The Senator's Children Read online

  She didn’t have to go, her mother said, but Betsy wanted to. Such a strange feeling as she walked the three blocks to school: Nick was watching her. They had buried him the day before, she had placed a red rose on the casket, suspended over the hole, and yet she felt him now as if he were floating above her. She stopped around the corner from school and stared up at an almost cloudless sky: way up a bird glided across her field of vision. But as soon as she turned the corner and saw her school and a few of her classmates—they waved to her, then quickly looked away—as soon as she encountered this ordinariness, whatever presence of Nick she’d felt was gone. She wondered if her mother had been right: she should not have come to school, not today.

  The youngest children were not in uniform; they were witches and nurses and Care Bears; there was a Yoda, a Superman, a President Reagan. Betsy wore her uniform—plaid skirt, white blouse, burgundy sweater—so why then did she feel that she too was in costume? There had been a photo in that morning’s paper—Betsy holding her father’s hand as they left the funeral, her mother behind them, eyes cast down, the bruises on her face visible, a square white bandage over the stitches at her temple—and Betsy felt that in the photo she did not appear to be herself. It was perhaps the only photo of her about which she could say—though she would never actually say this—that she looked pretty. With her brown hair pulled back from her face and with the light makeup she had been permitted to wear, she seemed older—a teenager rather than a ten-year-old girl. She resembled her mother, she thought, her mother as she’d seen her in old photographs. Her mother, however, did not look like herself. Betsy had asked if they could put on their makeup together, but her mother had replied tonelessly and without looking at Betsy that she didn’t want any makeup. This made Betsy wonder if she too shouldn’t wear any, if there was something inappropriate about light blush and barely noticeable lip gloss on the day of your brother’s funeral. She felt guilty for whatever her mother was feeling; she listened for her every word and watched her every expression closely and observed her father doing the same. Just before leaving for the church, her mother checked her bandage in a mirror just as Betsy had checked her hair and her father had checked his tie.

  And so as Betsy walked into her classroom, she imagined that she was still in the costume she’d worn the day before—that it was permanent. Her brother’s death had made her older and prettier, and she knew things none of her classmates knew.

  Her teacher, Mrs. Murrow, hugged her in front of the class, and she felt a thrill knowing that everyone’s eyes were on her.

  But almost immediately after that, the day settled into its routine. It was Wednesday. If not for the construction paper pumpkins and bats bordering the blackboard, she might have forgotten that it was Halloween. It’s Wednesday, she thought over and over, but she’d never understood why it wasn’t pronounced Wed-nes-day. She and her friends liked to pronounce words phonetically, the way they seemed meant to be pronounced: Feb-ru-ary, dic-tio-nary. They pronounced silent letters: the k in knight, the p in psalm, the ea in beautiful. Just a silly thing they did to let others know that they were friends. It was just another Wed-nes-day—except it wasn’t, because all morning she kept catching—cat-ching—her classmates looking at her, and others would not look at her, and while they were taking a math quiz—one from which Betsy was exempt but which she insisted on taking—Mrs. Murrow laid her hand on Betsy’s back and asked if she was okay, and perhaps this question itself caused her not to be, or caused her to realize that she was not, and she put down her pencil and said, “I’ve finished my quiz. May I please go home now?”

  When her mother arrived to pick her up, Betsy was ashamed of the bruises, the bandage, the stitches, as if she were responsible for them. She rushed her mother outside before her friends could see.

  “I didn’t think you should go to school today,” her mother said.

  “I wanted to try,” Betsy said.

  As they walked home, Betsy noticed her mother worrying the bandage; she couldn’t tell if her mother was trying to get her fingernail under the adhesive border to peel it off or was making sure it was properly fastened.

