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They have his father’s funeral in Boston.
It costs them something like five hundred dollars and a fourteen hour drive from Chicago, but Leo’s mother insists. “He would’ve wanted to be buried at home,” she says, holding her head high, and Leo has no strength to argue. The whole family turns out for the service, fifty people he’s never met who his aunts and uncles keep pulling him over to greet. His sisters huddle in the corner, Josephine with her arm around Elizabeth, glaring at any relatives who attempt to come near. Meanwhile Leo smiles and shakes hands and hears how he looks just like his old man enough times that by the end of the ceremony, he’s ready to puke.
The next day is Sunday, so they all go to church in a cathedral so enormous half the congregation is perpetually in shadow. Leo can barely remember the last time he was at Mass. It was Christmas, he thinks, years and years ago. He can picture Josie in a pair of feathered wings, the fiercest angel in the pageant. Do not be afraid!
Now his sister’s mouth is pressed into a thin line as the priest’s homily enters its fifteenth minute. On her left, his mother’s hands are folded tightly together, the same way they were eight days ago when the blue-and-red sirens arrived outside their home to confirm what they already knew: Leo’s father was dead. Single gunshot wound. Self-inflicted. Two weeks after his only son came home from the war in Vietnam.
Leo rises from the pew and slides silently out into the aisle. His sister Betty, seated to his right, touches his hand briefly as he goes. The priest is finishing up his homily, and the parishioners are beginning the Nicene Creed. I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth...
The doors to the church are made of old, heavy wood, and when Leo pushes them open he’s met with a rush of cold spring air that blows his hair back from his face. It feels good, bracing, alive in a way the air inside the church had not been. He lets the doors swing shut behind him and descends the stone steps before sinking onto the final one and letting his head rest in his hands.
“All right?” comes a voice from above him.
Leo turns his head. There’s a man leaning against the church building, smoking a cigarette. He looks to be a few years older than Leo, with dark brown hair and piercing blue eyes offset by a slightly dorky sweater. He’s got an expression of concern on his face that Leo understands perfectly—even in his church clothing he must look slightly wild, with his unwashed hair and the dark circles under his eyes that have refused to go away. “I’m all right,” Leo says, trying to sound as though he believes it. “Just needed a second.”
The man nods. “It was stuffy in there,” he says, passing his cigarette from one hand to the other and leaning down to shake. “Jed Bartlet. I’m afraid you’ve caught me engaging in my worst habit. On a Sunday, no less.”
“Leo McGarry,” says Leo, shaking the extended hand. “I don’t judge.”
“What brings you to Boston, Leo? You don’t sound like a local.”
“I’m not,” says Leo, and then, because he can’t be bothered to lie and is far too tired to soften the explanation, says simply, “My father died.”
Jed blinks, twice, but takes the words in stride. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says.
“Thanks,” says Leo. Jed takes another drag on his cigarette. There is silence for a minute, and then, surprising himself, Leo breaks it. “What about you?” he asks.
“Oh, I came to see the Paul Revere House,” says Jed. “Well, that was what I was most excited for, but they have all kinds of fascinating historic sites in this city. This cathedral is one, did you know? The Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Dedicated in 1875. They had John Kennedy’s Requiem Mass here.”
“Yeah?” says Leo. “Well. I can’t say it impressed me much.”
“Not Catholic?”
“Raised Catholic. It didn’t stick.”
“I was going to be a priest,” says Jed lightly. “That didn’t stick. The rest did.” He’s still looking at Leo with a slightly searching expression, like he wants to ask again if he’s really all right. Leo quickly diverts the conversation before the other man tries to get him into the confessional booth.
“You’re into history?”
“I’m a student of the past.” Jed’s eyes twinkle.
Leo smiles back. “Hey—are you a teacher?” It seems right. Jed has that kind of air to him, enthusiastic, benevolent.
“Not yet. I’m going to be one.”
“Of history?”
“Of economics. A professor, actually, as soon as I finish my PhD.”
Leo squints. The guy’s older than him, sure, but not professor-aged, not PhD-aged. “You’ve started already? How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-six,” says Jed, grinning slightly.
