by Kerry Clare
Now fully awake and all too steeped in the facts of the night before, Brooke hauled herself out of her bed, which was just a mattress on the floor, and rolled into the kitchen, where Lauren was sitting at the table eating toast, scrolling through her phone. This was one thing about Lauren that Brooke hadn’t appreciated properly until this moment: she thought celebrity gossip constituted “the news,” which would serve Brooke well today. Plus, she made great coffee, and now gestured for Brooke to help herself. But all the mugs in the cupboard were ugly, Brooke despaired, and none of them were hers.
“Are you okay?” Lauren asked, Brooke presuming she looked as terrible as she felt, and she asked Lauren if she had painkillers. Her head ached even more now that she was upright. Lauren had a bottle of ibuprofen in the cupboard, alongside all those jars of her boyfriend’s supplements and vitamins, and Brooke gulped two down with coffee in a mug with a gas station logo. And then she went back to her room to get dressed, ignoring her phone, or trying to. Determined not to check it, because once she started scrolling, there’d be no end to that, and in the meantime she’d have to head into work like this day was ordinary. This crisis was not one in which she was immediately affected, as difficult as that was for Brooke to get her head around.
Because before, of course, this crisis would have touched everything. As one of the longest-serving members of Derek’s staff, she would have been alerted right away, been part of an emergency task force to help get ahead of the story before it was all over the news. It was the rush she loved, even in the most impossible challenges, the kind of work that got the blood going, enough adrenaline that everybody could forget that they hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Ordering pizza and guzzling energy drinks, or else something stronger. Whatever it took to stay above water, drafting statements and trying out various defenses.
This whole thing was obviously a setup. The allegations in this case were both more than a decade old, which certainly did help his side. There’d be no evidence of anything anyway, so why had those women waited so long to come forward? It was political opportunism, part of a conspiracy, and Derek’s name had been besmirched. Damage done. Besmirched. Such a funny, old-fashioned word. What even was smirching? There was a musty kind of morality to all of this, Brooke knew, and it could be spun.
If she had been there last night, would things have been different? Would Derek still have broken down and cried, running away from the reporters? If she had been there, maybe he would have been stronger. He wouldn’t have run away, a coward. The pieces were already shattered, and he’d made everything worse, possibly unsalvageable. As though every step down those three flights had further ground the fragments under his feet, and how do you put that back together again? His staff would be doing their best, she knew. It’s what they were there for. If she had been there, she would have promised him that everything would turn out fine.
But making promises to Derek wasn’t her job now, professionally or emotionally, and she was only spinning in her mind. The reason for her headache, she supposed, because she couldn’t relax or think of anything else. She showered and got dressed, headed off to work, taking the bus because of a chance of rain, but this was a mistake because she was so jittery, her legs bouncing up and down. The woman sitting beside her with a bouquet of shopping bags noticed and was trying to move over, to put more space between them, but there wasn’t much to go around. So Brooke got off two stops early, figuring a walk would do her good.
She checked her phone now, finally—just to see the time, but also all the notifications. The messages the night before from her sister, her mother, but that was it for actual people. None of her former colleagues had been in touch—but why would they be? When she’d been shuffled out of that office in shame back in June, Brooke had mostly ceased to exist as far as they were concerned, and all her years spent cloistered in that political bubble had long ago cut her off from everybody else. Although the isolation she had come to appreciate, one bit of a silver lining to being trapped here in this no-man’s land, because she couldn’t imagine how she’d explain it, what might happen if she had to account for herself. Mortifying. So angry and heartsick, and she’d sound like a fool. Everybody would know that she was one.
What a mess it all was, she thought, scrolling right down to the end of her notifications, the initial alert that had started it all: BREAKING: Murdoch holding late-night emergency press conference.
She cleared her phone now, blanket deletions. It was noise, all of it, a story still developing, too soon for conclusions, and all those assholes who’d seen it coming: “I never trusted the guy.” Never mind that they had been bending over backwards to stay in that guy’s good books, to get him onside so they could get him to do their bidding. Everybody was a special interest group—but not Brooke. She was a rare breed in politics, she knew—she’d learned from the best.
Though she had always been like this. A reliable and diligent teenager, Brooke had been appointed to the school board as a student representative, where she discovered that behind the scenes was where the real work happened, unlike the popularity contest that was high school politics, which was mostly about organizing spirit rallies before the football game. It was the kind of showmanship she’d never gone in for, preferring substance instead, and Brooke had learned that much of what people recognize as politics—ideology, dogma, ego, spin—was really a distraction. What mattered was facts, and truth, and the weight of people’s stories, and when you really took the time to listen, walls came down and the space between didn’t seem so wide after all. Politics worked when you took the politicking out of it, which is what Derek had always told her, what they’d both learned from their years in the trenches.
And for sure, there were those who indulged in practices that gave politics its bad reputation, the power-grabs, lying, cronyism and chicanery—because that was the way it had always been done. But Brooke knew there was another way. Faith was fundamental to her politics—not the religious kind of faith, but instead certainty that there really were things to believe in. This was what had drawn her to Derek in the first place, the way he affirmed her ideals about how the world worked and what it could be. It was where they had always seen eye to eye.
