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“Did you know there’s a physicist in Belgium who thinks that time is curved?” They’re walking down the hallway to a meeting. Josh is still blinking sleep from his eyes and clutching his paper coffee cup like it’s the first one of the day. It’s not. God, it should be illegal to be this tired this early in an administration. And there’s still the second one, if they’re lucky.
Not that they’ve been lucky in the past year and a half. Maybe they’ll lose reelection and Josh will be able to retire early, get some sleep, spend time on a white sand beach and be so bored that he wants to die within a week.
“What?” He says to Donna, words making their way slowly into his brain.
“There’s a scientist. He thinks time is curved and that sometimes, under the influence or in times of stress, we sort of, you know, glimpse the future.”
“Where did you hear this?”
“In a book I’m reading.” Donna’s always reading a book – classics, trashy romances, presidential biographies, self-help, and once, on Airforce One, he found her reading the Norwegian tax code. Actually, it’s very fascinating when you think about it. He doesn’t know where she finds the time, especially on top of the ungodly amount of reading that she does for him.
“I think you read too much.” Josh says. “And I think that your Belgium scientist is getting you on.”
“It’s true, Josh. They did all these experiments back in the 60s where they gave people LSD and led them through guided meditations and they were going to follow up later to see if any of them correctly predicted anything.”
“Well did they?”
“Did they what?”
“Predict the future?”
“Oh. No. Well, they never finished the studies. LSD became a classified drug and their funding got pulled.”
“So they just essentially fed a bunch of people LSD for no reason? I gotta say, I miss the days before we had ethics boards in research.”
It’s a couple days Before. Only they don’t know what’s coming yet, so they don’t call it before. It’s just Wednesday or something. He’s headed to one of those exceptionally boring meetings. And this one isn’t even one of the boring meetings that actually changes the entire economic climate of the country, like with the corn subsidies board. It’s just boring.
“So when you see the future, what’s it look like? Donna, do you want to cover this meeting on recommendations for presidential aerobics whatever for me?”
“The recommendations meeting for the Presidential Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition? No, it sounds boring. I don’t think you see it. It’s more of a glimpse. And you just, I don’t know, you just know.”
“Like deja vu?”
“No, deja vu’s when you think you think something has already happened, but it hasn’t. This is like when you see something and you know it’s going to happen, only it hasn’t yet.”
“Deja vu in reverse?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
She hands him his files and legal pad. While his hands are full and he’s looking over the top sheet that she’s added to his notes, she reaches up and straightens his tie because he slept in his office last night and he needs the extra help to look like a real person. There’s a kind of choreography to it, lots of practice in how they move their bodies around each other.
It’s going to be such a boring meeting. Long and a waste of his time. He doesn’t even need to be there really. He’s just a walking, talking indicator that the President is paying attention to something, even if no one is paying attention to it at all. He’s just going to sit there for an hour and a half and think about…well about the idea that maybe time is curved, actually.
“Knock ‘em dead.” She flicks an invisible piece of lint off his shoulder.
“They’re old ladies mostly. If I knocked them, they might actually die.”
“Well, not dead, but…” She pauses for the briefest moment with her hands on his lapels and yawns. “Charm them then. It’s good practice.” She turns and walks down the hall.
It’s a good day here. Everything is humming and there’s only the normal number of disasters and the pit in Josh’s stomach is gone. It’s an easy meeting and he’s already thinking of the funny thing that he’ll say to her after it. It won’t make her laugh. (It’s hard to make Donna laugh. You really have to earn it.) But it will make her smirk a little and maybe shake her head.
“Donna.” She stops and turns over her shoulder, eyebrows raised. “Time’s curved?”
“Yeah.” She nods with a smile.
He drums his fingers on the doorframe. “Okay.”
It’s not a bad day.
**
Donna’s the only one in the waiting room.
