by Amy Faye
Paul took a breath. There were times that he wanted nothing more than to walk away from all of it, from all of them, but now, from where he was standing it seemed like maybe his black book full of dirty tricks was the best tool at his disposal.
There were other things to consider first, though. The right tool for the right job, for one thing. And second, when all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
Well, he wasn't going to let himself fall into that trap. There must have been another way out, but if he looked at the worry and grief on Lara's face for one more instant then he knew exactly how he was going to react. Or rather, he added sourly, how he was going to overreact, because he was damn sure that he wasn't going to under react.
The boy was burning up. He'd been like this every day, and it was only getting worse no matter what he did. He went through the list of options again, as if there would be something new. Then he stood, pressed the back of his hand against the boy's head and turned the cool compress on his head. It wasn't cold any longer, but it wasn't as if he had any way of replacing it, either.
His address book was always dangerously close to being full. As if he was going to suddenly discover that he was too full of people he knew, too full of people who owed him favors. This one, in particular, seemed as if it was going to be favor enough for a lifetime, if it came through. He had to hope and pray it would be enough.
The phone rang once, twice, and then finally someone picked up the other end.
"Dr. Richards," the voice said. He sounded distracted until Paul spoke.
"Doctor? This is Senator Green."
"Senator. How can I help you?"
He stepped out of the room and into the hall. It was louder in the hall, but at least then he wasn't disturbing Lara with the call, and with where it was about to go.
"You've got a lovely hospital, Doctor."
"Thank you, it's very nice of you to say so. May I ask why you're calling?"
"I need a favor, and I'm willing to scratch your back if you can scratch mine," he said. He kept his voice amiable. "Of course, I'm sure that I could find someplace else if I had to, but I wasn't lying: I do quite like it here, and I would hate to have to find another place that needed my money more."
There wasn't much, it seemed, that money couldn't buy. Paul's family had never been short on it. He'd never been short on it. His grandfather had, maybe, once. But that was so long ago that anyone who mentioned it was talking about ancient history.
The fact that it made it easier to grease the wheels a little, that it made it easier to get ahold of the chief physician of a major metropolitan hospital, was as despicable as it had been before he'd just done it two hours ago, but Paul couldn't make himself regret having done it.
He took the hallways slow, on the way back to Tim's room. There were always options, always choices. Sometimes it was easier to pretend the choice didn't exist, if the right answer was hard enough. If it was dangerous enough. Nobody wants to make a hard decision, nobody wants to make a bad decision.
But when there's no choice? People will do all kinds of hard things. They'll make all kinds of bad decisions, because they have to. There's no other choice.
This was one of those times that he needed to think of how there was no other choice, because if Dr. Richards was telling the truth then he had a choice to make and either option was going to be hard.
They weren't being entirely honest with Lara, and he understood why. Tim was sick. He was desperately sick, in fact, and the only answers were… well, surgery was the only acceptable answer. The other answer, because there was always a choice, was to let him fight it himself, and a boy that young never wins those fights. Most people older than him, stronger than him, would never win.
The answer was obvious because the alternatives were unacceptable, but that didn't mean that the boy had no choice. He could choose to continue on a failing kidney, for example. He could choose to walk out of the hospital right then and there, and stay in a coma until one day he wasn't even in a coma any more. They could choose all sorts of things.
The hard part was that the more that Paul got involved, the more that he put Lara and her son in an uncomfortable position of having to explain why a sitting US Senator and the current Democratic nominee for President had taken such an interest in them.
Those were questions that he didn't care to answer himself. Questions that Lara would almost certainly have cared to answer even less than he did, which was impressive because his preference was to ignore the issue entirely until it was impossible to continue doing so any longer.
He rubbed at his chin, hints of stubble just long enough to give it a little scratchiness rubbing back at the tips of his fingers. And then there was the question of what he was going to do about his wife. She was already furious about the entire thing, and now… the kind of donation it would take to get Tim high enough on the donor list to make a difference was the sort of splash that Helen wouldn't be able to stomach.
Which meant that whatever she was planning on threatening Lara with, it was about to come down on his lover's head. And if it came down on Lara, it was almost certain to come down on Tim's head, as well.
Then there was the other thing. The man on the phone. Whatever he wanted, it wasn't something good. He wasn't trying to help Paul out. He wasn't trying to make sure that everything went fine on their end. Whatever he wanted, he was stooping very near to blackmail to get it. More than close enough for the FBI to get involved, since it seemed to involve a Presidential election on top of all the other crimes that the man was intending to commit.
The list of who he could be working for was small enough that the names came readily to mind. The list was long enough that Paul didn't have an easy answer, at least not right away, and that was just as upsetting as well.
He took a breath and closed his eyes as he approached Tim's room in the pediatric ward. There was always a choice. The choice was usually obvious when you really considered all your options, and it was only the rare occasion that anything was seriously difficult to choose.
