“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I just didn’t know how else to do it.”
“There were a million other ways to do it,” he managed.
“Yes,” Cleo said. Because she knew now that there were.
They sat that way, in silence, mother and son, until Lucas stopped crying and closed his eyes and turned toward his wall, and after a while, Cleo thought he’d fallen asleep. Which was just as well. She didn’t expect to get much further than they’d gotten. Not now anyway. She watched his back rise and fall, and she missed both her parents so acutely, she was certain she felt an actual hole in her heart. Maybe that’s why she kept the list after all these years: it was what she had left of them, especially her father, to carry around, to plug that hole.
She rose from his bed. She wanted to share this with Georgie, to see if maybe she thought this made sense.
“You shouldn’t have done it that way,” Lucas said, not asleep in fact and still facing the wall.
“I know,” Cleo said, because all that he was accusing her of with those few words was fair. And she thought of her evening, of Francis, of their fall. “I didn’t want to admit that I was wrong, that I’d made an absolute mess of the most important thing in my life.”
“So fix it,” he snapped, turning to look at her, to meet her dead in the eye.
Cleo stepped forward and kissed his forehead and then made her way out of his room, closing the door behind her. But not before she promised that she would.
Georgie was waiting in the kitchen with a new glass of wine and the merlot stain wiped clean.
“Are you OK?”
Cleo nodded.
“Is he OK?”
Cleo shrugged. “Not really.”
“He will be,” Georgie said. “Teens are resilient. Just look at you.”
And then Cleo started crying again, and Georgie opened her arms to her. Cleo leaned in to her sister and dropped her heavy head onto her sister’s shoulder, leaving a damp circle of tears in just seconds. And when she had finally sputtered to a stop, she untangled from Georgie and was amazed at how much stronger she felt, just by making herself vulnerable, just by allowing herself to be held up.
TWENTY-SIX
Cleo couldn’t sleep. She checked on Lucas twice and composed an email to Gaby—who had called three times, which Cleo had ignored while tending to her son—demanding an explanation, but thought of Georgie’s advice and opted not to send it yet. Gaby had been her best and really only friend for more than a decade, and rather than deploy her usual slash-and-burn tactics, Cleo opted to lean in to her growth and consider that she should give Gaby the benefit of the doubt. So for tonight, she let it go.
She logged in to Facebook.
MaryAnne had cooled it a bit with her scathing posts, though she had already posted the YouTube video on her page. The comments below, however, were unexpected.
Oliver Patel: Hey, MaryAnne, can we maybe ease off this vendetta? Aren’t we all adults now?
Beth Shin: Far be it from me to defend Cleo, but I’d never have the guts to attempt the Dirty Dancing lift in public.
Maureen Allen: OMG, remember how obsessed we were with that movie???? Wine and rewatch soon?
Cleo giggled in the darkness of her office. News cycles came and went, she supposed. But Patrick Swayze was forever. She missed MaryAnne and the simplicity of their middle school friendship, before the complications that came next, so acutely.
She rolled her neck and shoulders, which were stiff from the evening’s fall, or maybe stiff from the stress of the enormity of everything.
On a whim, she typed in his name:
Doug Smith.
Facebook offered the promise of connecting with anyone at any time from your past. She held her breath and waited.
There were thousands of Doug Smiths. She tried to narrow it down to Northwestern, but that didn’t help. She tried Chicago. But that didn’t help. She scanned the first few pages of profile photos, squinting and leaning close toward the screen, but that didn’t help, and honestly, she wasn’t even sure how well she’d recognize his face, fifteen years later and sober, all those beer pong chugs long forgotten.
She tried Google, but the generic universality of his name was a nonstarter. Google Cleo McDougal, and you knew exactly who you were getting. Google Doug Smith, and it could be a mechanic in Denver or a PE coach in Phoenix or an accountant in Buffalo. (Her home state! Would it be ironic if he’d voted for her? she thought briefly, then dismissed it.) All these men were Doug Smith and yet none of them was her Doug Smith. Not hers. Lucas’s. She didn’t need to find Doug Smith for herself. She’d never wanted the white knight: not with Matty, not with Nobells, not even tonight, when Bowen had graciously lifted her to her feet.
