Cleo sucked the alcohol out of an olive and glanced at Matty again. He really was so very handsome, and she really had dumped him very cruelly their senior year. He reached over, squeezed her shoulder.
“Cleo McDougal.” He laughed. “You’re a fucking senator.”
“It’s going great right now, as you have probably heard.”
Matty laughed even bigger at this; then his smile fell.
“OK, with the exception of what MaryAnne did. I mean, what she actually wrote about your law professor . . .” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. That really was high school shit, too low of a blow.”
“It’s OK.” Cleo shrugged.
“It’s not really.”
Cleo bobbed her head. It wasn’t really. “Occupational hazard. Public takedowns. You start to get used to it.”
“Do you . . . Is there . . . I mean.” Matty started to redden. Same kid, two decades later. “Are you seeing someone?”
“Also an occupational hazard, Matty.” This wasn’t entirely true. Plenty of senators had full personal lives. Just not Cleo McDougal.
“So who takes care of you?”
Cleo’s head jutted back, just like it would have at seventeen. “No one takes care of me. I take care of myself!”
Matty’s hand found its way to her arm. “No, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant—when shit gets rough, who do you lean on?”
Cleo started to answer but found she couldn’t, because there wasn’t a good answer to offer. Matty’s eyes met hers, and she thought she saw something that looked more like pity than any form of judgment. She took her right hand, placed it over his, still on her arm. The heft of his grasp was grounding.
“Is it weird that you’ve stayed here? In Seattle?” she said finally, sliding her hand back around the stem of her martini glass, his curving around the neck of his beer. “With all the same people?”
“Oh, my life is on a different track.” He made a face. “That sounded condescending. I just mean that I don’t see them a lot. It’s not like a constant dinner party with MaryAnne and her crew.”
Cleo hadn’t been to a dinner party other than a mandated work dinner party in a long time. Emily Godwin, her sole mom friend in DC, was often kind enough to invite her to such things. Every few months she’d try to nudge her out, to come over for dinner. But Cleo was almost always too busy and besides, she knew that these were couple-y things, and her singleness threw off the table setting and dynamic as well.
“I go on a lot of dates,” Matty was saying. “Meet a lot of women. I think everyone I know has tried to set me up.”
“Ah, the beauty of being a single man at thirty-seven as opposed to a single woman at the same age,” Cleo mused, then ordered another drink. She was having more fun than she expected, and Cleo almost never had time for fun.
He laughed, though she wasn’t sure why. “Sure. But it also probably has to do with the fact that I am, as you have noted, too nice, an easy fix-up, and you . . . are . . . not?”
Cleo didn’t appreciate this intonation because she absolutely hated that female politicians were expected to be placid and nice, as if being demanding and being a bit of a hard-ass weren’t compatible with the job, when, in fact, they were much more compatible than being sweet. But before she could chide him, he said, “I think that’s why I admire you so much. Your edge. I think I kind of regret being such a pushover. I mean, you were pretty firm with me when we broke up.”
“Oh, I am sorry for being so cold back then.” Cleo softened. She could be a bit of a hard-ass. “I regret things too, of course.” Two hundred and thirty-three things.
“But not that, not us,” Matty said, laughing again. “No, we never would have worked. You had your sights set on something bigger. I had my nose in a coding book.”
“I can’t like a nerd?” Cleo found herself very much considering reliking this nerd. And that he was dismissing her made him all the more appealing.
“I find that offensive. We consider ourselves more geeks than nerds,” he joked, which kind of astonished her because she didn’t remember him ever being even remotely funny, much less sarcastic. “But no.”
