Part 4—Patriot Acts

For a century, the Appalachians were a barrier to the westward expansion of the British colonies; the continuity of the system, the bewildering multiplicity of its succeeding ridges, the tortuous courses and roughness of its transverse passes, a heavy forest, and dense undergrowth all conspired to hold the settlers on the seaward-sloping plateaus and coastal plains . . . .

[To] the unsuspected strength of the colonists . . . the geographic isolation enforced by the Appalachian mountains [was] a prime contributor. The confinement of the colonies between an ocean and a mountain wall led to the fullest occupation of the coastal border of the continent . . . conducing to a community of purpose, a political and commercial solidarity, which would not otherwise have been developed. . . . Unsupported by shipping, the American armies fought toward the sea with the mountains at their back protecting them . . . .

Wikipedia, "Appalachian Mountains: Influence on History"

(June 16, 2007)

Josh didn't have to be anywhere that Monday. One of the good things about his job at the Foundation was the flexibility in his schedule; unless he had people he had to meet with, he could do a lot of his work from home. It surprised him how much he enjoyed that: he'd always been a people person, thriving off the energy of the minds around him and the frenetic pace in his jobs on the Hill and at the White House. He still loved the buzz he got whenever he went into New York, but somewhere along the line he'd stopped wanting that on a daily basis.

That was one of the good things to come out of the disaster of last summer, he thought; he'd finally had to learn to slow down and enjoy some of quieter pleasures life brought him along its way. He'd never realized before how much he'd been missing. It had taken two months in the foothills of the Blue Ridge and those interminable hours talking to Sue Thornton to get him to see that, and why he'd been missing it. His addiction to work hadn't been just for the work's sake; it had always been the easy way out for him, easier by far than confronting the tangled mess of guilt and denial that had gotten twisted around so many other aspects of his life, especially anything to do with family or home.

Buying the house he'd grown up in before the tragedy that had caused all that tangled mess had been a gamble, really, but it had yielded all he'd hoped for and then some. He'd never expected to feel the kind of peace and contentment he'd found here. As he'd told Donna, it wasn't a question of living in the past but of rediscovering it, getting it back—of letting himself feel the sadness of what had happened in that place, but not allowing that sadness to keep him from remembering all the good things that had happened there, too. Living there had allowed him to feel for the first time he could remember that he really, genuinely wanted the things that house represented to him: family, children, a life with more to it than just work, however important that work might be in helping the world, and however important it might still be to him.

Now he knew he wanted those things and could even feel that perhaps he had a right to them. That was something else that had taken him by surprise—discovering how deeply he'd allowed himself to feel unentitled to the ordinary pleasures and supports of life. He'd had no idea: in fact, when Sue Thornton first suggested it, he'd laughed at her. Now he knew she'd been right.

He wondered, on this Monday morning, if he should have tried to explain all that to Donna that last afternoon, when they'd been talking about why he hadn't tried to make something happen with her during all those years they'd worked together, but he'd exposed himself so much that weekend and was so unsure of what the consequences were going to be that he couldn't have taken it then. Everything he'd said to her had been true, it just hadn't been all of the truth as he understood himself now.

But she'd said she needed to leave, needed to take her time before continuing this thing they'd begun that weekend, and if that was what she needed then, however much it hurt, he knew it was what he needed too. The last thing he wanted was to have to wonder for the rest of his life if she'd given up her job and stayed with him because he'd somehow guilted her into it by talking about how his brush with suicide had made him realize that the thing he wanted and needed more than anything else in the world was this house, or someplace like it, and Donna in it beside him, cooking together in the kitchen, talking together in front of the fire, making love together in the big bed upstairs, their children climbing in the apple trees and running through the garden outside. He knew too much about guilt to want to inflict it on anyone he cared about, or to have to live with the consequences of it anymore himself.

