by Amy Faye
But until then? She could disappear again. She'd done it once before, and she'd already left work. Left it for all the wrong reasons, yes, but the damage was already done and it wasn't going to get worse by walking away from her old life.
The house wouldn't even be that hard to sell. She was fairly certain of that. The market was starting to look up, property was starting to move, and August was a great month to find a new place anyways. The weather was nice.
If she wasn't tied to Salt Lake City, there were a thousand places she could go. Mom and Dad weren't exactly in a position to have her and a ten-year-old plopping down in their lives, but otherwise? Almost anywhere.
Lara pushed her weight down on the suitcase, and worked the zipper. Plane tickets cost money. Sometimes, they cost a lot of money. There were other ways to travel, though. Assuming she wasn't in any special hurry, they could move all sorts of ways, and not overly expensive. An Amtrak ticket was barely $100.
She could get to the house, sell it in a hurry, and be on the road again before Paul would risk chasing her down, right? Before the press could find her. She hoped so, at least. There wasn't much choice but to hope.
A knock sounded at the hotel room door. She ignored it. There wasn't much else choice, after all. She already knew who it was going to be, and she wasn't going to talk to him. If Helen wanted her out of town, well… fuck it. She'd get one last victory over Lara, but she wasn't going to stick around, that was for sure.
She pulled the zip tab and took a deep breath, hefted the bag. That was every thing she owned. She checked Tim's backpack. She'd taken it from the hospital, against her own better judgment she had to admit. If he woke up, he'd want some of the stuff inside it.
But he wasn't going to wake up, not while she was gone. Not any time soon. Not if the doctors didn't even know what to do about him, didn't even know what was wrong.
He was just going to get worse. She at least wanted him to be happy for the last few hours of his life, so she wouldn't tell him why she was upset if he did. Everything was there, as well. There hadn't been much to check. Most of his important things were in her bag from the beginning. He only had action figures and a few other assorted toys inside.
A few notebooks, the first pages filled with notes from his tutoring sessions, had joined them, and she had dutifully placed them inside his bag as well. They were his, after all.
Lara rubbed her head and looked out the window at the failing light. If she hurried she could get back to the hospital for the night, and in the morning, get on a bus and get the sale started, and be back in Sacramento before anyone noticed.
That was her hope. If someone did notice, if someone decided to try to stop her, then she was going to be in very serious, very real trouble. That wasn't an option, though. Not now, anyways.
Her gut twisted when the knock came a third time.
"Go away!"
The voice on the other end of the door was too low to hear, but it was a man's voice. She could make out that much at least.
"I said, go!"
"I'm not going to leave." Paul's voice only barely raised enough to be heard. Soft and low.
"I don't want to talk to you, Paul. Go, leave me be."
"I don't know what you're talking about, Lara. Just open the door and just talk to me for a minute, will you?"
For a sickening minute she believed him, and in that time she made the mistake of opening the door for him. Her face didn't change enough to hide her anger, though. It wasn't cold anger like the one that she'd felt when she first saw him. It wasn't some old wound that she felt itching.
Now she was ready to scream in his face, to start clawing at his eyes. She didn't see his bruiser but she didn't doubt that he was somewhere out of sight but not out of earshot. Probably not more than an instant away.
"There's nothing to talk about. Go away, and leave me be."
"Apparently there's a lot to talk about," he said. He looked deflated, like a balloon. She'd been in a hospital for two weeks and she had gotten used to that look in people, but not usually people who were by all accounts perfectly healthy. "You walked away from me, ten years ago, and I never knew why. I always just assumed, I don't know… maybe it was something I said, maybe I'd offended you somehow."
"Don't you try to fucking play me, Paul. I'm not an idiot."
"I never thought you were."
"And yet, you're trying to get me to believe that you had nothing to do with sending me away all that time ago. I was in your office, Paul. I was standing outside your fucking office, I was talking to Tom, and he told me with a dead fucking straight face that I'd be better off getting going now."
"That's exactly what I'm trying to get you to believe," Paul told her. "Because it's the truth. You told me you wanted to marry me, ten years ago."
"And you told me the same, but when it came down to it, I guess you wanted other things more."
He looked at her with his eyes dulled and dark and almost unfocused. "I never wanted anything more than that, Lara, and I still don't."
"Fine, then," she growled. She could feel her anger growing inside her as she spoke, and she said the words that she had intended to avoid at all costs. "Drop out of the race for me. For my son."
His face dropped to the carpet and he deflated even more. Paul was the strongest man she knew, but in that moment he looked… frail.
"I was already going to."
39
A phenomenal amount of work went into making someone President of the United States. It was, really, one of the most difficult things that any politician would ever do, and it took everything that both candidates had and tested it.
At the end, people voted for whatever reasons they voted for. Some were informed voters, who decided based on reasoned policy opinions. Some were single-issue voters; who is opposed to abortion? Who is for gay marriage?
