Ash Wednesday
      By Chai
      
      Rating: G-Nothing bad happens in this one, I promise. In fact,
      nothing very much happens at all, except an awful lot of talk.
      
      Category: Fanfic for fanfic-a post-ep for the Fantasy Virtual Season
      Eight episodes about the volcano: Jo March's "The Canary in the Coal
      Mine," Mdrgrl's "Layers Upon Lahars," and Jen
      Wilson's "Consequences."
      
      Spoilers: Through the first six episodes of the Fantasy Virtual
      Season Eight that's been posted on this list.
      
      Disclaimers: All the usual, plus the fact that I'm not a member of
      the Fantasy Eight writing circle, so nothing here has any claim to be
      a proper part of their Virtual Season.
      
      Feedback: Yes, please. I'll do almost anything to get it . . .
      chai4anne@yahoo.com
      
      Notes: I know, I know-I said I'd written my last fanfic months ago.
      I really meant it, but . . . . I'm blaming my relapse on Jo, Mdrgrl
      and Jen for writing such an intriguing set of episodes for the
      Fantasy Virtual Season Eight, and then leaving this possibility
      hanging out there, just begging me to write it.
      
      I wish I could write faster: this story started talking to me after I
      read Jen's "Consequences," and if I'd just dashed it off then, it
      wouldn't have the timing problems it does. As it is, you'll probably
      notice that it couldn't possibly fit between that story and "A Great,
      Great Day," which follows only a week later. By the time I realized
      that I was too deeply into this to stop, so I have to ask you to
      pretend that I'm a better writer than I am and managed to get my
      story done before her second episode was posted and we knew what the
      timeframe was going to be. Or to assume that this takes place in a
      universe that's identical to the FVS8 right up to the end
      of "Consequences," and then diverges enough to sneak in a couple more
      weeks before Josh has his "Great, Great Day."
      
      Except for the timing issue I've tried to make this story fit into
      the FVS8 universe, but I've probably made many mistakes with
      continuity, and of course I have no idea what directions the writers
      might still be planning to take these characters in. My apologies to
      Jo, Mdrgrl and Jen for taking the liberty of borrowing their stories
      to play with like this, and my thanks to them and to the other FVS8
      writers for the inspiration and the fun. More thanks are due to Aim,
      Carol (Caz), and Mistletoe for taking the time to read this and make
      suggestions. It's not their fault it isn't better.
      
      Once again, this story is NOT in any way an official part of the
      Fantasy Virtual Season Eight. You might find it helpful to remember
      some things that happened there a few months ago, though. And so:
      
      Previously, on the West Wing (Fantasy Virtual Season Eight):
      
      "Under no circumstances are you to ever discuss
      anything that happens in this building with Toby
      Ziegler," Santos finally said. "If I even suspect
      that's happening, you're out of here. You can pass
      that message on to Sam Seaborn, to Donna, to anyone
      here who knows Ziegler."
      
      "Yes, sir."
      
      "Other than that, the government has no right to tell
      you how to pick your friends. Although I would prefer
      it if your friendship didn't become public knowledge,
      at least until Baker is confirmed." With that, the
      President stood up and headed for the Oval Office.
      "By the way," he added, "if I find out you've been
      keeping any other information from me, you'll be out
      of this building in record time."
      
      * * *
      
      Everyone stood, thanking the President and wishing him a good night.
      
      "Josh?" he called.
      
      He paused in front of the door leading to his office. "Yes, sir?"
      
      "About earlier..." He took a step closer to his Chief of Staff. "I
      came down on you pretty hard."
      
      Josh gulped. He kept his eyes trained on the President.
      
      "I don't think there will ever be a time when I trust Toby Ziegler,"
      Santos began. "But I do trust you."
      
      Josh stood a little taller.
      
      "I can't imagine anyone serving as my Chief of Staff more effectively
      than you." The President looked him square in the eye. "I wanted you
      to know that."
      
      "Thank you, sir." He gave him a tight lipped smile.
      
      Santos walked behind his desk and picked up his suit jacket. "It's
      late. You should go home."
      
      "Yes, sir." Josh walked through the connecting door and closed it.
      He leaned against it, and sighed.
      
      * * *
      
      Something caught his eye and he looked over and
      saw a woman sitting in the corner of the tent crying quietly.
      A man was talking to her, and the President found himself watching as
      the
      woman clutched a tissue in her hand and nodded at whatever the man
      was saying.
      
      "Is that woman ok?" he asked Jeff softly as they approached Sam and
      Lester.
      
      "Is that woman ok?"
      
      Jeff looked over at the woman for several seconds before answering
      very softly. "Her two year-old daughter inhaled ash. She died
      yesterday afternoon. That's one of our trauma specialists with her."
      
      The small group of people were stunned into silence at the site
      director's words. The president looked down at the ground and closed
      his eyes for several long moments before looking at the grief-
      stricken woman again. He thought he might be sick, watching the
      woman sobbing over her daughter. Immediately and not voluntarily, he
      pictured Helen sitting there sobbing over Miranda.
      
      "Mr. President," Sam said softly. "Maybe we should give her some
      privacy."
      
      He shook his head but didn't take his eyes off the woman. That pain
      in her face; he'd caused that. He'd done that to her. "I have to go
      over there."
      
      Sam looked at Lester and shook his head. "Mr. President..."
      
      "I ha..." his voice was choked and he stopped to take a deep
      breath. "I have to apologize."
      
      "Sir," Lester said. "That's not your place."
      
      The president's head shot to Lester. "Of course it's my place. It's
      my fault."
      
      "Mr. President," Sam said gently. "If you go over there and that
      woman blames you..."
      
      "What?" the president snapped. "It'll look bad I don't care. I... she
      deserves... something. My apology at the very least." It wouldn't be
      enough; it wouldn't ever be enough, but she deserved it nonetheless.
      
      "And if she screams? Calls you a murderer?" Sam said a bit more
      sternly.
      
      "Then she screams and calls me a murderer."
      
      "And if she hits you? And the secret service pulls her off you and
      shoves her face into the ground and arrests her?"
      
      The president shook his head. "She needs..."
      
      "You. You need to apologize. She needs to be left alone to grieve in
      peace without having to face anyone who's going to cause her more
      pain. Whose needs are more important right now, sir?"
      
      * * *
      
      (From "The Canary in the Coal Mine" by Jo March, "Layers Upon Lahars"
      by Mdrgrl, and "Consequences" by Jen Wilson.)
      
      * * *
      
      tbc . . .
      
      
      
      
      Ash Wednesday
      
      Matthew Santos stood in front of the long French doors at the end of
      the Oval Office, looking out at the colonnade and the garden beyond.
      The sky was grey and heavy with clouds; there was a chill in the air
      that he could feel through the panes of glass, even with the doors
      closed. Some thin, yellow stalks of forsythia were doing their best
      to brighten the scene, and a few crocuses and daffodils were
      scattered across the lawn, but otherwise Washington's famous floral
      show was nowhere to be seen. And it was almost Easter. Spring was
      late that year, thanks in part, at least, to the eruption of Mt. St.
      Helen's a couple of weeks ago, bringing clouds of ash that had
      darkened the sky and led, according to the guys at the National
      Weather Bureau, to all the rain they'd been having all across the
      country ever since. Days and days and days of it. The cherry
      blossoms were due to put in an appearance, but if they ever did
      manage to struggle out of their buds they were going to be blown from
      their branches and battered to the ground by the driving rain before
      the annual festival could ever get underway. The rain seemed to have
      paused for the moment, but from the look of the sky, there would be
      more that afternoon. The weather was getting on people's nerves;
      everyone seemed unsettled, edgy, down-Matt himself most of all. He
      felt personally responsible. Which was ridiculous, he knew: he
      didn't make the weather. He hadn't made that volcano erupt. He had
      just . . . .
      
      "Mr. President?"
      
      Matt shook his head and looked away from the scene outside to his
      Chief of Staff, who was walking into his office with a handful of
      files. There was a tightness in Josh's face that Matt had been aware
      of for quite a while now-for the past two weeks, in fact. It
      bothered him, but he didn't know what to do about it.
      
      "Yes, Josh?"
      
      Matt made an effort to put his depression aside and try to sound
      jovial, welcoming. As efforts like that usually do, it came out
      sounding false. Matt saw Josh Lyman's face tighten a little more,
      the wariness in his eyes increase.
      
      "We need to look at these files on the education bill, sir."
      
      "Of course." Matt took a deep breath. "Josh-"
      
      "Yes, sir?"
      
      Matt hesitated. This sort of thing wasn't his strong suit at all.
      
      "Is everything okay?"
      
      Josh eyed him strangely.
      
      "I haven't heard anything about Kazakhstan since your briefing this
      morning, sir, but as far as I know there haven't been any changes.
      Your numbers have been going up steadily since the Vice President was
      confirmed. We're facing some challenges on the education bill, but
      we're going to get it. We need to discuss our response to Kervil,
      Samson, and Dean; that's what I've got here."
      
      Matt dropped his eyes from his C.o.S.'s face to the folder in his
      hand. That wasn't what he'd meant, but he hadn't liked asking the
      question in the first place. This sort of thing made him feel like
      those parachute exercises where you were supposed to be doing a jump
      over enemy territory in thick fog with no idea what was waiting down
      below. Freefall in thick, cold, fog, icy little water particles
      clustered around bits of dust, bits of ash . . . .
      
      "Right," he said, sighing and taking the folder from Josh's hand.
      But all the while they were talking, he was aware at the edges of his
      thought of the tautness in the other man's face and in his voice. It
      felt like an accusation. A hesitation, anyway, an unvoiced doubt of
      Matt's ability to do the job Josh had told him he should do. It
      irritated and frustrated him, making him feel even more tense than he
      did already. Of course he could do this job. If he hadn't believed
      that, he wouldn't have taken Josh up on his wild proposal two
      Christmases ago. But if Josh had stopped believing it. . . . He
      brushed the thought away. He couldn't afford to go there, couldn't
      afford to be distracted by thoughts like that: the only way to do
      this job was just to do it. He couldn't afford to worry about what
      his Chief of Staff was or wasn't thinking about him, what Josh Lyman
      might or might not do.
      
      But later that evening, when he was sitting with Helen after the
      children were in bed, he found himself thinking about his Chief of
      Staff again. He didn't even realize he was doing it until he heard
      Helen's voice saying,
      
      "I've asked you the same question three times now, Matt-what's wrong?"
      
      He looked up at her, surprised.
      
      "I'm sorry," he said. "Were you talking to me?"
      
      "Yes, Matthew," she answered, with exaggerated patience. "Strange
      though it might seem, I was talking to you. For the last five
      minutes or so, but you're obviously somewhere else tonight. What's
      wrong? I thought we were actually crisis-free for the moment, and
      could have a nice evening together." There was a bit of an edge to
      her voice. Matt winced inside, and bit his lip.
      
      "I'm sorry," he said again. "You're right, that's what we should be
      doing. Come here and tell me what you were talking about again."
      
      Helen walked over to the sofa he was sitting on and sat down beside
      him.
      
      "What's wrong?" she asked again, her voice a little softer this
      time. "Something's bothering you. Something's been bothering you
      for days now. You've been off in your own thoughts every evening.
      And I know you're not sleeping very well."
      
      Matt looked sideways at her. Her makeup had worn off hours ago; she
      was wearing track pants and an old sweatshirt that had been pink once
      but was more grey than anything else now. Her hair was tucked behind
      her ears, mussy and a little frizzy at the end of the day, but it
      looked like gold and shimmered like spun silk in the lamplight. She
      took his breath away; she always did. He didn't know what he'd do if
      she wasn't here for him. And she hadn't wanted this; he knew she
      still didn't want it, was just putting up with it because he hadn't
      left her any real choice. He couldn't come whining to her now about
      the consequences of his decisions. But she wasn't going to take
      silence for an answer, either. He sighed and put his arm around her
      shoulders.
      
      "I'm worried about Josh," he admitted. That was part of it, the
      least difficult part to talk about, though even this wasn't something
      he found easy to admit to, or put into words.
      
      "What's wrong?"
      
      "I don't know, exactly," Matt answered slowly. "But there's
      something, I can tell. He's been acting differently around me for
      the past couple of weeks: tense, distant. He's angry with me, I
      suppose."
      
      "Angry? With you? Why would Josh be angry with you?"
      
      "For not listening to him, I guess, about Kaplan and the volcano.
      And maybe for telling him off the way I did about Toby Ziegler."
      
      "I thought you'd apologized."
      
      "I did. I told him I trust him, that I want him to go on as my
      C.o.S., I think he's the best man for the job. And he is. I can't
      think of anyone else who could do this as well as he can. I'd be
      pretty lost if he quit right now, Helen. I can't afford it; I don't
      know what I'd do."
      
      There it was, the thought he hadn't been able to push away: what he
      would do if Josh decided he'd made the wrong choice and couldn't work
      for Matt anymore. If he quit. Matt had come down pretty heavily on
      him over that business with Toby Ziegler, but in spite of what he'd
      said, he'd realized over the past couple of weeks that there simply
      wasn't anyone else he could trust to guide him through the byways and
      pitfalls of this impossible job: not now, certainly, not yet.
      There'd be plenty of candidates for the position, of course, many of
      them older and more experienced in certain ways than Josh was, but
      Josh was the only one with seven years in the White House as Leo
      McGarry's right-hand-man, the only one who'd spent seven years
      negotiating for the executive branch with the legislative one, the
      only one who'd put in a decade and a half working the floors of the
      House and the Senate before that, the only one with the political
      brilliance to have been catapulted into a job like White House Deputy
      Chief of Staff at the age of-what? thirty-seven? thirty-eight? A
      position most men would count themselves lucky to get twenty years
      later, and would consider their crowning achievement, the capstone of
      their careers. And now, in his mid-forties, Josh was the President's
      Chief of Staff, and the only man Matt-whose own meteoric rise still
      left him feeling stunned and staggering-could picture in that job.
      Leo had told him Josh was the right man for it, and Matt, for all his
      doubts and hesitations, had believed him. He still believed him.
      There was nobody else who could do the job; nobody else Matt wanted
      to do it. . . .
      
      "Why would he quit?"
      
      "If he's angry enough, or fed up enough, he might. That was quite
      the public-relations disaster I created there, on top of all the
      other kinds of disaster that happened that day. And I spoke to him
      pretty harshly before that."
      
      "Matt, I've never liked Josh much, you know that, but I'll say this
      for him-he's a professional. He takes his job seriously; you know he
      does. He's got to be used to dealing with public-relations problems:
      look at what happened with President Bartlet when the story about his
      MS came out, and how they turned that around. Josh didn't quit then;
      I don't know why he'd quit now. I'm sure it's not the first time
      he's been told off, or hasn't been listened to. If he's angry,
      he'll get over it. You've apologized; that should be an end of it.
      Let it go."
      
      "I know," Matt said, "I know. I've been telling myself that all day,
      all week, ever since-ever since that eruption, really. It's just
      that there's something wrong. I can tell. He seems-closed-off, I
      guess, now. Unreachable. He's polite, and professional, and he's
      doing his job and doing it well. But I need more than that from him,
      Helen. I'm just realizing how much I need from the person in that
      office. Leo McGarry was Jed Bartlet's best friend; Bartlet could
      lean on him in ways I can't with Josh, because he knew him, he
      trusted him."
      
      "I thought you'd told Josh you trusted him."
      
      "I do. I do trust him. I think."
      
      "You `think'?"
      
      "I wish I knew him better, Helen. It's one thing to trust somebody
      because you know his record and the people who recommended him, and
      another to trust him because you know him. I don't have a friend
      like Leo McGarry who could do this; I wish I did, but I don't. There
      isn't anyone else I'd rather have beside me while I do this than
      Josh. But I don't know who he really is. And I'm not sure he knows
      who I really am, either."
      
      Helen sighed. She wanted to ask Matt why he hadn't thought about
      this months ago and done something about it then, before taking
      office, but she knew that was pointless. Men never saw the
      importance of personal relations the way women did. That Matt was
      seeing it at all, now, was something of a miracle, but then Matt was
      really a highly intelligent man, though his straightforwardness and
      single-mindedness sometimes seemed to blind him to things that, to
      her, were quite obvious.
      
      "Then you'll have to get to know him better, Matt, that's all."
      
      "I thought I would. I thought I was. During the transition, after
      he took that vacation, he seemed like a different man. More relaxed,
      more open, smiling, talking about things besides the job-about
      restaurants he wanted to take Donna to, concerts he was getting
      tickets to go to with Donna, pictures of Donna and the places they
      went to that week they went off together. Do you know, before that,
      I'd thought he might be gay?"
      
      "I'd wondered about that, too. I knew he'd dated Amy Gardner,
      but . . . ."
      
      "You thought she was his beard."
      
      "I thought they were each others' beards. But it turned out it was
      Donna he wanted all that time."
      
      "I really felt like I was starting to know him, to understand what
      made him tick."
      
      "And don't you still? He's still with Donna; that hasn't changed."
      
      "No, but he's changed, and I don't know why."
      
      "Have you asked him?"
      
      "I-" Matt sighed. Helen raised an eyebrow. He moved his arm out
      from behind her shoulders and shifted his position on the couch,
      trying to get comfortable. He ended up bent over, his head in his
      hands, running his fingers through his hair.
      
      "Have you asked him, Matt?"
      
      "Yeah," Matt said, and then quickly, "or no." He laughed, then, and
      shook his head. "I've tried to get it out of him, Helen but-I can't
      just ask Josh Lyman outright if he's upset with me, it's impossible.
      I'd sound like some junior-high-school girl who's had a spat with her
      friend, not the President, the Commander in Chief! But I can feel
      the tension radiating off him; I know something's wrong. Something's
      gotten to him, something that's affecting the way he acts around me,
      and until I know what it is, I won't know where I am with him."
      
      Helen sighed again. "Matt, you /are/ the President. Josh works for
      you. If his attitude is bothering you, you just have to tell him.
      It's up to him to change it, to be the way you need him to be."
      
      "It's not that simple, Helen. I need him in that job. I'm only just
      realizing how much I need him in that job. I can't afford to do
      something that might make things worse. I need to find a way to deal
      with this without pushing Josh too far. I can't have him quit on me,
      Helen; I just can't."
      
      He heard his own voice letting Josh know the circumstances under
      which Matt wouldn't just accept his resignation but would kick him
      out the door, and winced. But he'd had to say that; he'd had to. He
      couldn't have Josh talking about White House business with Toby
      Ziegler. Toby Ziegler . . . .
      
      "Maybe it has nothing to do with you, Matt. Josh has never been the
      most open guy in the world, has he? Maybe something's wrong at home,
      or with his family."
      
      "Does Donna seem worried about anything?"
      
      Helen thought for a minute, her brow creasing.
      
      "I hadn't thought about it before, Matt, but you know, she might be.
      She's been quieter lately, a bit distant. Not a lot. She was joking
      and laughing with Annabeth and me just this morning. But later, at
      the end of the day, she did seem-preoccupied. She's seemed that way
      quite often recently."
      
      "Can you try to find out what's going on?"
      
      "She might not want to tell me, you know, Matt. She's a private sort
      of person; I wouldn't want to pry."
      
      "But you'll try?"
      
      Helen sighed. This could be awkward. But still, if Matt was really
      worried . . . .
      
      "I'll try. And now come over here and let me give you a backrub; you
      need to relax and forget about all this nonsense for a while."
      
      "Mmmmmm."
      
      "Mmmmmm?"
      
      "Mmmmmm. Ohhhhhh. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm."
      
      "You like that, don't you?"
      
      "You know I do, you vixen. You're trying to get out of giving me
      that backrub, aren't you?"
      
      "Wouldn't you rather have this instead?"
      
      "Mmmmmmm. Ohhhhhh. Mmmmmmhmmmmm . . . ."
      
