by Amy Faye
Paul leaned over and covered his mouth, whispering something conspiratorially. Tim's eyes slanted up and to the side before he nodded.
"Mr. Ando! He's from Japan, Mom. He knows all about planes."
"Oh yeah?"
"He says we're going to have an extra careful flight, so you don't have to be nervous any more."
Lara blushed, and hoped Paul didn't notice. With him, that was impossible, though. He seemed to always notice every weakness of hers, every chink in her armor. "I'm not nervous," she answered defensively. "It's just been a little while since I flew."
"But Mr. Ando says it'll be fine."
"Good. Did he let you borrow his hat?"
Tim lifted it up off his head and looked at it like he had forgotten it was there. "Oh. Yeah!"
Lana could feel the airplane start to move, and her hands tightened automatically on the wide arm rests.
"You don't need to be nervous, Mom," Tim reminded her with every ounce of helpfulness he could muster. "Like I said. Extra careful!"
Paul chimed in then, as if to complete her humiliation. "You heard the man. Extra-careful, right?"
"Right," Tim echoed.
They rose quickly, and she could feel her stomach being left behind on the ground. She didn't regret it, per se, but good God, she'd forgotten how much she disliked flying. This was a mistake, without a single doubt.
By the time they'd leveled out, Lara's heart was thumping and she had pushed the window next to her shut. A young woman–just Paul's type, Lara noted sourly–stepped back from the cabin.
"Okay, we're leveling out. You're good," she said. The woman gave a look at Lara, but if she had any thoughts, then the girl kept them to herself.
Paul unbuckled his seat belt almost immediately and stood, stretching his legs and walking towards the back of the plane. He turned at the last minute before disappearing into the hostess station. "I'll just be one minute," he said, as if she cared, and then it occurred to Lara that he wasn't necessarily talking to her.
True to his word, he reappeared a minute later with a man younger than Lara was, thick plastic-rimmed glasses and a serious expression.
"Hey, Travis, this is my friend Tim. Tim, this is my friend Travis. He works for the New York Times. He's a reporter. Can you say hi, Tim?"
Tim smiled up at him and waved. "Hello."
"Hi," said the reporter–Travis, Paul had called him. "How are you? You like the plane?"
"It's big," Tim said, as if Travis might not have noticed.
"Yeah, pretty big," the reporter said. "And who's this?"
Lara covered up her face. "Please don't take a picture of me," she said. "I'd rather–"
"That's my mom," Tim offered, as if he didn't notice her avoiding the conversation.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, she's Mr. Green's friend, she said. From a long time ago."
"Is that right?"
She heard the edge of a deeper question in the reporter's voice, and something told her that she wasn't going to have the quiet, solitary, out-of-the-public-eye trip that she'd hoped for.
She should have known not to hope for things that were never going to happen, but she was still making the same mistakes all over again. Why not one more?
11
Paul smiled as they took off from Philadelphia. Lara still wasn't used to flying. Still gripped the arms of the chair as tight as her fingers would allow. And she still acted like she didn't do any of it, of course, which was almost as charming as well.
"You know, you don't have anything to worry about," he offered. Tim chimed in with a 'yeah!'
She shot Tim a narrow-eyed look with a little humor in it. Then she turned it on him and though nothing about it changed he wasn't so sure about the humor any more.
"I'm not worried," she told him, her voice matter-of-fact. "I just don't like the feeling in my stomach. It makes me feel queasy."
"Oh, you'll get used to it."
He looked out the window. There was something about being on a plan constantly. You get a different view of the country from 30,000 feet. Like all of its problems seem so small. And yet, he knew, they were all so big.
The people themselves were small, and yet they added up to something he couldn't really explain. That was one way that he hadn't even realized that Lara and Tim would help. They were a subtle reminder of what sort of things 'everyday people' worried about.
Helen worried about things that even Paul himself couldn't quite wrap his head around. She was almost alien to him. She worried about public appearances, about how people thought of her, but the minute that someone spent more than five minutes with her, she stopped caring about whether or not she was nice to them. That was a contradiction–if you want people to like you, then you have to treat them with respect.
If you don't care if people like you, then why spend so much time, so much effort, worrying about it constantly? The answer was obvious. She was as acidic towards everyone else as she was to him, but she was convinced that at any moment, they would turn against her.
With Paul, he guessed, she thought that she was safe to treat him like she did because she thought she had him by the balls. Maybe she did. But that didn't mean that he wasn't a man, and as a man, it didn't mean he wasn't going to be stubborn as hell if he wanted to.
If he decided to burn the fucking place down then that was what he'd do.
"Sir?" Brian was standing by the gate into the back of the plane. Somehow Paul hadn't noticed him, lost in thought or lost in watching Lara's face as she spoke softly with her son.
"Is everything alright?"
"Ah, yes, sir. Everything ought to be fine. Maybe you should see this anyways, sir, just to be certain."
He took the laptop that Brian held in one hand and opened it up. There was an article on some right-wing rag. It was making the same usual sensational claims about his history. The same usual sensational claims about their campaign. The same usual, wrong, claims.