Josh’s mother is stranded in Florida. Donna helped her book the plane tickets over the phone, but now there’s some unseasonable tropical weather system sweeping up the coast. And Toby, Sam, and CJ had to go back to the White House. The President’s been shot. There’s understandably a lot of work to be doing.
Donna has a lot of work to be doing. Not that anyone has told her she has work to be doing. But there are things Josh will want followed up on. Some emails and calls that he will want made, even if he dies, because he’s not a quitter or the kind of person who will do things by halves.
She realizes this in the first six hours of his surgery, when it looks like he might really, actually die. The thought of her cracking heads on behalf of a dead Josh Lyman, like an administrative ghost, is so funny that she starts laughing out loud in the waiting room. Once she starts laughing she can’t stop. She’s been crying so much that it’s a very wet kind of laugh. She really can’t stop so she goes to the restroom and splashes water on her face before she looks like she’s hysterical.
It’s there, under the unwavering fluorescents, that she realizes that if Josh dies she won’t have a job anymore. No one needs an assistant to a dead Deputy Chief of Staff. And he won’t be there to think that his haunting senators via Donna is hilarious. Dead Josh won’t care about the emails because he’ll be dead. She doesn’t start crying again. Just sits back down and bites her fingernails.
And it’s stupid but she really wishes Josh were here, inhaling vending machine coffee and jiggling his leg against hers at a thousand beats per minute. If Josh were here, and not trying not to die under operating theater lights, he would say something like: The thing about waiting for someone to get out of open heart surgery is… and twelve hours later they would emerge with Bartlet’s plan to fix hospital waiting rooms or healthcare or something. And it would be twelve very productive hours and not full agony.
Donna calls the office with updates every half an hour, even thought she knows that the Chief of Surgery is doing the same. Sam lets her do it, always picks up the phone by the fifth ring, never tells her that she’s clogging the line. She can hear him sometimes, covering the receiver and repeating something to Toby or CJ.
It’s true when they say that the presidency is an institution. Donna didn’t understand what this meant until she got into the West Wing. But now she thinks of it like the cogs in a watch – all ticking in unison, turning with the help of the others. Leo takes care of the president and the Senior Staff takes care of Leo. And Donna takes care of Josh. This is her contribution to American democracy. So she hangs onto the phone and Sam hangs onto the other end – two cogs trying to keep ticking.
In the end, Donna takes Josh home from the hospital. For half a second in the hospital, Abby waves her down. She’s about to say that Donna’s so tired she’s swaying on her feet. That they can look after Josh. It’s the practiced gesture of a woman with experience taking care of children and sick people. A woman who likes to move when there’s a crisis. Josh is both sick, and in his own way, one of her kids. But she stops suddenly, and sits back down with a stunned look on her face. She’s not just a mother and a doctor anymore, she’s the First Lady. And she can’t take care of Josh. So in the end Donna takes him home.
**
It’s April in D.C. It’s just rained. It’s a rainy, humid, miserable swamp town, but right now the air is full of mist that’s making halos around the street lights.
Josh spends the ride home making bad jokes and pretending that the seat belt doesn’t pull at his sutures. Hospital humor is the very worst of his material, right next to the dead dad stuff he tried out for about a week after the Illinois primary. He knows that Donna really thought he was going to die, because she’s laughing at stuff that should be making her roll her eyes. After a while he stops talking, just watches the monuments go by – lit up golden at night, gone soft.
Donna helps Josh up the steps and opens his apartment door using her own set of keys.
Standing on his stoop, Josh is glad to be alive. Glad that he lives in this manufactured swamp town, helps to run this sprawling, infuriating country, and is extremely pleased that he hired the degreeless Midwestern girl who appeared at his desk one day. Well, she hired herself, but all the more luck to him for that.
Donna is laying out his medications, writing sheets of instructions for him in that distinctive Donna-scrawl of hers. It took him more help than he would have liked to get into his apartment. Josh is starting to realize that the truly excruciating part of his recovery isn’t going to be the surgeons rooting around in his chest, but taking it slow as his traitorous body takes time to heal and knit together. He’s going to go insane.
