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Victoria says to the camera: “David Clarke has committed an unspeakable atrocity for which he will rightly suffer punishment. But this child is an innocent. Rather than subject her to an unpredictable and often harsh foster care system, Conrad and I have decided to foster her until she comes of age in our own home. Amanda is a victim too, and we must do all we can to help her.”
--
We will do what’s best for you, Victoria tells her. Amanda always believed, always knew her father did his best, but for days and days now she’s had strangers attest to her lack of understanding, her mistaken faith in a criminal. A young child does not have much clout, but Victoria Grayson does. With her, all mistakes are mended or made immaterial, a footnote in an untroubled life.
There are many differences to accept in the Grayson household. A meal is a sit down affair rather than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich whenever hunger strikes. Pajamas are not acceptable attire past 10 a.m. Sam is not allowed inside. And there is Daniel, distressed, it seems, at her presence.
For weeks she cannot stop crying. She thought the camera flashes had burned all her tears away, but they flood across snarled hair and silken pillowcases. Once, Victoria tries to hold her lover’s daughter close and calm her, earning screams and thrashes for her trouble. Control yourself, Victoria says. Amanda only screams louder.
But a little girl only has so much energy. A month of torment and she’s exhausted; she retreats to an immaculate bedroom on the west end of the beach house. Victoria sends the maid to check on her or, occasionally, Conrad. Amanda always feigns sleep but watches him enter quietly between twitching eyelashes, his expression caught somewhere between bewilderment and resignation. He does not know what to make of her. He is always kind, always courteous, too well trained in the ways of civility to act otherwise. She hates him for that.
Daniel does not visit her then, but when she eventually emerges from the bedroom, hair combed and teeth brushed, he meets her on the staircase. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he says and smiles. He does not appear upset any longer. She wonders what Victoria must have said to him.
“Where is Sam?” she asks.
--
“You won’t be seeing that Porter boy anymore,” Victoria says. Amanda makes no comment, only smoothes her scowl and walks away. In truth, she has known that this would be so since the day Victoria got a call from a realtor asking her to remove two children and a dog from the Clarke property. In those first few weeks, Amanda learned that a fight was lost once Victoria had made up her mind.
She wanders outside to the kennel where Daniel is playing fetch with Sam. Daniel tosses her the ball, inviting her to join the game. She throws it back to him and settles into the Adirondack near the gate, seething.
“What did she do this time?”
Frustratingly good-natured, he is learning to weather her moods.
“She told me I can’t see Jack.”
“I’m sorry.” She knows he means it. She is beginning to know a lot of things about him. Sam whines, confused as to why his playmate has stopped paying attention to him.
“What did you do with his leash?”
A strange pair shows up on the Porters’ doorstep not long thereafter. Amanda is in tears but Sam wags his tail happily, eager to see a friend. Jack is incredulous, almost on the verge of tears himself when she asks.
“But why do you want me to take him?”
“I can’t keep him. Victoria doesn’t want him around anymore.” Victoria had, of course, said nothing of the sort.
When she comes walking back up the beach, Daniel is waiting for her. “You’ll miss him,” he says.
Her eyes stop watering. She says, defiant, “No, I won’t.”
--
The summer ends. Victoria enrolls Amanda in the same Manhattan day school as Daniel. She can’t help but notice when other students start disappearing from her classes, concerned parents not wanting their offspring exposed to a traitor’s get. Only Daniel is a constant. Under his gentle guidance she learns the rituals of classroom, recess, and lunch hour. She keeps mostly to herself, though Daniel, ever dutiful, can often be found by her side. Together they laugh off the futile efforts of the would-be bullies--it’s hard to belittle a girl who answers every insult with a black stare that pierces even the most arrogant childish ego.
The Christmas holidays in those years are dominated by a tension that threatens to rupture the carefully planned succession of parties and ski trips and leave the bystanders bleeding. Somehow, it never quite breaks. Starting school again is almost a relief.
