by Faye, Amy
It wasn't good, and he wasn't happy about it, but he was happy that he could muster that kind of attention about anything at all. Surrounded by people who didn't believe in anything except their own power and greed, surrounded by doubt and unhappiness and everything that he hated, it was amazing that there was anything left that he felt the need to defend. Maybe he shouldn't have been amazed by it, but he was in spite of himself.
Paul's fingers tapped the buttons to call Lara. That would be the first step. If Helen had made it up to split the two of them, then he needed to ensure that hadn't happened, by getting the information straight from the horse's mouth.
The phone rang once, twice. Three times, and he was convinced that he'd have to call back later when Lara's voice answered. She sounded tired and something quavered in her voice that told Paul she'd been crying.
"What?"
He forced himself to ignore all of that. If he didn't, it would rip him apart, and he needed to at least temporarily remain focused on the task at hand.
"Lara, I need to talk to you about something."
"Yeah, well. I guess that makes two of us."
"Have I done something to upset you?"
Paul expected more reaction to that question, but it didn't come. Instead, Lara just held her answer for a long time before she gave a quiet, meek "No."
"Helen tells me that you got another call."
"Is that what she told you?"
"She told me that he insisted you get me to drop out of the race. Is that right?"
"If you know so much about it, why don't you tell me?"
She had been crying. Perhaps, she was still crying, though he couldn't be sure. She was angry with him, though. He was sure of that. What he wasn't sure of was exactly why she was angry.
"I just want to know if it's true or not."
"What, you don't believe your wife?"
"If she told me she'd killed a man and needed me to help me bury the body, I'd believe it in a heartbeat. When she plays nice and decides to give me information that seems useful, I'm a little less trusting."
"Well, why are you asking me, then?"
"You wouldn't lie to me," Paul said.
"You don't know that."
"Could you just answer the question, please? Is that what he wanted, or isn't it?"
"Just leave me be. Go away, forget you ever knew me, and I'll get over it. I've gotten over everything else. I'll get over this, too."
He wanted to tell her what was going on with the hospital. If the doctors hadn't spoken to her yet, though, he didn't want to give her false hope. So he tried to think of something else. A vague feeling at the back of his mind, that there was something he wasn't telling her, something he ought to have said, gnawed at him.
"What happened after I left? Anything?"
He heard her start crying, then, as clear as a bell. He heard the muffled sounds of her sucking breath through her teeth as she tried to get control of herself. She held the phone away from her mouth, maybe even put her hand over it, but it wasn't enough to hide the noise. Not from him.
He closed his eyes and let out a long breath. Helen had done something. He didn't know what it was, but he knew that he had been expecting something since the first time she'd started threatening Lara.
Paul's teeth ground together. Ten years ago, he'd been dangerously close to making the best decision of his life. Now he was beginning to remember why he'd been so close to it.
"Lara, I need you to talk to me."
"What's the point?" Her voice cracked and his heart cracked with it. Paul pressed his jaw together until it hurt.
"What did she do to you?"
"Don't act all innocent, Paul."
"I don't know what happened. I promise, I don't know anything about it."
"Of course you don't. You never know, do you? I should never have come to see you in the first place. You're a tornado and all you've ever brought on my head was trouble."
Paul's eyes snapped shut and he took a deep breath, holding himself as still as possible. If he was careful to stay calm then maybe, with luck, he would forget about what she'd just said.
"I'm sorry that you had to suffer like that, Lara. I never meant to hurt you, so whatever it is that I did to upset you… I'm sorry. If you want to go home as soon as Tim's out of the hospital, I won't stop you."
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. She seemed to be chewing on a response, deciding what she was supposed to say to that. Paul's eyes stayed shut and he took deep breaths. Eventually, if he was very lucky, he might be able to really calm down. He wasn't there yet, though, and he wasn't sure that he was going to be there any time soon.
"Tell me, Paul."
"Tell you what?"
"Tell me what you think about Tim. Tell me how you feel about him. Really."
Paul sensed more than knew that she was leading up to something. The problem was figuring out what the point she was leading up to. Was this related to whatever had chased her away all that time ago?
Paul Green had never been a sensitive man. He had too much money to develop the sense that common folks had without needing to be taught it. A born womanizer and too much ambition for his own good. Too much ambition to maintain a moral compass for very long.
"He's… he's a good boy. Smart. So smart, so sweet. Kind. If you hadn't asked I wouldn't have said anything about it, but… these past days, he's been one of the few things keeping me going at all."
Lara paused for a minute. Somehow, Paul thought, he probably hadn't stunned her with his incredible wit and verve. He sounded tired even to himself, and as much as he hadn't lied, wouldn't lie about something like that, he had no illusions that he sounded anything other than stiff and, well… tired.
"I'm glad to hear that," she said. She didn't sound glad, though. Not to Paul's ears. She sounded angry. "Because hopefully, you'll realize what a mistake you made when you told me to 'get rid of' him ten years ago."
