The Phoenix Candidate

by Heidi Joy Tretheway

  I reach for the Darrow brief on gun laws, the most pink-highlighted packet of all, and skim down his position statements. It’s a bitter pill to swallow and I hope desperately I won’t be asked about this.

  Because if the news anchor asks, I’m dead to Darrow. He’ll crucify me.

  ***

  My nearly sleepless night in the New York hotel room includes the following failed attempts:

  A glass of wine. Feels like acid in my stomach.

  A hot bath. Makes me shriveled and pruney, but not sleepy.

  Masturbation. Can’t get Jared out of my head; can’t get off.

  A pile of pillows. Can’t ignore the emptiness. The bed’s too big without him.

  At three a.m. I give up and call room service, ordering a massive bottle of mineral water that costs as much as a pizza, and a salad—extra cucumbers, hold the lettuce, hold the dressing.

  I lie in my pile of pillows with cucumbers on my eyes, sipping mineral water through a straw, really and truly hating Jared for leaving me alone.

  For leaving me.

  Does he really have so little faith in me that he thinks I’d just give up and let Darrow steamroll everything I stand for?

  Is that what he thinks I’m made of? I remember our fights and the fact that he walked out on me once because I stood up to him. He knows what I’m made of, and yet he doesn’t think I’m strong enough for this.

  Fuck him.

  Fuck him for getting under my skin, into my head, and inside my heart.

  For wrapping me in doubt about Darrow, and then practically gift-wrapping and hand-delivering me into Darrow’s campaign.

  For causing my last sleepless night, and this one, and probably a dozen more before I finally exorcise our brief affair from my head.

  That’s all it was. Not a relationship. Just an affair. Consenting adults spending a bit of time together. No strings, no commitments, no kissing.

  Just sex.

  In law school, Aliza and I had a name for casual hookups that lasted longer than a few nights. TMRs: Totally Meaningless Relationships.

  I imagine in Jared’s ever-changing world, moving from state to state and campaign to campaign, TMRs are about all he has time for. I’m a fool for thinking I’m something different. Like he could want me for longer and deeper than just another fling.

  Hell, I was nothing more than his vetting assignment. He just has a knack for mixing business with pleasure.

  I hear a short vibration and pry a cucumber slice off my eyes. On the bedside table my phone screen is lit up with a text.

  Trey: YT?

  Me: YT? What’s that? YouTube?

  Trey: No. You there? I don’t want to mess with your beauty sleep, but I think you need to see something.

  Me: I’m getting zero in the sleep department anyway. What’s up?

  Trey: I just emailed you a document. I couldn’t sleep tonight either. And I kept thinking about all the position papers we reviewed, and why the gun one was so specific.

  Me: Specific?

  Trey: It didn’t have the same tone as the others. It was a lot more prescriptive. A lot of very specific statements you must not make, but also a lot of recommended language that was just broad promises that didn’t really do anything.

  I flip open my laptop and as I wait for it to boot up and connect to Wi-Fi, I pull the folder of highlighted papers open and shuffle to the one Trey’s talking about.

  Me: I’m looking right now. I see what you mean.

  Trey: Well, that’s kind of weird, don’t you think? So I kind of went down the rabbit hole in terms of research. I looked at a lot of documents.

  My computer pings with an incoming email.

  Me: What did you find? And where are you right now?

  Trey: At the office.

  Me: You went back to the office in the middle of the night to do research?

  Trey: I never left, actually. When you went to catch your flight, I just kept thinking, and digging, and I found what’s fueling Darrow.

  I open Trey’s email and I stare—pages and pages of campaign finance disclosure forms are appended in scanned attachments, each of them highlighted in our signature pink, yellow, and green color-coding.

  There’s practically no green on these pages. No good news.

  There’s plenty of yellow. Cash and contributions balances, key contributors and who’s controlling the funds.

  But the pink makes these pages bleed.

  Through a series of shell corporations and super-PACs, Darrow takes money from the gun lobby.

  From the gun manufacturers.

  From the gun-rights advocates who most recently organized an open-carry demonstration by a school.

  Me: Holy shit, Trey. Darrow would never admit to this.

  Trey: Doesn’t matter. The paper trail just did that for him.

  I click through to the final pages of Trey’s scanned documents, where one of the named contributors and a top-five funder of Darrow’s campaign is quoted: “We don’t know if it’s going to be a Republican or a Democrat in the White House in 2016, but we’re going to make sure that no matter who wins, it’s a win for gun rights.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I close my eyes and let the makeup artist smudge liner along my lashes. She tsk-tsked at me for showing up to the television studio with pretty fierce bags under my eyes.

  “We’re going to run a ninety-second spot as a lead-in to your segment to introduce you. You’ll be able to see the monitor but not hear the audio,” a producer explains. “Then Rick’s going to introduce you.”

  The producer nods to the host at the other end of the green room. Rick Knox is conventionally handsome, perfectly shaven, and covered in pancake makeup. He’s also known as a conservative-leaning fireball against whose sharp bullshit detector no one is safe.

