The Senator's Children Read online

  Usually his body man and traveling chief of staff, Tim Swisher, ran with him, but today David wanted to be alone. That was the only thing he ever chewed Tim out about—when he needed to be alone. Someone was always following him, always hovering—lobbyists and party bosses and policy chiefs and media gurus and all the hired killers—and sometimes he thought, Enough already, give me some space, let me breathe. Poor Tim, he was the one David would bark at even when it was someone else crowding him. It was Tim’s job to clear space. It was his job to shield David. It was his job to know what David needed before he asked for it. It was his job to know David Christie better than David Christie knew himself. It was his job to know everything except what David didn’t want him to know. And if he happened to know something David didn’t want him to know, it was his job to pretend not to know it. He knew more than anyone, but no one could know more than David, who made sure that not quite everything came to him through Tim. That was fine with Tim; he trusted David. So if Tim heard David leave his hotel room earlier than usual that morning—Tim was almost certainly awake; he slept only a few hours a night yet was always sharp—he must have known not to open his door, he must have known that David wanted to be alone.

  It was too early to be hot, but David could feel it—it was going to be a scorcher of a day, ninety-something, maybe triple digits, record-breaking hot. And humid. Which David hated even more than heat. Humidity made him sweat like an Iowa pig—not that pigs actually sweat—and made him irritable, which he couldn’t afford to be, ever, because he had to smile and shake hands and pretend that every person he met was the most important person on the planet.

  Not even a mile into his run alongside the Des Moines River—a half-dozen diehards fishing off the bridge—and already he was tired and uncomfortable and angry with the day—with everything. He didn’t want to be running this morning, yet here he was. He didn’t want to be in Des Moines, yet here he was. He couldn’t remember why he was running for president except that someone told him he should, and that he could win, and then People magazine named him one of the “50 most beautiful people in the world,” and before he set one foot in the state, the polls said that 30 percent of Iowans recognized his face, if not his name, and that was good enough, and here he was—the goddamn state fair today. No, it was too late to turn back now. Once David was in, whatever it was, he didn’t like to lose. He was running. So he kept running.

  Normally he ran three or four loops, more if he felt good, but today he didn’t want the river and the men waiting for a nibble, half-asleep with their legs dangling over the water. His legs were burning and his lungs were burning and his eyes were burning from sweat and his shirt was sticking to his chest, and he said screw this. After one loop, soaked, he took off his shirt and ran downtown.

  A few blocks from the state capitol he saw some kid, probably a college student, taking down a Christie sign from a telephone pole and replacing it with a Kirkwood sign. David stopped running. As the kid was taping the sign, he must have sensed David behind him. He turned around.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes,” David said, “you can stop touching what belongs to me.”

  It didn’t register at first—the kid looked about to mouth off—but then he seemed to recognize David.

  “Put it back up,” David said.

  “Sorry I took down your sign,” the kid said when he was finished.

  “You’re sorry you got caught.”

  “Just doing my job.”

  “Okay, but you’re working for the wrong guy.” David’s face—his face on the poster—had a smudge of dirt on it, so he licked his finger and wiped it clean. “Listen,” David said, “when it’s down to me and Bush, I’d appreciate your vote. And if you come to your senses before then, give me a call.”

  David smiled and offered his hand, and the kid shook it, and David kept eye contact—he was good at that—and if Iowa had been a primary rather than a caucus, if this kid’s vote could have been private, David believed he could have won him over. He ran away into the humid August morning. He was angry with Iowa and the world and the last thing he wanted to do was eat fried food on a stick while listening to Garth Brooks.

  *

  A few hours later, that was exactly what he was doing. Deep-fried cheese on a stick, deep-fried hot dog on a stick, deep-fried pickle on a stick, deep-fried corndog on a stick. People kept handing David sticks, and he kept eating, and at some point he stopped asking what it was. Nothing hot on a stick could make him hotter than he already was, which was the hottest he’d ever been.

  How are you? Nice to see you. I’m David Christie, we could use your support. David Christie, nice to meet you, we could use your help. Hi, I’m David Christie. Hi, good to see you, we’d really like you to give us a chance. I keep saying we and us because it’s not about me, it’s about all of us who want to see things change. Hello, David Christie, nice to meet you. We’d love your support. Hi, I’m David. David, hello, nice to see you. David Christie, David Christie, David Christie, hello. I’d like to have the chance to earn your vote.

  He hated this. He preferred one-on-one, but Tim reminded him that the fair was all about see-me-touch-me. “They just want to shake your hand,” Tim said. “Actually, they just want to be able to say that they shook your hand, that you said hi, that they were close to you.”

  David Christie, nice to meet you. Thank you very much, appreciate that. I won’t disappoint you. That’s what I’m going to do when I’m president. David Christie, I’d like to earn your support. I’ll tell you the truth even if it’s something you may not want to hear. Hi, David Christie, I’m running for president of the United States. Nice to see you, thanks for coming out. I’m tired of two Americas, one for the haves, one for the have-nots, one for the insiders, one for the outsiders. We need one America. Hi there, nice to see you. Beautiful child. David Christie, appreciate your support.

