Set just after S2E12 The Middle Way.
With Henry and Elizabeth's relationship showing some strain after Dmitri was sacrificed to the Russians, I felt Elizabeth could use a friend. This whole story may just be tedious, but it was in my head, so I thought I'd write it down. Does this new friendship have any future, do you think? Let me know...
Characters borrowed shamelessly from the CBS show.
Three days after returning from Myanmar, Elizabeth was finally starting to relax. She never slept well on a plane and the journey and jet lag always took their toll. Today had been a good day, however, and she had made it home in good time for dinner with the family. She was alone now as everyone had dispersed after eating; Ally and Jason were upstairs under a mound of homework, Stevie was out with friends and Henry was at a meeting.
Having finished clearing up the debris from dinner, Elizabeth was just contemplating her options for the next few hours – should she make coffee and take a look at the documents waiting for her in her briefcase or maybe collapse on the sofa with a glass of wine and some old episodes of 'The West Wing'? She always enjoyed a dose of fictional politics, where everything seemed easier to accomplish than in Washington's reality.
The noise of the house landline interrupted her thoughts and she was surprised to hear her DS agent Matt announcing that her neighbor Ginny was at the door. With some trepidation, after the apocalypse of a meeting Henry and Blake had hosted for the neighbors on Saturday, Elizabeth opened the door and smiled at the woman in front of her.
"Madam Secretary, please forgive the intrusion," Ginny started cautiously. She was friendly looking, with an honest open face framed by wavy brown hair, but she was still flanked on either side by Matt and Frank.
"No problem," Elizabeth replied. "I'm sorry we've never managed to be properly introduced." Reaching out to shake Ginny's hand, she added, "I'm Elizabeth McCord. I think you already met my husband, Henry. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"Well," Ginny began, returning the handshake warmly, "I just wanted to stop by and say 'thank you'." With that, she produced a bottle of wine from behind her back and offered it to Elizabeth, who, noting a subtle nod from Matt, graciously accepted the gift.
Opening the door wider, Elizabeth inquired, "Have you got time to come in? Henry's out for the evening, so you'd be saving me from some very tedious routine paperwork, or a sad night alone with the TV. We could open this…" she proposed, indicating the wine with a wide grin.
"That would be lovely," Ginny stated emphatically, before stepping through into the hallway and relinquishing her coat.
For once, a coat in Elizabeth's hands made it safely to the closet. She gestured to Ginny to come through to the kitchen, where she quickly rooted out the corkscrew and poured a couple of generous glasses. The two women then settled on the sofa in the living room.
"You have a lovely home, Madam Secretary," Ginny said, looking around her. "Mine seems so much more…cluttered."
"Please, call me Elizabeth," smiled her host. "I guess I'm not here enough to mess it up, though you're not getting a look at Jason's bedroom!" She grinned and tried her wine, murmuring her appreciation. It was a very good, mellow red – just the job for the occasion. "So, you wanted to thank us? I rather feared you'd be demanding an apology. I heard about the meeting. I'm so sorry I got held up at work."
Ginny was beginning to feel more comfortable with every moment. Elizabeth just seemed…so normal. She certainly didn't look high-powered in her jeans, baggy sweatshirt and slip-on sneakers. "Well, the thanks are for getting the security guys to turn off the engines outside. I know it can't have been completely straightforward. Soon after you moved in, Ted had a rather difficult conversation with one of the drivers, who was quite adamant that nothing could be done about emergency protocols. I'm guessing you must have had to pull some pretty big strings to get around that." As Elizabeth looked comically innocent, Ginny continued, "While Ted thinks he's won a battle, but is still at war, I prefer to see the change as a genuine peace-offering on your behalf. My husband can be very rigid and unyielding sometimes, and I'm afraid his frustration with the disruption to our quiet little street rather got the better of him. It's true that a lot has changed since you bought the property from our previous neighbours – what with the remodelling works before you moved in and then the security presence. I feel bad, though, that I let him fester and wind up the Home Owners Association to the extent that he did." Ginny paused for a moment, gauging Elizabeth's reaction.
Elizabeth, in turn, was quietly impressed by her calm and thoughtful neighbor. Pouring them each some more wine, she commented, "It was a bit of a shock, to be honest, to have Ted serve us with a formal list of complaints like that. I am truly sorry if the SUVs have been aggravating your son's asthma all this time. How old is he?"
"Daniel's nine and, to be fair, his asthma is mostly fairly well under control. Ted was on his own with Dan one day last winter, though, when he had a severe asthma attack, and he's been panicked about that recurring ever since. I have to say that it was a bit unnerving to be called down to the emergency room to see my own son on the gurney and my husband barely holding it together. Ted's an actuary, and likes his life to have the same ordered control as his spreadsheets and calculations. He doesn't cope well when he has to face the unexpected or, for that matter, any disruption at all." Ginny looked wistful as she swirled the wine in her glass.
"What about you?" Elizabeth asked. "You seem a little more flexible, if I might say…"
"I guess I have to be," replied Ginny. "My job requires me to be able to change tack in seconds and be ready for anything. I'm a pediatric anesthesiologist over at Children's National, so the family medical stuff, like managing Dan's asthma, usually falls to me. We have a daughter, too, by the way, called Abigail. She's 11, but thinks she's grown up already."
Elizabeth found herself really warming to her neighbor. Perhaps the wine was helping, but she was beginning to wonder if she might just be making a new friend.
