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I.
It lives at the beginning of memory—the fear has always been there. Rosemary clutches her son closer, squeezing her eyes shut when a shadow appears under the door. Her husband is slurring her name, trying to turn the locked door knob. But she won’t let him in, even when he jerks the door so hard the house rattles.
Lizzie is tucked into the Moses basket on the floor, Billy in her arms.
The boy sleeps without moving, his head covered by thick wool blankets that dampen the sounds of his father’s rage. Instead he hears his mother’s heartbeat, the forced calm of her breathing. The lock won’t give out, she thinks. It can’t give out. In the morning she’ll tell him she fell asleep early and didn’t I tell you I need to fix the door knob, it locks on its own, that is, if John remembers this at all.
Billy stirs when John slams his fist against the inexpensive wood paneling.
(In years to come he’ll look at the divot in his parents’ bedroom door and wonder.)
It’s not until Lizzie begins to squirm and unsettle, and Rosemary has to decide between waking her son or letting her daughter wail, that he wakes. The latter will inform John that they aren’t sleeping, so she lets go of Billy and rolls over to pluck the six month old from her cot.
His eyes open in the startled darkness, and he silences a cry when John nearly puts his boot through the door. Sleepy, but not confused, he curls himself into a ball under the blankets and waits for his mother’s arms to return to him.
He’s too small to believe that the door could break.
II.
They moved the dresser in front of the door, wedged it in as tightly as they could. But it means that none of the heat from the woodstove enters their bedroom. Not that it takes much to gather heat; it’s a small room, especially for four. Especially considering that despite the bunk bed, the full, and the trundle, Mickey and Fi still prefer to sleep on either side of him.
Mickey, at eight, will outgrow it soon. And Will and Liz used to sleep side-by-side she has claimed the top bunk for years, peering down at him through squinted eyes. But Fiona is three, and traverses the bed in her sleep unless he holds onto her, and Will doesn’t want her to hit the floor again.
There are already enough bruises on her for people to look at.
John’s been out of prison for almost a year, and came home to a daughter who had never met him. But he also came home to a son who is now five inches taller than him, and several pounds heavier. Not that he can protect her when he’s at school.
All is quiet, but it hasn’t been last call at Duffy’s yet, and even then there’s no promise that John won’t spend the night on someone’s couch or someone’s floor.
(But if he doesn’t he’ll be home with too much whiskey in his belly, ready to pick a fight. They’ve already broken the porch railing, and Will doesn’t know for how much longer he can go before wrapping his hands around John’s throat.)
Fiona wriggles closer to her oldest brother, pulling the blankets over her head. The wind traces the outline of the small farmhouse, its hands gripping the clapboard tight and rattling the shutters. But the snow outside will keep them safe; Will sleeps soundly knowing that the longer the front door goes without being slammed open, the more likely his father will be stranded in town for the next few days.
He’s old enough to tend to the chores by himself, to tend to his little sisters and Mickey and his mother, it was what he did the three years John was in prison.
The shutters on their windows bang against the window and Fiona whimpers, her fingers turning into the flannel shirt Will’s worn to bed. Barely rousing, he wraps an arm around her and rolls over, putting her between him and Mickey.
He’ll wake at five and unhook the phone line so his father can’t call for a ride. John won’t show up for days, until after he’s drank all the money in his wallet.
But for now, winter keeps them safe and warm.
III.
He has a hard time sleeping past five in the morning, even now that he’s into his second semester of law school. But Sarah tries, likes to lie in past noon if she can, wrapping her long limbs around him to trap him in with her.
Will thinks he might be a novelty to her, the poor farmboy from Nebraska. Her parents’ duplex apartment overlooks Central Park, her parents pay for her to major in art history at Columbia, her parents pay for her tidy and secure dorm room but Sarah spends her nights here, in his dingy Morningside Heights place that he shares with three other law students.
They met when he clerked for her uncle, a federal judge.
Sarah’s hands are soft, unlike Rosemary’s, unlike his sisters’. Unlike his own. And her hair is long, dark, and cared-for and smells like lavender and juniper and mint and when he buries his face in her neck she smells like baby powder and if he closes his eyes and falls asleep there, he almost remembers that his father isn’t going to rip him out of bed at sunrise to do his morning chores.
