The Senator's Children Read online

  It was only later, after sunset, the tree up but not yet decorated, that her mother noticed. Betsy could tell by her face that something was wrong. “Oh no,” she said. “David.” She was grabbing her left hand with her right as if maybe she had stuck herself with a hook.

  “My ring,” she said.

  When Betsy was much younger, she’d been obsessed with her mother’s ring, a platinum band with her parents’ initials and their wedding date engraved on the inside. She kept asking why her mother wore the ring, why her father had given it to her, what it meant to be married, could she marry her father someday, could she marry her mother. Betsy would ask to try it on, and her mother would let her, and every time she’d say, “It’s so strange not to have it on my finger.” Her mother wouldn’t let Betsy wear it long and would never let it out of her sight.

  She had lost weight, and it was cold, and her skin was probably dry, and it must have slipped off.

  “Maybe it’s in the car,” her father said.

  “I don’t think I had it then.”

  “Let me check.”

  “It won’t be there,” her mother said, and then she left the room. She didn’t cry often, but when she did, she didn’t like anyone to see.

  “If it isn’t in the car, I’ll drive back to the tree farm,” her father said.

  “But it’s Christmas Eve,” Betsy said.

  “You two can decorate the tree without me.”

  *

  As David left the house, he almost stepped on a bird. He saw it at the last moment, a large, obviously dead bird at the bottom of the stoop. Some kind of hawk, which didn’t make sense on Delancey Place. What also didn’t make sense, not that he was a bird expert, was that it didn’t have any wounds. It didn’t look as if a cat had mauled it. Its body was clean. You wouldn’t know anything was wrong with it except that it was so still and its talons were clenched in a weird way. He’d seen a few dead birds before, but this was the biggest he’d ever seen.

  David had a bad feeling about the bird. He remembered a client he’d had years earlier when he was practicing law. They were in his office, and a bird flew into the window, a loud thud that scared both of them out of their chairs. The man ran to the window.

  “Thank God,” the man said.

  “For what?”

  “It flew away,” he said. “A dead bird is very bad.”

  “Bad for the bird.”

  “For us,” the man said. “If a bird flies into your window and dies—very bad. If you find a dead bird on your property—also very bad.”

  David wasn’t sure what to do with the bird. He didn’t want to leave it there, but he also didn’t want to touch it. He found a long stick by the curb and nudged the bird to make sure. It was stiff, and heavier than David had imagined it would be. He got two bags and the snow shovel. He held his breath and shimmied the shovel under the bird, then with one hand lifted it while holding a trash bag open with the other. The bird didn’t go in cleanly. David had to open the bag wider and reposition the bird on the shovel and push it in. Then he put the bag with the bird into the other bag, tied it, and put the bags into the trash can in the alley behind the house.

  *

  After an hour at the tree farm, David was sure he wasn’t going to find the ring. The owner said he could keep looking, but it was Christmas Eve, just before closing, and it didn’t seem right to keep him from his family. David spent fifteen more minutes taking baby steps around where he’d cut down the tree.

  He thanked the owner and drove home. He scanned for Christmas music on the radio, and there was plenty, but the same songs he would have been happy to hear a few hours earlier now depressed him. So he turned off the radio.

  When he arrived home, he told Danielle how sorry he was.

  She said, “It’s okay, you tried.”

  “I feel awful.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Let me feel awful.”

  “David, it’s all right.”

  He hugged her and kept telling her he was sorry; he wanted to say more.

  “It’s my fault anyway,” she said.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  Which was what he’d said to her seven years earlier, after the accident.

  FEBRUARY 1992

  As soon as Betsy turned the corner, her stomach went nervous, but only when she took in the specifics—news vans blocking the street, lights and cameras in front of the house—did she make a connection between the commotion and her father.

  It could have had something to do with Iowa, which he’d won four days earlier, or with New Hampshire, four days away, but somehow she understood that this could not have been about anything good.

  Maybe he’d said something he shouldn’t have, but to garner this kind of attention he would have had to say something truly terrible or stupid, and it wasn’t like him to say terrible or stupid things, he was careful, he knew how to shut up and let others say terrible or stupid things, like how when they used to play Ping-Pong, Betsy and Nick versus Dad, he drove them crazy with his flawless defensive game, his laser focus on returning, not one attempt at a winner, until one of them, usually Betsy, made an unforced error. He was the same way during the campaign.

  Betsy thought: Car accident, plane crash, assassination.

  She walked faster, and as she got closer, about halfway down the street, she saw two cameramen laughing, maybe some crack one had made to the other, and she guessed that no one would be joking, not in front of their home, had her father been hurt.

