Chapter Text
She thinks Stanley deserves a raise for his patience but she’s honestly forgotten how much he’s being paid for this. She’s also not sure at all if it’s her money, her insurance’s check, or if this is one of the bills Leo’s assured her he’ll cover.
CJ doesn’t ask.
Stanley’s patient, and she appreciates that, even if she wants to scream at him for that even being necessary.
She thinks he understands anyway.
She talks to Stanley in Leo’s living room while Leo visits the White House, and when Leo returns, Stanley assures her that he’ll be in touch. CJ assumes that means he’ll be in touch with Leo — not a lot of communication goes directly to her anymore.
Leo helps her from the kitchen table to the couch because he knows the therapy will have worn her out — if only for the conversational aspect of it. She’s not surprised at all when he asks her about it himself, too.
“So, what does he want you to think about?”
“C-th’ic-m, mo-ly.”
Leo raises his eyebrows. She rolls her eyes even though it’s not his fault he doesn’t understand her. “-ath’li-ism. Chu’ch.”
She doesn’t elaborate. Doesn’t want to revisit the question of hell and the sin of suicide. Doesn’t want to be confronted again with the knowledge she risked eternal damnation — no chance of forgiveness — letting herself die by her own hand. A sin akin to murder, her mother had called it once.
“I’d nearly forgotten you were Catholic,” Leo comments. “You don’t really practice, do you?”
CJ shakes her head. She thinks she lost her faith the year her mother died.
She stopped wishing it back sometime after meeting Andrea Wyatt in college. If she missed it sometimes, in the years that followed, CJ pretended she didn’t.
“When did you stop?” Leo asks. She’s not sure she wants to have this conversation again.
She doesn’t think she’s entered a church for non-professional purposes in twenty-five years or so. “Mom’s fu-r’l,” CJ says. “-un’ral,” she repeats, frustrated already at not getting funeral right when it feels so important. She doesn’t bother trying to say twenty-five the way she should. “Two fi’e, yea’ ago.”
“You were fourteen?”
CJ nods. Leo waits to see if she has anything more to say.
She tries to repeat the sentence we didn’t get along those last few months four times before Leo nods in understanding. She does it while shifting away from Leo a little. “F’ght a lot. -e’er used to. -ever. Ne-er”
“You were fourteen,” Leo reminds her, like that makes it okay that she ruined her last few months with her mother. “Teenagers fight with their parents — you never expect them to die that young.”
She nods. “Yeah,” she says, quiet and hesitant.
Leo looks at her but she can’t read his face, and when he asks “do you want me to ask what you were fighting about?” she shrugs.
CJ hums something and shrugs and hopes that gets across that she’s not sure. She’s absentmindedly rubbing the raised scar on her right arm until Leo clicks his tongue at her. She places her hand back in her lap.
“Alright. Tea?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
While Leo is in the kitchen, CJ remembers those last few months until her stomach’s turning with anxiety. She recalls the shouting matches between her and her mother — how alike they looked, and how their matching tempers blew up on each other far too easily. She tries to smile at the memory of her father struggling whose side to pick when half the time he didn’t understand what they were mad about.
He never did find out.
She remembers, though only vaguely, sitting on her knees in her old church after her mother’s funeral — a service they hadn’t been allowed to have at the church itself — and begging God for forgiveness, begging God to believe that she would be a better daughter to her father than she had been to her mother.
CJ hasn’t visited or called her dad since the attempt. She doesn’t dare imagine what God would have to say about it.
Leo comes back and places a mug of tea in front of her, and she must look quite anxious because he gives her a worried look before sitting back down on the couch. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She thinks it’s quite naive of her to say yes.
“Alright. What did you fight about?” Leo asks, turning the radio down a little to facilitate the conversation.
CJ doesn’t look his way. Everything, she wants to say. Nothing. “-v’ryth’ng,” she says quietly. He tells her to try a few more times until she gets to “every’ing.”
“We g’t a-ong,” she insists. She fondly remembers her mother taking her to church — her dad’s Catholic, too, but never really observed; Sunday Mass was just her and her mother every week, and she’d loved it. Her mother would braid her curls and buy new clothes specifically for Sundays when they could afford it.