He was about to ask what the hell she was talking about when the other side of the line went dead, and he had the feeling that she wasn't going to want to talk to him.
Someone had clearly told her some things, and they'd used his name to do them. He didn't have to think long to guess who it might have been, and if she didn't know it already, Helen was about to find out how much hell he could bring her.
38
Lara Green had never had a great deal of luck with men. It was probably related, she thought, to the last one that she'd seen seriously. The one she was seeing now, though she had no illusions this time about anything serious or long-lasting like she had the first time.
Maybe that was the curse of Paul Green. There was no way that anyone was going to compare to him, when he was at his strongest. Like the old poem went, 'when he was good, he was very very good; and when he was bad, he was horrid.'
She'd forgotten how horrid he could be, this time around. She'd let herself get wrapped up again. But to pretend that he had nothing to do with it? She'd been approached by his personal secretary, and she'd been given a letter from him. Signed by him, as she recalled, which left little room for doubt about what he wanted from her.
If she wanted to practice law, she'd abort. If she wanted to be able to show her face anywhere? No more child. No more Tim.
Was it just so unimportant to him that he'd forgotten about it? Had he experienced some kind of change of heart, and now he was just too embarrassed by the whole thing to confess?
Lara didn't know and didn't care. There were other things she needed to do besides thinking about how she was going to write off Paul for the rest of her life. Eventually, yes, she would have to explain the entire situation to her son. And she would, when the time came.
But until then? She could disappear again. She'd done it once before, and she'd already left work. Left it for all the wrong reasons, yes, but the damage was already done and it wasn't going to get worse by walking away from her old life.
The house wouldn't even be that hard to sel
l. She was fairly certain of that. The market was starting to look up, property was starting to move, and August was a great month to find a new place anyways. The weather was nice.
If she wasn't tied to Salt Lake City, there were a thousand places she could go. Mom and Dad weren't exactly in a position to have her and a ten-year-old plopping down in their lives, but otherwise? Almost anywhere.
Lara pushed her weight down on the suitcase, and worked the zipper. Plane tickets cost money. Sometimes, they cost a lot of money. There were other ways to travel, though. Assuming she wasn't in any special hurry, they could move all sorts of ways, and not overly expensive. An Amtrak ticket was barely $100.
She could get to the house, sell it in a hurry, and be on the road again before Paul would risk chasing her down, right? Before the press could find her. She hoped so, at least. There wasn't much choice but to hope.
A knock sounded at the hotel room door. She ignored it. There wasn't much else choice, after all. She already knew who it was going to be, and she wasn't going to talk to him. If Helen wanted her out of town, well… fuck it. She'd get one last victory over Lara, but she wasn't going to stick around, that was for sure.
She pulled the zip tab and took a deep breath, hefted the bag. That was every thing she owned. She checked Tim's backpack. She'd taken it from the hospital, against her own better judgment she had to admit. If he woke up, he'd want some of the stuff inside it.
But he wasn't going to wake up, not while she was gone. Not any time soon. Not if the doctors didn't even know what to do about him, didn't even know what was wrong.
He was just going to get worse. She at least wanted him to be happy for the last few hours of his life, so she wouldn't tell him why she was upset if he did. Everything was there, as well. There hadn't been much to check. Most of his important things were in her bag from the beginning. He only had action figures and a few other assorted toys inside.
A few notebooks, the first pages filled with notes from his tutoring sessions, had joined them, and she had dutifully placed them inside his bag as well. They were his, after all.
Lara rubbed her head and looked out the window at the failing light. If she hurried she could get back to the hospital for the night, and in the morning, get on a bus and get the sale started, and be back in Sacramento before anyone noticed.
That was her hope. If someone did notice, if someone decided to try to stop her, then she was going to be in very serious, very real trouble. That wasn't an option, though. Not now, anyways.
Her gut twisted when the knock came a third time.
"Go away!"
The voice on the other end of the door was too low to hear, but it was a man's voice. She could make out that much at least.
"I said, go!"
"I'm not going to leave." Paul's voice only barely raised enough to be heard. Soft and low.
"I don't want to talk to you, Paul. Go, leave me be."
"I don't know what you're talking about, Lara. Just open the door and just talk to me for a minute, will you?"
For a sickening minute she believed him, and in that time she made the mistake of opening the door for him. Her face didn't change enough to hide her anger, though. It wasn't cold anger like the one that she'd felt when she first saw him. It wasn't some old wound that she felt itching.
Now she was ready to scream in his face, to start clawing at his eyes. She didn't see his bruiser but she didn't doubt that he was somewhere out of sight but not out of earshot. Probably not more than an instant away.
"There's nothing to talk about. Go away, and leave me be."
"Apparently there's a lot to talk about," he said. He looked deflated, like a balloon. She'd been in a hospital for two weeks and she had gotten used to that look in people, but not usually people who were by all accounts perfectly healthy. "You walked away from me, ten years ago, and I never knew why. I always just assumed, I don't know… maybe it was something I said, maybe I'd offended you somehow."