Leo whistles. “What are you, some kind of genius?”
“Some kind,” says Jed, and it’s clear he’s proud of this, but he’s not leaning into it. Leo respects that. “And you? What are you going to be?”
“What I am is a soldier,” says Leo. “An airman. I’ll be back in Thailand next month, flying planes. My last tour.” His stomach tightens at the reminder, and he carefully steers his thoughts away, as he’s done so many times before.
“That’s what you wanted to do?” says Jed, raising his eyebrows. Leo feels himself tense.
“I signed up. It was my choice.”
“How old are you?”
“I’ll be twenty-two in a few months,” says Leo defensively. “Look—you don’t know me. I’m well aware of what I’m doing.”
“I never said you weren’t,” says Jed calmly, taking a seat on the step he’d been standing on. His cigarette has gone out while they’ve been talking, and he draws a lighter from his pocket and flicks it open, touching the tip of the flame to the end of the cigarette. They sit there, smoke curling into the air.
“Sorry,” says Leo quietly. “Shouldn’t have snapped.”
Jed shrugs it off. “You’ve been having a long week.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I can imagine,” says Jed. “My father died two years ago. Things between us were...” He trails off, then waves the end of the sentence away. “When I heard the news I went outside and smashed this horrible old wristwatch I’d inherited from my grandfather into about a thousand pieces with a rock. Anyway. There’s nothing like it.”
“Yeah,” says Leo. “Yeah.” He looks sideways at Jed, who’s reclining back against the stone steps. Despite his claim, Leo cannot picture him as a priest, not with the cigarette in his hand and the way his dark hair falls slightly in his eyes. Almost unconsciously, he lifts a hand to his own close-shorn head. “Did it help? To believe in God? After?”
“No,” says Jed. “Not really.”
Oddly, that comforts Leo, loosens the knot in his stomach just a bit. “What did help?” he asks. “How’d you get it to make sense?”
“I don’t know if I ever did that,” says Jed. “But I owed it to my family to be all right, you know? To make it through. To move on.”
“Your family?”
“My wife. My daughter.” Jed’s tone is soft, affectionate, and Leo suddenly feels the five years between them as though they are a physical distance. A wife. A daughter. These are things that Leo has pictured himself having, in the abstract. A faceless woman, a child he has already decided will never bear his name. He thinks of his father, across whose gravestone is written McGarry, whispering to him in a drunken voice: ain’t nothing but a family thing.
It’s something he never wants a child of his to hear. The cold anger is creeping over him again, crawling up his neck. Then, from beside him, Jed’s voice dispels it. “Hey,” he says, the concern back in his voice. “Take a breath.”
Leo does. “I’d rather take a drag,” he says, and Jed laughs and moves down a step to hand him the cigarette. Leo’s hand is only shaking a little as he accepts.
“This is the worst part now,” says Jed. “Soon you’ll balance it. I swear.”
They are sitting, Leo is aware, close together, like old friends. They are almost the same height, and their shoulders are lined up together. Jed’s bright blue eyes are trained on him.
There is a word Leo knows for the way his heart speeds up ever so slightly at the realization. An explanation for why his future wife and daughter refuse to materialize in his head. But he will not think it. He is practiced at this too. Instead he hands Jed back the cigarette. “I believe you,” he says, because he badly wants to.
Jed seems to understand that. “Time will help,” he promises. “ ‘The present now will later be past, for the order is rapidly fading.’ ”
“Is that from the Bible?” Leo says, blinking.
“Nah,” says Jed. “Bob Dylan.”
Leo grins, and the bells begin to chime. He looks up in surprise. The doors of the church are beginning to open, the sound of raised voices rushing out from within, and it comes to him that he has been sitting here talking to this stranger for a quarter of an hour. He stands, suddenly a little embarrassed, and Jed stands too.
“When you come home, stop by if you’re in my area,” says Jed. “I’m from New Hampshire. Dartmouth’s where I plan to be, once I get my doctorate.”
