White House Autumn (16 page)

They kind of did, but Meg shook her head.

“That’s what I like about you,” Beth said, draping her arm over Meg’s shoulders. “You’re so much fun to be with.” She took her arm away. “Your brothers here?”

Meg gestured towards the ceiling. “Yeah, up there somewhere. Dad’s still at the hospital.”

“How’s your mother?” Beth asked.

Meg shook her head, crossing the hall to the main staircase.

They found Steven and Neal in the solarium with Trudy, watching an old
Star Wars
movie.

“Hi, Mrs. Donovan,” Beth said cheerfully. “Hi, guys.” She hefted the bookstore bag. “Better turn that off—it’s present time.”

“Candy?” Meg guessed.

Beth laughed. “Can’t pull the wool
over your
eyes, can I?”

“How was your flight, Beth?” Trudy asked.

“Well, exhausting,” Beth said, “but—”

Meg nodded. “The whole hour and a half.”

“Yeah, with a good night’s rest, I’ll probably be okay,” Beth said. “But, my God, I remember my last trip to Zimbabwe—”

Trudy laughed, standing up. “I have some brownies and cocoa downstairs waiting for all of you.”

“Not,” Beth said, “double chocolate with butterscotch chips.”

Trudy nodded, smiling.

“Invite me more often,” Beth said to Meg.

“No, don’t worry,” Trudy said, as Meg moved to help her. “You four just wait up here.”

Beth sat down on the couch next to Steven and Neal. “How are you guys? You holding up okay?”

They both shrugged.

“What do you think of the hat, Steven?” she asked.

He shrugged again. “Pretty dumb.”

“I agree.” Beth put it on Neal’s head, and Neal actually laughed—a sound Meg hadn’t heard for almost a week. “Now, then.” She reached into her bag, pulling out a gift-wrapped present with a red ribbon. “This one’s for your mother and,” she reached back in, coming out with a blue-ribboned hardcover,
“this
one’s for your father.”

Meg leaned over to see the title. A very nice edition of Emerson’s
Nature and Other Writings
. Which was definitely her father’s kind of thing. “Good choice.”

“Well, thank you, Meghan,” Beth said.

“How come Mom’s is wrapped, and Dad’s isn’t?” Neal asked.

Beth shrugged. “Because your mother always used to say, ‘Pretty wrapping makes the experience complete,’ and your father would say, ‘Oh, for God’s sakes.’”

Meg studied her, impressed. “You have a hell of a memory.”

“It’s a curse,” Beth said sadly.

No doubt. “So, where’s my present?” Meg asked.

“Well, okay, so I brought
most
of you gifts.” Beth pulled out a Hardy Boys book—number eighteen,
The Twisted Claw
. “My personal favorite,” she said, and handed it to Neal.

“Hey, wow, thanks!” Neal said, sitting back to check it out.

“And this,” Beth took out a biography of Sandy Koufax and gave it to Steven, “is for you. An educational gift,” she said to Meg. “Both inspirational and precautionary.”

“I don’t suppose you have anything in that bag for me,” Meg said, being Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” Beth said, and tossed her a thick paperback.

Meg looked at the cover—splashy and trashy, lots of embracing—then turned the book over, feeling the spine. “The binding’s broken.”

“Well, sure,” Beth said. “I had to read it and make sure there was plenty of sex.” She grinned. “There is.”

Trudy came back in, with Jorge, one of the butlers, carrying a tray of brownies and cups of cocoa, and they watched the rest of the movie, Beth lightening the atmosphere considerably. After saying hello to Meg’s father, who finally got home around eleven-thirty, they ended up in Meg’s room, Meg stretched out on the bed while Beth examined the music on her computer.

“Your father looks even worse than you do,” she said.

Meg nodded. “He’s not sleeping much.” Possibly not sleeping
at all
.

Beth nodded, then gestured towards the computer. “You have the most embarrassingly dated collection of anyone in the entire country under fifty.”

Meg shrugged. “They’ve got just about every CD in the whole damn world upstairs.”

“No, we’ll just have to make do,” Beth said, her voice long-suffering. Then, she bent over her overnight bag, pulling out a pack of Newports. “Want to get over on the Establishment?”

Smoking was completely forbidden in the White House, but since Trudy had been known to sneak a cigarette here and there, and some of the members of her mother’s kitchen cabinet were notoriously fond of cigars, the rule got broken—mostly on the basis of the smoker’s status within the Administration’s hierarchy.