He’s on the edge of one painkiller, about to fade into another. He looks at Donna, really looks at her and not at the faintly Donna-shaped glow on the edge of his vision like in the past couple of days. Her hair is impeccable – smooth in its usually swoopy ponytail and she’s wearing a neat office skirt and a sweater, even though she’s been in the hospital all day and nowhere near work.
But there are dark smudges under her eyes, and an unusual air of unsteadiness to her as she leans against his kitchen counter like she might actually need the support. It’s a look he recognizes from primary debate prep, about two hours before he found her sleeping in the last row of the auditorium they were using. He’d had to cover her with his suit jacket.
“Donna, when’s the last time that you got a full night’s sleep?”
“I went home for eight hours last night, which is more than you sometimes let me have at the office.” She says crisply, eyes still on her list of instructions. “It’s been a light week.”
Having spent the last week in a gunshot, surgery, drug-induced haze, Josh doesn’t have the facts to prove her wrong, but he suspects that this is untrue. He remembers an awful lot of Donna. Donna filling out the form with his insurance information. Donna asking all sorts of questions of his surgeon. Donna beating Toby out of his room: They were pulling lead pellets out of his body twelve hours ago Toby, find somebody else to ask about Argentinian tariffs. Donna sleeping in the chair beside his bed, blonde hair fanned out like a curtain.
“Can you at least sit down? You’re swaying where you stand and it’s making me dizzy.”
Donna leaves his kitchen and sits in the armchair next to him. She pulls her bag on her lap like she’s about to leave any second now.
“Your instructions and your medicine are on the counter. And you should read the instructions before you start swallowing things.”
“Yeah, you’ve said about a dozen times.” His voice softens, curves around her name. “Donna, thank you. For the instructions and the badgering the surgeons and the all of it. You should really get some sleep.”
Donna flicks her ponytail over her shoulder in a valiant show of not-tiredness. “Thank you. It’s in the job description.” She’s blinking those long, sequential blinks that he’s come to know as a precursor to Donna falling asleep into a carton of chow mein.
“You’re dead on your feet.”
“I’m not on my feet because you insisted that I sit. And I haven’t been sleeping much. I didn’t want to miss a phone call from the hospital. I’m going home in a minute, I just need to think about how to stand again.”
“Donna…” His voice familiar, feathering out on the edges towards exasperation.
“Don’t ‘Donna’ me, Josh. Do you know how many organs you have?”
“The normal amount, I expect.”
“Seventy-eight, Josh. There are seventy-eight organs in the human body. There’s your heart and your lungs and those can collapse and rupture and block. And there’s all these valves and the places they connect and chambers and all of those can fail too and don’t even get me started on the rest of your organs…I know that the doctors said that you were okay to be home and you’re Deputy Chief of Staff to the President of the United States and you can take care of yourself, but I just never realized how many ways there are to die before last week.”
“And if you leave, you’re scared one of my many organs will fail and I’ll die.”
“One of your seventy-eight, yes.”
“What’s stopping me from dying while you’re in my apartment?”
“You wouldn’t do that while I’m here. You’re too stubborn and I think you would find it embarrassing.”
“That’s fair.”
“Okay. I think I’m going to leave now, since I’ve already word-vomited on you and I’ve been wearing the same clothes since Tuesday.”
She stands up, only a little unsteady at the edges now. Josh realizes that he doesn’t want her to leave, tries to come up with a good excuse to make his overworked assistant stay in his apartment
“Donna, come on. Just stay. I have a guest room. You’re too tired to drive home. You can shower and borrow some of my clothes so that neither of us smell like hospital anymore.”
“Okay,” Donna’s hand is on her bag, like she might actually stand up and leave, but then the tension goes out of her shoulder and she lets her head drift to one side. “But I’m staying because I’m tired and not because I’m scared that you’re going to die.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it, Josh. It just would be a bother to find a new job.”