      Their White House bed was too strong to break. For an hour, Matt was
      almost able to forget about Josh Lyman, about volcanoes, about being
      President of the United States. Afterwards, sweaty and exhausted, he
      fell asleep with Helen in his arms. But in the middle of the night
      he woke again. After lying sleepless for a while he slipped out of
      bed, dressed himself in his bathrobe and boxers, and made his way
      down the hall to the rooms where Peter and Miranda slept. Peter had
      kicked the covers off, as usual; Matt pulled them back on again,
      tousled the boy's hair, kissed his cheek. Miranda was lying huddled
      around her beloved old stuffed bear, the tattered baby blanket she
      still slept with wrapped around her neck and clutched in her hand.
      She slept that way, she'd told them once, in case of fire: if she had
      to leave her bedroom quickly, she'd still have Blankie and Raggedy
      Old Pooh safe with her. Matt straightened the covers around her,
      kissed her, stroked her hair. He stood beside her a long time,
      watching her chest moving up and down in the light from the open door
      and the hall.
      
      He could hear the rain starting up outside again, pattering against
      the windows, running down the glass. Little drops of ash and water.
      He thought about the clouds of it, moving overhead. And he thought
      about that Wednesday morning a month ago when he had knelt before the
      priest in church and prayed, as he always did now, for the wisdom and
      humility and courage to lead his country well. About the way the
      priest had dedicated the mass for him, and led the congregation in
      prayers asking for the guidance and protection of all the saints for
      their new President as he carried out the awesome responsibilities
      with which he had been entrusted by God Himself. About the way the
      music had soared, and the sudden, unexpected sense of possibility and
      conviction that had surged through him as the priest's thumb moved
      across his forehead in that crumbling, pasty mix of oil and ash.
      
      * * *
      
      "Josh," Donna said sleepily, from the door to the living room, "it's
      after eleven. Come to bed."
      
      Josh looked up from the papers he had spread out over the coffee-
      table, and blinked. "It's eleven o'clock already?" he asked.
      
      "It's ten after eleven, actually." Donna's voice was patient. She
      knew she was going to win this one; they had an agreement, and so far
      he'd been good about it. She was also wearing her blue silk
      bathrobe, which was open down the front, and nothing else.
      
      "You let me miss ten minutes?" Josh put the papers he was holding
      down, and stood up. He was moving stiffly; she saw him wince a
      little. He'd been sitting in the same place, working, since they'd
      finished dinner.
      
      "I was being generous."
      
      "You were being cruel."
      
      "I was being thoughtful. You seemed so preoccupied; you haven't
      moved out of that seat for hours. I didn't want to interrupt you if
      you just needed a little more time."
      
      Josh looked back at the coffeetable and shook his head.
      
      "I need a lot more time," he said, rubbing a hand through his
      hair. "I need another lifetime to deal with all this. But," and he
      looked back at her and quirked the corner of his mouth up in a
      smile, "I need time with you more."
      
      Donna felt her heart melt. Even after four months, she wasn't really
      used to being like this with Josh yet. To Josh being like this with
      her. She smiled, tenderly.
      
      "Come on, then. You've missed ten minutes already."
      
      "I'll have to do more to make up for them, then."
      
      "You did quite a lot last night."
      
      "I'll do more tonight. I'll work faster, harder-"
      
      "Faster isn't necessarily better, Josh-or harder."
      
      "I'll make it better. You'll see."
      
      It certainly wasn't worse. There were advantages, Donna sometimes
      thought, to having an overachieving workaholic as your lover,
      advantages that didn't exactly outweigh the disadvantages, but
      unquestionably helped to compensate for them. An hour later she was
      thoroughly sated, and Josh was asleep in her arms. If she wanted
      him to, he'd usually make the effort to stay awake and talk to her,
      but tonight she hadn't even tried for that. He needed the rest, and
      she needed to see him get it. She knew it wouldn't last long.
      
      It didn't. Twice in the next two hours she woke to feel him turning
      restlessly beside her; once she heard him muttering something in his
      sleep. About three in the morning she woke again to find the room
      quiet-too quiet. She felt beside her: the bed was empty, he was
      gone. It had been the same last night, and the night before that,
      and the night before that-the same for the past two weeks, since the
      eruption. Sometimes she didn't do anything, and tried to go back to
      sleep. Sometimes she got up and went to talk to him. Tonight she
      got up. He was in the living room, not working at the stack of
      papers on the coffee-table but standing in the window, looking out.
      The streetlight outside was filling the night with a pale grey light
      that made the houses look, Donna thought, as if they were covered
      with something soft and dusty, like ash. She crossed the room and
      put a hand on his back.
      
      "I'm sorry," he said, quietly. "I didn't mean to wake you."
      
      "I know," she said, rubbing his back gently. "It's okay."
      
      He hunched his shoulders a little, and she started to rub them,
      trying to work the tension she could feel in his muscles out of
      them.
      
      "It's not your fault, Josh."
      
      "I know."
      
      She wasn't sure whether that was the truth or not, but she knew it
      was all she was going to get from him. After a while, Josh followed
      her back to bed. After a while, he fell asleep again. After a
      while, she did too.
      
      * * *
      
      TBC . . .
      
      
      (Notes and Disclaimers in my first post)
      
      "Donna," Helen said to her Chief of Staff when they were finishing up
      her briefing the next morning, "you seem tired. Is everything all
      right?"
      
      The younger woman lifted her eyes from the papers she'd been sifting
      through; she looked startled.
      
      "I'm fine, ma'am," she said.
      
      "Please don't call me ma'am," Helen asked, plaintively, for what felt
      like the five-hundred-and-fifty-five-thousandth time. They were
      alone, Annabeth having left a few minutes before. Donna blushed a
      little.
      
      "I'm sorry," she said. "It's hard to remember."
      
      "It shouldn't be; I've asked you often enough. But really, Donna,
      you're sure everything is all right? With you? With-" Helen
      hesitated for a fraction of a second, aware of how nosy her question
      was going to sound-"With Josh?"
      
      Donna didn't blush this time. The little bit of color that had just
      washed over her face seeped out of it, leaving her fair skin even
      paler than usual.
      
      "We're fine," she said. "I'm fine. Josh is-fine."
      
      Helen bit her lip. This was going to be every bit as difficult as
      she'd thought it would be. But she'd promised Matt she'd try, and
      really, she thought he needed her to. He'd only slept a couple of
      hours last night; she'd heard him get out of bed at two or three in
      the morning, and he hadn't come back. He'd looked like hell at
      breakfast. If Josh's problems were making Matt lose sleep, they
      weren't Josh's private business any more.
      
      "Donna," she said, taking the bull by the horns, "Matt's worried
      about Josh."
      
      "The President is worried about Josh?" Donna looked astounded.
      
      "Yes. He thinks something's wrong. It's bothering him, so I said
      I'd talk to you about it."
      
      "Why does the President think anything's the matter with Josh?" Donna
      asked. Her eyes had shifted away from Helen's; she seemed to be
      finding something very interesting to look at on the bookcase just
      behind the First Lady's right shoulder. She shifted a little in her
      chair, and fidgeted with the papers on her lap.
      
      "He thinks," Helen said bluntly, "that Josh is upset about
      something. That he's angry. With him."
      
      "With the President?" Donna flicked her eyes back to Helen's face,
      meeting hers. Donna's were wide with what looked like surprise. The
      papers she was holding fluttered a little.
      
      "With the President. Donna, I know Matt and Josh argued about Mt.
      St. Helens, about taking Dr. Kaplan's advice. I know Matt probably
      said some pretty harsh things; he told me he did, actually. But I
      know he's apologized to Josh. If Josh is still angry about
      that . . . ."
      
      "Oh," Donna said, dropping the papers in her lap. "Oh, no. He
      isn't. He wouldn't be."
      
      "Really? Are you sure?"
      
      "Really, ma'am-Mrs. Santos," she corrected herself, "Josh wouldn't be
      angry with the President. Not the President. His job is to support
      your husband; I know that's all he's thinking about, all he's trying
      to do."
      
      Helen dropped her eyes. There were so many things this could be
      about: personal things, private things. The last thing she wanted
      was to intrude, especially when Josh's private life was also Donna's
      private life. But she remembered the way Matt had looked at
      breakfast, and lifted her eyes to her Chief of Staff's again.
      
      "Is there something else wrong, then, Donna? Because Matt says he
      feels a difference in the way Josh is acting around him, and it's
      troubling him."
      
      Donna hesitated. She looked down at her hands. Then she looked back
      at Helen. "It's okay," she said, firmly. "He's-there's nothing the
      President or you have to worry about. We're okay."
      
      Helen looked at her C.o.S. for a long moment, weighing her options.
      She had Plan B ready; she'd come up with it last night. She never
      fell asleep after sex the way Matt did; after getting up to deal with
      the mess, she was usually wide awake for at least another hour.
      
      "Well, that's good," she said brightly. "I'll tell Matt; he'll be
      relieved, I'm sure. Now, tell me, Donna-I've been meaning to ask you-
      do you have any plans for the weekend yet?"
      
      Donna looked surprised.
      
      "No," she said. "No, I don't. Josh will be working on Saturday;
      I've just been planning to do some errands and get some stuff done at
      home. Is there something you want me to do?"
      
      "If you really don't have other plans, then yes, there is. I've been
      thinking I'd like to take the children and go up to Camp David
      tomorrow night or Friday. Their school has a Staff Development day
      on Friday, so they'll be home. I hadn't planned anything, with their
      Easter break coming up so soon, but I'm really feeling a need to get
      away. I've been thinking it would be good for all of us to get out
      of the city, see something different, go for some walks and get some
      fresh air. Matt will be staying here, of course, though he might
      come up Saturday night if he can get away. I can go on my own, but I
      was wondering if you'd come with me. I'd enjoy having some company
      that wasn't wearing a gun." She smiled. Donna smiled back, a warm,
      genuine smile that made Helen relax a little.
      
      "Why, of course," she said. "I'd love to. It's very nice of you to
      ask me, ma-Mrs. Santos."
      
      "That's wonderful," Helen said, cheerfully. "Thank you! It will be
      chilly, but this rain is supposed to clear up before Friday, or I
      wouldn't bother going. Do you like to hike? I've been told there
      are some beautiful trails on the property. I've only been up that
      time the Bartlets asked us, after Christmas, and everything was
      covered in snow then, but the ground should be clear now. And if
      it's really cold we can come back and warm up by the fire."
      
      "That sounds great," Donna said. "I'll bring my hiking boots then,
      and some long underwear."
      
      "That's a good idea," Helen said. "I don't have any, I'm afraid;
      I'll just have to walk fast."
      
      "I think you do, actually," Donna said, smiling a little to herself
      at the idea of knowing the contents of another woman's wardrobe
      better than their owner did. "I remember Felicity ordering you a
      stack of things from L.L. Bean's just for Camp David." Felicity was
      the fashion consultant Donna had brought in to help the First Lady
      with her wardrobe. After Texas, she remembered the consultant
      saying, Helen would need plenty of warm things for winters in
      Washington and weekends in the mountains. It had amused Donna, who
      still found winters here mild compared to the ones she'd grown up
      with in Wisconsin, but she'd agreed. Helen herself had been so busy
      with Peter and Miranda that Donna doubted she'd remembered the
      conversation half an hour after having it; she didn't have much
      interest in clothes at the best of times, and helping two small
      children through the challenges of leaving their old home and friends
      and school and adapting to new ones while being followed everywhere
      by men with guns under their suit jackets and hordes of press people
      waving cameras and tape recorders had been a task that had, not
      surprisingly, absorbed most of their mother's attention until quite
      recently.
      
      "Goodness," Helen said. "I had no idea. I knew the children had
      some, but . . . ." She smiled, and shook her head. "I'm so glad you
      can come, Donna. It will be much more fun with you than it would be
      on my own."
      
      "Thank you!" Donna said, reminding herself not to
      add "ma'am." "I'll enjoy it, I know. I've only been a couple of
      times, but it was lovely. It's really beautiful up there."
      
      Helen smiled, but thought, not for the first time, how strange it was
      to have two homes that everyone around her knew better than she did.
      But Donna wouldn't always have been so familiar with them, or Josh,
      either. She wondered, not for the first time, what these people
      would have been like eight years ago, when they were as new to this
      life as she was. Donna had mentioned a few things about her
      experiences then, but really, Helen thought, she didn't know her
      Chief of Staff much better than Matt knew his. And she needed to, as
      much as Matt needed to know Josh, if they were going to work together
      effectively for the next few years. It was a good idea, this weekend
      together-it could only make things better for all of them. She still
      felt a little uncomfortable about it, though, which was probably why
      she found herself asking suddenly,
      
      "Josh won't mind your going?"
      
      Donna's smile slipped a little.
      
      "He'll manage," she said, trying to make her voice sound light. It
      was a good effort, but Helen could see her making it. So Matt was
      right; there was something wrong-and it was something with Josh, not
      Donna, who had seemed quite happy until she'd been reminded about
      him.
      
      "It will be an incentive to him to get Matt through his business and
      up there by Saturday night," Helen said, working not to let her own
      voice show that she'd noticed the change in Donna's. "I'll tell the
      staff to make up one of the private cabins for you two for when he
      comes. But I'd like you to stay in the main lodge with the children
      and me before that; it would be cozier. Could you get away Thursday
      night?"
      
      "I-I suppose so. I knew about the Staff Development day, so you
      don't have anything on your schedule Thursday night or Friday. I-I
      guess-if you need me to-I could."
      
      Helen winced at the reluctance in Donna's voice. She had to do this,
      though, she told herself; it was in a good cause. Donna might miss
      Josh, and Josh might miss his girlfriend, but surely they'd both be
      better off losing a couple of nights together than they would be if
      Josh lost his job. Not that he was in any danger of losing it if he
      didn't choose to, but still, if they could just get this thing that
      was bothering him sorted out, it would be better for all of them, not
      just for Matt. Though what was better for Matt was really the most
      important thing, now that he was President. If she could just spend
      some time alone with Donna, she was sure she could find out what Matt
      wanted to know. But perhaps two nights wasn't really necessary for
      that . . . .
      
      "Or why don't we go up Friday morning?" she said, brightly. "It
      would give you more time to get ready, and really, it would probably
      be best for the children and me too."
      
      There was no mistaking the relief on Donna's face.
      
      "That would be easier," she said, her smile genuine this time. "I'll
      tell Josh he has to get the President finished by Saturday night if
      he wants to see me then."
      
      Her eyes were bright as she talked about how to rearrange Friday's
      light schedule, and what time she would meet Helen and Peter and
      Miranda at the Residence. One night away didn't worry her too much,
      evidently; two did. That was interesting. But Donna and Josh were
      still quite newly together, Helen reminded herself. Perhaps her
      reluctance had nothing to do with whatever was causing the problems
      between Josh and Matt. Perhaps Donna simply enjoyed nights with her
      boyfriend too much to want to be away from him for very long.
      
      "There's just one thing I need you to do for me, Donna," Helen said,
      when the women were parting.
      
      "What's that, Mrs. Santos?"
      
      The First Lady heaved a deep sigh. "Please stop calling me Mrs.
      Santos. At least when we're in private-it's almost as bad as Ma'am."
      
      * * *
      
      The weathermen were partly right: on Friday morning the sky was
      brighter than it had been, and while grey clouds were still blowing
      across it, the sun was beginning to struggle through. It wasn't
      raining, at least not yet. Donna spent an hour in her office in the
      East Wing and then made her way up to the Residence, as Helen had
      asked her to. The Secret Service were expecting her, and let her by
      with a "good morning, Ms. Moss," and smiles. She found Helen with
      Peter and Miranda in the kitchen, the children still in their pajamas
      and sticky with crumbs and jam.
      
      "I'm sorry, Donna," Helen said, rolling her eyes as she tried to wipe
      Miranda's face with a napkin. "I should have known I couldn't have
      them ready when I told you to come." Miranda squirmed out from her
      mother's grip and ran away, shrieking wildly. Donna winced at the
      sound, then hoped Helen hadn't noticed.
      
      "Miranda Jean," Helen called after her, "come back here this minute
      and get your hands and face wiped! You know you're not supposed to-
      aaaagh!" and she ran out of the room towards the living room, where
      Miranda had already managed to fling herself onto a delicate-looking
      linen-covered chair.
      
      "I warned that decorator," the child's mother muttered. "You heard
      me, didn't you, Donna? I. Warned. Her!!!"
      
      Helen had asked for a relaxed living room, but relaxed in the White
      House really couldn't mean what it did in a normal home, a fact that,
      after days of argument with a whole committeeful of advisors, she'd
      reluctantly had to accept. The Residence was not, after all, just
      for the First Family; it had to be a place where they could
      entertain, though less formally than they would when the first State
      Dinner rolled around and she would have to preside over the State
      Dining Room downstairs. . . .
      
      "I thought she said everything would have stain guard?" Donna asked
      over her shoulder, as she headed back to the kitchen for a damp
      cloth.
      
      "That's what she said," Helen muttered darkly. "The housekeeper
      hates us already, I know it. Miranda, look at this mess. What on
      earth were you thinking of? What would Ms. Kersch say, if you did
      that at school? Go and wash your hands and face now, or there'll be
      a time-out."
      
      "Mom," Peter shouted from somewhere out of sight, "Mom! Where's my
      Cowboys sweatshirt?"
      
      "Miranda Jean, do I have to /count/???"
      
      "MOM!!! I said, where's my COWBOYS SWEATSHIRT???"
      
      "You have till five to get to the bathroom, Miranda. One-"
      
      "You gave Elizabeth the weekend off, didn't you?" Donna asked, amused.
      
      "Two-that's better-good and clean, Miranda!" Helen looked back at
      Donna. "She really needed to go to the dentist; she's going to need
      root canal, I think." She meant Elizabeth, Donna knew, not
      Miranda. "I could have asked Megan, but it's really her day off,
      and . . . ."
      
      The Santoses had two nannies, just so there wouldn't be a problem if
      one of them got sick, but Helen was always reluctant to make use of
      them for more than essential baby-sitting.
      
      "MOM!!!!! I SAID, WHERE'S MY COWBOYS SWEATSHIRT???!!!"
      
      "Stop shouting, Peter! Your sweatshirt's in your suitcase. Find
      something else, for goodness' sake, so we can get going before the
      day's half over."
      
      "I've got something fun for both of you," Donna called out. "For
      when we get there!"
      
      "Do you? Where is it? What is it?" Miranda tumbled back into the
      room, her face damp and almost jam-free. Helen caught her and wiped
      the last of it off her daughter's chin with her thumb before the
      child could squirm away again.
      
      "You'll see," Donna said, smiling. "It's in my bag; you can have it
      when we get there. Come on, Miranda, let's go find you something
      nice to put on, while your mother helps Peter find his sweatshirt."
      
      She put out her hand. The little girl put hers into it, and beamed
      up at her. The small hand was moist and a little sticky still, but
      it was warm and soft and trusting, and Donna's heart melted, the way
      it always did at moments like that.
      
      "I want my princess headband," Miranda said, who was practically
      bouncing with excitement. "And my Komodo dragon shirt, and . . . "
      
      Noise and mess notwithstanding, it was going to be a good weekend,
      Donna thought. And then, tomorrow night, Josh would be there.
      
      * * *
      
      They went by motorcade; Helen didn't like helicopters, and while
      Peter and Miranda were fascinated by them, they tended to make Peter
      sick. The children tumbled out of the car as soon as it stopped and
      took off, laughing and shrieking, to explore the paths and woods that
      surrounded the big main lodge and the cluster of outlying cabins that
      were at the heart of Camp David. Their agents followed at a discreet
      distance, not to guard against kidnappers or assassins-the grounds
      were thoroughly secured-but to make sure nobody got lost or turned an
      ankle.
      