“You are just too cool,” Meg said.

“I’d be cooler if I actually
lit
them,” Beth said, sticking a cigarette in her mouth.

Probably, yeah. She had seen Beth hold a cigarette at more than one party over the years, but had possibly
never
seen her take an actual puff.

Beth opened the bedroom door. “Come on.”

Christ, she didn’t feel like getting up. “Come on
where?”
Meg asked, lying on her bed.

“Just come on,” Beth said.

Meg followed her out to the Center Hall, Beth walking as cautiously as a cat burglar.

“Be careful,” Beth whispered. “We don’t want to be seen.”

“Oh, well, lucky we’re in the White House,” Meg said. “No one’s
ever
around.”

“Shhh,” Beth hissed, and slunk down the hall a few feet.

“You’re what,” Meg said, “a senior now?”

“Be quiet, you want to blow our cover?” Beth flattened just inside the doors leading to the West Sitting Hall. “You think it’s clear?”

Except for butlers, and stewards, and the like. Meg shrugged. “If they’re not making Dad a late dinner, I guess so.”

“We’ll have to chance it,” Beth said grimly, and crept down towards the kitchen.

Meg, starting to get amused, jogged after her.

Beth crouched down near the dumbwaiter, just outside the kitchen. “What do you think? Do we go for it?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Meg said. “What’s the primary goal?”

“I call it”—Beth paused, for effect—“Operation Heineken.”

Meg laughed.

“Look,” Beth said, “if you’re scared, just say so. No one will ever have to know.”

“No fear here,” Meg said.

“Good.” Beth took a deep, shuddering breath. “This is a very emotional moment.”

“See you on the other side,” Meg said.

Beth nodded, then released her breath, darting into the—as it happened, empty—kitchen. She ran her hands across the front of the refrigerator, as though testing for alarms, then opened the door a
centimeter at a time. Her arm snaked inside, pulling out one bottle of beer, then another. “Try to find an opener, but
be careful.”

Meg nodded, easing the silverware drawer open and extricating one.

“All right.” Beth wiped her sleeve across her face. “Now, look. Anyone stops us, and you keep going, you hear
me? Just keep going.”

Meg laughed.

Beth frowned at her. “Damn it, this is no time for levity!”

“Sorry,” Meg said.

Beth nodded impatiently. “Let’s just get out of here.” She stuck her head out into the hall, looking both ways, then motioned for Meg to follow her. They had just gotten back to the Center Hall when Beth stopped dead, Meg, naturally, crashing into her.

“What is it?” Meg asked, uneasy in spite of herself.

“I
tripped the sensors?
Beth said, her voice horrified.

Which, all things being equal, was entirely possible. “What do we do?” Meg asked.

“Run like crazy!” Beth raced down to Meg’s room, closing the door once Meg was inside, and leaning against it, out of breath. Then she looked up, grinning. “Was that fun?”

“Lots,” Meg said.

“Good.” Beth handed her the beers. “Open these, and
I’ll
put on our favorite song.” She clicked on a file on the desktop, and the Commodores’ “Brick House” started playing.

“Our favorite fantasy, more likely,” Meg said—although more in her case, than Beth’s.

“For you, maybe,” Beth said, dancing slightly and pretending to inhale on her unlit cigarette. Then she stopped, seeing Meg sitting in the rocking chair by the fireplace. “What, you’re not having fun?”

“A whole lot,” Meg said, and took a sip of beer. “Really.”

“Well, we’ll have to remedy
that.”
Beth scrolled through the music files. “Jesus, you have a lot of damn musicals on here.”

Yeah. So?

Beth put on “Tea for Two,” and began dancing—sweetly—to that, instead. But she stopped again when she saw that Meg hadn’t gotten up. “You’re
still
not having fun?”

Meg shrugged.

“Well, it’s not good, if you’re not having fun.” Beth looked at her for a minute, then sighed deeply. “Oh,
all right.”

“What?” Meg asked.

Beth just sighed, clicking on a different file.
“Now
are you happy?”

Meg grinned, as Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll” blasted out of the desktop speakers. “Yeah,” she said. “I am.”

BETH WAS SUPPOSED
to fly back to Boston the next afternoon, so Meg had permission to stay home from school. They had stayed up very late, listening to music and then strolling down to the kitchen for a second beer, but they got up pretty early, so that they could go over to the hospital for a quick visit. They caught her mother—who was wan and shaky, but trying to seem energetic—between meetings, then were driven back to the White House. They ended up at the table in the West Sitting Hall, while the downstairs chefs prepared brunch.