Something about his no felt definitive, and Cleo sank an inch in her barstool. Maybe it was the two martinis; maybe it was the heady whirl of nostalgia these past two days had brought, but she suspected she wasn’t thinking very clearly. She very much wanted Matty to kiss her, twenty years later, in the bar at the Sheraton, but perhaps he could see it better than she could, and they really would never have worked. (Something Cleo would have sworn to not ninety minutes earlier.) He had always been good at advice and even better at listening. Back then, she took this as a form of weakness. She had wanted someone stronger than her, but two decades later, Cleo realized that perhaps she hadn’t needed, still didn’t need, someone stronger than her. What she needed was someone to complement her. She resolved right there in the Sheraton bar to make sure that Matty remained in her life, even if he wasn’t going to buckle her knees with a kiss right now. (She wouldn’t protest.) She wasn’t long on friends, and yes, that was a real regret, whether or not she had added it to her list. (She may have, though; she’d have to check.)
“Do you think I was a bitch to MaryAnne in high school?” she asked. Matty would tell her the truth.
“I think MaryAnne is working out some of her own issues, especially with that stuff about the affair. We’re rapidly approaching our midlife-crisis age.”
Cleo had evaded enough interview questions in her time to know a dodge when she heard one.
“But I was a bitch?”
Matty sighed. “It’s a confusing time.” He waved to the bartender. Cleo hoped he wasn’t signaling for the check.
“High school?”
“Well, I mean, sure, but I was talking about now.”
Cleo still wasn’t clear on what he meant, but she never liked to betray any unknowingness, so she said nothing. In politics, unknowingness made you a target. Probably in life too. She wasn’t sure because she never let on. Instead, she’d research and she’d study and she’d dig deeper, staying all those late nights at the office while the heroic Emily Godwin dropped Lucas off at home, and solve for whatever question mark had been presented. Until no question mark remained. She might have been a bitch, but she was a bitch who did her homework.
Finally Matty said, “I mean, look. I’m just a white dude who lives in a loft with his Microsoft money, so correct me if I’m wrong. And I don’t want to speak out of turn. But it seems to me that when women talk about supporting women, neither of you put your best foot forward back then.” He hesitated, staring at the grains of wood on the bar, seemingly uneager to meet her eyes. “And now? I’d think that you’d each know better.”
Cleo sighed, then rested her head on his shoulder, surprising herself. She had never thought of him as particularly smart, but it turned out that he was actually quite wise. Regrets, she thought, maybe I have one more.
Lucas wasn’t back in the room by the time Cleo headed up, after Matty had paid the tab. (He insisted, then also admitted he was dating a twenty-seven-year-old, and then it was her turn to redden because Cleo had evidently wildly misread his intentions.) Afterward, in front of the elevator bank, they had hugged; he told her not to be a stranger. She promised that she wouldn’t, and unlike her promises to Georgie, she thought—she hoped—this was one she could keep.
“It’s funny,” he said to her after he kissed her cheek, “how people can come in and out of your lives after so many years away and how maybe they matter in different ways than they used to.”
“So I have your vote?” Cleo joked because Matty was being sincere again, and though she really, really wanted to appreciate that side of him, she also wasn’t used to nearly anyone in her orbit ringing with sincerity. Sure, she was passionate about some of her pet issues—school funding and equal pay and all that—but sincerity also meant vulnerability, and vulnerability in politics meant blood.
“You have
my vote,” he said. “And now you have my cell. So call anytime.”
“I will.” She nodded, and she remembered again how wonderful he had been when her parents died, and so she repeated, “I will.”
In her room, Cleo pulled off her violet blouse and jeans, folded them in her suitcase, and grabbed her pajamas, which she’d hung in the closet. She preferred them to be unwrinkled; she didn’t really know why. Lucas made fun of this, but he balled up all his clothes and dumped them in the corner of his room, so he was in no position to judge.
It was nearly one thirty in the morning East Coast time, so she should have been tired. But everyone knew that Cleo McDougal could run on coffee fumes and ambition, a habit honed early, mostly out of necessity when Lucas was a baby and it was just the two of them. Now this was one of her strong suits within the Senate—not her lack of sleep but her grit, her determination, her ability to work through just about anything.