She can’t muster up the energy to explain all that.
She fidgets with the necklace she’s wearing. “We w’nt to chu’ch -ogether, til she -sked me to s’op. We… fough- a lot, after. -bout nothing, rea’y.”
She distinctly remembers shouting at her mother over something that had started because one of them had forgotten to hang up the laundry in time before it began raining. They’d never been important fights — just frequent ones.
“Why’d you stop going to church?” Leo asks.
CJ wants to say she asked me to even though she knows he already heard her say that and it doesn’t answer the question he really wants an answer to.
She looks down at her lap. She’s feeling nauseous, suddenly.
She feels fourteen years old again, being told by her mother that Mary Grace’s dad had called. That same dread — that distant early-born wish to disappear — is familiar still.
“I k’ss- my -est f’ien-,” she says quietly. She fears she sounds childish, more so than her speech makes her fear that. “No-” she sighs. Not the first time, she wants to say. Far from the first time; they’d been sneaking kisses in her bedroom and the garden for months. She doesn’t bother finishing the sentence. “He’ dad -ame home.”
She’s inclined to repeat that her dad, her, but CJ knows Leo heard it, knows Leo knows what she’s saying, and can likely guess where it’s headed. She breathes less steadily than before. She remembers how Mary’s dad yelled his throat dry but doesn’t say that. “-alled my mo-”
She feels the need to say her mom wasn’t angry, wasn’t homophobic; that her mother was just disappointed, as she supposes any Catholic mother would’ve been. She wants to explain, but she’s too tired to say it in so many words. “I’s d-ff-ent wh- it’ your own k’d,” she says quietly.
“-iff’rent. She…” she doesn’t know what words to use. The more her heart races the more difficult it feels to say anything.
CJ reaches for the purposefully half-empty mug of tea and clasps her hands around it because it’s heavy for just her right wrist. “Th-t’s not -at we f’ght a-out.” She doesn’t know if Leo knows what she’s saying. It’s not what we fought about, she thinks, it just made everything else a bigger issue. She thinks it, like telepathy will make it more clear. “Ne’er talk’d ab’t it.”
Leo says nothing. He’s watching her with sympathetic eyes that she tries to find judgment in but can’t. CJ continues speaking softly. “She ‘sked. Once.” Just that once. She remembers the heartbroken look in her mother’s eyes when she’d confirmed she might be gay. CJ doesn’t call that homophobia.
“It’s d-ffe’nt when it’s -our own ki-,” CJ repeats. That much has always made sense to her.
Leo shakes his head. “No it’s not,” he tells her. He shifts closer towards her on the couch and she raises her eyebrows curiously. “It’s not. It doesn’t make a difference.”
“It did,” she says softly. She puts the mug down without taking a sip. Leo takes her hand.
She thinks that if her mother had lived longer, they’d have been able to talk about it. Her mom would have understood. She just needed some time— some time and patience to reconcile her personal beliefs and her love for CJ herself.
“She ‘ee-ed mo’e t-me,” CJ breathes in shakily. “N’ded mo’e. Not -er f’lt she was-” she pauses, forcing herself to take a deeper breath as Leo squeezes her hand. It wasn’t her fault she wasn’t given the time, she desperately wants to say, and she hopes he gets it. “Sh’ -asn’t g-ven th’t time.”
It was her fault — as much as it would have been CJ’s own fault if she’d died in her bathroom — but she doesn’t want to tell that part of the story to Leo. She’s always told others that her mother’s heart just stopped one day, suddenly and tragically.
She keeps the memory of her mom’s body swaying in the basement to herself.
She thinks her dad’s forgotten, too, by now. It’s an image just for her to keep.
“More t’me,” CJ repeats quietly, not being able to stand the thought that she might leave Leo with an impression of her mom that’s so negative. “She -ould ha’e ch-nged her m-nd.”
“Having had the pleasure of knowing the woman you’ve become?” Leo says softly, his hand still gently holding hers. “I know she would’ve. Any mother would’ve been so proud.”
