All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. Standard disclaimers apply. Please send feedback. The World in Solemn Stillness Luna
It begins to rain on Toby's birthday and continues through Christmas day. Rain everywhere, sifting from solid clouds to dull earth. Dissolving old gray snow, running over the sidewalks into ankle-deep puddles at every corner. Invisible from one angle, turn slightly and the ambient light changes each drop to silver. The air is rich with rain.
Toby sits on a couch in the surreal light of Andi's tree, watching the rain blur her living room windows. It's not the room of either of their dreams. She comes downstairs with a smile as warm and snug as her quilted bathrobe, with two howling infants whom she places in his arms.
"Breakfast," she says, and dashes into the kitchen for the formula that's already warming.
He juggles their weight around on his knees. Heavy. They've grown so fast. He knew they would, but it's startling. They take up so much space. He has a handful of years before he can't balance them both at the same time. He's forty-nine years old. A thought he shoves aside, as Molly punches his chest with her bite-sized fist. Huck's face is the healthy red of an apple. They understand more than hunger, now. Six months and they have distinct emotions, perceptions, and attention spans of nearly a minute. They recognize faces. He can make them laugh.
Andi comes back, takes Molly, hands Toby a warm bottle. Side by side, they feed their son and daughter. A Kodak moment, he thinks, and thinking that almost ruins it. Huck's eyes half-close in simple unthinking bliss. Nice.
"We can start them on finger foods, soon." Andi yawns. He hates the look of the exhausted blue flesh under her eyes. It's supposed to get easier once they start sleeping through the night.
"Was that in a book, or--"
"My mother suggested it."
He looks down, remembering to tilt the bottle up, to keep a check on the airflow. The warm pressure of his son's head in his palm. "Does your mother still have the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg in her basement?"
She rolls her eyes and raises Molly to her shoulder, patting a circle on her back. "She's never been that hostile to you."
"But for the intervention of Amnesty International."
"Anyway, she's good at raising children." She frees her hair from Molly's fingers, smiling. "And I checked with the books, and they said the same thing."
"Okay." He looks at the tree, at the ludicrously high pile of boxes under the tree. Seven kinds of wrapping paper. It's not possible to spoil children this small, is it? "Let's do this," he says, and sets the bottle down.
Andi slides out of the recliner, onto her knees. "We have to sit on the floor."
"Why?"
"Because that's how we do it." She turns Molly around in her lap. Her voice goes up. "Isn't it, yes, it is."
"Did your mother raise her children in a house without chairs?"
"Toby, get down here."
He sighs, carries Huck around the edge of the coffee table, and tries to get into a comfortable sitting position on the carpet. Which is impossible. Huck grabs at the ribbon on a box easily twice his size. "So, we just let them--"
"Yeah." Andi scoots a few inches toward him. "That one's his, go ahead."
"I don't think it really matters yet." He closes his hands over Huck's and helps pull the ribbon away, helps him grip the flap of the bright red paper.
"But it will." Andi picks up a lumpy package for Molly to pluck at. "And we don't want to pick up the habit of treating them like we can't tell the difference, or don't care."
Vaguely, he remembers fighting with his brother over a toy train. Holding a grudge. "Right."
Huck gets the paper off with a lot of help, and Toby pulls a large, fluffy panda bear that comes out of the box. "Hey," Toby says, bending close to him, "hey, how do you like this guy?" He waves the panda bear's paw. Huck reaches up, gurgling, gleeful. "Apparently, we're expressing gratitude through drool."
"He likes black and white," Andi says. "High contrast."
Wouldn't we all. He doesn't say it. That would be cynical. That would be sad. Instead he moves the bear into Huck's arms--actually, more like the other way around--and watches. Smiling. Everything is so loaded, now, with significance and possibility: this could be the toy that he has to pry from Huck's hands on his first day of school. He can almost see it, this future full of give and take.
Molly has managed to tear the silver snowflake paper off a plastic piano keyboard. She slaps one of the primary-colored keys. It lets out a high note and she screams in delighted response. Andi nuzzles the top of her head. "Oh, yes," she says. "I think Juilliard, definitely."
"Who's that from?"
"Me. Us."
Lines cross his forehead. "You got her something that makes noise?" Obligingly, Molly bangs the keys again. Huck turns toward the sound, wiggling in Toby's lap so he can get a fix on his sister. "Lots of noise," Toby adds.
"I can always take the batteries out. Besides, she likes noise."