“I got it.”
“I’m going to shower now.”
“Okay.”
Josh is falling asleep and Donna is in his shower, which is warm and full of steam. The water will be running through her hair, darkened the way blonde gets when it’s wet, and down her narrow shoulders. Donna is naked in his shower, which is an entirely normal place to be naked. In fact, it feels entirely normal for Donna to be in his apartment. It feels like she’s always been coming here, like it’s more than just a place with Josh’s stuff when she’s here.
He’s taken his evening round of medications — the antibiotics to fight against inflection, and the painkillers that blunt the edges of the world, the painful pulling in his chest, and the harsh halos around the ceiling lights. He’ll be glad when he’s off them and he’s got full possession of his brain back. But now he’s drifting off pleasantly in his bed where Donna put him and he can hear the running of his shower where she’s softly humming. Did he know that Donna does that? Hum in the shower?
With his eyes closed, he can hear the soft sound of her footsteps as she exits the shower.
“Old t-shirts, top drawer on the left.”
And the sound of her footsteps again to his closet and back into his room. He knows that now he should say something about his guest room, because she’s his assistant and he told her to stay the night only because he has a perfectly good guest room and it never gets used, not even as an office, because really, if he has work he’ll just stay late. There are boundaries, even in a relationship like theirs, which has always been – well Josh is the only person in the executive branch who can name all of his assistant’s ex-boyfriends and definitely the only one with strong opinions on each one.
“Can you stay for a second? I don’t –” I don’t want to be alone. Not for the first time, he’s glad it’s Donna, and not Sam or his mother, who took him home from the hospital.
He opens his eyes and she’s standing there in a pair of his boxers and a t-shirt from law school. He’s seen her out of the shower before (banging on her hotel door somewhere in one of the Carolinas for county-by-county numbers) but her hair’s all dark and Josh is suddenly reminded that she’s younger than he is, the age he was when he first started working on the Hill.
Donna sits on the edge of his bed.
“Nice shirt.” He says.
Donna frowns and inspects the hem. “It’s got holes in it.”
“It’s well loved.”
“I’m not sure you know how to do laundry.”
“Hey.” He’s definitely on painkillers, industrial strength, military-grade kinds, because he cocks his head. Donna, who is not, to his knowledge, on drugs of any kind, and therefore has no excuse, follows his signal and lays down on the edge of his bed, touching her chin to the top of his shoulder. “You can’t give me flack about my laundry. I’ve just been shot.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Josh has the strangest feeling of being in his bed, but also being somewhere else. And it’s, he swears to God, the painkillers or something, but it’s a thought he can’t quite blink away, a radio dispatch caught in the frequency of his head.
He and Sam – they’re in one of those anonymous country club rooms with the white wainscoting and cream wallpapers where these sorts of things happen. He’s fiddling with his cufflinks and there’s two glasses of scotch on the bar, ice slowly melting and condensation dripping onto the paper coasters.
“It’s called strategic communication, Sam. You should know something about that.”
“Strategic communication. So you’re telling me there was a plan.”
“A plan? Of course there was a plan. I knew the first night she stayed over. The night I got out of the hospital.”
“So it was a very long plan then.”
“Of course it was a long plan. You can’t rush these sorts of things.”
And he’s tugging at his tie, because it’s sort of a talisman that normally summons Donna. She learned the windsor knot and the bowtie very much under duress, but he knows that she can’t mind very much, because she agreed to marry him and it’s entirely too late to back out now.
And the radio signal’s fading. Donna’s hair is making a wet spot on his shoulder.
“I’m glad that you’re alive.” Donna says, very quietly, so quietly that Josh almost doesn’t hear. Then she moves, sleepily, closer into his chest, but careful of the stitches and the sutures that are still tenderly keeping him whole.
He tightens his arm around her, moves his nose against the top of her head. She smells like his shampoo and like Donna. Blissed out on painkillers and dancing dangerously on the edge of sleep he says, “I think it’s all going to work out in the end.”
