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Her glass of scotch is almost empty and she’s typing furiously enough that she barely notices anyone coming closer when Leo knocks on her door and opens it before she’s had time to respond — or dry her tears.
She does that, hastily and too obviously to hope he didn’t notice, before she does anything else. Leo’s frowning at her.
“I thought you’d left already,” he tells her, closing the door behind him while CJ continues to type.
She nods. “I came back,” she says simply.
“Canceled your Christmas plans to get back to work?”
“Didn’t have much of a plan to begin with.”
Leo sits down on her couch. “You weren’t going home?”
CJ stops typing for a moment. “I offered to cook for you tomorrow night, didn’t I? You thought I was flying back and forth to Ohio? I had dinner with Danny, now I have time for this.”
“And this is..?”
“A memo to the President about potential angles to start working on hate-crime legislation again.”
Leo sighs. She tries not to look like that hurts her.
“You know how we— we have to be careful about it, CJ. Not everyone thinks people should sentenced based on the thoughts in their head when they commit a crime— not everyone thinks it should change the nature of the crime. We can’t just—“
“Thoughts matter, Leo,” she says. She continues to type, her lips pursed together tightly — she doesn’t look at him. “What’s on someone’s mind when they take another person’s life matters. Because we understand the difference between murder and manslaughter. Because Lowell Lydell would still be alive if he hadn’t been gay. Because the tragedy of his death wouldn’t be followed up with but let’s not make it too big of a deal if he hadn’t been gay. And that matters. It should matter!”
She thinks she does a pretty good job hiding the way it stings when all that Leo says is “he really got to you, huh?”
CJ’s hands hover above her keyboard, a frustrated burning in her chest when Leo, kind and sympathetic and disturbingly dismissive, refills the now empty glass on her desk and tells her “take a break, CJ. Come sit with me.” When she doesn’t immediately respond he adds “or I walk you home. Either way, it’s Christmas Eve. You rushed through dinner just to come back and argue about hate-crime legislation?”
“The dinner was spent arguing about hate-crime legislation, too.”
“It’s almost hard to imagine how you had time to come back to the office after.”
“Don’t act like it’s funny,” she tells him.
He shakes his head and tells her to get her coat. “The President’s not gonna read it until after Christmas anyway, if you want to finish it, finish it tomorrow.”
“It’s Christmas tomorrow.”
“You didn’t have plans, did you?”
CJ grabs her coat, feeling like a chastised child. She has half a mind to quit on the spot and bites her tongue until they’re well out the building.
Outside the gates of the White House, while he’s still wrapping his scarf around his neck, Leo places a hand on her back and takes a deep breath.“Alright, what’s the pitch?”
“The government’s never cared when gay people die in preventable and unjust ways; I think it’s about time we even tried changing that.”
It’s the point she’d made to Danny earlier; he’d agreed with her on that, at least. She doesn’t feel any less childish saying it out loud now. In the pregnant beats of silence that follow, she’s momentarily not so sure that Leo will agree as easily.
“You’re talking about AIDS.”
He brings it casually, like recounting a distant memory. It’s unfathomable to her.
“Yes.”
Her hands are sweating now, palms clammy in the cold breeze they stand in. She moves from one foot to the other and puts her hands in her pockets just to take them out again. CJ doesn’t know what to do with herself or with the eery feeling that her heart, beating three times the normal rate, will give out before she’s home.
“You were, what? In college, when it got bad?” Leo asks. She appreciates his stillness — how he doesn’t fidget with anything, doesn’t shift uncomfortably, doesn’t let his eyes dart every which way. He’s still, he’s calm, and while part of her wishes he couldn’t so easily be calm when talking about this, she appreciates the grounding presence he offers all the same.
CJ nods. “I started at Berkeley in ‘83, across the bay from San Fransisco.”
“Did you know anyone who got it?”
She scoffs before she can stop herself.
“What does the scoff mean?” Leo asks — he sounds sincerely curious and that just makes it worse. They keep walking.
CJ’s surprised by her lack of hesitation when she coldly responds “it means I’m relatively confident to say that I’ve organized more funerals than most people working here have attended.” She pauses, allowing that to sit in the air for a few moments, before she more firmly adds “and no one cared. No one gave a damn beyond the fear and the disgust they felt towards those in attendance and those still waiting for their turn to be buried.”
“That’s not what’s happening here,” Leo tries.
“Looks familiar to me.”
