“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, when he came on.
“No bother,” Preston said, although she could hear a buzz of people in his office, and the sound of more than one television newscast in the background.
“Is it okay if I talk to you for a minute?” she asked, and checked to make sure that the door was still shut and no one could hear her. “I’m scared.”
There was a barest of pauses on the other end.
“Absolutely,” he said, and then raised his voice. “We’ll have to finish this up later, okay, everyone? And—no calls for a while, Janice. Thanks.”
Meg waited, aware that she was holding her breath—and probably shouldn’t be.
“Are you all right?” he asked, when he came back on. “Are you hurt?”
Two tough questions. Christ, impossible questions.
“Meg?” he asked, sounding tense.
“Are Mom and Dad back yet?” she asked. It had been Kansas City today, or St. Louis, or Houston, maybe. She couldn’t remember.
“About twenty minutes ago,” Preston said. “What’s going on?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m not really hurt, but Mr. Gabler’s either already in there, or on his way over to talk to her.”
There was another short pause on the other end. “Tell me again that you’re all right,” he said, “and then tell me what happened.”
She should be calm. Cool. Succinct. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I don’t—nothing makes sense.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice very soothing. “Tell me where you are.”
Jesus, where was she? She looked around the office. “I don’t know.”
“Okay,” he said, although she could hear a strong edge of anxiety in his voice now. “That’s okay. Is anyone else there with you?”
“No,” she said. Only, that wasn’t quite right. “I mean, they’re all out in the hall. We’re at the hospital.”
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
Oh, Christ, the poor guy. She laughed weakly. “Am I going to make you crazy if I say ‘I don’t know?’”
“Yes,” he said. “You are.”
Right.
“Why don’t we get your father on here,” he said. “Okay?”
Yeah, God forbid anyone ask the President to pick up the phone in the middle of the day. “What, you don’t think my mother would want to talk to me?” Meg asked.
“I think she may need a couple of minutes to calm down, first,” Preston said, and then laughed a laugh even more shaky than hers had been. “Might take thirty seconds myself, too.”
Now she felt guilty for upsetting him, but relieved that it mattered to him.
“I’m all right,” she said, when her father came on, and heard him let out a very long breath.
“They told me you were, but—” He stopped. “Okay. Thank God.” He stopped again, presumably taking thirty seconds of his own. “What’s happening? The only thing I’ve gotten so far is a ‘Shots fired’ report.”
The Secret Service wasn’t exactly quick off of the starting blocks, then, were they? She remembered that it had been just past four-thirty after she had finished letting that man take her picture with his son, and she glanced at a clock on the wall, shocked to see that it wasn’t quite quarter to five yet. She would have said that a couple of hours had gone by. “I don’t know,” she said aloud. “I was signing a ‘Get Well’ card for this lady, but then she came after me, and—I don’t know.” She had heard at least one gunshot, though; she was sure of that.
They had barely started talking when her mother clicked on.
“Are you hurt, Meg?” she asked, sounding as though Preston either hadn’t gotten down there in time—or that nothing he’d told her had had any effect whatsoever. “You didn’t get cut, did you?”
Cut? What the hell kind of information sources did the President have? “She threw paint at me, Mom,” Meg said, more than moderately annoyed.
“Actually, my understanding is that there was a can of red spray paint inside her horrid little doll,” her mother said.
Oh. That explained the hissing sound. “I think she had a gun, too,” Meg said, although she was increasingly less sure of anything at all.
“No, that was one of your agents bringing her down,” her mother said. “And one of the others got the knife away from her.”
Knife? What fucking knife? How come she had been there—and her mother was the one who knew all of the correct details? “Did they, um, you know, kill her?” Meg asked.
“No,” her mother said, and Meg heard the unspoken “unfortunately.” “I gather it’s a leg wound, or—I’m not entirely sure.”
The President, expressing doubt? Any foreign intelligence agents who were currently listening in had probably just fallen off their chairs. But Meg still felt as though she was about ten minutes behind. “So, wait. You hate dolls?”
There was a split second of utter silence.
“What?” her mother asked.
Maybe she, personally, had no problem with dolls whatsoever, but had been raised—more or less—by someone who despised them, and had ended up absorbing the prejudice by osmosis.
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” her mother said, “but my God, Meg, exactly what is it going to take for you to figure out that you simply can’t stop in transit? Ever.”
Wait, she was being blamed, because a lunatic assaulted her?
“You don’t have a lot of credibility there, Kate,” her father said grimly.
He was god-damn right about that. “Yeah, really,” Meg said. “I’m not the one who went prancing over to a mob of Edinburgh hooligans last week.”
The sound of the long-distance connection seemed acutely loud—or else, her stupid ears were still screwed up.
“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” her mother said in a stiff voice. “We’re talking about you right now, and the fact that you have to grow up and start being more careful.”
Like any of this was her fault? Any of it? And since when did being attacked by crazy people translate to a lack of maturity? Meg thought of about a dozen mean responses to hurl back at her, but couldn’t decide which one would be the most effectively vindictive. And, ideally, hurtful.