Like her world upending when the police came to MaryAnne’s house that night of the helicopter crash, because they’d already tried her own home, and told her the news. She and MaryAnne had been poring over U.S. News & World Report college rankings and assessing where they had the best shot. Then MaryAnne’s mother opened the bedroom door, looking like she was about to faint, and then the police guided Cleo to their living room couch, and that was that. Georgie flew up from Los Angeles the next morning and . . . Cleo tried to remember where she had slept that night, at her grandmother’s or at MaryAnne’s. It came to her—she’d slept at her own house that night, her childhood one. She was hysterical, of course. It was the last time she’d truly ever come undone, and she had refused to go to her grandmother’s. MaryAnne’s mother wasn’t sure what to do, so they drove back to her own house, and MaryAnne lay beside her in Cleo’s twin bed, and Cleo shook from the shock of it, her whole body quaking all night. And then they rose at dawn, and Cleo got into her parents’ bed, which smelled like her mother’s shampoo and her father’s aftershave, and she kept crying, unable to stop even if she’d wanted to.
Eventually MaryAnne’s mother had arrived and packed Cleo a suitcase and delivered her to her grandmother’s, and Cleo wept for three days straight. She stopped eating, and her grandmother fretted, and Georgie, now a responsible adult with a thriving life-coach practice, tried to intervene, but Cleo was also nearly a grown-up by then, and she was strong enough to push them away, to lock herself in her grandmother’s guest room and insist that they let her mourn on her own and fend for herself. It wasn’t a conscious choice back then to spurn their generosity. Cleo was in shock and adrift; her whole world had been their little insular triangle, Mom and Dad and her, and without this formation, Cleo didn’t know who she was. When two sides of a triangle collapse, you’re just left with a solitary straight line. Cleo remembered this now—lying on a bed at her grandmother’s and literally envisioning herself as a flat black line, and she had stared at the ceiling and considered what her parents would want her to do now. To weep, to mourn, or to get the hell up and light the world on fire. And she knew that it was the latter. So she stopped crying and resolved that her tears were a weakness, and she went to the funeral and sat dry-eyed. It was as if she had channeled her grief into stoicism, and from there Cleo channeled this stoicism and her ability to power through straight into her veins.
You get what you get. You do what you have to do. You stop crying. You stop sleeping. You turn yourself into someone to be reckoned with. You become a straight line, and then you become an arrow.
Tucked into the hotel duvet, Cleo logged on to Facebook on her phone. She clicked out of the app and then checked Lucas’s location. (Yes, she tracked his phone. Emily Godwin had suggested it, and it had never seemed smarter than now.) He was still at the coffee place. Surely it would close soon. Surely he couldn’t be falling in love with MaryAnne Newman’s daughter. Cleo tapped the Facebook app again. She didn’t want to tell Lucas whom he could and couldn’t fall in love with, but she might have to.
She scrolled through Matty’s page and his photos—he liked to fish in the summers in Idaho evidently and also had a dog whose breed was undeterminable. There was a recent picture with a woman, probably the twenty-seven-year-old, at a Coldplay concert, and all this just seemed so Matty. He was right, she thought; she was not the type of girl who went to Coldplay concerts and fished in Idaho, so maybe they never really would have worked. But maybe that kind of life would have been nice, even for a long weekend, even for an occasional long-distance romance. She knew that if she told Gaby about how he showed up and they had a few drinks and she rested her head on his shoulder, that she—Gaby of her firm no-kids policy and her likely no-marriage policy too—would squeal and think that maybe this was the start of something. You can be a staunch independent feminist and still love a Kate Hudson rom-com. But Cleo knew she would never be the heroine in a romantic comedy. She just wouldn’t. She’d made her peace with that years ago. When she left Northwestern on her own with a baby growing inside her.
She typed MaryAnne’s name into her search bar, clicked on her profile. She found herself inhaling deeply, as if she were about to get her flu shot or a gut punch or terrible polling numbers (which, incidentally, she never got—her home state loved her) and was steeling herself for it.
The lock on the hotel door beeped, then unlatched, and Cleo threw her phone to the foot of the bed.