“It’s not the same thing,” he insists. She wants to scream at him. “This is old-fashioned homophobia, it’s— I know it’s bad, CJ, of course it is, but this isn’t government failure, it’s teenagers in a small town. That was— government not doing enough.”
“We’re doing enough now?” She asks. He looks at her like he’s just sorry.
“It’s homophobia either way, Leo. It’s not— it’s not all that complicated. A gay plague, GRID. A whole—“ she swallows some words. “A whole generation just vanished like that while the government sat and watched it happen without lifting a finger until we’d lost thousands too many.
“And I know this is just one person, one kid. I know we didn’t kill him, we didn’t let him die but. God, Leo, how can you—“ CJ takes a deep breath. She tries not to look as lightheaded as she feels. ”He would have been alive for Christmas if he wasn’t gay. And the White House is standing by and saying not our problem. I don’t know what else to make of that if not government failure.”
She stops talking. She breathes in and out slowly, trying to steady herself when it feels like the world is spinning around her. This wasn’t the conversation she wanted to have tonight, or ever.
“We?” Leo asks gently, his eyebrows raised slightly but really not looking all that surprised.
CJ’s heart beats in her throat; she thinks she might be sick.
“I had a girlfriend.”
She says it quietly, but not quietly enough that it can escape Leo’s notice. CJ stops walking, her hands deep in her pockets to shield them from the cold and her eyes sharp, looking at Leo as his face falls slightly because he knows — is smart enough to guess — where the rest of that story might go.
There are tears in her eyes. Leo looks unsure of himself, like he wants to ask a million different things but doesn’t want to say anything at all. CJ shivers. “She tested positive in ‘86,” she says. “Though she likely got infected the year I started at Berkeley.”
“When did she die?”
She appreciates that he doesn’t pretend not to know how this ends. Appreciates the directness in his question, the lack of hesitation in his tone even when his face is filled with uncertainty. “1989,” she tells him. “December second.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Of course you didn’t. No one does.”
Leo steps closer. “No one?”
She doesn’t correct herself that there are one or two exceptions. It’s not worth the explanation.
“I wanted to do this,” she says instead. “This is what I’m good at. I wanted to do politics. Professional politics. Because I spent years trying to make a change from the ground, years, and nothing happened. Not enough. I wanted to do something good and this— this felt like it. And I couldn’t do this if anyone knew.
“I’m a spokesperson, Leo. I’m an advisor to the President of the United States, but first and foremost I’m his spokesperson. I’m the face of the White House and before that I was the face of his campaign and a dozen others before him. I like running people who are good, with good policies and good intentions, good people. And I don’t want to run their campaigns into the ground by coming on board as that one dyke whose girlfriend got AIDS. No one votes for that.”
Her words hang heavy in the air as she’s breathing erratically, eyes wide. She’s ashamed of the tears she has to wipe off her face while Leo stares at her with an unreadable face and a lifted hand that keeps hesitating to reach for her.
She should stop talking. She should shut up and apologise and keep it together as best she can until she’s home and rage at the empty walls. CJ can’t find it in her to keep her mouth shut now that she’s started.
“I spent years of my life pretending Jackie never existed — pretending it never happened. Because I wanted to do this.” CJ’s really crying now. She almost regrets giving Leo her name. She’s stopped trying to wipe her tears away. “She was dying and no one cared. She never got AIDS, not officially. She died as less than a damn statistic in the epidemic.
“She died, and it didn’t change a thing, and I wanted to do this, because maybe change comes from within after all. And I couldn’t do this if I was steeped in the stigma of AIDS, so— I don’t talk about her. It’s like everybody got what they wanted, like she never existed in the first place, because I wanted to make the world a better, safer place by doing this. And now I’m here. I’m the White House Press Secretary, I advise the President himself, and I still can’t—“
CJ takes a shuddering breath and doesn’t shy away when Leo places a hand on her upper arm. She must look like she’s lost it but she can’t bring herself to care. If she’s out of a job after this outburst, she’s out of a job.
“I wanted to marry her one day,” she continues, her mind spinning every which way. “One day, when we were forty or fifty years old and we could do that. And instead I’ve spent years pretending she never existed because I can’t tell people how she died without posing a risk to whoever I work for. Years, and here I am, and Lowell Lydell still got murdered for being gay, and I can’t convince a damn person in the White House to care enough that that’s why he died to do a thing about it. So what did I do all that for?”
