Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Regardless, here she was on MaryAnne Newman’s doorstep, just like she had been so many times in her childhood, and she may as well get it over with.

  She opened her eyes, raised her sunglasses to rest on the top of her head.

  A girl about Lucas’s age stood in front of her.

  It was as if Cleo were in eighth grade all over again, and she was shocked to feel the tingle of tears building. She blinked quickly; Cleo McDougal was not a spontaneous crier, and she didn’t even know why she was so emotional in the first place. The girl had MaryAnne’s blue eyes, her straight, long brown hair with fraying ends, a nose like a ski jump. Her cropped shirt aired her belly button; her denim shorts put her gangly legs on display.

  “Oh my God,” the girl said.

  “Oh my God,” Cleo replied.

  “You’re, like, you’re the senator.”

  “Oh.” Cleo chewed on her lip. “Yes. That’s me. But I also know your mom. Obviously.”

  “I told her not to write it,” the girl said, so easily betraying her own mother. “I told her it was petty, but . . .” She shrugged. “I think your generation is different from mine.” She twisted her hair into a spiral with her hand.

  “Oh,” Cleo said again. None of this was what she had been expecting. Cleo was good at confrontation—she’d honed the art after so many years in Congress. But this softer, kinder, younger version of their misspent youth had her off guard, uneasy in a close-to-an-emotional-breakdown sort of way. She could feel it in the sweat building in her armpits, in the staccato of her pulse. Then: “Well, is . . . is she here? Your mom.”

  The girl shook her head. “They go to the club every Saturday night for dinner.”

  Cleo turned in both defeat and victory toward Gaby. “She’s not home! Can we quit now?”

  “It’s just, like, a five-minute walk,” the girl said. “I can take you. But, I mean, I don’t blame you if you don’t want to speak with her ever again. It was shady, for sure. Like, the opposite of feminist. The affair stuff? Like, I said to her, Mom, no one cares who screws who anymore.”

  Cleo tried to laugh. “Well, I’m not sure how true that is, but thank you.” A snapshot of Nobells scampering out of her tiny apartment in a rush to get home to his family flew through her mind. She shook her head, as if that could release him from her memory. “Anyway, I guess since I showed up at your front door, I do need to speak with her, but—”

  Gaby cut her off, no longer whispering, shouting from the front lawn, “We’re in! Just lead the way!”

  Her name was Esme, which Cleo thought was exactly a name that MaryAnne would select—French. She was surprised, however, that Esme was nearly Lucas’s age. She didn’t peg MaryAnne as a young-mom type, but then, no one probably pegged Cleo as the young (single) mom type either. Truth told, Cleo hadn’t even been sure if she wanted children, but then her parents died, and when she saw the plus sign on the test the spring of her senior year at Northwestern, she thought it might be nice to go through life with someone. By the time Lucas was born, she knew she’d never have a moment of doubt.

  Which wasn’t true. She had plenty of moments of doubt. Somewhere on that list of 233 screwups, at least a dozen of them were related to Lucas. Not Lucas. She loved him more than she ever anticipated. Just the whole thing: the struggle; the exhaustion; how like it or not, being a mother at twenty-three and in law school affected her choices; how differently she anticipated it would all go for her. Maybe MaryAnne felt similarly.

  “Are you in eighth grade?” Lucas asked her, staring at the cement as they walked.

  “Yep. You?”

  “Yeah. But I guess I’m old enough to be in ninth.”

  “No, that’s not true,” Cleo interjected, and Lucas shot her a look that could quite possibly wither her right there in the fading sunshine on the Broadmoor sidewalk. Cleo popped her eyes back at him. She didn’t know the rules of him talking to a girl because frankly, she’d never seen him interact with one. Was she not allowed to speak? Did she have to render herself invisible? She was only thirty-seven! She liked to think that she was at least hip enough to make small talk with her kid.

  “Mom—” he said.

  “I only meant that when we moved to DC, you started kindergarten as one of the oldest. I didn’t hold you back.”

  “I didn’t say that you did.”

  “Well, it sort of sounded like . . .”

  At this, Gaby grabbed her elbow and pulled Cleo back a half pace to let Lucas and Esme find their footing on their own.