He let out a breath and scrolled. There was a name he recognized, there. Stan Reitman. He was a friend of Helen's. There had been a time, once, when Paul thought they were fucking. Helen wasn't the type, though, and she wasn't attractive enough to be able to use it as a bargaining chip.
Which meant that whatever he was working with her for, it wasn't between any bed sheets. The story claimed that the leaks on President Noble's involvement had come from Reitman; further, it claimed that they were total fabrications.
The second part, at least, was wrong. He knew that much. The first part, though…
"What does Helen have to say about it?"
"She says she's got no idea what they're talking about," Brian said. He didn't sound convinced himself.
Paul grimaced. He'd actually been feeling alright the past three days. He'd actually been able to cope with any of this. Tomorrow he'd be able to set down and actually sleep for a long night, and then he'd be back on the trail and ready to take on anything.
"Alright, thank you, Brian."
"Of course, sir."
At some point, he didn't know which, Lara had turned and was now looking at him.
"Is there something wrong?"
Tim's eyes were on him, brighter and hotter and full of more pressure than any spotlight he'd ever been under.
"I don't know. Probably not, but I ought to go and talk to my wife."
"Oh?" Tim's voice was coy, but Paul knew immediately that he wanted to be let in on the conversation. Better that he decided not to get into politics, and never learn how dirty it could get when the rubber met the road.
But if he wanted to know about how a politician's life was, then there wasn't much Paul could do about that. He would let him into big things, public things, until whatever interest he had lost steam and he finally could be convinced into something a little less insane.
Helen was a different beast entirely. Tim was off-limits to her, and vice-versa. He just hoped that his wife remembered that when she decided that she needed to pull on someone's strings. H
is, or Lara's, he didn't know who it would be first, but she was a spider and she knew which strings to pull.
"Not this time, buddy. Brian, you want to talk to him?"
Brian nodded and stepped over.
"This is Brian. He's with the Secret Service–do you know what the Secret Service is?"
Tim looked hurt. "They protect the President. Even babies know that."
"They do a lot more than just that," Brian cut in, smiling and kneeling down to talk to the boy.
"This is my friend Tim. Tim, Brian; Brian, Tim."
Paul took a deep breath, his hand touching Lara's shoulder just for a moment. That would have to be enough to get him through the next few minutes, because if things had gone the way he expected that they had, then it was going to get uglier before it got better. He was tired of ugliness. But he'd decided to be President, and that meant that ugly was his stock and trade.
"Helen?"
She looked up as he stepped through the curtain. She was reading a magazine–a fashion magazine, he thought, though he couldn't see the cover, and the inside was nothing but advertisements.
"Is there a problem?"
"You want to talk to me about Stan?"
"What about him?" She looked as innocent and doe-eyed as anyone had ever been, which was as clear an indicator that she'd done it as Paul had ever seen. She was never innocent, and only doe-eyed when she thought she needed an act.
"I want to know why he decided to go off the reservation. I want to know whether or not you put him up to it." He sidled up onto the arm of her chair and looked down at her. There was a shadow of fear in her eyes, one that he was not opposed to encouraging.
"I want to know why, because in an hour I'm going to be covered in reporters asking why we're pushing an unsubstantiated allegation about the President of the United States through our operatives, and I need to know why Stan wasn't thinking that the fuck through when he pushed it. Or whether someone else told him they'd thought it through and it was fine. Are you understanding my meaning here?"
12
The plane set down on the ground and Lara felt normal again. At least, for another hour or so. That was the lifestyle that she'd stepped into. Part of her wondered why exactly she had done it.
She didn't need to be here. She didn't really want to be here. Was it for Tim's sake? Not likely. He was important to her, the most important thing in the world to her. But that didn't add up, and Lara wasn't fool enough to believe that it did.
She was doing this for reasons that she didn't really understand, reasons that she didn't necessarily want to understand. After all, she wasn't just doing it so that Paul would care about her. Right?
She wasn't that stupid, wasn't that shallow, wasn't that… petty. She didn't need him, and she didn't even know that she wanted him. She reminded herself for the fiftieth time that week what he'd done to her.
Who knows–maybe he took her with him so that she could get dropped out of the plane at 30,000 feet and never be seen again. She'd heard some people on the internet suggesting that when people got close to Paul, and got too dangerous, they had a habit of disappearing.
It didn't sound right, but it didn't sound wrong, either. Paul was a man who knew what he wanted and was more than willing to do what he had to in order to get it. That alone was enough to set her on edge.
She swallowed hard and waited until the end to file off the plane, along with the press people. As if a woman with a child, no camera, and no press pass, might be a press agent. Someone would believe that in her dreams, maybe.
But so far, nobody had questioned it. Paul didn't give any speeches this time. Quick and easy, photos on the steps, getting off, and then he was carted ahead into a car. Slowly but surely, same as every stop, she was shuffled forward into another car. Sometimes it was the same one, other times, it wasn't.
This time, it was. What surprised her was the other passenger.
"Helen," Lara said, hoping her voice sounded light. She smiled and then gave a pointed look at her son. Hopefully, the spiny bitch wouldn't have anything truly bad to say in front of a ten-year-old boy, but Helen had always been a woman full of surprises. "It's been a long time. How are you? This is my son, Tim. Tim, this is Paul's wife, Mrs. Green."
