All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. Title/summary from Tori Amos. Please send feedback. Still In Recovery Violet
"The truth will do it almost all the time."
- Abigail Bartlet, "The State Dinner"
For four years of medical school, you were a stranger to sleep. At night you lay in bed and recited to yourself: anemia, aneurysm, angina pectoris to syncope, systole, tachycardia.
It's hard to love a person when you know everything that can happen inside him.
You didn't do it for the degree, for summa cum laude or the prestigious internship at Mercy, even though you earned all that. You did it because you wanted to be a good doctor. You did it because Peggy Rice dared you to climb a tetherball pole in fourth grade, and you slipped in the attempt, and the L-shaped gash on your left thigh required eleven stitches. You did it because Dr. Wilkenfeld smiled and squeezed your hand and made you brave. And it still hurt, but pain hurts less when you're not scared. You wanted to take away fear. It was what you wanted most in the world.
More than Jed?
Yes. More than Jed.
*
You wait in Sam's office, standing in front of his desk. Not missing the cast and the wheelchair; you like to use what little height you have. Sam jumps in the doorway. He's afraid of you and it makes you smile. "You need a couch," you tell him.
He blinks long lashes over blue. "Excuse me?"
"C.J. has a couch. Toby has a couch." You wave a hand at the wall he shares with Toby. "You have a couple of chairs from what, the Ford years?"
"Josh doesn't have a couch."
"Josh has the corner office. Josh also has a senior assistant."
"Dr. Bartlet--" Sam laughs, an unsettled laugh. "Can I help you with something?"
"There's a proposal on the table," you say.
"I'm not sure I--" Lashes lift, pupils widen. "Ah. The Majority Leader's health care proposal."
"That'd be the one." You cross your arms. "I watch a little C-Span, Sam. I've spent a bit of time around politicians. Admittedly, the ones I know are a bit of a motley, ragtag crew."
"You had Lilly get a copy of my draft for the President's response," Sam says. "And you don't like it."
"Well, they don't call you Princeton for nothing."
"And you're going to punish me," he says, looking resigned, looking doomed.
"I'm not going to punish you, Sam. I'm going to educate you."
He walks around his desk and sits down in his chair, big, comfortable, probably paid for out of pocket. "That's worse, isn't it?"
You turn and smile again. "Much worse."
*
Jed didn't ask you. He didn't ask you for anything.
Before he left for London he kissed two words into your hair, "I'll wait" and then you watched his shoulders recede through the airport, away from you. For four years. Four years of education, studying, searching, your hands shaking from caffeine and nerves. You wanted to do this; you would never be able to do this.
You had nightmares about every illness and every wound coming to hurt you, to get you, and so you stopped sleeping. There wasn't time, anyway. Hardly time for anything but textbooks and labs and then patients and rounds. Hardly time for the weekly long distance calls, static and desire traveling over the wire from his hand to yours. Four years of other boys.
He knew about them, because you hated to lie. You don't think he understood, though, you weren't just passing time. You were looking, because you were uncertain. Because he was away. Because you were scared.
Coffee with boys from your class, dinners and movies with Ron Ehrlich. You told Jed everything, meticulous like your lecture notes. He never doubted you. One weekend you went home and you overheard your mother, on the phone: "Well, she'll marry him when he comes back." You were so annoyed you left the next morning with no explanation. No one had any right to be sure. Nothing was sure.
In '66 the war began. Really, it began years earlier, the first signs and symptoms--you understood it, and it didn't matter. In '66 the long distance calls got longer, stranger. Terrifying. And every day you knew someone who was drafted, someone who signed up. Kids from your grade school, from the graduating class ahead of yours. Two of your cousins. Your next door neighbor's son, the first boy you ever kissed. Jed's friend Leo.
You didn't really know Jenny O'Brien other than to say hello. But you were concerned. And self-righteous. That's what you were, inviting her to lunch, almost pretending it was like the forties, or Gone With The Wind. The beginning of the adventure, of course, and not Atlanta burned and Tara raped. Then Jenny started crying into her iced tea. Even then, you were calm--bedside manner--and you held her hand until she pulled it away.
"We're getting married," Jenny said, wiping her eyes with her napkin. "When he comes back."
You didn't cry with her. You thought of Jed, in London, where there was no war.
You thanked God.
*
Sam holds his chin in his hand. "To be honest, ma'am, I've had a long day."
You're tempted to tell him he's too young to know how long a day can be. Instead, you nod patiently. "You understand I'm not here to play the boss's wife card, right?"
"No," he blurts. Instantly correcting: "I mean, yes. I mean--"
"I'm not here to slap you around because I'm the First Lady," you explain, sitting down in one of his ugly chairs. "It's not a political position and I don't think it should carry any undue weight. I'm here as a constituent, Sam. I'm here as a doctor. I'm here as a woman. It's in that capacity that I want to tell you this."
"All right."
You cross your legs. "Your draft is crap."
