No Safe Place (44 page)

The house was jammed with people—old and young, children and grandchildren—and the tables were covered with food and drink and photographs of Liam. The mood was as complex as death itself—brave, nostalgic, sad—and laughter mingled in the air with the softer voices of recollection. Lara had no chance to talk to Kerry. He was trapped in his role of public man—shaking hands, listening to complaints or advice, suffering those for whom his presence made their own grief more important, something to be shared with a senator. But for the fact that, to Lara, he appeared drawn, Kerry looked contained—speaking softly, touching and being touched, smiling when that was called for. The others left him no time for his wife.

Meg, Lara found, was an enigma.

She seemed quite different from the subdued woman Lara had noted at the funeral. Here, she was animated, seeking friends out, her warmth and energy offset only by a somewhat short attention span, a smile that seemed to flash and vanish. In this, she was the opposite of Kerry, who appeared to slow down, to look into faces. But it was not until Lara returned to the buffet that she found herself next to Meg.

“Pardon me,” Lara said. “You must be Meg Kilcannon, the senator’s wife. I’m Lara Costello.”

It took Meg a second to react, as though she had been startled from some private world. “I’m from Washington,” Lara explained. “I cover Congress for the
Times
.”

The warmth in Meg’s eyes receded. “That must be interesting,” Meg said. “What brings you here?”

“Liam Dunn. He and the senator seemed so close.”

Meg nodded. “Kerry really cared about him.”

It was a reasonable enough remark, Lara thought. But the distance in Meg’s tone puzzled her; she could have been talking about a rumor she had heard, rather than something she knew and felt. Then Meg was off to seek new company, smiling again.

It was time to go, Lara thought.

Glancing around the living room, she looked for Kerry, hoping to put in a word. But he was talking to a black couple Lara recognized from the photograph in his office. Kerry appeared tired now; head bent, he said something muted, and the woman kissed him on the cheek. Then the man touched his shoulder, as if in valediction, and Kerry walked out the front door, alone.

Puzzled, Lara went to take leave of Denis Dunn, then stepped into the night.

On the lawn, Lara saw a slim figure in shirtsleeves, gazing up at the moon.

She hesitated, and then walked toward him. A few feet away, she stopped.

Kerry did not turn. “Liam had a long run,” he murmured. “But still …”

When she stepped closer, Lara saw the tears on his face.

“Without him, Lara, I don’t know what would have happened to me. When I was nine—” His voice broke, and then was soft again. “When it comes to death, I’m no philosopher. It’s a weakness, sure.”

Lara’s fingertips grazed the sleeve of his shirt. “It’s not a weakness,” she said, and left.

After Liam’s death, Lara felt a subtle change in her relationship to Kerry Kilcannon.

They never spoke of Liam, or the night of his funeral. But Kerry seemed to accept her as more than a journalist. To Lara, they had entered that ambiguous zone of friendship in which a politician and a reporter use each other for their own purposes, and yet self-interest is tempered—and complicated—by genuine liking. Without saying so, they made up their own rules: personal conversations were always off the record; deceptions were forbidden; each would call the other with useful information. Lara was free to drop by his office; sometimes, when Kerry was restless, they might walk around the Capitol. “You’ve become the Kilcannon expert,” Nate told her. “With a lot of luck, you’ll be White House correspondent.”

Even Kerry, who understood her colleagues well, teased her about this. “If I decide I’m never running,” he told her, “you can always cultivate Dick Mason.”

“Just let me know,” she had answered. But Lara found Kerry intriguing for his own sake, a complex mix of toughness and sensitivity, fatalism and calculation. “He’s like a work in progress,” she told Nate over drinks at the Monocle. “Or a house where they keep adding rooms.”

Nate took off his glasses, inspecting them for smudges; by now, Lara recognized this as a nervous tic, perhaps the residue of shyness. “Does he ever talk about his wife?”

“No. Not really.”

Nate glanced up at her, smiling slightly. “Eight years in Washington is a long time to spend alone. Do you think maybe he’s got someone, after all?”

“Based on what?” Lara answered with some asperity. “Besides, for Kerry Kilcannon, sin actually exists. In
this
crowd, it’s part of his appeal.”

