The Summer House

by Jean Stone

  Arrived safely on the S.S. Steamship Authority, Danny typed now, watching each letter pop erratically onto the screen, wondering why a boy with 1548 on his SATs had never mastered the art of typing. Subject in question appears normal. Is presently sitting on back porch drinking iced tea, probably trying to ignore baby-sitters. More later. Over and out.

  He had already decided he was not going to share with rogerdodger the fact that his mother had wept silently on the ferry, that she had held his hand when they were disembarking or that when safely out of earshot of Moe and Curly (Danny’s nicknames for the Secret Service “baby-sitters” assigned to rob them of their last bit of privacy) and Clay, of course, she had asked how Danny would feel if they lost the election and if he’d blame her. He did not share these things with his uncle because he felt it was none of Uncle Roger’s damn business.

  Besides, Danny wouldn’t have minded at all if “they” lost the election. Maybe then there would be a chance for them to be together as some kind of family, to actually have time to do things together—things that had not been organized by a team of spin doctors, things beyond listening to speeches and posing for pictures.

  London, for example. Danny had always wanted to go there, to see for himself the places he’d seen so often on television and in films—Big Ben and the Tower and Madame Tussaud’s—maybe to find the cemetery plot of the last Adams to die there before their descendants bailed out for America. It seemed a bit preposterous that they’d never been. Then again, Adams/Barton family vacations had always consisted of summers on the Vineyard in this damp, gray-shingled old house, which for some stupid reason every one of them loved, where Dad and Gramps conducted politics in polo shirts instead of suits.

  He wondered how much would change now that Gramps was out of the picture. For the first time, Danny wondered if his father really had the stuff to be president without the old man directing his every move. And if maybe—just maybe—his father was scared.

  There had been a fleeting look in the eyes of the candidate after the funeral, a stare into space, a moment of blankness, then a blink back to reality and all that it meant. It had been just a brief look, but Danny had seen it, in the way his senses had grown more acute since his injury, as if the death of his legs had resulted in the birth of his eyes. It was a kind of “knowing” that he didn’t always find comforting.

  Danny shut off the computer, wheeled himself to the window, and looked onto the back porch where the subject of his e-mail indeed appeared normal. He folded his hands in his lap and decided that this wasn’t so bad: at least he and his mother would have some time alone, at least he didn’t have to face those god-awful cameras for a while.

  The wheelchair whirred again as he rolled over to the French doors. He sat there a moment, surveying the porch. Moe and Curly (“Please call them Keith and Joe,” his mother had asked)—so, all right, Keith and Joe—were stationed at the wicker table playing chess; Clay sat nearby wearing oversized headsets, tapping his foot, and reading a book on the occult. Closer inspection of his mother’s iced tea revealed that the ice had melted long ago and that she’d probably not had more than one sip. Danny watched as she stood up, gazed out at the sea, then descended the steps toward the path to the dunes, her long legs moving mechanically, her head downcast, looking very much like any unhappy woman, not the one destined to become the next First Lady of America.

  Just an ordinary day, rogerdodger, Danny thought with chagrin. Put that in your dot-com and smoke it.

  She marveled at how the human body could shut down into a state of numbness, at how long one could sit or walk and think or not think, at how the world could turn or not turn and that it was possible to fully, completely, totally not care. Liz shoved her hands into the pockets of her cutoffs and stared at the sand that sifted through her toes.

  It was good to have come. It was good to be in her old shorts, to be wrapped in one of Michael’s old T-shirts from Menemsha Blues, to be barefoot. The Vineyard house had always seemed like home to Liz—their summertime, carefree home, not snarled with the time schedules of the city. Life was always so busy during the school years, so filled with the scramble of comings and goings; the only time Liz felt settled was here, on the island, where the cry of the gulls was as familiar as the laughter of her children, where the warmth of the sand was as snug as a thick down comforter fluffed by the sun.