She doesn’t want to cry. CJ just shakes her head quietly and grabs his hand as tightly as her body allows. Even after this? She wants to ask. Even after what I did? All she really asks is “s-ill?” followed by an irritated “’till? Now?”
Leo nods. “Still.”
She only lets go of his hand when she reaches for her tea again.
She wonders what her mother would think of her now. She doesn’t say anything more or on the subject, and she’s glad that Leo doesn’t push it yet. She wonders if he will, some day.
“CJ?” he gets her attention gently, when she’s not sure for long she’s been holding her now cold tea. Leo slowly places one arm around her shoulders and lets her lean into the welcome embrace. “It doesn’t make a difference. It doesn’t. Not to me.”
She tries her best to believe him.
oOo
Carol swears up and down that it was Leo’s idea to do this.
It’s hard to believe Leo McGarry suggested getting ice cream, but CJ had no reason to say no beyond her desire not to go outside.
Andy’s holding her arm gently, even if CJ feels guilty for leaning so much on a pregnant woman, as Carol and Leo walk behind them. Her perfume smells nice — she hasn’t changed it in all the years they’ve known each other. It’s comforting.
Andy doesn’t try to talk to her — CJ thinks Toby might’ve told her she appreciates the silence more when walking is already so draining. She’s here because she said she’d meet her, and Carol insisted ice cream was a good idea that Leo had and Andy’s always had a way of getting excited for ideas that sounded unnecessary to CJ.
It’s nice of her to join, CJ thinks.
It’s only a short walk to the ice cream parlor, and CJ tries not to show she’s tired, tries not to show her body’s hurting, when she sits down in the corner of the booth and Andy sits down next to her. She thinks the others can tell anyway.
Carol orders them bowls of ice cream and no one says out loud she picks bowls instead of cones to make sure it doesn’t melt before CJ can finish hers.
It’s nice, she thinks, as the others talk and she sits back and watches them. Her body hurts, but it’s nice to sit here. She’s almost glad Leo or Carol came up with the idea. She doesn’t say that.
The almost peaceful conversation about something CJ can’t quite keep up with is interrupted with a loud “CJ!” from a nearby customer.
Congresswoman Dorsey, someone who CJ has had maybe a dozen lunch meetings with during the President’s first term, is a short woman with dyed blond hair who always sounds peppy despite rarely having a half-decent thing to say about the state of the world. Her smile is wide and full of surprise when she approaches the table in a hurry.
CJ wants to die. She thinks Leo would tell her off for joking that way, even in the privacy of her own mind, but it’s hardly a real joke.
“Hi,” she says, louder than she speaks most words. Andy’s squeezes her hand gently under the table.
“How are you doing? Everyone’s so worried about you on the hill, aren’t they, Andy? Just so worried! No one’s seen you! ”
She doesn’t do it herself, but CJ’s relieved to see that Carol’s looking around the small ice cream parlor in case anyone else might approach — or any reporter might see. CJ nods sympathetically, her heart racing at the idea of speaking too much, at the thought of revealing how poorly she’s really doing.
She’s glad she’s wearing the cardigan still, covering her arms, even though the shirt she’s wearing shows off just the top of her chest scar. Congresswoman Dorsey stares — she doesn’t hide that she’s staring — but says nothing.
“Yeah,” CJ says slowly, panicked as she tries to think of words to say that won’t reveal how hard it is to speak. No comes easy, so she dares to say “I know,” and it sounds natural.
“Can’t have been easy,” the Congresswoman says sympathetically. “They say you took quite a hit.”
It feels surreal to hear her talk like this. CJ’s fairly sure she’d have trouble coming up with things to say if her speech hadn’t been impacted at all.
“That’s one way to put it,” Andy interjects, smiling warmly at Congresswoman Dorsley while her hand stays wrapped around CJ’s wrist protectively. “How are you doing, Dawn?”
Dawn, that’s right. CJ’s not usually troubled with names, but she’s glad Andy said it.
