XV
WEDNESDAY:
It was some ungodly hour of the morning, but despite the long flight and the draining conversations she'd had the day before, Abbey wasn't sleeping.
The bedroom was unlit, but she'd been watching in the dark for long enough that the lines of her husband's face were visible to her. He was - wonder of wonders - sleeping peacefully, the stress lines of the day smoothed out by the gentle hand of sleep. He was so still compared to his usual nocturnal twisting and turning that Abbey knew it could only be exhaustion.
He couldn't have slept a wink the whole time she was away. It could almost have been flattering, if it wasn't so scary. It wasn't good for him to go so long without proper rest. It wouldn't be good for anybody, but especially not him, with the job he did and the unspoken but very real threat to his health.
She and CJ both had studiously avoided any mention of the thirteenth and nineteenth letters of the alphabet, but neither of them had stopped thinking about it for a moment. He was supposed to avoid stress...
She could have laughed. Oh, but Jed's life was nothing but stress. Most of it the good kind, the kind a man like Josiah Bartlet couldn't live without, but there was another level to it that surfaced entirely too frequently for her comfort.
And this went way beyond that.
The way Jed kept his mouth shut about his childhood wasn't the same way he froze her out of the day-to-day things that bothered him. This was a different kind of silence, not the stubborn refusal to spill that was really nothing more than a delaying tactic. This was just something that he point blank didn't want to share, with her or anyone else.
It made her unhappy, but in some ways he was right. The past was past, his father was long dead, and revisiting it wouldn't help him; it had been deceptively easy to push suspicions, insinuations and the jitters and flinches of her husband's younger years into the back of her mind. Jed had soon grown out of the skin of the reticent, surprisingly shy and naïve boy he'd once been, retreating back into him only in times of emotional hurt. He'd healed, so far as anyone was able, and become his own man. In the end, the shadow his father had tried to throw over him hadn't been nearly enough to eclipse him.
And now this.
She wanted to get out there and fight, hunt down her husband's enemies, but how could you defend against a man who was already dead? John Bartlet was the true culprit, and he was beyond her reach. The crowd of gawkers and sight-seers bent on scraping through the debris of troubled years for a few cheap thrills and an exciting story were a poor substitute, and lashing out wouldn't drive them away.
There ought to be lines that no one had a right to cross. But a president belonged to his people as much and more as they belonged to him, and in taking the position he was born for, her husband had forfeited his right to draw those lines for himself. The people would have their story, drink their fill of the troubles of the man they considered their property, to dissect and examine as they wished. And there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it.
And so she watched Jed sleep. It would almost have been better if it was like the movies, if she could watch him toss and turn in the grip of his nightmares, and listen to the muttered words that would explain his torment. But he just slept, and whatever was going on in that beautiful, complicated brain of his, she wasn't a party to it.
And that was what bothered her most of all.
Leo jumped in fright as his assistant appeared out of the shadows of his office. "Jesus, Margaret, d'you have to- What are you doing here this early?"
"Waiting to ask you that question," she informed him disapprovingly. "We've talked about this-"
He scowled at her. "Margaret, you came to work in the middle of the night specifically to tell me not to come to work in the middle of the night?"
"You just growl at me if I do it over the phone," she reminded him.
"Well, what makes you think I won't growl at you in person?" He shrugged off his coat and headed into his office, turning to switch on the light but getting beaten to it by Margaret.
"You do that too. But you can't hang up on me if I'm here in person."
"I can close doors, though," he informed her, and did so with her on the other side of it. He paused, but there was no sound of retreating footsteps. After a moment, he pulled the door open again, and glared in exasperation at his assistant, still standing in the exact same position he'd left her.
"Would you stop that?"
"It's the middle of the night, Leo. What am I supposed to do?"
"I don't know!" he shrugged. "Go home for an hour! Get some sleep on Toby's couch. Go... go eat a bagel or something!"
She looked at him as if he was crazy. "Leo, it's four AM."
He gave her a look. "What, you turn into something if somebody feeds you after midnight?"
"Do you know what kind of havoc eating in the middle of the night can play with your digestive system?"
