The Pinebox Vendetta Page 14

  She stopped talking because Joss was down from the flue now, her inky hair coated gray. Her eyes were closed tight against the dust—but when she opened them, her pupils were vibrating in place. She was holding a brick.

  A red brick with black splatters.

  Chapter 10

  Jamie waited in the foyer of the Latham Guest House. The inn had been booked in full for the Gallaghers, and he’d spent the last hour being hugged, toasted, and raucously celebrated by relatives both close and distant.

  Now he busied himself filling a paper cone with blackberry-infused water, watching a fly buzz around a potted plant.

  The fly would land on one of the plant’s rubbery leaves, twitch about for a second or two, then bop airborne again, weaving left and right and left again in response to…what, nectar? Pheromones?

  “Big brother.”

  So engrossed was Jamie in the fly’s existential motives that he didn’t recognize the voice. He spun from the plant, and there was Charlotte.

  “Char!”

  He stood for an embrace, falling into his sister’s warmth and dynamism. She squeezed him ferociously and was asking six questions at once about his travel, about Juba, was he sure he preferred the dorms to a room here?

  “Also,” she said before he’d answered any of them, “purely for my own logistical sanity—you are coming to this dry-run, yes?”

  She kept one eye on him while motioning to the doorman, seeming to convey something about cars or times or headcount.

  “I dunno, I’ve seen just about everyone,” Jamie said. “You and Mom are the ones I really wanted to catch up with so—”

  “Nope, you’re coming.” She softened the directive with that pixie-burst of a grin he remembered from youth—from award podiums or showing him some gem she’d made from their erector set. “Besides, if you want Mom, you have to. She’s meeting us there.”

  In the fifteen minutes before the caravan left, brother and sister filled each other in on the last six months—they’d last caught up in December, when Charlotte had been in Uganda donating education technology. She updated Jamie on their parents’ health while simultaneously hassling other Gallaghers into action.

  When Rory Gallagher got the bright idea to swing by Dakota J’s en route for a plate of wings “in celebration of Jamie!” Charlotte barred his way.

  “Not a chance, Rory.” Her arm was a rod across the door. “Wings turn into pitchers, and next thing you know, I’m dealing with a Buzzfeed situation.”

  She turned back to Jamie. “Sorry, this weekend? I just can’t. They’re exasperating, worse than herding cats. I like cats, cats at least take care of themselves, have some basic instincts of self-preservation.”

  In a forty-second rant, Charlotte lamented that their generation of Gallaghers seemed even worse than Mom’s. The clan’s baggy, do-as-you-like ethos was exacerbated by phones and internet and easy media. Anytime anybody got the first random idea about…whatever, tariffs, they popped off about it, not giving the first thought to how the position fit (or, 99.99 percent of the time, didn’t fit) into the brand.

  Jamie and Charlotte ended up in different cars heading to the dry-run, the rehearsal for tomorrow’s naming ceremony, as Charlotte was needed immediately for some site issue.

  Jamie shared the backseat of a sedan with a pair of men in Secret Service-issue sunglasses and the man they must be guarding: Owen Gallagher.

  “Jamie, wow!” Owen said, his mouth opening and closing. “I could not be more thrilled to see a person if they…” He cast about the plush interior for words. “If they handed me a dozen baked lobsters.”

  The ride was under ten minutes, the new college a straight shot east from the Latham Guest House, but even that little time was enough to convince Jamie that Owen Gallagher was a lightweight.

  Owen—the nephew of Jamie’s father’s half-brother, the former comptroller of Los Angeles—asked a series of awestruck questions about Africa.

  Did you see ivory poachers just walking down the road? If you could give one item to every child on the continent—just one item, no bigger than a toaster, say—what would you give? What would solve the most problems?

  The presumed nominee gave a long, finger-snapping discourse on Ebola, which he planned to eradicate. He dwelled on the virus’s gruesome symptoms, becoming excited and scrubbing his own forearms.

  When Jamie cut in to explain that simple respiratory tract infections were deadlier by orders of magnitude, Owen pinched his face—which resembled Jamie’s, only with the broad planes attractively lightened—and said, “Huh.”

