All Our Yesterdays (9 page)

The expression on one woman’s face changes when she recognizes James. She raises her wineglass with a hand weighted down with jewels—
new money
, my mom would say—and whispers to her husband behind it. The man’s head swivels to stare at James, who’s too preoccupied with turning off his cell phone to notice. I’m about to ask them if their parents taught them it was rude to gawk, which will make dinner a little uncomfortable but be worth it, when Finn clears his throat loudly beside me. Everyone automatically looks at him, and he’s staring at the woman and her husband with a steeliness I’ve never seen in his goofy expression. The couple immediately turns away.

James looks up from his phone. “You okay? I think they’re bringing water around.”

“Nah, I’m cool,” Finn says, winking at me, and I turn away.

Dinner is served by waitstaff in tails and white gloves, and the speeches begin. I can tell James is taking in every word, but after twenty minutes, Senator Gaines begins to sound like one of the grown-ups from a Charlie Brown cartoon episode
to me:
mwamp mwamp mwamp.
In between stealing glances at James—James in
a tux
—I toy with my salmon and push the vegetables on my plate into neat little piles. After a while, I make a landscape out of them: a green broccoli valley at the base of Salmon Mountain, which rises toward puffy clouds of basmati rice.

I catch Finn watching me, his expression lit up with mocking.
How old are you,
he’ll say,
four?
I wreck my landscape with my fork and lean my head against James’s shoulder.

“Bored?” he asks.

“A little,” I whisper.

“Well, at least you look beautiful.”

I forget about Finn entirely. I forget to
breathe
. Suddenly the idea of parting James from his clothes doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous.

“Hey,” I say softly, hearing the words come out of my mouth as though I’m separate from my body. “Want to come over to my house when this is over? My parents left for Vail this morning.”

James is watching the speaker at the podium. “Yeah, sure.”

He often stays at my house when my parents are away, which is constantly, so he’s not getting it. But I can’t just
say
it, especially not here, with Finn Abbott two feet away. So instead, I put a tentative hand on his leg.

Any closer to his knee and it would be merely friendly. If I gave it a quick pat, it would be friendly. But my hand is just a little too high on his thigh, and I try to channel Sophie as I give it a light squeeze. It may seem like a cool move from the outside, but my chest is so tight, I legitimately wonder if I’m having a heart attack.

James looks up at me, and I see the cogs beginning to turn in his head.

“Hey,” Finn says. “Nate’s up.”

I jerk my hand back, and James turns toward the stage. I die in about forty-six different ways as I add this to the list of reasons I hate Finn Abbott, and I clench my trembling hands into fists underneath the tablecloth.

Nate is the second-to-last to speak, right before the vice president. Mayor McCreedy, who’s an old friend of my mom’s and comes to every party at our house, introduces him. A “rising star” in the Democratic Party, recently elected Minority Whip and climbing the ranks in the House Intelligence Committee.

Plus, he’s a
Shaw
.

“Do you think Nate will run for president someday?” I ask while the crowd applauds, trying to sound normal. Tamsin or Sophie wouldn’t be all mute and trembling, so I won’t be, either. I’m casual.

James shrugs. “He’s never said anything to me about it.”

“He will,” Finn says. “Not the next time around, but after that, maybe. After he’s been a senator or governor.”

“What makes you so sure?” I ask.

“He’s got it all. The lineage, the resources, the perfect presidential hair. He’d be crazy not to run.”

James laughs, not hearing the undertone of mocking in Finn’s words that I do.

“Well, I think he’d make a great president. He’s smart and compassionate and tough. Plus, you know”—I shoot Finn a withering look—“he has such great
hair
.”

“You shouldn’t discount the importance of a good haircut, M. It really—”

I cut in. “I’m being serious here, Finn, can’t you—”

“—says a lot about the man!”

“—quit being an idiot for ten seconds?”

“Guys, shh!” James says. “Nate’s coming on.”

Em

I sit on the frozen asphalt, leaning against the side of a salt-dusted Civic with Finn beside me. He rubs his hands together to keep off the chill, while I stare at the gun that lays in my own open palm.

It’s heavier than I remember a gun being. It’s been a while, but I didn’t think I would forget that kind of thing, and now, for some reason, it’s all I can think about.

“You sure you’re okay to do this?” Finn says. “Because I can.”

I shake my head. “I’m a better shot than you, and we might only get one chance.”

“You’re
barely
a better shot than me.”

“Oh please, Abbott. You suck, and you know it.”

“Maybe, but I didn’t grow up with—”

I stop him finishing the sentence. I can’t bear to hear it.

“I’m doing it,” I say. The words come out icier than I intended, like the air froze them as soon as they left my mouth, and Finn doesn’t argue with me anymore.

Marina

Nate takes the podium to thunderous applause from the ballroom, ducking his head and smiling in a way that both he and James inherited from their dad. Next to me, Finn puts two fingers in his mouth and lets out an ear-piercing whistle that makes me jump and slosh mineral water over my hand. The rest of our table turns and glares, and I shove him, while he and James just laugh. James hands me his napkin to dry off with.

Nate adjusts the microphone. “Thank you. First I want to thank the National Committee for having me and all of you for coming. It’s your support that helped our party take back the White House, and hopefully with your continued support, we’ll soon be taking back Congress. So I sincerely hope you’re enjoying your eight-hundred-dollar piece of salmon.”

Gentle laughter ripples through the crowd. Finn looks down at his empty plate and my barely touched one in horror.

