Los Dias de los Muertos
CJ/Danny, mentions of others
Maybe PG
Through end of series
Not mine, never were, never will be, but they consume my soul
Reviews, feedback and criticism always welcomed
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October 31, 2008 Santa Monica, CA.
Danny Concannon entered his kitchen with an empty platter. CJ was by the refrigerator, refilling the ice bucket.
"Any more of those feta cheese phyllo triangle thingies?" he asked.
"Tyropitas. I've got some in the oven, they should be ready in three minutes at the most, wait for the timer," she answered. She crossed the room toward him, kissed him lightly. "Are we running low on anything else?"
"The cocktail franks will be the next to go, then the fried chicken wings. Jessica brought some baba ghanoush and pita bread. You need to promise Dick Jenkins anything short of sex for his herbal cheesecake recipe. The antipasto tray's still got a lot on it, but it looks picked over." Then he smirked. "And your veggie tray has barely been touched."
"I know that, it's more symbolic than anything else. Anytime you get four or more women together, at least two of them are on a diet, whether they need to be or not, and at least one of them thinks that one of those in the group who aren't dieting should be. And you can promise Steve anything, including sex, as far as I'm concerned, for his scalloped pineapple recipe." He made a move to swat her behind and she moved out of the way, laughing. As she walked out of the kitchen, she added, "Grab some more Electric Lemonade when you come back."
They were hosting a neighborhood Halloween non-costume party. Trick-or-treat hours had been from 6:00 pm until 8:00 pm; the neighborhood kids were across the street at Li and Yan Wei's, with sleeping bags, videos, and four young women babysitters. It was the grown ups' turn to celebrate.
The oven timer buzzed. Danny grabbed a potholder, pulled out the pan, and dumped the tyropita triangles on the plate. Martha Stewart he was not; he was not going to spend time arranging them in a pleasing pattern. He picked up a pitcher of the lemonade spiked with rum, vodka, tequila, and blue curaçao.
Walking into the family room, he saw his wife up in the face of one of their neighbors. Billy Rogers lived on the other side of Frank and Diana Munoz and was on the Santa Monica city council. "Billy, you cannot be serious! Water is crucial to all of us in the community. I don't agree with it, but I can understand we might want to privatize trash collection or even street maintenance, but we can't sell the water company to private owners! I don't have a problem with contracting out the management, but if we don't own our water, we are playing with fire! Billy, you have got to convince the others on city council to vote your way! You just have to!" She started repeating herself. Poor Billy looked like a deer caught in the headlights; Bully totally agreed with CJ but she was into one of those run on phases that could last longer than a three-part mini-series.
Danny had learned many years ago that the only thing to do was to just mentally sit back and enjoy it until she finally talked out whatever was messing with her mind. Unfortunately, Billy didn't know that.
Well, there was one other thing that Danny could do to stop her. He had also learned long ago that if he grabbed her by the back of the neck and kissed her, not only did it stop her babbling, it also befuddled and confused her in a most delightful way.
However, it was something he would only do when the situation was just between her and him. He had tried it once in front of others, the night before their wedding, and while it had worked, he immediately felt as if he had stepped across that line that Jed Bartlet delineated duing their "pre-Cana conference" in New Hampshire; he felt as if he had done it to show the others that he had some control over her. Later in the evening, he pulled her aside and apologized. Her reaction made him realize that apologizing to her could be an aphrodisiac. There was one other time almost two years ago when he had considered doing it, but realized at the time that he couldn't because of the circumstances. In hindsight, he was glad he didn't; it might have ruined things between them.
November 10, 2006 – Reception following Leo McGarry's funeral, Washington DC
Earlier that morning, when he had awakened, all the happiness and optimism that had permeated his life Wednesday night and yesterday had dissipated and had been replaced by trepidation. What if she had regrets? What if it had been just her grief expressing itself? True, she did tell him last month that she wanted to seriously weigh his proposal after President Bartlet was out of office; but would Leo's death and her reaction to it affect her decision? And worst of all, after a day of thinking about it, what if he didn't stack up, bedroom wise, with the other men she had known?
