First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [113]
THE OLD wood-frame house stood as it always had at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the border in Maryland. The house and its attendant property had resisted the advances of time and civilization. The huge oak tree still rose to a height above the roof; there was still a bird's nest in its branches outside Jack's bedroom. The forested area was, if anything, thicker, more tangled.
It was to Gus's house he took Alli. His home, the place Sharon had refused to move into, rejecting his past. In fact, she couldn't understand why he didn't sell it, use the proceeds to pay for Emma's tuition at Langley Fields rather than taking out a second mortgage on their house. "You own that horrid old thing free and clear," she'd said. "Why not just get rid of it and be done with it?" She hadn't understood that he didn't want to be done with it. Just as she hadn't understood that the house and property had been a place he'd taken Emma and, quite often, Molly Schiltz, when the girls were younger. They adored climbing the oak tree, where they lolled in the crotches of its huge trunk; they loved playing hide-and-seek in the wild, tangled woodland behind the house. They'd spread out like sea stars on the huge living room sofas, listen to Gus's old LPs—Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, James Brown, whose over-the-top stage antics they imitated so well after Jack showed them the electrifying concert video of him performing at the Apollo in Harlem.
On his way up the front steps, Jack noticed the Secret Service vehicle parked down the block, in front of the neighboring house. From that vantage point, the detail had an ideal view of the front and side of the house.
Jack padded into the kitchen, put the Chinese takeout on the counter. When he returned to the living room, he went over to the old stereo, selected a vinyl disc, put it on the turntable. A moment later, Muddy Waters began to sing "Long Distance Call."
Alli began a slow circuit, stopping here and there to peer at a photo, a book, a row of album covers. She ran her fingertips over an old guitar of Gus's, a stack of Jack's individually cased Silver Age comics of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and Dr. Strange. His stacks of videocassettes of old TV shows.
"Wow! This place is exactly the way Emma described it."
"She seemed to like it here."
"Oh, she did." Alli looked through the cassettes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Sea Hunt, Have Gun—Will Travel, The Bob Newhart Show. "She liked to come here when you weren't here. To be alone."
"What did she do here?"
Alli shrugged. "Dunno. Maybe she listened to music; she was nuts about the iPod you gave her. She took it with her everywhere. She made playlists and listened to them all the time." She put the cassettes aside. "She never told me what she did here. See, she had secrets from everyone, even me."
Jack, watching her, experienced a piercingly bittersweet moment, because as happy as he was to have her here, her presence—in a way that was most immediate, most painful—served to remind him of what he could have had with Emma. At the same time, he was overcome with a feeling of protectiveness toward her.
It had taken him some time after Emma's death to realize that the world had changed: it would never again feel safe, never have the comfort it had held when Emma was alive. Its color had changed, as if cloaked in mourning.
And there was something else. Through Alli, he was coming closer to Emma, he was beginning to understand that he and his daughter were not so very different. It seemed that Emma knew how similar they were, but Emma being Emma, she needed to go her own way, just as he had when he was her age. All at once, he experienced a jolt of pure joy. It seemed to him that he and Emma would have come together again, that they would have reunited, perhaps as soon as the day she had called him. She was coming to see him, after all. What had she wanted to tell him?
"Abbott and Costello." Alli was holding a cassette aloft. "Can we watch this? Emma talked about them, but I've never