Eighteen Acres
Page 23
“Why can’t she just stand alone outside Air Force One and read a statement in front of the cameras?” Tara asked. “That way, it would look presidential, and it would separate her from the day’s campaign activity, but we could stick to the schedule.”
Melanie shot Tara a look that said, Stay out of this, and sighed loudly before she spoke. “Because she can’t. Roger was her secretary of defense, and they went through a lot together. This morning, he shot himself. He has a wife. He has kids. And he left a suicide note—not for his wife or his kids but for Charlotte. That’s why she can’t just walk out of a campaign rally with hay in her hair from some state fair and say, ‘I sure am going to miss old Roger.’ This is a presidential moment, Madam Attorney General,” Melanie said.
“I see,” Tara said.
Melanie was sure she’d back down. But she didn’t.
This time, Tara faced Ralph when she spoke. “Isn’t this also a moment when we risk turning the discussion back toward the past and everything they didn’t like about Charlotte’s first term? And aren’t we moving up in the polls and succeeding in making the election about the future?” Tara asked.
Melanie was furious that Tara assumed she had a seat at the table for presidential decision making. So what if Charlotte’s numbers had surged since Tara had joined the ticket? It didn’t give her the right to weigh in on the things Charlotte did in her capacity as incumbent president. That was squarely Melanie’s domain.
Melanie pasted a smile on her face and cleared her throat. “Madam Attorney General, with all due respect, the voters expect a leader to stand by her friends when the situation is this dire,” she informed her.
“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” Charlotte said.
She’d been sitting at the table staring out the window, and it wasn’t clear to Melanie whether she’d been listening to the exchange. If she had been listening, Melanie was irritated that she hadn’t chimed in sooner to take her side.
“I mean, if I were inclined to stand by him when things were dire, I wouldn’t have forced his resignation or agreed to all the recommendations from the panel,” Charlotte said. “If I were inclined to stand by him, I would have called him when the report came out to see if he was doing OK. I would have called Stephanie. She was my friend at one time, too.” Charlotte spoke in a voice that was so soft Melanie had a hard time hearing her. “I don’t know why I drew such a bright line. I don’t know why I hardened so completely against him,” she practically whispered.
“Madam President, this isn’t your fault,” Melanie said quietly.
And she meant it. Roger’s suicide wasn’t Charlotte’s fault. It was hers. He had called her nearly a dozen times.
Melanie still hadn’t found her other cell phone. How was she supposed to manage the situation without her phone? She looked under the table, but every time her eyes moved to the floor of the bus, she felt as if she would vomit again. She shifted her gaze to the window and saw Tara whispering quietly to her husband. They looked as if they were conspiring.
“Madam President,” Tara said, “I don’t know if this is of any help, but I could pick up the ‘Conversations with America’ for a while if you want to go back to Washington to make a statement like Melanie suggests.”
“Thanks, Tara. I appreciate that,” Charlotte said. “Let’s see what Melanie and Ralph decide. And I really do appreciate your offer.”
“It’s the least I can do,” Tara said.
Charlotte returned her gaze to the view outside her window, and Melanie caught the look that Tara gave her husband. Tara looked satisfied that she’d infiltrated the inner circle, and her husband appeared to nod slightly, as though things had gone exactly as they’d planned. Melanie was tempted to say something to put her in her place, but she had too many other things to handle.
She moved slowly over to where the president was sitting. “Madam President, I’m going to have the speechwriters start working on a statement about Roger,” she said.
Charlotte nodded.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Charlotte was silent, but she moved her hand to her head and started rubbing her temples.
“Madam President?” Melanie said.
“I didn’t have any idea that he was taking things this hard, or maybe I just didn’t want to know,” Charlotte said.
Melanie couldn’t meet Charlotte’s eye. “We should call Stephanie. Do you want me to see if I can get her on the line?” Melanie asked.
“I don’t know if she’d take my call, but yes, we need to try.”
They rolled along for twenty more minutes before the bus pulled up alongside Air Force One at the airport in Columbus, Ohio. Ralph convinced Melanie that Tara could handle the president’s scheduled appearances while Charlotte was in Washington. Charlotte barely looked at Ralph and Melanie when they made the recommendation.
Before she boarded the plane, Charlotte moved over to where Tara and her husband were sitting and did her best to look cheerful. “Tara, I really appreciate your willingness to step in and handle the ‘Conversations.’ They’re nothing more than town-hall meetings, but since I promised no campaign, they’re all we’ve got.”
“Madam President, it is my honor,” Tara said.
“I’ll give you a call in the morning to check in,” Melanie told her.
“Great. You know where to find us,” Tara said.
“Ralph is going to stay behind to staff you. We’ll send written remarks to the bus overnight. Everything will be fine. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. And don’t you worry about us. We’ll be fine.” Tara gestured at the staff staying behind to work for the vice-presidential nominee’s first solo trip.
“You’ll be great,” Charlotte added before she walked off the bus.
