As the sound of the Jeep receded down the long cobblestone driveway, he heard another slight gasp and saw her body tremble.
“Mom?” he called softly.
She paused, then turned toward him. Tears glimmered. “I just wish . . .”
“I know, Mom.” He stepped toward her and embraced her.
“Your father doesn’t see in Sean what we see,” she whispered. “What an amazing man he is . . . and can become.”
Nor will he ever, Will wanted to say realistically, but he couldn’t hurt his mother that way.
She pulled back and gazed into Will’s eyes. “Are you considering making a run for president? I mean, seriously thinking about it?”
He hedged. “I don’t know.”
“Promise me you’ll put this family first,” she said, lips trembling. “Promise me you’ll put Laura and the kids first. They can’t grow up like . . .”
She left the rest unspoken, but Will understood. He’d decided long ago that when he and Laura had kids, they would have an actively involved father who was home for them. His own father’s absence had left a hollow, disconcerted feeling. He never wanted his kids to feel like he had—that his life was like the 2,500-piece puzzle he’d put together one summer, only to discover a single piece in the middle was missing and not to be found.
He also didn’t want his kids to have to live every day in the spotlight of the media, as he had growing up. But living out those vows day to day, in the midst of the blue-blood business world, was often tough.
As Bill Worthington always said, “To those who are given much, much is required.” Will was just starting to figure out what the “much is required” part of it meant.
“I promise,” he told her. “Family first . . . always.”
She nodded, but there was still a hint of fear and sadness in her eyes. “And you’ll always be in your brother’s court? Look after him?” she pressed. “Even in places where I can’t?”
He frowned. “Of course. But why would you ask that? You know I will.”
Her expression grew determined. “Promise me you will watch over your brother, no matter what. Because I know if you do, you will never break that promise.”
He felt a stirring of unrest inside, as if there were more to the promise than she was letting on. But he said, “I promise.”
And he meant it. Will had been the safe hub for his mother and siblings as long as he could remember, with his dad away so much. He wasn’t about to let any of them down . . . ever.
2
THE ARCTIC OCEAN
Sean stood with Dr. Elizabeth Shapiro by the railing of the ice cutter USS Cantor, watching the pod of beluga whales move through the cold waters as one. Attuned to each other, the whales reacted to threats and opportunities almost as a single entity. They fed together and, when necessary, took on predators together. The simple beauty in that unity had always amazed him. Why couldn’t that work with families too?
He exhaled, recalling the last Worthington family dinner and hightailing it out of there. If it wasn’t for his mom and his love for his siblings—even his perfect brother—he wouldn’t even have tried. Sean respected and loved his dad, but he’d never felt like he was on a level playing field with him.
“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel at home among the creatures of the sea,” Elizabeth murmured to Sean. “Now, among people? Normal people? That’s a different matter.”
Sean chuckled. “I’m glad to know I’m not a normal person then.”
At that, Elizabeth laughed out loud.
Sean, Elizabeth, and Jon Gillibrand, a reporter for the New York Times, had all run into each other some years back at an environmental symposium. The lean, leggy blonde had been stating her opinion vociferously at a lunch table, arguing down the best naysayers with carefully reasoned research until, one by one, they skulked away. All except Sean and Jon, that is, who were intrigued. They liked that kind of dialogue in anyone and were challenged and motivated by it, but they’d rarely seen it in a woman. Over some bland cafeteria food, the three had bonded and had kept in contact regularly since then, even as all of them traversed the globe. To Sean, his expansive network of friends was his family, and it was with them that he could relax and enjoy life.
With Sean’s wealth, connections, rakish red-haired good looks, swaggering confidence, and amiable disposition, he gathered Facebook and Twitter friends like his brother collected ties. That was something he and SB, his social butterfly sister, shared in common. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d had to work hard to get a date. But to him, all the beautiful models on his arm at black-tie social affairs were just that—beautiful models with nothing beyond the skin-deep looks.
Elizabeth, on the other hand, had a natural, simple beauty he appreciated. He’d never seen her wear a stitch of makeup even when she stood at podiums to give scientific presentations. She was also wonderfully quirky and brilliant. The only child of a world-renowned scientist, Elizabeth had grown up surrounded with oddball dinner guests who talked as easily about coastal biodiversity, environmental data gathering, and the mating patterns of harp seals as most families talked about soccer practice and the weather.
Sean had always been intrigued by ecology and climate change. He and Elizabeth shared fascinating dialogue—often in the form of short texts zipped across the globe—and every once in a while, like now, the experience of a lifetime.
They shared something else too. Both felt abandoned by a parent. Though Sean’s father was present, he’d never really been a part of Sean’s “important people” circle, and Sean had given up on that idea a long time ago. When Elizabeth was 11, her mother had decided she’d had enough of science and her husband trotting around the planet, as well as the rest of the Shapiro family.
So Elizabeth had gotten her wish—to travel with her father. Since then, Elizabeth and Dr. Leopold Shapiro had been a team. Everyone knew the eccentric scientist went nowhere without his daughter. Now she was a scientist in her own right, having just finished her PhD in ecology and biology at UCLA. It had taken her longer than the average graduate to finish her degree, with accompanying her father on his missions, but she’d had the rare opportunity to work directly in the field along the way.