When Brooke arrived for her shift at the library that morning, however, and began her first task—the newspapers—that long-held certainty was challenged. Unrolling the day’s editions—the increasingly diminished national papers, all three of them, plus the local daily and the weekly—pulling each one apart section by section, then re-assembling them on wooden rods designed for optimum organization and easy reading. Before any of this, however, she had to remove yesterday’s, folding each paper back into a tidy stack. Yesterday’s papers didn’t know about any of this, their headlines still screaming about electricity rates, and Derek would be quoted somewhere in the article, common sense, the voice of reason.
But today he was on every front page, photos from that moment at the press conference when he’d started to cry. Looking guilty as anything, it could not be denied. How could you spin a face like that?
The headlines today all-caps and all-incriminating:
DEREK MURDOCH ACCUSED OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT
BEFORE
The first time Brooke met Derek, she was downtown at Slappin’ Nellie’s, a dive bar Derek’s best friend Brent Ames had bought up and resurrected a few years before as part of a wider effort to rejuvenate the downtown core. It was the go-to place, where they were lax with ID if you didn’t make a point of being conspicuously drunken. And staying under the radar was fine with Brooke, because the whole scene was overwhelming—dark walls and flashing lights, pumping bass and dancing bodies—and she was uncomfortable with the idea of being absorbed into it. Instead, that night, she was watching, swaying, smiling, because she’d had two drinks, but there would be no more. She didn’t want to lose what little cool she had, ending up like her friend Vanessa who, at that instant, was vomiti
ng into a toilet already stopped up with reams of paper towel. Because as much as Slappin’ Nellie’s was their current stand-in for something worldly, being here only underlined to Brooke how much she wanted more than what this place had on offer. She knew that at the end of the summer, she and Vanessa would go their separate ways, and it was the possibility of it all that had Brooke swaying with more verve than usual that night, feeling above her station, perhaps, when Derek Murdoch appeared at her side. Scoping out the scene himself as he sipped his drink, offering a conspiratorial glance. He was better-looking than in photographs, she noted. Before, Brooke had wondered what his appeal really was, but seeing him in person, you could almost understand.
“Your friends are out there?” he asked her, gesturing toward the dance floor, and Brooke nodded, even though they weren’t. She didn’t want to let on that she was alone. Derek said, “Well, then, why aren’t you dancing with everyone else?” That old song was playing about the bed that’s on fire with passionate love.
But Brooke was determined not to be undone by his charm. She shrugged. “I don’t have to dance with everyone else.”
Derek nodded intently, like he was really considering what she’d said. “What’s your name?” he asked. “I think I’ve seen you around.”
“I’ve never been here before.”
“Around town, I mean.” They had to shout to be heard over the music’s crescendo. “You look familiar.”
She said, “Do I?”
“I’m Derek,” he said, as though he were offering her something, as though everybody didn’t know his name already. As though Brooke hadn’t seen his face on election signs all over town just a few months ago. He’d been a city councilor in the municipal election before that, the youngest person ever to be elected to office in Lanark, and she knew the whole Fire Boy Hero story. She also knew, like everybody else downtown did, about his reputation with the ladies. He “liked to have a good time with them” was perhaps the genteel way of putting it.
It was a reputation Brooke was pretty sure was not unfounded, especially with the way he’d sidled up beside her…but now Derek was pointing across the room at the guy in the DJ booth, Brent, almost as much of a local hero as he was. Derek said, “Listen, you know my buddy, Brent? He owns this place.” Brooke nodded. He said, “He’d get in a lot of trouble, see? If cops found out there were high school kids here.”
Brooke waited a moment. “What are you trying to say?”
“Just watching out for my friend,” said Derek.
“Okay,” said Brooke, drawing out the word with a sigh. Derek Murdoch wasn’t just a dork, he was an asshole. Who did he think he was, the liquor control board? The youngest person ever to be appointed to that too, no doubt.
“What is your name?” he asked, just before she walked away from him.
She said, “I’m Brooke.”
“Hi, Brooke,” he said, extending his hand now, like this was an election and he was installing a lawn sign. If she’d had a baby, he would have kissed it. Derek Murdoch was a cheesy guy, but his schtick was less off-putting than it should have been. He was watching out for his friend, his business. She’d been expecting sleaze, but he’d turned out to be more upstanding, even if it was annoying, and maybe the rumors about him were wrong, was what she was thinking as she accepted his handshake. As he leaned in close and confided, “You’re right, you know. You don’t have to dance with everyone else.” And then walked off into the night.
The whole encounter had been dazzling—or maybe that was just the lights and the booze, or that he was this famous guy who’d picked her out of a crowd. Whatever it was, after the fact, she had a difficult time believing that any of it had really happened.
Which was the reason she hoped she would see him again, and she did, nearly half a year later. By this time she had been away at school in the city for an entire semester, but was home for Christmas, out with a few high school friends who were turning into strangers, and once again she felt apart from things, standing at a remove.