  Cleo watched Esme stroll down the street, so lanky and at ease. Her gait was exactly like her mother’s—MaryAnne had always been good at track, one area where they didn’t compete with each other—and Cleo guessed that Esme had it in her to do a mile in less than seven minutes too. It was so strange, she thought, to show up and find a younger rendition of her old friend, as if time had stopped and she were looking at their old selves. Cleo found herself a little slayed at this, at the notion of their fourteen-year-old selves having the chance to do it again, to do it better. So maybe this was what regret felt like: sorry for the fact that they weren’t wiser to how they would blow it up.

  “I haven’t seen him this talkative since. . .” Cleo watched Lucas banter. “I don’t know. Birth?”

  “I glanced at his texts on the plane today,” Gaby replied. Of course she had, because Gaby was such a goddamn smooth operator. “I think he has a girlfriend back home too.”

  “He what?” Cleo actually stopped midstride.

  “I could be wrong, but . . . I’m usually not.”

  “I’m sorry, you mean my fourteen-year-old who usually communicates by grunting and stuffing food into his mouth has . . . what?”

  Gaby grinned. “See, look at that, we’ve only been in Seattle for two hours, and already I’m rocking your world.”

  “I hate you.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Gaby said, and they double-stepped to catch up with the other two who were leading the way.

  Esme waved to the security guard at the front gate of the club, and they wound through the walking path to the main building, which was also more or less just how Cleo remembered. Ornate fabrics, overstuffed window seats, bookshelves stacked with leather-bound collections that absolutely no one was going to read in between their tennis matches or golf rounds. Everything about the club was rich, and though Cleo was theoretically part of an elite class now, still, it knocked her off guard. Being elite in intellect or even elite with power wasn’t the same thing as being elite with wealth, because if it had been, Cleo wouldn’t have had to work so hard and fight so hard to land where she did. As a kid, Cleo always shoved her hands into her pockets, curled her shoulders, and kept her eyes down when they strolled through, as if the real members couldn’t see her if she couldn’t see them and that if she were invisible, no one could call her out (or throw her out) for being an impostor.

  Esme checked the time on her phone.

  “They’re probably getting drinks before dinner. Come on—I’ll show you.”

  Lucas trailed after her like a lovesick puppy, and Gaby giggled a little at the sight.

  They strode past the tennis courts, with towering lights just warming up at dusk, and the pool, where a few fortunate toddlers splashed in the shallow end with bored mothers looking on and a few seniors methodically swam laps. Cleo remembered this all so well, the way that MaryAnne would sign her in like they were sisters, the way that in middle school, they would sink into the pool until their fingers pruned, the way that they would linger in the locker room showers, using too much shampoo and conditioner because they smelled like honeysuckle and lemon, and both Cleo and MaryAnne thought such a scent might attract a few suitors. (It did not.) Through all of it, Cleo was grateful for MaryAnne but also always, always aware of that sign-in, that MaryAnne had the entry and Cleo did not. That MaryAnne’s parents could call their principal and demand a retake of the French test because her parents’ names were on a brick outside the sc
hool, and Cleo’s parents’ names were not.

  But Cleo brought other things to their friendship; she was the alpha in nearly everything else, and MaryAnne seemed fine with it all; they each had their power; they each knew their lane. And then they’d gotten to high school, and the stakes became so infinitely higher, and somehow an unspoken pact arose between them: Do whatever you must at whatever cost. As Esme opened the door to the bar area, Cleo considered that maybe this had never been their pact; maybe it had simply been an agreement she’d made with herself. No regrets. Of which, obviously, she had many: 233.

  Cleo’s pulse was throbbing at a near-medical-emergency rate by now.

  “They’re usually in the back,” Esme was saying, though Cleo could barely hear her above not just the din of the TVs airing a Mariners game and the clinking of forks and the uncorking of wine bottles and the popping of beer caps but of her own internal voice shrieking, Get the fuck out of here! But she too followed Esme, much like Lucas, and then they were there, in the depths of the bar room, and Gaby had her phone out and aimed like a shotgun, and there was nothing to do to turn back time (to an hour ago, a decade ago, two decades ago, Cleo didn’t know) because MaryAnne, in a pastel dress and soft pink blush and blood-red lipstick, was right in front of her.

