Long May She Reign (70 page)

She'd said it once; there was no reason to repeat herself. “So, why'd you take the job?” she asked.

“Well, obviously, I wasn't going to,” Trudy said. “We were all terribly uncomfortable, and I was gathering myself together so I could leave, but then I made a dreadful mistake.”

That didn't sound very good.

“I
looked
at you,” Trudy said, and touched Meg's shoulder affectionately. “And you gave me your little grin, and I was lost.”

Which was nice as hell, and Meg smiled shyly at her before leaning away from her hand.

They both looked up as Jorge came out with a pitcher of lemonade, and topped off Meg's glass—for which, she was very grateful. Trudy also asked him if they could go ahead and have some lunch, suggesting a menu of grilled cheese sandwiches, soup, salad—and, well, much more than Meg had any interest in eating. But, she just stared out the window at the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building, instead of saying so.

“Are you mad at her, too?” Meg asked, when they were alone again. “I mean, the way Dad is?”

Trudy didn't answer right away, fiddling around with her teacup. “We had some ugly words,” she said finally. “During everything. And—I was very hard on
both
of them, Meg, and I regret not holding my tongue.”

Her thirteen days had been no treat, but neither had anyone else's apparently. “What was it like around here?” she asked.

“I don't know if I can describe—” Trudy stopped to think. “It was like being trapped in a room full of wounded lions. Your parents, raging at each other in complete silence. And those poor stoic little boys.” She shook her head. “I really
had
to go home, to be with Jimmy, during his operation—” her son, who had had his desperately-needed kidney transplant then— “but walking out of this building and leaving those two little boys behind was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.”

Christ, it must have been awful. The good news, being that Jimmy's surgery had been—and continued to be—a resounding success.

Wounded lions, though. What a thought. Except it was all too easy to imagine. Especially her father.

“Your friend was an absolute godsend,” Trudy said.

Meg looked up. “Friend?”

“He was there, for all of them, every single second,” Trudy said. “He never even seemed to need to sleep. And knowing that he would be doing his best to take care of your brothers made it possible for me to go.”

Preston, then. “He's
everyone's
friend,” Meg said. “Not just mine.”

“Yes, of course,” Trudy said, and smiled. “Anyway, he was wonderful. He's been wonderful through
all
of this, especially to you, and I'll forever be indebted to him for that.”

Obviously, they'd often been together in the same room, but she had never really seen Trudy and Preston have any one-on-one conversations, so he probably had no idea that she felt that way.

“What?” Trudy asked.

Considering how jumbled up—and tired—she was right now, that was hard to answer. “It's important,” Meg said. For better or worse. “What people do in the clutch.”

“It most surely is,” Trudy said.

40

LUNCH WAS, AS
ever, immaculately prepared, and she made an effort to put a dent in her salad, before giving up and turning her attention to the grilled cheese sandwich, only managing to finish half of it.

“I'll go in and fix you anything you want,” Trudy said.

Meg shook her head. “What I have here is great, thanks.” Regardless of whether she felt like eating it.

They were just finishing when Dr. Brooks arrived to check her over, get a quick rundown on how she was feeling, discuss the concept of possibly setting up some acupuncture and biofeedback sessions, and hand her a prescription bottle of strong pain medication, Meg taking one of the pills before he had even gotten as far as the Center Hall. Then, she moved over to the couch, where Trudy was already sitting. Felix came out with a tray of coffee and petits fours, which looked too ornate and impressive to eat. But, she certainly wasn't sorry to see the coffee, and to appease Trudy, she put a chocolate-dipped petits four on her dessert plate.

“Before, you called Preston a godsend,” she said.

Trudy nodded.

“Does it bother you that we aren't religious?” Meg asked. Neal's interest in Sunday excursions to St. John's, notwithstanding.

Trudy peered at her over her glasses. “In what sense?”

Oh, where to begin. “Every sense,” Meg said.