She might seriously be out of a job in a few minutes. The only way she could’ve made this worse is if it wasn’t Leo but the President, but Leo might still ask her to resign — he could say it’d be for her own peace of mind. She’d rage at him, but she honestly wouldn’t blame Leo after all this.
What’s the point in keeping this job, she wonders for one brief moment, if all she’s managed to do is betray Jackie’s memory for the sake of accomplishing nothing after all?
“She never had AIDS?” he asks instead. She appreciates the genuine tone of the question, at the very least; he doesn’t sound like he’s asking her to resign just yet.
CJ leans against the wall of whichever building she’s standing in front of. She shakes her head and pulls at the lapel of her coat. “Never qualified. The definition— tailored to men, and even there it fell short. For women… they didn’t get AIDS; they just died of it.”
“That one sounds familiar,” Leo notes soberly. She forces herself to laugh. “When was it changed?”
“’92,” CJ says softly. Too recent a year to feel like a lifetime ago. She’d been working for EMILY’s list at the time, pretending the CDC’s actions meant little to her. “The number of women with AIDS went up 45% overnight, just like that. She’d never have made it to that day.”
Leo’s looking at her still. “’89, you said?”
Fresh tears form in the corners of her eyes when she nods. “Ten years ago earlier this month.”
“I’m sorry, CJ.”
The December air is cold around them. In the distance, with her eyes staring up at the streetlights without seeing a damn thing, she can hear carol singers. In a heartbeat, she’s twenty-four again, spending Christmas Eve in San Francisco walking around in the rain because going back to the apartment Jackie took her last breaths in was too much to bear on Christmas.
Leo says nothing yet. He hasn’t moved.
The carol singers move further away. She wishes it’d start raining. She can still taste the salmon she had at dinner and it makes her sick — she shouldn’t have ordered fish at a restaurant.
She probably shouldn’t have gone to dinner. It’d sounded like a better idea this afternoon — when she still thought she could change anyone’s mind on the idea that someone in DC should give a damn when kids are killed for being gay.
An unfair thought. She doesn’t care.
“You make a difference here,” Leo tells her eventually. “It matters. The work you do. It’s not for nothing.”
“Sometimes I think the only thing keeping me here is knowing that whichever guy you’ll pick to take my job after me, will manage even less than I did.”
Leo chooses the wrong moment to ask “who says we’d pick a guy?”
CJ rolls her eyes. “I do.”
He tilts his head in a stiff nod and says nothing to respond to that.
“You think this is worth the political capital it’ll cost to get it done?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to think about that at all?”
CJ shakes her head. Why should she?
Leo nods. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
He gets her to keep walking. A few more blocks and she can finally close her front door behind her.
“You don’t have any plans tomorrow, right?” Leo asks. When she rolls her eyes and tells him he can stop reminding her of that, he chuckles. “Neither do I. You don’t have to cook for me, but stop by the office? We’ll… see what’s possible.”
CJ dares to smile. It doesn’t sound all that promising, but it’s better than she expected. She’s not fired. “It’s Christmas tomorrow,” she reminds him. “No one we need is gonna take our calls. No member of Congress is even in town.”
Leo shrugs. “We can plan. We’ll make calls the day after. Besides,” he pauses, then laughs, like he’s just remembering something. “Toby’s been—“
She raises her eyebrows. Leo grins.
“Toby’s been complaining that Congresswoman Wyatt’s nagging him about hate crimes in between divorce proceedings. We’ll split the house, but when are you going to the President about Lydell? If anyone’s out of her mind enough to take that call tomorrow…”
CJ laughs louder than she thought she could tonight. She doubles over, head between her knees for just a moment, then straightens out and shakes her head with a wide smile. Of course.
Andy’d kissed her hours after burying Jackie — they never really talked about that.
“Of course she is,” CJ brings out, still laughing. “Of course.”
She’s not going to explain anything to Leo no matter how perplexed he stares at her. She shakes her head again.
“So we’ll make a plan tomorrow?” Leo asks her instead. She appreciates it.
“Yeah,” CJ says. She should feel relieved, should feel like she accomplished something. She just feels like she bared her soul and outed herself for the small possibility that Leo might be serious this time. “We’ll make a plan tomorrow.”
Leo walks her right to her doorstep, where he leans up to kiss her cheek and fix her coat. She thanks him quietly and doesn’t specify what for. He shakes his head.
“Get some rest, kid.”