“Oh just fine,” Dawn Dorsley says. “You know how it is. No one in the House wants to get their priorities straight — and now I’ve gone and lost my favorite contact at the White House!”
She looks at CJ when she says that, a happy grin on her face that makes CJ uncomfortable. She smiles back, shrugging her shoulder apologetically because she knows it’d be a risk to give apologies out loud.
“She’ll be back,” Carol says in CJ’s stead, reassuring and determined.
“Oh we know she will be!” Dawn’s voice remains cheerful, looking at Carol and Leo now. “It’s such a strange situation, but she will be! We all have so much faith in her.”
CJ thinks the reason Leo doesn’t like to let her watch the news is because that’s not true. She smiles anyway.
“Anyway, I just wanted to say hi. It’s so lovely to see you,” Congresswoman Dorsey tells her. “You look good, CJ,” she says sincerely.
CJ chuckles. She shakes her head, then laughs. “No,” she says simply, with no explanation. ”I… no.”
Congresswoman Dorsey laughs at that. “You’ve looked better,” she concedes. “But don’t deny me this. You look good, too. You really do.”
Andy squeezes her hand, just lightly, and Leo smiles at her like he agrees completely, and CJ doesn’t know what else she’s supposed to say but the begrudging “thanks,” she manages.
Dawn Dorsey nods with a smile and extends her hand before glancing at CJ’s arms curiously and thinking better of it. CJ doesn’t know what to do or say, but the Congresswoman’s voice barely falters when she leaves them with an upbeat “anyway, you hang in there, okay?”
oOo
After Carol and Andy have returned to work, CJ is grateful for Leo’s unrequested help in walking her from the couch to her bedroom. She’s drained, and she falls asleep before she’s managed to decide on whether she wants to sleep already.
Carol comes back in the evening to help her wash her hair. CJ’s getting stronger — she thinks she could shower herself for the most part, if she didn’t have to lift her arms too high and didn’t have anything else to do that day. She can’t do her hair — and she appreciates Carol’s reasoning that if she’s doing CJ’s hair, she might as well keep helping with the rest.
“Danny asked to see you,” Carol says when she’s massaging conditioner into CJ’s hair, twisting individual curls around her fingers while the water’s not running yet. “Not as a reporter, nothing on the record. Just to see you.”
CJ doesn’t immediately say anything.
“You don’t have to,” Carol tells her. “He’ll understand if you don’t want to yet.”
CJ shakes her head. She winces when she tries to turn around to look at Carol, and smiles when Carol walks around her instead so they can face each other. “Sure,” CJ says quietly. “-ould be n’ce.”
She’s not sure if she means it, but it sounds like the right thing to say. She’s enjoyed reading Danny’s articles.
“I’ll let him know,” Carol says, continuing to twist her curls from where she’s standing now. The letters on the old t-shirt she’s wearing are tapering off, CJ notices. She smiles.
“C’ld you be -re?” CJ asks, closing her eyes for a moment before she repeats “-ere?”
“There?” Carol repeats to confirm. CJ nods, looking down at her legs. “Of course. I’ll bring him over some time, okay?”
“Thanks,” CJ says, as Carol steps back behind her and turns the shower back on to rinse out her hair.
“Want me to do your legs again?” Carol asks, grabbing a can of shaving cream from the shelf with a smile and raised eyebrows. She’s laughing, even, when she adds “for when Danny comes over?”
CJ rolls her eyes. “N-t f- D’nny. Fo-” she clarifies, though she thinks Carol knows that too. “-ut sure. Thanks.”
She likes that it’s comfortable to do this. It makes it feel less humiliating that Carol seems happy to do it — that she offers with a smile, just because she wants to help beyond the bare minimum of what CJ needs. Leo doesn’t want her handling razors herself; it feels patronizing even though it’s hard to argue his logic.
The shower’s still running when Carol sits on her knees and gently shaves CJ’s legs, continuing to talk to her about the different things reporters are coming to her with.
She winces just slightly when Carol accidentally nicks her skin.