"Shortest route to a headache, I guess."
"I have them so often I don't notice anymore."
He raises his chin. "You look tired."
But she's already moving things out of her way, gifts to one side and rubbish to the other. She picks up a floppy package, something soft. "What's this? This is from your aunt, I don't know what it is. It's probably really ugly. Let's see..."
The babies are looking tired, too, full as they are. Before long they're whimpering, rubbing at their eyes. Andi's got a playpen with a soft floor, big enough for Huck and Molly to sleep side by side on their stomachs, in mirror position. It's hard not to think of them curled that way in the womb. He and Andi unwrap the rest of the gifts. She's careful with the trimmings. He tears them to pieces.
When the space under the tree is empty, and the rest of the floor is buried, Andi stretches her arms over her head. Her robe falls open a little in the front. He tries not to notice, notices anyway. "Maybe I did take this a little over the top," she says.
"Maybe." It's something like lighting a menorah with a blowtorch. He stands up.
"But it was fun." She gets up, too, yawning again, a hand to her mouth. "Even if they won't remember it."
He takes a high step over a pile of new clothes, toward the playpen. Watches them breathe. "They didn't really need more, more stuff, in general."
"Oh, you can't really have too much."
"Little capitalists." He reaches down, touches each of them, just once apiece. Warmth rises from them. "That's what we'll have."
"Happy little capitalists." Andi steps toward him. The corner of her smile turns down as he glances back. "You didn't get me anything."
"No." He'd almost bought her a necklace, single emerald on a fine chain. The twins' birthstone. He'd had his money out, and then he'd shaken his head. It was the wrong time. "Didn't we decide--"
"Right, it's better we didn't. We're less awkward now that you're over the, ah, marriage thing."
Somehow, she sounds completely certain that he's over it. Certain that it's over. He closes his hands loosely around the top of the playpen and doesn't answer her.
"Are you going into work today?" she asks.
"I don't know." He could. Other people will. But no one's going to begrudge him a day off, not this day. With the State of the Union suspended above his head by a single strand.
"There's a brunch in Greenbelt. My staff wanted me to stop by." He hears her yawn again. "I'm still winning them back, you know. It's not just the Baptists and the La Leche League that are pissed at me. There are a lot of important people who don't want to know me now, and I only have a year..." She sighs. "I'm still winning them back."
Toby turns around fully. "You want to go to the brunch," he says.
She shakes her head, pulling her hair back from her face. "There's too much else to do. Look at this place. Look at me." He does. And, yes, he can tell how little she sleeps. She's pale. She's not thirty anymore.
"You could wipe the floor with the women of Greenbelt," he says. "Take a shower. Go. Do your job."
For a moment longer she looks at him, testing his goodwill. Then she puts a hand up to his cheek, rubs her thumb over the line of his beard. "Thank you."
Don't thank me, he wants to tell her. Don't be sweet. Let's scream at each other, have the anger and the acrimony, and then force ourselves to be civil, for the children. Let's act like divorced people.
He is a hypocrite with a ring on his finger. He nods, and she winds her way to the stairs.
*
"No chewing on the tree," Toby says, tugging Molly toward him. "Your foot, yeah, that's okay."
He has the cell phone pinned between his shoulder and his ear. It laughs at him. "You sound nothing like Toby," Sam says. "I don't know who you sound like. Maybe the guy from 'My Three Sons'."
"Shut up," Toby growls. Automatically, he puts his chin down to hide his smile.
"That's better." Sam breathes easy, three thousand miles away. "So, why'd you call me?"
"You called me."
"I called you three weeks ago."
That long. Toby knows he's let some things fall behind. "I'm returning your call," he says. He's cleaned up most of the toys and all of the trimmings; the babies grope at what's left around them. Let's see what this does, how this tastes.
"Okay," Sam says. "So what are you doing? Apart from the twins, I mean--I mean--well, what's happening in the office?"
Either he's asking about Josh, or he's asking about Will. Toby doesn't really give a damn. He's not the newsboy around here. "There was a hand bell choir," he says. "And a minor hassle when somebody thought the President was endorsing opening a present on Christmas Eve."
"Oh, God, do I miss a White House Christmas." Sam doesn't even sound like he's joking. "You got snow."
"Some." He glances at the streaked window. Not much brighter at noon than it was at dawn. "It's raining now."
"Should I tell you the temperature here?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Yes."
"Then no."