Then there he was, alone. She recognized his profile, and approached him without even deciding she would. And was this that thing called charisma, such an inexplicable draw? She’d only ever read about it in books before.
Once she’d come up beside him at the bar, he turned her way. “You’re Brooke,” he said. And so the draw was explicable after all; he’d remembered her name. This guy. Who was waiting now with an expectant look—like he knew she’d be impressed. And she was. But did remembering her name mean that she was special or that he was, with such a remarkable skill for recognition? Either way, she liked it, but she didn’t want to show how much.
“We’ve met before,” he reminded her.
“I know,” she said, “but I’m not in high school anymore, so you don’t need to worry.”
“I’m not worried,” he said. “But listen, I know you. I do. It’s driving me crazy. I’ve seen you before, I’m sure of it, but I just can’t figure out from where.”
“You mean, apart from the time you threatened to have me thrown out of this place?”
“It wasn’t like that. And you’re just so familiar.”
She said, “Well, you’re kind of familiar too.” Playing like this was a two-way street, catching him off guard in the process. And surely he would call her bluff? But then, what kind of a person would he be if he did? Only the kind of person who is aware of just how important he is—but Derek Murdoch didn’t want to give that impression. He tried to wear his power like a shrug. “Where do I know you from?” she asked him. Like a joke.
He said, “Well, I work in politics.” He didn’t get it.
“Politics?”
“Party stuff, elections, making laws. You know.”
“I know about politics,” Brooke said. The music was quieter up at the bar than where they’d spoken the last time, beside the dance floor. She didn’t have to shout for him to hear her, and suddenly she felt a desire for him to know they had a connection after all. “I study politics,” she told him. “At school in the city.”
“Oh yeah?”
She said, “And I’m kidding, of course. About not knowing who you are. I would have voted for you. If I’d been old enough then.” She sensed an ease come over him with this statement, a return to familiar ground.
He said, “You mean that?” And from his expression, she could tell it was important that she did. That he needed her to, that he even desired her approval. And because she really did mean it, she told him so, and then he bought her a shot. “I mean, since you’re not in high school anymore.” Now he was the one teasing.
He gave her his card. “For when you’re back in the city,” he said. “And even when you’re not, I mean. We’re always looking for people who are into politics. Lots of ways to work together. Email me.” She tucked his card into her tiny purse and returned to her friends feeling a little buoyant, light-headed, or maybe she’d just had too many drinks. Her euphoria abated somewhat moments later when she saw Derek on the dance floor kissing a blonde girl, his hands all over her body.
Tuesday Afternoon
What if she just skipped today? Brooke considered as she dealt with the newspapers in the library. What if she just left the newspaper rods empty? “It’s not like there isn’t plenty of other stuff to read in the library,” she would explain to anyone who complained, and the only people who came in to read the papers were old people anyway. Everybody else read their news online now—although she could put a stop to that too if she switched off the power bar at the computer bank and disabled the Wi-Fi for the people who read the news on their phones. “The whole system’s gone down,” she’d say if they asked, feigning sheepishness. “Too bad, too, because I’ve got absolutely no idea who’s being accused of sexual misconduct today. But what are you going to do?”
And if her best friend Carly were there, she’d be rolling her eyes, bursting out in frustr
ation, “Why are you always defending him? Protecting him?” She’d be asking why Brooke was always making excuses, discovering loopholes, fixing it all, concocting fabulous explanations for why Derek’s behavior was just fine. For sure, if Brooke had been there at the press conference the night before, she would have been the one waiting downstairs in the parking garage with the ignition on, the getaway car. Roaring around sharp corners at top speed, just to get Derek out of trouble—but it was here that her fantasy was extinguished. Derek never let her drive. It was always him behind the wheel.
She felt the same instinct, though, to shield him, to excuse him. And not just because all that had been her job for so long. The single reason Brooke was grateful Carly was far away right now, doing an internship in South America, was that she wouldn’t have to explain to her friend what was really happening in her life, what was happening to Derek. Because if she did try to explain, Carly would only dismiss the fact that this was a setup, character assassination, sheer political opportunism.
“But do the details even matter?” Carly would demand. “If everything they’re saying, in general, is basically true?”
Can you really convict a man on the basis of his poor character though? Could that be enough? Wasn’t it the facts that were supposed to count, facts Brooke could hardly believe herself as she skimmed the papers below the headlines to understand? These women who’d come forward were being used by Derek’s foes both inside and outside the party. They were pawns, their stories batted around for political gain, accusing Derek of such terrible things. The Derek they were describing wasn’t the person that Brooke knew, and even if the last few months had suggested that Brooke didn’t know him so well, she didn’t want to see him suffer. Another fact, but one that would have Carly demanding: Why not? Because wouldn’t it be a kind of restitution? Maybe, but there was nothing satisfying about it, and Brooke would continue to insist Derek was a better man than Carly thought he was, because what would it say about Brooke if he wasn’t?