Trudy shook her head. “It bothers me that you don't have the comfort. These terrible things have happened, and I think you all feel so very alone. So, I wish you had that.”

She must be pretty far gone, since she couldn't fathom the idea of God being a
comfort
. More like an adversary. And a cruel one, at that.

“You know,” Trudy said, when she didn't respond, “I've always had the feeling that you think religion is something reserved for people who aren't very bright.”

Well, she definitely wasn't going to touch that one. Not even with a
thirty
-foot pole.

Especially since she knew that Trudy often felt self-conscious about not having gone to college, and the last thing she would
ever
want to do would be to hurt her feelings in any way.

But if she didn't come up with an answer, that, all by itself, would seem like a de facto endorsement of the sentiment. “No, of course not,” she said. “Never.”

Trudy nodded, but obviously didn't believe a single word of that.

Damn. All right, she was going to have to be somewhat more honest. “I think that maybe sometimes—” She stopped, to try and organize her thoughts. “Well, I guess it's possible that, in certain situations, there might be a tendency for, um, faith to negate reason.”

To her surprise, Trudy laughed. “Meghan, you're even more cagey than she is.”

Which wasn't exactly a compliment.

“Faith
isn't
reasonable,” Trudy said. “That's the whole point, dear.”

Granted, but she, personally, needed to have her life rest on much firmer ground than that. It just seemed too easy—and submissive—and, ultimately, futile to fall back on a knee-jerk “God will provide” and “it's out of our hands” outlook.

“Did you know that your mother's primary surgeon wasn't on duty the day she got shot?” Trudy asked.

Meg shrugged. There had maybe been some talk about that, but she hadn't paid much attention to it at the time, nor did she want to do so now.

“His wife had fallen off her bicycle and broken her ankle somewhere near the Tidal Basin, and he brought her over for X-rays, so the best cardiothoracic surgeon in the city happened to be standing in the Emergency Room when your mother came in,” Trudy said.

Yeah, so? Meg shrugged.

Trudy sipped some coffee. “I don't know. Something like that happens, and I can't help wondering.”

God, serendipity—or just plain dumb luck? “I bet someone else in Washington got shot that day,” Meg said.

Trudy glanced over.

“And that person had a bad chest injury, too, but
wasn't
lucky enough to go to an ER where a gifted surgeon was waiting around, with nothing to do,” Meg said.

Trudy nodded. “Maybe.”

More like, definitely. “So, God decided to help my mother,” Meg said, “and not
that
person, who was probably really nice, and had a family and everything, too?”

Trudy frowned. “I don't think it works that way. I don't think God chooses.”

Like hell. “
I
do,” Meg said. “If there's a God, then he or she is intervening sometimes—and not other times, and that isn't fair. I don't see any damn comfort in that.”

Trudy looked at her thoughtfully. “You're something a great deal more than ‘not religious,' aren't you?”

Yes. But, Trudy was deeply Catholic, and Meg didn't want to say anything unkind by accident, and it might be better to change the subject. At once.

Maybe they could try something non-controversial—like politics.

“Meg?” Trudy asked.

Well, okay, there was no easy way to avoid it, then. “I think we're on our own,” Meg said. “At best.”

At worst, there was no God at all, but just some malevolent higher power, toying with all of them like an unimaginably mean and mercurial cat.

Trudy nodded. “We might be. But, maybe God is wise enough to let people who want to be on their own do that, and to be more proactive with people who feel otherwise.”

It was still picking and choosing. Which
sucked
. “What,” Meg said, “you mean nothing bad ever happens to God-fearing true believers, and the rest of us are pretty much screwed?”

Trudy's eyes narrowed, and then she shook her head. “No. That's not what I meant.”

And it had been a lousy thing to say, since she knew damn well how seriously Trudy took her faith—and also knew that, belief in God aside, plenty of awful things had happened to her over the years, too. Meg sighed. “I'm sorry. I really shouldn't have—”

“You've earned the right to be angry, Meghan,” Trudy said. “I would never tell you otherwise.”