"Seventy degrees and clear as a bell." Sam pauses. "Zoey looked good on the tree-lighting thing."
Toby looks down. Molly's eyes are sort of a dark hazel. They were blue when she was born, but one of the nurses had said they would change. Huck's eyes were always dark. He'll probably never be able to think of that day with unmixed pleasure, without the wrong things getting into the memory. He says, "She's doing fine. Everybody's doing fine."
Sam chuckles. "This is the eloquence I expect."
"'Clear as a bell'?"
"From the guy who's about to write his fifth State of the Union."
In a way, it's his first. His, first. The thought is new, somewhat daunting. He bends to tickle Huck under the chin, and murmurs to him, "Gotta set an agenda before we shape the message."
"Yeah, and--hey. So you're taking first chair on that?"
Toby watches the smile bloom on Huck's face like an out-of-season sunflower. "Yeah."
"Well, that's great news." Sam's voice is slightly too bright. "That's terrific."
Sam's never going to get elected to Congress, or even the Orange County Wildlife Commission, if he can't fake enthusiasm more convincingly than that. Toby's mouth is still coffee-soured. He clears his throat loudly, says nothing. The silence draws out.
"It's just..." Sam begins, and stops again.
Here comes the question. What happened to Will, what's happening to Josh, why is this White House less than Sam imagines it could be? An argument they have been having since the start. An argument that leaves them both defeated. "It's just what, damn it?"
"I'm worried," Sam says, the false light leaving his tone. "I don't think you're the same guy who told the President that the era of big government wasn't over. You've become--you're resigned, to things changing by small increments, if at all." Sam sighs his heaviest sigh. "I'm not saying the State of the Union should be unrealistic, I'm saying... if we don't aspire to great things, Toby, we won't achieve the small ones. That's what I'm worried about."
'We.' Toby grinds his teeth. He does not say, Sam, you're on the other side of the country, or ask whether Sam's worry has gotten him anywhere. Instead he reaches for the Kleenex box on the coffee table, dabs at one tiny nose and then the other.
"Finger foods," he says. "Already."
Another sigh. The weight of the world. "Time gets away from us," Sam says.
Neither of them promises to call the other back.
*
He gives the twins another half a bottle apiece. Making a mess, small puddles of milk all over Andi's kitchen. He is still not efficient at these daily things, these things he doesn't do every day.
Once they're changed and fed and kissed, he puts them into the playpen again. First Huck and then Molly does the latest trick. With only a little struggling, they can roll over, from back to belly. Toby applauds. It seems to be the thing to do.
"When I was a kid, I used to go watch the girls on the ice at Rockefeller Center." Molly blinks sleepily at him. "Yeah," Toby says. "I don't know why I told you that, either."
He isn't thinking of his own childhood, exactly. A fairytale New York childhood. Window-shopping, glittery snow-globe snow, teenage girls in those skating skirts. Kids making snowballs out of what was left on the hoods of cars. Kids taking cardboard sleds to the park.
One December the pipes froze in their building and it was two weeks before Toby's mother could bribe the super to call a plumber. Two weeks of sleeping in their coats and mittens, of smuggling themselves in to shower at the Y. In the frigid apartment, his mother lit the candles, baked ruggelach, said the prayers. At night she would weep and curse in the language her children did not know.
He isn't thinking of his childhood at all.
"Listen," he says. "I'm going to take you there someday and show you, and we'll go out for pizza. You don't know what pizza is yet, that's okay. You are both New Yorkers. Trust me."
He sits down on the couch, suddenly exhausted from the sheer energy required to watch them. To be aware, always watching for what might go wrong. His gaze drifts around the room, aimless over all this space that is not home. Andi has a cigar box on the mantel, tied with two ribbons, a pink and a blue. Would it make him a bad parent to leave the babies in the playpen, go and smoke with the back door open? Yes. No. Yes.
Huck fusses a little. Maybe he's cold. Toby comes over and picks him up. Inhales the milky baby smell. Says, "You know something, Sam Seaborn likes things black and white, too."
The small head drops against his shoulder. Huck is asleep before Toby even gets back to the couch. He sits for a while. Holding.
Andi finds them that way when she sweeps in the front door, brushing the rain from the shoulders of her winter coat. She smiles. Both of the babies have her smile. "What have we been up to?"
Toby's getting to hate that pronoun. He shifts Huck from one arm to the other--he's lost feeling in his shoulder--and suppresses a groan as he stands up. "I told them there was no Santa Claus."