      After putting their bags inside, Helen and Donna followed too. It
      was colder than in the city and quite muddy underfoot, but Donna had
      dressed warmly and worn her hiking boots, so she didn't mind. She
      drew a deep breath, savoring the rich mix of scents that permeated
      the air: the heavy, pungent smells of mud and rotting bark and
      mouldering leaves; the fresh wetness of last night's rain; the
      astringent tang of spruce and pine. Except for the evergreens the
      trees were still bare, but soft swellings at the tips of twigs and
      branches hinted at the leaves and blossoms that weren't far away. A
      squirrel ran across the path ahead of them, and a cardinal overhead
      chirruped and twittered before flying away in a flash of scarlet
      feathers, sending a shower of cold rain droplets sprinkling down on
      them and making them both shiver and laugh with delight.
      
      "It feels so clean," Donna said.
      
      "And so quiet," Helen agreed.
      
      "No sirens."
      
      "No cars honking."
      
      "No radios blaring."
      
      "No kids screaming." Helen smiled, and shook her head. "Usually
      that's when I start to worry."
      
      "Their agents are with them; they're fine."
      
      "I know."
      
      There was a moment's silence, in which Donna thought she could hear
      the leaves beginning to unfold.
      
      "Do you like to run?" Helen asked, unexpectedly.
      
      "Run?" Donna repeated, blinking in surprise. "Yes, I like to run. I
      do it with Josh some mornings. Do you?"
      
      "I did, back in Texas. At the White House-what am I supposed to do,
      jog up and down the Mall with the Secret Service running beside me?
      I've tried it a couple of times in the garden, but there's not really
      that much room-I get bored going round and round the same track all
      the time. And I'm pretty visible from the sidewalk in places. I
      don't like that."
      
      "No one would see you here."
      
      "No, they wouldn't, would they?"
      
      "And this is a nice, wide track. It looks pretty smooth."
      
      "That's what I was thinking. Bet I can get to that bend in it before
      you can."
      
      And Helen took off. Donna stared after her for a second before
      breaking into a run herself. She caught up with Helen easily enough,
      but the First Lady glanced sideways at her and increased her pace.
      Donna sped up too. They jogged along side by side until they came to
      the bend.
      
      "Keep going?" Helen suggested.
      
      "Sure," Donna answered, not breaking stride.
      
      They ran side by side for a while longer. The trail they were on
      looped around on the flat for a while and then started to climb.
      They glanced at each other, nodded, and kept going, their breaths
      coming in shorter and shorter puffs as they pushed themselves up the
      steep incline.
      
      "Stop-at-the-top?" Helen asked, turning her head to look at Donna,
      who was keeping pace beside her.
      
      "Am-I-allowed-to-beat-my-boss?" Donna puffed out.
      
      "If-you-can!" Helen puffed back.
      
      "I-can-try!" Donna took a deep breath, and pulled ahead. Helen did
      the same. They were neck and neck when they reached the top of the
      ridge, where the trail opened out into a clearing with an attractive
      Adirondack bench and a view. They both ignored the bench and
      collapsed onto the ground, heaving for breath, but somehow finding
      enough of it to start laughing.
      
      "Nice-try-Donna!" Helen gasped out between laughs.
      
      "I was-just-being polite!" Donna gasped back. And then, because
      that sounded more formal than she knew the woman beside her would
      like, she added, "Helen!" It was the first time she'd been able to
      bring herself to use her hostess's name. It came off her tongue more
      easily than she'd expected, but how could you maintain formalities
      with someone when you were both lying on the ground, covered with
      sweat and shaking with laughter?
      
      They lay on their backs on the damp, mossy ground, giggling like a
      pair of high-school girls. Donna couldn't remember the last time
      she'd done something like this with another woman. Or with anyone,
      really-even with Josh, even on their wonderful trip, she hadn't let
      herself go as completely silly as this. It felt good.
      
      * * *
      
      TBC . . .
      
      
      "So, Mr. President-"
      
      "We haven't got Harrison yet?" Matt interrupted his Chief of
      Staff. "You've got Sam on it haven't you? And Amy? What's the
      matter with them-I'd thought we'd have this in the bag by now!"
      
      Matt could hear the pettishness in his voice, but he didn't care.
      They had to get through this, damn it; they had to get it out of the
      way so they could get on to other things. There was so much to do.
      He'd lain awake most of the night thinking about how much there was
      to do: about all the chinks in the walls, all the places where
      something might go wrong and leave him exposed and vulnerable, the
      way he'd been two weeks ago. FEMA-were they really sure about
      Goldsmith, the man they'd put in charge there? Kazakhstan, the mess
      he'd never wanted to be involved with-China and Russia staring each
      other down, and the United States right in the middle between them.
      Terrorism, immigration, school shootings-he'd been quizzing Josh
      about a staggering list of issues all morning, throwing off one
      question after another on seemingly unrelated issues till any normal
      man's head would have been spinning. Josh hadn't given any
      indication that any of it fazed him, but Matt was still aware of that
      tension in his Chief of Staff's face and voice and posture, and
      thought Josh probably had no more idea what to do about any of this
      than he did. He could feel the same tension in his own body, hear it
      in his voice. He took a deep breath, and raised a hand to rub the
      back of his neck. It was aching. There was a kink in it that was
      annoying the hell out of him, and his head was throbbing. And Helen
      had taken the children and left for Camp David that morning; there
      wasn't going to be anything relaxing to look forward to
      tonight . . . .
      
      "Are you all right, sir?"
      
      Josh's voice was quiet, but there was a touch of warmth in it that
      Matt would have welcomed yesterday. Today he was too tired to think
      of anything except the fact that he was letting his guard down. If
      he was going to get the job done, he couldn't afford to let anyone
      think he wasn't up for it, let alone the man in front of him.
      
      "Of course," he answered, not managing to keep the irritation out of
      his voice. Josh's face tightened, and his voice, when he answered,
      had gone cool and neutral again.
      
      "You've been looking pretty . . . tired, for the last few days, sir."
      
      "I'm fine." Damn it, why couldn't he make himself sound fine? This
      wasn't what he needed, this grilling about himself this morning; he
      just needed to find out what was going wrong with Harrison and then
      get on to the next problem before something happened. . . .
      
      "Are you getting enough sleep, sir?"
      
      "For God's sake, Josh," Matt exclaimed, crossly, tossing the paper
      across his desk. "I said I'm fine. What the hell business of yours
      is it whether I had my beauty sleep last night or not?"
      
      "I'm sorry to have to ask, sir," Josh said, his voice still quiet,
      his tone level. "But if I'm your Chief of Staff, it /is/ my business
      to make sure you're well enough to do your job."
      
      Matt felt the heat rise in his face. "Are you suggesting that
      I'm /not/ fit to do my job, Josh?"
      
      "No, sir, of course I'm not. But it's my job to make sure you stay
      fit to do it, and if I think you're getting too tired, it's up to me
      to do something about it. I can change your schedule today if you
      need it, let you take a break, get a nap."
      
      Matt knitted his brows together.
      
      "I'm not a two-year-old child or a doddering old man, Josh, and I
      don't have MS. Bartlet might have needed this kind of coddling; I
      don't. And I don't do naps."
      
      "Take some time with your family then, sir? If I cleared your
      schedule you could leave for Camp David this afternoon instead of
      tomorrow. We could take care of most of what we need to do there,
      after you'd had a break. Or you could come back earlier than you'd
      planned, on Sunday."
      
      Matt sighed. Josh was right; he WAS tired. More than tired. But a
      break wasn't what he needed; he needed to work harder. There was so
      much to do, so much to get on top of, if he wasn't going to make
      another mistake like he had a couple of weeks ago.
      
      "I'm fine," he said again, more brusquely than he intended to. "So
      will you stop acting like my nanny and tell me what's going on with
      Harrison?"
      
      Josh eyed him for a long minute. "All right, sir," he said,
      quietly.
      
      It struck Matt as both odd and irritating that Josh Lyman, of all
      people, should be suggesting that he take time off. As if Josh would
      ever willingly take any time off himself unless Sam or Donna forced
      him to. As if Josh didn't have bags under his own eyes, and look as
      if he could do with a little more sleep himself.
      
      * * *
      
      Donna still felt good an hour later, when she and Helen had made
      their way back to the lodge. They heard the children before they saw
      them; they were outside playing what looked like touch football with
      their Secret Service agents.
      
      "Mommy!" Miranda called out. "I want Mommy on my team!" She ran
      over and grabbed Helen by the arm, tugging her towards the game.
      
      "Oh, Miranda," Helen said, laughing. "I'm sure Donna doesn't want to
      play."
      
      "I don't mind if you don't," Donna said.
      
      "We haven't had a chance to play outside like this for ages," Helen
      said, apologetically, following Miranda. "You really wouldn't mind?"
      
      "Can I be on your team, Peter?" Donna asked.
      
      He nodded, one of the agents tossed the ball, and they all played
      happily, running and shouting with excitement, until a middle-aged
      man came out of the lodge, smiling, and said the children's dinners
      would be ready soon. Donna followed Helen into the house and
      supervised the hand-and-face-washing, while Helen found the children
      some clean clothes. Then they left Miranda and Peter having their
      dinners in the kitchen under the indulgent eye of the chef and his
      assistant, a young woman who promised Helen she wouldn't let them
      make nuisances of themselves. Donna heard her asking them if they
      wanted to help make chocolate-chip cookies after dinner, and smiled.
      Yes, this felt good, she thought. Helen was her boss, but she was
      starting to feel like a friend, too. A good friend. Not quite the
      sort of friend you think of as family-not yet-but for the first time
      Donna thought that maybe, someday, the First Lady might start to seem
      that way to her.
      
      * * *
      
      Josh briefed Matt on the state of the education bill and Harrison,
      and left the President with a stack of folders to peruse. Matt sat
      at his desk and thumbed through them. After a while, when he'd
      absorbed everything he needed to, he got up to stretch. He stood for
      a minute at the window again, looking out at the grey sky and the few
      flowers that were trying to struggle into bloom, and sighed.
      Thoughts flitted briefly across his mind: about the weather, about
      the reasons for it, about his Chief of Staff and the tension he
      sensed whenever the man was in the room, the feeling he couldn't help
      getting that something was stretched almost to the breaking-point
      between them and could snap at any minute. Matt wasn't overly given
      to analyzing the reactions of people around him-he was usually too
      focused on moving ahead and getting things done to waste much time on
      feelings and emotions-but some feelings were too strong to be
      ignored. Something had gone wrong between him and Josh, he knew
      that, and he knew he hadn't done much to patch things up between them
      earlier. But damn the man, did he have to sound so much like a
      mother hen? Get more rest, take a break-he didn't need a nap, damn
      it, and he didn't need a break, not right now, not when there was so
      much to learn, so much to get on top of. Nobody knew what it was
      like, nobody could know, to sit in this chair and be the one making
      these decisions, to be the one responsible when those decisions went
      wrong. He'd known he'd have to do that, of course, and he could do
      it. He'd been a Marine, a pilot, a mayor, a Congressman-he was used
      to taking responsibility and shouldering blame.
      
      What he wasn't used to doing was making mistakes. He really hadn't
      made a lot of them in his career up to now, not the kind that ended
      up costing people their lives when, if he'd just done something else,
      they wouldn't have lost them. Not-and this was the part he was
      finding so hard to deal with-not children. Not little children,
      little girls. He thought of Miranda when she had been two: her sweet
      voice lisping a little as she began to put sentences together; her
      big eyes wide with wonder at some new book or toy she hadn't seen
      before; her rosebud mouth turned up to his for a kiss; her soft,
      still-almost-baby-skin-he choked back a sob. If anything had
      happened to her-it was unbearable. Unbearable.
      
      Things happened to children every day, he knew that. Things were
      happening to children somewhere in the world, right now, right this
      minute. And it was his job to stop them. He was a soldier, a
      Marine, a practiced politician, he could do this; he had to. He had
      to put these thoughts behind him; he had to focus, to keep on top of
      things, so it wouldn't happen again. But it would happen again, he
      knew that. What he didn't know was how to bear that. How did a man
      live, how did a man sleep, when he carried this kind of
      responsibility? He'd thought he'd imagined it before he decided to
      run; he'd thought he'd imagined it during the campaign; he'd thought
      he understood it after the election, and on the day he took his oath
      of office. But he hadn't. No one could imagine this, no one could
      understand this-no one who hadn't stood and watched a mother crying
      for her daughter and known that it was his fault, that if he had just
      done things differently. . . .
      
      Josh certainly couldn't. Take a nap, indeed. Spend some time with
      your family. What did Josh Lyman know? He'd never had children; he
      never seemed very interested in them when they were around; he
      probably didn't want them, and never would. He might have a
      girlfriend now, but he still lived for politics-or politics and sex,
      anyway-what man didn't want sex? He supported Matt's education
      plans, but he could hardly feel the passion about them that Matt did:
      he was from Connecticut, for God's sake, from Westport, where you'd
      be hard put to it to find a house worth less than a million these
      days, and where the worst thing the kids ever had to deal with was
      not getting the ponies they wanted for Christmas-or Hannukah. Though
      most of them probably got the ponies, and nice little sports cars
      later on, too. Josh had gone through Harvard and Yale and had, Matt
      was quite sure, never had to work a day in his life to pay for either
      one of them. His father had been a partner in a big New York law
      firm, a litigator; Josh would have gone into politics because that's
      one of the things smart young men with good degrees and plenty of
      money and connections did to make a name for themselves. He was good
      at it, of course. He cared about the right things, but not for the
      same reasons that Matt did. He was driven-Matt didn't think he'd
      ever seen a man more driven than Josh Lyman-but it was obviously
      ambition that drove him, ambition and ego, the need to climb the
      career ladder and get to the top, even though it was the staffing
      ladder and not the ladder of elected offices that he'd chosen for his
      particular demonstration of skill and success. He couldn't be
      impelled by the same things that drove Matt, who was intimately
      acquainted with poverty and, having lifted himself out of it, had
      always felt that burning need to help the people who were still
      trapped in it, so their children wouldn't have to go through what he
      had and so they could enjoy some of the same things he did now. He
      didn't blame Josh for having had a better childhood than he'd had; he
      respected the man's commitment to liberal ideals and he needed the
      political savvy that Josh's years in the House and the Senate and
      Bartlet's White House had brought him, but he knew there was no way
      Josh could help him with this part of the job. Josh with his
      comfortable, wealthy family background, his Ivy degrees and his whiz-
      kid, golden-boy, single and single-minded Washington career could
      never understand the burdens that he, Matt Santos, who had children
      and loved them and had built his career on big ideas to help them and
      feed them and educate them, was carrying right now. Had been
      carrying for the past two weeks, since he had seen that mother crying
      for her baby at the Red Cross shelter after that damned volcano had
      erupted. Would always carry, as long as he was in this office,
      sitting behind this desk, making these decisions. If he couldn't
      sleep right now, he couldn't sleep; that was his problem, and no
      concern of Josh's. There was nothing anyone could say or do to help,
      least of all Josh Lyman. And it wasn't something Matt could talk
      about to Helen, either-Helen who, though she was beginning to adapt
      to his new job on the surface, was still unhappy underneath it all at
      the upheavals Matt had introduced into their family's lives. Matt
      was just going to have to get through this on his own. . . .
      
      * * *
      
      Donna and Helen had time to get showered and changed before eating
      their own dinner, which was delicious. Afterwards they played board
      games and read with the children-Donna brought out the books she had
      brought for them, but kept back the jigsaw puzzle and the bag of
      stuff for crafts she'd put together, so they'd have something to do
      tomorrow if it rained-and then got them ready for bed. Peter went
      off without a fuss, armed with his book and his mother's permission
      to read by himself for half an hour before he had to turn out the
      light; Miranda ran around squealing and giggling until Helen told her
      there'd be No Video For A Week If She Didn't Settle Down Right Now.
      After that she cuddled up while Donna read her one last story, and
      then snuggled into bed with her blanket wrapped around her neck and
      Raggedy Old Pooh clutched firmly in her arms.
      
      "At last," Helen said, when she and Donna were finally settled on one
      of the big couches in front of the fireplace, a wood fire burning
      brightly in front of them to dispel the damp and chill of the rain
      that was starting up again outside. Donna could hear it beginning to
      drum quietly against the windowpanes. She and Helen had built the
      fire together, disdaining offers of assistance from the staff, and
      she'd sent Helen into fits of laughter by telling her about the time
      Josh and Sam had almost burnt the White House down with their fire-
      lighting skills.
      
      "I've got to tell Matt about that," Helen had said, almost choking,
      she was laughing so hard.
      
      "You have my permission," Donna had said airily, waving the box of
      matches over her head victoriously as the wood began to catch. "It's
      a classic."
      
      They heard the floorboards creaking, and a patter of small, bare
      feet. It was Miranda again, wanting a glass of water. Helen got it
      for her, then came back to the couch and the fire.
      
      "At last," she said again, plopping down beside Donna and dropping
      her head back on the cushions with an air of huge fatigue. They both
      laughed. "I think she's really gone down this time. It's
      exhausting, isn't it?"
      
      Donna hesitated, not sure whether it was polite to agree or not.
      
      "Oh, go on, you can say it," Helen said. "It is, it really is."
      
      "But it's good too, isn't it?" Donna said, smiling. "She's so sweet
      like that, with her blanket and her Pooh. And yet she's really very
      advanced for her age; she sounds so grown-up sometimes when she's
      talking. And Peter's so intelligent, and says such interesting
      things. He's an awfully nice boy."
      
      "Yes," Helen agreed, pouring Donna a glass of wine and handing it to
      her. "Yes, it's good too. Very good; I couldn't live without it.
      It's not for everybody, I guess, but it's what I wanted. I wouldn't
      know what to do without them, I really wouldn't."
      
      Donna nodded, a bit of a lump coming to her throat. Helen looked at
      her astutely.
      
      "Do you think you and Josh-?" she asked, and then added,
      hastily, "I'm sorry, you don't have to answer that. That was rude."
      
      Donna shook her head, trying to smile.
      
      "No, it's okay," she said. "I don't know; I don't know if we will or
      not. I don't know if Josh wants that or not."
      
      "You do, though?" Helen asked, quietly.
      
      Donna nodded, tightly.
      
      "Yes," she said, softly. "Yes, I do. Not right away, not now-this
      job means a lot to me, and I really want to do it well-but
      someday . . . ."
      
      "Don't wait too long," Helen said. "I need you in this job, God
      knows, but babies don't always happen when you want them to, you
      know. Sometimes it can take a lot of trying; you don't want to leave
      it too late. It really is something too special to be missed."
      
      Donna looked down at her wine and nodded again, not trusting her
      voice to say anything.
      
      "It doesn't have to be a choice, of course," Helen said,
      thoughtfully. "Between a baby and me, I mean. Your office is
      plenty big enough for a playpen, and I'd be more than happy to hire
      someone to help you out any way you needed to when the time comes."
      
      Donna smiled, but felt her eyes start to mist over; she was really
      touched that Helen would take such an interest, that she'd care. And
      that she valued Donna enough to be willing to go to so much trouble
      to keep her if she had to.
      
      "Thank you," she said. Her voice was a little husky. "That's good
      to know. But really, I don't know whether it's going to be . . . an
      option, or not."
      
      Helen tipped her head and regarded her curiously.
      
      "That's one of those things it's kind of important to know how your
      partner feels about, isn't it?" she said, not unkindly.
      
      Donna looked back at her glass and nodded again.
      
      "I know," she said. "I know. But it's still early for us-we've only
      been together a few months, and there have been so many other things
      to talk about, and Josh is so busy, and under so much stress-" She
      broke off abruptly and bit her lip. Helen looked at her more
      intently.
      