"Mm." His mouth collapses into a funny little line. "See, I saw that coming and it still kind of hurt."
"Well, the truth hurts." You soften your voice, but only a little. No pulled punches. "This is where your job should be easy, Sam. There's a clear partisan line and a clear opportunity, and you're up there with a wiffle bat."
He's frowning now. "It's not the most aggressive writing I've ever done, but I wouldn't classify it as--"
"Sam. The Majority Leader stood in front of a camera and suggested that the fetus should be reclassified as an unborn child."
"For health care purposes."
"I don't care if it was for purposes of winning a game of Scattergories, Sam. He said it, and it's the kind of thing you ought to knock out of the park. Your statement is a wiffle bat."
"He said it for the purpose of providing prenatal care to the country's poorest women." He fidgets in his seat, taps his fingers on the chair's ergonomically-designed arm. "And it'd be a dangerous step to the right to suggest that coverage shouldn't be extended as far as possible."
Ready so quickly to play devil's advocate, and you think: That's what pays your rent. Yet he still imagines himself the idealist of the administration, the last knight on horseback. You give him another patient nod. "Okay. But it seems--and tell me, please, if I'm wrong. It seems like a bigger step to the right to clear a path for the Republicans to do an end run against abortion rights."
Sam pushes his chair back just an inch, wary, worried. "It would be, if that was what we were doing."
"That's not what this speech is for?"
You're using your most innocent voice, the one you've heard your daughters affect. It always got on your nerves; it gets on Sam's too. His face is suddenly sharp, clear, an ice sculpture. "No, ma'am, and I think you know that in an election year we have to pick our battles."
"Explain it to me," you say, "and I'll explain why this isn't the way to go about extending health care."
After all, you are each experts in your own fields.
*
Two sets of photographs, always next to each other in your mother's scrapbook, in frames, in a drawer. A black robe for your graduation, a white dress for your wedding day. Crimson around your shoulders or roses in your hands. They show you smiling, a wide grin for the camera and the private smile in the shots you didn't know they snapped. They are real smiles. They are unafraid.
Lizzie came too soon. You started throwing up in the second week of September, and--though you should've known better, you studied to know better--you thought it was the flu. It was another intern that figured it out. You both kept such strange hours then, between your double shifts and his all-nighters in the library. Of course it was over coffee, coffee and steak fries at 8 a.m., when you told Jed. He kissed you across the greasy table. He was so happy.
Breathless, he said, "Are we ready for this?"
You said, "Yes."
Was that a lie?
No, because you were hoping so hard it was true. No, because by the time Lizzie was born, you were ready, made ready by your mother and grandmother and Dr. Spock, made ready by your own body. Ready because you had to be.
She was a Daddy's girl, Daddy's girl with Mommy's eyes. But you were a good mother, as you have been good at everything, and it got easier, as everything always does. Ellie was conceived, you think, in Stockholm; before her birth you threatened laughingly to name her after Alfred Nobel. When they placed her in your arms, she blinked at you, eyes already dark in her scrunched face. For her, you were honestly ready.
Were you ready two years later, with a toddler and a ten year old? You said you were. You thought you were. But you didn't sleep, between surgeries and piano recitals, croup and chicken pox. You don't remember the taste of a single meal that year, don't remember sex that year, don't remember where you were when you told Jed there was one more on the way.
You remember nothing out of the ordinary. Just a long labor, the tearing and the tears, the weak little scream that met your own. When they did not place the baby in your arms, your training and the old hypochondria kicked in. The wave of adrenaline flooded out the last of the pain. You didn't dare ask, only panic and ask yourself: tetralogy of Fallot? Spina bifida? Down Syndrome?
Dr. Brandeis came to you, and to Jed, whose fingers were laced with yours, whose knuckles were white. Her voice was so composed you wanted to slap her. Instead, you ground your teeth. You reminded her that you were a doctor too. And then she spoke about amniotic fluid, hypoplasia, renal agenesis. You couldn't talk. You let the doctor tell your husband that the baby's kidneys and lungs were improperly developed. Potter's Sequence, it was called.
He was not going to live.
They let you hold him--Edward; you had settled on the name long ago, even though the bassinet was tagged 'Baby Boy Bartlet.' You knew, and understood, and did not believe that there could be anything wrong. He looked like your other children, only smaller. So small. But he breathed on his own, and cried, and sucked Jed's finger for an hour in the mistaken belief that it provided some kind of sustenance.
When he opened his eyes briefly, they were blue, exactly Jed's shade, the mysterious color between sky and steel. The color of oxygen, you thought, sick with the irony of it, knowing oxygen was what he needed, what you couldn't give him.
Four years of medical school. Forty weeks in your womb. Seventeen hours of your son in your arms, in his father's arms before he simply stopped, a breath out and no breath in. None of it was enough.
Early the next morning, you were both crying. Jed's hands were in yours, and he laid his head in your lap, and you bent and closed your eyes against his hair. It was quiet for a while.