  Cleo felt a rush of flop sweat streak down her back. Professional confrontations were her forte. Personal confrontations, she realized only at this moment, were not even in her repertoire. Panic was setting in, and though Cleo McDougal never, ever in her life ran from a fight, her instinct was to turn and flee. She glanced toward her old ex–best friend and for just a tiny flicker of a moment was punctured that this was what it had come to. Then she sewed that lament back up.

  “Hi, Mom. Look who I found,” Esme said, and Cleo decided immediately that she loved this girl. She was a little bit cunning and also succinct and knew that she was slaying her mom just a bit in her guts.

  MaryAnne’s eyes moved from her daughter to Cleo, who was doing her best to contain her adrenaline, and her jaw went slack. Just for a moment. Then it firmed up, as did her steely eyes and her rigid posture. (“I have a backbone,” MaryAnne once snapped at Cleo, after the mayoral internship debacle. She meant it metaphorically, but MaryAnne was also a debutante, so she meant it literally too. No one had better posture than MaryAnne Newman.)

  It was only then that Cleo worked up the nerve to take in a wider view. She’d assumed that the “they” in Esme’s remarks had been MaryAnne and her husband, but now she saw that it was a table of eight, all faces she recognized, all faces from her yearbook and probably some of those Facebook comments too.

  “Shit,” Cleo muttered under her breath. She turned and looked at Gaby, who was recording with the determined furrow of a documentary filmmaker. “Shit!”

  Gaby paid her no mind, and Cleo spun forward.

  “MaryAnne, um, hello.”

  The back room had fallen so silent that Cleo could hear a bat crack from the Mariners game out front. Eight sets of eyes on Cleo—well, eleven if you counted Lucas and Esme and Gaby, but Lucas and Esme may have been staring at each other.

  MaryAnne rested her hands in her lap and swallowed. It was so odd, Cleo thought, trying to remove the nostalgia and the crest of emotion that had swept through her just moments earlier, to see her after so many years. Her mannerisms were still the same, her face, though older of course, still a mirror of who she had been at seventeen. Twenty years had passed, and yet Cleo could nearly read her mind, just like before when they were inseparable.

  “Cleo,” MaryAnne said finally. “This is a surprise.”

  “I think it’s Senator McDougal,” Esme interjected, and Cleo wondered if she couldn’t adopt this child before she left town.

  “Cleo’s fine. Of course.” But she smiled at Esme as she said this, an acknowledgment of their shared feminism, of the power that came with a title that so few women had yet to attain.

  “Hey, Cleo!” From behind MaryAnne, Oliver Patel, her sole defender on that ruinous Facebook post, offered a wave. “It’s so cool to see you here!”

  “Hey, Oliver,” she said back, and his eyebrows rose a little bit like he was surprised that she remembered him. But he had always been kind and also extremely handsome—dark hair, dark eyes as big and as entrancing as a full moon, just the right grade of stubble—so of course she remembered him. He was unattainable, a baseball player, someone Cleo passed in the halls and thought that if she were a different type of person—softer, prettier, the girl who laughed at jokes she didn’t get when he told them on the quad during a free period, the type of girl who actually spent her time on the quad during a free period—maybe he’d kiss her one night at a party after drinking a beer. Yes, Cleo remembered Oliver Patel. Cleo had been hard-core in high school but she hadn’t been impenetrable.

  To his right sat Maureen Allen, who had less nice things to say about her, and Susan Harris, then Beth Shin, who, well, ditto. (Cleo didn’t remember the names of the three others at the table, though she knew she should have.) They’d all been on the debate team together, but Maureen and Susan dropped out their junior year to . . . Cleo couldn’t quite remember why—but she did remember thinking at the time that she was glad they had. Beth had been a decent debater, but those two were barely adequate, and Cleo thought they held the team back. But now, so many years later, well, she hadn’t really thought about how they might all still be friends—not just Facebook friends but real-life friends—how their world from back then wasn’t so different from their world now. Surely, if MaryAnne had wanted to, she could have made choices that expanded her scope beyond what it had always been. She couldn’t hold Cleo accountable for her sitting in the same country club with the same people discussing, likely, the same gossip that she had at fifteen. (Cleo didn’t want to judge—anyone should do whatever made them happy—but then MaryAnne dragged her into this whole thing to begin with, so perhaps Cleo had the right to do and think whatever she damn wanted.)

