The Hearing (15 page)

S
amantha’s face was alive in the brilliance of sunlight reflected from banks of clouds beneath them. Alive but troubled. Michelle,
sitting on the aisle, slipped over into the center seat beside Samantha. She put her head next to Samantha’s and looked with
her through the narrow window.

“Beautiful.” Maybe she could cheer her up.

Samantha smiled and nodded, but did not speak.

The night before, Michelle and Gus had asked Samantha to call them by their first names. They wanted her to know they did
not expect her suddenly to stop thinking of Doreen and Larry as Mom and Dad. Samantha had only shrugged.

Michelle looked with Samantha through the window at the clouds and sunshine. Referring to the difficulty of leaving Larry,
she said, “Is it better now?”

“Hmmmm.” Like a cat purring, but without the contentment. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” Far away. Michelle could barely catch the
words. And Samantha’s eyes—a child’s eyes in a woman’s body. Michelle studied her, gazing out the window.

Michelle said, “I’m really sorry Larry couldn’t come.”

“He has to work. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

Samantha was too practical to carry the fight beyond defeat. It was done now. Accept it. It was hard to know how much Samantha
would really miss Larry. They seemed more like brother and sister than father and daughter. Larry had telephoned the hotel
in Saint-Tropez, and Carl drove back and picked up Samantha’s things. He packed his own bag, and the next morning met the
others at a Holiday Inn near the airport, where they had spent the night. That morning Larry had kissed Samantha goodbye,
watched the three of them disappear into the departure lounge, and headed back to Saint-Tropez.

Samantha slept most of the trip. Gus and Michelle watched her, like parents staring proudly into the crib of a newborn.

The plane landed, stopped rolling, and a male voice on the PA system said, “Will Miss Samantha Young please call herself to
the attention of a flight attendant?”

When Gus had called Rothman from Nice to tell him what was happening, Rothman had said not to leave the plane with Samantha.
“If reporters find out you’re on the plane we don’t want them to see you with Samantha and
start wondering who she is. I’ll send some people to pick her up. We’ll get you back with her later.”

Samantha disembarked with two White House Secret Service agents, and five minutes later the other passengers got off. Just
past the Customs and Immigration area, a dozen men and women with TV cameras, microphones, and lights, plus a crowd of print
reporters and photographers, confronted passengers. At first Gus thought there’d been a movie star on board. Then they spotted
him and Michelle.

Someone yelled, “What about the abortion?”

A young man wearing face makeup stuck a microphone in Gus’s face.

“There’ve been reports you arranged for the abortion of your wife’s child. Can you comment on that?”

Gus looked at Michelle, trying to keep her balance in the crush of reporters jostling them with microphones, pocket recorders,
and notepads.

A woman waved a newspaper at him. A headline said
PARHAM URGED ABORTION FOR WIFE
. She yelled, “Did you see this?”

Michelle struggled to remain upright, her face a picture of fury.

A man yelled, “What about the rape case?”

Rape case?

Another voice: “Have you seen the TV ads? What’s your reaction to them?”

A man pushed Michelle roughly aside to get closer to Gus. She glared for a moment at the back of his jacket, then kicked him
behind his left kneecap. The knee buckled, and he dropped. Her face clouded with horror at what she had done.

Gus grabbed her arm. Through the mob he spotted
Rothman with two large young men in unbuttoned blazers. The men shot into the crowd, and twenty seconds later Gus and Michelle
were in the back of a State Department limousine with tinted windows. Michelle’s hair was mussed, and a button had been torn
from Gus’s jacket.

Rothman said, “Welcome to Washington. You still wanna be a Supreme Court justice?”

“More than ever.” Gus touched Michelle’s arm. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. What a battle.” Dredging a comb from her handbag, she said to Rothman, “Where’s Samantha?”

“In another car ahead of us.”

Gus said, “I hope she didn’t go through anything like that.”

“No one even knew who she was.”

Michelle stuffed the comb back into her purse. “What I want to know is, where’d they get that arranged-for-an-abortion stuff?”

“Someone suggested to the media that you ended a pregnancy.”