After the funeral, he had decided to take the bull by the horns, as it were, had gone to her office and found out that not only did she enjoy being in his bed Wednesday night and not only did she look forward to being there again, she also talked about wanting to work out what it all meant for the two of them. She felt burdened by the "hostess/mistress of ceremonies" aspects of the funeral and it felt good to see her smile; it felt damned good to know that he had put that smile on her face.
He was making small talk with Ainsley Hayes, or rather, she was making small talk with him, not that anything Ainsley said could be classified as small talk.
Now, he was a writer and he loved the English language properly spoken and written. Sentences that ended in prepositions hurt his ears; non-agreement between subject and verb did the same thing. If he was ever captured and held as a prisoner of war, all the enemy had to do was expose him to a barrage of double negatives, split infinitives, and dangling participles; he would be broken like fine bone china dropped from a third story window. But Ainsley carried the art of good grammar (or what she thought was good grammar) to the realm of the ridiculous. He looked up, saw CJ talking with Donna Moss, and caught her eye. He smiled at her, she smiled back, somewhat shyly, and he could feel his joy break out all over his face. Surely, it was some form of venial sin to be so happy at such a sad occasion. He hoped he could hide his joy, but he felt like high-fiving someone.
A few minutes later, she told him that their plans for the evening needed to be set aside. When she explained about Donna staying at her place, he was tempted to tell her that according to one of his sources, Donna would probably have a better offer within the half-hour, but things like that were part of the reason he wanted to get out of reporting. When she went into her unending explanation about why she couldn't simply tell the truth to Donna, he thought about kissing her the way he did before Bartlet's second State of the Union speech and when he surprised her as Santa Claus. It would accomplish two things; one, it would cause her to shut up; two, it would very clearly explain to Ms. Moss why her hostess would not be there when Donna went to bed and hopefully not even when she awoke the next morning. If he were more sure about what he had heard from his fellow reporters on the Santos campaign trail, he would be tempted to walk up to Josh Lyman and talk with him as men do (or at least as men like to think they talk with each other). Then Josh would take Donna home with him; if Donna protested with objections similar to CJ's, Josh could tell Donna that Danny would explain it all to CJ. At the same time, Danny would tell CJ that Josh would explain it all to Donna. However, this was not the time to lay all the cards on the table. In this case, incrementalism was definitely an option. So he just stood back and enjoyed watching her stumble over her words and explanations. He was fairly certain that this would not be the last time he would be enjoying such a scene. The important thing was that she wanted to be with him again; his optimism was back – things would work out for the best.
October 31, 2008 – Santa Monica, CA
He managed to catch her eyes and she understood what he was telling her with his. She smiled at him, turned to Billy and apologized, and then went to get a Coke and mingle with the rest of their guests. They were getting very good at reading each other's thoughts, each other's moods.
Three weeks ago, Scott had confirmed that she was indeed carrying again. This time, there was only one baby and he felt a little better about this pregnancy, although Scott and the other doctors assured him that there would have been no reason to fear if it had been twins again.
On the way home from the doctor, he asked her if she would consider speaking with Frank Hollis about bringing on someone else to help with the fund-raising so that she could restrict her work to managing and overseeing (from the confines of her home and the UCLA offices, of course) the pilot project in Namibia. She agreed with him and the executive search committee of the Hollis foundation went to work looking for suitable people.
So far, they had told only a few people in strict confidence about the baby. Their joy was cautious, but they were happy. They had been through pregnancy last year; they knew what to expect. His book was published last week and the reviews had been good; he was moving up on the non-fiction bestseller lists. His bi-monthly op-ed piece was syndicated in about 80 papers across the country, at least one per state. In February, he would start working on Leo's biography. The Prince of Wales had sent him an outline and two chapters. The man had a good grasp of what he wanted to convey and the man knew how to write a decent essay; he wouldn't have to do much more than suggest a tweak here and there, maybe some phrasing and a little polish.
She was with Hank and Steve; he walked over to join them, put his arm around her waist. "You can't do that to poor Billy," he joked. "He may decide not to run again, and God knows who we'll get."