“Hey,” Lucas said. “How was your night? Anything exciting happen?” He flopped belly-down on his own bed, then angled his face toward her.
“Very funny.”
Lucas propped himself up on his elbows. “What? Did something happen?”
Now it was Cleo’s rare chance to roll her eyes at him. “I know that you messaged Matty, OK? The jig is up.”
Lucas swung his feet out toward the floor and sat up. “Don’t be mad. I just . . . I don’t know, it’s kind of pathetic how you have no life.”
“This coming from a kid who is literally locked in his room when he’s not at school or soccer.”
“But I have a life, Mom. Also, that’s entirely age-appropriate—teenage boys are supposed to lock themselves in their bedrooms and ignore their mothers. But all you do is work.”
His phone blipped, and Cleo lost him to his texts for a moment. A grin spread across his face; then he typed something back quickly.
“Is that Esme?”
“Stop snooping!” Lucas yelped, his smile gone.
“Lucas, you’re sitting two feet away from me, typing with a ridiculous look on your face. That is not snooping; that’s observing. A mother is allowed to do that.”
“Fine.” He stood, walked to the bathroom, shut the door. Cleo heard the lock spin.
“We still have a lot to discuss,” she called after him.
He didn’t answer, of course, because he’d given her as much as he’d wanted to for the night, and then he was gone. He really was her son, she thought. And she didn’t know if this filled her heart or emptied it.
EIGHT
Cleo missed Monday in the office, and despite working for the entire six-hour plane ride home, she was now behind. Cleo McDougal did not like being behind, and anyone, from MaryAnne Newman to Arianna, her junior-most staffer, could have told you that. She was a scheduler, a go-getter, and never once in her history of schooling had she missed a deadline, not even that rocky fall of her senior year when she was still unpacking her boxes from her move into her grandmother’s and unpacking her grief from everything else.
She had just made it back to her desk after a committee vote—a bill on the childcare tax cut that she had cosponsored, which indeed made it out of committee, and now the real negotiating began: cajoling, bargaining, duping, and manipulating members of the other party to give her what she wanted in exchange for something they wanted—and had barely plopped into her desk chair when Gaby knocked. This was being gracious, because Gaby never knocked; she just announced herself.
“I just got off a very interesting Skype.”
“Uh-huh.
” Cleo was rooting around in her bottom drawer for a protein bar. She found a box of Girl Scout cookies—Trefoils—and figured that would do. She’d bought a bunch from the custodian’s daughter last year. Franklin worked the evening shift, and since Cleo was always there late, they’d struck up a friendship. “Do Girl Scout cookies expire? Do we know?”
“Doubtful,” Gaby said. “That’s seriously your lunch?”
Cleo tore the box open and placed a cookie smack in the middle of her tongue as an answer. “Oh my God,” she managed. “Heaven.”
“You were definitely a Girl Scout, weren’t you?” Gaby reached for one, despite her admonishment.
“Brownie and Junior. My mom was our troop leader. I probably would have kept going until high school, but MaryAnne convinced me that we’d never get boyfriends if we did.” Cleo thought of the two of them, at Pagliacci’s, watching Oliver Patel and the other baseball players slide their trays down the line to the cashier and MaryAnne narrowing her eyes and saying, We can’t be Girl Scouts anymore, Clee. It’s over. Hot guys don’t feel up girls who are Girl Scouts.
“Was she right?” Gaby reached for another cookie, then reconsidered and placed it back in the plastic.
“Well, we quit. And I did end up dating Matty. Though he was not really the type of boy MaryAnne meant. I mean, you met him.”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh, right. I’m distracted. But she and I weren’t beating anyone off with a stick.” Cleo stacked two cookies on top of each other and bit down. “I did lead our troop every year in cookie sales, though. One year I had so many that we couldn’t use our dining room.”
“Of course you did.” Gaby laughed. “Let me guess, MaryAnne came in second.”
Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel Page 10