**
Years later, Josh is fiddling with his cufflinks. They’re his father’s, and his mother had presented them to him this morning while blinking away tears. It’s been a marquee weekend for tears, and they haven’t even made it to the actual wedding yet.
It’s still the rehearsal dinner – not some anonymous country club, but the familiar halls of the White House (not entirely un-country club like at the end of the day), because Bartlet had given Josh a very strange look when he’d said that he and Donna were going to sneak out to the courthouse one weekend and the next thing he knew the White House Events Office was calling his personal number and sending him Rose Garden availability dates. It all worked out in the end, since two US Presidents had insisted on attending and the security involved in that sort of thing was normally a nightmare.
They’re getting married tomorrow, under a white rose chuppah on the South Lawn. CJ cried through the entirety of the rehearsal, most of the dinner, and then started in earnest again during the speeches. Toby, who spoke in lieu of both Leo McGary and the groom’s father, was brief and characteristically pessimistic and somehow brought half the room to tears.
Between Sam, who’s been treating his best man speech with the gravity of a State of the Union, and Bartlet, who’s officiating, there’s not much of a chance that the rest of the group is escaping with dry eyes tomorrow. Josh is unclear why exactly he decided to stack his wedding party with the most eloquent speakers in the free world, and then Sam appears, bearing double scotches that Josh definitely didn’t order, and he remembers that none of them gave him very much choice in the matter.
“What was,” He takes the glass from Sam, “Toby going on about in his speech?”
“The essential doomed nature of love in a cruel world? I think he was trying to say that he’s very happy for the both of you.”
“No, I got that part.” Josh takes a drink, sets the glass down on a paper coaster. “I meant the part about my being slow on the uptake.”
“I think he meant it took you over a decade to make a move on the girl you were in love with.”
“Make a move?”
“Yeah, make a move.”
“Well you don’t make a move on the girl you’re in love with, just to start things off.”
“You don’t?”
“No. You move very strategically.”
“I don’t think you should overthink what Toby was trying to say.”
“Well, I’m trying not to think too hard about the fact I’m getting married tomorrow, so I’m overthinking something Toby said instead. It’s a force of habit. It’s a deflection strategy.”
“If it helps, okay.”
“It’s called strategic communication, Sam. You should know something about that.”
“Strategic communication. You’re telling me there was a plan.”
“A plan? Of course there was a plan. I knew the first night she stayed over. The night I got out of the hospital.” Josh blinks. He has the strangest feeling, like a distant radio signal catching, like remembering something he doesn’t quite remember.
“So it was a very long plan then.”
“Of course it was a long plan. You can’t rush these sorts of things.” Donna’s hair, making a wet spot on his shoulder.
“A decade long plan.”
“It was a very careful and might I add, very successful plan.”
And then like a miracle, Donna’s there, looking very pretty in white, telling them that Charlie and Zoey (egged on by CJ) are attempting to make everyone do a round of shots. And the radio’s fading out, a signal further down the road.
In the car, on the way home, he’s watching the monuments roll past, lit up golden at this time of night. The mist is clinking to the streetlights and he’s tracing a finger across Donna’s open palm, lingering on the smooth golden underside of her engagement ring when he says:
“Do you remember what you said to me, about time being curved?”
“When?”
“I don’t know. We were walking down the hallway to some meeting.”
“That narrows it down.”
“Sometime during the first Bartlet administration. You said there was this Belgian scientist you read about in a book and I spent the whole Presidential aerobics meeting thinking about whether or not time was curved.”
“Presidential Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition.” Donna corrects out of habit. “Oh. Déjà vu in reverse. I remember now, why?”
“I could have sworn I had a moment back there. You know what, nevermind.”
He slips his arm around her and she settles into the familiar place nestled next to him.
“Nevermind?”
“Nevermind.” He closes his hand over hers. All things considered, tomorrow is going to be a good day.