  It was bitter cold and windy and she hadn’t worn gloves, and was carrying a bag, and her hands were freezing, and she really wanted to be home and warm. In the bag was a box, and in the box was a tie she’d bought for her father at Brooks Brothers—rather, a tie she’d bought to be from her mother to her father. She always bought him ties, they both did, always blue, for every occasion—birthday, Christmas, Father’s Day, anniversary, winning Iowa. This one was for Valentine’s Day.

  She closed her eyes and waited, imagining that when she opened them, the cameras and reporters would be gone.

  And then there it was—the light beneath her eyelids, and with it, the Nick-feeling. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this. It never showed up when she expected it or looked for it. She had lain in bed on the night of the Iowa caucuses and closed her eyes and tried to connect with Nick, looked for that light she wasn’t even sure was real, but she couldn’t sense him.

  She could feel him now, could feel something, and it told her to stay away. She opened her eyes: they were all still in front of the house. She walked around the block to the alley behind the house and snuck in through the back.

  She found her mother hiding in the tub. Her mother was fully dressed—jeans, a light blue sweater, wool socks.

  “Has Dad been hurt?”

  Her mother shook her head no.

  That was the beginning and end of their conversation. That was all Betsy wanted to know. As long as her father wasn’t hurt, they could handle whatever this was about.

  She could have turned on the TV, could have gotten in the tub with her mother and closed the curtain, could have snuck out the back of the house and taken her mother with her, but somehow she knew what to do and had the bravery to do it: she walked out the front door, still carrying the tie, and faced the cameras.

  They charged the stoop. But, as if realizing it was just David Christie’s daughter, not even old enough to vote, they paused.

  But then one reporter asked her, and then they were all asking, what her reaction was to the news, the reports, the allegations, the photo, had she known, had her mother known, was it true, what did she know, how did she feel?

  She knew to say nothing, what her father was so good at—let them talk and talk and make themselves look bad. She stood there stone-still. “Just a girl,” she imagined someone might say. “Leave her alone. As if her mother having cancer isn’t enough.”

  Betsy used the same tactic when her father came home that ni
ght. By then he had made three denials—in New Hampshire, upon his arrival in Philadelphia, and in front of his home—simple and quick.

  Nothing but tabloid trash.

  I love only my wife.

  I’m determined to focus on the issues important to our country.

  When he came inside, Betsy stared at him, and kept staring, until her father looked down.

  And so without a word spoken between them, she knew.

  *

  Danielle and Betsy sat on the couch. David sat on a chair across from them, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. He was wearing a dark gray suit but no tie.

  He had been in politics too long by then, and the politician in him had spread like her cancer, Danielle thought. She didn’t recognize him. He probably saw this moment—telling the truth to his wife and daughter—as one that could be spun, as if he were trying to maintain strong family favorables.

  He said: poor judgment, terrible mistake, foolish behavior.

  “Save that language for them,” Danielle said. “We’re not them.”

  David looked down like a boy ashamed.

  She asked who, and he said, “Nobody,” and she said, “Who is she?” and Betsy put her hands over her ears, and David said, “She’s nobody,” and for the first time Danielle raised her voice and said, “Everybody isn’t standing in the cold outside our home because of nobody.”

  “Please stop,” Betsy said. “Please, please, please.”

  “I made a mistake,” David said.

  “David,” Danielle said. She had an urge to repeat his name over and over as if to say: “David, it’s you. Did you forget who you are?”

  “David,” she said again. She had no other words.

  “Forget what’s outside,” he said. “Forget the campaign.”

  The phone rang. Betsy got up, walked calmly across the room, picked up the receiver, and then put it back into its cradle.

  Immediately the phone rang again. She unplugged it, then left the room.

  “So stupid,” David said.

  “I don’t want to hear another word,” Danielle said.

  “So stupid.”

  “Stop,” Danielle said. “I can’t feel sorry for you.”

  Except she did. She wished she didn’t, but she did. She knew what it was like to make a terrible mistake.

  *

  But four days later, when David finished third in New Hampshire, she no longer felt sorry, and five days after that, when he finished fifth in Maine, she didn’t feel sorry, and the day after that, when he suspended his campaign, she didn’t feel the least bit sorry, and now that the campaign was finally over—there would never be another campaign—she was ready to hear everything. The whole truth and nothing but. Every single thing that led to the photo of her husband with some woman straightening his tie in front of a hotel. They were going to sit down and he was going to tell her and they would be done with that part of it. The whole truth at once, like tearing off a bandage—the way Betsy had pulled off Danielle’s bandage after the accident, when they had their election-night picnic on Franklin Field. One rip. Gone.

  *

  “How did it happen?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “No, tell me—how did you meet this person?”

  “I was greeting a crowd before a speech.”

  “Where?”

  “New York.”

  “When?”

  “August.”

  “Before or after my diagnosis?”

  “Before.”

  “And even after you knew—Christ, David, I feel sick.”

  “We don’t have to do this.”