“Are we the only ones here?” Beth asked.

Meg nodded. “Except for the Cast of Thousands.” Which was the nickname she and Steven had given the staff on the very first day they moved in.

“Do they mind fixing us stuff?” Beth asked, uneasily.

Meg shook her head. “They get upset when we
don’t
ask.”

Few things made the Residence staff’s blood run colder than moments when, for example, they caught the President wandering out of the kitchen with a spoon and a cup of yogurt, absentmindedly eating out of the carton as she walked.

After an astonishingly short wait, they were served a huge meal
of juice, fresh melon, muffins, doughnuts, eggs, bacon, sausage, and milk.

“I sure would be fat if I lived here,” Beth said.

Meg shrugged. “On school days, I mostly just have cereal.”

They ate with very little conversation.

“Pretty tough week,” Beth said.

Meg nodded.

“She doesn’t look like she’s well enough to be working,” Beth said.

No, but it sure as hell hadn’t stopped her. In fact, on the second day, she had overheard Glen, her mother’s chief of staff, telling Winnie, the deputy chief of staff, that her mother had been trying to get the 25th Amendment lifted before she even fully came out of her anesthesia, and that she had, officially, submitted her formal written declaration to resume office to the Speaker of the House and the President
pro tempore
of the Senate just after three in the morning—and that her doctors had not been enthusiastic. Since the Speaker was a very close friend of her mother’s, he had actually still been at the hospital, presumably trying to lend mostly-ignored moral support to her father, and he had managed to convince her—with some difficulty, and a quite heated conversation, Meg gathered—to wait a few more hours. So, ultimately, she had reassumed the Presidency at about seven AM, approximately nineteen and a half hours after she’d been shot.

Which, as far as Meg could tell, was at least three weeks premature.

“At least she’s getting better,” Beth said.

Meg shrugged, eating a cube of melon in an attempt to prove that she had something resembling an appetite.

Beth started to say something else, but helped herself to more bacon, instead.

The melon was delicious—at the absolute perfect stage of ripeness—but her stomach hurt, so Meg put her fork down. “I don’t feel like talking about what happened. Okay?”

Beth helped herself to some eggs, too. “Then, we won’t.”

Meg nodded.

“I’m sorry about tennis,” Beth said.

Another verboten subject, but Meg nodded, telling herself that she
didn’t
feel tears in her eyes. “Thanks. It isn’t—well. It’s no big deal. Thanks.”

It was quiet for a couple of minutes.

“If you want,” Beth said, “we could go listen to ‘I Love Rock and Roll.’”

Meg shook her head. “I’m sorry, I know I’m being a jerk. I’m just kind of tired.”

“Then, let’s go watch a movie or something,” Beth said.

That seemed like a reasonable enough idea, and they ended up carrying orange juice and a few of the doughnuts up to the solarium, where—after a short debate—they decided to put on a couple of old
Avengers
episodes, which made Meg sad since that was something she usually only did with her parents once in a while, after Steven and Neal had gone to bed. Although she had watched a few of the Cathy Gales, and a single Tara King, she had never particularly seen the point of watching anything other than Emma Peel episodes.

“You sure have a lot of messages in your room,” Beth said.

And the stack got bigger every day. Meg shrugged. “To be honest, I haven’t really looked at them.”

“There are probably some from me in there,” Beth said.

No doubt. Meg shifted her position. “I don’t know. When I get back from the hospital, I just haven’t been—well, you know.”

Beth nodded. “What’s the deal with Josh?”

Meg scowled into her orange juice glass. “What do you mean?”

“I just kind of figured he’d be around,” Beth said. “You haven’t even mentioned him.”

Meg shrugged, tightly gripping her glass.

“You guys have a fight or something?” Beth asked.

Or something. “Yeah, I guess. I mean—” Meg let out her breath.
“Christ, I don’t know. One minute, he was at the hospital and I was really glad he was there, and the next minute, he was bugging the hell out of me, you know?”

Beth shook her head.

Meg glanced at the television where Steed was goofing around about having raced up the stairs in a department store because he’d heard that Mrs. Peel was in Ladies Underwear. “I don’t know.” She sighed. “It’s like, he just stood there and let me yell at him. He didn’t do
anything.”