This time, though, the choice was difficult, and it was difficult because every option seemed to preclude itself, in a roundabout way.
If he helped Tim, then he was alienating Helen. Helen, who tied him to the seedy underbelly of politics. Helen, who was essentially his trump card when things got bad. Helen, who would do everything she could to make his life a living hell if he tried to push on without her.
Whoever it was that was threatening Lara, threatening to expose her and essentially ruin her life and her career, would be as safe as can be from any retaliation with Helen gone or angry. She was the one who could hit. Paul didn't hit. He barely knew how to.
If he didn't… well, the drawbacks of failing to help Tim were so obvious that they went without considering. Which meant that in the end, somehow, he had to help. He had a choice. He had a great deal of choices. He could make Lara disappear in an instant, without ever once exposing himself to any sort of blow back.
He could make the problems all go away without much trouble, by pretending that there weren't any problems at all until it was too late. It would have been easy. Easier than trying to find a way to make everything work, anyways.
All he'd have to do would be to go back to his hotel, get a good night's sleep, and the next morning, climb on board his plane. That would be as easy as it could get. Hell, he'd done it more than once. Cheryl's face flashed through his mind. An inconvenience, cut out without a second thought.
But when one of the choices is unacceptable, then you might as well have no other choice. Whenever the unacceptable options are crossed off, it's easier to pretend.
And right now, Paul thought, he had no choice but to make something happen. Because he couldn't keep looking at Tim's face all twisted up like that.
34
Lara's stomach twisted up, and she looked down at her son again. Every time that she looked away it was because she had to, like she was threateni
ng to suffocate any moment.
Up until this point in her life, the last ten years, Tim had been her air. The oxygen she needed to live. With him sick, and the doctors seeming to know nothing, seeming to do nothing, he was slipping under the surface of the water and she had no way of helping, nothing that she could do at all but watch him slip further and further away from her, further and further from shore.
She rubbed her eyes and clamped down her jaw and pulled open a book. She read out loud. It was something she hadn't done in a long time, not since he was five or six and learned, bit by bit, to read to himself. But when he was a baby, when he couldn't read, it had been every day. She sat by the crib or by the bed and read out of whatever she was reading at the time until he was old enough to understand.
She switched over to things that would make sense to a child, after that. Picture books, with short and simple and sweet stories written for a young boy. But there was no reason to read him anything like that now. Lara had a copy of Good Housekeeping and that would have to do. She wasn't sure that he could hear her anyways. Thinking about it only made her feel worse, so she made sure not to.
A nurse stuck her head in as she waited for Paul to… do whatever it was that he did. Whatever it was that he was going to do. If he didn't want to be there then she wasn't going to force him. She didn't know why she cared whether he was there at all. He hadn't been there for any other point in Tim's life except the one where he was made.
Why would it matter that he was there now? The answer was obvious; it didn't matter. So why was she getting so uptight about it?
It made no sense. More than that it pissed her off. But there was nothing else to be done for it but accept that she was nervous, that she wanted him with her, and that was how it would be.
"Ma'am?"
Lara's eyes shot up and she noticed the nurse for the first time seriously. "Yes?"
"Is there anything we can get for you? Cup of coffee? Something?"
"No, I'm fine," she answered, though she felt anything but fine. There should have been something inside her. Grief was supposed to feel like you were being torn apart by sadness. But she didn't feel anything like that. No sadness to speak of. No tearing apart. Nothing.
In fact, that was everything she felt. She felt nothing. She thought nothing. Everything was just sucked into the black void in her mind, regardless of what it might have been.
Everything else fell into that pit, as well. She could feel something where hunger should have been. Her stomach was empty and it gnawed at her, but she didn't really feel it.
At this point they were going to release him, and he was just going to stay overheated, with his mother trying desperately to change ice packs on his head, until nature took its course. Lara could see it in her mind. That was swallowed up by the void, too. Everything was going wrong, she knew. And there was nothing that anyone could do about it.
Her phone rang. Lara looked at it like she'd never seen it before. The phone number that it showed wasn't connected to any contacts, but she had seen that before. She would have frowned if she could feel anything. It wasn't an appropriate time, but she was too tired and too drained to feel anything about it.
"What?"
The voice on the other end of the line was the same this time, as well. "Have you had some time to think?"
"What do you want from me? What are you offering?"
"I thought we discussed what my offer was. My offer is, you don't have to spend the rest of your life having to convince people you weren't Paul Green's little whore."
"And what is it that you want in exchange?"
"That's a good question," the voice answered. He sounded like he was trying to be menacing, and if this were all happening three days ago then she would have been afraid of him. Instead she just wanted the conversation, the call, and all of it to be over. He could threaten her with whatever. She didn't care. Whatever happened to her didn't matter, anyways. Not if her son didn't get better. "What are you willing to offer?"
"Your offer is too low for me to have any ideas. I don't care if you publish whatever you've got on me."
"And your son? What about him?"