“Who did that?”

“Harrington, probably. It was on the news last night. He must have leaked the documents about your interest in abortion but
withheld the documents showing that in the end you rejected abortion and had the child. This gets the pro-life people down
on you for supporting abortion. If we want to reveal that you did not have an abortion after all, it forces us to come out
on the issue, giving it more life and energy, after which the opposition will suggest that we faked the adoption documents
and you really
did
have an abortion. The more we fight over it, the more attention it gets. Whatever happens, we lose.”

“But can’t we do something? I never—”

“There is no way we can win an abortion battle, Michelle. If Gus appears to support abortion, the pro-life people will attack
him. If he opposes abortion, the pro-choice people will go for him. In either case, he’ll lose enough votes to kill his confirmation
in the Senate.”

Rothman glanced at Gus and smiled. “But don’t be impatient. We have weapons too. It’s just beginning.”

Gus said, “What was all that about a rape case, and TV ads? We leave town for a day and it’s like the world changed.”

“A day can be a very long time in this town. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Where’re we going?”

“We’ve got a house. State uses it for visitors. Very secure. No one will bother you.” He looked at Michelle. “Samantha will
be there when you arrive. How is she, by the way?”

“Wonderful.”

“And Larry Young?”

“A very nice man.”

No one mentioned Doreen.

The house was three stories, red brick, surrounded by a black, spiked iron fence, squeezed between the Brazilian and Norwegian
embassies on a tree-shaded street of large homes and grassy lawns. A cook and a white-aproned maid lived on the top floor,
and a team of round-the-clock State Department security agents, with jackets, ties, and nine-millimeter automatics, occupied
a cramped office off the entrance vestibule, monitoring TV screens, motion sensors, and sound detectors arrayed around the
building and on the
roof. A locked steel cabinet contained stun grenades and Uzi automatic rifles. Six rosebushes along the south border had
given the house its nickname and official security code: Blossom.

The limousine eased through metal gates into a narrow driveway separating the house from the brick-walled Brazilian embassy.
At the rear of the house, the limousine maneuvered in a turning space and backed down into a partially underground garage.
Before the driver could get around to open the passenger doors, Gus and Michelle were already out, nodding hello to a dark-haired,
twenty-one-year-old Portuguese maid named Louisa.

The first thing Gus did was take a bath. He was up to his neck in steaming water when the door opened and Samantha walked
in, carrying a toothbrush.

She said, “Oh, excuse me. I’ll just be a minute.”

She finished with her teeth, turned off the water, put the toothbrush back in its plastic case, screwed the top on the toothpaste
tube, said, “See you later,” and walked out.

As Gus lay there naked, stunned and silent, it dawned on him that he and Michelle may have been taking a lot for granted.
Neither of them knew Samantha. They knew she was pretty and clever, and that she was their daughter. But they didn’t
know
her. In the day and a half since Gus had met her in the Nice airport, she had managed to leave him charmed, frightened, and
bewildered. Solidly in the grasp of adolescence, she was childishly helpless one minute, stubbornly independent the next.
You accepted her as a cute, innocent Shirley Temple and the next thing you knew she was coming at you like a rottweiler. It
was hard to know who she was. She probably didn’t know herself. Growing up sur
rounded by more adults than children—as she appeared to have done—had left her bright but lonely.

Samantha wasn’t sure about Louisa, the Portuguese maid. Louisa had been in Washington only two weeks and it seemed the only
friend she’d made was a twenty-two-year-old unmarried State Department guard named Todd Naeder. Louisa was so eager for feminine
companionship that the evening Samantha arrived they sat in Louisa’s tiny third-floor bedroom while the maid poured out what
appeared to be two weeks of stockpiled intimacies, most of which involved trysts with Todd Naeder in the back seat of the
garaged Cadillac limousine.

“In the limousine?” Samantha asked, wondering if there was some polite way she could just say good night and go to bed.

“Todd says it’s the safest place. The guards are the only ones with keys to the garage. It’s armored.”

“The garage is armored?”

“No, the limousine. Todd says the things we get up to in there it’s a good thing.”