  People kept coming at him, and he kept smiling and shaking hands, and he was starting to find a rhythm, he was starting to remember that he believed what he was saying. But the damn heat—he could hardly breathe. Men in bib overalls pushed massive gourds in wheelbarrows. Pigs grunted in their pens. David couldn’t avoid the smell of chickens and cows and manure. He was swept up a hill away from the fairgrounds but could still hear Garth Brooks. Someone handed David funnel cake and he got powdered sugar on his pants. He paused for a milk chug-a-lug and a grape-stomping contest and arm-wrestled a high school kid. Children wearing helmets and masks rode rodeo on sheep. A boy, maybe ten, shorts at his ankles, peed behind a bale of hay. And David thought, as he shook sweaty hands: Why are they alive when he’s not? Why are these people breathing and eating here in East Jesus when my son is gone?

  “Tim, get me some water, would you?”

  “You doing all right?”

  “I just need some water, okay?”

  Tim came back with a bottle of water, and David drank it. Then they continued up the hill, a small crowd following, to where gourds were being weighed.

  Halfway up the hill, David heard, “Help!”—a woman’s voice. When he turned around, he saw a woman standing above a boy—the same boy he’d seen peeing behind a bale of hay. The boy was shaking in the dirt as if possessed. A half-dozen people stood watching; they seemed afraid to touch him. David knelt in the dirt beside him and cradled his head. The boy’s jaw locked and spit flew out of his mouth and his eyes rolled back, and this was the first real thing David had experienced in weeks.

  A minute passed, a minute that seemed much longer, and the boy’s legs stopped jerking. His face relaxed. His mouth fell open.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” his mother said. “This has never happened before.”

  The boy seemed almost too calm, his mouth too slack. His eyes were open but empty. David put his ear to the boy’s mouth. He asked everyone to be quiet, and waited to feel the boy breathing. Nothing. He felt the neck for a pulse—nothing. He checked again, made sure, and then started CPR. The boy’
s mother said, “God, please,” just once, and then she was quiet, everyone was, as David breathed into the boy’s mouth and pressed his chest and breathed into his mouth again, and it was as if there were no one else in the world except him and this boy.

  The boy breathed so suddenly—a gasp while David’s mouth was touching his—that it scared David. He sat there, dirt on his pants, his shirt soaked with sweat, and cradled the boy’s head until paramedics arrived. Then he hugged the boy’s mother as she cried on his shoulder.

  NOVEMBER 1991

  Two months ago he couldn’t remember why he was running—he was hot and sweaty and old and some Kirkwood punk was ripping down his face from a pole—but then he breathed life back into a boy at the state fair and the boy breathed life into David’s campaign. Two photos—David cradling the boy’s head, about to start CPR, and David embracing the mother—appeared on the front page of the Des Moines Register and the Washington Post and the New York Times and most newspapers in the country. The bump was way more than a bump: it kept going and going, and now David was down by only single digits in Iowa and had pulled even in New Hampshire and in national polls. Kirkwood could hear him coming now, David thought. Tsongas and Clinton could hear him. Bush too.

  Some days he still wasn’t sure why he was running, but it was better not to think about it too much. He cared about the issues he’d built his campaign around—closing the increasing gap between wealthy and poor Americans; raising the level of honesty and transparency in government; recommitting to the importance of serving one’s country—but everyone knew, and now he knew, that running for president was a sadomasochistic affair. But after what happened with the boy, David decided: Fuck it, who cares, I’m not going to stop long enough to think about it, I’m going to wake up each day, most in Iowa, get in the car, and let Tim tell me where we’re going—diner, pizza place, flapjack festival—and what the other candidates are doing, what the press is saying, what happened in the world overnight, then get out of the car and smile and shake hands and answer questions and ask people how they’re doing and really pay attention and have fun.

  He went for a long run on a clear, cold morning two days before Thanksgiving. Only one man was out fishing in the Des Moines—a short, stocky, bearded man with a Cubs cap pulled down over his eyes and a hole in the back of his coat. The man could have been sleeping, but David paused his run to ask him if anything was biting (David had never been fishing in his life).

  Without looking at David, the man said, “Not yet.”

  David held out his hand and said, “My name is David Christie, and I’m running for president of the United States.”

  The man shook his hand. “I know who you are.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a chance.”

  “I like Kirkwood.”

  “I like him too,” David said. “Seems like a nice guy. But that doesn’t mean he should be president.”

  “Why should you?”

  “Because I’m not afraid.”

  “Everyone’s afraid of something.”

  “What I mean is, I’m not afraid of anyone—lobbyists and special interest groups and people who think they can throw their money around to get what they want.”

  The man spat into the water and wiggled his line. “Funny, you’re the first I ever heard say that.”

  “I mean it.”

  “And you’re the first I ever heard say that.”

  “That’s why I’m running. I want things to change.”

  The man lifted the brim of his hat and gave David a look.

  “I know, I know,” David said, “I’m the first you ever heard say that.”

