No Safe Place (45 page)

Lara felt a stab of disappointment. Instinctively, she asked, “Is it Meg?”

“Oh, no. Meg’s fine.” His tone grew weary. “It’s Clayton and Carlie’s five-year-old, Ethan. He was climbing a tree in the backyard and just fell somehow. The fall broke his neck.”

On the other end of the line, Lara felt the tragedy in the pit of her stomach. “Oh, no,” she said, and then asked softly, “Is he still alive?”

She heard Kerry draw a breath. “Yes. As of now, that’s all
they’re hoping for.” There was a long silence, and then Kerry said, “He’s paralyzed, Lara.”

Inwardly, Lara winced. Is there anything I can do? she was about to ask, and then she realized that she did not know the Slades and, in this private part of Kerry’s life, had no place. “Oh, Kerry,” she said. “I feel for them all.”

“You just can’t know—” His voice caught, then went on. “They’re here at the hospital, waiting, while their son lies in an oxygen tent, not moving or making a sound. All I can do is be with them, for as long as they want me.”

What to say, Lara wondered, when nothing is adequate? “Don’t worry about the dinner,” she said at last, and then added quietly, “If you have a chance, call me. I mean, if you want to …”

“Yeah.” His voice was barely audible. “I’d better go.”

When she hung up, Lara closed her eyes. It was strange how clear her image was of Kerry at this moment—pulling himself together, then walking down the bleak corridor of a hospital at night, to be with his stricken friends.

The next time he called her, Ethan Slade was dead.

It was the morning of the Congressional Correspondents Dinner. Telling her, his voice was uninflected.

At her desk, Lara spoke in an undertone, so that Nate and the others would not hear. “How are your friends?” she asked.

“As you’d expect.” He paused. “They’d have taken him any way but dead, Lara. I don’t know how anyone gets past this.”

He sounded utterly dispirited; nothing in his own experience of death, Lara sensed, had quite prepared him for this. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. “For you, too.”

He was quiet for a moment. “After the funeral, watching them, I knew it was time to leave. Some things, they wouldn’t want even
me
to see.”

Once more, Lara sensed how much this family meant to him, his feeling of lonely helplessness. “Where
are
you?” she asked.

“Here, in Washington. There were things I had to do, and it’s better than doing nothing.” Then, as if in an afterthought, he told her, “If you haven’t traded me in, I’ll come with you tonight.”

Lara hesitated, surprised that he would go, and at her selfish
desire to see him. “Are you sure?” she asked. “With what’s happened, it seems like a lot.”

There was a moment’s silence. “No,” he said. “It would be better for me, I think.”

Lara felt relief, the warmth of being able, perhaps, to help someone she cared for. “Then we’ll make it an early night,” she promised.

The dinner was in the banquet room of the Grand Hyatt—several hundred men in black tie and women in evening dresses, looking about to see who else was there and with whom. The
Times
had reserved several tables for its correspondents and their guests, including the secretary of defense, the ambassador to the United Nations, the governor of New York, an eminent British actor with an interest in politics, and, sitting beside Lara, Senator Kerry Kilcannon.

To her now-practiced eye, Kerry looked drawn, a little tired. But he was good company, holding his own in conversation, laughing in seeming amusement at a comedian’s after-dinner speech. “Whenever I see the Prime Minister of Israel and the head of the PLO,” the comedian gibed, “it gives me insight into others of our recent history’s warmest friendships—Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz, Dick Mason and Kerry Kilcannon …”

Laughter broke out. At a nearby table, Mason stood, giving Kerry an exaggerated bow, while Kerry, entering the joke, folded his dinner program into a paper airplane and lobbed it in Mason’s direction, miming dismay as it fell short of the target. “I modeled it after the B-2 bomber,” he said audibly, alluding to one of the administration’s recent weapons orders, and there was another wave of chuckles. Grinning, Jeannie Mason retrieved the paper plane and presented it to her husband, as the comedian said, “Senator Kilcannon wants you to play at
his
house, Mr. Vice President. And you’ll never guess the address.”

Gazing up at the dais, Kerry smiled faintly, but his eyes were distant. It was not a night, Lara felt certain, when he had much interest in his own ambitions, or in the rituals of Washington. And, knowing this, she felt something akin to guilt. Leaning over, she whispered to him, “If you like, feel free to skip the after-dinner party.”