      "You'll find the right time, I'm sure," she said. "Have some more
      wine?" Donna relaxed visibly and held out her glass. Helen filled
      it. She didn't want to push things too far, too soon. She could
      come back to that subject later, when they'd both had a little more
      easy conversation, a little more wine . . . .
      
      * * *
      
      An hour later they were well into the second bottle, and they both
      had their shoes off and their feet up on the couch. It was big
      enough that they could lean back on the cushions at either end and
      stretch their legs out comfortably, facing each other. The fire was
      burning cheerfully in the big stone fireplace in front of them; the
      lamps glowed in their golden-brown mica and burlap shades. The
      Navaho rug at their feet was bright and warm, and more rugs and
      blankets had been thrown over the backs of the couches and chairs,
      making the place look cozy and informal. It was a pleasant room,
      Donna thought, comfortable and inviting, in spite of the kitschiness
      that was almost inevitable when a decorator had been asked to conjure
      up the essence of American Lodge. Most of the furniture here was on
      its third or fourth administration, she knew, something that had
      distressed the ladies on the Party's White House Decorating Committee
      no end, but hadn't seemed to trouble the Santoses at all.
      
      "This is a great couch," Donna said.
      
      "Yeah," Helen said, laughing and waving her glass in the air, as if
      offering up a toast to the couch, "That decorator wanted to replace
      it, you know, but I wouldn't let her. There's nothing wrong with it
      at all."
      
      "Nothing," Donna agreed, settling down into it a little more
      deeply. "Nothing at all."
      
      "A few little spots here, a cushion that's been sat on a few times
      there-that's nothing."
      
      "Nothing. Nothing at all."
      
      "I hated that decorator."
      
      "I'm sorry." Donna tried to straighten up a bit and sound
      professional. "We should have got you another one. I thought-"
      
      Helen waved her glass again, cutting her off. "I would have hated
      any decorator," she said. She wasn't laughing anymore. "I
      hated /this/. This whole Being Presidential thing-the pomposity of
      it, it's ridiculous. I just wanted to have a normal life. I wanted
      our kids to have a normal life."
      
      Donna nodded. Helen hadn't made any secret of how she'd felt.
      
      "I know what you're going to say," Helen said. "It's a wonderful
      opportunity for them. I know that; I know I should be grateful for
      it. I keep trying to be. I'm getting better at it, I think,
      but . . . ."
      
      Donna nodded again. Helen /was/ getting better at it.
      
      "It's an opportunity for you, too," she said quietly, not quite sure
      how Helen was going to react to that, but feeling-not for the first
      time-that it was something the First Lady needed to think more about.
      
      Helen sighed, and swilled her wine around in her glass, looking into
      it.
      
      "I know," she said. "I know. You're not the first person to say
      that-Matt must have said it to me a thousand times. But I didn't
      want an opportunity. I was perfectly happy where I was, doing what I
      was doing-helping out in the kids' classrooms, going along on their
      field trips, volunteering in that family shelter, spending time with
      my book group, with other moms. And I was looking forward to getting
      some time to myself, now Miranda's started school. I was going to do
      some writing, work on my photography-I've had a project I've been
      wanting to get to for ages. Matt says I can still work on it if I
      want to, but how can I? There's never any time. Everyone's got
      something else they want me to do, every minute of the day. And they
      all act as if what I was doing before was nothing. What I was doing,
      what all those mothers I knew were doing. Like if women aren't going
      off to offices and scrambling up career ladders and making lots of
      money, they're doing nothing. `Here's your chance to make a
      difference in the world,' they're all saying to me, as if I wasn't
      before! As if all the fundraising and policy planning and lawmaking,
      all the negotiations and the diplomacy and the rest of it, can make
      any real difference to the world if, somewhere along the line,
      someone isn't stepping out of the spotlight and picking up that child
      that's crying, and wiping her nose and giving her a hug and a kiss,
      and then sitting down to read a book with her. Or taking her to a
      science museum, or talking to her about math, or cheering on her
      soccer team-everyone sneers at soccer moms, but SOMEONE'S got to
      cheer the kids on at their soccer games, don't they? And the boys-
      they need it as much as the girls do. Someone's got to listen to
      them practice the piano and tell them it's okay to be a boy and be
      better at music than football or fighting; someone's got to give them
      hugs and kisses and tell them it's okay when the other boys have been
      picking on them because they still like stuffed animals, or because
      they slipped up at school and admitted their favorite color's pink.
      Someone's got to listen to them and help them sort things out when
      they're confused; someone's got to teach them that it's better to be
      honest and get a lower grade than to cheat and get a good one, that
      it's better to be kind to animals than to kick them or kill them,
      someone's got to teach them how to stand up for themselves without
      hurting other people, and how to be gentle and good without being a
      wimp. It takes such a lot of work, bringing kids up to be decent
      human beings in this crazy world we've created, where you can just
      turn on the t.v. and see people killing each other twenty-four hours
      a day, seven days a week. It's pretty important work. But when a
      woman decides to do it, everybody jumps all over her and tells her
      she's wasting her time and her talents, and she should be doing
      something else."
      
      Donna blinked. She wondered if Helen meant her. She hoped not.
      She'd never said anything like that, and never would, but she /had/
      been trying to convince the First Lady to come up with an agenda that
      looked beyond her children's needs. She'd thought Helen wanted that,
      and had understood why Donna wanted it for her. If she
      didn't . . . .
      
      But Helen was still talking.
      
      "I had a career, you know, before we had kids. I loved my job. But
      I loved my kids more. I could see that you can't do this job
      properly and squeeze it into a couple of hours in the evenings when
      you're tired from a long day at work and thinking with half your mind
      about how you're going to get ready for the morning; you certainly
      can't do that when your husband wants to be a mayor of a major city,
      or a Congressman, or President of the United States, for God's sake.
      I've been bored plenty of times, and I've been frustrated, but I knew
      I wanted to do this job and do it properly. And it's not just about
      staying home and giving hugs and wiping noses; it's about so many
      other things. It's not really a job women can do just sitting at
      home by themselves-or men, either. Moms need to be able to talk to
      other moms, dads to other dads, both of them to each other. They
      need to talk about their kids and their schools and what's working
      and what isn't. They need to have friends they can turn to who'll
      pick their kids up after school when they're running late, who'll
      tell their kids to zip their coats up when it's freezing out and
      their mothers aren't there to tell them to look after themselves,
      who'll tell their kids to mind their manners when they hear them
      mouthing off, to get back on the sidewalk when they see them
      skateboarding in the street, or back to school when they see them
      hanging out getting into trouble-they need those other moms and dads
      to help them do the job, and the kids need other kids' parents in
      their lives almost as much as they need their own. But the moms need
      time to get to know those other parents and to get to know their
      children, to build those social networks that will help hold all the
      kids up later on, and so you have coffee with other mothers and talk
      about each other's kids, and you talk to them at playdates and on the
      playground, and you volunteer in the classroom and join the P.T.A.,
      and in between you maybe volunteer at a school in a poorer
      neighborhood or at a shelter for battered women or homeless families
      so your perspective doesn't get too limited and you can spend some
      time reading to kids whose mothers don't know how to, and wiping
      their noses and giving them hugs because no one else does, and if
      you've got a few minutes to yourself at the end of the of the day you
      write it in your diary because that's a pretty rare day. I get
      so /sick/ of the little sneers I see in everyone's eyes whenever they
      talk about what I was doing and what I can do now. As if I wasn't
      doing something meaningful then, as if I wasn't contributing
      something important then, even though nobody was paying me for it and
      nobody was ever going to remember that I'd done it, except maybe some
      of those other moms and those kids."
      
      Donna flushed.
      
      "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry if I-if I've said anything to make
      you feel that way. I didn't mean it like that, I-"
      
      "Oh," Helen said, sighing. "I didn't mean you. Not really.
      There've been a few times, but-I know I'm in a different situation
      now and I need to take advantage of it. I know need to get an agenda
      going and do things in a bigger, more public way now; I know why
      you've been urging me to do that, and I want to do it, of course I
      do. I've got to balance that with my kids-having their dad become
      President has been a pretty big deal for them, their lives have been
      totally disrupted, and if they're not going to pay too big a price
      for that down the line they've got to have some stability and
      continuity in their lives, they've got to be able to count on me
      being there when they need me-but I know you understand that. I
      meant . . . I'm not sure who I meant, exactly. Just people.
      Political operatives, Party people-the ones who have their own kids
      parked with nannies who don't speak English and then wonder why
      little Johnny's speech is so delayed, or why they can't control him
      the way his nanny can when she's not there. Old college friends, the
      ones with the great jobs and no kids, or the ones who put their kids
      in daycare and couldn't believe I didn't want to do that too. And
      Matt-I probably meant Matt, which isn't fair, because I know he did
      understand what I was doing before, and valued it, and supported my
      doing it, but he doesn't seem to understand how hard it was to be
      uprooted from everything I was doing and dragged around the country
      campaigning and then suddenly find myself here, with nothing left of
      the life I had before and no way of ever going back to it. I had a
      job, Donna, an important job, and I still have it-I'm just having to
      try to figure out how to do it in these totally strange
      circumstances, with none of the friends or the kids' friends that I
      had to do it with before. And how to do it and still do all the big
      things for the country and the world that I know I need to do,
      because nobody should be in this position and not try to do those
      things, whether it was her choice to be here and do them or not."
      
      Donna nodded, slowly. She realized she hadn't really given much
      thought to what Helen had been doing with her life before her husband
      had decided to campaign for President. She wondered if,
      unconsciously, she hadn't been guilty of dismissing it the same way
      Helen felt other people did. Professional recognition had become so
      important to her over the past few years that perhaps she had
      transferred some of her feelings about that to this other woman: if
      she herself wanted to work on the public stage, Helen ought to want
      to, too. And Helen did want to, now that she was in this position,
      she had said that. But perhaps Donna hadn't been understanding
      enough of the demands of Helen's other job. She certainly hadn't
      thought of it /as/ a job, the way Helen did. And perhaps there was
      something they could do with that . . . .
      
      "You know," Donna said, "maybe that's one of the things we can put on
      your agenda-working to create more awareness of what at-home parents
      do, and helping to build conditions that would let them do it more
      easily."
      
      Helen snorted.
      
      "The women's caucus would just love that one. They'd think it was a
      subversive right-wing strategy to get women out of the workplace and
      back in the kitchen again, oppressed and barefoot and pregnant. I
      can just imagine what Amy Gardner would say."
      
      "You know, that's really the best argument I can think of for making
      it the star item on your agenda."
      
      Helen laughed then.
      
      "You're not a fan of Amy's? Oh, I forgot-she and Josh-"
      
      "Yes," Donna said hastily, "they did, but that's not why. At least,"
      wanting to be honest, because Helen had been so open and honest with
      her, "that's not the only reason why. Amy's entirely too hard-line
      and dogmatic; she's got tunnel vision about what she thinks are
      women's issues, and while that's going to please a certain part of
      the President's base, it's not going to help him with most voters at
      all. We could help to offset that. It could be a really good idea
      to have you voicing something different. We could make it clear that
      you're not arguing against women in the workplace. You support good
      daycare-you do, don't you?"
      
      "Of course I do," Helen said. "Not every family can afford to have
      one parent stay home full-time with their kids. And not every woman
      should do it. If she doesn't want to be there, she's probably going
      to do them more harm than good. But if she does want to make that
      choice, or if a man wants to do it, they shouldn't be penalized for
      that. My sister can write her daycare expenses off on her taxes. We
      can write our nanny off-both our nannies. But when I was staying
      home doing the same job a nanny would be doing, Matt couldn't write
      me off. That's just wrong."
      
      "It's about choice, really, isn't it?" Donna said, warming to the
      subject. "You want to take a stand for a woman's right to choose the
      work she does and where she does it. As well as her right to choose
      in other ways."
      
      "Yes. And to be supported in her choice, to have conditions that
      will let her make the choices that are right for her and her family.
      It shouldn't have to be an intolerable financial burden to a family
      to have a parent step out of the public workforce for a while to
      raise her children and to support other parents raising theirs."
      
      "There needs to be more awareness of what's involved in doing that.
      That it's a job-a real job, an important job. And then maybe a tax
      credit to help offset the cost of it. A more substantial deduction,
      at least."
      
      "At least."
      
      "There must be other things we could do too, mustn't there?"
      
      "Really, we need to be working for a society that's more child-
      centered. Children are our most important resource, they're our
      future. And yet their needs tend to come pretty low down on our
      country's list of priorities."
      
      "Child nutrition is a big problem still; it affects students'
      attention-spans in school, and millions of children go to bed hungry."
      
      "In a country as rich as ours, it's a sin."
      
      "Working families need high-quality, affordable daycare, but they
      also need flex-time and parental leave and all those other things the
      President campaigned on."
      
      "I can support him publicly on those."
      
      "Yes, you can."
      
      "And on education. Education really is crucial; every school should
      be well-funded, well-cared for, well-staffed . . . ."
      
      "Safe."
      
      "Beautiful. If it isn't good enough for my kids, it shouldn't be
      good enough for anybody else's, either."
      
      "That would make a great sound-bite, Helen. We could address it to
      anyone who doesn't support the President's education plan: you could
      show pictures of some of the really bad public schools across the
      country and say, `Would this be good enough for your kids? Then how
      can you say it's good enough for someone else's?'"
      
      "Good parents don't just care about their own kids, they care about
      everyone's."
      
      "Just because they're kids?"
      
      "Just because they're kids. And because good parents know what kids
      need, and how badly they need it."
      
      "What a difference that hug makes?"
      
      "What a difference that hug makes. Or that teacher who cares enough
      to notice when someone's shoes are untied. Or when he doesn't have
      any shoes."
      
      "Or when she's having trouble with her reading or her math."
      
      "The teacher who has the training to notice."
      
      "And to know what to do."
      
      "Or just the teacher who isn't so stressed-out by having to deal with
      thirty or forty out-of-control little demons running around all over
      the place that she has the time and energy left to notice and do
      something."
      
      "Smaller class sizes are really crucial, aren't they?"
      
      "They really are. And the only way to get them is to pay for them.
      We've got to create a society that cares enough to pay for what our
      children need."
      
      "And that's where the First Lady could make a real difference,
      because she can get people thinking about the children and their
      families, and not just the program. You can put a human face on the
      issues by talking about your own experiences with your own children
      and your friends' children and the children you've worked with as a
      volunteer. People will listen to you, Helen, because you /are/ a
      mother, and because you've made children's issues your issues in a
      very real way. They've been your job and your life and they still
      are, and that's what will give you the authority to stand up and talk
      to people about children and what they need. Being the President's
      wife will open the doors and win you the platform, but your
      experience is what will give you something to say and the right to
      say it."
      
      "Wow," Helen said, with a little laugh. "I hadn't really thought
      about it quite like that-that I had anything important to say, or any
      real right to say it. I mean, the idea of standing up and asking
      people to listen to me, just because I'm Matt's wife . . . ."
      
      "You haven't by any chance been undervaluing yourself and what you've
      done as a mother, have you?"
      
      Donna was smiling now. This, she thought, was what her job was
      really about-not just designing agendas or arranging speaking events,
      or, thank goodness, helping the First Lady choose her wardrobe, but
      listening to another woman and getting her to see that she did, in
      fact, have the experience and the resources she needed to make the
      most of the tremendous opportunities that lay ahead of her in her new
      life. Opportunities that were opportunities for Donna, too. She
      could learn as much from the First Lady, she thought, as the First
      Lady could from her. The frustrations she'd felt in dealing with
      Helen up till now were, she realized, mostly indications of the ways
      she herself needed to learn and grow. She needed more patience and
      understanding and, yes, humility, even, if she was going to do this
      job well-she'd thought she'd learned everything she had to about
      those things and then some when she was working for Josh, but really,
      didn't every new job require that you learn about them even more?
      Josh was having to learn more about them to do his new job. Perhaps
      even the President was having to learn more about them to do his.
      And there would be other things for her to learn about, other ways to
      grow in this new job too-lots of other ways. . . . But Helen was
      talking again.
      
      "Amy will be furious, won't she? Matt won't like that."
      
      "Do you care?"
      
      Helen grinned, wickedly.
      
      "No, I don't care. I couldn't imagine why he hired that woman. What
      about Josh, though? What will he think?"
      
      "Amy's feelings aren't really very high up on Josh's list of
      priorities any more, Helen."
      
      Helen laughed.
      
      "I didn't mean that. I meant-what will he think of my talking about
      some of those things? About more support for mothers-for parents-who
      stay home? I sometimes get the feeling that Josh doesn't think too
      much of me and what I'm doing now, or what I was doing before, being
      home like that with the kids . . . ."
      
      "Josh?" Donna opened her eyes wide. "Josh doesn't-" She cut
      herself off. She'd been about to say that Josh didn't care what
      Helen did or didn't do, as long as it didn't get in the way of what
      the President was doing, but she realized that that sounded even
      worse than what Helen thought he was thinking.
      
      "Josh isn't thinking that," she said, more gently. "Josh is just
      thinking about what he's got to do to help your husband do his job."
      
      "And you. I know he's thinking about you."
      
      Donna dropped her eyes and smiled a little. And me, she thought.
      Yes, Josh was finding time with everything else that was going on to
      think of her quite a bit. It was still such a new feeling, to know
      that Josh was thinking that way about her.
      
      For all her excitement, Helen noticed Donna's smile. She had
      wondered a little whether Donna's quietness over the past couple of
      weeks and the tension that Matt had noticed in Josh simply meant that
      the two were having couple problems. She hadn't really thought so,
      though, and she was sure she was right about that now.
      
      "Have another glass of wine," she said to Donna.
      
      "Sure," Donna said, looking up from her reverie, smiling. But at the
      back of her mind she was still thinking about tomorrow night, when
      Josh would be here. And Helen had promised them one of the cabins to
      themselves . . . .
      
      * * *
      
      TBC . . .
      
      
      (Notes and disclaimers in my first post)
      
      Josh shrugged himself into his coat and threw his backpack over his
      shoulder before starting to walk towards the Oval Office, where he
      was going to try one more time to convince the President to head to
      bed-he thought that maybe, if Matt saw that his Chief of Staff was
      ready to leave the office before 9:00 p.m., he'd go too. Josh had
      begun to realize that one of the qualities that had made Leo so
      effective in this job had been his calm. He'd never hurried; Josh
      couldn't remember Leo ever hurrying-well, a few times, maybe but
      those had been extraordinary circumstances, not everyday ones. That
      his marriage had fallen apart in their first year of office made it
      clear that he hadn't always been able to strike a balance between
      work and private life, but he'd always seemed rested, always seemed
      to have time to savor a good meal, or the recollection of one. Josh
      was a long, long way from becoming Leo-he couldn't really picture
      himself ever becoming like Leo-but he had begun to realize that a big
      part of his job was to keep life manageable for the President, and
      that he would do that best if he at least seemed to be keeping it
      manageable for himself. Which meant heading out the door before 9:00
      when there was nothing so pressing happening that he really had to
      stay, even when Donna wasn't waiting for him to go home to.
      
      Not that he was looking forward to going home when Donna wasn't
      there. He was tired enough-he was wiped, actually, exhausted-but the
      thought of going home to his apartment alone didn't hold a whole lot
      of appeal. It was amazing how quickly he'd gotten used to having
      Donna there with him. He wished she hadn't had to go away,
      especially now. He'd lived on his own for years; he'd managed
      sleepless nights on his own for years. He could cope by himself, he
      knew that. He just didn't want to have to. This had been a bad
      stretch, these last couple of weeks, and having Donna there had made
      all the difference. Not that he'd told her everything: he didn't
      want to burden her with all that crap if he didn't have to. But just
      having her there, feeling her next to him-her warmth, her softness,
      her concern . . . .
      