  As they spilled out at Gallagher College, Jamie thought about mentioning this to Charlotte.

  Charlotte was the driving force in the clan now—never mind the judges and mayors, the sitting senators and corporate titans. Charlotte had the treasure chest. She had the energy and will. If she decided to pull the plug on Owen Gallagher, his presidential candidacy was over.

  A phalanx of press popped Owen and Jamie’s pictures, calling questions, their flashes brilliant in Jamie’s eyes.

  No, he thought. Don’t get involved. The voters will see through him.

  But what if they didn’t?

  Jamie took advantage of the commotion surrounding Owen to slip past to the courtyard, which had been trimmed with balloon arches and poinsettia centerpieces on cloth-covered tables. Stretched across a banner backdropping the stage was the new crest: a robed woman holding black and white scales.

  Charlotte and their mother stood onstage, the latter considering the podium with an expression of distrust.

  “Mom…?”

  Joan Gallagher looked up at her son’s voice and, after a brief doubletake, bounded off the stage to him.

  Jamie hadn’t grown up near his mother, the senior senator from Massachusetts. He and Charlotte had been raised by nannies, and their father had kept them in Boston rather than move to DC after her election to Congress.

  Still, seeing her famously furrowed brow rise and feeling her spare body against his own was terrific. She’d been a great help obtaining a passport for the trip—a detail he’d overlooked until it was almost too late—and they hadn’t seen each other in person for three years.

  Jamie laid his hands on the podium. “You two were looking at this.” With his eyes, he brought Charlotte into the exchange. “Something wrong? What’s it supposed to do?”

  His mother said, “That was precisely my question, Jamie.” She turned to Charlotte. “What is it supposed to do?”

  Charlotte groaned. With an air of fast-diminishing patience, she swiveled the podium for both to see.

  “Your entire speech lives right here, Mother—right in SmartPodium. It’s all loaded in memory. You can teleprompt as well if you like—they’re linked by Bluetooth”—she made a twisty motion with thumb and forefinger—“but the speech is here, too.”

  She indicated a razor-sharp display embedded in the angled platform.

  Joan Gallagher said she preferred reading speeches off paper. “Computer screens put me off, the glare.” She wrinkled her nose. “They’re impossible in the sun.”

  “No, this tech is different. This is e-ink, it’s better than paper.”

  Jamie’s mother touched the screen with her index finger and jerked back.

  Charlotte said, “It’s amazingly useful. Every topic is cross-linked to supporting materials. So if you go off-script, or get some nasty question from the audience? All you do is tap that passage and a slew of background facts pop up.”

  She demonstrated on the phrase opioid epidemic. A dozen bulleted facts zipped to the screen.

  Jamie squinted at number four. One hundred fifteen US deaths every day? Could that be true?

  Joan said, “I’m not taking questions today. And I rarely go off-script.”

  “Look, I was just demoing the capabilities,” Charlotte said. “You don’t have to use them.”

  Their mother continued to regard SmartPodium as though it might at any moment grow arms and strang
le her.

  Charlotte said, “Read the damn speech off a stone tablet if you want, Mother. I give up.”

  On the topic of stone tablets—an elderly woman was entering the courtyard now, walking with the help of a cane and a half-dozen aides. Her eyes scanned the stage and surrounding areas, quick, skeptical. Aides bent to hear her mutterings.

  Jamie’s mother rushed to greet her. “Finally!” he heard. “The festivities can officially get underway…”

  As the photographers outside clambered for a shot, bulbs exploding behind the cast-iron gate, Jamie sidled up to his sister.

  “I can’t believe it, she looks exactly the same,” he said of the elderly woman. “Maybe the hair’s less brown? Not much, though.”

  Charlotte nodded, waving to the elderly woman, who was hooding her eyes their way now. “She’s the Rock of Gibraltar. Did you follow her last campaign, when the progressives ran against her in the primary?”

  “No, I missed that. She beat ’em?”

