Balance of Power

SIX

Kerry sat on the edge of the bed, Lara beside him, listening to Joan Bowden through the telephone. The scene was so vivid that he could envision it—the darkened living room; the frightened woman; the husband passed out in their bedroom.

    'It's bad,' Joan whispered and then, haltingly, she told him what had happened.

    'Where's the gun?' Kerry asked at once.

    Lara turned, clutching Kerry's sleeve. Fearfully, Joan answered. 'He still has it.'

    'Has he mentioned suicide again?'

    'Not tonight.' The despair beneath her whisper deepened. 'Only if I leave him.'

    'What about threatening you. Or Marie.'

    Joan hesitated. 'Just me.'

    'And the beatings are more frequent now.'

    'Yes.' The word held weary resignation. 'They're worse, because John's drinking more. He's worried about his job.'

    Kerry stood, fighting his own anxiety. 'You have to get him out of there,' he said with quiet urgency. 'Or take Marie and go.'

    'How? Where?'

    Kerry felt Lara at his back, her hands clasping his waist. 'There's a drill for this,' he answered. 'Wait until he leaves for work. Then call the District Attorney's Office and ask for the domestic violence unit. I'll have spoken to them myself by then.

    'Tell them what John did. They'll go to court for an emergency protective order. It's called a kick-out order. They'll take his gun away, make him pack up and leave. Unless you go to a shelter.'

    The enormity of this induced an extended silence. Lara leaned her face against Kerry's back.

    'No,' Joan said at last. 'I can't put Marie in a shelter. It's too much.'

    There was no time, Kerry thought, to argue. 'If you stay at home,' he said, 'there are things you can do. Keep close contact with the police, and Mary and your mother. The order should ban John from coming there, cut off his visitation . . .'

    'He'll go crazy . . .'

    'He'll use Marie if you don't stop him.' Kerry paused, lowering his voice. 'How do you know he won't just take her?'

    'Take her.' Joan's voice was anguished. 'Then how can I do this?'

    'By protecting her. If John has to see her, it should be at a visitation center. Otherwise, the order should say that he can't go near her—at your home, her school, or wherever. Make sure her principal and teacher have a copy of the order. Then change your locks, and start looking for another place . . .'

    'We'll help her,' Lara whispered from behind him.

    'We're here for you,' Kerry finished. 'Don't worry about money. And if you want Lara to fly out there, she will.'

    Once more Joan was silent. Though he was careful not to say so, Kerry shared her trepidation for reasons of his own: in Kerry's first domestic violence case, the husband had shot his wife to death on the eve of trial, in front of their young son. Joan and Marie were poised on razor's edge; she could not stay with him, and yet leaving was the moment of greatest danger—the time when a husband's violence, fueled by the desperate sense that control was slipping away, might turn lethal.

    'We'll get John in a program,' Kerry promised. 'Each step of the way, I'll be with you.'

    Through the phone, he first heard quiet, then a sigh. 'If you talk to them first,' Joan told him in a choked voice. 'I'll try.'

* * *

    Afterward, Kerry and Lara returned to the porch. The Mall surrounding the monument was silent now, the festivities ended. The air was moist but cooler.

    Head bent, Lara touched her eyes. 'I don't know,' she murmured.

    'About what?'

    'Anything. Even me.'

    Watching her, Kerry waited until she spoke again. 'I'm so damned scared for her. But it's all a tangle.' She faced him. 'This was supposed to be our night. Instead you've taken on my sister.

    'I'm angry with her, God help me—why did she marry this man, why did she stay so long, why did she have to call tonight? And angry at myself. I can't even get her to talk about this, except through you.' She gave a brief shake of her head. 'I didn't say it was pretty.'

    But at least that was honest, Kerry thought. Wearily, he perceived that he had become part of a complex triangle in which Lara, despite her guilt over this, might resent both him and Joan.

    'She's in danger,' Kerry said.

    'I know that. I can feel it from here.' Her voice softened. 'If anything happened to her or Marie it would kill me.'

    'I know that, too.' Kerry reached for her hand. 'So listen to me, okay?

    'You've done so much for me. But you don't have to do everything anymore. Because there are also things I can do for you.

    'It'll take some getting used to, for both of us. But some morning we may wake up feeling sheer relief at being able to lean on someone else.' Pausing, Kerry saw that he was asking, at least in one sense, for a favor. 'Protecting them means a lot to me. Please, let me help her. Who better, after all?'

    Studying him, Lara took this in. Then, at length, she said, 'Whatever you do, Kerry, I want to know before you do it. She's still my sister, and I can't let go.'

SE VEN

'The Army thinks they've trapped Al Anwar,' Clayton Slade told the President.

    The two men sat in the Oval Office. Kerry had slept little, worrying about Joan. But the Presidency did not stop. It was his iron routine that at seven a.m., he and his Chief of Staff met to sort out their priorities, the endless list of choices a President must make.

    So, as always, the first sight of Kerry's workday was an AfricanAmerican with a round face, short, greying hair, clipped mustache, gold wire-rim glasses, shrewd black eyes and a laconic wit which cut to the core of whatever came their way. Since meeting as young prosecutors, Clayton had been Kerry's closest friend and, in politics, they complemented each other—Kerry was intuitive, at once 'ruthless' and a romantic; Clayton was earthbound, pragmatic, deeply attuned to consequence and, at times, a brake on Kerry's impulses. Kerry relied on Clayton's judgment—between the two of them, he once had quipped, they might just add up to one reasonably decent President. But Clayton had learned—and this was the most delicate part of their relationship—that he could not act in Kerry's name.

    Now their daily meeting was as integral to Kerry's comfort as the decor which made the Oval Office his— bookshelves filled with biography and poetry; busts of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; the world globe on his desk, a reminder of his power and its limits; a table with photographs of Lara, his mother, his godfather Liam Dunn, his brother James. All of them had helped define who Kerry was; only Lara knew him as well as Clayton did.