  *

  It was much too big for her, Nick’s red football jersey, but Betsy liked having it on. She was slightly chunky—she’d heard her mother use that word to describe her—and it was nice to wear something that made her feel small. She used to feel small too whenever Nick hugged her or lifted her up. He used to sneak up on her from behind and squeeze her love handles, and she would cry out, startled, but then laugh. She didn’t like the phrase love handles. Love was fine, but handles made them seem more than what they were, which were curves, really, a little extra flesh around her waist. Beneath Nick’s jersey, which reached her knees, she had no curves that anyone could see.

  She lay curled up in bed, facing the window, waiting for night to darken her unlit room. On her nightstand she kept a black shortwave radio—a tenth-birthday gift from Nick. She’d asked for one because she was proficient in Spanish and had even started learning German. But what she’d ended up liking even more about the radio was that it kept her company at night and helped her fall asleep, especially when she listened to languages she didn’t know. She reached for it now and brought it into bed with her. Even the click it made when turned on she found comforting, and its red on-light, and her careful rotation of its round tuning dial, and the wonderful moment when a human voice from the other side of the world found its way across a sea of static to her ears.

  For a few minutes she listened to a Japanese woman who spoke with a girl-high pitch and soothing inflection. She wasn’t reading the news—there were too many long pauses and too much sympathy in her voice, that was what it sounded like to Betsy, a sincere offering of condolences—and Betsy wanted to know what the woman was actually saying.

  *

  The doorbell rang. Betsy must have fallen asleep. The Japanese woman was gone, replaced by a Japanese man who spoke too fast and sounded belligerent; she imagined the man speaking too close to her, gesticulating wildly. She turned the dial a few degrees until faintly, through static, she heard a boy’s voice. She sat up suddenly and pressed the radio to her ear. The boy was speaking English, she was pretty sure. His voice must have recently changed; it broke, then deepened again. She couldn’t make out any words. Then he faded away. The bell rang again, and again, and so she got up to answer the door.

  When she reached the top of the stairs, she saw her mother sitting on the bottom step, her back to Betsy. She was a few feet from the front door but made no move to answer it. Betsy walked down the stairs toward her mother. She could hear the voices of children on the other side of the door; she imagined them in costumes, holding bags filled with candy. “The porch light is on,” she heard a woman say.

  It was unlike Betsy, this gesture, but there was something about the curve of her mother’s spine, how she sat slouched on the bottom step wearing a thin white cardigan. Betsy sat behind her mother and wrapped her arms around her.

  Her mother jumped up as if she’d seen a ghost. Betsy was frightened now too—and confused.

  “Take that off.”

  Betsy didn’t understand.

  And then she did, and she started to cry.

  Her father must have heard; he came to the stairs, his hair mussed as if he too had been sleeping. It was only seven o’clock.

  “Who was at the door?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Betsy said through tears.

  “What happened?” her father said.

  “I need her to take that off,” her mother said.

  “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “Of course not,” her father said.

  The bell rang again. Her father looked through the eyehole and then turned off the porch light. He took her mother into the living room. Betsy stayed where she was and listened to them whisper.

  “The jersey, the sleeves when she hugged me, it frightened me.”

  “It’s okay now.”

  “
No, it’s not.”

  “She lost her brother.”

  “I can’t look at that jersey.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

  “Okay, but lower your voice.”

  “Betsy,” her mother called, “stop listening and go upstairs.”

  “Lower your voice, please,” her father said.

  Betsy went back to her room. She wouldn’t take it off, she decided. As long as her mother didn’t have to see it—that was all that mattered. She kneeled by her window and looked out at the trick-or-treaters walking past her darkened house to the next porch, which was lit, and more children came and walked past, and more, and then fewer, and soon Delancey Place was quiet.

  *

  In the middle of the night, David heard her crying. He got out of bed, careful not to wake Danielle, and went to her room. She was whimpering in her sleep; he hadn’t heard her do that in years. He waited for it to stop, and when it didn’t, he turned down her covers, lifted her, and carried her to his room. She was still wearing Nick’s jersey, and he considered pulling it over her head but decided that was unnecessary. He laid her in the middle of the bed, beside Danielle, and then he got in and pulled up the covers. Neither Betsy nor Danielle had woken. But now he was wide awake, and as peaceful as it felt to have Betsy in bed beside him, maybe even because of how nice it felt, the agony of yesterday—the casket lowered into the hole, eventually having to walk away, to go home—returned to him, and there was nothing to do except clench and unclench his fists under the covers and listen to his daughter’s breathing.

