they disappoint, they disappear, they die but they don't
She fumbles with her keys, eyes numb and dry with tiredness, every bone in her body longing for sleep, on an evening that has long since digressed into a rainy Washington night. They're still scrambling to pick up the pieces of thethingthathappenedwithzoey (as they have started calling it, all of them, there might have been a goddamn memo passed around instructing them to do so- and just like that, all words and no spaces, no pause to breathe or think or digest what thethingthathappenedwithzoey actually was), and it makes staying up late feel a lot less like the heroic public service she signed up for, and a lot more like something she's going to need a lot of therapy for later on.
She distractedly massages her temple with the hand holding her keys, pressing the cool metal against her skin as she bends over to retrieve her mail from her doormat. A couple of bills, a postcard from Hogan in college, and then, a large, padded envelope addressed to her in an unfamiliar hand.
It's only when she glances at the return address that she realizes this must be her stepmother Molly's writing. This can't be good. She holds the envelope closely to her body as she slips off her coat, walks into the kitchen, pours herself a glass of red wine, walks into the living room and sinks down on her beautiful couch, faux antique and upholstered in a velvety magenta that always smells like dust and makes her feel like she's being hugged. She curls up on the couch and methodically tears open the envelope with her fingernails. Inside she finds two plastic ziplock baggies lined with paper towns, several sheets of paper filled with typed writing -she recognizes her Dad's typewriting immediately, the impatient crossing out, the way the ink has blurred wherever he tried to make his point by hitting the keys especially hard- and a note from Molly, written inside an aged and yellowed card showing a plump mailman with rosy cheeks holding out a large alarm clock, the words "IT'S TIME TO TELL YOU I'M THINKING OF YOU" floating over his head in a faded orange.
Dear CJ,
You're probably wondering what this is about, so here is an explanation, as much as I have one. Your Dad has been talking a lot about giving you your mother's coral necklace lately, so I told him we should send it to you. I think he really wanted you to have them, pass them on- he told me your mother wanted you to wear them at your wedding. So that explains the necklace, I think. He insisted on sending you the other thing as well - I think he was convinced that was your mother's corals- so I put both in the package, which I think is what he wanted. By the way, you probably shouldn't read the typed letters- they give off a wrong impression, he's really much better than they make him seem, but typing is hard because it requires more concentration in a different area of the brain than talking.
It'd be great if you could make it out here sometime. You should see him, before it gets worse the way he's doing now.
Anyway, I hope you're doing alright and not working too hard. We say a prayer for the President and his poor little girl at Mass every week now, and I say one for Hal and his little girl every day.
Love,
Molly
CJ closes her eyes for a second, focusing on the floor under her feet and pushing the guilt, the dull nauseous feeling that is so much worse than a sharp, acute pain would be into the very back of her mind. She puts the typed pages aside -she will read them, but not now, not tonight, because after the day she's had, she doesn't need another reminder that there's a point where fathers stop being the giants holding up the universe, and start becoming lesser men- and pours the content of the first baggie into her palm.
A necklace tumbles out, faded, once-blood-red coral beads, and even though she was ready for this, it feels like being punched in the stomach.
She remembers this necklace from childhood, remembers her mother letting her look at her jewelry when she was sick in bed, remembers loving the deep, vibrant red and the strange, spiked beauty. She remembers begging her mother to allow her to take it to school on every single show-and-tell Friday, or to let her borrow it every single Halloween. And her mother, who was not the kind of person to give out unreasonable directives, would always just say no, you can't have that; no, you can't play with that, and leave it at that. One day, when -she knows this now, she didn't then- her Mother was already sick, had probably just discovered the lump in her breast a couple of days ago and was in a state of silent, headless panic as she waited for her doctor's appointment to roll around, CJ had given in to temptation. Her best friend Maureen Foster had been over for a play date, they had been playing dress-up with her mother's old ball gowns and CJ's assorted Halloween costumes, and CJ had told Maureen that she had the nicest necklace in the whole wide world to go with the reddish circa 1953 prom dress Maureen was prancing around in. Her mother had run to the store for some eggs, so she'd known the coast was clear. She'd sneaked into her mother's bedroom, extracted the jewelry box out of the heavy oak cabinet in the corner while Maureen kept watch at the door, had found the necklace and held it out triumphantly when her mother had walked in.
Karen Cregg did not yell. She didn't ground CJ, she didn't tell her to wait till her father got home, she didn't cut her TV time or pocket money. She just sent Maureen home and said quietly and composedly, "Claudia, I think we need to have a conversation."
Eight-year-old CJ had never felt more horrible in her life. She had been expecting punishment and a lecture on why sticking to the rules and keeping your hands to yourself was important which she knew she deserved, and instead all she saw that wide-eyed look in her mother's face which she later came to understand was fear, and, "I can't leave my children alone".
"Claudia," her mother had said, "I need you to do what I tell you to. I need you to promise me that even when I'm not around, you're going to stick to the rules and you're going to be a good girl for me."