      His hand was on the doorknob and he was about to walk in to say
      goodnight to the President when he stopped and thought for a minute.
      After the election his mother had suggested, hopefully, that perhaps
      he could start using a real briefcase now, and she'd bought him a
      very nice one at the holidays. After that she'd asked regularly, in
      true Jewish-mother form, if he liked it and if he was using it or
      not. Donna had made him bring it to the office one day so he could
      tell her yes. It was still languishing there somewhere, in some
      drawer or closet where Margaret had packed it away after tripping
      over it for the twentieth or thirtieth time--unused and, usually,
      unthought of. He thought of it now, and wondered whether he should
      actually trade it for his backpack. Maybe his mother was right.
      Maybe the President would trust him more, maybe he'd be more inclined
      to listen to him if he dressed the part more consistently and didn't
      go around looking like some sort of overgrown, superannuated college
      student who'd put on a suit for his first job but hadn't quite
      managed to leave all the vestiges of his frat-kid life behind.
      
      Josh sighed. He was so tired. He had no idea where the briefcase
      was, and no real inclination to go looking for it. But he dropped
      the backpack on the floor and adjusted the lapels of his coat, his
      tie. Then he squared his shoulders and opened the door, ready to go
      and try one more time to talk the President into doing whatever he
      needed to do to get a good night's sleep.
      
      * * *
      
      "Donna." Helen cradled her glass in both hands, looking into its
      murky depths. She needed to get on with this, no matter how awkward
      or uncomfortable it was going to be. And she felt certain that it
      was going to be very awkward and very uncomfortable, in spite of the
      happy, friendly time she and Donna had had together that day. In
      some ways the fun they'd had earlier almost made this harder; if
      Donna felt more like a friend now, Helen had more to lose if her new
      friend resented her prying questions. And yet, if she hadn't been
      able to think of the woman in front of her as something like a
      friend, she knew she wouldn't be able to do this at all.
      
      "Donna," she said, quietly, "what's going on with Josh?"
      
      Donna stiffened. If her glass had been full it might have spilled.
      As it was, she tightened her hold on it and raised it carefully to
      her lips, taking a slow, deliberate sip before answering.
      
      "Josh?" Her voice was deliberately casual. "Why-you know, they're
      working on the education bill, and that lawsuit on the west coast.
      He's got Sam on that, I think, as well as on the education bill, and
      Amy Gardner-"
      
      "Donna," Helen said quietly. "You know I didn't mean that."
      
      "I-I'm not sure what you meant, ma-Helen."
      
      "I meant, what's bothering Josh, Donna? I told you before, Matt's
      sure something is, and it's worrying him."
      
      "Ma'am-"
      
      "Helen."
      
      "I don't think we should be having this conversation, Helen."
      
      "Donna, I think we have to. I know this is awkward, but honestly,
      Matt needs to know. Whatever it is, it's affecting the way he and
      Josh work together. Matt can't have that-he's got enough other
      things to worry about without having to worry about what's bothering
      Josh."
      
      "Why doesn't he just ask Josh then?" Donna's voice had an edge to it
      that made Helen wince inside. It was hard to imagine a more
      difficult conversation, but she couldn't see any way out of it. Matt
      had said he needed to know, and what Matt needed really had to come
      before anything else now. Helen had no intention of watching her
      husband worry any more than he had to, no matter how unhappy she
      might be about his having got himself into this terrible job.
      
      "I don't think he knows how, Donna. He's not very good at that sort
      of thing. He's a typical man that way, I'm afraid. Nobody could be
      a bigger fan of Matt's than I am, but I've been married to him for a
      long time, and that's one thing I've learned about him: he's pretty
      clueless when it comes to knowing how to sort things out with someone
      when there's a problem that's personal. You'd think he'd be good at
      it because of what he does, but he's not really a politician, not in
      that way. I think voters respond to him partly because of that: they
      don't feel like he's manipulating them, because truthfully, he
      wouldn't know how. And that's a wonderful thing. But it also means
      that he doesn't always have the-the finesse, I guess-that most
      politicians do, and when something comes up that calls for it, he's
      pretty much lost."
      
      Donna looked away. She felt torn between wanting to protect Josh's
      privacy and an overwhelming desire to explain him to Mrs. Santos and
      the President, to see these people to whom he had already given so
      much-and who were unquestionably going to take so much more from him
      over the next four or maybe eight years-understand why Josh was the
      way he was and what his job sometimes cost him. She was still
      burning from the insults the President had dished out to Josh over
      the business of Toby and the vulcanologist. Josh had been proved
      right, of course, horribly right, and he had said that the President
      had apologized and assured him he trusted him, but from what she had
      been able to dig out of Josh about Matt's actual words, she didn't
      think the President had gone far enough with his apology-not nearly
      far enough.
      
      "Donna," Helen said. "Please. Matt doesn't know how to talk to Josh
      about this. I wouldn't know how to talk to him about it. Neither of
      us really knows him well enough, and I think we need to-Matt
      certainly needs to-if he and Josh are really going to trust each
      other and work well together. And if Matt isn't going to be
      endlessly putting his foot in it and saying something tactless
      without even realizing it," she added, trying for a lighter note.
      Donna didn't smile.
      
      "Josh doesn't need a lot of tact," she said. "God knows he doesn't
      have much himself. He can take correction and rebukes from someone
      like Leo or the President; he takes them better than anyone I've ever
      known. But he does feel them-that's what people don't realize about
      him. When someone he respects has been angry with him, when he's
      been told he's done things wrong, it does affect him. He doesn't get
      angry back, at least not with the President-he never gets angry with
      the person he's working for, he doesn't let himself. I think it
      might be healthier for him if he did."
      
      Helen sat silently, taking that in. "How does it affect him, then?"
      she asked gently, after a minute.
      
      "Lots of ways," Donna said. "But mostly it just ups the pressure
      inside him. He gets angry, all right, but mostly he gets angry with
      himself. He doesn't know how to let up on himself; he never has."
      
      "He seemed to be pretty angry with you last fall, after you joined
      the campaign," Helen said, shrewdly. Donna sighed.
      
      "He was," she said. "He was very angry with me, but I honestly don't
      think he recognized that that's what he was feeling, not until Lou
      stuck us in a room together and told us to work it out, and he blew
      his stack. I don't think he'd let himself think about it like that,
      or call it that."
      
      "Hmmm," Helen said, unconvinced.
      
      "It's complicated," Donna said. "He's a complicated man. Maybe he
      really is angry with the President, Helen, but he'll never
      acknowledge that, not even to himself. He could never admit that he
      was angry with President Bartlet for not telling them about his MS,
      for the mess that put them all into. Josh could have gone to jail
      over that, and he didn't know anything about it at all. But Josh
      would never say that he was angry with President Bartlet about that.
      I've never heard him say that."
      
      "I would never have guessed that," Helen said. "To be honest, I'd
      have said that Josh was someone who spent a lot of his time being
      angry at people. He has that reputation, rather-`Bartlet's bulldog,'
      isn't that what the press used to call him? And he gets so tense and
      keyed-up. He doesn't smile very much."
      
      "He used to," Donna said, sighing, and picking up her glass. It was
      almost empty. They were drinking red wine. She would rather have
      had white, but when your hostess is the First Lady and your boss you
      don't criticize her choice of wines. She didn't actually dislike
      red wine; she just liked white better. This was good wine, too,
      full-bodied, rich, and warm on the tongue. She'd have a headache
      later, which she never got with white, no matter how much she drank
      of it, but knowing that didn't stop her from letting Helen pick up
      the bottle and fill her glass again. "And yes, they called him
      Bartlet's bulldog. But that's because he's so good at bullying
      Congress, especially Republicans. He loves getting mad at
      Republicans, Republicans and Democrats who aren't living up to their
      name. He has no trouble getting angry with them at all."
      
      "You said he was a complicated man."
      
      "He /is/ a complicated man. You said the President isn't a typical
      politician, Helen. Well, Josh isn't a typical politician either.
      He's worked in Washington for a long time, so he's learned that you
      have to make compromises to get things done-to get good things,
      important things done. He's learned that sometimes politicians have
      to sign on to programs that aren't ideal, just because it's the only
      way to see any progress on the issues that matter more. He's learned
      how to do that, and he's learned how to work with congressmen and
      senators and get them to do it, but he's still far more likely to err
      on the side of honesty than of what you're calling finesse. He's had
      to learn the hard way when to keep his mouth shut: he used to blurt
      all kinds of things out that he shouldn't, just because he cared so
      much about the issues he was talking about, the solutions he was
      trying to find, and it seemed so obvious to him that what he was
      saying was right. People often think he's arrogant and egotistical,
      but he's really not; he's just more passionate about what he's doing
      than a lot of people are, and that makes them uncomfortable. He does
      have ideals; he does care about the truth-he cares about it
      passionately, it's what he does all this for. He left Hoynes nine
      years ago and went to work for Governor Bartlet's first campaign
      because he saw that Bartlet was willing to tell people the truth. He
      could have run Hoynes' campaign again last year, he could have run
      Bob Russell's, but he wanted to work for someone he could believe in,
      someone he could trust to care about the issues as much as he does
      and to tell people the truth about them, and he thought your husband
      was a man who would do that and do it well. He takes his work very
      seriously."
      
      She paused, and looked down at her glass, as if she was afraid of
      what Helen would find in her face if she could see it.
      
      "Very seriously," she said, again. "I don't think you really
      understand how seriously Josh takes what he does, or how much it
      costs him sometimes to do it well."
      
      * * *
      
      "Mr. President?"
      
      Matt looked up from the papers on his desk, rubbing his neck
      unconsciously. He was so stiff and so tired, but there was still so
      much to do . . . .
      
      "You're on your way out?" he asked, a flicker of annoyance in his
      voice that he didn't want there but couldn't seem to keep out. Was
      he really the only one who realized how much there was to do?
      
      "Yes," Josh said, quietly. "And you should be too, sir. We'll get
      more done tomorrow if we've had some sleep tonight."
      
      Leo would have died from shock, Josh thought, if he could have heard
      that. He'd have been pleased, though. And Donna would be
      pleased . . . .
      
      "You go then, if you've nothing else to do. I'll go when I'm
      finished here. There's a lot to be got through yet, you know."
      
      Matt's irritation was plainer than before. Josh stood looking at
      him, saying nothing for a minute. Matt was too tired to notice the
      way the other man drew in a long, deep breath, as if steeling himself
      for something he knew was going to be hard to do.
      
      "Mr. President," Josh said firmly, "I know you're not going to like
      this, but-I think you should talk to somebody."
      
      "What?" Matt said.
      
      "Talk to somebody, sir. Somebody who'll be able to help you start
      getting some more sleep."
      
      "I don't think it would be a good idea for me to start taking
      sleeping pills, Josh," Matt snapped, pettishly. "The Joint Chiefs
      might have a problem with that if someone decided to start a war in
      the middle of the night."
      
      "I don't think that would be a good idea either, sir. That's why I
      think you should talk to somebody. Because you really do need to
      start getting some more sleep."
      
      Matt stared at Josh, blinking.
      
      "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" he asked, slowly. Josh
      looked at him steadily.
      
      "I can arrange for someone to talk to you privately, sir. No one
      would ever know. I think it's what you-"
      
      "'Someone'?" Matt said loudly, standing up so suddenly that his chair
      shot back and hit the wall. He hardly noticed. "'Someone'? You
      mean a shrink, don't you? You're saying you think I should see a
      shrink?!?"
      
      He leaned on the desk heavily, breathing hard, as he stared at the
      face of the man in front of him: the man who had told him he
      shouldn't leave public office but should run for President; the man
      who had done more than any other single person to put him in this
      office, with its burdens no one who hadn't sat behind this desk could
      possibly understand; the man who now, apparently, thought Matt was
      unfit for that office, just because he hadn't had a good night's
      sleep.
      
      "A psychiatrist. That's what you're talking about, isn't it? You're
      saying, because I could have used a little more sleep last night, you
      think I should see a psychiatrist!"
      
      Josh took another deep breath.
      
      "It wasn't just last night, sir, you know that. You didn't sleep
      much the night before that, or the night before that, or the night
      before that. In fact, I'd say you haven't slept much for a couple of
      weeks now. Since-"
      
      "Do you remember who you're talking to?" Matt ground out furiously.
      Josh's face was lined with tension; a vein in his temple throbbed.
      But he looked Matt squarely in the eye and said,
      
      "Yes, Mr. President, I do."
      
      "Really? Because I wouldn't have guessed it. You don't sound like
      you think you're talking to the Commander in Chief of the most
      powerful military in the world. You don't sound like you've
      remembered that you're in the Oval Office talking to the President of
      the United States. You sound like you think you're talking to some
      pathetic, self-pitying little whack job who's so afraid of his own
      shadow he can't shave in the morning without whining to some shrink
      about all the things that didn't go right in his childhood, who can't
      get a papercut without getting some kind of post-traumatic stress
      about it too!"
      
      Josh flinched. All the blood seemed to run out of his face, leaving
      it a sickly greyish-white. He dropped his head and shoved his hands
      into his pockets, where Matt could see him clenching and unclenching
      them through the fabric. There was a long, ugly silence. Then he
      lifted his head again. His face was drawn, the myriad little lines
      that had unexpectedly appeared in it gathered around his eyes and his
      mouth, making him look suddenly twenty years older.
      
      "Do you want me to resign, sir?" he asked for the second time in as
      many weeks, in a low, half-strangled voice Matt had never heard
      before.
      
      * * *
      
      Helen looked at Donna steadily over the rim of her glass.
      
      "What do you mean?" she asked. "I do know how hard Josh works; of
      course I do. Matt knows it too. He appreciates it; he really does.
      I know he's told Josh that."
      
      "Josh," Donna said, choosing her words carefully, "would never
      knowingly do anything to betray the President's trust. He would
      certainly never tell the President a lie. I think it hurt him to be
      called a liar. I think it hurt him quite a lot."
      
      "Matt called Josh a liar?"
      
      "Yes."
      
      "When?"
      
      "That afternoon, before the volcano erupted."
      
      "Before you came to dinner?"
      
      Helen remembered how silent both Matt and Josh had been that evening,
      how awkward the little dinner party had been.
      
      "Yes."
      
      "Do you know why?"
      
      "Josh told me the President was angry because Josh hadn't told him
      that the vulcanologist Josh thought he should meet with, Dr. Kaplan,
      had been Toby Ziegler's brother's college roommate, and Toby had
      talked to Josh about him and what he had to say."
      
      "I don't understand. What did Matt think Josh was lying to him
      about?" Helen knew all about the problem of Kaplan and Toby Ziegler;
      she remembered telling Matt he was punishing Josh for something that
      wasn't Josh's fault. She'd told Matt he should apologize. He'd said
      he had.
      
      "Josh told me that the President said-" Donna's voice choked a
      little. She hadn't really realized how angry she was herself about
      what the President had said until Helen had started talking to her
      about it. She took a deep breath and tried again to steady her
      voice. "He said Josh was a liar because he hadn't given him all that
      information about Dr. Kaplan. He said Josh had told a lie of
      omission."
      
      "I'm so sorry, Donna," Helen said. She meant it. "That was-wrong of
      Matt. He told me he'd given Josh a hard time; he didn't tell me
      exactly what he'd said. If he said that . . . I can see why Josh
      would have been angry. But Matt told me he'd apologized."
      
      Donna nodded, her face still tense with all the emotion she was
      trying not to show. "I think he did apologize for not listening to
      Josh's advice and passing Dr. Kaplan's warning on to the Governor of
      Washington, or beginning an evacuation in time to get people out.
      But Josh said the President told him if he ever found out that Josh
      had withheld information from him again, any information, he'd fire
      him."
      
      Oh, dear, Helen thought. Matt had never been very good with
      apologies, but she hadn't thought he'd do as bad a job of it as
      that. And he didn't understand why Josh was acting differently
      around him? But Donna was still talking.
      
      "I don't think Josh is angry with the President, Helen, I really
      don't. Or if he is, it isn't something he realizes he's feeling.
      But he doesn't know what your husband wants him to do. He /can't/
      tell the President everything; that's impossible. It's Josh's job to
      filter what gets through to the President, so your husband can
      concentrate on what he really needs to and doesn't have to be
      distracted by every little thing. Every day, every minute, Josh is
      sorting information, prioritizing it, deciding what the President
      needs to worry about and what he doesn't. He knows how to do that.
      But I think he has no idea now how your husband is going to react to
      his doing that, when he's going to think that Josh has withheld
      something he shouldn't have and be upset about it. Josh can deal
      with the President being angry with him-it hurts him, but Josh
      doesn't let being hurt stop him from doing what he has to do. But to
      be called a liar, to be told he could lose, not just this job he's
      worked so hard for, but any chance of ever doing a job like this
      again, just for doing what he was supposed to be doing-that's so
      unfair. I think Josh feels like he doesn't know how to deliver what
      the President wants and still do what the President really needs.
      He's hurt and he's worried, and when Josh is really hurt or really
      worried, he gets pretty tense, and he pulls into himself. That's
      what the President is seeing. That's what's going on."
      
      Helen nodded, slowly.
      
      "I'm sorry, Donna," she said again. "I shouldn't say this, I
      suppose, but if Matt said all that to Josh, he's been an idiot. I'll
      tell him so."
      
      Donna bit her lip and nodded too.
      
      "Thank you," she said quietly. The two women sat for a minute,
      looking at their empty glasses, lost in thought. Then Helen shook
      herself and sat up.
      
      "Let's have some coffee," she suggested. Donna nodded. Helen went
      to the kitchen, and came back a few minutes later with a coffee tray
      and a bottle of Bailey's. Donna took a cup. It was scalding hot,
      the way she liked it, and the liqueur was smooth, sweet, and strong.
      
      She took another sip, feeling the heat and the buzz rush through
      her. She'd had quite a bit to drink, but she'd always had a pretty
      good head for alcohol, and although she was feeling it, she wasn't
      drunk-not yet. She knew she'd just said more than she would have
      without all the wine, but, thinking about it, she decided she wasn't
      sorry; she thought, on the whole, that it had been important to get
      those things out and understood. She wanted to say more. She
      thought for a minute, sipping her coffee, weighing how much her
      judgment might be being colored by the wine and the liqueur,
      considering how much farther she could safely go.
      
      "At least," she said, after a minute or two, during which both women
      had been sipping their coffee without speaking, "what we were talking
      about-that's part of what's going on."
      
      * * *
      
      "What?" Matt said, staring at his Chief of Staff in bewilderment.
      
      "You don't really want me in this job, sir. I can clear out my
      office and have my resignation on your desk in an hour." And Josh
      turned and started to walk towards the door.
      
      Matt blinked. Josh must be right about the sleep, he thought; he was
      too tired to process what had just happened, how they had got here
      again when here was exactly the place Matt had been most wanting to
      avoid. But what the hell had brought this on, anyway? God damn the
      man, if Matt couldn't even disagree with Josh without him dangling
      his resignation like that-
      
      "God damn it, NO, Josh! What the hell do you think you're doing? I
      thought we'd been through all this. I am NOT asking for your
      resignation; you know I've said I want you in this job. Though if
      you're going to play this sort of game with me every time I don't
      care for your advice, you almost make me wonder if I shouldn't just
      accept your resignation and get it over with. I never thought you
      were such a goddamned diva, Josh; Bartlet and Leo may have been able
      to put up with your temperament, but if you're going to work for this
      President, you're going to have to cut that kind of crap out!"
      
      Josh stared at him for another long minute, his mouth still taut, the
      vein in his temple still pulsing angrily. Then he took a deep breath.
      
      "I-serve at the pleasure of the President, sir," he said,
      quietly. "Do you need anything else tonight, Mr. President?"
      
      Matt rubbed a hand over his head, feeling suddenly exhausted.
      
      "No," he said. "No, not tonight. I-I think I'll go to bed. You
      should too."
      
      "I'll see you in the morning then, sir."
      