It’s just a bit of blood. CJ would’ve barely noticed it if it hadn’t stung a little when Carol made the cut — but even that sting feels like nothing. She might’ve mistaken it for a hair being pulled out had Carol not gasped the way she did.
It’s just a bit of blood. CJ doesn’t immediately understand what it is that makes Carol go grey in the face.
The razor falls onto the bathroom floor and CJ can see the way Carol moves away from it in a panicked flinch, can see the way Carol’s face contracts staring at the open knives and the tiniest droplets of blood on CJ’s legs — the smallest smudge on Carol’s fingers.
Carol looks like she’s going to throw up, looks like she might pass out, looks like she’s not quite here anymore, and CJ freezes for a moment as she’s too tired to figure out how to respond to that.
She’s relieved Carol doesn’t throw up or pass out, because she doesn’t think she’d have reacted in time. Carol’s breathing quickly, doubled over on the shower tiles and she whispers something about blood and mirrors and laundry that CJ can’t understand.
CJ tries to lean forward, pushing past the way that strains her abdominal scar, reaching for either Carol or the razor until her arm’s too close to the razor blade and Carol shrieks. It hurts to back away again as quickly as she does.
“Everything alright?” Leo’s voice sounds from behind the closed bathroom door, and CJ would laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation if she wasn’t at such a loss of what to do. He sounds concerned — she doesn’t know how to say he shouldn’t be. She’s not sure if she can say that without lying.
CJ reaches out her arm towards Carol, ignoring the razor for what it is, trying to say “yeah” to Leo just as Carol’s eyes dart down to the red scars on her arms in another wave of nausea-inducing panic. Carol’s crying — high-pitched and uncontrolled gasping sobs that only get worse when CJ tries to get closer.
“Carol,” Leo calls. “What’s happening?” CJ would almost be offended by the assumption.
“Pa-” she starts, her own words coming out with more difficulty as Carol is staring daggers at the scars on her arms. “-an’ -tack. Fuck.” CJ’s breathing faster herself, too, a hand on her own chest to try and keep her incision from hurting.
She hates the method of spelling her words out in syllables, but when Leo asks what’s happening again she sucks it up. “Pa. N- nic. -ta. At. -ack.” She brings out, fully aware she’s sounding out of breath and scared herself.
“Can you help her calm down?” Leo asks, loud and clear and wasting no time.
CJ tries to shift her chair closer, but winces at the way that movement pulls at the scars on her arms. She winces, and Carol looks like she’s staring at something from a horror movie.
It really takes her longer than she thinks it should have to sink in.
It’s her.
Carol’s shifting away on the bathroom floor with fear in her eyes to get away from her.
CJ tries to extend a hand, turning her arm so that her scar isn’t visible this time, but it does nothing to help.
It’s her blood that triggered this. Her injury. Her mere presence that makes it impossible for her to calm Carol down.
“One of you talk to me before I have to come in,” Leo says, a fair warning CJ knows he won’t be able to avoid for long. He can’t risk it.
She looks down at herself — shivering cold and naked with red scars on her torso and her abdomen, her leg and both her arms. It’s no wonder she’s frightening Carol, she thinks. CJ’s never felt disgust towards her own body so intensely.
The warm water is still hitting her back and she can’t fault Carol for being scared of how repulsively fragile she is. Who can blame her, blame any of them, for being scared she’ll die when she looks this broken, this dependent, this cut up?
She tries to move her legs out of the water but that only means the blood from the little cut Carol made can flow freely without being washed away. Carol’s nails are digging violently into her own hands and arms and CJ can do nothing to stop her when she can’t reach for Carol without making it a dozen times worse.
She did this to her, CJ thinks, for one awful moment, before she’s filled with frustration that her guilt in this does not provide her with the answer.
CJ looks at the bathroom door and mouths I’m sorry to Carol, who’s sitting with her back against the wall just outside the shower, a wretched sob echoing across the room.
She can’t do this by herself. Not when she’s the cause.
“Co- in,” she says loudly.
“Come in?” Leo repeats back.
“Yeah.”
Carol’s struggling for breath, staring at CJ like she’s risen from the dead.
