Notes: Night Light belongs to Kevin Hearn and Thinbuckle.
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Loneliness is black as night
Does darkness ever crave the light of day?
Like a moth attracted to the light
That promises to show the way
And when our time has come
They say a light will lead us on�
--Kevin Hearn
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I thought that night was the worst of my life. I thought that almost losing you at the hands of a madman would be the worst thing that could ever happen to me.
I was wrong.
I know you don�t remember that I stood there that night, just outside the window, and I watched. I know you wouldn�t have wanted me to, and you would have tried to tell me to leave, hiding your concern for me under some self-deprecating joke. But I�m not like you. I�ve never been squeamish in hospitals, or around blood. Well, I never was before that night, at least. These days I can�t walk into a hospital without being nearly knocked out by that sterile smell.
It�s entirely your fault. You�ve been rubbing off on me.
It�s strange, how little I really remember about that night. Getting to the hospital, it was all a blur of activity and anxiety. I wasn�t worried about you, of course. You were invincible. It was the others I worried for. And even then I wasn�t too concerned. It was all a false alarm. Shots had been fired, but the bad guys always have bad aim, right?
That�s how it is in the movies.
I should have known the second I walked into the room. Looking back, I remember so clearly the way they all looked at me, and then shifted their eyes away guiltily. But it didn�t register then. You weren�t in the room. I noticed that right away, but there could have been a million things that you were supposed to be doing. The fact that you weren�t in the room was no reason to be concerned.
It was Toby who finally met my eyes. I would have thought it would have been CJ, or at least Sam. But it was Toby, this man who I had such respect for, but felt like I barely even knew. It seems fitting that he was the one to tell me. I think he only did it because CJ and Sam couldn�t get the words out. They were like me, refusing to put into words that this horrible thing had happened, refusing to make it real by giving voice to it.
His voice was calm, and that scared me more than anything. That he could speak of it with such brutal stillness, it made it feel even more unreal. But it was the look in his eyes that made me believe, not his words. I didn�t understand the words, as they came from his mouth with calculated precision. I didn�t know what he was talking about. But I looked into his eyes, and they told me everything.
I learned afterwards that he was the one who found you. That his voice failed him as he tried to call for a doctor. I was furious with him, with all of them, that no one had thought to look for you sooner. If I had been there...
But I wasn�t. And I realize now that they all did the best they could. They had been shot at. The President had been taken away, no one knew if he was alive or dead. There were people screaming, police and Secret Service hurrying around, ambulances pulling up, and lights flashing. Someone was bound to get lost in the shuffle. I can�t say what I would have done if I had been there. I don�t know what it�s like to be shot at, to see the people around you, the people you care about more than almost anyone else in the world, dropping to the ground, and not knowing if they�re falling because they�re shielding themselves or because they�ve been shot. I don�t know what it�s like to have glass exploding over your head, bullets zipping by your ears.
I do know that I wouldn�t have let you be the one lost in the shuffle.
I thought about it a lot, as I stood there behind the window that night and watched the doctors put you back together like a puzzle. I thought about what might have been different if I had been there. If I had asked you a question, and you�d launched into one of your long-winded explanations, would you have been a few paces slower? Would you have been somewhere else when the guns fired? If I had been walking along beside you, would I have been on the side of the shooters? Would I have been shot instead?
Would it have been better that way?
I was alone with my thoughts most of the time, but people came and went as the hours of your surgery wore on. Dr. Bartlet came in a few times to try to explain what they were doing, but her medical jargon just rattled around in my brain for a while without being absorbed. I think she finally realized that, because she stopped coming. Sam stopped by for a few minutes, and he�d probably kill me for telling you this, but we cried together. I had been alone in my worry and fear for too long by that point. Mrs. Landingham had stayed in the waiting room, and it had been an hour or two since Dr. Bartlet�s last visit. I turned around as Sam stepped into the room, and I burst into tears. I didn�t realize he was crying too, until he hugged me and I felt his tears dripping onto my neck.
Leo came in for a while too. He didn�t say a word while he was in there. He just stood beside me and gazed through the window with that impenetrable Leo stare. He was still in the room when the doctor came back to tell me the surgery was over and you were going to be ok. I never told you this because I thought you�d laugh at me, or worse, you�d worry about me, but I fainted when he said that. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, my knees just kind of went out and I crumbled. I don�t remember hitting the floor. I must have been unconscious before then.
By the time I woke up, the nightmare was over. You had a long road of recovery ahead of you, but you were alive. Leo told me what you said when he and the President visited you, and I had my first genuine laugh since the shooting. Only you, Josh.
I thought it was the worst night of my life.
I wish it was.
This is the part where I tell you that I should have seen it coming. But the fact is, I did see it. And when I went to talk to Leo that afternoon, I knew that he could see it too. He said he was going to talk to a guy. That was enough. It could wait a few days, until after the holidays.
I was so excited for the party that night. I wasn�t kidding, you know. Yo-Yo Ma does rule. That, by the way, is why I didn�t notice. Any other day, any other moment when I was in the same room as you, I would have been aware of where you were, of how you were doing, of if you needed anything. But Yo-Yo Ma was playing, Josh, and I was watching him. I was watching his fingers dancing through the notes, and his bow gliding across the strings. I didn�t see you start to panic.
It was Toby who told me about that too, afterwards, when everything was over. Toby, who loves you like a brother behind all the gruff words and harsh criticisms. You could have talked to him, you know. Or Sam, who has been there for you through so much. Leo, too. He would have listened to you, and he would have even understood, which is more than I can say for the rest of us.