      "Yes. Right. Josh-"
      
      But he didn't know what to say. Josh looked at him, his face so
      completely shuttered that Matt could get no help from it at all.
      
      "Yes, Mr. President?"
      
      Matt sighed. He was too tired to sort this out tonight; it would
      have to wait till the morning.
      
      "Good night."
      
      "Good night, Mr. President."
      
      The door to the Chief of Staff's office closed with a quiet click.
      
      * * *
      
      Helen looked up from her coffee, surprised. "There's something
      else?"
      
      Donna looked at her seriously. "There's always something else,
      Helen. Like I've said, Josh is-a complicated man."
      
      Helen knitted her brows together. "Tell me," she said, concern
      evident in her voice.
      
      Donna sipped her coffee thoughtfully, wondering where, exactly, to
      begin.
      
      "Part of the problem," she said, "is that it was Toby." Her voice
      seemed to soften a little when she said that, and she looked almost
      sad, Helen thought.
      
      "Toby Ziegler?" she asked, even though she didn't really need to.
      
      Donna nodded. "It's-I understand why your husband is worried about
      Josh talking too much to Toby, Helen. Josh understands why, too, and
      he won't do it. But-it's hard on him. Harder than you or the
      President can realize."
      
      "Because they're friends?" Helen asked, sympathetically.
      
      Donna hesitated. "Yes, they're friends," she said. "It's
      complicated, though."
      
      Helen smiled, then thought from the look on Donna's face that perhaps
      she shouldn't have.
      
      "You said everything was complicated with Josh," she said,
      apologetically.
      
      Donna still didn't smile. She looked very serious. Helen felt a bit
      bewildered. The Bartlet staff had all been friends, obviously, and
      Toby had been through a difficult time, but she still couldn't
      imagine what there could be about a man she thought of as crusty and
      unappealing to make Donna's voice go soft and to bring that intent
      seriousness to her face.
      
      "Toby and Josh . . . it's hard to explain. They have a few things in
      common, but they're very different, too, and they've sparred with
      each other more than they've ever agreed. Half the time you wouldn't
      even think they liked each other. Especially Toby-when I first met
      them, I really didn't think he liked Josh at all. I'm not sure Toby
      thought so, either."
      
      Helen couldn't help laughing a little at that. She felt a certain
      sympathy with Toby there, though she wasn't going to say so. But
      Donna seemed to read her thoughts. She flushed.
      
      "I know what you're thinking," she said. "I know what Josh can be
      like, how he can seem to someone who doesn't know him. But-you have
      to get to know him, Helen, you have to. He's a difficult man
      sometimes, but he's so good, really, he cares so much about doing the
      right thing, about helping people, making a difference. And he
      doesn't do it for himself. It isn't ambition, not the way people
      think-not ambition for himself. It's just-he knows he can make a
      difference, and it's not even like it's a choice, really, it's
      something he just /has/ to do. He works so hard-I've never seen
      anyone work as hard as Josh does. He never stops and counts what
      it's costing him, never. And it does cost him. He loves it, but
      it's hurt him, this job, and the job he did before, for President
      Bartlet-it's hurt him in so many ways, but he just keeps going,
      because he couldn't live with himself if he let himself stop. If
      he's not out there, in the thick of it, trying to fix things, it
      makes him crazy, watching, seeing all the things that need to be
      done, all the things that would make this country a better place, and
      not being able to try to make them happen. When he was shot-"
      
      She broke off suddenly, and turned her face away, swallowing. Helen
      saw her eyelashes fluttering, the coffeecup trembling in her hand.
      
      "That must have been very hard," she said gently. "You were with him
      then, weren't you?" She meant "working for him," but Donna took it
      differently.
      
      "No," she said, and Helen heard the catch in her voice. "No, I
      wasn't. I should have been. I was always with him, but the
      President was just giving a speech to a bunch of college kids, Josh
      didn't need me for that, he said I could go home. I was so pleased
      because it was an early night for a change and I got to go home. If
      I'd been there-" her voice caught again. She stopped for a minute,
      swallowing hard. When she spoke again her voice was even, though
      Helen could hear the effort it was taking her to keep it that way.
      
      "He was alone," Donna said, looking down at the carpet. "He wasn't
      with the others; he'd come out of the meeting behind them, and he was
      alone. He said later he heard the shots and ran towards them. He
      was trying to get to the President, trying to get to the others, I
      don't know why-to help them, to be with them? What kind of person
      hears gunshots and runs towards them? But Josh does. Josh did. And
      because he did, he got shot. And he was alone. They didn't find him
      right away; they didn't even go looking for him right away. The
      Secret Service put the President in a car and took him away. They
      put Leo in a car and took him away. Sam, C.J., Charlie, they all
      said later they thought Josh was with Leo, but he wasn't, he was
      sitting bleeding his life out somewhere behind them. If Toby
      hadn't . . . . It was Toby who found him. Toby realized Josh wasn't
      there and went looking for him and found him."
      
      "It was Toby?" Helen said, understanding now why Donna's voice took
      on that different note when she said Toby's name.
      
      Donna nodded, not trusting her voice any more.
      
      Except with her family, Helen wasn't a very physical person; she
      didn't like to be touched by people she didn't know well, or to touch
      them. But she found herself putting out a hand now, taking Donna's,
      and squeezing it gently. The two women sat silently, looking at the
      fire, lost in their own thoughts.
      
      * * *
      
      Donna broke the silence first. "Josh is very loyal, Helen. He
      doesn't have a lot of friends, really; he doesn't trust a lot of
      people; but when he does trust you, he's loyal to you. I don't think
      he's any more loyal to Toby than he would have been if he hadn't been
      shot and Toby hadn't found him. He's no more loyal to Toby than he
      is to C.J., or Sam, or . . . or me, really."
      
      "I hope he'd be more loyal to you!" Helen exclaimed, startled.
      Donna's eyes were still a little watery, but she smiled.
      
      "He feels different things for me, of course, but . . .
      fundamentally, I don't think his loyalty IS that different. That's
      why I know I can trust Josh, because being loyal isn't just something
      he's trying to do for me, right now, because he has to, to get me to
      go to bed with him. I've been with men like that; no matter how much
      they say they want you, no matter how much they think they mean it,
      it never works when it's like that, when it's something they're just
      putting on because they have to, and it's not-not part of who they
      are, you know?"
      
      Helen nodded a little. "I know. I've been with men like that too,
      before I met Matt. He was different. I knew right away that he was
      different. I knew I was going to marry him the first time I heard
      him talk about his family. He lived in such a different world than
      they did, he'd come so far from where he'd started-but he was so
      loyal to them, to his mother and his father, to his brothers-and one
      of his brothers is pretty hard to be loyal to. But Matt was. He
      still is. That's why he does all this, I think-in a way, it all
      comes from his loyalty to his family, to his roots. He wants to help
      other families like his-not just Latino families, but other hard-
      working, poor people. He's very loyal to that idea. I'm sure it's
      because he's so loyal to his family."
      
      "Exactly," Donna said. "And if Josh is loyal to his family and his
      friends, Helen, he's ten times-ten thousand times-more loyal to his
      job, to the President he's serving. I've seen him with President
      Bartlet, and I see him with your husband, and I know there's nothing
      more important to him than supporting the President, than serving him
      the best he can. He'll do anything, give up anything-his health, his
      mind, his life, even-not to let the President down. But it's hard on
      him, Helen, to have to give up his friends. He doesn't have very
      many of them, and the ones he has matter a great deal to him. Toby's
      one of them."
      
      "Matt didn't tell Josh he had to stop being friends with Toby, did
      he?" Helen asked, startled. She couldn't imagine her husband telling
      anyone to do that, no matter how angry he was. Though Matt had been
      very angry about Toby Ziegler; Helen still didn't entirely understand
      why he had been so angry, when it was President Bartlet Ziegler had
      betrayed, not him. If betrayal was even the right word for what Toby
      had done-there was a part of Helen that thought "salvation" was a
      better one.
      
      "Not exactly. But I know he told Josh he couldn't talk to Toby about
      anything that happened at work, anything. And that's hard on Josh,
      Helen. Your husband is a young man to be the President, and Josh is
      a young man to be Chief of Staff. He can do it-he can absolutely do
      it-but it would be easier on him if he had people he could talk to
      about it sometimes, people with experience he can trust. And with
      Leo gone, who is there? He has Sam, of course-I'm so glad he has
      Sam. But Sam isn't as experienced as Josh is. There should be C.J.,
      but she's made it clear she really wants to get away from the White
      House right now, and doesn't want to hear too much about it." And
      things were tricky between Josh and C.J., Donna thought, but didn't
      say. Very tricky. "And then-there should be Toby, but now Josh
      can't talk to him either, and that's hard."
      
      "Surely Josh can see why he shouldn't be talking about White House
      matters to Toby Ziegler, Donna."
      
      Helen felt a need to take her husband's part about something in this
      tangled mess he'd managed to make, and while she'd argued with Matt
      about Toby herself, she understood where Matt was coming from and was
      surprised that Donna wouldn't understand it, too.
      
      "But what Josh talked to Toby about had nothing to do with what Toby
      had done," Donna protested, hearing her voice grow a little
      heated. "And just because Toby had leaked one secret doesn't mean
      he would do it again. That was-that was an extraordinary situation.
      Toby did it to save lives-to save those astronauts' lives."
      
      Helen nodded.
      
      "I know," she said. "I really don't understand why President Bartlet
      didn't just send that shuttle up right away. It seemed such an
      obvious thing to do."
      
      "Exactly," Donna said, bitterly. "What good could a `secret military
      shuttle' ever be, anyway? The whole point of a shuttle is to be able
      to use it more than once, but once you use it, it isn't secret
      anymore. There's nothing a military shuttle could do that couldn't
      be done another way-I've heard from-" She stopped, not wanting to
      say outright what Josh's views on the shuttle had been.
      
      Helen nodded again.
      
      "I know," she said. "The regular shuttle carries secret payloads all
      the time, anyway. Everyone knows that." It still baffled her that
      Matt was so furious with Josh for talking to Toby Ziegler, when Matt
      himself had thought at the time that Bartlet had made a bad call in
      not sending the military shuttle up as soon as the astronauts' need
      was known.
      
      "And it wasn't just the astronauts' lives Toby saved-it was the
      entire space program! If they'd died, the country would have been
      outraged. NASA wouldn't have been able to get funding from Congress
      for the next twenty years. Toby's brother was an astronaut, and he
      had just died. What Toby did was-it was wrong, of course, he
      shouldn't have done it, but he'd never done anything like that before
      and I can't imagine him ever doing anything like that again. And
      Josh wasn't telling Toby anything when they talked about Mt. St.
      Helens and about Dr. Kaplan's advice. Toby wasn't asking Josh to
      leak anything to him; he wouldn't-and if he had, Josh wouldn't have
      done it. Toby was trying to tell Josh something Josh needed to know,
      something the President needed to know. Toby knew Kaplan, knew his
      training, knew his career. He knew Kaplan was the man to listen to,
      and Josh knew he could trust Toby not to make that recommendation
      lightly. The President needed to listen to him. And if he had-"
      
      "Matt feels terrible about what happened, Donna." That was one thing
      Helen was certain of. He wasn't talking to her about it, but she was
      quite certain that he was still feeling terrible about the lives that
      had been lost because he hadn't listened to Josh. She thought that
      might be why he was so acutely aware of Josh's moods now, and so
      worried about losing him.
      
      "I'm sure he does. I'm sure he does. But not any worse than Josh.
      He couldn't possibly feel any worse about what happened than Josh
      does."
      
      "It was Matt's call, Donna. Josh gave the advice; Matt didn't listen
      to it. I know Matt's apologized to Josh for that, told him he should
      have listened. It's Matt who has to bear the guilt of not having
      listened, of not having done what he could have to save people's
      lives. He'll always bear the guilt of that. I don't think you or
      Josh can really understand what that's like for him."
      
      Donna looked at the First Lady helplessly. "Oh Helen," she said, a
      catch in her voice. "You really don't know Josh at all, do you?"
      
      * * *
      
      TBC . . .
      
      
      (Notes and disclaimers in my first post)
      
      Josh sat on the couch in his living room, his head tipped back, his
      eyes closed, one hand resting on the seat beside him. His phone was
      in it, but he hadn't used it yet. He was still in his overcoat,
      which he'd unbuttoned but hadn't gotten as far as taking off. He'd
      been sitting like that for a couple of hours, thinking, trying not to
      think . . . .
      
      Finally he sat up. He scrubbed a hand wearily over his face and
      through his hair, then hunched himself forward a little and picked up
      the phone.
      
      There were two calls he needed to make, but it was too late for one
      of them. He'd do that one in the morning-eight o'clock should be all
      right. But right now he had to make the other one. He wanted to and
      he didn't want to. He'd promised to make it, he'd been looking
      forward to it, but now that he was finally finished with this
      gruelling, exhausting day, he wasn't sure that he could bear to. He
      was either going to have to lie to her, which he hated to do and
      which rarely worked, anyway, or he was going to have to go through
      the whole humiliating business all over again, and he hated to have
      her know when he'd been humiliated. And it would hurt her-he knew it
      would hurt her, and he hated the thought of hurting her. But if he
      didn't call she would be worried, and if he didn't tell her now he'd
      have to eventually, and then she'd be hurt anyway, and angry with him
      for not telling her sooner, and really, there was just no good way
      out of this conversation at all.
      
      It flicked across his mind to be angry with the man who had put him
      in this position, but he shut the thought out firmly, the way he
      always did. Matt Santos was the President, and it wasn't his fault
      that Charlie Young had loved Zoe Bartlet or that Zoe had loved him,
      it wasn't his fault that a gang of racist boys had been able to get
      guns when they wanted them, it wasn't his fault that Josh had taken a
      quick trip to the bathroom after President Bartlet's speech to a
      bunch of college kids and had come out of the building after the
      others to hear gunfire and run towards it. It certainly wasn't Matt
      Santos's fault that a little boy had wanted popcorn one winter night
      almost forty years ago when his parents were out, or that a young
      girl had left the burner on under the popcorn maker while her brother
      danced around her like the little clown he'd always been, waving her
      violin bow and making her chase him to get it back. Or that,
      standing in the back yard frozen with horror half an hour later, he'd
      forgotten every single thing they'd practiced at school for their
      fire safety unit-everything except the one thing he'd just done.
      
      The biggest problem with getting diagnosed with PTSD, Josh sometimes
      thought, was the way all that therapy made you remember the things
      you'd almost managed to forget. He took a few more of the deep
      breaths he'd been working on for the last couple of hours, pushed the
      memories back again, and started to dial her cell.
      
      * * *
      
      "Oh, Helen," Donna said, "you really don't know Josh at all, do
      you?"
      
      The First Lady's face changed. "What do you-" she started, but at
      that moment small footsteps pounded down the hall and Miranda
      exploded into the room, crying frantically. Helen got up to soothe
      her and carry her back to bed. Just as she was leaving the room,
      Donna's cell phone rang.
      
      When Helen got back, Donna wasn't sitting on the couch anymore but
      was standing by the fireplace, looking down at the embers glowing in
      the bed of grey, dusty ash.
      
      "Sorry about that," Helen said, cheerfully. "She had a nightmare.
      Something about losing Blankie and Raggedy Old Pooh. Blankie was
      wrapped about her neck and Raggedy Old Pooh was right there in the
      bed; I don't know why she was so upset, unless it's just being in a
      new place. I should have expected it, really. I've put her down in
      my bed and told her I'd sleep beside her later on."
      
      Donna tried to smile, but it didn't reach her eyes. They looked as
      if they were a million miles away. Or perhaps, Helen thought, just
      very tired. It was late, and they had both had a good deal to drink.
      
      "I think I'll go to bed now, Helen," Donna said. Her voice sounded
      as worn out as her eyes looked. "It's been a great day, but . . ."
      
      "Of course," Helen said, sympathetically. "You look exhausted."
      
      Donna nodded.
      
      "I am, I guess. I-" Her voice caught. She blinked, and looked back
      down at the fire. Helen realized suddenly that she was on the verge
      of tears.
      
      "Donna," she said gently. "What's happened? Is something the
      matter?"
      
      Donna shook her head, still looking at the fire, still looking as if
      she were blinking back tears.
      
      "I'm-okay," she said. "Everything's-okay. I'm just-tired, I
      guess." Helen didn't believe a word of it.
      
      "All right," she said, reluctantly. "Can I get you anything?"
      
      "No thanks. I just want to get to bed."
      
      "Okay. Good night, then." Helen watched as the younger woman made
      her way almost blindly across the room.
      
      "Donna," she called out, just as Donna was opening the door.
      
      "Yes, Helen?" Donna turned around, wearily.
      
      "It was Josh calling, wasn't it? Just as I went out with Miranda?"
      
      Donna looked at her for a long minute, then nodded, looking more worn
      out than before.
      
      "Yes," she said, her voice barely audible. "Yes, it was Josh."
      
      Helen looked back, weighing her various obligations as employer,
      hostess, wife and-though it was still new to her to think of Donna
      this way-friend. When was it better to make someone talk even though
      they didn't want to, and when was it better to leave them alone?
      She looked at the stiffness in the other woman's posture, the
      tiredness and-yes, she could see it now-the misery in her face. She
      thought about her own natural reticence, and how much like her Donna
      seemed to be that way. Then she thought about Matt, about his
      sleepless nights, about the tiredness-the exhaustion-in his face when
      he'd kissed her goodbye that morning. About the monumental
      responsibility he'd taken on when he'd put his hand on the Bible
      she'd held for him and said the words of the oath of office; about
      the people whose lives would depend on the decisions he would make,
      and about what he'd told her about his need to know his Chief of
      Staff better so he and Josh could work together better, about his
      fears that he was going to lose Josh and be left without the guidance
      and support he needed to do his job.
      
      "Donna," she said finally, in the firmest tones she could summon up,
      not wanting her hesitation to show through, "what is it I don't
      understand about Josh?"
      
      * * *
      
      Matt felt as if he were moving through a fog as he made his way up to
      the Residence, his agents trailing behind him. He couldn't stop
      replaying the scene that had just taken place in his office: Josh
      suggesting he should see a psychiatrist, Matt objecting, Josh trying
      to resign. When he thought about the things Josh had said-more, the
      things he had implied-Matt could feel his pulse quickening and his
      temper flaring even now. But at the same time, he was uncomfortably
      aware that he wouldn't have wanted a stranger to have heard his
      response-and while Josh was no stranger, he was a long way from being
      an old friend who could be trusted to understand, either. Someone
      who didn't know Matt well might have thought-God, Josh wouldn't have
      thought Matt was belittling the problems of veterans, would he? Matt
      was a vet himself; Josh should know he would never do that. It had
      been the other way around-it was partly because Josh had been
      exaggerating the importance of little things and trying to make them
      somehow equivalent to serious ones that he'd reacted the way he had.
      To say that a healthy man should see a psychiatrist when he was
      simply a little short of sleep was to trivialize the treatment and
      the conditions it was really needed for-to trivialize the very real
      trauma of the men and women who'd fought for their country under
      terrifying conditions and seen terrible things. Their suffering was
      real, and required real professional help. Matt's problems were
      nothing like theirs. Even the suggestion that he might need anything
      like the same kind of treatment they did was an insult to them-and to
      him, too.
      