It was true, Lara thought, but for reasons beyond Catholic guilt. Kerry deeply wanted to be good, as a politician and as a man, and doubted that he was. To violate his own moral sense would be to wound himself; however blind his wife might be to this, Meg Kilcannon was a beneficiary, and so was Lara. Though she liked him for it, it made her a little sad.

“Do you ever want kids?” Kerry had asked her the day before.

They were sitting on the lawn in front of Capitol Hill, enjoying the first break of spring; Lara had brought sandwiches and, between bites, had been asking why flood relief for North Dakota was held up in the Senate. The conversation had meandered to Lara’s biggest news—for the first time, she had become an aunt. “It’s hard to believe,” Lara told him, “that I’m related to this midget.” Kerry laughed; his question had followed, asked with the detached curiosity of one friend to another.

“Me?” Lara gazed out at the cherry blossoms, trying to form an honest answer. “I think so. But it scares me, too.”

Kerry tilted his head. “Why’s that?”

“Because if I let it mean too much to me, maybe I’ll get married when I shouldn’t. I’m only twenty-eight. I need independence, my own reason for getting up in the morning.” Lara’s voice grew pensive. “I guess I think about my mom.
We
were the only reason she got up.”

“Does it have to be one or the other?”

His tone was serious, genuinely questioning; Lara guessed that the subject had meaning to him. “Part of it, I guess, depends on who I’m with. I still haven’t figured
that
out.”

Kerry was quiet. Never, Lara realized, did he ask about her social life, nor did she ever speak of it. “Well,” he said at last, “thank God you have choices. At your age, my mother believed hers were already made. Mostly, she was right.”

Lara had an instinct for hurt; she could still remember coming home and discovering her father was gone—that he had not loved his wife, or her, enough even to warn them. The same instinct told her not to ask about Michael
Kilcannon and yet, perversely, spurred a question she could not resist.

“What about you, Kerry? Did you ever want kids?”

Kerry picked a blade of grass. “Yes,” he said. “It just never happened. And with politics …”

It seemed to trouble him, Lara thought.
If you want children,
she almost asked,
why not have them?

As if he had heard her thoughts, Kerry looked up. “At least I get to be godfather,” he said, “to Clayton and Carlie’s kids. And there’s a boy I see here, whenever I can. A five-year-old.”

“‘See’?”

“I take him places. On Sunday afternoons whenever I’m here.”

Lara felt the freshness of discovery. “Is it some sort of secret?” she asked. “I’ve never read anything about it.”

Kerry shrugged, as if discomfited. “Why should you have?”

All at once, Lara was deeply curious—it was as though she had discovered another missing piece of him. On impulse, she asked, “Do you ever let anyone come with you?”

His eyelids lowered, and then he looked at her directly. “If someone wrote about this, it wouldn’t be about Kevin anymore. And I’d guess he wants me to himself.” His voice softened. “The sad thing is that it takes so little. One interested adult can make such a difference, and many kids don’t even have that.”

Lara turned to him. “How did you meet Kevin?”

“At a day care center I was touring. Every time I turned around, he was there.” As if reliving this, Kerry shook his head. “Sometimes you can look at kids, and see the problems in their eyes. Kevin didn’t have to say a thing.”

There was a flatness in Kerry’s voice, the tone he sometimes used, Lara had learned, when he was trying to gain distance from his own feelings. “What do you do when you can’t be here?”

“I call him. Once you start this, it can’t be a hobby.”

What would it have been like, Lara thought to herself, to have had a father who cared, even enough to pick up the telephone and call. “It’s good you feel that responsible,” she said.

“The harm you can do …” His eyes narrowed, as if at some distant memory. “Ten years ago, when I was a prosecutor, a
young boy got attached to me. I invited him to.” His tone
became quiet again. “I learned not to create too many expectations, and to know the ones I could keep.”

The recollection was hurtful, Lara sensed. “It sounds like you’re pretty good with kids, Kerry. In fact, I was thinking you were prime father material.”

In profile, Kerry was still; Lara felt him deciding whether to respond. “At some point,” he said at last, “Meg realized she didn’t want a family. Perhaps politics makes it look worse to her—being Jeannie Mason’s not for everyone.” He turned to her. “I mean, can
you
imagine being Jeannie?”

How honest should she be? Lara wondered. “No,” she answered. “But then I can’t imagine marrying a politician.”