When Leo enters the bathroom, CJ’s leaning over, resting her elbows on her legs in a half-hearted attempt to give herself a shred of coverage. It hardly matters; but it feels wrong not to try.
“Are you okay?” he asks her, first, even as he’s kneeling next to Carol with a worried look. CJ nods, not really thinking about it when she waves her hand his way in an attempt to let him know she’ll be fine.
She’s not sure how, yet, but she’ll manage.
“Yeah,” she says softly. “-leas. She-” CJ starts, then shakes her head. “Fine.”
Leo nods. She watches him say something to Carol that she can’t quite hear. He helps her up — she watches as Carol grips Leo’s arms like her life depends on them. “Out of the bathroom,” Leo tells her, as a shaking Carol nods with a dazed and terrified expression. “She’s fine. She’ll be fine, I’ve got her. Get out of the room.”
Carol doesn’t look at her as she gets up, helped up by Leo and shaking when she walks out of the room. CJ’s heart plummets in her stomach watching her leave like that.
“What happened?” Leo asks her, looking directly at the floor to avoid look at her. It makes it harder to communicate, she realises — not enjoying the reminder that she’s relying more on her expressions and gestures to talk to him than she notices herself.
CJ extends her leg slightly, even though he’s not looking at her. “Cut me,” she says slowly. “-az’r. Razo’. The bl’d… I… sca’e her.”
“Okay,” Leo says slowly. He nods, more to himself than to her. She says nothing. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he tells her. “Don’t risk a fall, if you can’t get ready yourself, wait.” He talks to her with a stern voice. He pauses, then, and the nervous glance he shoots at the razor she can easily reach makes her shake her head.
She’s not that cruel. It’s on her mind — now that he’s shot her that too meaningful glance — but she’s not a monster. “No,” she says, quiet but clear. “-on’t.”
“Okay,” Leo says. She feels a strange relief that he trusts her. “Okay.”
Left alone in the bathroom, CJ hates nothing more than not being able to see or hear what’s happening in the living room. She can only vaguely hear their voices, can hear Carol’s panicked sobs quiet down without being able to understand what Leo’s telling her.
CJ’s shivering, dripping wet and cold on a chair in the shower, her arms wrapped loosely around her own body.
She gently kicks the razor further away from herself, not entirely sure what moves her to do that.
When she tries to get up, it’s initially hard to lift herself off the chair when the floor’s slippery and she’s more shaken up by Carol’s panic than she’d realized. CJ sits back down quickly, cursing at herself inside her head, and despite knowing she’d better wait, knowing Leo would be worried and angry if she pushed herself and got hurt, she tries again.
She almost falls, but doesn’t, and Leo doesn’t have to know that.
CJ walks slowly, taking small steps until she’s standing on a mat on the floor where she doesn’t feel she’s about to slip.
She glances at the mirror without meaning to when she’s making her way to her bathrobe. Her skin too pale, her hair too thin despite its curls, ugly scars down her torso, her leg, and both her cursed arms.
There’s a small droplet of blood making its way down her leg and the thought of reaching down to wipe it clean is so exhausting it brings tears to her eyes. She’s shivering, still, her bathrobe in her hands while she’s struggling to find a reason to put it on instead of continuing to stand in the cold staring at a body that looks more disfigured by the second.
It’s hard to imagine what Congresswoman Dorsley was looking at.
She can’t blame Carol a bit for being frightened of her — she can’t understand how Carol and Leo might still see something worth saving in this.
She doesn’t know how she finds the motivation to look away at all.
oOo
“You knew someone was going to have to find you.”
Leo gives her a glass of water and a bowl of cut up banana as he says it, neither an accusation nor something he forgives her for. Carol’s left hours ago — calmed down and apologetic for something CJ doesn’t know how to apologize for herself. CJ’s barely said a word since.
“Yes,” she says now, taking a sip of water and leaving the fruit for what it is. “I know.”
