The Wrong Side of Right(2)

It wasn’t until I’d gotten to my house that fear set in, icy and creeping, frost on a field. Our LA bungalow was surrounded by local news crews, there to report my mother’s death.

Community hero, founder of the Cocina de Los Angeles Food Bank, dead at age thirty-five.

“It was instant,” Marta had told me, safe inside the living room and wrapped in a blanket like I was the one who’d been pulled from a car wreck. “She didn’t feel any pain.”

As if anybody could know that.

Marta had a quiet word with the news crews and they packed up and left. She stayed the night and I half slept for seventeen hours and when I woke up, my mom was still dead, but her brother, Barry, and his wife, Tess, had arrived.

They were nice people whom I’d met a few times before. They had a grown son and a landscaping business in James Island, South Carolina. They were all I had in the way of family—no grandparents, no father, not even his name, and suddenly no mother. They were willing to take me.

And now, nearly a year later, they were calling me, telling me to come home, to my new home, where this couldn’t be happening, couldn’t possibly be happening to us again.

I pulled around our corner to find a gridlocked freeway where our house should be. My foot hit the brake. There were news vans in neighboring driveways and rows of cars penning in the tidy hedges all along the usually sleepy street. I recognized only a couple of the bumper stickers and window decals—parents, here to pick up their kids from the day care center Tess operated from our house.

An agitated blonde came down the sidewalk, balancing her toddler on one hip while struggling to shove his cluttered bag over her shoulder. I rolled down my window and drifted closer to her SUV.

“Mrs. Hanby!”

Her taut face dropped when she saw me. She let her son into the car, glaring at the news vans. “You need to get in there fast, hon. They just keep coming—I barely managed to get Jonah out!”

Behind the glass of the backseat, Jonah blinked at me, saucer-eyed. I probably looked just like him. I swallowed, had to ask.

“Is it my aunt? Is Tess okay?”

“Oh sweetie. You haven’t seen the news.” Mrs. Hanby came around to give my arm a squeeze, her eyes squinting with pity. “She’s fine, but you need to go on home now and find out for yourself.”

She tapped my car twice, like she was spurring a horse and weirdly, it worked. I drove, holding my breath, past two gleaming black Town Cars, past my uncle’s truck with the big sign on it advertising “Quinn Yards,” past the first news van, dimly registering the letters CNN emblazoned on it. There weren’t any cars in the driveway. But there were people—hordes of them, masses, carrying cell phones, microphones, cameras.

I turned in slowly, hoping they’d move out of the way, praying I wouldn’t have to call attention to myself by laying on the horn.

I didn’t need to. They parted, all right. They practically ran, flanking my car like the waves of the Red Sea before falling in behind me. I shut off the engine and heard an unnatural hush settle around the Buick. A camera was pressed against the passenger window. Its red light was on.

I opened my door and the tide rushed in. They were a crash of voices, a wall of faces, something out of a zombie movie.

“Excuse me,” I cried, trying to politely shove a camera-man so I could shut my car door. The crowd pressed closer, howling. I couldn’t make out words until a petite brunette with a peacock-branded microphone scrambled into my path and asked: “When did you first learn that Senator Cooper was your father?”

“What?”

The words weren’t connecting. They were nonsense words. Magnetic poetry.

I tried to push forward, but there were hands, microphones blocking me at every angle. Then there came a ripple in the wall and a large bald black man walked through, wrapped one arm around me, and ushered me past the crowd, onto the porch, and through my front door, saying, “You’re all right, kid, you’re all right.”

Aunt Tess was first to greet me. I coughed a sob and rushed to hug her, but she gently held me back.

“Kate,” she said, in an unnaturally singsong tone. “You have a visitor.”

And then, through the door to the living room, I saw him.

He was slowly rising from my uncle’s battered armchair, his hand shaking as he loosened a red silk tie. He stared at me, eyes wide, like I was a ghost, like I was covered in blood or wielding a gun, like I was terrifying.

I knew exactly who he was. Everybody in the country did, especially juniors who’d just finished their AP US history exams.

Senator Mark Cooper. Republican, Massachusetts.

Candidate—President of the United States of America.