However, it is the summer that grants her release. She is always David Clarke’s daughter, but for those few months she’s also just a girl spending her summer vacation in the Hamptons like many others. There are more changes, of course. Hunts for sea glass have been replaced by weekend trips to Martha’s Vineyard, sailing excursions, and overpriced hunter jumper riding lessons. Daniel teaches her to play volleyball and tennis, runs with her from the house to the sea and jumps into the surf, laughing. He never asks her about her father, for which she is grateful. Instead, he tells her all his little boy dreams, his desire to work for his father and “the greatest company in the world.” Nevermind that he’s not entirely sure what it is that Grayson Global does. She never really understood what her father did either but it must not have been anything good.
They hardly notice when Charlotte arrives. Wrapped up in the demands of a new baby, Conrad and Victoria loosen their grip on their son just enough for him to become totally enthralled with Amanda, any adherence to approved socialization between the two of them totally abandoned. What’s better than a friend that never has to go home at the end of the day? She kindles contempt for other less daring, less exciting individuals within him. Nevertheless, his adventurousness has its limits. Mom wouldn’t like it, he says, any time she pushes a little too hard.
--
Her father is a liar and a murderer. Austere looking men and women told her as much once they wrested her from the steel arms of the S.W.A.T. team. It’s been over a year and she has not had so much as a letter. Victoria must know something, but Amanda’s considerable courage still shrinks before her impenetrable iciness.
Her father is a liar and a murderer, but she aches for some news of him. The word prison conjures up images of cold iron bars and barking dogs but never her father’s face. And she has questions, hundreds of questions. Most of them center on Victoria, Conrad, and that blonde woman from the television who has become a frequent guest of the Graysons, although there is one in particular that begs for an answer: what does she want with me?
--
Victoria sends them to different high schools. For Daniel, a top-ranked preparatory in Pennsylvania with an alumni roster that closely resembles the guest list for a White House state dinner. Amanda spends fall and spring at an all-girls boarding school in Maine. The semesters creep by, punctuated by occasional bleeding lips and ruined personal property (Amanda is both target and perpetrator). The students throw insults at her with a perverse exultation--epithets such as “traitor’s daughter,” “whore,” and once, absurdly, “terrorist.”
Victoria writes strongly worded letters to the headmistress several times to present her concerns about this treatment, but little can be done. Amanda only tells Victoria about these incidents out of a self-righteous urge, a kind of I-told-you-so smugness. She’s been unwelcome for so long that these offenses are just a triviality. It is not as though she is entirely without friends either. She is effectively queen of the misfits of the academy, mistress of a troupe of disaffected girls who’ve been given endless material resources as a substitute for love. But none of them are Daniel.
Amanda receives frequent phone calls from him and is grateful for every single one. There are days, however, when she almost expects to hear her father’s voice on the other end of the line. She doesn’t pick up then.
--
“Why were you so scared of me at first?”
“Scared?”
“Call it what you will. What I mean is that when I first came here you would barely even speak to me.”
“As I recall, you didn’t have much to say to me either. At first.”
She swats him on the arm. “Spill.”
He looks in her eyes, a little bashful but so warm. “It’s embarrassing. I knew that your father had done something wrong, very wrong. But I didn’t understand what. So when you came to live with us I thought somehow you had brought that wrongness with you.”
The impulse to laugh is almost too strong. She turns her face to the sun.
“But Mom explained it to me. She said that you had no part of it, that your father was a good man who had gotten into a bad situation, who had trusted the wrong people. I thought it was strange, but she said he was one of the miserable few who actually suffered for a sin.”
Amanda feels a terrible prickling around her neck and shoulders. She shivers in the July heat.
“So did I?”
“Did you what?”
“Bring something bad into your home.”
He grins at her, oblivious. “Time will tell.”
--
Amanda Clarke turns sixteen. Everything familiar is strange and too saturated, too sharp. The years without word from her father seem like an impossible tragedy, but more than that she’s agonizingly aware of her body and the bodies of those around her. Daniel’s especially. Like headlights cast in darkness suddenly striking the branches of trees and other hidden things, he is revealed to her in stark contrast. He responds to her in turn, lips and hands brushing over tanned skin. He can’t help but be pulled in by this anxious gravity.
That summer, she takes Victoria’s son for a lover.