He has a box spring and a mattress on the floor, a full. Sarah sleeps on top of him most nights they spend together, and the broken thermostat keeps the apartment hot all year round so they wear hardly anything, if anything at all. And not that he would admit to her, to anyone here, she’s his first real girlfriend.
(Skipping the first and fifth grades and completing undergrad in three years is not conducive to a normal social life. Not that attending a school with less than four hundred students is conducive to a normal social life.
But his father is well known in the one-road town where he was born and raised, and no matter how smart he is, no matter how good he is, he’ll never be good enough to make people forget that he’s John McAvoy’s son.)
A car backfires, and he jerks awake.
“Babe?” she murmurs, trying to tighten her grip on his shoulders.
Even if she’s slept on the forty-second floor her whole life, Sarah’s sleep isn’t disturbed alarms and fights and slamming doors. Will won’t tell her why he wakes violently, won’t tell her much at all. If she holds him fiercely enough, holds him in bed long enough to outlast the birds chirping outside his window, maybe he’ll let her something know something more personal than his class ranking and hometown.
IV.
Liz was the first of them to be married, and now she’s the first of them to have a marriage fall apart. Her husband is leaving her their apartment across the street from the hospital in Lincoln where they’re both residents, which Will thinks he’d better, since her husband is also leaving her to take care of their infant daughter on her own.
All he needs in order to do his job is a computer, a printer, and fax machine, so he takes off from Washington to Nebraska and manages Liz’s divorce proceedings and tries to remember how to take care of a baby when Liz is at the hospital trying to keep her career and reputation together and their mother is at her factory job or lying about seeing their father.
Will has come to the conclusion that Olivia only seems big.
His niece, barely six months old, looks like Fiona. But bigger. Which makes sense, he realizes one night, when she won’t settle down after a late night feeding (and he desperately needs to get back to remarks on the START II treaty so that they can be vetted by the British Ambassador who is fresh from Moscow), is because when Fi was this small, he was much smaller.
The remarks remained unfinished; he falls asleep in the rocking chair in Liz’s bedroom with Olivia drooling on his shoulder.
(Like mother, like daughter.)
He considers staying. Setting up his own law firm, passing the bar in Kansas and Michigan and Illinois. They may all be doomed to be unlucky in love, but his niece is draw enough that he considers staying in Nebraska.
(Fiona, now eighteen at the University of Nebraska like the rest of them, stops by between classes. He doesn’t know what happened to the seven year old he first left behind a decade ago, but this young woman is taller than Rosemary and Liz and is sharp and unyielding and someone entirely too much like him, which frightens him.)
The idea of family being enough is terrifying.
But having a child in his arms as he sleeps is familiar, and he has little by way of familiarity in Washington.
(He’ll go back to DC to write Bush’s third State of the Union, and the praise he receives will keep him from ever thinking of Nebraska as home ever again.)
V.
MacKenzie likes to steal his clothes. Which isn’t a sentiment that’s new to Will, but it’s how brazenly Mac goes about it. Like she has every right to invade his closet and strip down out of her professional clothes and slip into his own, shedding her work persona for an entirely different woman who climbs into his lap and teases him with her bottom lip between her teeth and bosses him around.
(Although, he admits, the bossing around also happens at work. And he likes it.)
She wears nothing to bed but one of his flannel shirts and a pair of lace briefs and sleeps as poorly as he does.
Will loves her, if for no other reason (but there are many, many others) than that they have spent twenty-four hours together more than once and at no time ran out of things to talk about. But they’re not talking tonight. Mac has barely been able to speak all day, not since the call from London in the early afternoon, carrying the news of her father’s heart attack.
Sir Edward McHale has always been a man who’s refused to accept no as an answer, Will knows, even if Will wasn’t important enough in the Bush Administration to meet the man himself. He’ll live, and be angry that something has disrupted his trip back to England for his annual report to Tony Blair and the Queen.
That’s what he tells her, and she smiles faintly.
(The phone call comes shortly before they go on the air at six. Ted will recover.)
