Authors: John M. Green
ED Loane walked into Isabel’s mid-town Manhattan campaign headquarters, not far from his own office. Isabel and Gregory were hunched over a sheet of paper covered in
scrawled boxes and arrows, the latest adjustments to the campaign strategy, Ed presumed.
“I just heard… Ahmed’s off the hook. Damn lawyers!” he grunted, glowering at Gregory, knowing he had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard Law School after an
undergraduate politics degree in Australia. “The bullcrap streaming out of Foster’s mouth… And what about the freakin’ judge! That conniving Democrat bastard chose his
timing brilliantly, didn’t he? To inflict maximum damage on you... Here’s how it’ll go: ‘Ahmed’s free to walk the streets, but he’s not innocent… a threat
to all Americans.’ And he’s
your
man, Isabel. End of story. Damn it.”
“That’s extreme,” Isabel said. “Judge Thomas doesn’t go for my politics but he’s not going to endanger the country for that. Besides, while I accept Karim
stole the money, I can’t believe he knew the charity was a terrorist front.”
“Don’t ever defend that shit publicly,” said Ed, walking to the window.
Gregory was about to give his opinion when Ed’s head snapped round and the ice of his glare froze Gregory’s tongue. Instead, he straightened his tie, a Versace, and let Ed
continue.
“Ahmed has to go down for this
before
the election, or we’re finished,” said Ed. “I’m telling you this thing will fester, and it will screw your campaign.
Trust me. None of those fancy arrows on that stupid sheet of paper will change that.”
A silence jagged the air for almost a minute, a staggering time for someone like Gregory for whom speech and thought were almost indistinguishable.
S
IMON KNEW THAT his girlfriend Elia despised Mike Mandrake. It wasn’t merely that the journalist was a sharp-elbowed loudmouth from
Washington DC, there was something else. Simon tried pressing the issue but Elia clammed up as she usually did about her work. “It’s confidential”… “If I told you,
I’d have to kill you, ha ha”… They were all excuses, not reasons. Whatever was behind it, Elia was continually pissed off about something and it was bugging their
relationship.
“It’s just
him
, okay?” she said, trying to push Simon off. “He’s an egotistical bully and a repulsive shit, and… and he’s got no background in
TV, but then… you know, this is the thing… he’s cracked something no one’s managed to crack before. So I loathe the guy… seriously, but his work...
it’s…”
“This work. Is it worth the crap he’s dumping over you?”
Elia’s eyebrows rose like someone poised at the top of a cliff debating whether to jump.
Simon waited.
“It’s about Isabel Diaz’s past,” she said.
“You already told me that.” He stood and stretched his lanky frame. “Beer?”
She nodded.
He sidled over to the fridge. Take it slowly. That’s what one of the fridge magnets said. He knew it was Elia’s joke to remind him to fix the loose shelf inside, but right now he
took it as a warning for this conversation. He noticed her fingers were fretting her bottom lip. “What is it, then?” He couldn’t help himself. “Is he linking her to
Ahmed’s terrorists? Is that it? Jesus, Elia. How could you?”
Like many of the former runaways Isabel’s charity had given a hand to, Simon was very protective of his benefactor. He didn’t know her personally, not really; they’d only met a
few times, but her Triple-B foundation had changed his life. At sixteen, he was doing drugs and living on the streets. It was his arrest for busting a convenience store that tripped him up. The
duty lawyer hooked him up with a Triple-B guy in court that day for someone else, and who convinced the judge not to send him to juvy if he signed up for their vocational training program. It was
hardly a choice, and he had begrudged it at the time. But it gave him the chance to pick up on plumbing and these days Simon’s ample chest puffed proudly at being a solid citizen who made a
difference to people’s lives. He fixed their pipes. It was far better than living in them.
“It’s a human interest thing.” Elia was biting her lip now.
“So what’s turning you inside-out?”
She glanced back over her shoulder, and shook her head as if realising the stupidity of the action. “We’ve tracked down who Isabel’s father
really
was.”
Simon handed Elia her beer and carried his over to the TV. “What? Was he a Bolivian drug lord or something? That it?” He kept looking at the screen, feigning the right level of
disinterest to keep Elia going.
She cleared her throat. “Ah… here’s the thing… he wasn’t actually Bolivian.”