"We'll just draft CJ," Steve said.
Danny made a cross with his two index fingers. "Get behind me, Satan. She can't save the world and Santa Monica at the same time and still churn butter, iron my boxers, darn my socks, that sort of thing."
November 2, 2008 – Santa Monica, CA
CJ opened her eyes, glanced at the clock, saw that it was about 5:30 in the early evening. Wow, it was later than she thought. The space beside her was fairly cool and she could hear the sounds of football coming from the family room. Danny must have decided to let her sleep.
She got up, picked up the floppy hat from Donna's wedding and the plastic wrapper from the Candy-Pants. Earlier, when they were at Sunday brunch, Danny turned down dessert and then whispered that he would rather have her in the hat and a pair of the panties she got at Donna's bachelorette party when they got home. She glanced over at the nightstand by his side of the bed, saw a few scraps of the edible underwear, and wished she had bought a few pair of the edible men's briefs.
Throwing a shift over her head, she walked into the family room and discovered her husband softly snoring in front of the ESPN football guys. Picking up his empty beer bottle, she went to the kitchen, grabbed herself a bottle of seltzer, and made sure that the kitchen door was locked. After checking the living room door and the one from the garage into the courtyard, she went over to the hot tub, disrobed, checked the temperature, and lowered herself into the water. Scott had told her that as long as the water wasn't too hot and the air jets weren't on, she could use the tub for a couple of months.
They had gone to church today. They usually went about twice a month, often on Saturday evening. Today was the feast of All Souls and as part of the service, the parish commemorated the lives of those who had died in the past year. There had been nineteen candles carried in by members of the Teen Club at the beginning of Mass and placed by the altar. The ages of the dead ranged from their infant boys to the 106-year-old grandmother of the parish deacon. After the homily, the names of the dead were read and she, Danny, and family members of the others carried up white roses and placed them in a vase by the altar.
After Mass, they entered the boys in the book set up for people to list the names of family and friends who had died over the past twelve months. They also added her father's name. (Last year, since it was their first November in the parish, they had entered the names of his parents and her mother.) They stopped to look at the Altar of the Dead that had been set up in by one of the side altars. At the party, Diana had explained that "Los Dias de los Muertos" (the days of the dead) – the Aztec, Mayan, and other Mesoamerican customs of honoring the dead with fruits, candies, flowers, baked breads and other tokens – had been adapted by the Spanish missionaries. "Of course, they moved the feasts to coincide with All Saints and All Souls and tried to take away the festive nature of it, make it purely spiritual, but they failed," she added. Then Danny had to explain that those feasts were adaptations of the Celtic and Druidic feast of Samhain, which not only celebrated the harvest and the new year but also the day when the boundaries between the living and the dead were relaxed. She sometimes wondered if waxing esoteric was a Notre Dame trait; her husband was nowhere near Jed Bartlet in terms of geekiness, but he did have quite a store of trivia on which to draw when he felt like it.
Her hand moved over her still flat stomach. By the end of next May, God willing, they will have been married for two years, and she will have been pregnant for eighteen of those twenty-four months. She was looking forward to being a mother and she was looking forward to seeing Danny as a father. They had so much fun on Friday night before the party handing out candy to the Trick-or-treaters. In a few years, they'd be trading off, one of them at home to hand out candy and the other taking the minnow inside her door to door.
She felt his hand on her hair and opened her eyes to see him removing his clothes, joining her in the hot tub. "Dr. Danny prefers being with me than being with Chris Berman?" she asked.
Last night, he told her that he was thinking about going back to school, getting his Ph.D. While in Washington for the wedding, he had been talking with Toby about the state of reporting and writing and the man challenged him to do something about it. "To put a nicer spin on an old adage, 'Those who can, do; those who are tired of doing teach others to do'. Think about it," Toby told him. Danny had spoken with the LA Times editor, who put him in touch with the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC. He would work out an inter-disciplinary program with the English department, getting a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and an M.A. in Print Journalism. He really didn't need the degree to teach; he could come on board right now as an adjunct faculty member, but with the degree would come tenure and other benefits, not to mention more money. What did she think?