  Three hours later, in darkness, Danielle gone from bed, David woke with his fists still clenched, his fingers sore.

  NOVEMBER 2, 1984

  David knew there was a fine line between sincerity and show. Actually, he thought, they often overlapped. He’d had to negotiate the relationship between the two during the campaign and, before that, as a trial lawyer. Both jobs required sincerity as well as exaggeration. How things were and how others perceived them. Genuine emotions and manufactured emotions. Most of his clients had been injured in car accidents, many caused by drunk driving, injuries ranging from whiplash to paralysis. Some clients were the families of those killed, survivors suing for damages. As an attorney, he understood how to put a number on such loss, some figure the family tried to believe could compensate for even a fraction of their pain. It was never enough, but there was a number. When he spoke about a family’s grief, he did feel it—not exactly what they felt, but something—and he never doubted that the work he did on behalf of his clients was valuable. He believed that he was good at what he did at least in part because he could sufficiently imagine the pain of a man who would never walk again or have sex with his wife again, or the sorrow of a mother who’d had to bury her child. He felt for them and channeled his emotions into his work, even before the accident that took Nick. But now he knew that there really was no number.

  David thought about sincerity and show, real emotions and manufactured ones, as he stood beside Betsy on the sideline of Nick’s high school football field, only a few miles from where the accident had taken place. It was Friday night, four days before the election.

  Danielle had not come; she couldn’t, she said.

  The team had retired Nick’s number ten and planned to keep his locker as it was: his helmet, his cleats, his white home jersey hanging from a hook. When the coach showed David and Betsy the locker—the team was already on the field, warming up—David noticed on a shelf behind the jersey a bottle of shampoo and a spray can of deodorant, and while he could imagine the jersey and helmet and cleats in the locker forever, he did not want to return here years from now and see the deodorant and shampoo bottle, its cap missing. Without asking the coach if it was all right, David removed the shampoo and deodorant and put them in the trash.

  David put his hand over his heart as the national anthem played through the stadium’s speakers, and when the song ended, he expected the announcer to ask for a moment of silence.

  But the teams took the field and the visiting team kicked off and the kick returner on Nick’s team—David still thought of the team as Nick’s—ran the ball out to the thirty-yard line. The offense ran onto the field, and David was confused. Why were he and Betsy standing there on the sideline? Were they expected to watch the entire game? And then he noticed that while the players on both teams were in their positions, the linemen in their stances, ready for the snap, no one stood behind center. No player moved. The stadium was silent. Thirty seconds passed, a minute, the silence went on—and yes, David thought, such gestures mattered. And this kind of silence, rather than the kind he had expected, allowed him to see Nick’s physical absence, to feel it, in a way he might not have otherwise. There was no quarterback.

  The referee blew his whistle and the center stood and ran the ball to the sideline and gave it to David. Then he gave Betsy Nick’s captain’s armband. David shook the boy’s hand, and then the game resumed with a new starting quarterback.

  NOVEMBER 6, 1984

  David voted early in the morning but wanted nothing to do with election night. So he made a plan. He’d arranged things with Penn Public Safety. He and Danielle were alums, after all, and he was running for the Senate, at least for a few more hours. An officer met him in the parking lot, walked him to the stadium, and unlocked the gate. David led Danielle and Betsy to the fifty-yard line of Franklin Field, where he unrolled a queen-size sleeping bag and laid a blanket beside it on the cold grass. He’d made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and brought a thermos of hot tea, and they sat on the blanket and ate dinner while David told Betsy—he’d told her many times before—the story of how he and Danielle had snuck onto this same field twenty-five years earlier and slept in a sleeping bag, and how people used to say that Danielle looked like Jackie O, and how David had to woo Danielle because he’d dropped Modern Drama, and Danielle finally added a few details (“I liked your father, he had nice hair and a great smile, but I just wasn’t sure about him”), and David could see that Betsy enjoyed hearing this story again.