  “We do.”

  “We don’t have to do it now.”

  “We’re not going anywhere. I’ll get sick on this rug if I have to. So you were greeting your fans—go on.”

  “I was shaking hands, and all that, and this woman—”

  “Her.”

  “Yes, she handed me a piece of paper, and I put it in my pocket.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know. If I could go back in time—”

  “You can’t.”

  “If.”

  “You can’t.”

  “But if I could, I’d drop that paper, never look at it.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “If I were to look through your pockets and your dresser and your files—”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “What was it—a love note? A proposition? What?”

  “Her name, phone number.”

  “No note?”

  “I know you. That was the whole note.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No.”

  “And you decided it was a good idea to call her.”

  “I thought maybe she did know me.”

  “That’s not what you thought.”

  “I’m answering your questions, okay?”

  “So you called her—then what?”

  *

  The truth was he had met her in the Algonquin Hotel lobby. He’d just finished meeting with potential donors and was about to leave for the airport when he saw her sitting alone at the hotel bar. It was a Friday around five o’clock. She looked familiar, but he couldn’t recall her name or how he knew her. She had shoulder-length dark hair; her features were dark too—her eyes, her skin—and he guessed that she might be Italian or Spanish, and God it was bugging him—how did he know her?

  A car was waiting in front of the hotel, but he walked over to her. She looked up at him and smiled as if she did know him. She had a gap between her two front teeth—like Lauren Hutton.

  “We know each other, don’t we?”

  “Are you someone famous?” she said.

  “No.”

  “You look like an actor from a soap opera I used to watch.”

  David laughed; he hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time.

  “I’m David.”

  “Rae,” she said.

  “Rae what?”

  “Bautista.”

  “You look like a Rae Bautista.”

  “Oh really. What does a Rae Bautista look like?”

  “Like you.”

  “You look more like a Dave than a David.”

  “I’ve never been a Dave.”

  “You’re totally a Dave,” she said. “You should try being Dave for a while, see how it feels.”

  “So we really don’t know each other?”

  “We do now.”

  David’s driver walked to the bar and said, “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but your flight.” Then he went back outside.

  “I knew you were famous,” Rae said.

  “Just because I have to catch a flight?”

  “Okay, sir.”

  “Are you famous?”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  David shook her hand and said, “It was nice to meet you.”

  “We’ve already met—remember?”

  “Right.”

  “Hey, maybe we knew each other in a past life.”

  “Maybe,” David said.

  “Or maybe we’ve already met in the future.”

  “Sounds like science fiction.”

  “Time isn’t a straight line, Dave.”

  David realized that he was still holding her hand; he let go.

  “I have to go,” he said. “Good luck getting famous.”

  “I was joking about that,” she said.

  “Good,” David said, “because I hear being famous sucks.”

  “Hold on,” she said. She reached into her purse and took out a paperback book and a pen. She tore out a page from the book, then laid the book on the bar. David could see the title, Bright Lights, Big City. She wrote something on the page, folded it, and gave it to David. “See you in the next life,” she said.

  This was hardly the first note a woman had handed David. He always gave them to Tim Swisher. He pu
t the note in his jacket pocket with the intention of doing the same. Then he went outside where his car was waiting.

  He didn’t look at the note until he was on his flight to Des Moines. Tim was sleeping in the seat next to him.

  It said: Now I know you.

  And her name. And her phone number.

  *

  “I didn’t really know her,” David said. “I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse.”

  “Nothing makes it better.”

  “I didn’t love her.”

  “Then it was about sex.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “David, come on.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “She was new,” Danielle said.

  “Yes.”

  “She wasn’t me.”

  “Like I told you, I didn’t know her.”

  *

  It was August and he was in his hotel room after two hours of doing what he hated most to do: asking for money. People he knew, people he didn’t know, some people he didn’t like. He had flown from Iowa to New York again just for this: to ask. To hold out his hand and say please. He wanted to ask over the phone—he hated that too—but Tim Swisher told him, “David, we’re talking very deep pockets. These need to be face-to-face.” He took off his jacket and tossed it onto the bed, and it landed in such a way that he could see its inside pocket. Her number was in that pocket. In the two weeks since they had met, he had moved the note from jacket to jacket. He had read the two pages of Bright Lights, Big City three or four times, and kept telling himself: Give the note to Tim Swisher. Or just tear it into pieces and throw it away.

  But now, back at the Algonquin, where he had met her, he took out the note, unfolded it, and looked at her name. He had the strangest sense that he had known this name for a very long time. He imagined that she was still sitting downstairs in the hotel bar. Her number had a 718 area code. He picked up the phone and dialed.

  Their conversation was brief: he invited her to his room; she said she could be there in a half hour. She didn’t ask why he wanted to see her—she must have known by then who he was—and he didn’t offer a reason.