MacKenzie’s never let Will see her cry before tonight. When she was with Brian, she stopped letting anyone see her cry at all; Brian had standards, and she tried to meet them. And Brian hated when she cried.
Tonight she cried until she tired herself out, her face buried in his shirt and her arms wrapped as tightly around him as his arms are around her.
Will sleeps less deeply than her tonight, his muscles contracting and relaxing with a sharp irregularity that keeps him on the cusp of waking. It’s a courtesy, perhaps. If something happens, and she needs him, he doesn’t want to miss it. If something happens, he doesn’t want her to sleep through it, either.
He needs her.
(And it scares him, to need someone who doesn’t need him more.)
He wants her to know she can need him, too.
Or at least depend on him.
VI.
Sloan sleeps fitfully, her limbs flailing out. The second time she kicks him in the shin he tucks the blankets in around her, pinning her down to the mattress.
It’s a virus. Most things are, nasty untreatable germs that live on door handles and to be entirely honest, this is why New Yorkers shouldn’t visit the DC bureau. But Charlie said “leadership and we need to stop making their claims about being the unwanted stepchild so legitimate” which is how Will and Sloan find themselves in DC on Friday night, talking to anchors who hate them and senior producers trying to claw their ways into promotions.
Will likes Sloan. Likes Sloan and feels partially responsible for her (since he volunteered her to come down with him instead of Tony Hart… among other things, like her behavior in the chair during the Fukushima broadcast) so when she takes a turn for pale and sweaty around ten o’clock he shakes out three Tylenol from the bottle in his carry on and forces them into her as casually as possible.
She falls asleep on top of his bed.
Instead of moving her back to her room (Sloan is sleeping soundly, even if face down in one of the pillows) he just nudges her over, takes her shoes off, and pulls the covers on top of her. Ignoring the possibility of sleeping in her bed, or on the couch, he stays with her.
She hasn’t shared a bed with anyone in over a year; being abandoned at the altar tends to sour the little intimacies. But her body is wracked with shivers and she’s hours from her apartment, so when she wakes, her thoughts wracked with fevered logic, she burrows her face in Will’s shoulder and feels warm.
He doesn’t make her move.
VII.
Nina sleeps with leaden limbs, sprawled and crooked like the branches of a tree. Takes up space, demands space in his bed, in his life. Will wonders if he should like that, having someone who wanders through his apartment like she belongs there without invitation. He certainly liked it when it was Mac.
But when she fences him between her arms and legs in bed it just keeps him awake.
It started well.
Nina believes she knows how to love him, that if she never leaves him and never lets him doubt himself, doubt what he wants, that he’ll love her too. Its simple arithmetic: MacKenzie McHale hurt him, deeply. To knit the wound back together she only has to stitch the gap, pull it taut, and create new skin with her determination to provide him with everything Mac took away.
(Nina doesn’t realized that Will already has the scar; his hurt isn’t a new and bleeding scab, but the dull ache of improperly healed tissues.)
Maybe the misunderstanding will imprint itself to truth, or so Will hopes.
He tries to get used to how her body feels lying next to him.
It’s never been a problem to adapt before, so he rolls over, gathers her in his arms, and tries to make them fit.
VIII.
It’s uncertain who is seeking comfort from whom, or even what sort of comfort is being sought. Their father’s death was sudden and not wholly unexpected after over forty years of near-constant alcohol abuse, and neither has seen the man in over a decade besides.
You were the man who raised me, Fiona whispers fiercely as the minister gives the eulogy. He was our father but you’re the man who raised me.
She falls asleep on his shoulder where they sit on the floor in their childhood living room, drinking John’s liquor. They’re both equally fucked, perhaps, the oldest and the youngest. Lizzie and Mickey have marriages and children but here they are, twelve years between them and a string of failed relationships and gainful promotions, sky rise apartments in different cities and hefty bank accounts and emptied-out lives. He left her behind more than he should have and she was the one always left behind.
But he did try.
Fi is his.
(The first of his many children, as he tries to fill the hole that only seems to get larger with every passing year. He gets older, they never do.)
His fingers comb thoughtlessly through her hair, even in slumber, here in this place. There’s nothing left for them to fear. It’s over, but he cradles her head and keeps her close.