Melanie watched Charlotte walk up the steps of Air Force One. She didn’t turn and wave to the cameras as she normally did. As soon as she disappeared into the front cabin, Melanie hurried up the front stairs and walked straight to the senior staff cabin to call the speechwriters back at the White House.
“Hey, guys, can you meet me when we land?” she asked.
“Yeah. We started something already based on your e-mail. We’ll have a first draft for you to review. Couple questions, Mel. Where and when are we doing this?” one of the writers asked.
“I think we want to do it tonight. I need to talk to the president again. And I don’t have a speech venue yet, but it will be somewhere on the eighteen acres. If you guys have suggestions, let me know. At first, I thought East Room, but that doesn’t feel right. I was toying with Rose Garden, but I could be persuaded to move it indoors, maybe to the Briefing Room. I don’t know. I’ll call you back. If you have something you can fax to the plane before we land, we’ll start reviewing it here.”
“Melanie, one more question. Does she want to mention what happened in Afghanistan or just keep it broad? Lifetime of service, that sort of stuff?” the writer asked.
“I don’t know. Let me call you back.”
She hung up and asked the Air Force One operator to place a call to Brian’s cell phone. His voice-mail picked up. Melanie was getting ready to leave a message when Charlotte appeared in the doorway to the senior staff cabin.
“I need to talk to you,” Charlotte said. She turned and walked straight back to her cabin. Melanie stood and followed her, shutting the door behind her.
Charlotte was standing in front of her desk, leaning against it with her arms crossed. As soon as Melanie closed the door behind her, Charlotte motioned for her to come closer.
“He tried to see me,” Charlotte said. “He called Sam, and he asked her for ten minutes to come see me, and we didn’t give it to him. How would you feel? I should have shown him more compassion. He was my friend.”
“He called me, too,” Melanie said. “On multiple occasions. If anyone is to blame, it’s me. I should have seen him. It’s my job.”
Charlotte didn’t say anything.
“Do you really believe that, Melanie? That we’re not responsible? That we didn’t hold the power to absolve him?” Charlotte said.
Melanie stared at the ground.
“Because I think we screwed this one up. Big time. We let Roger get destroyed because we saw this the way we see everything—black and white. There was no room to forgive, because we don’t have a box for that in November. We cut him out like a cancer because he traded one life for another, right?” Charlotte said.
Melanie looked up. “Yes. You said at the time that doing so made him just like the enemy,” Melanie reminded her, not sure where Charlotte was going.
“I remember. But didn’t we just do exactly the same thing?” Charlotte said. “Didn’t we trade Roger’s life for Dale’s?”
Melanie felt goose bumps rise on her bare arm. “No, no, it’s not the same,” she said, shaking her head.
“Melanie, if you are capable of that kind of denial, you are much better suited for this job than I am,” Charlotte said.
Neither of them said anything else, and after a few moments, Charlotte sat down at her desk and pretended to read pages from a briefing book.
Melanie turned to leave. “Let me know if you need anything,” she said.
Charlotte didn’t look up.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Dale
Dale stood stretching at the beginning of the path and told herself over and over that she could turn around if she got tired. Since the accident, her body felt foreign to her—fragile and untrustworthy. To regain her strength, and because she didn’t have anything else to do, she’d started walking along the trail under the Golden Gate Bridge each afternoon. It was the only part of her day she looked forward to. The night before, she’d decided to advance to jogging. The thought terrified and excited her. She checked her shoelaces, turned up the volume on her iPod, and waited for a group of women in their sixties to pass before she jogged slowly onto the trail.
After only a couple of minutes, her breathing steadied. Her insides felt fine. She turned and looked back and figured she’d already gone about half a mile. With each step, she felt stronger. She felt her body moving beneath her without faltering or breaking. She felt her lungs taking in more air and pushing more air out than they had in ages. She jogged along in silence for about twenty minutes and stopped just under the Golden Gate Bridge.
A group of moms pushing strollers ran by while she stood stretching her hamstrings. She was breathing heavily, and her legs were burning, but she felt invigorated. She felt her cell phone vibrating in her pocket and pulled it out to check the caller ID. It was her agent.
“Hey, Arnie,” she said.
“You sound like you’re having a heart attack,” he said.
“I’m running,” she said.
“Why?” he asked.
“That’s what people do out here. They run, hike, wind-surf, kayak, spin, yoga—all that crap.”
“Sounds like your spirits are up. Maybe that’s what you needed,” he said.
“Any luck with the last round of calls?” she asked.
“Yes and no. You want the good news or the bad news first?”
“I should probably get the bad news over with while my endorphins are up,” she said.
“The cables aren’t hiring before the election. They all love you—said they hated what happened to you, and they’d love to talk to you after the election but can’t hire you for the final stretch.”
“How is that possible?” Dale asked, feeling her runner’s calm evaporate.
“Hold on. I do not come to you empty-handed. The ABC affiliate in San Francisco is a great station, and they’d love to have you cover the vice-presidential campaign for them for the final weeks. They’d pay you a freelancer’s day rate.”