  The man smiled and went back to his fishing. “What you did with that boy—even if you don’t win, you’ll always have that.”

  “I was happy for his mother.”

  “I lost a child years ago—my daughter.”

  “I’m very sorry,” David said. “I know what that feels like.”

  “Cherry pit,” he said. “I tried everything, I tried so hard I broke her ribs, but couldn’t get it up.”

  “I lost my son in an accident.”

  “We use that word, lost, but we’re never going to find them.”

  “No,” David said, “we’re not.”

  He thanked the man for his time, wished him luck fishing, then ran around the river. Flurries began to fall—the first snow of the season.

  *

  On a cold Friday night, the day after Thanksgiving, Danielle was in New York City, hours after having met with her oncologist. She looked at the young woman walking beside her and recognized the blue dress she was wearing—it used to be Danielle’s—but not, at first, the young woman: Betsy looked like a younger Danielle, and the dress only heightened this perception.

  “Take your pill.”

  “Later, okay?”

  “Why are you so stubborn?”

  “I’m not stubborn,” Danielle said. “I have cancer, and therefore I can have whatever I want, and what I want is to see this play without being loopy.”

  Betsy was right—she could be stubborn. When Danielle’s stomach cancer was diagnosed in September, David said he would end his campaign, and Betsy seemed to want this too, her parents in the same place, but Danielle said absolutely not. She meant it but was also aware that it was the selfless response and would be seen as such. Normally she didn’t care much how others saw her, but she was scared, and maybe being seen as brave would actually make her so. Betsy, a senior in high school, wanted to defer college for a year, and Danielle said the same to her—absolutely not—but Betsy fought her on it, fought harder than Danielle expected her to, it wasn’t just a gesture, and she grudgingly admired—and was moved by—her daughter’s unwillingness to budge. Danielle had said, “Let’s see where we are in the spring. A lot can happen between now and then.”

  David had bought three tickets for Six Degrees of Separation, a play Danielle had seen alone over a year ago when it was Off-Broadway. It was a tragicomedy, and Danielle had been considering a new course on this subject, and she’d wanted to see it again. David had wanted to see it too, but: Iowa. The play was nearing the end of its Broadway run. She’d loved it the first time she saw it, in a smaller theater—so small that the cast, when not onstage, sat in the front row. She hoped the director would keep that touch, which must have been born out of spatial restrictions but fit organically with a play that broke the fourth wall. Maybe she could offer an entire course on plays that broke the fourth wall. She stopped walking a few blocks from Lincoln Center, took out the hand-size spiral notebook she always brought with her to the theater, and made a note: new courses: tragicomedy, fourth wall.

  “You’re not going to take notes during the play, are you?” Betsy said.

  “Of course not.”

  Danielle flipped to the first pages, where she’d written the following as soon as Six Degrees ended and the lights came on the first time she saw it:

  Stockard Channing Stockard Channing Stockard Channing

  Tell them!

  Eureka in the bathtub.

  Whatever’s going on anywhere, I do not want to know. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.

  How do we keep the experience?

  It’s pained on two sides.

  She read this last line three times, once aloud—not realizing that she was spoiling the final line of the play for Betsy—before she noticed her mistake. She corrected it: It’s painted on two sides.

  She put the notebook back into her purse, and they continued to walk toward the theater.

  “I can tell you’re in pain, your lips are tight.”

  “I’m okay,” Danielle said.

  “Seriously, just take a pill.”

  “You look pretty.”

  “Don’t change the subject,” Betsy said.

  “Stunning, actually.”

  “Because I’ve lost weight.”

  “Not as much as I have.”

  “I’m determined to fatten you up.�
��

  Danielle winced, stopped walking, and grabbed her side.

  “That’s it—you’re taking one.”

  “I don’t need one.”

  “Obviously you do.”

  “Then I don’t want one.”

  “Take half.”

  Danielle forced a smile. “How much longer until you leave for college?”

  “I told you, I’m deferring.”

  “I told you, you’re not.”

  “Dad says it’s my decision.”

  “Mom says it’s not.”

  Danielle started to walk again, slowly, but Betsy stayed where she was. Danielle stopped and looked back, waited for Betsy to catch up.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Danielle said. “I take the pill, you agree not to defer.”

  “I don’t even understand you. It’s almost like you want to be in pain.”

  Danielle winced again, she doubled over this time, but before Betsy could say anything she waved her off and said, “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  What she wanted to say: “Yes, I want this pain. I don’t want to die, but I accept this pain, because I had four glasses of wine, and I was behind the wheel, and I have been waiting for this—call it karma, call it penance.”

  But she could never say that. That wouldn’t work in a play, she thought—a character saying that to another character. Maybe it could work if spoken directly to the audience—right through the fourth wall.

  Betsy hugged her mother, and as she did, she reached into her mother’s purse. She took out the pill bottle, opened it, shook one pill into her hand, and gave it to her mother.

  Danielle put the pill into her mouth.

  Betsy returned the bottle to her mother’s purse, and they walked the final block to the theater.