"I promise," CJ had muttered, staring at her socks, wishing her mother would snap at her to look up and speak more clearly, child. Instead she held out a hand and cupped her daughter's cheek, kind of leaving it there. CJ looked up and was dumbfounded to find her mother's eyes sparkling with tears. "Mommy," she'd said, desperately. "Mommy, I said I was sorry and I said I promise and I'm never gonna do it again, Mommy. Really. Pinkie swear. Stop crying, Mommy."
Her mother had smiled, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand impatiently. "Sorry, kiddo. I accept your apology. And you're grounded for a week. No tap, no choir, no play dates. And because you'll have so much free time, you can do your brother's chores."
CJ was so relieved that her mother was back to normal, she didn't even argue with the somewhat draconian punishment.
Almost four decades later, she sits there, staring at the necklace as a rush of images washed over her. Her mother, hairless and frail in a hospital bed, teaching her how to knit during that long, horrible winter of her first round of chemo and radiation. Her father, coming home from the hospital late at night and sitting down at his typewriter, his fingers moving over the keys so quickly the taps sounded like gunfire as CJ and her brothers lay awake. She pictures her nine-year-old self praying five rosaries a day for two weeks, and upping it to ten when her mother doesn't walk out of the hospital fully cured on day fifteen. Most of all, she pictures that necklace lying in her palm, that necklace she always associated with the first time the horrible, icy wind of something being terribly, terribly wrong blew through the previously so comfortable house of her childhood.
With trembling fingers and a vision slightly blurred from tears she didn't realize she was crying, she opens the second, larger baggie. Underneath the kitchen towels, she finds a faded bottle-green scarf, small enough to wrap around her doll's neck, badly knit with rough patches, knots and bumps in almost every part.
This is so unfair.
She doesn't need this tonight.
Not after today, not after spending all day wishing her President would come back to her from whichever dark place he had holed himself in in the middle of all his grief and self-incriminations, not after spending the past year wishing her father would come back to her from that awful gray place in his mind she can't understand, and finding the two were uniquely, disturbingly similar. She doesn't need to be reminded that she's spent the past thirty years wishing her mother would come back to her from wherever she had gone much too quickly, much to early.
This, this is the scarf her mother taught her to knit during that awful winter. CJ remembers sitting on her mother's hospital bed for entire afternoons, feeling her mother's frame become smaller and spindlier next to her, struggling with the silvery needles. After her mother died, knitting kept her sane. For a whole year, she never did anything but knit, except chores and occasionally homework when it couldn't be helped. She knitted and knitted, until her scarfs and mittens and hats were as even and sturdy as her mother's had been. She knitted and knitted, until one Friday afternoon, she decided that she could do better than this, put down her knitting needles and picked up her English book instead. By Sunday, she could spell every single spelling word in that book, even "envious" and "mustache".
She'd never knitted again, and had sold the scarfs, mittens and hats she'd made at the charity auction for the famine victims in Ethopia at Our Lady of Mercy in Dayton, and made twenty-five dollars and sixty-three cents, too.
But her father had kept this one scarf, and sent it to her now, with her mother's corals.
She wondered, briefly, if he could possibly have known that the objects were connected in her mind. The part of her that was still a lonely and confused child who wanted her parents back screamed yes, of course he knew, that his sickness maybe made these things clearer to him, that living in the past made him understand the connection between his eight-year-old daughter huffily doing the dishes on day three of her punishment, and glaring at her mother who, unbeknownst to any of them, has a biopsy scheduled at Dayton County for the next morning , and his ten-year-old daughter holed up under the kitchen table, attempting to knit a sweater as the dirty dishes pile up in the sink. Of course he'd known. He's her father. He's the smartest man on the planet.
Not anymore, CJ sighs, and it's not just the Alzheimer. She outgrew him. Literally outgrew her father's mind and his kitchen table and his world, and she'd thought she'd never find that feeling again, loving someone who was the smartest person on the planet, who was the person holding up her universe, who figured out everything, or tried, at least. At the age of eighteen, with a scholarship to Berkley her claim to fame, CJ Cregg had been sure she'd outgrown having parents.
And then Jed Bartlet came along, and somehow down the line, it felt like gaining a father all over again, a giant holding up her universe. And of course, this one crumbles, just like her mother did, growing taught and tiny until there was nothing left of her, just like her father, grown fumbling and helpless like a child in the dark.
Her president is crumbling in front of her, and there's nothing, nothing she can do. And she's so, so sick of it.
It seems like, in the dark living window, she glimpses and image of her ten-year-old self, putting away those knitting needles and opening her schoolbook by her own accord.
So she drains the glass of wine, changes into her favorite pajamas, sets the timer for the coffee maker, and goes to bed. When her alarm rings at 5:45 the next morning, she's ready.
She goes to work. Because that's what she can do. She can show up and be there, and sometimes, it helps.Sometimes, getting up the next morning, sometimes holding up your universe on your own for a little while is all you can do, when mothers die and fathers fade and giants crumble.
That ten-year-old girl believed that. And she still does.