Elizabeth had guts and spunk, and she loved plunging in to do the kind of work that others merely dreamed of and had to apply for all sorts of grants to do. Sean could have helped her financially—had even offered to—but she’d refused. Somehow that made him respect her even more. He had to admit, growing up as a Worthington made life fairly easy, at least in the financial realm. He never had to think about what he spent.
Elizabeth lived on a shoestring, but she held to her ideals and views. That was what Sean admired the most. Maybe when he was ready to settle down, he’d . . .
He shook himself free of that crazy thought. At 35, he still had a lot he wanted to do before he was tied down. That was Will’s deal, not his. Somehow Sean couldn’t see himself in a New York penthouse apartment, changing baby diapers and going to kids’ soccer games.
He drew the hood of his parka closer as the Arctic air crept in, and peered back toward the water. There weren’t many predators of beluga whales this far north in the deep waters of the Arctic Ocean. It was difficult for even the hardiest Inuit village to make camp close enough to these waters to send out boats to find them, and the polar bears hadn’t arrived here with the coming ice yet. That left only the orcas.
But today the pod had company. A lone ice cutter followed slowly after them, marking its passage through ice-free waters. There should have been a cover of ice this late in the summer. But there wasn’t. In fact, that was why the ice cutter was trailing behind the pod of beluga whales.
Two dozen scientists, including the two Dr. Shapiros, were on a scientific mission of a lifetime—the first effort to study and document Arctic Ocean conditions tied into a global monitoring system. The USS Cantor, the brand-new Navy ice cutter and the first in a generation that Congress had commissioned, had left por
t at the start of summer, right after Elizabeth finished her degree. As the ship worked its way around the perimeter of the Arctic, the science team dropped buoys to extend Argo—a system of thousands of scientific buoys that had been used to study the amount of warming in oceans in various parts of the world. This was the first effort to study the Arctic.
The plan had been to start along the coastlines that surrounded the Arctic Ocean and then work slowly toward the center as the summer deepened and the ice melted. They’d get as close to the center as they could, cutting ice as necessary. That way, they could put as many buoys in place as the ice melted, and then even more buoys as the ice started to refreeze.
They’d even planned to encircle the series of deep-drilling wells that American Frontier, the world’s largest and most adventuresome oil company, had been granted permission to build. It had been an extraordinarily controversial decision, but after two years of near disasters, American Frontier had managed to finish several wells without incident. The Navy ship had planned its mission around a few of the wells that had been operational now for more than a year, even when the ice returned.
But a strange thing had happened that put all the scientists on alert. As the USS Cantor completed its trip around the perimeter and then inched its way toward the center of the ocean, the ice had kept melting . . . and melting . . . and melting.
At first none of the scientists on board, cautious by trade and skeptical by nature, had said much to the Navy crew about the situation. But their speculations popped up in their blog posts accessed by a selective audience—including Sean and Jon—that perhaps they were witnessing the first ice-free Arctic summer in thousands of years. When the ice continued to melt more each day, the situation in the Arctic became too obvious to ignore any longer. There’d been a fierce battle between the Coast Guard and the Navy over rights to the ship. The Navy had won.
To the average person, melting ice in the Arctic wouldn’t mean much of anything. But the Shapiros were convinced by the data that the melting was only the beginning of what could become a very big deal for the entire planet. Elizabeth had even emailed some of the data to Sean and Jon, two of the few people outside of her dad and their close colleagues whom she trusted to be objective and honest with any facts and evidence they were given. Stunned by the data, Sean had used many connections to wangle himself on board the USS Cantor. Not only did he crave being on the cutting edge of major changes happening in the world, but Will was on the board of American Frontier, so their family had a vested interest.
“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” Elizabeth gestured toward the Arctic Ocean.
“You mean the belugas?” Sean studied the glow on her face. Power and position were important to a lot of people. Not to Elizabeth. She merely wanted the time and tools to gain the knowledge to make the world a better place for all—people and animals.
“No, not the belugas,” Elizabeth said, startling Sean out of his reverie. “I mean the ease at which we’ve been cutting through the ice. It’s not thick at all. Some days just a thin sheet. Other days the chunks are easily broken up. And the volume isn’t near what anyone had expected. The Arctic Institute at the U of Washington has been predicting that the ice has been melting for years to maybe a quarter of what it was 20 years ago . . .”
“. . . but no one believed them,” he finished.
“Yeah, even when the CryoSat system in Europe recently confirmed it.” She shook her head. “I wonder how much it’ll take for people to become aware of just how much has been lost at the top of the world.”
Sean had no answer to that. People in general believed what they wanted to and ignored what they didn’t want to know about.
The beluga whales had been with them for the past few days. As the ship broke up ice and generally scared the fish in the environment, it was easy for the whales to follow behind and eat the swarms of fish scattering in the ship’s wake. It was a nice, symbiotic relationship.