“Sure, professor. When I get back home, I’ll look you up.” He’s mostly kidding, but Jed looks suddenly serious. He puts the cigarette out and flicks it to the ground, grinding it apart with the heel of his shoe. Then he drops a hand on Leo’s shoulder and squeezes it, hard.
“Do it,” he says. “I’ll remember you.”
Here is something they do not tell you: you will lose your name.
When it happens, Jed is standing on the steps of the Capitol building, one hand on his mother’s Bible and the other raised to the sky. The Chief Justice reads out a name and he says it back—I, Josiah Bartlet, do solemnly swear—and then it’s gone. Whatever string that tied it to him, severed, just like that. No one calls him Jed anymore. No one says it as they laugh and shove his shoulder, no one says it as they smile and shake his hand, no one shouts it out as he approaches. No one but Abbey, and in her mouth it has changed shape. Jed, she says, and in it there are a thousand questions. What are we doing here? Why did I agree to this? Why did you?
Exchanged only between two people, the name begins to lose familiarity. Soon enough it stops feeling like it was ever his. He hears it sometimes. He recognizes the syllables. But it sounds off now, foreign. He’s someone else now, a different person called different things.
Except: one year in, he collapses to the ground in the Oval Office and shatters the Stueben glass pitcher, and then he’s lying in bed with a one-hundred-point-nine fever and Abbey calls him and says, “Leo knows. I had to tell him.” She is crying. “I had to tell someone and it had to be him.”
“It’s all right,” he says. “It’s all right. It’s time. It’s past time.” When he hangs up his hand is shaking and he doesn’t know if it’s from fear or the other thing. Then Leo comes in, strides into the room, and he says it.
“Jed,” he says. “Of all the things you could’ve kept from me...”
There are times when Jed looks at Leo and the years fall away, and he sees him again at twenty-two, before the map of the world wrote itself across his face. This is not one of those times. Right now Jed looks at him and feels all the weight of thirty years of friendship pressing down on him. Thirty years. More than half his life. All that time with his name in Leo’s mouth, and then one year without it, and now this—a return. A sudden pounding of the heart in his chest.
“You haven’t called me Jed since I was elected,” he says, and Leo looks at him with a kind of fierceness he has never seen before, and suddenly Jed wants to tell him every last second of these seven years of secrecy, and knows, someday, he will. But most of all, he wants to go backward in time. Not much. A half-second would do it.
Say it again, he thinks. Say it again. Say it again.
This time of year, New Hampshire is bright and cold, and the promised leaves are just beginning to bloom green on the branches outside Leo’s window. After getting up with a wince—he feels older every morning—Leo skips the hotel breakfast and finds a window seat at a diner where he orders pancakes drenched in state-specialty maple syrup, less because he’s actually craving them and more because it seems the kind of thing that Jed would do. Now more than ever he wants a moment inside his friend’s head, wants to anticipate the answer to the question he has come to New Hampshire to ask.
When he found Jed again, after the war, after his discharge (honorable) and their country’s exit (anything but), he had not expected Jed to keep the promise to remember him. Half-hopeful and half-embarrassed, he had found a number in Dartmouth University’s directory, dialed it, and listened to the sound of the phone ringing. Said “Leo McGarry” into the receiver and a moment later heard his name echoed back to him.
“Leo!” Jed had said. “My stair-step friend. How are you?”
Twenty-five years ago, now. Whenever he mentions to Jed how the time has passed, the other man always insists it cannot be true. “I won’t believe it, Leo,” he will say, laughing. “Over twenty? No. It can’t be more than two or three.”
Leo can believe it. Sometimes it seems to him that he spends most of his time counting backwards. Twenty-five years since that day he called Jed, and twenty-nine since they first met. Twenty-four years since he met Jenny, twenty-three since they were married, twenty-two since Mallory was born.
Fifteen years since he started drinking, even though he used to swear he’d never touch a bottle. Six years since the pills got involved. Four years since he went to rehab. Four years clean. It means everything, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to mean much at all—he still wants a drink, as he exits the diner and walks down the street. But he won’t have one. Not today, and not tomorrow, and not, he hopes, the day after that.