  “Annihilated ’em.” Charlotte brushed lint off her jacket. “We had testimonials from four ex-presidents running in all the major markets.”

  “And she survived the debates?”

  “Didn’t have any. We said her calendar didn’t permit it. ‘Too busy crafting important legislation to put Maine back to work.’”

  Bernadette Gallagher (“Beetle Bern” to her friends) had voted on the Equal Rights Act of 1964 and served on JFK’s Commission on the Status of Women. She was a favorite punching bag of the Pruitts—they used her in ads and fundraising mailers. “Stop Candidate X! Tell Washington you don’t want another foot soldier in Bernadette Gallagher’s tax-till-you’re-broke war on the middle class!”

  Jamie asked whether she had a speaking slot later today.

  “That’s a no,” Charlotte said. “Last time we put her in front of the camera, she used the term queers—and not in the reclaimed academic form.”

  On Bernadette’s heels came the rowdy cousins from the Pacific Northwest, then the Canadian technocrats with their Nalgene bottles, then the fiftyish rocker Lem Gallagher, sporting gray stubble and a motorcycle jacket.

  Owen Gallagher fell in with the cousins, cuffing one of them at the ear, laughing at a football handed off into his gut.

  Cocktails were passed around, tall-stemmed glasses garnished with fruit or olives, and Jamie felt transported to the Gallagher gatherings of his childhood. Policy chatter, opinion swaps on serious novels of the day, sumptuous food and drink—the whole rambling mess spilled from one courtyard to the next, now loud, now profound, now silly and stupid and alive.

  Charlotte tried corralling the principals to the stage.

  “Gather round, all,” she called. “We need to get a take on the optics.”

  Nobody changed what they were doing.

  “People, now!” She cupped her hands to her mouth. “When Meet the Press plays footage of this and we look like a third-grade talent show? We’ll owe it to these moments, right here.”

  Jamie was beginning to understand why the Pruitts kept beating Gallaghers in elections, even with all Charlotte’s Smart money.

  Nonetheless, he found himself accepting an offered julep and chatting with different clan members. The cousins made a giant fuss over him. Lem—in that soulful voice that’d made him an icon of the American Rust Belt—hassled Charlotte about keeping Jamie’s secret so long, then threw his arm around Jamie.

  “The beating heart is back,” he rasped, smelling of cigarettes. “For you, sir, we are grateful. Forever grateful.”

  Charlotte got her dry-run, finally. Each speaker stood at the podium while her audio-visual pros blocked out cameras and chairs and shades.

  Owen’s speech was last. As a woman with an ear-mic positioned him by the shoulders, he looked out over the assembled Gallaghers. He burped. The cousins laughed uproariously.

  Jamie frowned. Despite his initial reluctance, he found himself invested in the event now, tugged back into the family concerns. He’d grown up in this world. It was comfortable for him.

  The next time Charlotte whizzed by, he mentioned the car ride over.

  “I hear you, I do,” she said. “What can I say? It is what it is. Owen polls better than anyone in our stable.”

  “But he—he’s…” Jamie considered many words. “He’s not a well-informed candidate.”

  “No,” Charlotte agreed, “but he’s got zero baggage, plus these superficially crossover assets—the look obviously, the fact that he’s from New Hampshire, an early primary state with a reputation for fierce independence.”

  “How did the state do while he was governor?”

  “Fine.” Charlotte fluttered her lips. “State did just fine. Owen won’t light up a climate change panel for you, but he won’t screw up either. We can manage him, control the messaging.”

  Using her eyes and undertone commentary, she took Jamie around the courtyard explaining what made each alternative inferior.

  Victoria Parr would draw giant crowds, but the unions wouldn’t come home for her.

  Giles Gallagher would be tireless on the trail and have the support of his fellow talking heads, which was part of his problem—when you’ve spent the last twelve years of your life on television, there are simply too many soundbites and scattershot positions to defend.

  Jamie said, “The Ebola thing—Owen was almost giddy. It felt like he was describing a slasher movie.”

