy horizon.

Liz stood up and went to the fireplace. She lifted the poker and shoved it at the fire, wondering when it would be legitimate to voice her concern. Was two hours long enough? Three? BeBe … all of them … thought she was being foolish. A hysterical mother not wanting to let go. But it wasn’t true. She had always, of course, worried about the children when they were out. But Danny was … different. Yes, he was twenty-two. He was an adult. And he should be able to do as he pleased. But all that had stopped the day of the accident.

“He’s going to need massive blood transfusions,” Father had said, and the life and the soul and the spirit had drained from her body, leaving her smothered by a blanket of cold like she had never known. Cold for her child who lay virtually lifeless, cold for the fact she might have to tell them the truth. Tell them the truth that his blood might be different. It would not match Michael’s; it would match Josh Miller’s. And they might need to know that to save Danny’s life.

She had stood in the white-on-white corridor of Massachusetts General Hospital, hearing the muted sounds of sirens in the distance, hearing, but not hearing, voices around her that sounded as if they were coming from deep inside a tunnel. She had looked down at her terra-cotta suit and wondered not what the people of the state would think of the governor’s wife and her unmentionable transgressions, or even how Michael would react when he learned the truth. She had thought only of Danny. And Mags. And Greg. Of how this would hurt her innocent children and if she could ever forgive herself for what she had done.

But she had been spared. Blood was taken from the blood bank and Michael “replaced” it with his, as did Father, as did Mags, as Greg would have done if he’d been old enough. But Liz had been spared, and Danny had been spared, and the other children had been spared. And every person who believed in the Adams legacy and in the leadership of Michael Barton had been spared learning the pain that Liz had carried all those years.

She poked at the fire and warmed herself against the growing chill of the rain.

The polls, of course, would go wild if news that Danny was missing ever leaked out; if the world ever learned about Liz’s renewed love affair with Josh, or that Danny was not Michael’s son at all, but Josh’s, of all people. The polls would bounce like a steel ball in an old-fashioned pinball machine, zinging and pinging all over the playing field, until the gossip finally settled on … Michael for sympathy? Josh as a victim, never having been told?

She stared into the embers and realized how sad the country was, that the choice of its leader could be so influenced by the behavior—then and now—of a scared, confused wife.

The perfect life
. Oh, sure, Beebs, Liz thought. If I’ve had anything it hasn’t been that. Then she thought about Mags. And about Greg. They had a different father from Danny, but she had loved them all equally and she still did.