On the arm of the couch behind them his silenced phone keeps lighting up, the display flashing the increasingly frequent calls from Nina. He’s ignored every one since his plane touched down in Lincoln last night; there’s no way he could explain to her about John, about Rosemary ten-years-dead, about this clapboard farmhouse with its dented walls and repaired furniture and the rows of empty whiskey bottles collecting dust on the windowsills.
But he spoke to Mac earlier, after the burial, if only to assure her that he’s fine. After Friday’s broadcast, he owes her that much.
(The fact that her voice in his ear makes him feel steady is irrelevant.)
Will is drawn to Fiona, thinks he’ll probably always be drawn back to his siblings. But they’re all older now, and without the iron bonds of fear building them together it hurts less that they’ve drifted apart. Nebraska has no such pull to him. Nebraska, the farm, this house. They can all sleep without fearing what’s on the other side of the door.
News Night is what calls him home.
IX.
He rolls over into a sheaf of papers. Mac, on the other side of the bed, follows. Not touching, they sleep separated by a wall of wire reports and epidemiological articles on Northwest Pakistan but in the same position. If they were closer one of her arms would be draped over his waist, her face buried between his shoulder blades.
A month ago he RSVP'd to a party in Westchester with a plus one. Two weeks ago he dumped Nina in the ACN Morning green room. Last night Mac asked if he had time this weekend to work on the broadcast on the Marine presence in the Khyber Region with her and while he would have loved to bail on the party, he only said yes in the first place on Charlie’s orders.
So he asked her if she had a dress she could wear.
(Its dark green, and shimmering. The cut is fitted to her body but the neckline is high, to her collarbones. Constricting at her arms and knees, but he’s been watching her go all night long and she wonders what it means from the pause after his father’s death and the ragged exhalation that was the end of his relationship with Nina to this terse holding of breath in a hotel room they’re sharing, like they’re the exes who can share these kinds of intimacies.
If she wasn’t too afraid to question the change in her relationship with Will these past two weeks she’d ask what else she could do now.)
Mac sighs in her sleep, shifting uncomfortably in the silk cocktail gown that he unzipped halfway so she could take her bra off. Champagne makes them both drowsy, and what they could have expected but to fall asleep halfway through writing the script is uncertain.
The night (the party, the dances they pretended to concede to, the easy banter and helping the other unknot from their formal attire and now this, sharing a bed) has been familiar, but distant. They move in countermoves, remaining close while still apart. Even sleeping, his fingers twitch at the memory (recent and old) of sweeping her hair off her shoulders to fix the clasp of her necklace.
Brows furrowing, he rolls over again, back towards her.
And onto more papers.
Grumbling, he pushes the files down and away and moves even closer. If he reaches he can touch her. But the closeness is enough that he sleeps through until her alarm goes off in the morning.
X.
It’s not as if he hasn’t called the wrong person while wasted (although for her it was a case of simply dialing the wrong number) so he can’t blame Maggie. He does ignore her stuttered apologies, get into a cab, and pull her out of the corner of the dark hotel bar she’s hidden herself in all the while cursing himself for not remembering it’s been a fucking year since Uganda. She’s too drunk to remember her own address, and he definitely doesn’t know it, or where her key is, so he makes the executive decision that Maggie can sleep it off in his guest room.
There are numerous brief moments, up until Maggie falls asleep with her head on his thigh on his couch, where he considers calling Mac.
(But the old habit of hoarding secrets to keep them safe dies violently and gracelessly, so Mac remains uninformed until Maggie cuts her hair three days later.)
She can’t sleep alone, spent her childhood climbing into bed with her older brother and wedging herself between him and the wall, waiting for the doors to stop slamming. There’s a house waiting for her in Kansas, but she can’t go home. But she can drink, although she’s beginning to think that she can’t anymore. Not if it means that she loses her job.
Her position on News Night’s senior staff is what she has left.
(Something will make her forget. Something will make it stop hurting. Something will come.)
Will is adequately warm, but she still shivers under the fleece blanket he threw over her curled up form before tipping his head back against the back of the couch and falling asleep. His neck is beginning to cramp, and he’ll wake soon to put a pillow under her head and a glass of water on the coffee table (and then a bottle of aspirin, and then find another blanket, and try to calculate how awkward this is going to be in the morning) before retreating to his bedroom.