“She feels the blood,” Leo tells her, folding open a newspaper when he sits down next to her at the kitchen table. “Carol. I doubt you remember, but she tried to stop the bleeding when she found you. She can’t stop feeling the blood between her fingers, she says. And she finds it hard not to picture the various ways in which you could still die on her.”
Like the razor, CJ thinks. She’s not sure what she’s meant to say.
“This is a question you don’t have to answer,” Leo starts, which makes her dread the question. “But I wanted to ask… did you think about who’d find you? You expected to die — did you consider who’d find the body? Did you wonder when?”
She shakes her head.
“No- in the -om’nt. Mom-t.” She looks at him, unsure. “Th-y say…” she stops herself. They say she would’ve done a better job if she’d thought it through more, she doesn’t want to say. She feels stupid — that after so many years of thinking about it she still ended up failing this pathetically.
“Ca’ol, or Toby, or you, fi-ding me… det’rre’t. At times.” CJ admits. She doesn’t know if that sounds believable when she still did it — when Carol still found her. She hopes he knows it’s the truth. “But in the -om’nt… did’t -ink about it.”
“Just how much time have you spent thinking about your death since turning eighteen?” Leo asks — he sounds like he could be joking when she knows damn well he’s not.
CJ says nothing for a while. She picks at her banana while her mind’s racing a thousand miles a minute and it’s making her dizzy. Leo turns the page of his newspaper and focusing on the sound helps.
She remains silent for long enough that she thinks Leo might’ve assumed she’s not gonna say anything else. She’s not sure if she’s going to, either, until she’s already started saying it.
“I -ant’d to u’e a gun.”
She’s not sure if she should say that. She doesn’t think she should have, when she sees the way Leo’s hands freeze, the way she knows he must be looking at her even though she can’t bring herself to tilt her head his way to check.
She feels weird about saying gun with no issue.
He says nothing, so CJ feels the need to explain.
“I’m no- ‘tupi-,” she says quietly. “I’s eff-tive. B-r’ly fails. Qu-ck -eath.” She’s not helping the situation at all, but Leo’s not stopping her from talking. “I th-ght ab’t it — ‘bout ge-ing a l’cense. Thr-” she pauses, taking another sip of water. “-rough the yea’s.”
She’s impressed by how unfazed Leo sounds when he answers her. “Changed your mind after Rosslyn?”
CJ just nods.
She couldn’t do that to Josh.
It’d have been more effective — much more effective. She’d have barely suffered, she likes to think. One bullet, a quick death. She’d have been a tragic, soon-to-be-distant, memory as opposed to the pitiful scandal living in Leo’s house.
“-osh,” she says simply. “He… I cou’dn’t.”
“Curious line to draw,” Leo comments. She continues to stare down at the table. “The weight of losing you would’ve undone him no matter what method you used, don’t you think?”
“I f’lt the gun m-ght -ake it wo’se.”
Leo manages to increase her guilt in tenfold without sounding accusatory at all when he asks “you had the presence of mind not to use a gun for fear of hurting him worse, but not to consider not killing yourself at all?”
It feels oddly right to hear him use the word instead of talking around it. CJ shakes her head. Those two decisions feel worlds apart to her but she can’t find the words to explain why that is.
“Try,” Leo encourages. It helps that he’s still checking the paper in between looking at her. She feels less like a spotlight’s being shone down on her.
“Gun was… p’pe’tion.” She sighs. She takes a sip of water and tries for preparation again. “P’epa’tion,” she manages. “This,” CJ lifts up her arms slightly. “-mpu’se. -ulse.” Impulse, she thinks in frustration, but when she looks at Leo she thinks he knows what she’s trying to say.
Using a gun would’ve been far more effective, but it would’ve required her to acquire a license long before buying the thing itself and learning how to use it to avoid simply maiming herself for life. CJ glances down at herself and tries not to think of the irony. She always got herself back together before she could get through that kind of planning.
She doesn’t remember the night she tried to kill herself.
She thinks only Carol does, and only part of it; the rest remains a mystery. She’s not sure how to live with that.
“You couldn’t bring yourself to prepare for it?” Leo asks, as if it’s that simple. CJ doesn’t respond with any words, she only shakes her head.