"Shh," Andi scolds. She takes Huck from him. "Hey, Mommy's home."
"Also, the Tooth Fairy," Toby mutters, going to the playpen. "There'll be none of that." He reaches down to Molly. Half awake, she hides her face in the corner of her blanket.
"We should enjoy telling them stories," Andi says. "Before they hit the age where they don't believe anything we say."
He decides to pick Molly up anyway. She whines, squirming in his arms. "When does that happen?"
"For you, it was probably around your second birthday." Andi smirks at him. "We have to do more than enjoy them this way. We have to defend it. We're responsible for making sure their capacity for belief and wonder lasts as long as possible."
"We're also responsible for equipping them to live in the world," Toby says. The look Andi shoots at him, he could bite his tongue in two. It's almost impossible to resolve the contradiction, to accept that Andi is one of the leading progressives in the country and she still believes in this Victorian myth of childhood. But she does. He bounces Molly gently in his arms to settle her down. "How was brunch?"
"Worth it." She manages to slip her coat off without putting Huck down. "I know that it's not your favorite, but I like to be out there, one-on-one."
"Schmoozing."
"You say 'schmoozing,' I say...reconnecting." She ruffles the down on top of Huck's head. "Except, no, that sounds really stupid."
"Your point is, it was worth it."
"Yes. Thank you for--"
"I'm not the babysitter, you don't have to thank me."
Their eyes meet. Crimson rises under Andi's clear white skin. "No. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound like that."
He nods, turning slightly away from her. The tree twinkles at him.
"I brought you a doughnut," she says. A note of something, maybe nerves, just under her voice. "Blueberry. It's in my purse if you want it."
Molly reaches out to grab a branch of the tree. Toby whirls her away just in time. "I don't want anything," he says, as quietly as he can. The babies look at each other. Toby doesn't meet Andi's eyes.
*
By four o'clock the sky is black. He goes into the office, because that's the behavior ingrained in his middle-aged, divorced brainstem. Because he can think of nothing better to do. His eyes sting from the heat and light when he walks into the West Wing. Christmas lights strung up everywhere. They look a bit like barbed wire.
He rubs the end of his sleeve across his face. Through the metal detector and down the hall. As he rounds the corner, he narrowly misses walking into Donna. She backs up. "Oh, hi."
Toby nods, starts to pass her, but she turns and falls into step with him. "We've got rum and eggnog in the Mural Room, if you're interested."
"We?"
"Josh, me, a Lauren, some other people who didn't make it out of town this year." She smoothes her pale hair into place. "There were some crackers, too. They might be gone."
"I'm not hungry." It's not entirely true, but he has no appetite for this exercise in holiday spirit. Or team spirit. He comes to work to work. And he's never liked eggnog.
"Did you--or maybe Andi--did you do the present-opening thing, with the twins, or are they too little?"
"Both," he says. "They're too little, and we did it."
Donna clasps her hands under her chin. "So adorable!"
"Yeah." He wishes they'd taken pictures. So far, there is not a single picture that includes both children and both of their parents. Six months. Something is wrong with this. Donna is still next to him, still talking. "What?"
"I know we go a little overboard with all this." She draws circles in the air with her finger, taking in the lights, the garlands, the glare. "And now that you've got the kids, and you're doing Christmas with them at least some of the time...I just wondered if it bothers you."
He wonders, too, backed into this pine-scented corner. If they should be conditioning the twins to the commercial holiday. If he should have refused to participate. Or ceded them entirely to Andi's church; God knows lately he is not a man who takes solace from his faith.
"I get them for Passover," he says, glancing at Donna. She looks older than she used to, but she still looks too young. "Could, could you do me a favor?"
She raises her eyebrows. "Don't tell everyone in the Mural Room you're here?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah, no problem." Her fingers brush his sleeve. "Happy Hanukkah."
Toby crosses the empty bullpen and ducks into his office. He turns on the computer, takes off his coat. Leaves the lights off. There are files and files of false starts, paragraphs stowed away in case he needs them. He won't need them. All these beginnings and endings that no one else will ever see. Vaguely, he wonders what's left on the hard drive of Will's laptop. He does not look toward the blinded window.