As he turned to her, Lara had a sense of intimacy, a private
moment amidst a very public event. “Do you need a lift?” he asked.

Lara nodded. “That would be nice.”

When the dinner broke up, they left the room, stepping into the cool night. She had been proud to be with him, she realized, and this deepened her sense of selfishness. “I never got to ask about the Slades,” she told him.

Kerry handed his parking stub to the valet. Turning to her, he slowly shook his head. “It was hard.”

To Lara, the understatement bore the weight of his emotions, a hint of his solitude. For much of the ride, they were quiet.

Lara lived in a converted brick town house just off Connecticut Avenue. To her surprise, Kerry found a place in front. Turning to her, he said, “Thanks, Lara. For asking me, and for leaving.”

She hesitated. “Can I give you a cup of coffee?”

Kerry looked down, reflective. Then he glanced up at her again. “Do you have any cognac?” he asked.

Lara’s apartment was on the second floor—living room, a small kitchen, a bedroom that caught morning light. She did not have much furniture, given the money she still sent her family, but everything was neat and of good quality. Entering with Kerry, Lara realized to her surprise that she wanted him to like it.

He glanced around, openly curious, as though looking at another facet of her life. “Well?” she asked.

Turning, he answered, “I was thinking how much nicer this is than my first apartment in Newark. Or my apartment here.” He smiled. “Thirty-nine, and still living like a college kid.”

“Forever young,” Lara told him, and went to the kitchen.

She poured the cognac into her only wineglasses. When she returned, he was sitting on the couch. It stopped her for a moment; unlike with the other men she knew, the sight of Kerry Kilcannon in her living room unsettled her. Lara handed him the glass, taking the chair across from him and placing her cognac on the table between them, waiting until he took a sip. “Tell me about the Slades,” she said quietly. “After you called.”

Kerry gazed at the wineglass in his hands. “Ethan died an hour later.” He shook his head. “To see Clayton and Carlie sit
beside him …

“The next morning, we rode with Ethan to the funeral home. They were like automatons, both of them—very soft-spoken, very precise in telling the funeral director what they wanted. No one cried until we got to the car, and then Carlie broke down entirely.” Kerry’s eyes closed. “She couldn’t stand to leave Ethan alone, she said. Clayton got in the back seat, to hold her, and I drove them home.

“When we got there, Clayton stood in front of the house—this beautiful Tudor in South Orange, the place they’d worked so hard to have. I could see him thinking if they’d only chosen some other house …” Kerry took a deep swallow of cognac. “So I put my arm around his shoulder, and he leaned his head against me. No one said a word.”

His voice, soft and very sad, made the Slades’ grief palpable to Lara. “Did the funeral help at all?” she asked. “It does, sometimes.”

“Not here. Though I’m not sure what would have helped.” Kerry looked up at her. “The minister tried. But the twins looked hollowed out—Ethan was their little brother, their pet. Carlie couldn’t stop crying, and Clayton never cried at all.

“He was like that until we got back, lost in this deadly kind of quiet. And then he took out a chain saw, went to the backyard, and methodically turned that tree into kindling.

“Carlie watched until she couldn’t stand it anymore.” Pausing, Kerry winced at the memory. “This time,
I
held her.”

Except at the death of Liam Dunn, Lara had never seen Kerry’s emotions so exposed. But that had been a chance encounter; this was not. Now, she realized, he had come to her. “Will they survive this, Kerry?”

“I think so. They have two daughters, a twenty-year marriage, a strong relationship. They love each other and they’ve overcome a lot …” His voice turned flat. “That funeral, Lara. Maybe there’s nothing that can explain to me the death of a five-year-old boy. But for me it was hollow and inadequate, as so many rituals are. I kept thinking of how I felt when our party chairman put on this memorial dinner to honor Jamie—so empty, so meaningless, so full of platitudes. The sheer heart-lessness of it would have made him laugh.”

She watched him, a slender man with ginger hair, no longer
just a senator, but somehow part of her life. “Your brother,” she asked softly, “what was it like to lose him?”

He looked at her steadily; for a moment, she expected some deflective remark. “Ennobling,” he answered. “Of course. They asked me to take Jamie’s place, and I sacrificed myself out of love for him and a sense of duty. Isn’t that how the story goes whenever my media people tell it?”

