Danielle goes downstairs to get a wineglass and the bottle of wine on the kitchen counter. With the sharp tip of the corkscrew’s worm she cuts the foil over the cork, peels it off in one satisfyingly large piece, pushes the worm into the cork, starts to twist, calls up, “Betsy, you okay?”
No answer. No sound of water play. No sound of Betsy talking as herself or as Belly Bear or as any of her toys.
She calls up again, “Betsy?”
Silence.
And then a cold feeling in her stomach as she hurries upstairs. “Betsy?” she says. She almost drops the bottle as she reaches the bathroom. Betsy is out dripping wet to get Belly Bear and bring her into the tub even though they’ve been over this how many times, the water would hurt Belly Bear’s stuffing, but Danielle’s so happy to see that Betsy’s okay that she can’t be angry.
The wine in her glass isn’t quite half gone when Betsy says, “Can we do double tubble?”
“Not tonight. Mommy just wants to sit here and relax.”
Betsy’s quiet for a moment. Then she says, “But you don’t do double tubble with Nick anymore because he’s too big and tomorrow I’ll be too big.”
Danielle laughs. “Not tomorrow you won’t be—don’t worry.”
“Then when I’m four.”
“Not when you’re four or five or even six.”
“But when I’m old.”
No, Danielle thinks, you must never grow old. She wants to stop time right now or somehow shrink Betsy and hide her from time in the palm of her hand or back in her belly.
Danielle sets her wineglass on the floor. She takes off her sweater, and Betsy squeals with delight. Pants, shirt, socks, bra, underwear, she undresses, steps into the tub, the water still warm enough, and sits across from her daughter. She washes Betsy’s feet, and Betsy washes hers. Danielle is already nostalgic for this moment, she’s pre-nostalgic—what’s the word for that, she thinks, one of those untranslatable German words. Probably somewhere in her notes. She stops washing Betsy and tries to think of the word. She considers getting out of the tub and hurrying down the hall to grab her notebook. But then she feels Betsy’s hand on her leg and returns to the moment. How silly, she thinks, to want the notebook now, and all for a German word to describe what she’s feeling. She washes Betsy’s back, trying to re-create the feeling she fears she’s lost by making it more than it was, when what it was was more than enough.
The lights flicker but stay on. Should probably finish washing Betsy now, she thinks, in case the power goes out. She reaches for her wine, but just as her hand touches the glass she hears a loud crash, which sounds as though it came from somewhere in the house. Startled, she jerks her hand. The rest of the wine spills, the glass breaks.
*
David tells Nick to stay downstairs. He takes the stairs two at a time to the second floor, where he finds Danielle in the hallway holding a naked dripping Betsy. Danielle’s robe, missing its belt, is open enough for David to see that she’s naked beneath it.
“We have a tree in our house,” she says.
“You can come up,” David calls to Nick. He hugs Danielle and Betsy. “I saw that it went right through the window by the rocker, and I thought—”
“We’re okay,” Danielle says.
Nick, now upstairs, says, “Will I have school tomorrow?”
“Of course,” Danielle says. “There are snow days but no such thing as a tree day.”
They walk across the hall to look at the damage. The window is gone, broken glass all over the floor. A large tree limb extends through the window frame and drips rainwater onto the floor. Wind blows more rain into the room. The rocking chair is on its side, one of its rockers in two pieces beside it. The lights flicker again, and again they stay on.
*
Danielle watches Nick watch David. He wants to do everything David does, wants to be him. David picks up the large shards of glass, then sweeps the rest. Everyone else, he says, has to stay away. With a handsaw, like the one he uses at the Christmas tree farm every December, David cuts the tree limb into smaller pieces, then drops the pieces to the sidewalk below, making sure no one’s walking past. No one’s coming out on a Sunday night to replace a window, so he gets a tarp and tape from the basement and cuts the tarp into a square slightly larger than the window frame. Nick’s desperate to help, and so David lets him be in charge of taping the tarp, which David holds in place. Danielle holds sleeping Betsy, her robe closed to keep out the cold and damp.
*
Later, Nick wakes afraid after a bad dream he can’t remember. He walks slowly across the hall, tries not to creak the floor. He sits at the top of the stairs. On the wall beside the staircase he sees the reflection of flickering TV light. All in the Family ends—he knows the song even though he isn’t allowed to watch the show—and then . . . more music, the ABC Sunday Night Movie, which he’s allowed to watch only during the summer and if the movie’s appropriate for kids, but usually it isn’t. He wonders, as he always does when on the stairs listening to his parents watch TV, if they know he’s there.