“Huh?” He turned back so quickly he spilt his beer on the rug.
Isabel’s father
was
Bolivian. A businessman. Everyone who’d been through Triple-B knew that. The story was famous.
“He was Chilean,” said Elia, the sweat beading her upper lip. Normally, she’d never reveal a work secret.
“That’s it? That’s the big deal? That he’s Chilean? Who the fuck cares…they’re all Latinos, right?” he joked. Though he was sure the detail was
important, he didn’t understand why.
“Shit, Simon,” she said. “Madeleine Albright … remember her? Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State? I don’t think she just toasted ‘mazeltov’ when
she was leading the Middle East peace talks and she suddenly discovered her parents had been Czech Jews, not the Catholics she’d always believed.”
“Albright, shmalbright.”
“If you’d spent your whole life believing that your dad, who you’d never met, was a Bolivian businessman but, live on national TV, you get ambushed and get told for the first
time that he was actually a high-ranking Chilean diplomat, don’t you think it might matter to you?”
Simon ignored her glare and joined her on the sofa. ‘He
is
dead, right? He’s not gonna turn up on your show like it’s
This Is Your Life
or something?”
“He’s definitely dead,” Elia said, pushing back a bang of her black hair that had escaped her elastic. “He died a month after Isabel was born.”
“After?”
“Apparently.”
“You think you should tell her this live?”
“My opinion isn’t worth shit. It’s Mandrake who wants to spring it on her, in front of millions. And the bastard’s got something else… he won’t tell me what
it is… but he says it’s huge, and he’s dangling it out there like…”
“I hope the fucker chokes on himself.”
L
ITTLE DAVEY LOANE was definitely his dead mother’s son, and Ed was sick of people tactlessly reminding him of it. Davey’s thick blond
hair flopped just like Jane’s used to and his open blue eyes lit up with her same buoyant optimism. But adore his son as he did, it meant occasionally… in a certain light… if
Davey walked or ran in a particular way… his mere presence could reignite Ed’s rage. Fury at the infidelity that led to Jane’s death, and contempt for the man who caused it,
often refuelled the suspicion that perhaps Davey was not his son at all. He’d thought about tests, but he didn’t really want to know.
This Saturday morning, Isabel was at home for a rare lazy family breakfast. The house was way over the top for Isabel, but Ed loved it, more for its memories than anything else, so she had
forced aside her discomfort over it. The six-bedroom, eight-bathroom mansion had been described in the realtor’s ad Ed saw when Davey was born as “renowned and admired for over eighty
years as one of the most important houses in the Hamptons, Long Island. It took the eminent Manhattan firm of Polhemus & Coffin seven years to build the home, which is listed at over 7,000
square feet and located on eight acres overlooking Shinnecock Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.” Why three people plus help needed so much space was not something Isabel could answer. Not even Ed
liked entertaining or throwing big parties, but he did fish, so at least it had that going for it. And it was private.
George Hicks, Isabel’s substitute father, had flown over from California to stay a few weeks to help with Davey while the campaign was in full swing. Ed wasn’t thrilled about it, but
tolerated him, which was not exactly hard in this house. Ed and George didn’t see eye-to-eye on anything, apart from Isabel. And Davey.
Working his hands in American Sign Language, Davey had been begging George to cook up some of his famous ricotta hotcakes with honey. It was Davey’s favourite BBB breakfast treat, which
George falsely claimed he’d invented at the original Big Bad Burgers diner even before Isabel had walked in on the scene. Unlike Ed, who had mastered ASL, and Isabel who was adequate, George
was totally inept so the boy turned his request into a kind of charades.
Davey loved it when George laughed—his teeth stuck out even further and his wiry grey ponytail flailed round so he looked to Davey like both ends of a horse. His bucktoothed grin was where
George’s nickname ‘Buckets’ came from; at least that was Isabel’s child-friendly explanation. George had laughed when she told the boy that little lie. It had been the
summer of ’64 and George was on security for the Rolling Stones’ first US tour. In those days George was always overflowing—with booze, drugs, whatever—and it was one of the
Stones, Brian Jones, who bestowed the nickname on him. (Brian was the wild blue-eyed boy who ended up at the bottom of his swimming pool and, even then, people said he looked better dead than
fellow Stone Keith Richards did alive.)