"Hello, Mrs. Green," Tim offered dutifully. He held his hand out for a handshake and she took it gently. Helen managed to look like she didn't want to throw up, which was an improvement for her. Maybe she'd learned how to behave herself in the last ten years.
Helen looked over the boy with a critical eye. "How old is he?"
"Nine," Lara answered, hoping that none of them would give it much thought. Hoping desperately that they wouldn't bring up anything else.
"And his father?"
"He left," Tim offered, at the same time that Lara said "Out of the picture."
"Oh?"
Helen raised her eyebrows and Lara could see in her eyes that she was doing math in her head. Nine years, add nine months, and… hmm. Interesting.
"I had a few nights out and, well, I don't know how much I have to tell you the rest."
"So… oh, is that right?"
She sounded like she believed none of it. Lara's stomach twisted up in a knot but she forced herself to keep as normal an expression on her face as possible.
"So how's life? Any different as a Senator's wife than a District Attorney's wife?"
"You know, you meet the most interesting people, living in D.C. You wouldn't guess who stopped by the other day. Sting! You know, the singer."
Helen's smile was smug. Paul's lips had been pinched together from the moment that the women had started talking, but he somehow managed to keep his mouth shut.
"Oh yeah? Very interesting. He seems very nice, from what I've been able to see."
"Oh, very nice. Yes."
Lara took a breath. "I just don't know how you do it, moving around all the time like this. I'd go crazy living a life like this."
"We could always drop you back off," Helen offered, "if you and your son are feeling too tired."
"I'm here to support my friends, even if it has been a long time," she said.
She looked over at Tim. He looked like everyone in the car had suddenly started speaking Greek. It had only been ten years, but it felt like explaining all the history would take a hundred times that, and to a boy who wasn't quite ten years old would be that much more complicated.
"Well, we're glad to have you around," Helen offered. It didn't take an F.B.I. agent to know that she was full of shit. But Lara smiled in spite of that.
"Thanks, I'm glad to be here, even though it is a little hectic. It's good to be able to be involved in the process, you know?"
"I'm sure it is," Helen said. They were silent a long time. There was plenty left to say, but Lara knew better than to say it. After all, some of it involved cursing, and she wasn't going to do that in front of her son.
Lara had always wondered, dimly, how it was that Helen could manage to keep going with the charade. She wasn't sure that there was anyone in the world that the other woman could stand. Certainly, nobody had ever presented themselves as a friend of Helen's. Nobody who didn't want the connections, and then 'friend' was used very differently in that context anyways.
But the answer was obvious. She got along with her husband because she had to. He was a tool to her, and presumably she went through life assuming that other people looked at the situation more or less the same way.
That was, no doubt, why she disliked Lara so much. Lara was particularly ineffective at using people like tools. Paul was no exception. In fact, if anything, Paul was a broken tool that she just seemed to keep around for no apparent reason.
She could never use him for much of anything, and she'd never asked for much. There was one thing she'd wanted from him, and it was the one thing she knew she'd never get from him. Ten years ago, he'd reminded her that she'd never have him as hers, not really.
Since then she thought she'd learned better.
B
ut if that was all she wanted, and she knew she'd never get it, Lara thought sourly, why was she here? Maybe, in this one case, Helen was right. If people were tools then she ought to know what she was getting out of the arrangement, because she certainly knew what she was giving.
If she was being used, why not the other way around?
13
Paul laid his head back on the bed and did the math for the fifth time. Nine years old. If he had done the math then Helen had done the math, as well. Nine years, plus somewhere between nine and twenty months, and… well, it wasn't necessarily likely.
She'd walked away from him ten years ago. If he tried hard to remember, it wasn't too hard to do the math, not at all. If she'd told him, if she'd come to him with it, then the choice would have been obvious. Whatever the reason that she walked away, if he were the father then he had every right to know about it.
He rubbed his eyes and rolled over. She ought to have been there with him, he thought sourly. At least then he had something to distract his mind. But that would mean… he wasn't sure what it would mean.
It would mean he'd made a choice that he wasn't at all prepared to decide on, yet. On the first night it had felt surreal, like nothing was going to touch him either way, so why not? And after, he was so high on… on Lara herself, that he asked her to come before he'd really thought it through.
Having her around was one thing. Her and her son were like medicine. Like a battery charger, or something. Now that he had them, they were beyond useful.
Ten years ago, he'd been able to fool himself into thinking that he could have it all. He'd fooled himself into thinking that she wanted everything as much as he did. Whatever her reasons, she'd more than demonstrated that he was too hasty in making those decisions, for himself and for her.
He rolled over. The line of thought was putting him in a bad mood, and he needed to sleep more than anything. But he didn't sleep. Instead, in spite of himself, he thought.
If he were to have her staying with him, it might give her the impression that it's all about sex. The truth was, if he never had sex with her again, then it would be enough just to have her around. If he did have sex with her again, well… that would be preferable. But it wasn't a deal-breaker by any means, and it was important that she knew it.