Every time she thought of preparing it, she ended up talking herself out of it for one reason or another.
She appreciates how much Leo is trying to understand when he asks “then why do it, if thinking about how to do it pro-actively made you not want to?”
CJ shakes her head again. “No,” she says. “Wanted,” she adds quietly. “A’ways— wanted, -ust… ch’nge- my mi’d on acti-.”
“Until that night?” Leo asks. He turns the page of the paper and she takes a sip of water. He nods towards the banana.
CJ closes her eyes for a moment — her arms are starting to feel heavy. She wants to sleep. She wonders if he’d let her cut the conversation short for that, and she’s almost certain that he would but doesn’t want to ask.
“T-enty -ear’,” she says. “-ears,” she repeats. “Wi’ed I was dead.” She says it plainly, even as her voice is unsteady. She’s squeezing a piece of banana between her fingers without realizing it and wipes her fingers on a napkin. “-ought it,” she adds, unsure how to convey how some days were so much easier than others, how some days were impossibly hard to get through. “F-ght. It felt -mpo’ible, s-times.”
CJ shivers. She pictures Carol’s horror-struck face and thinks nothing she says can make up for doing that to her. “Ne’er did,” she says. She hadn’t been able to do that to her father — not after her mom. She couldn’t do it to Andy, though she says no such thing to Leo or to her, ad wonders sometimes if Andy knows how much she mattered back then. She couldn’t do it to the various campaigns and causes she’d worked for — none of which could have reasonably dealt with their spokesperson committing suicide.
“Dad,” she says only. “A gi’lf’iend. -iff’rent c-mpaigns.” She leaves it unsaid that Bartlet for America was one of those campaigns.
She appreciates that Leo’s staying silent while she’s struggling through her words.
“Just… I j’st cou-n’t.” Couldn’t, she doesn’t bother repeating. She says it softly, hating how weak it makes her sound when she has to force her voice out. She hates having to look his way to see tears in her mentor’s eyes. “Twe’y years. I c-ldn’t.”
She doesn’t even remember what it was that brought about the final moments. Can’t remember what changed that day — what changed in those hours between getting home and trying to take her life. She doesn’t really care.
“Did n’t wan- her to f’nd me,” CJ insists, her hand shaking when she takes another sip. “An-one.” She hadn’t wanted anyone to find her, hadn’t wanted anyone to have to grief her, or have to help her in and out of a shower because she failed to die. “Fou’d, g’iev-d, I— no one.”
She’d wanted to die for twenty years and had always understood that she couldn’t protect people from grieving her and get what she wanted. “Al’ays cho-e to keep p-ple f’rom grie-ing me.” CJ is silent for a few moments, picking up another piece of banana and trying not to look at the scar extending to her thumb. “Til now. Th’s once. I… t’ied. ”
She realizes she’s looking for forgiveness only when Leo looks, for a moment, like he might give it to her.
“Twenty years,” Leo repeats quietly. She can’t tell if her forgives her or not. “Hard to think straight after twenty years of fighting your own brain,” he tells her, like he knows just what that’s like, and he silently takes the hand she’s not using to eat.
“I hu’t her,” CJ says, her voice breaking.
Leo doesn’t deny that. He squeezes her hand as he says “yes you did. And not just her. You hurt a lot of people, Claudia.” It’s hard to swallow the piece of banana when she’s trying not to cry. “But you’ve been hurting for over twenty years,” he adds. “Don’t dismiss that, or how much you tried to fight it.”
She’s too scared to ask if Carol could forgive her. She’s not sure Leo would have a clue, anyway — and she doesn’t want him to make something up, even if she doubts he would.
“I trie-” she says instead. I swear I tried, she thinks. I don’t know why it wasn’t enough — why I couldn’t keep fighting it — but I swear to you I tried. “I did,” CJ adds quietly.
“I know you did,” Leo assures her. “We know you tried, kid. Twenty years is a long time to fight that battle on your own.”
It sounds like forgiveness, if she wants to hear it.
She’s not sure she deserves it