      Matt didn't say goodnight to his agents when he walked into the
      Residence, but closed the door behind him and stood in the middle of
      the spacious living room, looking around him. There were no lights
      on; the only illumination came from the windows, giving the room a
      greyish, otherworldly look. He hardly recognized it: he felt as if
      he was on a movie set, on a stage or in a dream, not in his own
      living room-this vast space with that dramatic, famous window at the
      end of it that he'd seen in so many photos and movies without ever
      imagining that it would one day be his. As much as anything here
      could really be said to be his. Normally he didn't question his
      right to this place, this job, but tonight all he could think was
      that surely this wasn't where he was supposed to be. He'd gotten
      onto the wrong elevator, stumbled into the wrong set of rooms. They
      seemed so wrong, so quiet, so empty. And they were quiet and empty,
      with Helen and the children gone. Matt hadn't spent a night here by
      himself before. He hadn't really thought about what it would be
      like, when she'd said she wanted to take the kids to Camp David for
      the weekend so they could get some fresh air and she could maybe get
      a chance to talk to Donna about the things Matt had been worrying
      about, about Josh . . . .
      
      Josh. Matt had a sudden image of Josh's face as he offered, for the
      second time in as many weeks, to resign: it had been grey and drawn,
      like the face of an old man. Matt had no idea why Josh had reacted
      so strongly, though he had a vague, uneasy sense that he ought to be
      able to figure it out. But he couldn't seem to put one thought after
      another in a logical way anymore; all he could do was look around him
      at this living room and think vague, aimless thoughts about the
      Kennedys sitting for photographs in front of that window, and the
      Bartlets, and how the security lights outside made the room look as
      cold and grey as Josh's face. Ashen, Matt thought now-like the room,
      like everything around Matt these days, Josh had looked like he'd
      turned to ash.
      
      And if that wasn't a crazy, irrational thought for the President of
      the United States to be wasting time on, Matt didn't know what would
      be. Maybe Josh was right, maybe he did need to see a shrink. But
      damn it-his temper flared hotly for a minute at the thought, then
      died back again. Or sleep. Maybe he just needed some sleep.
      
      He forced himself to move. He walked through the dimly-lit rooms,
      feeling more and more tired with every step. By the time he reached
      their bedroom he was too far gone even to think about how empty it
      felt with Helen away. He dropped his clothes in a heap on the floor
      and all but fell onto the bed. He was asleep almost before his head
      hit the pillow.
      
      * * *
      
      The two women sat facing each other, curled up like children on the
      big couch. The fire had died down, leaving only a few dusky, glowing
      coals. The room felt chilly without its warmth, but neither woman
      noticed, or reached for the Pendleton blankets that were draped
      invitingly across the cushions behind them.
      
      "Oh Donna," Helen said at last, her voice a little choked. "Matt
      doesn't know that. I'm sure Matt doesn't know any of that. If he
      did, he would have understood . . . ."
      
      Her voice trailed off. Donna stared at her in bewilderment.
      
      "He must know," she said. "How could he possibly not know? It's all
      in Josh's security file."
      
      * * *
      
      Matt woke to find sunlight filling the room. He blinked. He wasn't
      used to seeing sunlight when he woke up. Even after a good night he
      was usually up before dawn, and lately . . . . He rolled over, looked
      at the clock, and blinked again. That couldn't be right. That
      couldn't possibly be right.
      
      "Stevie!" he shouted, pushing himself to a sitting position and then
      swinging his legs out of the bed. "Stevie!"
      
      Stevie Harper, the President's bodyman, opened the door.
      
      "Yes, sir?" he said politely.
      
      "Stevie, what were you thinking of, letting me sleep in so late? I
      should have been up hours ago."
      
      "Mr. Lyman told me not to wake you, sir."
      
      "I was supposed to be meeting with Harrison-"
      
      "Mr. Lyman took care of that, sir. He said you needed to sleep."
      
      Matt shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. He wanted to
      lash out at someone for treating him like a baby, but he didn't want
      to snap at Stevie. Or at Josh, he thought, remembering with a
      sinking feeling the scene in his office last night. Josh had tried
      to resign again. Somehow the very thing he'd most wanted to avoid
      had happened, and Josh had tried to resign again. Matt had refused
      to let him, of course, but he was going to have to sort out what had
      happened there. He couldn't let things get to that point again. A
      surge of anger welled up in him that Josh would have done that
      again. It felt like some kind of power game, like a kind of
      blackmail, almost. Except . . . .
      
      Except that Matt was remembering now what Josh had said, and what
      he'd said, and how Josh had looked when he said it, and he knew Josh
      had been entirely serious and not playing games at all. And while he
      still felt a flicker of fury at what Josh had suggested, he also had
      a sinking feeling that perhaps his response had been less than
      ideal.
      
      Matt sighed, and leaned against the window frame, stretching, then
      straightened up and stood still, looking out. He was still tired,
      but his head felt clearer than it had for a couple of days now. He
      really had needed that sleep; Josh had been right about that, at
      least. And perhaps Matt had been, if not wrong, then at least not as
      unquestionably right in his anger at Josh as he had wanted to believe
      last night. He could be more honest with himself this morning, and
      he had to admit that his outburst at his Chief of Staff had had very
      little to do with any conscious thoughts about veterans with PTSD and
      their entitlement to special treatment and respect, and a lot more to
      do with Matt's own pride and his need to be seen as strong and
      capable and in control, able to handle with ease the demands of his
      incredibly demanding job. And that was foolish. He'd never worried
      much before about what other people thought of him; he could hardly
      afford to start now. He'd told himself he could do this job, and he
      could. It really shouldn't matter what Josh Lyman thought of him.
      He needed Josh's advice, he'd told Helen he needed to understand the
      man and to have Josh understand him, but he didn't need Josh's
      admiration or approval to do the job Josh had persuaded him to run
      for. It was just that it had stung, to realize that a man whose life
      had always been smoothed and cushioned by class and money and Ivy
      League connections thought that Matthew Santos wasn't able to get
      through a few sleepless nights without running to a shrink to whine
      about it . . . .
      
      "Mr. President, sir?"
      
      "Yes, Stevie?"
      
      "Mrs. Santos called, sir. She told me to tell you to call her as
      soon as you were up."
      
      "Okay," Matt said, smiling a little. Then he frowned.
      
      "Everything's okay up there, isn't it?" They'd have woken him if
      there'd been any problem, surely. But still . . . .
      
      "Yes, sir. Mrs. Santos said she and the children were having a good
      time. But she wanted to talk to you as soon as possible."
      
      "Okay," Matt said again. "I'll call her now."
      
      He was just reaching for the phone when Stevie knocked on the door
      again.
      
      "Mr. President? There's someone else on the line that you might want
      to talk to first."
      
      "Who is it, Stevie?"
      
      "Former President Bartlet, sir."
      
      * * *
      
      "Good morning, Mr. President." Jed Bartlet's voice on the other end
      of the line was relaxed and jovial. In spite of his worries about
      last night and about Helen and her urgent need to talk to him, Matt
      smiled.
      
      "I could say the same to you, sir. In the very same words."
      
      "It's a club, you know. We could write letters in the nuclear codes
      and trade secret decoder rings. But please skip the title; that's a
      foolish formality. It's just Jed now. Certainly to you."
      
      "In that case, you'd better call me Matt, sir."
      
      The voice on the other end of the line laughed. "Oh, no," it
      said. "I had to put up with being Mr. President to everyone except
      my wife and daughters for eight years; you'll have to put up with it
      too, President Santos."
      
      Matt shook his head a little, still smiling. "Surely Leo let up on
      you in private, didn't he?"
      
      "Leo? He was the worst of the lot. My oldest friend, and he
      absolutely refused to call me anything but Mr. President and Sir,
      from the day I took office, till-" There was a pause, and then Jed
      went on in a softer voice. "I was really looking forward to hearing
      my name from him again."
      
      "I'm so sorry, sir," Matt answered quietly. "I was really looking
      forward to working with him as my V.P. It's a great loss."
      
      "Yes. It is. But Baker is a good man; you'll do well with him."
      
      "Yes, we will, but still-Leo-I feel responsible, you know. If he
      hadn't had the strain of the campaign-"
      
      "No," Jed said firmly. "Don't think that. Leo wasn't doing anything
      he didn't want to do; you could never get Leo to do anything he
      didn't want to do. He was having the time of his life."
      
      "Thank you. That's good of you to say."
      
      "It's the truth. It's what I've told Josh, more than once. He'll
      never really believe it, of course, but it's the truth just the same."
      
      Josh. Matt stirred uncomfortably. He was trying to think what to
      say, when Bartlet continued.
      
      "I was lucky to have Leo. I couldn't have managed without him those
      first years. But C.J. did a wonderful job when he had to step down.
      And Josh would have done a great job, too."
      
      Josh again. Matt opened his mouth, but Bartlet seemed to be in a
      meditative mode on the other end of the line, and not inclined to
      give his successor time to say much at all.
      
      "If Leo hadn't had other ideas, I would have asked Josh. But it's
      just as well I didn't; he would have done it, and then he wouldn't
      have gone looking for you."
      
      Matt smiled a little. "I'm glad you didn't then, sir."
      
      "Yes, it's a good thing I didn't. But I would have, you know; he's
      grown a lot over the last few years, and he would have done a fine
      job for me. As I'm sure he's doing a fine job for you."
      
      "President Bartlet-"
      
      "Jed."
      
      "It's very nice to hear from you, of course, but-if you don't mind my
      asking-is there a particular reason why you called just now?"
      
      Jed laughed quietly.
      
      "You're not going to tell me you've got a meeting to get to? Your
      Chief of Staff told me you'd have some time this morning."
      
      "You spoke to Josh first?"
      
      "Actually, Josh spoke to me first. He asked if I'd talk to you about
      some of my experiences in the role you're occupying now. I said I'd
      be glad to. I know it can seem as if nobody else could ever
      understand what you're having to deal with, but in fact there are one
      or two other people still alive who do know what it's like."
      
      Matt was silent.
      
      "It's a pretty exclusive club we belong to, Mr. President, and we few
      members need to do our best to look out for each other. There are
      some things it's helpful to know and nobody else can tell you. The
      staff knows about some of them-Josh certainly does-but they don't
      feel comfortable telling the secrets of one President to another."
      
      "Secrets, sir?" Matt said, wondering if they really were going to
      talk about the nuclear codes or Cracker-Jack-box decoder rings.
      
      "There's a lot of stress involved in the job you've taken on,
      President Santos; a lot of stress. Difficult decisions that leave
      you wondering afterwards if you've done the right thing, and when
      lives are involved, a lot of guilt sometimes, too. We're both
      Catholics; we know a thing or two about guilt, don't we? Though
      we're not the only ones; the Jews know how to do it quite thoroughly,
      too. I have a pretty good idea what you've probably been going
      through these last couple of weeks. And I thought you should know
      what I did to help me deal with those kinds of feelings once. It was
      actually Toby Ziegler who told me what I needed to do, and I was
      pretty angry with him when he first suggested it . . . ."
      
      * * *
      
      Matt Santos sat in the chair by the window in his bedroom, the phone
      dangling from his hand. He was looking out at the heavy sky, the
      trees still brown and bare, the few straggling efforts at blossoms in
      the garden below. The morning light had a grey, filtered look, as it
      had every day since the volcano erupted, but for the first time in
      the past two and a half weeks it no longer struck him as making
      everything it touched look as if it was coated in a film of ash.
      
      He felt better. There was no denying that he felt better than he had
      in days-in weeks, really. Possibly better than he had any time since
      his Inauguration. There was no denying that it had been very helpful
      to talk to someone who understood what he'd been having to deal with,
      who had been there himself and knew exactly what the burden of
      responsibility was like. Talking could never take that burden away,
      but it eased it. Perhaps what helped was simply the realization that
      he wasn't entirely alone.
      
      And yet there was something still troubling him, something he hadn't
      felt able to share with Jed Bartlet, although he'd had the feeling
      several times during the conversation that Bartlet was creating
      opportunities for him to bring it up. Yesterday Matt would have
      rushed to the conclusion that Josh must have told Jed how strained
      the new President's relationship with his Chief of Staff had become.
      Today Matt was pretty sure he hadn't. But Jed Bartlet was a wise and
      experienced man, and had undoubtedly been able to glean a great deal
      from both Josh's manner and Matt's own, without either of them
      mentioning the difficulties they were having with each other at all.
      
      Matt sighed. Perhaps he should have talked to Bartlet about it.
      Bartlet had said quite a bit about Josh, one way or another, some of
      it humorous, all of it complimentary. Bartlet clearly knew Josh in
      the ways Matt didn't. He had known Josh much longer than Matt had,
      of course, and Josh had been close to Leo, and Leo had been close to
      Jed. Leo . . . . Matt sighed again. Things might have been so
      different, if only Leo hadn't died. Leo would have told him things
      about Josh, helped him understand the man, and Matt would have felt
      less reluctance confiding in him about his new Chief of Staff than he
      did with Jed. It was odd that he could talk to the former President
      about how difficult he'd found the loss of life from the volcano
      disaster to deal with, and yet he couldn't quite bring himself to
      admit that he didn't know whether he really liked or trusted his new
      Chief of Staff, and was afraid his new Chief of Staff neither liked
      nor trusted him.
      
      The phone in his hand rang. He saw the number and hit "Talk."
      Helen's voice came clearly out of it, ringing with exasperation.
      
      "Matthew Santos," she said, "for goodness' sake, if you wanted to
      understand Josh Lyman, why didn't you read his security file?"
      
      * * *
      
      "Josh."
      
      Matt stood in the door that led from the Oval to his Chief of Staff's
      office. Josh looked up, startled, and stood at once.
      
      "Mr. President."
      
      Matt studied the face of the man in front of him. It looked a lot
      like the one he'd been seeing in the mirror every morning for the
      past week or so. Josh had made sure Matt had had a good night's
      sleep last night; he didn't look as if he'd had much himself.
      Knowing what he knew now, Matt wondered if Josh had really been
      getting any more sleep than he had since the volcano disaster. If
      that was the case, Josh had been handling it better, but perhaps the
      man was just more used to it; he had more reason to be.
      
      Matt held up the thick file folder he'd brought with him.
      
      "I just read this."
      
      Josh went very still.
      
      "Sir?"
      
      "Your security folder, Josh. I hadn't looked at it before."
      
      "Sir-I-I thought-I asked you-I told you-"
      
      "You told me to read it, Josh. You reminded me about it several
      times. Don't worry; I remember."
      
      Josh's face relaxed ever so slightly, but Matt could see the wariness
      in his eyes still.
      
      "I'm afraid I ignored you," he continued. "Kazakhstan, the
      transition-you know how many other things there were to worry about.
      I had a lot on my mind; I didn't think I needed to spend time looking
      at what the F.B.I. and the Secret Service had to say about a man
      who'd had daily access to President Bartlet for more than seven
      years, and who only left the White House when he agreed to run my
      campaign."
      
      "I'm sorry, sir." Josh hunched his shoulders a little. Matt could
      see the tension in every line of his body. "I should have sat down
      with you to discuss it. I should have made sure that you were aware
      of everything in there, that you understood the implications . . . ."
      
      "Josh," Matt said quietly, but Josh didn't seem to hear him.
      
      "I'm sorry, Mr. President," he continued, his face as grey and lined
      as it had been last night. "I should have done that. It's something
      I don't enjoy talking about, that I don't much like people knowing
      about, and I guess I find it hard to discuss. I knew I should be
      talking to you about it, but-I didn't want to have to, so I thought I
      could deal with it by letting you read the folder instead. It was an
      inexcusable omission. I'll start on my letter of resignation now."
      
      "Josh," Matt said again, smiling a little to try to set Josh at ease,
      although there was nothing in the situation he found amusing, least
      of all his own part in it, "Josh, that's not necessary at all. As I
      think I've told you once or twice before, if you offer me your
      resignation, I won't accept it. I asked you to be my Chief of Staff
      because I couldn't think of a better man for the job. Nothing in
      this folder and nothing you've done or haven't done has changed my
      mind about that at all. And you don't have to apologize. It's I who
      should be apologizing to you. What I said to you last night was
      disgraceful. There's nothing for you to be ashamed of in having PTSD
      or having received psychiatric treatment for it. The best I can say
      for myself is that I was exhausted last night, and furious at the
      idea of your thinking that I wasn't handling the stress of my job
      well. You were right, of course-I wasn't. I don't think I have been
      for some time."
      
      "Sir, the Presidency is an enormously stressful job. The
      responsibility, the pressures-no one, no matter how capable or how
      strong he is, can really be prepared for those. You've been doing a
      fine job, and I know you're going to do an even finer one-I wouldn't
      have asked you to run if I hadn't been convinced of that. But you
      can't do it entirely by yourself. You have to have people to lean
      on, people you trust. I want to be one of those people for you, but
      I don't know how much-I've been unsure all along how much you really
      trust me. I thought there might be someone else who could help you
      more than I can, a professional who's experienced in counseling
      people in highly stressful jobs, for instance, who knows how to talk
      to someone about the issues that come along with this kind of
      responsibility. I was never suggesting that you have any kind of-
      psychiatric disorder, or problem. You're just in a new situation
      with enormous responsibilities attached to it, and you need to figure
      out how to balance those with your own needs in-in an emotionally
      healthy way. It's not a weakness in this situation to want that
      kind of help. And it's been done before."
      
      "Yes," Matt said. "Yes, Jed Bartlet told me that it had."
      
      Josh smiled a little. "Did he call you, then?"
      
      "This morning. I gather I have you to thank for that."
      
      "I didn't tell him anything, sir, only that I thought you might find
      it helpful to talk to someone else who's sat at that desk in that
      office, and had to make some of the same kinds of decisions you're
      having to."
      
      "It was helpful, Josh. Thank you for asking him."
      
      "It's my job to try to make yours easier, sir. Even if that
      sometimes means making suggestions you don't like."
      
      "I know that, Josh. I didn't remember it last night, but I do know
      that. I apologize again for what I said last night, and for making
      your job so difficult sometimes. I'm not an easy man to help, I'm
      afraid."
      
      Josh smiled.
      
      "That's all right, sir. I've been told I'm pretty difficult to help
      myself, sometimes."
      
      Matt smiled too. Then he grew serious again.
      
      "Josh," he said, "I don't want to intrude. But there are a couple of
      questions I need to ask you, now that I've finally read this folder."
      
      "Of course, sir," Josh said, the lightness gone from his voice
      again. "Whatever you want to discuss."
      
      "Do you mind if I sit down?" the President waved at one of the
      armchairs in the room. Josh looked startled.
      
      "Of course not. You don't have to ask me for permission, sir."
      
      "Come and join me."
      
      "Of course, sir."
      
      Josh sat down awkwardly across from the President. He wasn't used to
      talking to Matt in his own office instead of in the Oval or one of
      Matt's private ones, here or, occasionally, upstairs in the
      Residence. Matt leaned forward, cleared his throat, and gestured to
      the file.
      
      "It says here that you haven't had a major episode of PTSD-a
      flashback-for several years. Is that right?"
      
      "That's right, sir. The records are all there. I've kept them up to
      date."
      
      "Have you had any other effect from the condition that you've had to
      deal with since I've known you? Since we took office, especially?"
      
      Josh shrugged.
      
      "There are effects I deal with all the time, sir. They're more
      pronounced at some times than at others. I know how to handle them;
      they don't affect my performance on the job. Or at least, that's
      what I think. Several top psychiatrists have agreed with me; you'll
      find their reports in that folder."
      
      "Yes," Matt said. "I read those. I know PTSD is considered
      incurable-you can learn how to manage it but you're never going to be
      entirely free from it, or that's what medical science believes now.
      It's a stress disorder, so you suffer from increased stress
      reactions, of course, which you handle with a combination of
      medication and relaxation techniques. But it can't be pleasant to
      deal with, and I imagine it takes quite a toll on you, physically and
      emotionally; I know what the stress I've been under has felt like,
      and I certainly don't have PTSD. I'm sure you know how to handle
      it. I didn't ask about it because I was worried about your ability
      to do the job; I'm not. I was really wondering what kind of hell
      I've managed to put you through over the past year or so, and
      especially the last couple of weeks. It's occurred to me that I've
      asked an awful lot of you, and I haven't always been exactly
      considerate about the way I've asked it."
      