“In any case,” her mother said, “we’re going to fly up tonight and bring you back.”
The hell they were. Meg gripped the phone, wondering whether she should just slam it down. “Yeah, well, good luck with that, because I’m not coming.”
“Yeah, well,” her mother said, hitting her inflections with insulting accuracy, “guess what? You don’t have a vote here.”
Fuck her, and her horses. “I’m eighteen,” Meg said. “I not only have a vote, I have the deciding one. All you’ve got is an opinion.” And a stupid one, at that.
Her mother expelled a hard breath. “Well, I’m afraid that you’re very much mistaken about that, Meg. In fact—”
“All right,” her father said, sounding furious. “That’s enough. I think you’d better hang up now, and count to ten—or do whatever the hell it is that you do—before we continue this conversation.”
It was very quiet. Excruciatingly quiet.
“Um, Dad, are you talking to Mom, or me?” Meg asked.
Her father laughed. “I’m talking to your mother, Meg.”
There was more silence, and she assumed that her mother’s mood was rapidly moving from violent simmering to outright boiling-over.
“Are you really okay?” her mother asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” Meg said. Her heart still felt funny, and she was bruised everywhere, and her hand was throbbing horribly, and it was hard to hear, and— “I was scared.”
“Well, I’m scared, too,” her mother said, and took a deep breath. “I’m very sorry to have gotten so upset. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
Apology accepted. Meg nodded. “Okay. But I really want to stay here. At school, I mean.”
Her mother sighed. “Yes,
I can appreciate that. But, your father and I are going to need to come up to see you, and—I don’t know—hug you, or something of that nature.”
A not entirely unappealing concept. “You can’t blow off the Cinco de Mayo dinner,” Meg said. Which was scheduled to be held that night, and would garner a fair amount of press coverage—especially if the President didn’t bother showing up.
“Well, as it happens, I can,” her mother said. “Especially under the circumstances.”
It still seemed like a bad idea. Meg frowned. “But, doesn’t that mean Psycho Lady gets what she wants?”
Once again, it was quiet.
“Not letting them run our lives is another way of letting them run our lives,” her mother said.
Hmmm. Was that circular logic, or a good argument?
“We’re your parents, Meg,” her father said. “And we love you, and—give us a little room to work here, okay?”
Yes, that was only fair. “I just—if you come racing up here, won’t it embolden more nuts, and make them think it’s open season on me?” she asked.
Neither of her parents responded.
Oh. Right. It was already open season on her.
“I think we’re all too upset to think clearly right now,” her mother said finally. “But what I’d like to have happen first is to have a doctor look you over, and make sure you’re all right. And then, the three of us can talk some more, and decide what we want to do next. Okay?”
Since that seemed like a good strategy, neither she nor her father disagreed, and she promised to call back as soon as she had been examined. She was pretty sure her father would have preferred keeping the line open the entire time, but she needed a little space to decompress, and she was sure her mother needed some.
And there was also the minor detail of her Cabinet meeting having been interrupted.
No female FBI agents had arrived from the nearest field office yet, but a female police officer, as well as a woman from the local district attorney’s office, stayed in the room to maintain the chain of custody and collect her paint-stained clothes and surgical brace for evidence. Meg thought about refusing, but someone had the sense to go find Vicky, who stood by the examining table with her hand on her shoulder, and that made her feel somewhat more safe. And while two of the three doctors were male, at least she had met all of them before.
She was afraid to admit that she had been worried about the way her heart was beating, but they listened to her chest with a stethoscope and took her blood pressure, without her having to ask, and when she was offered a small dose of Valium, she didn’t turn it down.
Her knee had already been banged up from the tennis-induced sprain, and the two orthopedists didn’t think it seemed much worse, but all three doctors were very concerned about a new displaced boxer’s fracture of the fifth metacarpal on her bad hand, as well as a large crack in her fourth proximal phalange—she sort of remembered slamming into something very hard, like a wall, when she was trying to punch her way free—and her wrist seemed to be swollen, too. The X-rays and so forth were being faxed or emailed or something to her Washington doctors, and they all seemed to agree that after a closed reduction was performed, she should be put in a cast to immobilize the area completely and protect it, until more studies were done, and then they would decide whether to continue to treat it conservatively, do a more complex form of closed reduction, or resort to an open reduction with internal fixation or some other surgical correction.
It had started to improve somewhat, but she told them about the ringing in her ears, and an ENT was immediately brought in. Apparently, it was a normal auditory response when a gun was fired right next to a person’s damn head, and the specialist didn’t think she’d sustained any permanent hearing damage, although—big surprise—she was going to have to undergo some comprehensive tests, to be sure.
There was a land-line in the room, and her parents called several times during all of this. Increasingly, her father was the one making short-tempered “we could already be there by now” remarks, while her mother said evenhanded, reasonable things, and tried to keep the peace.