  Maureen Allen and Susan Harris and Beth Shin, unlike Oliver, said nothing and just glared.

  Then Cleo remembered, as Esme had been trying to remind her, that she was a goddamn United States senator, and MaryAnne Newman shouldn’t intimidate her, SeattleToday! op-ed or not, lurid (inaccurate) rumors or not, Facebook slander or not. She too righted her posture, and she was sure from the look in MaryAnne’s eyes that she remembered Cleo’s body language as well.

  “I’m here because obviously I saw your op-ed.”

  MaryAnne’s cheeks flushed, which surprised Cleo, because you’d have thought that MaryAnne wanted the fight, the confrontation, what with the public takedown. But maybe she had just wanted to air a bunch of dirty laundry without thinking through the consequences. God, wasn’t that at least what half of the internet was these days? Screaming into the void about someone or something or an airline or a coffee shop or a slow pedestrian or a lousy driver and getting it off your chest? Never once did you think any of those people was going to respond.

  “Also, I saw your Facebook post, and then, of course, I saw all of your comments.”

  Oliver Patel grinned, and Maureen and Susan and Beth pulled back from their glares and looked as if they might turn figuratively green. Consequences. Regret. They’re tied together.

  “Well, it was all true.” MaryAnne sniffed. “You were not very nice by the end of high school, and I am doubtful that you should be president. If you can’t get those who know you well to vote for you . . .” She flipped her hand as if to say, Well, then you’re screwed.

  “It wasn’t all true,” Cleo said. “You didn’t fact-check the date of my son’s birth.” At this, she gestured toward Lucas, who really was not paying too much attention and instead stealing sideways glances at Esme. Gaby had been right: something was happening between the two of them, that unknowable alchemy that ignited teen hormones, and Cleo lost herself for a beat, considering the consequences of a romance between the two. These days, with social media and text and FaceTime (did kids use Face
Time?) and who knows what else, a three-thousand-mile lovesick relationship didn’t seem far-fetched. Cleo turned back to MaryAnne. “That was low, and I would at least think beneath you.”

  MaryAnne sniffed. “I went with the information I had been made aware of. And I don’t like cheaters. But if that affected you”—she pointed her chin toward Lucas—“I’m sorry. I am. Perhaps that was out of bounds. Children should be off-limits. Not, however, their parents.”

  “Apology accepted,” Lucas said and offered a little shrug. He was used to political sniping, and he was used to his mother defending herself, Cleo supposed. It occurred to her that she didn’t want to raise a son who grew up thinking this was all normal. None of this was normal. If she had her list here now, she’d add this one—have raised son in a toxic bubble of Washington, DC, where he thinks launching metaphorical grenades at your opponents is just your average day. Cleo considered this notion. Of course Lucas thought this was normal. She was his mother. He’d learned it from her. Regret.

  Cleo inhaled, exhaled, looked to Gaby, who was all business with her camera phone. She wanted to get this over with now, rip off the Band-Aid and be done with it. Convince Gaby that filming four more of her regrets would only end in disaster.

  “Well, I flew all the way here today to apologize.” She said it stiffly, not like something emotive she’d rehearsed to argue on the Senate floor. She knew she could do better. She inhaled again, tried to soften. “Teenage girls can be pretty tough, MaryAnne, and I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  MaryAnne’s face pinched for just a moment, and Cleo, aware of her old friend’s mannerisms, was sure that this could all be over. That she’d be forgiven, and they could pour themselves a glass of . . . she didn’t know what they were drinking but something fancy . . . and move on. Cleo didn’t really want to befriend MaryAnne again—she was firmly not into looking backward—but a shared drink felt like a peace offering that would be a nice gesture, a neat bow tied around this now-closed chapter.