      Josh flushed.
      
      "This is a job I wanted to do, sir. You haven't asked anything from
      me that I haven't been prepared to do."
      
      "I know that, Josh. And I'm grateful for it-that's something I don't
      say often enough, how grateful I am for everything you've done for
      me, and everything you're still doing. But there are limits, or
      there should be. If you suffer from a stress disorder, I should have
      been taking that into account, instead of letting you work yourself
      into the ground, first on the campaign and then during the
      transition. I don't want you ending up having a heart attack, Josh,
      or a stroke, either now or after we leave office."
      
      "I can do the work, sir."
      
      "I know you can. But I can be a little more considerate about the
      way I treat you when you're doing it. Can you honestly tell me that
      you haven't been having any kind of stress reaction to the way I
      handled that business about the volcano, or the way I've been barking
      at you for the last couple of weeks since?"
      
      Josh looked down and scuffed at an imaginary spot on the carpet with
      his foot.
      
      "I-sir-"
      
      "Can you, Josh? I know you didn't lie to me about Dr. Kaplan or Toby
      Ziegler; don't start now, please."
      
      Josh looked up, then away.
      
      "No, sir," he said, almost inaudibly. "I can't say that. But that's
      part of my job. I can deal with it."
      
      "You shouldn't have to, damn it, Josh! It shouldn't be part of your
      job; it doesn't have to be. And I'm going to make sure it isn't in
      the future, even if that means humbling myself enough to take your
      advice and talk to someone professional about the stress I've been
      feeling myself. Although, to be honest, I think President Bartlet
      might have been the professional I really needed to talk to most."
      
      Josh looked up and smiled a little then.
      
      "I'm glad, sir," he said. "I thought he might help."
      
      "You thought right. He said I could call him any time; I think I'll
      take him up on it. But Josh-"
      
      "Yes, sir?"
      
      "My behavior isn't the only reason you've been under a lot of stress
      these past two weeks, is it?"
      
      Josh looked away again.
      
      "What do you mean, sir?"
      
      "Sam told you about the child, didn't he? About the mother we saw at
      the Red Cross shelter out in Washington, whose daughter had inhaled
      ash and died?"
      
      Josh looked back and met the President's eyes, uncomfortably.
      
      "Yes, sir. He thought I should know that you'd been-distressed about
      it."
      
      "I was. I was very distressed about it. I still am. I'm a father;
      I have a son and a daughter. And if anything ever happened to
      Miranda or Peter . . . ."
      
      "Yes, sir. I understand, sir."
      
      "Yes, you do, don't you, Josh? But-I'm almost ashamed to admit this-
      I didn't think you did. I didn't think you could."
      
      "You don't have to have children to care about them, sir."
      
      "No, of course, you don't. That wasn't what I meant, though."
      
      "What did you mean, sir?"
      
      "I'm afraid I've been guilty of making assumptions, Josh.
      Assumptions about you, because I don't really know you very well-
      about your life, based on the kind of life I just assumed someone who
      grew up where you did and went to the schools you did and had a
      father who worked for the law firm yours did would have had. I
      should know better than that, but I didn't."
      
      "I'm not sure I'm quite following you, sir."
      
      "President Bartlet wasn't the only person I talked to this morning,
      Josh. Helen called, too. It seems she and Donna spent last night
      getting drunk and talking about us."
      
      "Oh, no." Josh leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes in
      horror that was only partly mock. "This can't be good."
      
      "No, it's probably pretty bad, but it was bound to happen sooner or
      later, you know. I don't know what Helen said about me-you can get
      that out of Donna when you see her this afternoon-but Donna told her
      a few things about you that made some parts of the psychiatrists'
      reports I read in your security file make a lot more sense than they
      would have otherwise."
      
      Josh opened his eyes, any trace of amusement gone. He glanced up
      into Matt's dark, sympathetic ones and flicked his own away again,
      looking out the window, then down at the carpet, then out the window
      again.
      
      "I didn't know about your sister, Josh. I'm sorry I didn't."
      
      "That's all right, sir," Josh said softly. "It was a long time ago."
      
      "She died of smoke inhalation?"
      
      Josh nodded, still looking out the window.
      
      "When Helen told me about that, and I read those reports, and thought
      about what Sam must have told you about that business at the shelter
      in Washington, I realized that you've probably had a lot more to deal
      with than I have, these past two weeks. And I'm sorry, Josh. I just
      wanted to tell you that I'm sorry. I'm sorrier than I can say that I
      didn't take your advice and listen to Dr. Kaplan; I'm desperately
      sorry that that woman's daughter died because of it; and I regret
      deeply that I haven't been more sensitive to what you must have been
      feeling about that, too. It wasn't your fault, Josh. It was my
      call, not yours, and I made the wrong one. You did everything you
      could have to try to convince me to do what I should have done; there
      wasn't anything you left out, anything you should have done
      differently. If it's anybody's fault it's mine, not yours. I hope
      you know that."
      
      Josh dropped his head for a minute, then looked back at the man in
      front of him.
      
      "If I'd told you how I'd heard about Dr. Kaplan, sir-if I'd told you
      from the start that Toby had recommended him-and hadn't left you to
      find that out by yourself, if that hadn't taken you by surprise at a
      bad moment-would that have made a difference?"
      
      Matt looked into his Chief of Staff's face and saw everything there
      that he'd been afraid he would. And he'd thought he'd had a bad
      couple of weeks. He kicked himself mentally, hard, for putting a man
      like Josh, with his unique vulnerabilities, through what he'd
      obviously been through recently.
      
      "Honestly, Josh? No, I doubt it would have. I'd have gotten steamed
      up about Toby Ziegler and stayed that way no matter when I found out;
      I wasn't prepared to be rational on the subject at all. And that's
      something else I've got to apologize for-that, and that tirade I
      treated you to about lies of omission. Helen gave me a good blast
      about all that, too-I guess Donna told her about it. You can't
      possibly tell me everything, Josh, I do realize that. There's no
      reason you should have told me that Ziegler had recommended Kaplan,
      and I had no business to call you a liar over it. Quite frankly, I'm
      surprised you didn't hand me your resignation then and there and
      refuse to take no for an answer."
      
      "I wouldn't do that, sir. I serve at the pleasure of the President:
      as long as you want me working for you, I'll be there working for
      you. You can count on that."
      
      "Thank you, Josh. That's important to me. I realized a couple of
      things last night, and while I was talking to Jed Bartlet this
      morning, and that was one of them: I realized how much I need to know
      that I can depend on you. Helen's kept asking me why I was on such a
      rampage about Toby Ziegler, when at the time of the incident I'd
      thought Bartlet should have sent that shuttle up as soon as it was
      needed-it was useless as a military weapon anyway, and it didn't give
      us any real capabilities we didn't have in other forms already. But
      even if it hadn't been, I thought it was wrong not to use it to save
      lives."
      
      "I won't talk to Toby about anything that goes on here, sir. I told
      you I wouldn't, and I won't."
      
      "It wasn't about Toby, Josh. That's what I realized this morning.
      What I was angry about was never really about Toby Ziegler at all."
      
      "I don't understand, sir."
      
      "Don't you? It was about you, Josh. It was about the fact that I
      don't know you the way I need to. I don't know you the way Jed
      Bartlet knew Leo, I don't even know you the way Bartlet knew Toby
      Ziegler, and at some level, I was afraid that one day I'd wake up and
      find you'd turned on me the way I thought Ziegler had turned on him."
      
      Josh's eyes went wide.
      
      "I would never do that, sir. Never. You have my absolute word of
      honor-"
      
      "It's all right, Josh," Matt said, waving his hand in the air a
      little as if to clear it. "I don't need it. I know you wouldn't. I
      had a long talk with Bartlet this morning. He said you don't leave
      people. He told me a bit about what you said to him when you left
      the White House to come to work for me, about how hard that was for
      you, and how, if he hadn't been prepared to give you his blessing, he
      didn't think you could have done it. And he said some other things
      too, things about Ziegler and what he thought the man was trying to
      do and why; and basically, if he can forgive Toby Ziegler and say
      that leak isn't something the man would do again, I guess I can
      too."
      
      "President Bartlet said he knew Toby wouldn't do it again?"
      
      "He said he knew Toby had just lost his astronaut brother, and he
      thought that had a lot to do with it. He said he'd realized that
      Toby was trying to save the astronauts and the space program and
      maybe the world from broken treaties and the militarization of
      space. And he said he'd come to realize that Toby was also trying to
      save him."
      
      "Toby was trying to save President Bartlet?" Josh looked puzzled.
      
      "From himself, Bartlet said, or something like that. He said he's
      glad now Toby did it. He doesn't know why he didn't make that choice
      himself, and he's glad he doesn't have to be living with the regrets
      he knows he'd have about it, with those men's lives on his conscience
      now. He said it took him a while to get around to seeing things that
      way-that he almost didn't sign Toby's pardon, he was still so angry
      with him for going behind his back like that-but that a few months'
      retirement had done wonders for his sense of perspective."
      
      Josh smiled.
      
      "I'm-that's wonderful, sir. That's the best news I've heard in a
      long time."
      
      "Apparently Abbey helped. And the season."
      
      "The season?" Josh asked, sounding pleased but confused.
      
      "Lent, Josh. Apparently Abbey told President Bartlet he should try
      giving up self-righteousness for Lent."
      
      Josh actually threw back his head and laughed.
      
      "That sounds like Mrs. Bartlet," he said. "She never puts up with
      any guff from anybody, not even the President."
      
      "Helen told me something remarkably similar this morning, Josh: she
      told me to stop being such an ass, thinking I can't trust anyone
      unless I know them like an old friend, and I can't get to know anyone
      as a new friend because I'm the President now and I can't afford to
      let anyone think I'm less than perfect. She told me it was obvious
      to everyone that I was a lot less than perfect anyway, and the longer
      I went on trying to pretend anything different, the more obvious it
      would be."
      
      "And I thought only Donna said things like that. Donna, and Abbey
      Barlet."
      
      "Donna, and Abbey, and Helen-they're three women who don't mince
      words."
      
      "I don't want to think about what Donna's going to tell me to do for
      Lent, sir."
      
      "You're lucky you're Jewish; she can't tell you to do anything for
      Lent."
      
      "I'm lucky she's Protestant, you mean; if she told me I had to do
      something for Lent I'd probably have to do it, Jewish or not, but
      those church calendar things aren't really a part of her world view.
      Or they haven't been, up till now."
      
      "Watch out, Josh. If she spends much more time drinking with Helen,
      her world view may change."
      
      "Or Helen's will. I mean, Mrs. Santos's, sir."
      
      "She'd like you to call her Helen, Josh. You know, I've been trying
      to think how to say this without sounding like a high-school girl,
      but-there's something else I've realized over the past couple of
      weeks, Josh, that I wanted to say."
      
      "What's that, sir?"
      
      "There's one other professional I want to be able to talk to, even
      more than to Jed Bartlet. But I don't want to talk to him just as a
      professional; I want-I need-to be able to talk to him as something
      more than that. I need to be able to talk to him as a friend."
      
      "I don't understand, sir. What are we talking about?"
      
      "You, Josh. We're talking about you. You're a consummate
      professional, and I'm more grateful than I can say for your
      willingness to do this job and give me your professional advice. But
      I've realized over the past couple of weeks that I need more from you
      than that. I need-" Matt stopped. It was hard to put into words
      exactly what he needed from Josh; everything that came to mind made
      him sound like a sap. But Helen had told him to cut the crap and
      just tell Josh straight out what he wanted from him and not worry so
      damn much about sounding like a candy-ass, because Josh wasn't going
      to think he was one, he was going to understand and he was going to
      be pleased.
      
      "I want-I need a friend, Josh. I need you to be for me what Leo was
      for Jed Bartlet-a brilliant Chief of Staff, which you already are,
      but also a trusted friend. I don't think I can do this job without
      that. And there isn't anyone I'd rather have beside me, not just as
      my Chief of Staff but as my friend, than you."
      
      Josh flushed again, more hotly than before.
      
      "Thank you, sir," he said, his voice a little thick with emotions
      that took him by surprise. "I'd be honored to call myself your
      friend."
      
      "And I'd be honored to call you mine, Josh," Matt answered, smiling
      with genuine relief. If there was a little reserve in Josh's face
      still, a little caution in his eyes, that was hardly to be wondered
      at. But there was less than there had been. It was a
      beginning. "Thank you. And to that end, let's see how quickly we
      can get through today's business and get up to Camp David, so we can
      break open a couple of bottles of beer in front of the t.v. like good
      friends should. The Astros are playing this afternoon."
      
      "We're pretty much done, sir. I took care of Harrison earlier this
      morning. We'll have him on board as long as we just . . . ."
      
      And the two men started to walk together towards the garden, where
      Marine One was waiting to take them away for a weekend that was
      looking as though it might be a lot more relaxing than anything
      either of them would have anticipated just a few hours before.
      
      * * *
      
      The children heard the helicopter first, and ran to see it land.
      Donna and Helen hurried after them and grabbed their hands to keep
      them a safe distance back. Donna could tell as soon as Josh appeared
      on the stairway that something had changed. He looked tired, she
      thought-with her gone he'd probably managed to get even less sleep
      last night than usual-but he looked better, too, less tense, more
      relaxed-happier, she decided. He gave her a grin that melted her
      heart from twenty feet away, and crossed the distance between them
      with a bound, throwing his arms around her and kissing her hard and
      long without the slightest trace of embarrassment. Beside them Helen
      and the President were embracing, too, and the children were hanging
      off their father and swinging themselves around as if he was their
      own personal swingset and jungle gym combined.
      
      Josh came up from the kiss still grinning.
      
      "Hey," he said. "Did you miss me?"
      
      Donna smiled at him, too breathless to think of a snappy reply.
      
      "I did," was all she could manage, and how lame was that? But the
      way his dimples deepened made it impossible to care.
      
      "I missed you, too," he said tenderly, brushing a strand of hair back
      from her face and looking into her eyes in a way that made her knees
      turn to jelly and her thoughts turn to the cabin Helen had helped her
      take her things over to that morning. It was a particularly nice
      cabin, with a big, old fieldstone fireplace, a basketful of dry
      kindling and logs, and a very large and soft and comfortable-looking
      bed, draped in layers of patchwork quilts and Indian blankets, and
      looking as if it would provide a very warm and cozy nest on a cold
      and rainy night. It was starting to rain again now, fine, light
      droplets making a mist in front of her eyes and condensing on Josh's
      face and hair. But she didn't mind, she thought, as long as he was
      here, happy and safe beside her. The rain was almost a plus, really,
      when they had that snug and inviting cabin to go to, with that warm
      and inviting bed . . . .
      
      As if he could read her thoughts, President Santos called out,
      
      "Donna, that man is tired-I don't think he sleeps when you're not
      there. Go show him where you two are going to be tonight, and see if
      you can get him to get a couple of hours down-time. But make sure to
      have him back in the lodge before the afternoon is over; there's an
      Astros game he and I are going to watch. We're planning to have a
      few beers and talk about the really important things, like baseball."
      
      "And women," Josh said, with another dimpled grin. "We're going to
      talk about women."
      
      "Women, huh?" Donna said, pulling back a bit and frowning at him with
      mock severity.
      
      "Our women," Josh said serenely, ignoring the scowl that earned
      him. "After all, that's what you guys do to us."
      
      "We guys get together and talk about women? About /your/ women?
      Josh, you are so seriously confused-"
      
      "That he needs you to get him unconfused," the President said,
      laughing. "Go along, you two. There's lunch if you want it, but
      otherwise I'll see you for the game, Josh. It'll be a pretty long
      game; you can take your time. You really do need some sleep."
      
      "Sleep's not what I need," Josh whispered in Donna's ear, as she led
      him away.
      
      "Oh? What else did you have in mind?"
      
      "I don't really think I could find the words to describe it. You'll
      just have to wait and see."
      
      Hours later, after Josh had pulled himself reluctantly away from
      Donna to go and watch a baseball game, and after the game was over,
      and dinner, and Josh had surprised everyone-even Donna-by
      playing "Heart and Soul" with Peter on the big piano in the living
      room and then teaching Miranda how to play it too, and after Blankie
      had been lost and found and lost again, and finally wrapped around
      Miranda's neck and sent to bed with her and Raggedy Old Pooh, and
      after Josh and Donna had said goodnight to the President and his wife
      and had shivered their way through the surprisingly cold night air to
      the cozy little cabin that was waiting for them, the fine, grey drops
      of rain began to change. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, they
      grew thicker and softer. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, they
      began to leave brushstrokes of white across the muddy ground.
      
      Hours later still, Matt Santos propped himself up on an elbow and
      looked out the window of his bedroom. The curtains were only partly
      drawn, and in the light from the security spotlights outside he could
      see the white flakes drifting silently down. He was so startled that
      he got up to take another look. Snow in April, he thought: I had no
      idea it could snow in April in Maryland. But this was in the
      mountains; it wouldn't be snowing back in D.C. He stood there
      watching as the shimmering, soft stuff settled on the trees and the
      ground. Even after his years in Washington as a Congressman, the
      Texan in him hadn't gotten over his wonder at the sight of snow. It
      always seemed magical to him. It changed everything, made everything
      feel, for the moment at least, peaceful and pure and fresh and new.
      
      That was an illusion, Matt knew. The snow would be gone in a day or
      so, leaving plenty of mud on the ground to slog through, but that
      sense of newness still seemed wonderful to him. It was what he had
      been wanting so badly: a clean slate, a fresh start. It didn't
      change anything that had happened, and it didn't mean he wasn't going
      to have to work damn hard to do better in the future, of course. He
      knew it was going to take a lot more than a confession and a few
      words of absolution from his priest before he could ever let himself
      off the hook for those deaths in Washington State; he would be
      working every day, every hour for the next four years, or maybe
      eight, to make sure he never let anything like that happen so
      needlessly again. And he knew it was going to take more than an
      apology and a few beers in front of a baseball game to build a real
      friendship with his Chief of Staff; he was going to have to work at
      that, too, every day. It would be hard sometimes: it was so easy to
      forget, in a position like the one he had now, that the people who
      supported him were only human too, with weaknesses and
      vulnerabilities he needed to go easy on and work around at times, as
      well as the amazing strengths he leaned on every day. No,
      remembering that wasn't always going to be easy. But Matt had never
      been afraid of hard work: he just needed to be pointed in the right
      direction sometimes, and then he could take on any challenge . . . .
      
      He stood by the window for a long time, watching the snow falling,
      feeling again that sense of possibility and conviction that had so
      eluded him for the past few weeks. When he finally turned away and
      settled himself back into bed beside Helen, he fell asleep again more
      easily than he had in a long time, snowflakes drifting through his
      sleepy thought like a benediction.
      
      In the little cabin just a short walk from the lodge, Josh woke in
      the night, too. He didn't get out of bed, though, or look out the
      window at the snow. He turned himself over and gazed at the woman
      sleeping next to him-at the curve of her throat, the fine line of the
      bones in her cheek, the soft, light wave of her hair spread over the
      pillow-and felt overcome with wonder that she was there beside him.
      He wanted to kiss her, but he didn't want to wake her, so he just lay
      there quietly, watching her. After a minute she reached sleepily
      over without opening her eyes, found his hand and pulled it close to
      her, settling it against her breast. He buried his head in her neck
      then and kissed it softly, over and over, until they both drifted
      comfortably back to sleep.
      
      In Washington that night it was wet and cold, and the weathermen on
      the t.v. and the taxi-drivers and their passengers and anyone else
      who was awake were all wondering what this weather was doing to the
      cherry blossoms and when it was going to stop. But in the log-built
      lodge and the little cabin tucked snugly away in the blue foothills
      of the Catoctins, nobody minded it at all.
      
      * * *
      * * *
      
      The End
      
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