  I wonder if that’s why Darrow dropped out of this slot and sent me.

  I get miked up and Knox does a brief drive-by to say hello, but he’s distracted by another producer with a clipboard talking a mile a minute. I follow directions to my swivel chair pulled up to Rick’s angled desk, then watch as the Knox on Politics title sequence animates on the monitors.

  The lead-in segment begins to play. Old footage shows me bent and kneeling, my shoulders convulsing in sobs as I press my forehead to Ethan’s headstone in anguish. I’m transported to the cold December day at Cascade Ridge Cemetery five years ago.

  I can’t unsee this image. I can’t. But being smacked in the face with it so early in the morning sends my stomach into total revolt and I leap from the chair and run to the side of the set, finding a trash can I can dump my guts into.

  It comes up in thin, yellowish waves. There was little more than mineral water and coffee inside me, and a chasm of hurt. I look around wildly, absolutely blowing this interview before it’s even started, and a black-clad producer rushes up to me with an uncapped water bottle.

  “Drink this.” He taps a button on the box on his belt and speaks quickly into his microphone, then turns to me. “Can you go back? Right now?”

  I look across the set to where Knox is poised beneath blazing lights. The monitors continue rolling—images of the Willamette Mall where Seth and Ethan were shot, a montage of our family photos, and more tape of the aftermath of other shootings across America.

  I don’t have to do this.

  I can call in sick. Nobody would dispute me.

  And yet, I have to do this.

  For Seth and Ethan. For the victims at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Fort Hood, Columbine, Aurora, Omaha, and Marysville.

  For Trey and Mama Bea and Trey’s brother, shot in the streets before he even graduated high school.

  For Jared, who told me the only candidate he’d want for Conover is one with a spine.

  And for me. I have to do this for me. My opportunity is now.

  I take another swig from the water bottle and stride back across the stage to my chair. I give Knox a tight smile and a nod. Bring it.

  *** />
  “I think we can agree that gun legislation is going to be one of the most contentious issues of the 2016 presidential election,” Knox says, “so I’d like to hear more about what you’d like to see the candidates do.”

  Damn. Can’t a girl even get a warm-up question?

  I smile like I’ve been dying to answer this question all day.

  “Any meaningful gun legislation needs to start with the outcomes we intend to produce,” I say. “And so when I say I want greater accountability in ownership, I mean that I think every responsible gun owner needs to have a vested interest in keeping these weapons out of the hands of criminals.”

  I go on to explain my proposed legislation, including mandatory reporting of gun thefts, penalties for failing to properly store and secure weapons, and tighter standards on private party sales to ensure guns aren’t sold to people who would otherwise be banned from buying them from traditional retail outlets.

  “That sounds like a lot of red tape to me,” Knox says, and I hate him for his smirk, his pancake makeup, his condescending air. “It sounds like you’re making it a lot harder for average people to maintain their Second Amendment rights.”

  “Not at all. I come from a hunting family. My late husband hunted duck and deer. But I’m also keenly aware that forty-two percent of mass shootings perpetrated in the last five years involved a firearm the shooter could not legally own.”

  “Then you’ve proven my point. Criminals will always find a way to kill people.”

  “No, you’ve proven mine. When we work together to lock up weapons properly, or to make buyers go through the necessary checks that are far less rigorous than even getting a driver’s license, we make it harder for them to access it.”

  Knox frowns. “You can’t control for crazy.”

  “Then what do you do? Do you give up and throw open your school doors to anyone who’d like to walk in with a semiautomatic weapon? No. You figure out lockdown procedures and police response. You implement the See Something/Say Something campaign. You fight like hell.”

  “And what’s to say any of this works?” Knox sneers. “Can you prove all of these little laws are actually making us safer?”

  “That’s just it, Rick. The silence is your only proof. Today is your proof, because here we are talking gun violence and showing tape from five years ago rather than watching something unfold today. Every little thing we do, every bit of violence we prevent, is something we’re not going to see on the national news. And I’ll take that silence any day.”

  “You’ve got a pretty extreme position on this, Congresswoman Colton. Your name’s been mentioned as a running mate for both Conover and Darrow. How do you imagine working on a ticket with one of the candidates? How could you reconcile your ideological differences?”

  “I don’t think I need to, Rick. Do you? Do you think I should put these proposals on ice to make myself a bit more electable? Because that’s a pretty big slap in the face to all of the voters who supported me in the first place. They thought I’d fight for this, and for them. And I intend to keep my promise, even if that makes me an impossible running mate.”

  Knox breaks for commercials and I want to run a little victory lap around the studio, but I’m assaulted by the makeup artist’s powdered brush and Knox makes a quick dive off the set for something.

  When he returns, Knox gives me a quizzical look, like he can’t figure me out. “What you said just then? It’s brave, but it’s career suicide.”

  I take a sip from my water bottle, shrug, and smile. “I know.”

  “You could have been a running mate, Grace,” Knox says regretfully. “That’s what this show was supposed to be about. We were getting the exclusive before your big announcement.”

  “With Darrow? Please. I didn’t fall in line. He’s not going to want me.”

