this misery would have happened in the first place.
She found herself crying, her emotional defenses weakened by the Flexeril. Why wouldn’t they let her visit her son? Couldn’t they see that by punishing her they were punishing an innocent child? Travis needed his mother. All children need their mother, for God’s sake! Why couldn’t that Rivers lady see the damage she was inflicting? Why couldn’t she see for herself that by keeping them apart, she was retarding Travis’s recovery.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Donovan?” a voice said. “Are you awake?”
Carolyn wasn’t sure herself until she opened her eyes. In the dim light of the darkened hallways, she saw a tall young nurse standing in her doorway, with a uniformed cop by her side. “Mm-hmm,” she croaked, her throat thick from disuse. “I’m here.”
The two forms approached together, and for just an instant, she wondered if she should be frightened.
“My name’s Jan, Mrs. Donovan, from the pediatric ICU. I’ve come to take you to see Travis.”
As the sun rose in McLean, Virginia, news crews began to stir from their uneventful all-night vigil outside Senator Albricht’s home. The morning on-air talent was arriving now, in time for the pre-network morning news shows. Red-eyed second-stringers could go home now, relieved from their fruitless wait for some dramatic overnight development.
It took a special breed to find status in the act of being awake at such an ungodly hour, but in the prestigious Washington, D.C., news market, face time meant everything. It didn’t matter that the average viewer was too comatose ever to remember what the face looked like. It was all about paying your dues.
Clayton just didn’t get it. He’d held a lot of jobs in his lifetime, from buck private in the Army to summertime tar slinger for a roofing contractor. He respected any job that earned an honest wage, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out the allure of the news business. Reporters never built anything, never contributed to the greater good. Instead, they made their living by fanning the flames, doing whatever they could to tear down the hard work and reputations of others.
He left the window shaking his head. Under the weight of his exhaustion, his cynical streak had begun to show. Maybe Alba was right. Maybe it was time to leave legislation to the young bucks and mend the fabric of his soul.
First, though, he had a reputation to mend and a debt of his own to call. When he’d last spoken to Chris MacDonald, around eleven last night, his chief of staff reported that he was ready to launch on Frankel the minute Clayton gave the go-ahead. With only a little exaggeration, Chris said, they could fill a football stadium with people who would pay their own expenses to get a shot at nailing Frankel to a tree. They’d accumulated countless examples of Frankel’s ruthlessness and could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man was a flaming asshole.
Unfortunately, they’d yet to find anyone willing to testify that they’d seen him break a law.
“It’s not that they haven’t seen him do it,” Chris was quick to clarify. “They just won’t say it under oath.”
“Suppose we subpoena them?” Clayton had asked.
Chris laughed. “Does the expression ‘I can’t recall’ ring any bells?”
Indeed it did. He’d even used it a few times himself over the years.
So here it was, morning again. The horrid rumors were a day older, yet the good guys weren’t a single step closer to ruining the man who started it all. It was a difficult time, Clayton told himself-one that called for patience. And another cup of coffee.
He walked carefully as he passed his sleeping bride. In hopes of inducing a full night’s sleep, Alba had finally resorted to taking an antihistamine, which seemed to be doing the trick. Clayton was pleased. She’d been looking way too tired. This morning he wanted her to sleep until she was slept out. He’d actually turned off the ringers on all the telephones upstairs, just to keep the place quiet. He figured that whatever crises might have arisen during the night could wait till morning.
Padding down the hall to his converted bedroom office, he lifted the stack of faxes that had accumulated during the night. Much of the pile were letters of support from fellow senators, and as he read each of them, he jotted a handwritten note on his personal stationery for hand-delivery later in the day. Once read and responded to, he sacrificed the originals to the shredder, reducing the pages to so much confetti.
For the most part, the rest was unremarkable bullshit from constituents. A few nervous supporters demanded clarification of his real role in all of this controversy. These he saved. By the end of the day, Chris would take care of it all.
The rubber tires of the wheelchair rolled silently across the polished linoleum as Jan eased Carolyn to Travis’s bedside. “He’s just sleeping,” the nurse whispered. “We’ve given him something to help him rest. He’s going to be just fine.” She lowered the bed rail and moved Carolyn in as close as the chair would allow. “Stay as long as you like.”
He looked so- young. Barely a lump under the stark white sheet. “Look at you,” Carolyn whispered, the words barely audible even to herself. “You’re just a baby.” And to her, at that moment, her son looked just as he once was-as he looked, in fact, the last time she just sat and watched him sleep. In her mind, the strong, lean features were chubby again, the disheveled mop of hair a mere sheen of corn silk. Those were the happiest days-the days full of promise. Now there was only the reality of atrocities committed against his youth.
The muscles of her neck rebelled as she reached out to brush a greasy tendril of hair off Travis’s forehead. There really was no baby left in him at all, she realized. He still had those eyelashes, though-Bambi lashes, she called them, just to get a rise out of him. He’d get so mad…
The lashes fluttered, and then his eyes opened; unfocused, and heavy with sleep.
“Hello, sweetie,” she whispered. “It’s only me. Go back to sleep.”
The eyes closed again, and right away, she knew he hadn’t heard a thing. She wanted him to be awake, though; she wanted to tell him so many things. But he needed his sleep and the rest that came with it. Leaning back again, to ease the growing spasm in her neck, she lifted Travis’s hand from where it lay on top of the sheet, and kissed it, careful not to disturb the IV lines. In the yellow darkness, she studied his long, slender fingers. The nails needed trimming, as they always did, and they were dirty. Amid all the sterility and all the technology clustered around his helpless form, those dirty fingernails seemed like a final remnant of boyhood.
“I love you, Travis,” she whispered.
The fingers flexed in her grasp. A sleepy attempt to let her know he was there with her, after all. His eyes fluttered open again, and it looked for all the world as if he was trying to smile; but in the end, he just couldn’t make it happen. His lips faltered, then started to tremble around the ugly white-tipped tube that continued to rob him of his voice. He looked at his mom for a long moment, and through his gaze, she could feel his fear and his anger.
“Travis, honey, I’m so sorry. I’m so-” Suddenly, her voice stopped working.
He fought hard for control, shutting his eyes tight and folding deep lines into his forehead. But it was a losing battle. Tears bubbled up from behind his eyelids and tracked lazily over the pale, taut flesh of his cheekbones. He squeezed his mother’s hand tightly now, as his body began to tremble, and his mask of bravery folded in on itself. Filtered through the respirator, his sobs were merely whispers against the silence of his room, rendered even more pitiful by the rhythmic hum of machinery that a child should never have to see.
She kissed his hand again and rested her forehead on his bed rail, ignoring the darts of pain from her neck. Her baby needed her now. And she’d stay right by his side for as long as it took for him to smile again.
It was nearly eight o’clock when the senator reluctantly turned the phone back on, and within two minutes, it rang. Here we go again. He considered ignoring it but took a deep breath instead. “Hello?”
“Hi, Clayton,” the familiar voice said from the other end. “This is Harry Sinclair. I think we’ve got a breakthrough on that matter we discussed the other day.”
The senator’s heart skipped a beat. He’d discussed only one issue with his longtime friend and contributor, and for him to announce a breakthrough, it had to be momentous. “Good morning, Harry. Sounds interesting.”
“What are you doing for lunch this afternoon?”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