She reconsidered that last one, then pulled up her email quickly.
Bowen—I have found myself behaving like an asshole too many times in your company. I’d like to say that it’s because you intoxicate me, but it’s also probably that I can be an asshole. I’d like to get that drink with you. But I insist on paying.
-Cleo
She read it over once and, unlike her note to Gaby, she hit Send immediately. It went off into the email-sphere and now out of her control, but she had no regrets.
Lucas was still grouchy on Sunday, and Cleo gave him his space. She went for a run and put her phone on Do Not Disturb so she wasn’t inundated with the updates from the overnight news slog, which saw the YouTube video crowding out the regrets list headline, which was still slightly overshadowed by the #pullingaCleo hashtag. She was happy to read, however, that both lawsuits from the hashtag confrontations had already been dismissed when the men were faced with evidence their victims made public. Women weren’t willing to take this shit lying down anymore, and Cleo sprinted up a hill in her neighborhood and pumped a fist just because. She typed out a quick text to Gaby—she had longer thoughts that needed to be unpacked between them—but at the very least, they should celebrate this. That two young women had spoken up. That they had been heard. That two older men were being held to account.
Then she turned off her phone entirely, because she knew that thrusting herself into the presidential conversation meant a thorough examination of her life, but she also knew that like most things, this would all pass. Maybe not all of it. She could already see how the conversation about her regrets was being framed in some outlets: “Can We Trust a Woman with So Much Baggage?” and “How Many People Does Cleo McDougal Owe Apologies To?” and so on and so on.
She ran through her local streets with her hat pulled low and resolved that she did owe apologies to a few people—like Lucas, like MaryAnne, and like Doug Smith, whom she should have tracked down on campus because he deserved to be part of Lucas’s story, but at the time Cleo, fairly or not, had been so let down by everyone she’d come to count on—her parents were dead, her sister was absent, her high school boyfriend too smothering, her best friend, well, that was Cleo’s own doing—but as Cleo saw it at the time, she was her own best shot. It wasn’t how she would do it now, and she didn’t want to excuse it, but then, that’s what regrets were, after all. How you looked back and realized how different it should have been.
She felt a cramp building and slowed her pace. And then the idea came to her all at once, though it had probably been twenty years in the making. That’s how easy and how hard it was to ask for help.
She scrolled to his number in her contacts, where she’d located his address not too long ago to send that salmon from Alaska. She shook her head and smiled, looking at how he typed it in back in the Sheraton bar: MATTY!
It was early in Seattle. Not yet eight. But she remembered that, like her, he’d always been a morning person, and so she took a chance.
He answered it on the second ring and sounded like he was inside a wind tunnel.
“Am I catching you at a bad time?” Cleo shouted.
“One second, hang on!” he shouted back. He adjusted something on his end, and then the line was quiet. “Sorry,
” he said. “I’m on my bike. Training for a triathlon.”
Cleo grinned at the notion of her geeky high school boyfriend morphing into a triathlete but then realized that anyone could be anything if they worked to redefine themselves, and maybe with this call, Cleo was aiming to redefine herself too.
“I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said. “That salmon! Best I’ve had in my life. Think I’m going to book a cruise up there, just to see if I can catch some for myself.”
Cleo grinned wider now, at the ease between them, at how happy she was to be able to pick up the phone and connect with her past.
“Listen, I was hoping I could ask a favor,” she said. “I mean, if you wouldn’t mind, I could use a little help.”
Matty laughed for what felt like a minute. Cleo imagined him pulling over on the side of the deserted road to get a hold of himself. “Are you kidding me, Cleo? I think this is probably the first time in the history of Senator McDougal’s life that she has asked someone for help. I’m fucking honored. Tell me what I can do. I’m ready.”
Matty said it would take a couple of days. He thought they had some data searches that he could run internally to track down the generically named Doug Smith.