"I'm guessing we have a few things in common, maybe," she suggested. "My brother, Will, is a doctor. He's a trauma surgeon, working in Syria at the moment, and a constant worry to me, but it means I know a little about the kind of working patterns you face. It sounds like we both have to try to balance family life with jobs that demand a lot of our attention and keep us up at odd hours. It makes it hard to find time for normal social niceties, like meeting new neighbors when you actually move house, instead of over a year later."
"You might be right," laughed Ginny, "the difference being that I have to make life or death decisions that affect the single child under my care in the operating room at the time, whereas you have to make those decisions on behalf of the nation! I guess neither of us have much room to relax…at work, at least! Actually, my work pattern might be one of the reasons I've been less bothered by the security presence outside than some of our other neighbors. It's actually quite comforting to know I don't have to worry about safety when I arrive home in the early hours of the morning on a bad on-call night."
"Well, I'm glad there may be some benefits! DS can be both a blessing and a curse sometimes. They've certainly got me out of some tricky situations, but it's a pain not being able just to take a walk without them wanting to check the route and accompany me wherever I go. I'm quite fond of that ice-cream place down the road, but it's such a performance to go there myself, that I usually have to settle for Henry or the kids bringing me some fro-yo back. It goes with the job, though, so…" Elizabeth broke off with a sigh.
"I was pondering on that aspect of things over the last couple of days, actually," revealed Ginny, "And I think we have probably been a bit unfair. Yes, there have been some irritations about the parking issues, but your security team are always polite and professional." Pausing for a breath, she went on, "After Henry expressed his point of view on Saturday, before unceremoniously throwing us all out, I realised that we have been so focussed on our minor irritations that we haven't considered the pressures and challenges of your work or what it's like for you and your family to have so little privacy. It occurs to me that you've had to ask about my children, but I already know the names and ages of yours and would recognise them in the street, because I've seen them in the media. That really doesn't seem fair. They all look like fine young people, by the way."
"Thank you." Elizabeth was unused to anyone showing any empathy for her family's situation and felt quite touched by Ginny's comments. "It's hard to maintain any degree of normality for them, but we constantly try to do our best. Sometimes it's easier than others. I drive the DS guys mad when I want to support Ally at her soccer games, but it's important to us both that I get there whenever I can. The worst aspect of it all is the occasional situation that suddenly makes me fear for their safety. It's terrifying to feel they may be at risk."
"I can understand that completely," Ginny acknowledged. "I know it's a different kind of threat, but I see that sort of gut-wrenching vulnerability all the time in the parents of the children I care for, as they hand them over to me for their anesthetic. They have to trust me to bring them back safely, but there's always the fear of the unknown and the terror of having no control for a while. I've experienced it once or twice myself, too, with Dan's asthma and when Abbie had her tonsils out, even with the benefit of medical training."
Elizabeth regarded the woman in front of her thoughtfully, as they both paused to sip their wine. She realised that it was quite some time since she had last shared a drink and a chat like this with a friend. Henry had been her best friend and confidant for so long that she had never really needed many other people around her, but just now, with the complications in their relationship brought by the loss of Dmitri, she felt a little less secure. It occurred to her that the circle of friends she had always been able to turn to had been hugely curtailed since her time at the State Department. George and Joey were dead, Juliet was in custody (and could no longer be considered anything close to a friend), Isabelle was on assignment overseas, and she couldn't exactly just phone Conrad for a social chat. Of course she had a new circle of acquaintances, but she had been forced to admit, just last week, how little she really knew Nadine. She wondered how much she would have in common with any of her staff outside of their shared commitment to the work of the State Department. There was the awkwardness of her being their boss, too. Sitting here, just passing time in good company, was really pleasant.
As if she had read Elizabeth's mind, Ginny broke the silence. "You know, this has been really nice. I don't have time to keep up with all the intricacies of international politics, but I've been aware of who you are, of course. I felt I would get along with you, if I ever had occasion to meet you, after I saw you on 'Face the Nation' last year. You're an impressive woman, but the comments you made about making the world a better place for our children, after you'd had such a terrible experience in Iran, really struck a chord with me. I'm so pleased I've finally had a chance to speak with you."
Elizabeth blushed slightly at the 'impressive woman' comment, but appreciated the genuine sentiment behind Ginny's words. "That was a difficult time for me," she managed, "But we do the best we can and try to keep pushing forwards. I've enjoyed meeting you, too. I think we might have avoided some of the unfortunate neighborly animosity if you and I had shared a drink and talked things over months ago!"
The bottle of wine and both glasses were empty as the front door opened and Henry returned home. Wandering into the sitting room, he kissed the top of Elizabeth's head with his usual "Hi Babe" and then turned to Ginny with a nod. Henry remembered their brief introduction on Saturday, and how Ginny had smiled and had seemed like she was about to make conversation, before Ted had pulled her firmly away. Perhaps she was the more amenable one in the Rhodes household.
"Henry, I think you've met Ginny", Elizabeth said, as the two women stood up.
Henry blushed a little and shook Ginny's hand again. "I apologise for my temper at the meeting the other day," he began, "I think we could have done with a more accomplished diplomat there," he added, turning meaningfully to his wife.
"You're quite forgiven, Henry," Ginny reassured him. Turning to Elizabeth, she added, "The presentation by your assistant was actually quite illuminating," and with a wink, "At least I no longer fear for the safety of neighborhood lost pets!"
Ginny began to walk towards the door. "Well, now we've put the world to rights, I'd better be off home. Many thanks for the wine and the chat, Elizabeth."
Handing Ginny her coat, Elizabeth decided she could spend another evening like this.
"Until next time," she said to her new friend, "Good night."