"Don't you try to fucking play me, Paul. I'm not an idiot."
"I never thought you were."
"And yet, you're trying to get me to believe that you had nothing to do with sending me away all that time ago. I was in your office, Paul. I was standing outside your fucking office, I was talking to Tom, and he told me with a dead fucking straight face that I'd be better off getting going now."
"That's exactly what I'm trying to get you to believe," Paul told her. "Because it's the truth. You told me you wanted to marry me, ten years ago."
"And you told me the same, but when it came down to it, I guess you wanted other things more."
He looked at her with his eyes dulled and dark and almost unfocused. "I never wanted anything more than that, Lara, and I still don't."
"Fine, then," she growled. She could feel her anger growing inside her as she spoke, and she said the words that she had intended to avoid at all costs. "Drop out of the race for me. For my son."
His face dropped to the carpet and he deflated even more. Paul was the strongest man she knew, but in that moment he looked… frail.
"I was already going to."
39
A phenomenal amount of work went into making someone President of the United States. It was, really, one of the most difficult things that any politician would ever do, and it took everything that both candidates had and tested it.
At the end, people voted for whatever reasons they voted for. Some were informed voters, who decided based on reasoned policy opinions. Some were single-issue voters; who is opposed to abortion? Who is for gay marriage?
Most were neither. Most voted straight-party, even as they pretended not to. They'd reason their way through everything and at the end, every vote was Republican, and it had always been that way, their entire lives.
Nobody voted based on whether or not the candidates were tired at the end of the race because everyone was tired. It was a grueling process that lasted almost two years, between making sure that your face was in the papers for months before you announce, and then you begin to campaign in preparation for the coming primary.
Then Primary season is over, and the strongest candidate from each party is left to test exactly how long that strength could keep going for another six months or so. Technically, the end of Primary season was in June. Technically.
In reality, the decision had been all but made by March. April and May were formalities, an opportunity for something to go horribly wrong for the candidate in the lead or horribly right for the underdog, depending on which one you supported.
Paul Green's candidacy was the consequence of that entire process.
His entire career had been a meat grinder. The last two years were only the icing on the cake of a long battle to the top, one that he had fought reluctantly. One that his people had been more than happy to step in and deal with for him.
The idea that he should stop them, that he should step away and let someone else take a turn at bat had only once crossed his mind. Ten years ago, he was a prosecutor, and he wasn't trying to yank his own chain when he thought that he had been a damned good one.
He hadn't seen the inside of a courtroom for a decade, and he was afraid to think how much he missed it. There were a great many things that seemed more important now that he looked back. Things that he didn't realize how much he would miss until they were gone.
Lara had been one of those things, and when he got her back he didn't know what he was supposed to do when she seemed like she was angry enough to fly away again.
He squeezed his stomach tighter and closed his eyes and tried to figure out how he was supposed to do this.
Well, the first part was easy. He called his lawyer. The man was a professional and a half, and fifteen minutes later a small stack of papers was coming through the hotel fax. He had them in his hands, still warm from the printer, not a minute later.
He stepped out through the door, flagged the car down and slid into the back. The entire thing felt odd; he'd been putting it off for so
long. It was easy to do what you had to do when there was no alternative, but now it seemed as if the veil had been lifted and had to seriously answer the question of why it had taken him so long.
The second part, on the other hand, took a little longer. Once you made the first call, the others started to get made for you, but there were still dozens of first calls to make.
The past days had involved a lot of silent driving. Today was the exception, though. Too much talk, it felt like. Too much to be done, and not enough time to rest and really think about what his options were.
When he stepped out of the car, he wasn't surprised to find that somehow the press had beat him there. They seemed to smell blood, and he'd been calling people the whole way, so some had nearly as long as he had to arrive.
He forced himself to wait, because there were others who weren't there. People who it was very important he have there. So he waited, sitting in the back of the car and rubbing his forehead, waiting. A van drove up, black, and a man stepped out, looked around like he had someplace important to be any moment, and something important to see.
Another joined it a minute later. This time, the rear doors didn't wait long after the front ones to open, and a petite woman with looks that had once almost been pretty stepped out, her face twisted up in a mask of fury. She searched the crowd and didn't see him, because he wasn't there to see.
With all the players gathered he stepped out and took a deep breath, rapped a small stack of index cards on his leg and stepped out into the lazy afternoon heat.
Helen moved quickly up behind him and said something he ignored. That was the only way to deal with her, he knew. Ignore whatever you could, and whatever you couldn't… ignore that, too.
The cameras started flashing before he hit the podium. Once he was there he stood by as he watched his wife come up beside him, expecting him to turn and kiss him for the cameras as well. She was in for an unpleasant surprise.
"I suppose you're all wondering why I've called you here today," he began. He held a long pause. "And I suppose you have all been wondering, as well, why we've been sleeping at the wheel, with an election on."