  “But he did. His campaign went nuts pulling out all the stops to get you on this show. And then you get here, and instead of backing his moderate point of view on gun control, you threw down the hard line. Why?”

  “Let me tell you something, Rick. You say Darrow’s a moderate? Let’s look at his record. He singlehandedly undermined the three most significant laws in California on guns. And his top campaign contributors? Gun manufacturers and a pro-gun organization that actually defended a campus shooter’s right to carry.”

  “So you think Darrow’s position is something that would block your legislation from moving forward?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” I snort. “You’re assuming he’d be nominated. And assuming he’d win the White House. I intend to fight like hell to be sure he doesn’t get past square one.”

  Knox nods, then pauses a beat. “Well, Congresswoman Colton, this has been an incredibly informative and candid chat. Thank you for coming to Knox on Politics.” He turns to the camera and delivers a few sentences of wrap up while the blood drains from my face.

  Oh, God. We’ve been rolling tape this whole fucking time.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “I love you, Grace. You know that?”

  “I know,” I say miserably, and sink into the chair by Trey’s desk. Three empty grande triple-shot cups fill his trash can, and he looks far more chipper than I do considering that we both lost sleep last night.

  Damn twentysomethings and their killer ability to bounce back. I’ve lost Jared, and now I’ve lost my chances with both Darrow and Conover. I feel like I should be in mourning, not dragging my rear back into my office directly off the shuttle back from New York.

  I give Trey the play-by-play of what went down with Rick Knox, complete with sound effects and gestures as I demonstrate my opportunity with the Darrow campaign crashing and bursting into flames.

  “That’s brilliant.” Trey’s grinning.

  “Brilliantly underhanded, you mean.” I’m still stinging from Knox’s sleight of hand, but I really only have myself to blame. I knew I was miked, I knew I was sitting in front of cameras, and I knew it was a reporter asking me questions. The fault is entirely mine.

  “I love it when you stick to your principles and give the world the finger,” Trey says. “I hope you’ve got a little more where that came from.”

  “What?”

  “Lauren’s on her way over here.”

  My eyes widen. “Oh, God. I thought the segment wasn’t airing until tonight?”

  “Friends in high places?” Trey shrugs. “She must have gotten a preview. You ready for this?”

  My office door opens and Lauren Kennedy Darrow glides in, her pursed lips the only hint of her mood.

  “May we speak in private?” she asks. No greeting. No preamble.

  I’m tempted to take my lashings right here—I know Trey would enjoy the show—but I nod to my inner office. Once I’ve closed the door behind us, she straightens to her full height, several inches more than mine, and breathes fire into each of her words.

  “You. Betrayed. Me.”

  “Is that what they’re calling it these days? I’d call it being independent.”

  “I’d call it short-sighted. You just ruined a perfect opportunity.”

  “To do what, Lauren? Sell out?”

  She crosses her arms and snorts. I can’t help but imagine tiny puffs of smoke coming from her nose, like some impotent dragon, and the smile that tugs at my mouth incenses her.

  “We had an understanding, Grace. I handpicked you and delivered you to one of the best media ops you’ve ever had. You should be grateful for that. You had one job: stick to the script and prove your loyalty. And you fucked it up.”

  “Maybe I don’t see it that way.” I move behind my desk, to my position of power. “I’d say your loyalty test is bullshit, because once I realized who I’d be climbing into bed with if I joined your ticket, I wasn’t feeling all that loyal to you or your stupid script.” My voice rises with emphasis. “I’m loyal to my constituents, and my principles. Not to your campaign.”

  Lauren’s lip curls as if I’ve just fed her some deliciou
sly evil gossip. “What an interesting choice of words, Grace. Climbing into bed with someone. We should talk about who you’ve been shacking up with.”

  “No. That has nothing to do with this.”

  Lauren takes a couple of steps to the side, circling my desk, a predatory move that makes the fine hairs on my arms stand up. “You’ll find out soon that you’re wrong. Fucking Jared Rankin has everything to do with this election, and your ability to win it. He’s your kryptonite, Grace. You might think you want him now, but—”

  I cut her off. “I don’t. It’s over, and he has nothing to do with me turning down Darrow. I just don’t like the way you work.”

  “I don’t think you appreciate what’s about to happen, Grace. Jared’s going to ruin you.”

  “How? He’s got nothing to use against me.”

  Lauren smirks. She actually smirks, rocks back on her heels, and if this were a movie, she’d let out a full-on evil cackle. Instead, she simply counters, “But I do.”

  Lauren takes another step around the side of my desk and alarm bells go off in my head. What does she have on me? What could she do to me?

  “When I throw you to the wolves, Grace, just remember that Jared can’t save you,” Lauren hisses. “Don’t go crying to him that this isn’t fair. Don’t you fucking whine to the media about a double standard.”

  “What did you do?”

  “An eye for an eye, Grace. You accuse my husband of being less than honorable on national television, I repay the favor.”

  “I’ve never been less than honorable,” I retort, outrage building in my voice. What the hell does she think she has on me? Whatever it is, it can’t be true.