Trudy was the only person she knew well who ever called her Meghan—and she only did it when she was at her most solemn. Strangers, of course,
routinely
referred to her as Meghan, thereby proving that they were, in fact, strangers.

“That doesn't mean that I don't consider it a great blessing that you're here,” Trudy said.

Meg had been about to say something both apologetic and conciliatory, but now she was angry again. “I crawled through those mountains by myself.” Broke her hand alone, fought the pain alone, fought the
terrorists
alone, did everything for thirteen straight fucking days completely alone. No revelations, no sense of peace, no intervention—or comfort.

“What made you keep crawling?” Trudy asked, sounding genuinely curious.

“
I
made me keep crawling,” Meg said. Sheer god-damn exhausting force of will; nothing more.

Trudy nodded. “But, you could have quit.”

Meg looked at her.

“No, I guess not,” Trudy said, and smiled.

They sat there quietly, the petits fours still untouched.

“It would be easier not to believe in God, than to believe in a God who isn't kind,” Meg said.

“Yes, it surely would be.” Then, Trudy smiled again. “But, how can I not believe in God when I'm sitting here looking at one of his best efforts?”

Meg had an instant, cynical reaction to
that
, but it had been such a loving answer that she kept it to herself.

Trudy held her hand up. “And please don't tell me you think that means he needs more practice.”

Pretty close to exactly what she'd had in mind. “How'd you guess I was going to say that?” Meg asked.

Trudy patted her good leg. “Because I've known you since you were three years old, and even after everything that's happened, you're still very much yourself.”

The question being, was that a good thing, or a bad thing? “I feel like someone else,” Meg said uneasily.

Trudy shook her head. “You aren't. You're just a little more complicated now.”

Maybe. She was starting to remember how tired she was, and almost yawned. A nap would not be the world's worst idea.

Trudy lit up another cigarette, and then winked at her. “So. Is there a boy?”

Meg nodded, feeling herself blush.

“Is he nice?” Trudy asked.

A Great Unknown. “I'm not sure yet,” Meg said. “Other people say no, but mostly, he's been really nice to me.”

Trudy frowned and drew in on her cigarette. “Only mostly?”

“One extremely mean crack,” Meg said. “But he sent me flowers the next day to apologize. Roses and everything.”

“Well, good for him, then.” Trudy settled herself comfortably against the cushions. “So, tell me all about it. Not just him, but everything you're doing up there.”

The normalcy of the request was refreshing. Exhilarating, even. So, Meg told her about Jack, and her dorm, and her entrymates, and the mess with Susan—and even the nightmares. Her classes—about which she suspected she should make an effort to sound more interested, physical therapy, dealing with the press and paparazzi, dealing with hundreds of new people, dealing with ice and snow and mud and hills and flights of stairs, day after day after day.

“Am I boring you completely?” she asked, after a while.

“That
question
bores me,” Trudy said.

Whenever they'd come home from school, Trudy had always wanted to hear chapter and verse, in great detail, from all three of them. She'd been inclined to quiz her parents, in depth, about their respective days, or weeks, at work, too, although maybe she regretted the impulse when her father would go into long explanations of taxation minutiae, or her mother said things like, “And
then
, after we vitiated the previous concurrent resolution, we incorporated it into an
alternate
resolution, which, despite the recalcitrance of the subcommittee, I thought was very promising, indeed.”

They were still talking—or, okay,
Meg
was mostly talking—when her father came down the hall, wearing a dark suit, heading for her parents' bedroom. He looked surprised to see them, probably because he must have expected her still to be asleep.

“Are you going to Steven's game?” Meg asked.

Her father automatically looked at his watch, and nodded.

“Maybe I should come, too,” she said. “I mean, he'd be glad.”

Her father shook his head more adamantly than seemed to be necessary. “You look awfully tired. And besides, it's an away game.”