“I’d think you’d have better access through the government,” he said. “Don’t you have big intimidating databases that can do things like this? Like, not only find Doug Smith but tell you his last eighteen purchases and what he’s craving for dinner and what side of the bed he sleeps on?”
“We do,” Cleo said. “But this one is personal. And for once in my life, my job has nothing to do with it. And I’d prefer to keep it that way.”
Matty whistled his approval. “I guess people can change.”
“I’m not changing, Matty. I’m improving. There’s a difference.”
He laughed again and said, “Goddamn it, you are such a fucking politician. I can’t believe I ever thought we could make it.”
And Cleo laughed too, because, to paraphrase her chief of staff, both of those things were true at once.
Cleo knew she needed to deal with Gaby, who had texted her back asking if they could talk about how the list got out, but she didn’t know how or what to say yet. Georgie, who was heading home on the latest flight out Sunday night, suggested honesty.
“It seems to me,” she said, “that other than Lucas, she is the foundational relationship in your life. She’s been your family, and you should treat her accordingly.”
“But I’ve been terrible with family!” Cleo pointed out.
“But not anymore,” Georgie said, her bangles jangling and her tunic flowing, as she folded her clothes into her suitcase. “Not anymore.”
Gaby was waiting for her in her office on Monday morning with a latte and a breakfast burrito.
“I wanted to offer sustenance,” she said, her hands thrust forward like a peace offering, her tone suggesting the same.
But Cleo had already eaten. Lucas was out of school for the week to recover from the surgery—and she’d lured him out of bed and sat with him at the breakfast table, and they shared a plate of scrambled eggs with cheese. Cleo couldn’t remember the last time they’d done that, and she ruffled his hair on her way out, and he mildly grunted his annoyance, and then she told him not to watch Netflix all day, but he said he made no promises in an extremely irritated voice.
“Did you find him?” he asked.
And Cleo told him the truth, unlike too often in the past: “I’m trying.”
He nodded and returned to his screen. So things were like they were before, but different too.
Cleo slid back her chair and shook her head at Gaby’s breakfast offering. Her stomach was flaring with nerves as it was. She didn’t want to believe that Gaby had released her list, and she’d promised Georgie honesty—and she knew it was the only way through, but still, even with Cleo’s newfound emotional growth, none of it came easily. “I ate already.”
“Oh, OK.” Gaby’s face fell. She delicately set the latte and burrito on Cleo’s desk, as if they were fragile, as if, in fact, they were their friendship.
Cleo folded her arms and stared at her best friend and her chief of staff and a woman whom she had admired for as long as she’d known her.
“I want to believe the best, I do, but I think you owe me an explanation,” she said.
“I promise, I didn’t say a word to the press,” Gaby said. “I swear on anything that matters to us. It wasn’t me. I called . . . Didn’t you listen to my voicemails?”
They both knew that Cleo never listened to voicemails. If you wanted to reach her, you put it in writing or you went through her staff. Cleo supposed now that this was one more thing about herself that she would have to revisit. Listen to your goddamn voicemails! She thought that this was something she could do. But perhaps she hadn’t wanted to listen to Gaby’s. That was the more truthful answer here. She hadn’t been ready to hear that Gaby had betrayed her. Because then what?
“Gaby, you were the only person who knew. Do you know how vulnerable I felt? To see my private life all over the news? Do you know what it did to Lucas?”
Gaby’s brow furrowed. “What does your list have to do with Lucas?”
Cleo stared, and something passed between them, as it can between best friends, and Gaby understood.
“Shit. Oh shit. Cleo . . .”
Cleo exhaled. She didn’t want to detonate everything like she had with MaryAnne. She thought of their confrontation in Seattle at the country club, and for the first time, Cleo truly understood what MaryAnne felt—the sting of the betrayal—and what she needed—the acknowledgment that circumstance had trumped friendship and an honest, gut-sucking apology. Why had that been so difficult for Cleo to provide?