Obviously, they meant well, but the constant phone calls were very stressful, and she could feel her own temper fraying. She’d lost all track of time but surely the Cinco de Mayo dinner had started by now. “What, do you guys keep running out of the room?” she asked. “Aren’t your guests starting to get upset?”
“In all honesty, should it come to that, I feel strangely sanguine about the prospects of our winning a war against Mexico,” her mother said, and then paused. “Are we on speaker-phone?”
Christ, that would be all they needed. But, even if they had been, the doctors were busy conferring in the corner, and Vicky had gone out to find her a snack. “No,” Meg said.
“Ah. Good,” her mother said. “It would have been unfortunate if someone had overheard that.”
No question. But the fact that she had spoken without weighing the possibilities first indicated that her mother’s energy was flagging, too. Meg shook her head. “You’d better go drink some coffee, Mom.” Either that, or risk mis-speaking her way into an international incident.
“Yes, you may have a point,” her mother said. “Russ, she’s right about people being offended, too. Would you mind going back out there for a while, and we’ll take turns?”
An idea her father did not adore, but he agreed, and then, for the first time since all of this had started, she was alone on the phone with her mother.
“All right, it’s just the two of us now,” her mother said softly. “Tell me what you really want us to do.”
Because they both knew that she wouldn’t feel comfortable being quite as brutally honest if her father was still on the line. Meg gritted her teeth. “Mostly, I want you to know what I want you to do, without me having to walk you through it.”
Her mother didn’t quite groan, but she didn’t seem pleased, either. “Okay. I assume you want us to drop everything and come up there, but you’re so wrung out that you’d like to get some sleep first.”
Not bad. “Very close,” Meg said.
“Do you want us to come up tonight, then?” her mother asked.
“Very far,” Meg said.
Her mother made an exasperated sound. “Meg, I’m going to feel like a perfect fool if you make me stand here and guess.”
Tough.
“I really don’t—” Then, her mother’s voice changed, the annoyance instantly departing. “Yes. Just put it on the desk, please.”
Someone on the other end said something unintelligible.
“No, black is fine, thank you,” her mother said.
Coffee, then.
“All right,” her mother said, back on the telephone. “Presumably, you want me to drop everything and fly up first thing in the morning.”
Bull’s-eye. “Yeah,” Meg said. “And then, Dad can come in a few days, after you both go to the Correspondents’ Dinner—” which was scheduled for Saturday night— “and are funny as hell there, to prove nothing’s wrong, and that way, I’ll get two visits, without it seeming like such a big deal.”
Her mother sighed. “I really wouldn’t mind if you were a little less of a politico, Meg.”
When it was all said and done, what was wrong with being a politico, as long as one tried to serve the public interest? “He’s been here twice,” Meg said, “and you’ve never come to see me.”
Not that she was pissed off about that, or anything.
Her mother seemed to be weighing her answer—unless, of course, she had just paused to gulp some coffee. “Are you sure that’s what you want?” she asked.
“Very sure,” Meg said.
53
BY THE TIME the doctors released her, Garth had arranged for her to be taken out through a back exit, to avoid what she gathered was a good-sized crowd. She had no idea whether that meant primarily civilians—or mostly the media, but she wasn’t interested enough to ask. Vicky had found a pair of clean sweat
pants and a Mount Greylock Mounties t-shirt somewhere, so she changed out of her hospital gown and wore those, along with her brand-new, paint-free brace and cane.
She would have preferred to put on her sunglasses, but they—god-damn it—had disappeared during all of the confusion, too. Security was extremely tight as she was hustled outside, and while she had the sense that lots of people were around, all she could really see were agents and police officers.
Once they were in the car, surrounded by extra lead and follow vehicles, she found her satellite phone near the seat belt, and thought about checking her messages, but set it aside, instead. She was too damn tired to bother.
She started to close her eyes, but then forced them back open. “Thank you,” she said. “I can’t remember if I told you guys that, but I should have.”
Dave, who was driving, and Garth, who was in the passenger’s seat, both shrugged, but Dave looked pleased. Garth seemed too edgy and focused to tune into much of anything other than the goal of getting her back to her dorm, and safely inside her room.
There was also a chance that he was as embarrassed about the whole letter opener business as she was.
“Is everyone okay?” she asked. Another thing which hadn’t even entered her mind until now—and certainly should have.
Dave started to say something, but Garth interrupted him.
“We’re all fine,” he said. “I’m sorry we had to manhandle you that way.”
She never wanted to know who had had his hand on her thigh, even though intellectually, she knew it had been with the sole purpose of checking her for injuries. “It’s okay. I didn’t mean to get so scared.”
Garth laughed without any humor whatsoever. “You should have been scared. We didn’t—well, I’m really sorry.”
If he was already second-guessing himself to such a degree, she could only imagine what the formal debriefing meetings were going to be like. But something about the way Dave was stolidly looking straight ahead made her suspicious. “Are all of you really okay?” she asked.