Most were neither. Most voted straight-party, even as they pretended not to. They'd reason their way through everything and at the end, every vote was Republican, and it had always been that way, their entire lives.
Nobody voted based on whether or not the candidates were tired at the end of the race because everyone was tired. It was a grueling process that lasted almost two years, between making sure that your face was in the papers for months before you announce, and then you begin to campaign in preparation for the coming primary.
Then Primary season is over, and the strongest candidate from each party is left to test exactly how long that strength could keep going for another six months or so. Technically, the end of Primary season was in June. Technically.
In reality, the decision had been all but made by March. April and May were formalities, an opportunity for something to go horribly wrong for the candidate in the lead or horribly right for the underdog, depending on which one you supported.
Paul Green's candidacy was the consequence of that entire process.
His entire career had been a meat grinder. The last two years were only the icing on the cake of a long battle to the top, one that he had fought reluctantly. One that his people had been more than happy to step in and deal with for him.
The idea that he should stop them, that he should step away and let someone else take a turn at bat had only once crossed his mind. Ten years ago, he was a prosecutor, and he wasn't trying to yank his own chain when he thought that he had been a damned good one.
He hadn't seen the inside of a courtroom for a decade, and he was afraid to think how much he missed it. There were a great many things that seemed more important now that he looked back. Things that he didn't realize how much he would miss until they were gone.
Lara had been one of those things, and when he got her back he didn't know what he was supposed to do when she seemed like she was angry enough to fly away again.
He squeezed his stomach tighter and closed his eyes and tried to figure out how he was supposed to do this.
Well, the first part was easy. He called his lawyer. The man was a professional and a
half, and fifteen minutes later a small stack of papers was coming through the hotel fax. He had them in his hands, still warm from the printer, not a minute later.
He stepped out through the door, flagged the car down and slid into the back. The entire thing felt odd; he'd been putting it off for so long. It was easy to do what you had to do when there was no alternative, but now it seemed as if the veil had been lifted and had to seriously answer the question of why it had taken him so long.
The second part, on the other hand, took a little longer. Once you made the first call, the others started to get made for you, but there were still dozens of first calls to make.
The past days had involved a lot of silent driving. Today was the exception, though. Too much talk, it felt like. Too much to be done, and not enough time to rest and really think about what his options were.
When he stepped out of the car, he wasn't surprised to find that somehow the press had beat him there. They seemed to smell blood, and he'd been calling people the whole way, so some had nearly as long as he had to arrive.
He forced himself to wait, because there were others who weren't there. People who it was very important he have there. So he waited, sitting in the back of the car and rubbing his forehead, waiting. A van drove up, black, and a man stepped out, looked around like he had someplace important to be any moment, and something important to see.
Another joined it a minute later. This time, the rear doors didn't wait long after the front ones to open, and a petite woman with looks that had once almost been pretty stepped out, her face twisted up in a mask of fury. She searched the crowd and didn't see him, because he wasn't there to see.
With all the players gathered he stepped out and took a deep breath, rapped a small stack of index cards on his leg and stepped out into the lazy afternoon heat.
Helen moved quickly up behind him and said something he ignored. That was the only way to deal with her, he knew. Ignore whatever you could, and whatever you couldn't… ignore that, too.
The cameras started flashing before he hit the podium. Once he was there he stood by as he watched his wife come up beside him, expecting him to turn and kiss him for the cameras as well. She was in for an unpleasant surprise.
"I suppose you're all wondering why I've called you here today," he began. He held a long pause. "And I suppose you have all been wondering, as well, why we've been sleeping at the wheel, with an election on."
That got him a laugh.
"Well, you know what? I've had a lot of soul-searching to do. I talked recently about my friend, my very good friend. A little boy, ten years old, who has been traveling with me the past couple of months. He's very sick, and without surgery, the doctors… well, they're optimistic. They're always optimistic. But they're very cautious about the optimism, we'll say.
"Since I met that little boy, I've had to do a lot of soul searching. Since he fell sick, a little over two weeks ago, I've had to do a lot more." He stopped and clicked the cards against the podium, though he hadn't looked at them again since he had written everything he wanted to say down.
"A lot of thinking about what I'm doing here. What it means to me. What I want out of the Presidency. There are problems. Hell, nobody needs to tell me that. But I have to ask, am I the man to solve them?"
There was another pause. He frowned. There were a thousand questions he should have been asking himself. Questions he'd been ignoring because, well, someone had to be President. Someone had to try, and why not him?
But the answers were becoming less and less clear. It wasn't hard to guess the reason. He hadn't been asking them at all, and now that he thought to actually ask, he was realizing that he'd never had a good answer to any of it.
"The bible says, 'why do you notice the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?' I've spent the last ten years looking at the country and seeing everything that I thought I could fix, but… the truth is, I was ignoring the log in my own eye. I was pretending that things were fine in my house, that I could afford the time and the effort to go out and straighten up the lives other other people. Tonight, I'm ashamed to say that I was wrong."