Not that he was finding it easy to live with the consequences of letting her go. The weeks after she left were almost as hard to get through as those first weeks after he'd moved into the house had been. Then it had been the old memories that had haunted him: he'd eaten every meal out of the house for the first month just so he wouldn't have to step into the kitchen, even though he knew from the agent's description that it had been completely remodelled and rebuilt. He'd been a little less than perfectly honest with Donna about how building fires in the fireplace had affected him: he hadn't had much trouble with it as a teenager in the house they'd moved to, or—apart from his failure to read warning signs about flues that were welded shut—as an adult in the White House, either, but in this house his hands had shaken so badly he'd gone through half a box of matches the first time he'd forced himself to light one on an icy winter night, and the smell of smoke and crackle of flames had kept him awake night after night, long after he'd doused the fire in the fireplace and drawn the mesh curtains tight across the opening, after he'd patrolled the house, checking every battery in every smoke detector he'd put up in every room. He'd made peace with those ghosts eventually, but it had taken a lot of sleepless nights and a few expensive phone calls to Sue Thornton to quiet them down.

He wasn't finding it much easier to deal with the new ghosts that seemed to have moved into the house to haunt him: the memory of Donna standing on his doorstep in the rain; the look on her face just before he kissed her the first time; her warm, silken body moving under him in his bed. The sound of her voice telling him she loved him. The sound of that same voice talking about her loyalty to Bob Russell, telling him she had to leave. "It's only for a while," he told himself twenty or more times a day. "She said she wanted to be with you; she said she'd quit if she had to. This is only for a while."

But the trouble with taking his defenses down and letting himself admit how much he needed her was that he didn't have anything much left to put up in their place. He read her emails over obsessively, and avoided using his cell phone in case he missed one of her calls. The contact always left him raw and aching for hours afterwards, but he craved it the way he imagined an addict craved his drug. It was hard to focus on his work, harder still to keep up the chores around the house he'd found so much simple satisfaction in just a few weeks ago, but he didn't want to go into New York instead; he couldn't tear himself away from the sense of her that clung to every room in his house. He turned down all the offers that came in to comment on the White House in newspapers or on t.v., and all the dinner invitations, too. He found himself studying the postcard of the mountains in the mornings and before he went to bed, trying to remember why he'd written those things and what they'd meant to him again.

But on this particular morning, he woke up feeling better than he had any time in the weeks since she'd left. She'd called him the night before and said she was going to talk to Will in the morning—today. She thought Will had had time to get over his pique with Josh for the things Josh had said in that last t.v. appearance, and was pleased at the ease with which their education bill had passed the House and the reception it seemed likely to get next month in the Senate. He even seemed pleased with her for catching that ambiguous language that might have held things up, although Deputy Chief of Staff Porter seemed rather less pleased, and had been making more than his usual share of sneering remarks about assistants.

Josh burned with indignation when she told him that, but his desire to go and smash Harold Porter into a wall was offset by relief that Donna was going to bring the issue of her relationship with Josh to Will at last. He hoped it went well; however much he hated her working for a President he despised, he understood why it mattered to her, and he wanted her to have any opportunity she wanted and any satisfaction it could bring. She'd ended the conversation by telling him again that she loved him and wanted to be with him. Josh didn't feel any need to look at mountains that morning; he was humming in the shower and whistling to himself as he puttered about the kitchen, getting his coffee going while listening to the morning news on the little t.v. on the counter, and yelling at the announcer when he mentioned anything particularly inane that Tom Cruise or Jennifer Lopez had done.

The shriek of the kettle and the whirr of his coffee grinder drowned the anchor's voice out for a minute. Josh breathed deeply, taking in the rich aroma of the coffee mingling with the eggs and bacon he had going in the frying pan—his family had never been observant, and the smell of coffee and bacon was one of the good memories that was deeply rooted in this house for him—and relishing the contentment he was feeling. The sun was shining outside. It was going to be a beautiful day.