“Except,” Lara ventured, “that you didn’t really like him.”

He swirled the brandy in his glass, watching it. “It’s all so complicated,” he said at last. “Then, and now.

“Suddenly Jamie was dead and there I was, caught in my own ambivalence. Perhaps even my envy. Although I told myself that I’d little more want to be as cold as Jamie than as mindless and brutal as our father.” The simple statement startled her; tonight Kerry’s reticence had vanished. “All those things I’ve said to you about politics, Lara—the loss of self, the tunnel vision of ambition, the sacrifice of people you love—to me, Jamie was all these things and, even worse, he knew it.”

Lara was overcome by curiosity, the absence of barriers. “Why did you take his place, then? Let alone position yourself to be President?”

Kerry gave a mirthless smile. “Survivor guilt, isn’t that the theory? Jamie would have been President, and if you inherit the crown, you have to make something of it. Sometimes I think even Clayton believes that.” His voice was quiet again. “But it’s more complicated than that. Because when I took this job, I discovered a pride in doing it which is my very own.

“Did I want what he had, after all? Was Jamie better than I thought, or am I more like him than I know?” Kerry shook his head. “And what
was
he like, when he never let me know him?

“I don’t know the answers. And there’s one more answer I never want to know.” Once more, Kerry looked at her. “If I could bring Jamie back again, and give up what I have because he died, would I?”

The nakedness of his admission, the sheer pain of what he carried with him, left Lara at a loss for words. In her silence, Kerry seemed ashamed. “
Look
at me,” he said with a trace of self-contempt. “Here it’s Clayton’s son who’s dead, and I’m maundering on about Jamie. About myself, really.” His voice
softened. “Except that I seem to have lost the habit of hiding from you. Or even wanting to.”

Suddenly Lara felt conscious of everything—the distance between them, the dim light, the slight chill of the room on her bare shoulders. “Who
do
you talk to?” she asked.

He looked away. At length, he answered, “These aren’t easy things to talk about. To anyone.”

Lara gazed at him again, torn between caution and the desire to reach out to him. Quietly, she said, “There’s me, Kerry. Now there’s me.”

Their eyes met, and then Kerry turned away. He stood abruptly, trying to smile. “Then I’d better go, Lara. Before I tax your patience.”

In her confusion, Lara was still. “You don’t have to,” she said at last. “Not yet. Unless …”

Kerry looked down at her. His lips parted, as if he was startled in mid-thought.

Slowly, Lara stood.

Her eyes were wide, self-doubting. Kerry could feel the pulse in his own throat.

“I’m not sure,” he managed to say, “that you know how I feel.”

Kerry saw her surprise, her fear, as clearly as he felt his own. “I think I do,” she answered.

They were inches apart, not touching. Kerry gazed into her face, stunned and pale and so lovely that now, this close, it almost hurt to look at her.

“Are you sure?” he asked. Then his fingers grazed the nape of her neck, and her eyes shut in answer.

Her mouth was soft, warm.

Kerry pressed against her, wanting the heat of his body against the cool of her skin, feeling his lips in the hollow of her neck now, saying her name. For a moment, her breath caught.

After a time, it was not enough.

Why didn’t you know?
he asked himself. But nothing mattered now—not Meg, not his career. Only her.

When he slid down the straps of her gown, fingertips grazing her skin, Lara trembled. “Wait,” she whispered. “They’ll see us.”

Pulling away, Lara went to the bedroom. Then she turned to him, dress around her waist.

She was beautiful. “I never thought …, ” Kerry murmured.

Lara managed to smile, 3though her voice tremored. “If you don’t come to me, Kerry, we never will.”

Fumbling, he switched off the light.

In the shadows of the bedroom, Kerry knelt, kissing her nipples, her stomach. His nerves twitched with wanting her.

When they slid into bed, the sheets felt crisp and cool. And then she was against him, murmuring, “Kerry,” and he no longer felt alone.

Gently, Kerry touched her hair with his fingertips, looking into her face.

Do you know how I feel?

Yes,
Lara realized.
God, yes.

His mouth slid slowly down her stomach, and then Lara was lost.

The rest was instinct, his and hers, a craving that felt months deep. When he was inside her, she shuddered.