He heaved a deeply put upon sigh. "Oh, dear God."
If it was Margaret's plan to associate the experience of coming in to work early with forms of dire punishment, he had to admit, she was doing well.
"Leo, what's going on?"
The question hit him unexpectedly, and at this time in the morning it took a moment to unstick his tongue and formulate a suitable response. "The Ambassador to Cambodia's lying in a morgue in Phnom Penh with a bullet in his brain," he reminded her sharply, "and you're asking me what's wrong?"
"I meant other than that."
"Isn't that enough?"
She obviously knew he was hiding something, but would have let it slide. Some compulsion, perhaps driven by the memory of how concerned she'd been over him during and after his relapse into drinking six months ago, made him call her back.
"Margaret..." He met her eyes. "You'll know soon enough, okay?"
She bobbed her head in a quick nod. "Okay."
She left, and then he was alone with his depressing thoughts. Leo closed the office door, and sat down to work.
Sam lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. He hadn't slept much. Thinking about the president. Thinking about how he would feel if his father's 'little indiscretion' of twenty-eight years was suddenly splashed all over the papers, every journalist in the country digging for dirt, scrambling for an angle, dissecting his psyche to see how it might have affected him.
It wasn't like being hounded over Laurie, or his relationship with Steve - those were choices, for better or worse; he shouldn't have had to have fought those battles, but he'd been prepared to. But for the things that had been done to you, the things that you'd had no control over... You could choose your politics and your relationships, and whether they were worth making a stand for. You didn't have a choice over who your father screwed around with.
And that wasn't even comparable to- To-
How were they supposed to handle the spin on something that he didn't even want to fit inside his head? It was hard to imagine the president as a child, almost impossible to ever accept that the child he'd been could ever have gone through...
Child abuse. Jed Bartlet, child abuse. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't get the two ideas to co-exist inside his brain. The president was so, so... comfortable. So open and casual and easy with people. Too many movie melodramas were insisting that victims of abuse weren't like that, they were jumpy, they were basket cases, they were irrevocably damaged.
It was a dangerous stereotype, but one that was hard to shake. You wanted to believe that there were markers that you would recognise, that you would instantly know, because that was how you coped with the idea that these things could be going on anywhere around you. You salved your conscience by saying 'Well, if that was happening to anyone around me, I'd know about it'.
But you couldn't. You couldn't pick the victims out any more than you could tell the villains by their squinty eyes and shifty expressions. Anybody at all could have these secrets in their past, and you would never know unless they confided in you.
Or unless the secret was ripped from them, brutally, and displayed before a world that would see it as just another movie melodrama; the thrilling story of how an emotionally and physically bruised and battered boy overcame his roots to go on to become the leader of the free world. They'd lap it up, clamouring for all the details - the ultimate underdog story.
Never mind what it would do to the man at the centre of it all.
And, God help him, he'd be helping them spin it that way - because the alternative was 'President's Mental Health Called Into Question After Shock Abuse Revelations'.
After all, the journalists had all seen those sensationalist movies, too.
The springs of the bed creaked, and Steve was resting on one elbow to lean over him. "You're awake," he observed softly.
"No I'm not," he mumbled automatically.
Steve let out a small snort of breath that carried his amusement, and pulled Sam closer, absently running his other hand over his chin. "You gonna shave that off this morning?" he asked mildly.
"No." He kissed Steve's palm.
"You want to tell me what's wrong?"
Sam met his eyes. It was impossible to see the colour of them in the dark, but he could still read the concern in his boyfriend's posture. "I can't," he said quietly. Not that it was going to remain a secret for much longer, but still... Somehow he would have felt worse about passing on the secret personally than letting Steve hear it for himself. It would have felt like a betrayal, gossiping about the president behind his back, sharing knowledge he'd never been entrusted with in the first place.
"Okay," Steve accepted, laying back. They were silent for a few moments. "What time are you getting up for work?"
"Soon." He hesitated for beat, then reached out. "Call me this afternoon?"
"Sure. I promise." Steve's fingers curled around his own, and though he knew he wasn't going to get back to sleep, he still felt better.