Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel Read online

  “This will just be a blip,” Gaby said, staring at her phone, reading and talking and strategizing all at once. She looked up, locked eyes with Cleo, who was settling in behind her highly organized, extremely neat desk, unwinding her scarf that warded off the late-spring chill, sinking into her chair that needed some WD-40 again to stop the squeaking. “I’ll squelch this like . . .” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”

  “I know,” Cleo said. “This doesn’t worry me.” A beat. “All that much.”

  She reached over and straightened a pile of color-coded folders, then brushed some dust off the silver-plated picture frame with a shot of Lucas when he was a toddler and dressed as a chocolate-chip cookie for Halloween.

  “We can have the bitch killed,” Gaby said, laughing just a little. She knew, as a black woman, that she had to manage her anger, at least outwardly, though not so much in front of Cleo, who had known her since their second year at Columbia Law. If she said this aloud outside the office, the headlines would go on for days, likely ruining her career and possibly ruining any hope of Cleo’s run for president.

  “That might be extreme: death,” Cleo replied. “She’s just nursing a grudge from high school, though the paternity stuff is wildly out-of-bounds. Obviously.” She tapped her mouse, zapping the screen saver of the suffragettes and waking her computer. “Still, I suppose I could have been kinder back then.”

  “We all could have been kinder in high school.”

  “Weren’t you elected, like, homecoming queen?”

  “Well, sure.” Gaby reached for a protein bar from her bag. She was training for a marathon and had to eat every two hours. “But I didn’t get there by being nice. Homecoming queens are elected by playing dirty.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I was not homecoming queen.”

  “I don’t list it on my résumé,” Gaby said. “Though it was pretty great training for now. Is Lucas OK?”

  “Fine, actually. He knows it isn’t true.” Cleo sighed. She had real work to do and just wanted this to evaporate. “I can reach out to MaryAnne. I think she still lives in Seattle. I can apologize.”

  Gaby inhaled sharply. “You only apologize when I tell you to.”

  “I just meant that I think I could smooth the waters with her.” Cleo thought of her old friend, and even with her public betrayal, she recognized that maybe MaryAnne’s wounds weren’t entirely unjustified. Her tactics? Yes. Her inaccuracies? Well, sure. But Cleo had burned the two of them down. That also was true. And maybe it still stung for MaryAnne in ways that Cleo had numbed herself to.

  “If there had been a time to make it go away, it would have been before the op-ed on that ridiculous site, which, let’s be clear, is not even journalism,” Gaby said. “Besides, you’re a single mother who has a fifty-four-percent approval rating. We can withstand one bump as long as it’s managed.”

  This was true. People did like Cleo. That’s why donors were lining up, encouraging her to run. That’s why her office was stacked with photos of her with musicians, actors, and plenty of big hitters in DC too. Both sides of the aisle, which was no small feat these days. She was measured and level and generally batted straight down the middle but wasn’t afraid to swing at a curveball or a breaking ball, an analogy that she felt she could own, since she was the only girl who’d still played Little League at eleven. By twelve, the boys were outpacing her, and her parents gave her the option of switching to tennis. Initially Cleo had been heartbroken, but then she quickly wised up that it wasn’t baseball that she loved; rather, it was winning, and if she couldn’t be the best at second base (her position), well, she’d be the best from the baseline. It didn’t really matter all that much to Cleo. She just wanted the trophy. And she knew how much her success delighted her parents—she was precocious enough to recognize it even then. Still, she managed to tamp this ambition down in just the right ways in adulthood: too pushy and you were unlikable, not pushy enough and you’d never run for Congress (or president!) in the first place.

  “People do like me,” she said. “But maybe apologizing is the right thing to do anyway.”

  “What did you do?” Gabrielle was now finished with her breakfast bar and was moving on to a green smoothie from the mini fridge that sat under the flat-screen, where news spun around the clock. Cleo eyed the anchor, Bowen Babson—inarguably a man who should have been on Cleo’s radar and in her league, but he was five years younger than she and had a reputation for women ten years younger than him, and so she was theoretically over-the-hill while he was just hitting his prime. Cleo didn’t think she’d ever gotten more than a collegial smile from Bowen, which was fine, she supposed; she didn’t have time or really the inclination for a romance. A quick hit of sex, well, sure. She wasn’t going to turn that down. But even that led to complications of publicity, of gossip, and when you are in the public eye, you can’t afford a scandal such as occasionally sleeping with the anchor of Good Afternoon, USA, even with his green eyes and jaw that looked like Captain America’s. Today Bowen must have been sitting in for the regular morning anchor. Cleo didn’t mind. She didn’t mind one bit, actually.

  “What did you do to her?” Gabrielle repeated. “Because you know I don’t care, to be clear. High school shit is high school shit.”

  “Says the prom queen.”

  “Homecoming queen,” Gabrielle corrected.

  “Forgive me, is there a difference? We had neither.”

  “You didn’t have homecoming? Or . . . prom?”

  Cleo shook her head. “We had both, but I grew up in Seattle, you’re forgetting. They didn’t believe in anointing women—or men, I guess—into categories. Or winners. Or whatever. We didn’t have cheerleaders either.”

  Gabrielle’s eyes grew wide. But she was from Texas, and other than Election Day, the Super Bowl was the most historic day of the year for her.

  “So she’s not mad at you for going Carrie on her at homecoming. OK, I can cross that one off.”

  “If you seriously thought I was the type to dump blood on someone for wearing a tiara, I feel as if we have other questions to address.”