There must have been something wrong with Samantha’s smile. Louisa said, “How old are you?”

“Guess.”

“Seventeen.”

Samantha shook her head.

“Sixteen?”

Another shake of the head.

“Tell me.”

“Thirteen.”

“
Thirteen!
Oh, wow.”

“It’s okay. Everybody thinks I’m a lot older.”

“I don’t believe it.
Thirteen
. Are you …”

“What?”

“Have you ever …”

“Am I a virgin? Yes.”

“Todd’ll never believe it. That you’re thirteen, I mean. You stay away from him.”

Samantha shrugged. Louisa was okay, she guessed, but she didn’t seem like the sort of person you really shared your memories
with, not the kind of memories Samantha had.

Samantha went to bed that night thinking about her father and about the Steinway she’d seen downstairs in the living room.
She closed her eyes and imagined that she could hear the faint notes of Dvořák’s Concerto in G Minor. Dvořák was her father’s
favorite composer, the G Minor Concerto his favorite piece. She imagined that she could get out of bed, go downstairs, barefoot
in her pajamas, and stand in the doorway watching his back as he played the Steinway. Then she’d walk over to him and put
her hands on his shoulders. Without looking around, knowing it was her, he’d lay his cheek on her hand. After a moment, she’d
move around him to the other side of the piano and lean against it, elbows on the polished mahogany, and watch him play. His
eyes would be closed. She’d close hers. Together they would soak in the music.

She missed him a lot. Why had he let her go? He shouldn’t have done that. She’d already lost her real parents, and then she
lost her second mother, and now she’d lost her second father. What was wrong? Why didn’t anyone want to hang on to her? Her
second mother, Doreen, hadn’t made any bones about it. Once, when Samantha was seven, she’d gone to bed early, nine o’clock,
and her mother had dragged
her out of bed. Her mother’d been fighting with her dad all day. As far as Samantha knew, she’d been fighting with him all
her life. She just seemed to get angrier and angrier, nastier and nastier. Samantha had gone to her room to get away from
the screams and threats. If they hit each other she didn’t want to see it.

Her mother had yelled at her. “What did I tell you to do?” It was as if she’d come into the room dragging all her anger with
her, couldn’t move without it.

Samantha said, “I’m tired.”

“What did I tell you to do?”

“Serve drinks.”

Samantha was scared. Her mother had never hit her, but she’d hit her father, chased him with a knife into the bathroom. Lately
she’d been mad all the time, never cooled down, never lost the lines of rage that marked her face like scars.

“So get dressed and do what you’re told.”

She was shouting. Samantha’d been up at six to finish homework she couldn’t do the night before because she’d been serving
drinks to all the people who came to the house. She was tired of being scared of her mother. She felt like giving up.

“I’m tired. I got up early this morning.”

“Don’t talk back to me, Samantha.”

Samantha was silent. She didn’t care.

“Did you hear me?”

Samantha turned toward the closet.

“I’m talking to you!”

She opened the closet door.

“Don’t you ignore me, you little bitch.”

Samantha turned and looked at her mother. Her
mother’s hand struck Samantha’s cheek. Face burning, tears blurring her vision, not caring what happened, Samantha said,
“I hate you!”

She said it again, softly, not even minding if her mother heard. “I hate you.”

“Don’t you—how dare you talk to me like that! You think I care if you hate me?”

Her mother laughed, the nasty little laugh she used with her father. “Who cares if you hate me, a miserable little monster
like you?”

“I’m not a monster.”

They were still in front of the closet, Samantha streaming tears, her mother’s eyes dark with fury, searching for ways to
hurt.

“Your mother thought you were. You’re lucky she didn’t kill you before you even got born.”

What did that mean?

“Oh, you don’t know what to say to that? Nothing smart to say to that?”

Her mother nodded her head, staring at Samantha. Samantha knew that what her mother had said was something terrible, supposed
to hurt her, and that her mother was waiting to see the pain.

“So, you know so much, but you didn’t know that. Something you didn’t know. Not so smart after all, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

Her mother crossed her arms. A man called from the living room, but her mother wasn’t listening.