Until then, his fingers unconsciously drift through long blonde hair.
One day, Terry Smith will call him asking what he thinks about Maggie Jordan, and he’ll have the distance between this night and the night she’ll report live from Boston on his mind when he answers.
XI.
The sibilant crash of the waves reaching the shore lulls them to sleep.
They put in for the time off back in January, three weeks in July during their three least-watched weeks of year for what was supposed to be their honeymoon in a private villa on the French Riviera. Instead they’re in East Hampton, praying that Pruitt doesn’t demand their presence back in Manhattan. But the idea of a private beach remains the same.
There only decision they’ve made today was whether to nap in the hammock up on the back porch of the house overlooking the ocean, or down on a blanket under the umbrella on the beach. The hammock is the safest bet; at the end of the first trimester along her morning sickness still hasn’t subsided. The porch is cooler than down on the sand, and because the heat turns her stomach when the hormones really don’t need to be helped along, Mac falls asleep on top of Will in the shade.
He lets the gentle rocking of the hammock in the ocean breeze take him along with her.
They both dream about the baby.
(There’s so much that can go wrong, but the blood tests have come back clean. After all of this they worry that nothing can be easy, or follow the straight path. But Mac has made it to twelve weeks without incident, and even at her age the risk of miscarriage has substantially decreased.
Not that Will is any less fidgety about being hours away from their high-risk OB.)
The words we’ll have to do this with the baby appear increasingly on their lips, even as the baby is little more than the firm round of Mac’s stomach pressed against Will’s as they doze. In between meetings and paperwork and her daily fights with Pruitt she lets her mind run through all the genetic permutations, comforted by how she loves every child that may come.
His chest rises and falls in time with the rhythm of the ocean rolling in. This may be their only chance to brace for the many and infinite ways the past few months have changed their lives, even if they’ve vowed to forgo regrets. Especially if they’ve vowed to forgo regrets.
Mac’s toes draw up his shin, her knee coming up to frame his hip. His fingers flare over her back before his arms wrap around her waist. In tiny increments, their bodies fit them more tightly together.
Both of their phones are inside, on the kitchen counter, and on silent.
They need rest.
(And each other, but that’s no longer a topic of debate, just something that’s fulfilled without asking.)
For now, skies are blue.
XII.
The knee replacement doesn’t come as a surprise; the children systemically take out his legs in enthusiastic and brutal greeting, their six year old still likes to be carried around when she can be, and he’s never denied indulging them in any of their schemes that involve less-than-gentle play in the backyard or living room.
Mac murmurs her apologies about needing to be on a conference call with the heads of the DC and LA bureaus, setting 101 Dalmatians to play on the television in their bedroom and setting the kids on the end of their bed and instructing them to behave for Daddy until I come back, and looking at their oldest with a coy, Charlotte, you’re in charge—you hear me? Teddy? Josie? Listen to your sister and be careful with Dad, before heading upstairs to the home extension of her office.
The oxycodone he took after finishing his physical therapy for the day has him muddled (it has, after all, been almost nine years since he took Vicodin recreationally), but he can mind them while they watch a movie.
It’s their three year old who tires first, even after insisting all afternoon that she doesn’t need a nap.
Crawling up the mattress she avoids his splinted knee and situates herself on his chest, wrapping her chubby arms around his neck and tucking her blonde head under his chin. And then the four year old, planting himself at Will’s side; Will lifts his arm so his son can pillow his head on his bicep. Their first grader lasts the longest before sliding under the blankets on his other side and resting her dark head next to her sister’s, clutching her father’s arm like a security blanket as Cruella de Vil struts across the screen.
Mac comes back forty minutes later to find the kids clinging to Will in their own way, all four of them asleep as the Blu Ray play screen repeats itself quietly over and over. It’s been pouring all day leaving her with three stir-crazy children and Will hasn’t slept well at all since the surgery five days ago, so she decides to leave them be and clean up the wreck that has become their living room.
Backing out of their bedroom she silently closes the door, leaving it open a inch.