  She was glad they had taken the ferry. It had been years since they’d had the time: usually the vehicles were brought over by “employees” of Michael’s or Father’s, while Liz, Michael, and the kids were whisked from one place to another in somebody’s borrowed jet.

  Following the path, she stopped and looked at the clusters of Queen Anne’s lace. They were the same white, intricately webbed blossoms that had adorned her wedding, along with plump pink and lavender hydrangeas. They had been flowers suitable for a wedding between the Adamses and the Bartons, the Yankee bloodlines maintained, the royal road paved to the White House.

  For some reason she thought of her mother now, how beautifully she’d been dressed at the wedding in powder blue chiffon and Great-grandmother’s pearls. For that one day, Mother had put aside the pain of Daniel’s death long enough for a champagne toast, long enough for a smile.

  It had pleased Liz that the wedding had made Mother happy, if only for that one day.

  She and Michael had married four years after Daniel was killed. Liz was barely twenty and Michael twenty-six, but there had seemed no sense in waiting. The plans had been made, the future was set, the families were ecstatic.

  So was Liz. Michael had been there at Daniel’s funeral. Indeed, Michael had been there ever since, sometimes in closed-door meetings in Father’s study, sometimes—though not often enough in recent years—walking the cobblestone streets of Back Bay with Liz, holding her hand, talking of life, of the world, of the future.

  It had been, and still was, a good marriage, though not without compromise (as if any could be), not without frustration. Overall contentment was how Liz thought of their partnership, which like most things, she owed to Will Adams. Because Will had wanted their marriage. Will had expected it to succeed.

  She closed her eyes and let the sun sink into her skin now, ignoring the footsteps behind her, footsteps that belonged to the Secret Service agents Keith and Joe.

  “It’s for your own good,” Roger had told her when she protested having them follow her to the Vineyard, when she’d said she resented this intrusion into her own time, her own hurting time.

  “You’d better get used to them,” Michael had added, with a wink that reminded her that Keith and Joe, or others just like them, might follow her the rest of her life.

  She knew it was for her own good. She knew that every presidential candidate since Bobby Kennedy was automatically assigned a Secret Service contingent. But Liz did not think she’d ever get used to their constant presence. It made all her visible years as a governor’s wife seem private by comparison.

  She walked across the sand. At least she was thinking again. At least she was focusing on something other than the image of Father lying gray on the floor, the commotion of Michael fruitlessly administering CPR, the EMTs strapping Father to the gurney and covering him with the sheet, while Michael directed them so capably.

  “You’re not afraid of anything,” Liz had once commented the summer after Daniel was killed, when they were so young, when they were walking along this same beach, groping with words and feelings, trying to see how—if—each of them fit with the other.

  Michael had smiled. “Of course I’m afraid. I’m afraid of a few things.”

  “Like what?” Liz persisted. “Snakes?”

  Michael laughed. “No. Not snakes.”

  “Bats?”

  He shook his head.

  “Skunks? No,” Liz answered herself, “you weren’t afraid that time when Daniel was twirling the skunk.”

  They both became quiet, the mention of Daniel’s name still awkward on their lips, in their hear
ts.

  “I was afraid,” Michael said finally. “But I didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Especially Daniel,” Liz whispered tentatively.

  “And you,” he added. “I didn’t want you to think I was less brave than your brother.”

  The way his voice cracked, the way he turned his face slightly from hers, had opened her heart and let him come in. Quietly, Liz took his hand. Should she tell him that she would never compare him with Daniel? Afraid to say the wrong thing, she kept silent.

  They walked a few more steps, then Michael said, “I miss him so much, Liz. You think I am afraid of nothing, but sometimes I am afraid of that. I’m afraid of the fact that Daniel will never come back, and he’ll never know how much his friendship meant to me.”

  It must have been then that Liz decided to marry Michael, to forgo the kind of schoolgirl passion she’d felt with Josh Miller for someone more acceptable, something much safer, someone whose hand felt very strong as it rested in hers.