There was something inside her, she realized. The darkness flared white-hot and burst out of her before she knew any better.
"Tim is the only thing that matters right now, and no matter how much I think about that, it doesn't fucking matter. He's got to get better before I fucking think about his feelings!" It wasn't until she fell silent, her hands shaking, that Lara realized she'd been shouting into the phone, holding it up. Her throat hurt from the shrill shrieks at the end. The pit inside her went dark again, and with her hands still shaky she let out a long breath and the anger went away as suddenly as it had come on.
"I want you to talk to your boyfriend, and I want you to find out what it would take to get him to leave. Do you think he knows? That it's his son?"
"Fuck you," she said. Her voice was low and soft and cold, and she wasn't sure it he could even hear her on the other end of the line.
"You mean you haven't told him? That's cold, Lara. You really ought to tell him. It's a cruel secret to keep from a man."
"Fuck you," she answered again, a little louder this time.
"Paul drops out, and we keep what we've got under wraps. Senator Green stays in the race come Monday, and we drop all our research and all our information in the middle of a rabid, desperate-for-a-scoop press pool. I don't think I have to tell you how that would go down."
"He won't drop out," she said. Her voice was hard and cold and the pit inside her swallowed up everything but cold reason. "He's got too much tied up in this election. He's been working for it for too long, and if you think he'll sacrifice all that for me, you didn't do your research well enough."
The phone on the other end of the line was silent for a long moment. "Didn't I? Or didn't you?"
The line went dead in her hand and she dropped the phone on the bed beside Tim's foot. She dropped her hand on his leg beside it and squeezed.
Her head should have hurt. She could feel the ache, she could feel the sensitivity to noise and to light. She could feel every hint that she should have had a migraine, but that blackness in her stomach swallowed that up, too, and left her with nothing at all to fall back on except for the distant knowledge that there was nothing she could do for her son but wait for him to get better.
Or, she thought bitterly, wait for him not to. An innocent boy. One that had never done anything wrong, one that had never hurt anyone. Everyone but her had wanted him gone, had wanted him out of the world, from the moment he was conceived.
And now, when she was finally starting to feel like he was coming into his own… God had decided that he was going to give very serious consideration to taking her boy back.
35
Paul's face felt long and stretched, and he seriously considered going back to Tim and talking about everything he was thinking about. It wasn't as if the entire choice was his to make, after all.
But if he did, he wasn't sure what would happen. Why would even go to ask her opinion? The best that would happen for Tim would be for her to agree that he was doing the right thing. On the other hand, what if she didn't agree? What if she decided that his career was, somehow, more important? What if she decided that she couldn't stomach the guilt any more and she wouldn't allow him to make the sacrifice?
It would be easier after he'd already cut the check, after Tim was getting all the treatment that he needed. Then he could go back, tell her that he was sorry for running away. He'd done it before and she was no doubt used to it by now, after all.
His stomach twisted and he rubbed his head, his eyes still shut. There was no choice, but he just needed somewhere to lay his head, somewhere away from it all.
Paul headed toward the entrance to the hospital. Robbie followed behind, two inches or more taller than he was, and his posture impeccable. Paul had never had impeccable posture. He had good-enough posture. But he'd never developed milita
ry bearing because he'd never had the distinction of serving.
He looked up from the white and gray tiled floor when he heard the footsteps behind him stop. It wasn't the sort of thing that was preferable for a bodyguard, to allow the subject to distance himself. Which meant there was, without a doubt, something to see.
Helen was always a sight to see, though she was never particularly pretty, and she had only gotten less appealing as the years passed. She had a grim expression on her face that was startlingly unlike a smile, in spite of the corners of mouth being pulled back in a way that she no doubt thought might be a smile.
"Paul. Is everything alright?"
He pinched his lips together. The 'good wife' act was decades late for either of them to pretend that she was going to be polite or kind. If she was playing at sympathy then it was just another part of her attempts to get something that he couldn't put his finger on yet. It was a matter of time until she came out with it.
"Why are you here?"
She raised her eyebrows in a pantomime of surprise, but that pulled-tight rictus never faded from her face, as if she was afraid that someone might get a photo of her with a frown. Afraid that it might come back to bite her somehow, if anyone caught her anything but ecstatically happy. Instead, they were going to catch a photo of her looking like she wasn't sure how human expressions worked.
"I'm here because I'm worried for you, of course. How's the boy?"
"The boy does have a name, you know."
Helen took a breath and let it out and blinked at Paul as if he were being terribly childish. "Of course he does, Paul. I know that. But I'm not worried about him. I'm worried about you, about how you're doing. I know you're worried. He's a good boy but it's not important to me how he's doing as much as how you're feeling about it. Is that fair?"
"When have you ever worried about me in the past?"
There was that pantomime surprise again. She raised her eyebrows as much as she possibly could and her eyes rolled around in her head like marbles across the floor. "When–why, Paul, I can't believe you'd say that to me!"