Her husband Ed accepted it. War veterans had their own sacraments to the past and respected others for theirs, no matter how weird. George Hicks, effectively her adoptive father, he knew. His wife Annette also, but she was long gone.
Slotted behind scratched glass inside its battered tin frame, the glossy print was possibly the most travelled photo in the country. The zip pocket in her leather satchel protected it, keeping it in much the same condition as when she’d swiped it out of her mother’s bedside table drawer. She could easily have replaced the frame or the glass as Ed had suggested many times, but that would have been a sacrilege. This was her greatest treasure, despite all her wealth. It was her only physical memento of the man who had kissed her only in her dreams: her long-dead father.
Without needing to look, though she did, she knew every striking contour of her father’s face and cherished the differences from her own as much as the similarities. Was he tall, as she was? From this head-shot there was no way to know, but her mother had filled in the blanks, holding her hand way above her own short head, saying he towered above her “like a Bolivian jacaranda.” Perhaps that was where Isabel had got her own five-foot-ten. His charisma was “as vivid as clusters of lilac blossoms” of the same native tree. Maybe, Isabel wondered, she’d inherited her people skills from him; her mother’s were certainly nothing to emulate. She briefly shuddered just thinking about her. Though the photo was black-and-white, it lent her father’s skin a moody tone, which long ago she decided meant it was olive, surely, and velvety. Just like hers. And when she touched her own cheek, as she did now, she sometimes imagined it was his.
Hernandes Diaz. She loved the ring and the metre of his name, how the syllables and the Ds tapped out on her tongue. She could even smell the Brylcreem on the comb he would have brushed his shiny black hair back off his forehead with, hair blacker and thicker than her own very practical bob.
His bedroom eyes, black and soulful, locked right onto hers as though she were the only person in his gaze. Since her mother’s eyes were brown, Isabel had always been curious about why her own were green.
Hernandes had died just before she was born so he never laid those eyes on her.
Of course, he never saw her scar, either. Thankfully. Her finger traced itself along the familiar track across her neck. She couldn’t help it. Often, just visualising this photograph helped Isabel fend off her dark spells… and if it didn’t, she always had what was in her purse.
5
ED LOANE’S EYES were bleak after three sleepless nights. It was lucky Isabel was away campaigning and fund-raising. On a good night, Ed could look out from his floor-to-ceiling office window and see his own reflection lit up in the brassy Trump Tower opposite him on Fifth Avenue, New York. But not now, with the midnight downpour outside.
He turned and stepped over the scatter of files he had earlier hurled across the rug, patterned with a subtle but patriotic motif of white five-pointed stars.
At ease, the former general commanded himself. His sixty-plus years had seen it way tougher than this. The last ten were here at the helm of a global Fortune 500 corporation, but the decades before were in active service… from ’Nam, Grenada, Nicaragua, to the Gulf. Heck, his epaulettes hadn’t got their four stars from Special Operations Command just for spreading hummus on Saddam Hussein’s samoon bread.
Yet Ed’s most important work was today, helping to airlift his wife into the White House. Sometimes he campaigned with her and other times, like this week, his business kept him off the stage.
She’d be president, and he’d be right there behind her. Some in the media, the liberals among them especially, were scaremongering how Ed would be the ventriloquist behind his dummy. “Elect her, but get him,” they agitated, though because Isabel had such a strong persona, the polls said the public wasn’t buying it.
He suppressed a smile.