  Charlotte did not laugh, which Jamie appreciated. “Look, I’m with you. I am. And understand: if Owen gets into the White House, trust me, he will make exactly no policy decisions about Sub-Saharan Africa.”

  She was right, of course. Having grown up in the clan, Jamie understood the public face of campaigns didn’t always—or even often—match the underlying ideas. In high school and college, he would rage at his parents about this.

  “It’s pure fiction!” he remembered saying. “Us, the Pruitts—we invent these conflicts so we can fundraise off them! The language and logic we pick has nothing to do with actual policy. That surface part is all demographics and emotion.”

  Thinking about Owen, seeing him yuk it up now with the cousins, Jamie felt the old disillusionment.

  It all boils down to power. It’s no more or less than the pursuit of power.

  Charlotte was looking at him with concern. “Don’t let it drag you down, the horse-trading. Things are improving. They are. Good stuff’s happening.”

  From a pocket, she produced a plastic card—the size of a business card, same sapphire blue as the Smart logo.

  “I want to give you this.” Charlotte twirled the card in their shared sightline. “Encoded within are credentials for a new system we just launched called NetHuman. It’s a secure system, a kind of clearinghouse for all our philanthropic and charitable projects. It encompasses political stuff too but you aren’t required to—”

  “No thanks,” Jamie interrupted. “I appreciate it, Char, but I’m not getting involved.”

  “You don’t have to!” She pressed the card into his retreating hand, forcing his fingers closed around it. “Use it however you want. You can log in and access presentations we’re giving, or just cruise around for charities or NGOs who need support, either financial or manpower. I baked in enviros and microfinance, pretty much every org that exists.”

  She described the technology, how different users had different accesses. Most functions were gated from regular volunteers or online users.

  “Your access is top-level, of course.”

  She kept trying to give him the card. Jamie kept handing it back.

  “I don’t want top-level access. I don’t want any access to—”

  “Please, Jamie,” Charlotte said. “Take it. I have to tell you, I thought about you the whole time I was designing this network. About how many people want to do good, ache to do good, but simply don’t know how. All this energy with no place to go. NetHuman solves that! It gives you the information to do good anytime you’re moved to, anywhere in the wor
ld.”

  Her appeal was so raw and earnest, Jamie didn’t feel he could refuse. It was just a plastic card, after all.

  “I’ll take it,” he said. “But I’m not using it.”

  “Great, tremendous!” Charlotte hopped with glee. “Stick it in your pocket and forget about it. But later on when you see some injustice, or if you’re remembering some child you couldn’t personally help, fish it out. Log in and see what’s possible.”

  She bore in her message with a look. Jamie felt a rush of affection—for her energy, her belief, for how perfectly her childhood thirst for fairness—applied to dolls or action figures or brownie splits with Jamie himself—had matured as an adult.

  He took the card. They hugged again.

  Maybe he would check it out. NetHuman. A little oxymoronic, but I’m sure she polled it thoroughly.

  Now a pair of teens, a boy and a girl, hurried past with staplers and red flyers.

  “Thank you, Yoders—nice work!” Charlotte called after, but they were already through the stone arch to the street.

  Jamie squinted. “Yoders? That isn’t…those can’t be Aunt Cecily’s kids, can they?”

  “The very ones,” Charlotte said. “They’re helping with the redistricting fight. Connecticut has a reform bill on the ballot to get rid of gerrymandering.”

  “They can’t be any older than, what, sixteen?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “And they’re gung-ho into redistricting?”

  Charlotte shrugged.

  The Yoders, twins Jamie and Charlotte used to roll Hot Wheels for in the Nantucket greenhouse, popped back into the courtyard for more flyers.

  The fact that they were twins made it somehow worse, Jamie thought. Like the clan was stamping out its army in pairs, swelling methodically to keep its various missions staffed.

  Watching the Yoders’ passion now as they darted back outside with fresh flyers, Jamie felt nauseous.

  His phone buzzed. A text from Sam.

  need to talk quick if u can. meet daily cafe?

  He stared at the phone. A new queasiness took hold of his stomach.