“I’m not even going to say out loud what I’m thinking, but tell me you’re thinking it, too,” she said.
“You can say it. How the hell did we get here? Next in line for evening anchor and now our best option is working freelance in local?”
“Exactly.”
“Want my advice?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said.
“You should buy a sailboat, have a kid, take up tennis, and relax for a year. Someone else will stumble by then, and you can make your comeback. You’re trying to force something that just isn’t there right now.”
“Thanks, Arnie. You always know just what to say. How long do I have to decide on the San Francisco station?”
“I told them I didn’t think you’d be interested, but they said if you were, you should go see them tomorrow.”
“What time?” she asked.
“Dale, are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.
“What time?”
Her legs were aching as she walked back along the route she’d jogged minutes earlier. She rehearsed what she’d say to Peter as she made her way back up the hill to Pacific Heights.
He was in the den watching the news. She walked in and sat next to him.
“Hi, honey. How was your walk?” he asked.
“Good,” she said, rubbing her quads.
She stood up to get some Advil just as the evening news was starting.
“You want anything?” she asked Peter, just as the anchor announced that with weeks to go before Election Day, Charlotte had abruptly left the campaign trail to attend Roger’s funeral and had no immediate plans to return.
Dale sat back down to watch Brian’s package and was surprised to see that Tara had taken over the role of chief campaigner for Charlotte.
“I can’t believe Ralph and Melanie left Charlotte’s reelection in Tara’s hands,” she said.
“I’m not sure they had a choice,” Peter said.
“What do you mean?”
“I spoke to some old friends today whom I hadn’t heard from in a while. They said Charlotte is taking the news about Roger very hard. She feels responsible. He left a note for her.”
Dale was quiet. Since learning about Roger’s suicide days earlier, she hadn’t been able to begin to process the fact that he’d taken his own life. She took a deep breath and blew it out. “It will never end, will it?” she asked.
“What?” Peter asked.
“This story. The crash. The accident. Charlotte’s speech. Getting outed for having an affair with you. Getting fired. I will always be the reporter who was sent up in Marine One, the one who was sleeping with the president’s husband.”
Peter didn’t say anything.
“I know that you think I’m pathetic for feeling sorry for myself. You never complain about anything, so you can’t fathom why I can’t get past this, but you don’t understand. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have decisions made for you—decisions that you never would have made but you have to live with all the same,” she said.
He looked at her.
She knew she was wrong. Of course, he knew what it was like to have decisions made for him—decisions that affected his life. Isn’t that what Charlotte had done to him throughout their marriage? But Dale wanted to get a reaction from him. She wanted him to scream at her, to drag her out of the puddle of self-pity she was drowning in.
“You’re right,” he said. “I never went through what you’ve gone through—what you’re still going through. And no, it will never go away completely. You will be part of the history of Charlotte’s presidency forever. But you do get to decide one thing.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“How long you stay pissed at the world. You get to decide when to stop being angry and start living again.”
She looked at him. There was no bitterness on his face. She could detect only concern and the same weariness she’d first noticed when they were staying in Georgetown.
Peter stood up and went to his office. She sat in the television room and stared out at the fog below the wind
ow. She could barely make out the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. She pulled her BlackBerry out of her purse and sent an e-mail to the news director at the station that was interested in hiring her.
“I look forward to speaking with you tomorrow at noon. I’m confident we can work something out,” she wrote.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Charlotte
Brooke wasn’t even quiet when she was whispering. Charlotte heard her on the phone talking to Mark about how Charlotte seemed paralyzed.
She had no idea.
In the days since Roger’s suicide, she had simply put one foot in front of the other. But her paralysis, as Brooke described it, was protecting her from something far worse. By forcing him out and allowing him to take the fall, she’d killed Roger as plainly as if she had pulled the trigger herself.
Charlotte had delivered a statement in the East Room on the night they’d returned to Washington. She’d spoken to Stephanie and their children and offered her condolences. Stephanie had been polite and gracious. She’d invited Charlotte to speak at the funeral. Charlotte had attended the funeral and delivered a eulogy that Melanie and the speechwriters had stayed up all night writing. It struck the perfect tone of tribute and absolution.
Charlotte never would have acted on it, but Stephanie hadn’t been crazy to worry about Charlotte’s relationship with her husband. Charlotte had felt as possessive of Roger as if he’d been hers, and his death had extinguished her last reserves of emotional resilience. She could not muster the strength to push aside the sadness and regret that consumed her. Roger had been more of a companion to her than her own husband. They’d shared a passion for the nitty-gritty details of the military campaign and intelligence reports they received from Iraq and Afghanistan. They’d spent hours talking about what Iraq would be like in another generation. They’d shared tears when they learned that soldiers they’d met on their trips had been killed or wounded, and they’d made special trips together to Walter Reed and other military hospitals to visit the wounded soldiers.