His career is now something he can think of in decades. Two years finishing his education at the University of Michigan, three years working on his law degree, then six back home in Chicago making connections with the labor unions. Ten years operating in Washington D.C., four serving as the Secretary of Labor, and Leo still isn’t used to the way people dodge out of his path in the hallways. Is Jed? he wonders. He will have to be.
New Hampshire streets are full of history. It’s a thing Jed always says to him, but now, as he walks, Leo is finding the proof. The shops and restaurants along the street bear slogans on their windows—America’s oldest! World’s first!—and he keeps pausing to read plaques on which are written names and dates. For almost twelve thousand years people have been living on this land. It’s been over three hundred since the Europeans reached it, and two hundred since it became a state.
Seven years have passed, meanwhile, since Leo and his family drove up to Jed’s family house in Manchester to stay with the Bartlets for the weekend. They had gone to church together that Sunday in a building Jed’s ancestors have been visiting for generations. Liz, who’d been a baby when Leo and Jed had first met, was away at college, while Mallory and Ellie, teenagers, had needed to be separated in the pew to keep from giggling. Jenny and Abbey had sat with pigtailed Zoey between them, leaving Leo and Jed together on the end, shoulder to shoulder.
On the steps of that church in Boston, Leo had told Jed that the Catholicism he was raised with had not stuck to him, and that had been the truth. But there are some things that simply do not leave you. Prayer is one of them. Leo can remember as clear as if it were yesterday lying in the mud with gunfire echoing in the jungle around him, clasping his hands together and mumbling all the holy words he could think of, any words that seemed helpful at all. He had prayed like that, he also knows, at his wedding. It was a beautiful day, sunny and perfect, and as he looked into Jenny’s eyes the prayer on his lips was that they would be happy. When Mallory was born he prayed then too, for her and for himself, that he’d be able to do better for her than his father had done for him.
None of it was anything compared to the prayer he’d been repeating half his life: to be normal, to feel normal. The way he is about Jed—this thing he’s been fighting the whole time they’ve known each other—it never meant he loved Jenny or Mallory any less. And it didn’t mean that they, or his prayers, had ever made any difference. Even now, as he steps into a cab and tells the driver to take him to the state house, Leo can remember the knot in his stomach that day in the church, as they all clasped hands to recite the Our Father. He remembers the linen suit he’d been wearing, the dust motes dancing in a shaft of sunlight from the window, the stifled laughter from his daughter as she craned her neck to trade smiles with Ellie. He remembers the sound of Jed’s voice as they sang the hymns, baritone and slightly off-key.
After the service they’d gone on another walk together through the fields. “If you want a Latin translation of what we heard today, I’m at your disposal,” Jed had said, and Leo had laughed and said, “Right, that’s likely.”
“We read from that passage at our wedding,” said Jed fondly. “First Corinthians. I’ve always loved it.”
“Will you throw me out of the farmhouse if I admit I wasn’t fully listening?”
“Never,” said Jed. “I’m delighted. They always stop me from going over things again in the car. I’ll even recite it for you in English. Listen - ‘If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.’ ”
“Almost as good as a Dylan lyric,” said Leo. He could feel his heart beating.
Jed grinned. He said, “ ‘Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.’ ”
Jed had always been a gifted speaker, but as he listened there and then, Leo remembers thinking that he could lift houses into the air with just that voice, that rhythm of sound. Whole houses, clear off the ground. And in that moment something had come to him, a striking, shining epiphany. Leo isn’t a faithful man, but he can recall how sudden words had rung in his head, not his own. There are some things it is useless to fight.
Leo had looked at Jed from the corner of his eye and thought, This is one of them.
He had thought, You will be the leader of this country, and I will be beside you. In sickness and in health, I’ll be beside you. This is the way I will make it make sense. You’ll run, and I’ll be there, and I’ll love you, and you’ll win.
When he arrives in Jed’s office he will make it sound like the idea has newly occurred to him. It will not be true. Counting backward, it has been no less than seven years, and no more than twenty-nine in the making.