I�m not upset that you didn�t talk to me, Josh. I just want to know why you didn�t talk to anyone.
You always have been stubborn. You always have believed that everything that has gone wrong in your life is your fault, and that if you work hard enough, if you get to the next task soon enough, and you complete it fast enough, maybe you�ll be able to prevent the next bad thing from happening. It didn�t surprise me that you would want to deal with this alone. But to be surrounded by people who love you and want to help you, and not turn to one of them? I don�t understand that at all.
I guess that�s my biggest problem with all this, now that I�ve gotten past the denial, and the anger, and the guilt. It�s the confusion. I don�t understand it. I can�t comprehend how it could have happened.
I don�t know why I decided to check on you that night. Toby didn�t tell me about your attack until later. I guess you could call it woman�s intuition, but if I did that, I�m sure you�d laugh at me. So I�ll just say it was sheer dumb coincidence, which seems to happen to you a lot. You didn�t answer when I buzzed, but that was nothing new. You�re a deep sleeper, and sometimes I have to call at least twice in the morning to wake you. So when one of your neighbors happened by, I walked in with him and knocked on your door. It wasn�t until I had been there knocking for a few minutes that I started to worry. I called your name, but you still didn�t answer. I think I called 911. I must have, because soon the hallway was full of police and paramedics, and the door swung off its hinges as they rolled you into the hallway.
After Rosslyn, I started to watch you more, when I thought you weren�t looking. And when you�d stop and give me that puzzled little smile, I�d look away, because I knew you wouldn�t understand what I was doing. See, when you come that close to losing someone, when you spend hours by their side as they lie on a table with tubes and needles sticking out all over, that�s all you can see when you look at them. So you store up images in your mind of that person, healthy and whole, so that maybe someday you can look them in the eye without remembering the pain and the worry and the guilt. Instead, you remember the impish dimple that appears in his cheek when he knows he�s gone too far in his criticism of your dating habits, and the frustration in his voice when he pleads for you to tie his damn bowtie already, and the cocky swagger that can only mean that he�s kicked some Republican ass.
I can�t do that this time. Now, every time I think of you, there�s blood.
No one heard the window break. Your neighbor was just getting home when I arrived, and the super was at a Christmas party. No one was around to hear anything. I wonder, sometimes, if you wanted it right up until the end, or if you changed your mind somewhere along the way, if you tried to come back but were already too far gone. I wonder if I had gotten there sooner, if I had searched you out before you left the party, if I had taken my eyes off Yo-Yo Ma and his cello for one split second...
I miss you, Josh.
I started work again this week, and it was the hardest thing I�ve ever done. They moved me into Communications to take Cathy�s place until they�I was going to say replace you, but that�s just laughable�until they get a new DCOS. Sam is a good boss, and a good friend, but he�s nearly as shaken by this as I am, and every time I look in his haunted eyes, I see a mirror of myself. I don�t know if I can stay here much longer.
The others are no better. I look at Toby, whose expression has become even more morose, if such a thing is possible, and I see you cavorting through the halls, shouting for him to come quick and see Sam get his ass kicked by a girl. I look at CJ, who was barely able to announce your memorial service at her briefing without bursting into tears, and I see the smirk on your face as you tell me completely earnestly to fill her office with turkeys, she won�t mind. I can�t look at Leo at all.
Someone had thought to call the White House that night, I don�t know who, and he was still there, hard at work after the party. He was the one who called your mother, and he told me that it was without a doubt the hardest thing he has ever done in his life. I�ve only talked to him once since that night, and it was a conversation of brief words and heavy silences. Our guilt is the same. We knew. And we did nothing.
Did you know, I wonder, how this would affect us all?
Did you care?
I like to think that if you had stopped to think about it, if you had realized the toll that your death would take on each of us, that you wouldn�t have done it. I like to think that it was the illness Leo and I suspected that led you to do it, and that it wasn�t a conscious decision of your brilliant but addled mind.
I don�t know how you could leave behind a world full of people who loved you. Who still do, even now. There is anger: you can see it in the spark of Toby�s eyes, and in the tightening of CJ�s lips as she prepares to take questions. But that anger is born of love, a love that can�t understand being abandoned. I didn�t tell you enough how much I loved you. In fact, I don�t think I told you at all, except that one time, as you lay silent and asleep in your bed at GW, rigged up to an endless maze of wires and tubes. I believe to this day that you heard me. I felt you squeeze my hand.
I should have told you every day.
I took the book down from its shelf today, and I sat on my couch for a long time, staring at the cover, reciting to myself the words that had burned their way into my heart little more than a year ago. I didn�t start crying until I opened the cover, and stared blankly at the words scattered across the page, words that had lost all meaning. I�m afraid that from this day forth, the first page of The Art and Artistry of Alpine Skiing will forever be imprinted with the wrinkles of dried tears.
It�s late, and I�ve been lying on the couch crying into your Harvard sweatshirt for too long. I have work in the morning, and even though I can�t face the thought of another day in that building without you, I�ll still set my alarm and I�ll still roll out of bed at some obscene hour of the morning, fumble my way to the coffeemaker as soon as my feet hit the floor, and drive to work on that first caffeine rush of the day. Because that�s what I do now. I go through the motions. But I�m hollow.
Goodnight, Joshua. Sleep well.