He opens a file that is just an unlabeled list. Even to title it would be too official. These are the things he imagines working into the State of the Union. Mostly little things, if little is defined as 'under a billion dollars.' Mostly things that won't happen, or things that don't play in primetime. A few that are just too large to negotiate. His personal favorite is a Manhattan Project for energy independence. Research grants, tax incentives to car companies. It would cost as much, or more, than curing cancer. It might save the country, if not the planet.
With a click of the mouse, he highlights that section. He deletes it with one key and brings it back with another, watching the possibility appear and disappear. He deletes it again and closes the file without saving. Productivity.
His hand wanders to the phone, picks up the receiver. He doesn't know who he's calling until the number flickers from his fingertips. It rings at David's house. All right, Toby thinks, rolling his knuckles against the flat of his desktop. He can do this, play the good brother, the good son, though last year he could have throttled Josh, and nearly did. It rings some more. He can play forgiving.
At the fifth ring, he realizes no one is home. Or no one is answering. The machine clicks on and plays a recording of his nieces singing, atrociously, "let's have a party, we'll all dance the hora." At least they don't sound happy about it.
"Happy holidays," he says, after the beep. His mouth hangs open as he tries to think of something to add. He thinks of nothing, and hangs up, equal parts relieved and annoyed that he's wasted the gesture. The hell with heritage. He rests his forehead in the palm of his hand and stares, blankly, at the blank screen.
*
When the size and inky darkness of the office become oppressive, when he can't sit in his chair anymore, he leaves for a drink. Somehow this is different from drinking to celebrate, or commiserate. This is going out to drink alone, and seriously, in the privacy of a bar he's never mentioned to his friends.
The rain and wind are sharper now, drawing harsh diagonals down his windshield. He finds a place to park and walks the rest of the block. Cold rain needles the top of his head. Someone's tied a bell to the door of the Dark Horse. It jangles when Toby walks in. Mostly empty, though there's a woman sitting at the bar. His eyes adjust to the dim bourbon-colored light. They recognize each other at the same time.
"Oh, God," C.J. says. She's wearing a brown jacket and a hat, a man's fedora that he's never seen before. Left hand curled tight around a glass of something clear. A look of utter disdain crossing her face. "What'd you do, follow me here?"
He edges toward her, hands in his coat pockets. "I drink here sometimes," he mumbles. "What are you--"
"I drink here sometimes." She arches her back, standing up. "I guess, not anymore."
"C.J.--"
"Just don't, just let me..." She pulls her jacket tight across her chest. "Forget it." She shoulders past him, elbow to his ribs and out the door.
He looks at the empty barstool, the fingerprinted glass on the bar. The smell of her cologne lingers, or maybe he imagines it. He rolls his eyes at his own predictability, and then he turns to follow her.
A short way up the street, her hat's been blown into a puddle. Toby catches up as she stoops to fish it out. "I have my car."
"Damn it." She throws the hat back on the ground. Her hair blows theatrically around her face. "I just wanted to be. I don't know. Alone."
"Yeah." He turns his collar up. Useless. The rain is a blur between them; he can't read her face. "Car's the other way," he says.
She ignores him, tucks her chin and keeps going. Long strides, into the wind. "I didn't want to sit at home with the phone ringing. With everyone calling and feeling sorry for me."
He's glad he didn't call her today. He hunches his shoulders forward. "I didn't follow you."
"My brother called, my cousin, my sister-in-law..." She rubs her hands quickly across her face. "They're all in California. They ask how I'm doing, they try to make me jealous of their weather and then they want to talk about how Dad is. And what am I supposed to do, tell them I don't want to discuss it?"
She steps on a patch of sidewalk still frosted with black ice, nearly falls on her ass. He catches her instinctively, a hand on the small of her back. For a few seconds she forgets to pull away. He says, "Tell them to call Dayton."
"If I don't want to discuss it they think I don't, they think I don't care. I think I've been dealing really well. As long as I don't have to talk about it I'm fine." She wipes at her face again, vicious, and it occurs to him that she might be crying. He hopes he's wrong. "There's no fucking privacy anymore. I don't know how I can stand another year, another three years of..."
The unfinished sentence trails along behind them. He could say to her: none of us know how to stand it, but we stand it. If the President can stand it, we can. I don't know how to do better. He could say: I'm sorry.
"This is my building," she says.
He never realized how close the Dark Horse is to her. Always coming from the other direction. He watches her step up into the doorway, combing the rain from her hair with her fingers. The yellow light of the nearest streetlamp is not kind to her. Five years of this city. The work, the schedule, the weather. Her face still gives away too much of the truth about her.