“Our political system is broken,” Nate says. “Money and special interests speak louder in D.C. than the voices of our citizens. But the beauty of our democracy is that it’s always evolving, and nothing that has been broken is ever beyond repair as long as we proceed with courage, integrity, and an eye toward our common interests as a people.”

I may not understand politics, but I understand Nate. Most of the men in this room only care about power, but when Nate talks about working for the good of all people, I know he means it. He really cares, when most of us just say we do. I glance over at James and smile at the earnest, worshipful look in his eyes as he looks up at his brother.

“It is up to us to rebuild our government and the promise of our democracy. If we don’t—”

Something explodes. A concussion rips through the air, the sound so loud that it feels more like being hit than hearing something. I discover myself hunched in my chair, hands jammed over my ears, with no memory of having moved. Around me people are screaming and scattering, some running, others falling out of their chairs and flattening themselves to the red and gold hotel carpet.

On the stage, Nate has crumpled and fallen behind the podium. I stare at him, frozen, the shouts around me going silent in my ears. He’s staring out at the crowd, his cheek pressed to the floor of the stage, and for a second I swear he’s looking right at me.

What’s going on? Why is no one helping him up?

Then I see the blood. It’s blooming from his chest the way the garish red rhododendrons in Mrs. Murphy’s yard unfurl when the sun comes out.

The world regains its speed and noise with a crack. My throat feels raw, and I realize I’m screaming.

Nate’s been shot.

James lunges toward the stage, tearing through people to get to his fallen brother. Finn, along with a half a dozen other people, turns and runs in the opposite direction, out of the ballroom. I go after James.

Secret Service agents have bundled the vice president out of the ballroom, and a line of them forms a barricade across the front of the stage, pushing back against the people who are being thrust toward them by the surge of the fleeing crowd. Behind the agents, the men who were already on the stage are clustered around Nate, including Mayor McCreedy and Senator Gaines, who’s kneeling over Nate, pressing a hand to the wound on his chest. James runs full force into the line of agents as though he doesn’t even see them. They catch him around the arm and the collar, holding him back.

“That’s my brother!” he screams, voice barely human. “That’s my
brother
!”

I find my voice. “He’s James Shaw, let him through!”

Thank God the mayor looks up and says, “It’s okay, gentlemen!” Otherwise I think James might have torn them apart. He’s incandescent with terror, on fire with it, and no force of nature could have held him back. He leaps onto the stage, crashing into the second layer of men between him and his brother and battering his way through. I can only watch helplessly from behind the agents’ line as he kneels at Nate’s side and clutches his hand.

Nate’s eyes roll around the scene horribly, as though he can’t focus them, and I turn and vomit all over the ballroom’s ornate carpet.

Seven

Marina

Time passes. I don’t know how much. The Secret Service herds us out of the ballroom—the crime scene—and I end up sitting on the floor in the lobby, a few feet from where the front doors open and close, sending gusts of frigid air over me, not caring about the years of embedded dirt I’m getting on my beautiful dress. Somewhere I lost one of Sophie’s shoes, and a bruise is rapidly darkening on my arm, which I don’t remember hitting. All around me people are huddled in small groups, crying or answering questions from the agents who spread out to take statements, but I don’t really see them. I know I should be finding Finn or calling Luz or hailing a cab, but all I can do is sit and stare and remember the day James put his parents in the ground.

James seemed to be carved from marble the day of the funeral. Twelve years old, dressed in a new black suit and shoes that were too big for him, with an expression like hard white stone. I stood at the back of the church with my parents on either side of me, two tall columns of black as solid as the walls of my house, and tried to see James’s face, all the way in the front pew with Nate at his side.

He was silent and still, and I kept waiting for him to cry. I would have cried.

My parents told me to give him some space, but as soon as we reached the Shaws’ reception, I ran off and left them at a buffet table collecting plates of crab puffs. I slipped through the crowds like a little fish through a school, bobbing and weaving at waist level, looking for James’s dark head and pale face. I did two laps of the first floor, but he was nowhere. Nate—who was clerking for Justice MacMillan by then and had his own place in Capitol Hill but still came home most weekends—was shaking hands and taking condolences. When he saw me, he inclined his head toward the staircase and mimed opening a book.

In the library upstairs, I found James’s suit jacket laid over the back of the sofa and his shiny leather shoes flung into a corner, but there was no sign of James. I called his name, but only silence greeted me. I stepped farther into the room and finally found him curled up in a large wing chair that faced away from the door, so folded in on himself that he was invisible until you got close. I sat down cross-legged on the floor beside him, even though I knew Mom would be mad about the wrinkles in my best navy dress.

“You okay?” I said. I knew he wasn’t, of course, but I didn’t know what else to say.

“Why did your parents name you Marina?” he asked, his voice steady and normal, like it was any other day.

His unnatural calmness unnerved me. “It was my grandmother’s idea. It’s after a character in a play.”

“Shakespeare, right?
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
,” he said. “Marina was born on a boat during a storm.”

“Yeah.”

“Mom and Dad named Nate after my grandfather, who was the governor of Connecticut. They never expected to have me. Mom said they argued for months over what to name me. She wanted James, and Dad wanted Michael.”

“How did your mom win?”

He finally met my gaze, and the look in his eyes was like falling and falling and never hitting the ground. “I never asked.”

My tiny heart broke, because I think, even at ten years old, I was already a little in love with him. “James—”

He jumped to his feet before I could finish my sentence, and then the lamp on the table beside him was flying into the wall and shattering into a thousand pieces.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen!” he cried, his hand bleeding from where he’d hit the lamp with the side of his fist. “How could it just
happen
and there’s no way to change it? One stupid second and a wet road and everything’s ruined forever?”