The New Hampshire State House is a beautiful building, and Leo takes a moment to admire it when he steps out of the cab. Jed’s office is on the second floor. The nervousness that has had him in its grasp since waking begins to leave him as he makes his way up the stairs. When he arrives, Mrs. Landingham signs him in without an appointment. Jed is in an open-door meeting, two eager staffers gesturing to a bulletin board. They are five feet apart. Leo could stride into the room and take him by the shoulder if he wanted, see the sudden, perfect smile bloom across his face. But that will wait a minute more.
Instead, Leo takes the diner napkin out of his pocket, shakes it out, and writes three words.
When he was young, because he was always a gifted speaker—or perhaps because he liked to argue—people used to tell Jed that he would make a lawyer one day. Sometimes Jed wonders whether his father would have liked him better if he had chosen that path, would’ve preferred Jed had he stayed out of his own field. But of course, if he had studied to be a lawyer, he would not have met Abbey. He would not have met Leo. His life would not be the one he has now.
Anyway, it’s a decision he cannot imagine himself making. The courtroom never had any pull for him. In fact, the opposite was true: something about the concept of standing before a judge, arguing the value of a life, always repelled him. Yet now he thinks that if he could choose another path to follow, he would change his course of study after all. A lawyer, a judge himself, or a congressman still—anything so that he could be there with Leo in that room, next to him as the camera follows him down the aisle to his seat. Anything to keep him out of the room in the first place. Anything, Jed thinks, watching the screen, so that he could do something to prevent what is going to happen from happening.
They are swearing him in. Josh is looking for a way to take the guy out of the room. And Jed is doing nothing except waiting, because they tell him it’s all he can do. He knows the questions the committee is bound to ask. He knows because Leo told him, as soon as Jed had recovered from what the doctor diagnosed as an inner-ear infection, the night of the third debate on the first campaign.
“I’m so sorry,” Leo had said, eyes downcast, like he could barely even bring himself to look at Jed. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t need to ask me for forgiveness,” he’d responded. “You have to get out of the habit of doing that.”
To this Leo said nothing at all, just stood there, hands in his pockets, Jed knew, to disguise their shaking. He crossed the floor and took him by the shoulders. “You stopped. Right? Did you have a drink this morning?”
“No.”
“What about tonight, are you gonna drink tonight?”
“No.”
“That’s all I need to hear. There isn’t a thing you can do that’s not going to make me proud of you. All right?”
And Leo had looked up at him with tortured eyes, as though there were some great gulf between them Jed did not then understand.
Now, watching the trial begin—Leo on trial, because of him—Jed feels perhaps he is beginning to. He is beginning to know how it feels to betray someone you have loved half your life. Mea culpa, he thinks. Mea maxima culpa: if I did not know you, this would not be happening.
Or perhaps: this would not be happening, if you did not know me.
January, 1999. The three of them are standing in a long room with vaulted ceilings and windows set high into the walls. Abbey is hovering by the glass, staring out at the crowd and twisting her scarf in her hands. She had smiled a faraway smile at Leo when he came in, and he had stopped a moment there with her. “All right?”
“I’m fine.” She nodded her head towards Jed. “Go on.”
There are already a few Secret Service agents patrolling the edges of the room, casting glances at their new charge, but they stand respectfully back when Leo approaches. His friend is looking up at the ceiling with a fixed expression on his face. Leo doesn’t say anything, merely waits until Jed looks away and meets his gaze. Then: “Scared?”
“Terrified, I think,” says Jed conversationally. There is more gray in his hair than there was when they first met, but his eyes are just the same, blue and shining, reminding Leo of cold stone steps and cigarette smoke. “I can’t be sure. I’m only part-time on Earth at the moment.”
“Going to rejoin us soon, I hope.”
“I’ll consider it.” And then Jed smiles, and it’s like the years melt away and they are twenty-one and twenty-six again and Leo is so proud of him he thinks his heart might burst with it, and then Jed reaches out and pulls him in, and they are hugging tightly. When Leo moves back, the sun has emerged momentarily from behind the thin gray clouds. The light reflecting off the glass is so bright that Leo has to close his eyes when he leans in to kiss him, pressing his lips to the side of Jed’s face.