*
“Do you think he fell asleep on the stairs?” Danielle whispers to David, and David says, “Probably.”
And then everything goes dark—the TV, the lamp on the end table beside the couch, the sconces in the dining room, the light at the bottom of the stairs.
They hear Nick trying to find his way, then Betsy crying. “I’m here,” Nick says in the dark. By memory he feels his way to Betsy’s room and to her bed, bangs his foot on her dresser, reaches for the sound of her crying, takes her hand. “Don’t worry,” he says. He leads her out of her room and into the hallway, where they wait in the dark.
A circle of light appears on the wall at the top of the stairs. It starts big and shrinks as the source of the light—the flashlight David’s holding—moves up the stairs and closer to its projection on the wall. Danielle has a flashlight too.
“You guys okay?” David says.
“Sure,” Nick says as if he’s never been afraid.
Danielle picks up Betsy and smells on her neck the bath they took. Betsy smells on her mother’s neck her father.
“Power’s out,” David says. “Not much we can do but wait, but it’s late anyway, so how about we call this day a day?”
“Can we have a sleepover?” Betsy says.
“Of course,” Danielle says. “You too, Nick.”
Nick’s old enough not to want to show how excited he is about not sleeping alone.
Betsy says, “Now we can all dream together.”
The temperature is supposed to drop into the thirties overnight, and there’s no heat, so they lay four blankets on the bed and get under them, David and Danielle on the ends, Betsy and Nick beside each other in the middle.
Betsy asks if the light’s going to come back on in the morning, and Nick says, “Even if not, the sun will come up.”
Betsy yawns, then closes her eyes. The dark beneath her eyelids is even darker than the dark everywhere else, but she makes sure one foot’s touching Nick.
“Can’t we go back to page one and do it all over again?” she says.
Danielle doesn’t know what Betsy means, but then she remembers this is a question Pooh asks near the end when saying good-bye to Christopher Robin.
Betsy tries to stay awake in the dark, but her eyes keep closing. She doesn’t want to fall asleep. She doesn’t want anyone else to fall asleep either.
“I want today again,” she says.
“Today happens only once,” Nick says.
Acknowledgments
Novels are not written alone—not by a long shot. Sure, a writer works alone for a time, often a long time, but eventually, when he’s done all that he knows to do, he loosens his grip on a book that no longer belongs to him and maybe never did in the first place. The novel becomes collaborative: kind, smart people show the writer that he can do more and better than he thought he could. The writer’s name may go on the cover, but other names belong besid
e his. Here are some of those names:
Many thanks to my agent, Kim Witherspoon, and her team at InkWell Management, especially William Callahan. Just as many thanks to my editor, Meg Storey, who knew better than I did what this novel wanted to be, and to everyone at Tin House. I’m grateful to Franklin & Marshall College for funding that supported the writing of this book. I couldn’t have written this novel without Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House, his masterpiece about the 1988 presidential campaign.
Last but never least, let me acknowledge not for the first time how much I owe to my wife, Nicole Michels, and to our son, Dangiso.
*
This novel contains brief quotes from the following: John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation (Vintage, 1990), Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New Directions, 1947), Maurice Sendak, Very Far Away (Harper & Brothers, 1957), Dr. Seuss, The Shape of Me and Other Stuff (Beginner Books, 1973), Ruth Krauss, The Cantilever Rainbow (Pantheon Books, 1965), and A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1926).
The jokes on page 155 are variations of jokes told by Jay Leno and Jon Stewart.
© ERIC FORBERGER
NICHOLAS MONTEMARANO is the author of two previous novels, The Book of Why (2013) and A Fine Place (2002), and a short story collection, If the Sky Falls (2005), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His short stories have been published in Esquire, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Pushcart Prize, and elsewhere, and have received special mention in The Best American Short Stories four times. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Montemarano grew up in Queens and now lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he is a professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College.
Copyright © 2017 Nicholas Montemarano
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Montemarano, Nicholas, 1970- author.
Title: The senator’s children / by Nicholas Montemarano.
Description: Portland, Oregon New York, New York : Tin House Books, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017010544 (print) | LCCN 2017013560 (ebook) | ISBN 9781941040805 | ISBN 9781941040799 (alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PS3613.O5484 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.O5484 S46 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010544
First US Edition 2017
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