Chapter Fifteen

It was nearly 2 A.M. when I reached my hotel room, but Bernadette and Rhonda were awake, sitting on the carpeted floor, talking. Behind them a TV blared, and every light in the room was on. They were drunk.

They smiled bleary smiles at me—the first time Bernadette had smiled at me in months. “Did you try the punch, Ari?” she said. “It was fan-tab-u-lous.”

“Fantabalous.” Rhonda stretched her arms over her head and waved her hands.

“Fantabulous.”

Both of them giggled.

Someone pounded on the door. I looked at them, and they didn’t move. I went to the door and put my eye to its peephole. Walker stood there, blue eyes vivid against the beige walls and beige carpet. But he wasn’t my Walker. He looked a little crazy—his eyes were heavy lidded, almost shut, and his mouth hung open.

I didn’t want to let him in. But I opened the door.

“Ari,” he said, “hey, Ari. What the hell?” He didn’t say it in an angry way. His voice drawled.

Yes, he was drunk, too.

“I was looking for you.” Walker sounded almost maudlin now. “I looked and I looked, and then I saw you, talking to that guy Cameron.” He took a deep breath. “Now don’t get me wrong, I can see why you’d be talking to a guy like that. But I, I…” He lost his train of thought.

“Were you drinking punch?”

He smiled at me, a lopsided grin.

I wondered, What did they put in the punch?

“Walker, go back to your room.” I spoke clearly and slowly. “We can talk in the morning, after you’ve had some sleep.”

He stood there for a minute, shifting his weight from foot to foot. My skinny boyfriend, I thought. Even drunk, he was cute.

“I’ll walk you there.” I went back inside to grab my key and I told the others where I was going, although I’m not sure why I bothered. They were laughing again, more loudly now, their heads tipped back.

When I led Walker back to the third floor, he said, “Aw.”

When we reached the door, he said, “Aw. You are so nice.” He leaned forward and might have fallen if I hadn’t braced his shoulders, propped him against the wall. I knocked on the door, and Richard opened it. He, at least, was sober.

“Another drunk?” he asked. “Great. Now we have a pair.”

He pulled Walker into the room. I said good night and went back to the elevator. But instead of going up, I went down.

The reception room was empty now. What had I expected? I went to the corner where I’d stood next to Neil Cameron for more than two hours, making polite conversation with him and his supporters, savoring every second of his presence. I didn’t remember much of what we’d said (I remember saying that I liked his suit, and he said it was made of bamboo fiber; he asked what my parents did in Florida, and I said something I can’t remember), but I recalled vividly what I felt each time his eyes swept across my face.

Was this what love felt like? I wished I could call my mother or Dashay to ask. But Mãe was out of reach, and it was too late to wake up Dashay.

I slowly went back to the elevator, back to room 408.

When I slid into my seat at the Fair Share caucus next morning, Richard looked surprised to see me. “I assumed you’d be in bed like everyone else, sleeping it off.”

I’d just left Bernadette and Rhonda fast asleep in our room. “What happened last night?”

“First there was punch at the reception,” he said. “Don’t ask me what was in it. I don’t drink. Then everyone got together in one of the student rooms, and I guess they drank more, and who knows what else they did. I didn’t go.”

“Neither did I.” I looked the room over, but Cameron wasn’t there. Neither was the woman in the red dress. I was wearing my trouser suit again, but I’d taken time that morning to put on mascara and tinted sunblock. Richard would never have said it, but he thought I looked pretty.

The seminar leader that morning reviewed the history of the Fair Share party, which had been born two years previously after efforts to tighten state environmental protection laws failed in several states. Richard listened skeptically. Those laws failed for good reasons, he thought. Tuning in to his mind was like entering an antiseptically clean, brightly lit restaurant. There was nothing to tempt one’s appetite.

The first priority of the Fair Sharers was to give the party greater national visibility, the speaker said. “By the time the presidential primaries are held next year, we need to be a household word,” she said. “Luckily, we have a candidate who will make sure that happens.”

“Who’s the candidate?” I whispered to Richard.

“Probably that guy we heard last night,” he said, doodling an American flag in the margins of his notebook. “Cameron. Might as well call himself a socialist. That’s what he talked like.”

In Richard’s way of thinking, the environment existed as an industrial resource, plain and simple. It would renew itself, he figured. That was nature’s way. I thought for a second how out of place he must feel here and at Hillhouse, where the majority cared passionately about environmental conservation. But Richard didn’t mind being an outsider—in fact, he relished it. He felt confident that he was superior to the rest of us.

“That speech last night was a lesson in how to lie with statistics,” he said.