“That’s just it. Meg didn’t.” His voice had the trace of irony that Lara had come to know as his response to sadness, the inscrutable works of fate. “To understate the matter, my career was an accident. One Meg wanted no part of.”

Lara gazed at him, a youthful man of thirty-nine, and tried to imagine Kerry nine years before, faced with his brother’s death. “So the price you pay …”

“Is having a wife who doesn’t want to give up her own life—friends, career, predictability—to be an afterthought in someone else’s. Who can blame her?” As if listening to himself, he said more softly, “The truth, Lara, is that I’ll always feel guilty about coming here when our marriage needed my attention most, and I’ll always resent Meg for the feeling. I’ve never known who to blame, or whether it would have been different.”

And how will it be next year? Lara wondered. Or the year after that: early in its second term, the administration was beset by allegations of illegal fund-raising, raising anew the potential that Kerry could challenge Mason. “What if you
do
run?” she asked.

Kerry’s expression became almost bleak. “It would make the human cost that much worse—for Meg and for me. A friend once told me, ‘To want any one thing too much is barbaric.’ Run for President, I think, and you learn how true that is.” Kerry looked directly into Lara’s eyes. “You’re part of the cost—you and your friends in the press. If I ran, you’d pick over Meg and our marriage until there was nowhere left to hide.”

Lara met his gaze. “No one’s comfortable with that,” she
said evenly. “Not you, not us. But Nixon and then Gary Hart
changed the rules. We can’t know
what
decisions a President might be asked to make, but we can ask what kind of man is making them, and why.”

Kerry shook his head, smiling faintly. “Easy for you to say. You’ll never be on the other end of the telescope.”

“Because I’d never choose to be. But anyone who runs for President does.” Her voice softened. “Would that really keep you from running, do you think?”

Turning, Kerry gazed at the lawn, its shadows lengthening in the afternoon sun. “Oh, it should …” For a long time, he was silent. “After I was shot, and then Jamie died, I wondered why it had happened that way. Why not me? I asked myself. Every day since then has seemed like a gift. Now the question I ask myself is ‘What are you doing to deserve it? And what
should
you do?’”

Oh, Kerry,
Lara found herself thinking,
there should be more to your life than that.
Briefly, she touched his arm. “You’ve already paid your debts, Kerry. You deserve a life of your own.”

When at first he did not answer, or look at her, Lara thought she had gone too far. “I have part of a life,” he said pensively. “I came here as Jamie’s brother, and somehow turned into me. It’s just that a piece is missing, sometimes.”

Lara felt a strange sensation, the smallest catch in her throat. Then Kerry glanced at his watch, breaking the moment. “Time to go,” he told her.

A few days later, Lara stopped by Kerry’s office. “I came by to ask you out,” she told him.

Kerry cocked his head; with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie loosened, he looked less like a senator than like the young and
harried lawyer he once had been. “Dinner and a movie,” he asked, “or
Meet the Press
?”

Lara smiled. “The Congressional Correspondents Dinner. It’s six weeks from now, so this is sort of like asking Brad Pitt to next year’s Winter Prom. But I know how popular you are, and this will give you plenty of time to rent a tuxedo.”

“I
have
a tuxedo,” he said with feigned hurt, and then adopted a teasing tone. “But don’t you have a boyfriend or something?”

“You mean bring some guy I’m
dating
?” Lara answered in mock horror. “People would think I didn’t
know
anyone. Whereas
you’re
at the top of the food chain.”

Kerry laughed. “It’s a sick society, here inside the Beltway, and you’ve already learned the rules. Leave, Lara, while there’s still time.”

Lara felt a moment’s doubt. “If Meg is coming …”

He shook his head. “Oh, no, don’t worry about that. The fun has worn off for her.” Smiling again, he added, “Really, I’d be happy to go.”

Leaving, Lara stood on the steps of the Russell Building, savoring a warm spring day.

It would be fun to spend an evening with him, she thought, sharing part of a world he knew well. Much, much better than a date …

Five days before the dinner, Kerry called her at home.

From the first few words, Lara knew that something was terribly wrong. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but there’s a problem. I’m in Newark, and I don’t know whether I’ll be back for the dinner. If you want to ask someone else …”