All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. The title's from a 10,000 Maniacs song. Standard disclaimers apply. Please send feedback. Gold Rush Brides Violet
On a plane heading east to west, she lets her mind go around in circles.
She's always had a useful talent for dividing her attention. It's perfectly possible for her to walk down the hall studying notes on nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe, and memorize the new Justice Department appointees -- and in the same moment, to hear Toby's voice and think about how he says her name, sometimes. In the dark.
Or, in the dark, he will reach up and trail his fingers from her cheekbone to her sternum, and suddenly she will wonder exactly how many acres of Alaskan land are endangered by the pipeline. She is not ashamed of it. There are other nights when, seconds after they've separated, she turns her head and he's picking up his pen and notepad and scribbling something down. It's a spiral, turning their two separate worlds into one.
She reads five newspapers every morning; it's as essential to her routine as coffee and a shower. The steward looks at her oddly when she asks for four of them, having brought her own copy of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Luckily, the neighboring seat is empty, and she can spread out. She reads about foreign diplomacy and corrupt cops and stock market fluctuations. And she reads a review of a Smithsonian exhibit, letters written home by women of the American frontier. It stays in her head for the rest of the weekend, even when she's thinking about other things.
So, she is home. Her mother gives her a suspicious look the minute she walks through her parents' front door. It's been that way since she was fifteen -- her mother always guesses when she's been seeing someone, always raises her eyebrows, knowing and questioning at the same time. She hugs her father and doesn't return the gaze.
But she stays up all night with her brothers and her widowed sister-in-law, and before dawn she finds herself blearily explaining how long she's known this man, how he's frustrating and tempting and somehow reliable. They all laugh at her, a little, but gently. She wants to talk about the frontier women, about their stories of loneliness and illness and wilderness, the pursuit of Californian gold. She's trying to make a point about their courage. She's trying to pin down the bravery it takes to pick up everything and leave. But everyone around her is dozing off on the living room furniture. Pretty soon, she does the same, and sleeps without dreaming.
The next day is spent mostly in her mother's kitchen, fueled by coffee and birthday cake and cold, delicious leftover lasagna. She fills it with telling stories about Josh falling down, and worrying about her father's cholesterol, and hoping that her brothers argue over nothing more fundamental than which of them finished the wine. It's solid and simple and familiar. She leans against the counter and lets it wash around her, knowing she'll be too busy to come back again for a while.
Some hours later, she's on a red-eye heading west to east, and she realizes that that's the way home, now. Her compass has reversed itself, and that makes her smile a little sadly. Instead of sleeping, she flips through Time and Newsweek. She thinks about AIDS in South Africa, standardized testing scores in Connecticut, Toby picking her up from the airport, the power crisis in Death Valley, and how much time they will have together before work.
Above the Midwest, she's already strategizing for the day ahead, but most of all for this single hour. Five to six a.m. is still her time, but more and more she's been willing to give it to him. It's not always sexual. He's found the best place in the city for breakfast pastries, and he scolds her because left to her own devices, she'd probably come up with a Pop Tart, not toasted. And they'll argue that, or censorship laws, or drug policy, the same in his kitchen as they are in the office. She reads the papers; he makes the coffee. Of course, more often than not, they end up back in bed, and that's fine too.
This is more than even her considerable powers of concentration can handle, sometimes. It's dizzying to be his friend, his colleague -- his employee, she makes herself remember -- and to be something else, for which no words seem appropriate. It's maddening not to know what world she's in, where they're going, from one moment to the next. Her parents' world is steady, stable, defined; hers is none of these things.
She doesn't understand why this man affects her this way. She thinks it's dangerous to enjoy it, just like it's dangerous to enjoy that he still wears his wedding ring. But that's a sign of his respect for his past, a tacit acknowledgment that some part of him, and some part of her image of him, is bound up in Andi Wyatt and always will be. And, she has to admit, it draws attention to those hands of his. He drives her crazy, in every sense of the cliché, but it can be delightful.
Carrying her handbag, she gets out of her seat and slips into the plane's too-small bathroom. She washes her hands and fixes her hair, and looks herself in the eye in the tiny mirror as she takes her birth-control pill. There were these women in the gold rush, she muses. They didn't have anything to hold on to. They got married and went west, and they made their own comfort in the midst of the chaos. That's what she wants -- not the marriage, just the courage.
Things would be simpler if they'd never started going home together, never let the sex become more than casual, never let themselves need and want each other. But they had, and she tells herself to face it as she returns to her seat. They'd already gone a long way from simplicity; the journey had started the first time he ever shook her hand. She fastens her seatbelt for the landing, and decides there's really nothing to do but enjoy the ride.
Neither of them know what's going to happen. She can't control the way her worlds are blending any more than she can control her response to his touch. This may be one of the mornings when he's in a bad mood and a hurry. He'll pull up for her in the pickup lane, and they'll go straight to work and dive into the day. Or he may be waiting in the terminal, his head lowered and his eyes raised, almost smiling, and they'll start fooling around right there in his car, on the highway, and God knows where they'll be when they get off -- she makes the pun in her head, and it makes her laugh out loud.
She touches down at Dulles, where the sunrise is making everything blush. She gathers her things and thinks that she doesn't have to know where she's going, not all the time. She knows her own strength, and she knows there's a home, a family she can touch base with when she needs it. It's enough to make her brave. So she walks straight out into the morning, knowing she has five newspapers to read, and wearing a smile to meet what's waiting for her.