Last night, she told him she thought it was a wonderful idea. Yes, they would figure out how to pay for it. Yes, she would help quiz him for the Graduate Record Exam. Yes, if he wanted to teach part-time one or two nights a week at West LA Community College to help pay for school, she a) wouldn't mind and b) would make sure to be safe at home on those nights before he left for Culver City. "Dr. Danny," she teased him. "If the Minnow" she touched her stomach "turns out to be a girl, the wedding invitations will read 'Dr. and Mrs. Daniel Concannon request the et. cetera, et. cetera, et. cetera"
Now, he sat down in the water, facing her. "Let's see," he held out his right hand, palm up. "Naked wife in hot tub." Now the left one, also palm up. "Five guys discussing football. Call me a wimp, but I'll take option one." His right foot played along her left calf. "We never finished talking last night. What did Frank want when he phoned earlier?"
"The Executive Search committee came up with three people for fund-raising. I can pick none, one, or two but not all three. There's a bit of history with all of them, some more than others." She looked at him from under her eyebrows, not sure she really wanted to spoil the mood with the topic.
"So?"
"Laura Gail Fitzwallace, John Hoynes, and Glenallen Walken."
"Fitz' widow?" He seemed surprised.
"It's not that far out," she said. "Historically, men don't get to elite status in the military unless their wives are strong, outgoing women. The commander's wife managed the other wives at home on base while the men were off to war. If this were something like the March of Dimes, she'd be great, but the scope of this is beyond anything she or the others like her have ever encountered."
"Then it will have to be Walken."
That's what she was thinking, but it surprised her to hear him make such a imperative statement. She tried to lighten the mood. "So do you not trust Hoynes, not trust me, or not trust either of us?"
"Don't be ridiculous," he snapped. Obviously, her attempt at humor didn't work.
Then they were both talking over each other.
"I'm sorry, Da-"
"Forgive me, Jean –"
"ny, I was just surprised because "
"nie, I didn't mean it "
"you usually don't make such "
"to come out that way."
"categorical statements."
They stopped, smiled at each other. She grabbed his hand across the water, squeezed it.
He leaned forward, took both her hands in his. "It's his ambition. He's always going to be looking for a way to come back. It's in his nature. And in any other situation, I'd think it was a good thing. I'm just afraid he'd want to take over, take your job, after you've put so much into it, so much infrastructure into the task of building infrastructure, as it were. You saw how it was out here before Toby pulled you into 'Bartlet for America' – so much backstabbing. As for the other, you know it's never been an issue. It's just that I know how much this thing means to you and I don't want to see you hurt. Besides, then I'd have to go after him, and I think he could take me," he joked.
"You're right, as usual, husband mine, but – ".
"You think it might turn into another situation like the one eight years ago with Tad What's-his-butt from State?"
"Yeah, I know what he said, but - . Well, I know that Josh and Sam rely on him quite a bit to help steer the President in the right direction. I could say that I don't want to poach him out of my friendship for them and out of respect for Matt Santos."
"You could also say that you want him to stay in DC because he would be better for Margaret than Arnold Vinnick."
"Which surprisingly has the advantage of being the truth," she laughed, then turned serious. "So that leaves Glen Walken. We have a past with him also; I don't know what he believes or doesn't believe about you, me, and the Sharif story. Plus he would be working for someone who for three days, theoretically worked for him. I don't know if he could deal with it; I'm not really sure I could deal with it, he is a former president."
"Have him come out here, meet with you, Frank, and Bonnie in San Luis Obispo. Bring him down here, see how he meshes with you and Nancy. Then bring him here, meet with you and me. We'll put everything out in the open, see where we stand. And if he doesn't work, you tell Frank, tell the committee, to come up with some more names."
And in the waning hours of a weekend on which two ancient cultures honored the past and looked forward to the future, harvested the results of the work of the year gone by and anticipated the work of the year to come, the two of them remembered their sons, planned for the child to come, and planned for their lives together, still falling off the cliff, still holding hands on the way down.