He let out a breath. There had been so much work to get here already, and it hurt to have to unmake all that effort. At the same time, the weight falling off his shoulders felt remarkable. Better than he had imagined it would.
"So it's with a heavy heart, and more apologies than I can ever give to my party, my running mate, and the American people, that I have to withdraw from the election, and from the wider political sphere. I can only hope that one of my very capable colleagues can fill the position as well as I had hoped to do."
He stepped off the podium. Too many questions would have to be answered if he stayed. Many of them questions he couldn't answer if he'd been asked.
Lara waited off the side and he drew his arm around her as Robbie, per Paul's instructions, handed the stack of papers, stuffed into a thick manila envelope, over to Helen.
"What is this?"
She had an incredulous look on her face. Apparently none of what he had said had quite dawned on her yet.
"Helen, I'm sorry to spring this on you, but I think we both know it's been a long time coming."
"You can't leave," she said. The idea seemed to be going through her mind for the first time. As if it had been well and truly impossible up to that instant.
"You can't stop me," Paul answered.
"I need you." There were hints, however faint, of desperation and even real feeling in her voice, and for a moment Paul sympathy, strong enough that he started to reconsider. Her voice fell lower. "I need you campaigning for me. If you don't…"
He frowned and turned again. Part of him had waited for her to tell him that she was going to miss him. That had been a mistake.
Helen wouldn't miss him; he'd never been there in the first place, not really.
She was going to miss what he could do for her. And that wasn't enough for him, not any more. There were more important things than politics. He had to meet with a doctor to talk about a very serious and very expensive surgery.
Epilogue
Lara eyed her boys with the same bemused expression that seemed to characterize everything that she felt about them. She listened for the sound of wheezing coming from Tim, watched his movements as he twisted and writhed on the ground in a vain attempt to out wrestle his father.
If he hurt, if he came close to pulling something, then she would stop them without a second thought. He always seemed to forget that it hadn't been so many years ago that he'd been sitting there with his stomach open wide enough for a grown man to stick both hands in and pull out large chunks of his insides.
If he remembered it, then he made no sign of it. He had barely spoken about being sick at all since he'd recovered from surgery; if he thought of it as any different than any other time he'd had the flue, or a cold, then he made no sign of that, either.
Her hand rested on her belly; it seemed to fall there naturally, regardless of what she did. Something inside her felt like it was twisting up again. This time, at least, she knew what it was, and she knew why she was so tired all the time.
It was nice to know that it wasn't just anemia, that she ten hours of sleep was probably enough and she wasn't tired for no reason. It wasn't that she was sick, though the possibility was always there on some level. That was a very serious risk, when you were pregnant. Any illness that would be unpleasant for you, was liable to kill the child.
Twelve years ago, she'd been young. Too young for a child, by today's standards. Now, she was a little old for it. Somewhere in the past century, the window for having children had shrunk until you only had barely enough space and time to have one child, maybe two if you had them back to back.
Now she was older. Paul seemed to notice her watching and slacked his grip on their son. Tim wasted no time scrambling out of his grip and wrapping his arms around, trying to find a grip. Paul smiled at her and for a moment sh
e thought he wasn't going to notice the boy who was at that very moment twisting Paul's arm behind his back by the wrist.
Then, as if totally by surprise he twisted the arm back and slipped it free, dived in and his fingers found the sensitive area under Tim's arm and teased him until he was a writhing and gasping mess.
Paul left Tim there, breathing hard. "Is everything alright? You need to go to the hospital?"
She shook her head. "I'm fine. You're fine. Go on, Romeo, before Tim decides to start playing dirty."
"I wouldn't do that," Tim protested. She winked at him.
"Of course you wouldn't, sweetheart. But I have to make sure that your father plays fair, too."
The words felt strange, even now. Even after two years and nearly six months. Tim stalked over as well, seeming to have lost interest for the moment in continuing their roughhousing.
"Can I feel her?"
"Sure," Lara answered. Tim put his hand on her belly. He seemed tentative, even nervous, and it gave her a warm feeling in her belly that made her glow with delight.
"I think I felt something," he said.
"She's kicking," Lara answered. She put her hand over Tim's. "Sweetheart? Can you go get me a glass of water? I need to talk to your father for a minute."
Tim looked up at Paul uncertainly, as if he might suddenly run off again. It wasn't as if Lara didn't have the same fear, deep down, but she managed to convince herself it was irrational; at least, most of the time, she did.
"You did this to me, mister."
He leaned down and pressed a kiss against her neck. "I suppose I did. Is that going to be a problem?"
"That depends," she answered. She moved her head and allowed him better access to the sensitive flesh of her throat.
"On what?"
"You better not run off again."
He pressed another kiss against her neck, one that made her shiver as the beginnings of arousal started to light deep down in her belly. He pulled away at the sound of the back door sliding open.
"I won't," he assured her in a voice that she found it hard to disbelieve. "Not ever again."