  David checked his pocket not for the first time, feeling for his concession speech, which he’d folded into a square the size of the bandage on Danielle’s face. The bandage, he noticed, had come loose on two sides and looked about to fall off. Normally he might have reached over and pressed it back on, but nothing was normal, he remembered, and he was afraid to touch Danielle.

  He was surprised when Betsy did. But rather than reaffix it, she ripped it off, exposing the stitches. Danielle said nothing. She didn’t scold Betsy, as David expected her to. Her eyes filled, but she blinked back the tears. She touched the wound, running her hand along the stitches.

  It started to snow lightly, and the tea was gone, and Betsy said her hands were cold, and so they all got into the sleeping bag, Betsy in the middle. It was a tight fit for three, but warm. Danielle lay with her arms at her sides. They let snow fall on their faces, Betsy opening her mouth to taste it. David was glad to be here as the polls closed, the field now coated with the thinnest blanket of snow. He reached for Danielle’s hand and held it, and felt no pressure in return, but he would not let go no matter if she never returned his gesture.

  But then he felt her hand squeeze his. He wrapped his arm around Betsy, and Danielle did the same, and he thought: For now, this is enough. We are here. We are still here. Our daughter is. She needs us.

  *

  When they got home, an hour after the polls had closed, the phone was ringing. It was Mike Bennett, David’s campaign manager.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I told you.”

  “You said you’d be home before the polls closed.”

  “We fell asleep.”

  “You have a speech to give.”

  “I decided I’m going to call Groff to congratulate him, and that’s that. Who came up with the idea for a concession speech anyway? Hold on,” David said. He laid the phone’s receiver on the kit
chen counter, took the square of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, held it near the receiver, and tore it into pieces. He picked up the phone. “Did you hear that? That was my concession speech.”

  “You don’t need to give one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Congratulations, David.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Senator David Christie,” Mike said. “How does that sound?”

  “It sounds—I don’t know,” David said.

  “It sounds great,” Mike said.

  “How close was it?”

  “As close as it gets.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Things turned the past two weeks.”

  After a pause, during which David couldn’t think of what to say, Mike said, “A car will pick you up in twenty minutes.”

  When David hung up the phone, he walked down the hallway toward his room. He stopped outside Betsy’s room; he heard a German man’s voice coming from inside—her shortwave radio, he realized. His bedroom door was closed too. He could hear Danielle opening and closing drawers, probably getting changed for bed. She had been going to bed hours earlier than usual and waking when it was still dark. He wasn’t sure how to tell her what had happened or how it had happened—sympathy votes, he assumed. He would have to ask her to put on a dress, and to help Betsy put one on, and tell them that a car would be here soon to take them down to Old City, where he would say what? There wasn’t anything he wanted to talk about other than Nick. And his family. Why couldn’t he simply do that? Congratulate Senator Groff on his twelve years of service in the Senate and a well-run campaign, thank his staff, speak honestly about the past two weeks, and reassure Pennsylvanians that come January he would be ready—he did not know if this was true—to serve their interests in Washington. A short speech. No sentimental clichés about winning this for Nick. Just the truth: that he missed his son, and that this was bittersweet.

  He wasn’t ready to walk into the bedroom; he wasn’t ready to tell Danielle, or anyone. He felt a wave of heat on his face, but when he touched his forehead, it was cold and clammy. He went into the bathroom and splashed his face with cold water. Light-headed, he cupped his hands together and let them fill with water. As he drank from his hands, he started to feel better, but when he raised his head, he felt much worse. He hurried to the toilet, kneeled on the floor, and got sick.