George, now in his seventies, hadn’t done drugs or alcohol for decades, often joking he got the same effects these days just from standing up fast.
He was about to head off to make the flapjacks when Davey tugged at his shirt to stop. The boy turned to Ed and after asking him to act as interpreter for his new joke, he made the sign for
“big” and thumped his chest.
“A big gorilla,” said Ed, his grin widening.
Davey then put his finger to his mouth and his ear.
“Ah, a big deaf gorilla.”
Davey nodded and continued.
“A big deaf gorilla… King Kong,” Ed said, “is storming through a town… he reaches down to pick up this beautiful woman. She’s deaf too. He has the deaf
woman in the palm of one hand and says to her…”
Suddenly, Davey smashed his free hand down onto the palm that was holding the imaginary woman and started to jig on the spot. Ed cracked up himself and, until father and son composed themselves,
all Isabel and George could do was look to each other, trying to guess at what was so funny.
“I’m sorry,” said Ed, wiping a rare tear. “King Kong says to her in ASL,” but he broke into laughter again. “Okay, this deaf King Kong says, ‘Will you
marry me?’ But see, the ASL sign for ‘marry’ is to slap one hand down onto the other so King Kong, instead of asking her to marry him, crushes her to death.”
Isabel leant over to give Davey a big hug as George laughed his way to the kitchen. Ed excused himself, too. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Davey,” he said, and after stroking
his son’s head he walked off.
Isabel was so flushed with laughing that her scar stuck out against her neck.
“Why have you got that?” Davey signed when the two were alone. He reached for it and touched it gently, though to Isabel, his finger seemed to burn. Davey had asked before but
she’d fended him off with her stock answer, “Someone hurt me once.” Previously it had been enough for the boy, but he was getting older and more insistent.
“Who hurt you?” He pressed it this time.
The ASL sign for a man, Isabel knew, mimicked grasping the front brim of your hat, but gallantry was out of place. Her colour drained and she let Davey lip-read instead, “A man,” she
whispered. “A bad man.”
“A boy hurt me at school yesterday,” he signed almost immediately; Davey was, after all, only eight. “He whacked me over the head with his lunch box.”
Isabel forced a smile. “I’m sure it was an accident.”
“No,” he continued signing. “He was angry because I hid his water bottle. How did the bad man hurt you?”
There was no way Isabel would reveal the shockingly sensitive details to an eight-year-old. She’d never publicly admitted it was a rape, just an assault gone very bad. Fortunately for her,
the records from back then were patchy. “Davey,” she said, “he cut me… with a piece of glass and…” Her voice broke off.
Ed walked back in. “Hey, big feller,” he said, making sure Davey’s eyes had followed Isabel’s toward him, “Are you telling the next president how she should run
this country, or are you still jabbering about gorillas?”
“A man hurt Isabel, daddy. With a piece of glass,” the boy signed earnestly, then touched her scar.
Ed saw the silent wail on Isabel’s face and the scatter of smile lines around his eyes fell away. “Isabel doesn’t want to talk about that, Davey,” he said.
“Okay?”
Davey shook his head so his hair flew out at the sides, “Not okay.”
Isabel rested her hand on Ed’s arm, and breathed in, “It’s fine,” and turned back to Davey. “Davey, the man did bad things to me, so… so I can’t have
any children.”
Davey absorbed the information for a moment, chewing his tongue and tapping Pip his stuffed toy penguin on its head. One of Isabel’s campaign badges was pinned to Pip’s
chest—the button with the red, white and blue rose. “But
I’m
your child. You said so!” he signed, a tear drizzling from his blue eyes. “Why can’t you have
me anymore?”
She shot a look of alarm at Ed. “Of course I can have you, Davey. I meant that I can’t have a baby.”
The boy nodded weakly, sniffed and wiped his eyes. “Did the man hurt you a lot?”
She nodded.
“Did he kill your mother too?”
Isabel’s breath caught in her throat, hoping she’d misunderstood the signing but she saw Ed’s jaw tighten and knew she hadn’t. Ed had been right in trying to avoid this
path. Often his relationship with Davey was excellent, like this morning, but it was sometimes marred, and not merely by a boy’s typical disappointments over a busy father who wasn’t
always around. Wrongly, Davey blamed Ed for his mother’s death and there would be days when he just wouldn’t communicate with his father at all, freezing him out.