The bacon was spluttering in the frying pan. Josh turned off the heat under it and moved the pan to another burner, then dumped the coffee grounds into the press and took the screaming kettle off the stove. It gurgled and spluttered until he poured the boiling water over the rough grounds, the smell of coffee steaming up into his face. In the sudden quiet that followed, the voice from the television rang out with unexpected force:

" . . . a series of explosions that rocked the nation's capitol just minutes ago while commuters made their way to work. Screams and smoke are reported to be issuing from two busy subway stations, Union Station and MetroCenter, in the heart of downtown Washington, D.C., while passengers are still stumbling out, some of them bleeding. And—wait—yes, this is a confirmed report I've just been handed, that there's been another explosion in the vicinity of the White House. We have no further details at this time. We'll keep you posted as we get more information on that. And now, we've got our correspondent on the ground at Union Station, two blocks from the United States Capitol . . . ."

The boiling water filled the press and spilled over, flooding the counter with black, scalding liquid that ran over the edge and down the front of the cabinets, splattering Josh's bare feet with drops that burned and stung. He hardly noticed. The kettle dropped to the floor with a crash as he ran for his phone. His hands were shaking so much he could barely hit the single digit on his speed-dial for Donna's cell.

He couldn't even get her voice-mail; her box was already full. Of course—every journalist in the White House Press Corps would be calling her, asking when she'd be briefing, begging for a comment. But where was she, and was she all right? He tried the White House number, but the switchboard was jammed. He turned on the larger t.v. in the living room and sat on the couch in front of it, mechanically pushing Donna's two numbers over and over, hoping to get through, watching transfixed by the pictures of a city and a nation under siege.

The reports were varied and confusing: a plane had crashed into the White House and blown up. It hadn't hit the White House, but had been shot down by the Secret Service snipers on the roof and exploded in the gardens near the Ellipse. There hadn't been a plane, but a bomb in a car that had somehow gotten through the security at the gates and exploded right beside the building. Not one car, but two cars and two explosions. Not inside the gates but outside them. A plane and a car. Not a plane or a car bomb at all, but one of the crazies in Lafayette Square, who'd gotten tired of waving his sign calling for the end of the world and decided to do something more dramatic to bring it on.

Meanwhile the number of casualties at the two Metro stations was growing, and there were reports of unspecified incidents at the Capitol and the State Department, while a fiery pileup on the Beltway might have been caused by an explosion in the densely-packed morning rush-hour traffic. And then, unexpectedly, reports of new attacks in different cities around the country: bombs had gone off, almost simultaneously, in the subways in New York and Chicago. A truck loaded with explosives drove through the doors at a major shopping mall in St. Louis. And another, a little while later, at Disneyworld. There was no mistaking the accuracy of some of the reports: the pictures of people staggering from the subways and out of the mall were terrifying.

Finally, at a little after 12:00 noon, Donna's picture flashed on the screen. She looked pale and Josh could tell she was upset, but she spoke firmly. At a few minutes before 8:00 that morning there had been what appeared to be a suicide bombing on Pennsylvania Avenue, close to the White House gates. A number of people had been injured, but the exact number of casualties was not known at this time. Moments later, a small twin-engine aircraft had crashed near the back of the White House and exploded. There was some damage to the building, but she was unable to report on the extent of it or on the number of casualties at this time. The President and his family had not been injured.

There had also been bombings at two Metro stations in the downtown area around the same time, and later in the morning at subway stations in Chicago and New York, and a shopping mall in Saint Louis. An attempted attack at Disneyworld had been thwarted by alert security personnel, and the driver of the truck arrested. The President was deeply grieved and angered by these attacks on United States citizens and the United States government. No, she could not comment on the extent of the damage to the White House, the whereabouts of the President, or when he would be addressing the nation. No, she could not comment on how the bombing had taken place in the section of Pennsylvania Avenue that was supposed to be secure, or how the airplane had evaded the no-fly zone over downtown Washington and the Secret Service precautions around the building. The White House did not comment on matters of security. She would not take any further questions at this time.

Josh pushed himself out of his couch, went upstairs, and packed a bag. Then he got in his car and started driving. Washington wasn't the sanest place to go at the moment, but it never occurred to him that he should be doing anything else.