"I don't feel sorry for you."
She pauses with her key in the lock, looks at him over her shoulder.
"You don't need it," he says. "And I didn't follow you. I never expected you there."
He knows the twitch at the corner of her mouth, not a smile but near a smile. Unlike anyone else's expression. He knows exactly why she makes him wait a full minute in the rain. She throws up her hands. "Come in."
He does. There are no pretenses. He's loosening his collar on the way upstairs, watching her fingers on the buttons of her coat. Inside her wet and clinging skirt, her legs shake slightly. Maybe he does, too.
She lets them into her apartment, hangs up her coat carefully. He switches on the light and sees the wrapping paper scattered across half her living-room floor. The only sign in the place that Christmas is anywhere close. C.J. follows his gaze. "I was wrapping presents," she says. "I had to mail a lot of things out."
"When?"
"Last week. Ten days ago." She gives a cool chuckle. "Shut up."
Then she's against him, and then he's undressing her, warming his cold hands on her skin. She is always warm to the touch. His coat is thrown over the couch, her fingers on his belt buckle when she leans back. "Hey," she says.
He hears himself groan. "I'm not, I'm not going back out to the drugstore."
She hits his upper arm with the side of her fist, looks at him sideways through wet lashes. "I was going to say, we--no strings, all right?"
No strings attached. For the first time he realizes it applies to both of them. She is promising him nothing. She never has. He supposes he accepts it, not that it's his choice. Nothing here is guaranteed, except perhaps their old and brittle friendship. "No strings," he says. "Damn it." He kisses her once and pulls her down on the carpet.
The rain lashes a regular rhythm against the outside walls. A hand closed on her thigh, a hand under her head. The paper rustles under the roll of her hips. He wants to keep his eyes open, to watch the change on her face as she takes him in. Always so goddamned warm. Rain everywhere and what sounds like thunder, rattling the glass in the windows, pounding the roof. Her hands scrabble at the carpet for something to hold onto--"No," he says, "hold me," and she does. Fingernails in the back of his neck. Scraps of gold paper sticking to their sweat.
C.J. hums through bitten lips, rises up to kiss him, unexpected and almost sweet. That's all it takes. He's falling into her, crushed against her. He can't move or breathe for a while. His pulse slows at last, subsides; the pain at his heart is only metaphysical. Metaphorical.
He rolls over beside her. They are quiet and still for what seems like a long time. They both know what happens next.
"I'm getting old for this," she says, staring up at the ceiling.
Toby gets up from the floor. Again. His knees feel like hell. "I'm six years older than that," he says.
"Hmm." She splays her hands over her stomach. "Happy birthday."
"Yeah, right." He feels like an idiot, getting his wet clothes back on piece by piece. An idiot, still wearing a ring.
She reads his thoughts. One thought, at least. "Oh, get something dry out of the closet."
"I don't think you're my size."
"I have one of your shirts, asshole."
All at once she seems to realize she's wet and naked. She stands up, peels the wrapping paper off her skin, goes into the bedroom. After a minute she comes back wearing a towel and hands him a white dress shirt. It fits. The shirt, the fedora: C.J. probably keeps pieces of everyone she's ever touched. She carries so much with her. His throat is suddenly dry. He shifts his weight toward the door.
"You want a drink?" he asks, because he knows she won't go with him.
"Right now I want a shower." She hugs herself. "I could sleep until next year."
"I couldn't."
She turns her face away from him, staring out the window, at the rain, as it gathers and scatters all the light that's out there. Her shoulders rise and fall with a deep breath. "No," she says. "Neither could I."
He doesn't say anything as he pulls his coat on, checks the pockets for his keys. Not even 'goodnight.' Certainly not 'merry Christmas.' Collar up. He's down and out and gone.
In the first cold blast he is already thinking about tomorrow morning, about Monday morning. His head is full of ringing phones and unused phrases. Possibilities. He is surprised to find his hands turning into fists in his pockets, surprised that he is less satisfied than he was when he woke up this morning, less content than he was a year ago. Ready to fight. Sam's wrong in ways he couldn't even count.
The weight of the world.
Toby stops on the sidewalk, finds C.J.'s lit window. He looks back until he is certain, without seeing, that she is behind the glass. Watching. He stares at the light, at where he knows she stands, nods and turns away. He goes on walking into the slant of the rain, unarmed against the cold, and unresigned.