Suddenly there was a commotion behind them, near one of the American Frontier platforms they’d reached in the past hour or so. A deep, muffled explosion that sounded like it had come from the depths of the ocean.
Sean and Elizabeth jerked their heads, almost as one. Disturbances of any kind were news out here in the stillness of the Arctic.
“What in the world . . . ?” Elizabeth asked.
They waited several minutes, eyes focused on the spot where the pod of whales had been. At that instant, several surfaced and churned madly. Ice and water spouted and roiled.
Then, as if by magic, the water started to change color. Sean stared in growing fascination, which soon morphed to horror, as first one beluga whale and then another thrashed wildly near the surface.
“It’s black!” Sean called as one of the belugas flailed close enough to the cutter for them to get a good look. Some of the whales had come in contact with black, sludge-like oil in the water. Many were now coated with the stuff.
The cutter erupted with activity. Elizabeth’s father scurried toward them, coat half on and the tail of his rumpled shirt hanging out the back of his trousers. Gripping the rail of the ship, he focused on the spot where Elizabeth pointed.
Almost every sailor on board was on deck within minutes. Elizabeth’s eyes met Sean’s, then both of them stared back at the slowly spreading oil slick now becoming evident on the surface.
In that instant Sean realized the oil was coming up from the bottom of the ocean floor. Like the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, American Frontier’s grand adventure in the Arctic Ocean was about to take center stage—in the worst possible way.
And he was right in the middle of it.
NEW YORK CITY
He’d always been odd. At least that was what everyone but his mother said.
They never said it to her face. They didn’t dare. But he felt it in every stare of the other school children so intently that at last she removed him from public school and put him in a special school.
“A place for gifted kids,” she told him.
He believed her, even though he continued to feel as if he were the pendulum of a clock, swinging between the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.
There at the new school, he found acceptance and other kids like him. And he discovered his love for theater. At the age of twelve, he announced that he was going to be an actor. “Someday you’re going to see me in the spotlight, and my name in the headlines,” he told his mother.
“I have no doubt,” she told him proudly.
Her belief in him is what had made him hang on for years, believing in his dream of becoming a famous Broadway actor. He’d been to quite a few workshops and more than his fair share of auditions. But he’d never gotten a decent callback—either because he was actually a bad actor or because the whiff of desperation clung to him like a damp cloth.
“That’s okay, son,” his mother would say, patting his arm. “You’re just down on your luck right now. Things will turn around. Wait and see.”
Then came the day where he’d come home and found his mama slumped in her favorite chair. She’d gone on to her eternal reward.
After that, the darkness that had always fuzzed the edges of his brain started to descend more often, followed by periods of frantic job hunting. Within the year, he’d arrived home to a locked door and a foreclosure sign on his home.
Yet each time he passed through the theater district, close to Times Square, he vowed he’d do right by his mama.
Somehow he would make the world pay attention.
He merely needed the right opportunity.
3
NEW YORK CITY
It had been only yesterday that William Jennings Worthington VI’s life was a little simpler, when he was at the summer home in Chautauqua. If you could ever call a Worthington’s life simple. Will shook his head.
Early this morning, shocking news had come in the form of an understated phone call from the Arctic Circle. News that would not only sweep across the world once the networks
got ahold of it but was likely to swiftly change Will’s own destiny. He’d been at home, the sole place he could truly relax and not worry about what the rest of the world thought of him. There it was his wife who kept all the family plates happily spinning. Not that he didn’t contribute heavily as a father, but Laura was a master organizer as well as a wise encourager for their three kids, who were so incredibly different from each other.
His firstborn, Andrew, was 12, with Laura’s dark brown hair and lean frame. He had Will’s serious nature and drive to make a difference in the world, but Laura’s inventiveness. Someday, given the right tools, the kid would go far.
Patricia was 10 and had her maternal grandmother’s auburn hair, freckles, and startling green eyes. When she wasn’t with her friends, she was texting them.
David had just turned 8 and was a real charmer who made friends with everybody he met, including their mailman. Davy was constantly up to something and kept both Laura and Will on their toes.
Together, the three kids and Laura kept their home buzzing with activity.
But now it was empty, and Will couldn’t wait for it to be filled again. Tomorrow night. They’ll be home tomorrow night.
Each year Laura took the kids for two months of their summer vacation to Malawi to build wells and clinics and help the villagers with medical needs. Will met them there for three weeks, the largest chunk he could carve out of his business schedule. It had been their agreement ever since Laura had felt the first flicker of life in her womb.
“I want our kids to experience what life is like for those who are poor,” she’d said, her hand caressing her belly, “and to grow passionate about finding ways to help people in need.”
Will had wholeheartedly agreed. He’d spent far too much time in prep school with rich, spoiled kids who thought only of themselves and the moment.
So he and Laura had researched places that could use their help even before Andrew was born. And when Andrew was a toddler, they’d launched off on their first trip to Africa. Since then the family had passionately done anything they could for the people of Malawi. Laura, an amazing linguist, could even speak much of the local language now, and the kids had picked up enough words to be passable.
A Perfect Ambition Page 2