“Explain it to me,” Cleo said to Gaby. “Other than Lucas, you’re just about the only person I trust, and with this . . .” She shook her head and shrugged. She didn’t think she needed to elaborate. “I believe you, Gabs, but the math here doesn’t add up. So please, before I say something I’ll regret . . .” Regret.
Gaby sighed. “Veronica called me. She was happy with the press you were getting with, you know, the hashtag. And she knew you were doing the benefit, the . . . dancing thing. But she was worried. Not about that—”
“You specifically told me to do it because she wanted me to,” Cleo interrupted.
“No, she did. She does.” Gaby regrouped. “Her people were starting to get concerned that with all of your recent press—MaryAnne, the two lawsuits . . . that one more misstep would make you a liability.”
“You told me she loved all the recent press!”
“No, Cleo, she—yes, she does. But you know that Veronica Kaye is bigger than just . . . Veronica Kaye. She has a board and a team, double the size of yours, and the whole thing . . . Look, I step in a ton of shit to keep your feet clean.”
Cleo narrowed her eyes. “What does that mean?”
“It means that I make bargains all the time with people to get you checks or endorsements or . . . whatever. It’s my job, and I am happy to do it. But this time, when Veronica called and expressed that a few people on her team were starting to worry, I only wanted to reassure her. They had watched my interview on Bowen’s show, when we discussed regrets—I mean, I didn’t even want to do the show in the first place, but I was trying to take one for the team!”
Gaby stopped and waited as if she expected Cleo to thank her, but Cleo did not, so she continued. “Anyway, she kept circling back to how he and I had touched on ‘regrets,’ which I didn’t think was a big deal at the time on the show—at the end of the day, it’s just a word! And really . . . I don’t know. I got nervous that she was going to second-guess her support—which we have pinned your whole presidential launch on—so I told her. As a way to explain why you were doing some of the things you were doing and that you were coming to grips with some laments from your past, and how that actually made you a stronger candidate, not a weaker one.”
“Well, don’t do me a
ny favors,” Cleo said, which was petty and she regretted as soon as it was out of her mouth because she wanted to do this honestly.
“It wasn’t a favor; come on. Cleo, I’ve been on your side since the beginning. I told her it was confidential, and she promised that it was. I don’t know, maybe someone in her office overheard. And I’m sorry that Lucas got hurt, and I’m sorry that you feel exposed and betrayed. I did what I thought was right because I thought playing the long game mattered more than the immediate consequences.”
Cleo knew all about playing the long game. She also knew how it could backfire.
Her phone buzzed in her briefcase, and she ignored it.
“Look,” Gaby said, her eyes pleading now. “She kept asking me, and I didn’t know what to do.”
“What, specifically, was she asking you?”
“She said that you seemed different—not just because of the ‘gumption’ but also a little more open, I guess a little wilder, but . . . that’s not the right word. Unpredictable, that’s what it was, which, by the way, is a good thing for you. Not just in your polling but for you, Cleo McDougal.” Gaby sighed, looked genuinely pained, which Cleo knew was rare for her. “Anyway, she wanted to know what had changed, what caused you to go from a little sassy to a little volatile. She wanted to be sure that she was backing the right horse.”
Cleo’s phone buzzed again, and she reached for it. It could be Lucas, and she wasn’t willing to risk missing any more of his calls.
“Before you take that,” Gaby said, as close to tears as Cleo had ever seen her. “Cleo, just know I really am sorry. I should have protected you, and I thought that I was, but I can see now why I wasn’t.”
Cleo stared at her best friend, who had had her back for so many battles, who had never asked her to change, who had never demanded an apology from her, even when she was in the wrong. And Cleo knew that she had been in the wrong plenty of times.
It was so rare to offer a truthful naked expression of apology, Cleo thought. Not with any motivation, not with any edge or angle or motive. Gaby had hurt her, and she had acknowledged it and made amends. Cleo didn’t want to be like MaryAnne, who held a grudge like a lifeline, or like the person who had wronged MaryAnne—her teenage self and maybe her adult self too—who deserved that grudge in the first place.
Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel Page 28