"We'll be all right," he said in his softest voice, the voice of the boy who nearly became a priest. "We have the girls. We can get past this."
You remember being sure that you would remember this. The sun was just rising, and your parents were flying up from Florida. From navel to thighs you were all one twist of pain. With your lips next to his ear and his scent in your air, you whispered, "I know."
And that was a lie.
*
"We have statistics," Sam says, and puts on his glasses. "Statistics that clearly show that children who receive prenatal care are healthier when they're two and three years old. So are their mothers."
Your eyebrows go up. "Their mothers are healthier when they're two and three?"
He hesitates, but lets the lame joke pass. "I'm saying they've got legitimate numbers to back up the plan."
"I've heard the numbers." You look past Sam's face to the window behind him. Beyond your reflection it's only dark. "And I've heard Millicent Griffith on the subject, and I'm not arguing the point."
"If we come down hard on this in public, this is what they'll say." Sam's hands are flat on the desktop, but not idle, and he picks up a pencil to roll it in his fingertips. "Prenatal care saves lives."
So you have to look straight at him, eyes to eyes, and you cannot be the first to break contact. You are older, wiser; your voice is steadier than his hands. "I'm not arguing the point. And you shouldn't either."
He leans back in his chair, pointing the pencil at you. "Gallup has the country split. Forty-eight percent identify themselves as pro-choice, forty-two as pro-life. But when the question's whether abortion should be available in all or most circumstances, that drops to about forty percent yes, sixty percent no. This is an election year, and we need--" He sighs, shaking his head at a long day's worth of paper piled on his desk. "There's only so much we can say. We don't have the margins we'd like on this. The Majority Leader has... well, the majority."
You know he's right. You know he wishes he was wrong. So you stand up, and you are calm when you say, "You can say that we can extend Medicaid instead of CHIP, and insure the mothers instead of treating them like incubators. You can say that health insurance should cover birth control, and that schools should teach it. You can say that we should spend more money helping low-income girls get through school and sending them to college, because you know what really makes a healthy baby, Sam? A mother who's prepared."
He looks away from your face, his eyes chastened and childish, but he stands up politely. "Thank you for the input, ma'am."
"You're welcome." You edge toward the door and look back at Sam, at his office, his chairs. "You still need a couch."
"I'm scared of Edith," he murmurs, so deadpan it might be sincere.
"Edith?"
"Over in OMB. Tall lady, white hair, voice like James Earl Jones."
You laugh, permitting yourself just a bit of scorn. "In all honesty, Sam, you really need to get a pair."
"Are you saying that as a constituent or as a woman?" he blurts. You stare at him until he ducks his head, maybe blushing. "That didn't come out very well."
"It's forgotten," you assure him, and you walk out still smiling.
You go back to the East Wing, past your office where Lilly and Gigi and Tyrone recap your schedule, making final changes that will be changed again tomorrow. When you were practicing surgery there was always paperwork: consent forms, records, reports, presentations, dissertations. You were always signing your name. You don't do that as much anymore. Other people handle your drudgery. You don't miss that part, exactly.
It's late. Alone in your bedroom, you change into a nightgown. You sit on the edge of your bed for a while, reading the New England Journal of Medicine. You haven't scrubbed into a surgery since 1997. Instead, you have been spending time with politicians, with diplomats. People you would never have known, in the life for which you trained yourself.
Four years of medical school, and you were willing to spend four years in this place. And you are not really reading.
It was a lot of fun trying for Zoey, and you were proud when Jed went into politics. You were happy and successful, a member of a happy and successful family. But when a doctor sat down with you and spoke of multiple sclerosis for the first time, when you first realized that Jed's brain would fail him, the lie came as fast to your tongue as the statistics to Sam's. It still does. You keep saying it'll be all right. You have always wanted to take away fear.
You set the magazine down on your nightstand, next to your earrings and a framed picture of Jed. In the picture he looks like a young Kennedy. It's the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. You liked the shot so much you had an aide pull it from a publicity folder. Tonight you don't want to look at it. You switch off its halo of lamplight and tuck yourself into bed.
When you wake up, Jed is next to you. His breathing tells you he's not sleeping. You can feel him staring at the ceiling, counting sheep or starving children. His leg brushes against yours beneath the comforter, and you don't move.
There's a scar on your left thigh that, when you acquired it, hurt worse than anything had ever hurt you. It changed your life. There are smaller scars on your husband's thighs. Needle marks. Puncture wounds that you made.
You think: I love you so much, and you make it so hard. And he loves you so much.
You make it so hard.
It is hard, to love a person who knows everything that's ever happened inside you.
He thinks you're still sleeping. Soon you'll turn to him, smile as he blinks gray exhaustion from his blue eyes. Before that happens, you think of the other men you've slept beside. You think of the untruths it has taken to stay true to him. The war he did not fight in, and the one he is fighting now.