The first time is at a party, one of those late summer affairs hatched out of boredom and pitifully lax safeguards against underage drinking. They’re both on the wrong side tipsy, stumbling through the doors of the Connors’ darkened guest house. Her brain keeps telling her stop stop stop but her fingers (surprisingly nimble) unbutton his shirt anyway. Any hesitation either of them might have had disappeared with the fifth shot of tequila. He apologizes as he pushes into her; she gasps shut up, Grayson into his ear and draws him in further.
For weeks afterward she’s terrified not of being pregnant but of having to explain such a scenario to Victoria. She buys Daniel a pack of condoms, shoving them into his hands with an air of impatience. He blushes as he accepts them, stuffing them hastily into a dresser drawer, but they make good use of them in the days and weeks that follow.
It is not, after all, incest.
--
Daniel is certainly better informed about her father’s actions now, though he is still reluctant to discuss David Clarke with Amanda, or anybody else for that matter. This had been in line with her own preferences for ages, but the shock of a life so violently altered has finally worn away to a clinging sense of doubt and a need for answers.
“Did you know that your mother was having an affair with my father?” she asks him, not maliciously. He looks disgusted anyway.
Suspicion had, of course, always been part of her life with Victoria and Conrad. She was willing, for Daniel's sake, to ignore it. That is beginning to seem untenable. Years of listening to snatches of fights between the two of them, low tones and shrill whispers sometimes giving way to shouts, have cemented in her mind that a shared secret is the only thing that keeps them together. “It has nothing to do with us,” Daniel says.
__
Victoria and Conrad are not the only ones fighting these days.
“If you only knew how many times I’ve defended you! People at school, people we know. They’re ignorant. They say terrible things about you, about me and my family for taking you in.”
“I don’t need you to do that! I don’t need anyone to do that. I’m responsible for myself.”
“How can you be responsible for yourself? My parents have given you everything.”
His loyalty will never be to her.
--
I love you, Daddy.
Her love for Daniel is not a Möbius strip. It has a definite end.
--
She receives notice that her father has died in prison six weeks before her eighteenth birthday. Conrad troubles to ask her if she needs anything, but he mostly leaves her to herself, not interested in scrutinizing whatever unfathomable emotions she’s experiencing. Charlotte ignores her, as usual. Victoria’s mask slips--she looks so solemn that the years seem to grow faint and fade, and Amanda is brought back to that night. The image of her foster mother’s beautiful face burns bright in Amanda’s memory.
Daniel is gone that summer, already building a solid foundation for a bright future, as Conrad put it. An internship in Boston, what wonderful preparation that will be! Or so everyone says. Without him there she feels like a mere visitor in the Grayson beach house. The feeling was never quite so acute before.
The Hamptons are growing quiet again, the run of parties and charity events drawing to a close for the season. It is a hazy August afternoon and Amanda sneaks off to the Stowaway, something she’s been doing more and more often as of late. She and Jack have begun, tentatively, to rebuild their friendship after years of avoidance and awkward greetings in public places. He is learning to tend bar, so he sneaks a shot or two of rum into every glass of coke she orders. She rewards him with knowing glances and even a smile or two. He’s handsome and more confident than she would have expected. She had forgotten other people could exist.
“Shit.”
He’s paused in wiping down the table, looking out the window with a deep frown.
“What is it?”
“That guy’s here again.” She senses his unease; something in her switches on.
“A guy. What does he want?”
“He came in here asking about Amanda Clarke, saying he had something for you. He’s apparently seen you come in here before. I told him to get lost. He seemed like a creep.”
She walks over to the window and peers out, eyes landing on the lanky, bedraggled figure perched on the bench. Jack moves towards her, reaching out his arm protectively, but she’s already lurching for the door. She tramps toward the bench; the stranger snaps his head toward her, his chapped lips parting slightly.
“You. Who are you?” She wants to shake him.
“Nolan Ross. I have a message for you.”
“Yeah, well let me tell you there are a lot of people who’ve had a message for Amanda Clarke. None of them good, most of them about how my father should have been killed on the spot for what he did.”
This Nolan Ross looks at her like a hungry dog. “I’m a friend of your father’s,” he says.
--
Amanda thinks, maybe, she should tell Daniel about the box. She never does, not even as she watches he gun pressed to his forehead. She has one last kiss for him, after.