Jed grips his hand. “Because of you,” he says simply.
“Other way around,” Leo says, squeezing tight.
Outside, it’s forty degrees with a bracing wind, and the crowd is alive with anticipation. Leo has never seen this many people in one place before, seven hundred thousand brightly colored spots waving their arms and cheering. The band launches into “Hail to the Chief,” and Leo watches Jed and Abbey descend the stairs together as the crowd roars in one voice. He hopes that someone somewhere is recording the sound, so that they can play it in classrooms across the nation, today and years from now. This is the year that ends the millennium, if you listen to the radio, though Jed counters that it will really happen in 2001, since there was no year zero. Either way, thinks Leo, it is undeniable that they are coming to the end of something, for which they do not yet, perhaps, have the words to describe.
When they reach the podium, Abbey takes the red-leather Bible in her gloved hands and Jed rests his palm on top of it. Chief Justice Ashland asks him to repeat these words—I, Josiah Bartlet, do solemnly swear—and Jed raises his other hand to the heavens.
“So help me God,” he says.
Leo finds him alone in the church, staring up at the stained glass. He doesn’t speak as he slides into the pew alongside him, for which Jed is grateful. A man is dead because of him—because of them both. There are no words for a thing like that.
It’s well past midnight, and the church is empty. He is only inside thanks to a late-night call to the pastor, who had not asked questions when he emerged from his car to unlock the doors. Some of his detail are hanging back by the entrance, and some are circling the nave like shadows. Every movement of theirs seems magnified in the echo-filled space: the rustle of their jackets, the crackle of their microphones as they murmur back and forth.
His own voice seems loud in the silence too, though he speaks barely above a whisper. “I can’t stop thinking that it’s my fault. I know it’s not rational.”
“It’s not,” says Leo. “Simon Donovan could have walked into that corner store yesterday. He might have walked into it tomorrow. It would have gone the same whether or not you gave the order for Shareef.”
“Sometimes I really don’t recognize myself. I think, how can I have changed so much without my noticing? I wish they had told me that would happen.”
“Who? Me?”
“No,” says Jed. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I still recognize you,” says Leo. They are not talking directly to each other, but following the same line of sight up to where the moonlight is making a single panel in the window glow an otherworldly shade of blue. “I know I brought you here. You wouldn’t have come without me. I know that.”
“Do you want to know if I forgive you?”
Leo looks at him.
“I forgive you.”
“If you need to be angry at me, you can be angry,” says Leo. “It won’t change anything. I won’t start to regret it. Now or ever.”
Jed thinks of Abbey, asleep back at the residence. She doesn’t know what happened tonight. It’s possible she never will. If you could have told him, when they married, the volume of secrets he’d one day be keeping from her, he would not have believed it was possible.
“Rosslyn,” he says.
“You caught me. I do wish that hadn’t happened.”
“I mean, Rosslyn. I didn’t know yet, you know, that the bullet hadn’t hit anything major. Sure felt like it did. And I didn’t know what the anesthesia was gonna do to me. But I wanted to see you. To tell you. Not just so you could talk to Abbey about the MS.”
“What?”
Jed swallows. It feels insurmountable, this thing he is about to admit. “I couldn’t say it then. But I wanted to tell you that it was all right. I’d still do it again.” He looks over at Leo.
“I’d still do it again,” Jed tells him.
They sit in the silence. After a while, Leo says, in a voice carefully neutral, “I’m glad to hear that.”
“Coming out of the anesthesia,” says Jed. “It was like nothing else. It was like I was a stranger in a strange land. I had this fear that none of you were going to recognize me. For a moment, I thought,” and the words almost choke him. “For a moment—when I woke up and saw you, you know—I was scared you didn’t even know me. That you didn’t even know my name.”
Leo reaches across the space between them and takes his shoulder, turning him so they are facing each other. There is fondness in his face, mixed with intense exasperation, like he cannot quite believe that he has to explain this.
He says, “Jed, I will always know your name.”