  As the path to the cove came into her sight now, Liz decided to turn back. She was not ready to relive too much of her life—not today, anyway.

  Heading back to the house, she passed the agents and gave them a quick smile. Then she saw in the distance the wheelchair on the porch—the wheelchair that was unable to traverse the sand well enough to get down to the beach. The eyes of the young man sitting there seemed fixed in her direction. They were eyes that belonged to the one person in the world who would depend on her forever, the one person for whom she must pull herself from this depression.

  Liz raised an arm and waved at her son. She remembered it was peach season on the Vineyard. Peach pie had always been Danny’s favorite. As it had been of his Uncle Daniel before him.

  Chapter 15

  “I don’t want to go,” Danny said to his mother.

  “I’m not asking you to drive,” Liz replied, climbing the stairs up to the porch. She did not know why Danny refused to drive the van they had bought him, the one fully equipped for him, offering him freedom from a world of confinement. She often wondered if she would ever know her son again, if he would ever know himself. “Just come with me. You can’t sit here all day watching Keith and Joe play checkers.”

  “Chess. They play chess. And I don’t watch them all day; I go on the Internet.”

  Liz sighed. She did not know how far to let him go, when or how to force him back to society and life. She did not know where those boundaries lay and how far beyond them she should intrude. Danny, after all, was not like her other children; he never had been. He was the brightest, the most charismatic and energetic. He had also been the most challenging to raise, always inquisitive, always wondering how things worked and why. But his energy seemed depleted now, and if his mind was still sharp, he rarely let Liz see that. Perhaps he, too, had shut down into that limbolike state of disinterest. The difference was, Liz knew that, one way or another, she would feel again, she would one day—probably soon—rejoin the world. For Danny, the outcome was less certain.

  “Clay!” she shouted to the far end of the porch. “Talk some sense into your patient.” She was trying to act light-hearted, trying, as the psychiatrists had suggested, to seem normal and positive and not devastated for her child and his anguish. The trying was easy some times more than others.

  “It’s not Clay’s job to talk sense into me, Mom,” Danny answered for his nurse. “He’s here to wipe me and dipe me and put me to bed, not to make me part of your human race.”

  Exasperation formed a small knot in her chest. It seemed that if Danny couldn’t be civil to the world, he could at least be decent to Clay, whose patience with her son seemed to outweigh his salary.

  “Okay,” she relented, “but I’m going to make peach pie and you’re going to eat it.”

  “You win, Mom,” Danny replied, his words riding the wave of disinterest again.

  Liz went into the house and grabbed the car keys from the wall hook. She didn’t feel as if she’d won anything at all.

  “You can’t go in,” Joe said to Liz as she pulled into the parking lot of the Chilmark General Store. It was the fourth time he’d said it since he’d jumped into the van as she was pulling out of the driveway. He’d threatened to force her to turn around. “The store could be unsafe,” he repeated now. “It hasn’t been cleared.”

  Liz turned off the ignition and looked over the rocking chairs that lined the front porch of the store, the hanging pots plump with geraniums, the people who lazed there munching sandwiches from the deli or walking in and out of the screen doors with the ease of a long summer day. She noticed the wheelchair ramp. Handicapped accessible, she thought, wishing it hadn’t become second nature for her to notice these things.

  “I have been coming to this store since before you were born.” Of the two agents, Liz preferred Keith: he was close to fifty, soft-spoken, and calm. Joe was not much older than Danny, but brimmed with good health and vivacity. “Believe me,” she bristled, “when I tell you the Chilmark General Store is safe.”

  Joe placed his healthy, young hand on her arm. “I can’t let you go in alone.”

  “Please,” she said, jerking open her door. “Don’t be ridiculous. There are no evils lurking between the peaches and the corn on the cob.” She got out of the van, slammed the door harder than necessary, and marched up the wide wooden stairs. She tried to block out the sound of the passenger door opening, then closing, and the feel—that damned pervasive feel—of footsteps behind her climbing up her heels. She put a hand to her forehead. Why was she being so uncharacteristically bitchy? She could not seem to help herself.