Someone shushed him, and the speaker turned toward us. “But we’ll need the support of each and every one of you if our message is to reach the American people.”

Richard said, “Fat chance.”

The man sitting next to him said, “Why are you here?”

“Did you ever hear the expression ‘Know your enemy’?”

I pretended that I was somewhere else. Usually, when I did that, my mind went to Jamaica, a place I knew only from Dashay’s descriptions. I thought the words Montego Bay, and off I went: white sand, turquoise water, no Richard.

We spent the rest of the day, apart from a lunch break, sitting in that hotel conference room. We learned how a fledgling political party organizes and finds its place in the public eye. The audience comprised students and volunteers of all ages. Our speakers were hardheaded, but their addresses were designed to be optimistic. Thanks to grassroots efforts and community-building, the Fair Share Party would get its national reputation. Cameron would appeal to more voters than the primary party candidates. The media would be reluctant at first, but would buy in after the primary elections showed that FSP could win.

Midway through the afternoon, Richard said to me, “I’m leaving. This is a waste of time. No real decisions are being made here—they happen late at night in smoke-filled rooms, same way they always did.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I was glad to see him go. I remembered my father’s words that politics were ephemera—transitory events that recurred in cyclical patterns, hardly worth one’s interest. By the end of the day, I half agreed with him, and I wondered if Richard could be right.

From time to time, images from the night before visited me, made me look around the room again in case Cameron had come in. I must confess, I didn’t think once about Walker.

But when I got back to room 408, he was there, sitting on the sofa that opened into Bernadette’s bed, while Bernadette sat on my bed and Rhonda lay across the other one. Their eyes looked glazed, and they all smiled at me. Drunk again? I wondered.

Walker patted the sofa seat next to his. “Ari, Ari,” he said. “I missed you.”

I sat down. Trying to pick up their thoughts brought me such a jumble that I gave up. “Are you all going to the reception tonight?” That was the next thing on the agenda. On the following day, we’d have morning seminar sessions, then lunch, then head back to Hillhouse.

“Love receptions,” Rhonda said. “Just love them.”

“Okay,” I said. “What are you all on?”

They smiled at me.

“What substance are you imbibing?”

Bernadette took a small plastic bottle off the nightstand and tossed it to me. I opened it and saw little pills stamped with Vs. Sugar pills? Looking around me, I didn’t think so.

“Try one.” Walker put his arm around me, but I shrugged it off.

“Thanks, but no,” I said. “It might interfere with my lupus medication.”

That night Walker, as planned, took me out to dinner. This was a real “date”—I wore a blue silk dress, and Walker had put on a jacket and tie.

As we came down Broughton Street, I said to him, “I didn’t think that you used drugs.”

“I don’t.” He seemed completely happy, moving along next to me, taking in the sights. “V is more of a mood enhancer, you know? One of the guys at the party last night had a bunch of it.”

I felt disappointed and confused, cheated out of what I should have been feeling on the night of a date.

“I don’t see what harm it does,” Walker said. “But if it bugs you that much, I won’t take any more.”

“Don’t take any more.” Whatever was in those pills made Walker someone else, to me. Yet part of me questioned: Easygoing, affable, uncritical—what was wrong with being that way? How do we distinguish genuine feelings from ones induced by substances? And why do we value the “real” ones more?

I said, “There’s the Marshall House. That’s the first hotel I stayed in by myself.”

Walker looked up at the black wrought iron that supported and trimmed the hotel balcony. “Cool,” he said.

Through the burgundy-draped windows, the hotel lobby looked the same—black-and-white diamond-patterned floors lit by glass bowl-shaped ceiling fixtures. The restaurant next door had its candles lit; they made the deep green walls glow.

Then I saw him. Sitting at the bar, his back to us, was a tall blond man in a black suit, drinking from a dark red glass.

Malcolm. I stopped moving. Walker sauntered on a few steps, then turned.

“What’s the matter?”

I didn’t say a word.

“Ari, you look like you saw a ghost.”

But he wasn’t a ghost. As I looked, he raised the glass as if toasting someone. Had he seen my wavering reflection in the mirror over the bar?

“Let’s go in.” My voice sounded matter-of-fact, but my blood was racing. The last time I’d seen him was in Sarasota. This man set the fire that nearly killed us, I thought. This man made my father and my mother vampires. He killed my best friend.

Walker followed me into the bar, thinking I wanted to have a drink. But I wanted answers. Why had he singled my family out? Was he somehow responsible for my father’s illness, too? No matter what the answers were, in my heart I craved revenge.

As we walked in, Malcolm didn’t act surprised at all to see me.

“Ms. Montero,” he said, rising from his seat and extending his hand.