“Boot-licking isn’t your forte,” said Isis, though Diana wasn’t quite so sure.
Dwayne spoke, “Some lawyer wrote it up in the Post.” No one said anything, so he continued, “He says if the President dies, the Vice-President becomes President—we all know that, right, but the crucial word is becomes, okay? That’s the word the Twenty-Fifth Amendment uses… becomes—and to become President, the VP has still got to qualify with all the eligibility doodads, including the natural born citizen thing. But listen to this: if the Vice-President himself is dead or he won’t stand… whatever… and succession slips to the next-in-line, which as we know is the… ta-da… Speaker, she actually doesn’t become President under the law, she only gets to act as President, and… boom-boom… no eligibility criteria to interfere…”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” said Isis, cutting him short.
48
BACK IN THEIR home in the Hamptons, Isabel was stretched out with Davey on one of the soft lounges in the great room, struggling with the instruction manual, trying to decipher how to operate his birthday camera. George was watching from the red Regency récamier, and kept switching from one end to the other. No matter which way he lay, he couldn’t get comfortable on the double-backed day bed, so eventually swung his legs off and moved to the chaise longue. Ed was stuck in a meeting in New York.
“It’s totally intuitive,” the camera salesman had told Isabel. Not for her it wasn’t, though it was clearly different for Davey. He was way ahead of her, snatching for the camera, pressing this button, twisting that dial, tapping an icon on its screen, discovering shortcuts here and new tricks there. Naturally, she was worried he would press, pull, tap or twist something wrong and wreck it, but so far the slim-line digital camera with a thousand-image memory chip seemed Davey-proof. And apparently intuitive.
By noon, the boy fancied himself as a modern-day Ansel Adams, the photographer famous for his idealised landscapes of the American West. She’d recently taken Davey to an Adams retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where back in the 1940s Adams was instrumental in establishing the first museum department of photography. Contrary to Isabel’s expectations, even after two hours traipsing around MOMA’s tiring concrete floors, there hadn’t been a single shuffle or yawn out of the boy. Davey was hooked and she knew what his birthday gift just had to be.
Davey dragged Isabel off the lounge and posed her on several of the antique chairs, first one way, then the other. And he had George prancing around like an arthritic old ballet dancer despite having an arm in a sling.
Davey scampered off to download his new snaps onto the computer in the family room. George fell back onto the sofa for a bit of shut-eye and Isabel kicked her feet up onto the glass coffee table to read a little more of the camera manual. Interesti…
SHE woke up to one of Davey’s pinches. He was flapping computer prints in her face while jigging a little dance and, when he had her attention and pushed her feet off the coffee table, he spread the shots out, like a breathless artist revealing his portfolio for the first time.
“Very artistic,” she said as she rubbed her eyes before even seeing the snaps. He had printed only six shots—his best, she guessed—and positioned them in two horizontal rows of three, temporarily masking the bottom row with blank sheets. The top three were grotesque blowups: Isabel’s left nostril, her left eye and her shoe. “Excellent,” she nodded. “At least you got my good side!” and she rocked her head back for a good laugh.
He peeled off the blank cover sheets on the three below. An eerie Dorian Gray intensity haunted the first, where Davey had snapped himself in a mirror. And the shot of George’s bandaged wrist with his head lolling back, snoring on the sofa, bordered on the melancholic.
The third was a shot of Isabel’s scar. Davey must have noticed her eyes avoiding it; he took her finger and pressed it to the photo, tracing along the line but he almost recoiled when he felt the shudder tremble from her finger up her arm.
Isabel looked over at George, hoping for a diversion, but he was still asleep. She hadn’t felt this in weeks. She’d even been entertaining a tentative optimism that she’d got her dark cloud under control.
Why now? And with a photograph?
Her fingers found themselves combing through Davey’s blond locks as tears streamed down her cheeks. He slid up on her lap and nestled his head into her shoulder. His stringy arms wrapped around her, holding her tight and then he did something he’d never done before: he lifted her hand from his hair and pressed it against his voiceless throat and, in turn, he stroked her scar.
Isabel caught her breath, and she felt it at the same time as she heard it.
A breath of a whisper.