  Liz opened the screen door and stepped inside, holding the door until Joe caught up.

  She made her way to the back of the store, which she knew better than the large supermarkets in Boston, where she rarely went, but sent the cook. On the Vineyard, however, Liz had always been able to be herself, the keeper of her own kitchen, her own domain. She took a paper bag, then began examining the peaches, tucking the best into her bag, only the firmest—“not too ripe,” Mother had instructed so many years ago.

  Not too ripe.

  Liz stared at a peach in her hand, struck by the realization that both her parents were dead, that she was a forty-four-year-old orphan now.

  It reminded her of Christmastime when she was a child, when Will had packed his four children into the station wagon and driven them to the orphanage on the north end of the city. There they distributed dolls, toys, and games to the poor orphans and shared candy-cane cookies that Cook helped them bake. The next day their pictures always appeared in the newspaper, children of privilege sharing with the less fortunate.

  Liz did not know how old she had been when she began to suspect that Father had them do this for the image it created and not for the good of the motherless and fatherless orphans.

  Her hand closed over the peach. She felt the cords in her neck grow taut.

  Enough, she said to herself, quickly dropping the fruit into the bag, and heading for the checkout. It was then that she noticed Joe speaking with someone … a young man as polished as himself, a man with a similar U.S. Marines buzz cut and nondescript clothes. Liz kept moving, hoping the agent was not hassling him, wasn’t going to make a scene, right here in the Chilmark General Store where she had practically grown up.

  She ducked down an aisle. Huddling against a shelf of soup cans, she heard Joe say, “No shit. You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Did they know each other? Joe laughed, but Liz could not make out the next words or who had spoken them. It didn’t matter. Obviously it was just a friendly encounter and Liz was being paranoid.

  She headed back to the cash register and paid for the peaches.

  It was not until they were both back in the van that Joe grinned and said, “Unbelievable, I ran into an old friend in there. Rob Morrison. I knew him in Washington. We trained together.”

  Liz thought for a moment, then carefully steered the van out onto the main road, sensing s
omething discomforting, almost foreboding. “He’s with the Secret Service, too?” she asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” Joe replied. “Guess he’ll be on the Vineyard for a few days. He’s assigned to your husband’s competitor.”

  Liz did not have to ask who he meant. Everyone in the world certainly knew by now that the candidate of the opposite political party also had ties to this island.

  She steadied the wheel in her hands and struggled to keep her eyes on the road, wondering why Josh had chosen now to come to the Vineyard.

  “Josh Miller is coming to the island,” Danny announced from his perch in front of the television, where he half watched the evening news. There were rattling sounds from the kitchen. He looked toward the room but did not get a response. He turned back to the TV.

  “Sources close to the campaign tell us that Mr. Miller will retreat to his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard with his strategists in an attempt to find a way to bridge the seesawing gap in the polls, now at eight points between him and Michael Barton,” the talking head at the anchor desk reported.

  “Dad’s only leading by eight points,” Danny called out, but still his mother did not reply, as if she did not remember—or care—that right after Gramps died the difference had expanded from six points to twelve, and that now it had dropped back to eight. He also knew that an eight-point lead was not big enough to relax.

  He stared at the television wondering who the people were who were polled, and why that was supposed to indicate how the whole country felt. It was like during that entire Clinton-Monica thing. At one point the polls said that, despite the scandal, his favorability rating was at something like seventy-two percent. But three-quarters of the people Danny associated with had not agreed.

  Danny reached down and scratched the top of his leg, not because he could feel any kind of an itch, but because it was there. He wondered what life was like for the rest of humanity who did not have to deal with polls or men with dark hair and penetratingly black eyes, like the man on the screen in front of him now, the man whom thirty-eight percent of the people (with sixteen percent still undecided) preferred over his father.