  Gabrielle laughed at this, and Cleo did too, deflecting for the moment that Cleo had not always been as likable or as kind. (Was she kind now? She didn’t even know.) Gabrielle reached toward the mini fridge and grabbed a second green juice, sliding it across Cleo’s desk, which, despite its organization, had too many folders and too many papers for a clear path from A to B. Thus, Cleo did not reach for the bottle when it became moored behind a stack of files.

  “Come on, you need your energy. This might be the only healthy thing you eat all day.”

  Gabrielle, marathon trainee, was practically lit from within. Her skin glowed, her energy was boundless, and her teeth—which had little to do with nutrition and more to do with a wonderful Dallas-based orthodontist—were as white and as straight as those of all the celebrities in the photos in her office.

  “Fine,” Cleo acquiesced. “I’ll try it, but I won’t like it.”

  “Welcome to Washington; that’s basically our motto.”

  Gaby and her comms team had gotten out ahead of the story, true. But like it or not, that hadn’t quashed it entirely. The op-ed had over ten thousand retweets on Twitter, and Cleo was also trending, albeit not at number one, so that was a relief. It was nuts, Cleo thought, how this theoretically unimportant—and, more critically, unverified—gossip could take off so quickly. Sometimes politicians used this to their advantage. But today Cleo was playing cleanup. She did one interview: Gabrielle didn’t think that Cleo needed to give such a piece wall-to-wall coverage, and besides, she had to be on the Senate floor for votes, and she simply couldn’t devote all her time to an old high school dispute with her former best friend.

  On CNN, her one interview with Wolf Blitzer, she’d come off as human, flawed (in a good way, which mattered in polling numbers), but not terribly contrite, which Cleo had thought was acceptable.

  “Should we all apologize for being sel
f-centered at seventeen?” Cleo had laughed when Wolf asked her if MaryAnne’s charges of selfishness had merit. “Because I have a fourteen-year-old, and I’m pretty sure that this comes with the territory of being a teenager.”

  “Speaking of him—” Wolf didn’t have to finish his question.

  “Wolf, I can say unequivocally that her lurid insinuation about my son’s father—which is our private family matter—is untrue. I don’t know who her source was, but her facts are wrong. And I don’t want to have to discuss this further.” Cleo didn’t mention that the accusation of an affair was indeed accurate. Because she didn’t want to have to waste any energy thinking about that man, that mistake, and besides, she felt confident that by batting down MaryAnne’s gossip with facts, she could bat down the rest of it too. On this, with Wolf, she proved correct.

  “Also, Wolf, I should say that I’d rather not discuss my son.”

  Lucas was going to be pissed that she’d mentioned him publicly, though technically this was MaryAnne’s fault—generally, he would have preferred that she ignore his existence in any capacity other than at home and/or when he needed money or food or a ride or whatever else he requested when he emerged from his room, and he certainly did not like her to mention him in interviews. But it was true: teenagers were assholes, and Cleo didn’t want to lose the chance at the presidential nomination because of that.

  “Moody teenage years do have the right to be off-limits . . .” Wolf smiled.

  “And no one gets out of those unscathed.” Cleo smiled.

  Wolf chuckled but pressed her. “I have a grown daughter. I understand. But . . . why did your friend raise this at all, if it’s all untrue? Just a baseless smear?”

  “You’d have to ask her about her intentions,” Cleo replied, and immediately she knew this was a mistake. Cleo rarely made mistakes, much less in public, much less with Wolf Blitzer. The last thing she wanted was CNN chasing down MaryAnne Newman and combing through Cleo’s childhood—or any of it. She knew some of this was inevitable with a presidential run; with her congressional campaigns—barring her first campaign against Martin Bridgewater, which had been a bit of a nail-biter—she’d easily triumphed, and any opposition research had been limited and squelched quickly, but she didn’t need to direct the cameras to MaryAnne’s doorstep.

  Cleo followed up before Wolf could latch on to her slip. “What I mean, Wolf, is that of course there were petty disagreements. If memory serves, we both chased the coveted editor of the paper position and a junior-year summer internship, and we were both on the debate team. I was captain. Perhaps MaryAnne thought that she should have been instead. It was a long time ago, before . . . well, as you and your viewers know, my senior year was difficult for many reasons—”

  “Your parents,” Wolf interjected, as if Cleo had forgotten.

  “Yes, well, my parents were killed the summer before in a helicopter accident, and I don’t think that any seventeen-year-old can be expected to handle that with the grace that’s required. Not completely anyway.”

  Cleo did not want to play the “dead parents card” any more than she wanted to play the “Lucas card.” But it was true: her parents had been killed when, as a surprise anniversary present, her dad took her mom up on a new Boeing chopper he was working on, and Cleo then had to move in with her grandmother. And maybe she still would have cut MaryAnne off at the knees to be the editor of the paper—she was the golden child of the household, and she knew, both then and now, that her parents had hung the moon on her achievements—but Cleo couldn’t say now. Her dad had taught her to reach for what she wanted, to grab hold and dig her nails in deep, so she didn’t think he would mind her mentioning her parents now. With Wolf. On national TV. With the presidential bid calling. Her mother, though . . . her mother may have minded.

  “So you do have regrets?” Wolf asked.

  “Don’t all people have regrets?” She hoped her face didn’t twitch when she said this, betraying her. She’d have to rewatch the tape later to be sure.

  Wolf nodded at this and let her off the hook. Politicians being human was always a good thing to go to commercial with.

  Did Cleo have regrets? Of course she did. But this did not please Gaby.

  “I love you, Clee,” she said once the CNN crew had left their offices and in between bites of her midday omelet (protein). She passed Cleo a wipe to remove the TV makeup. “But you admitted that you’ve made mistakes. Men can do that. Women, not so much.”

  Gaby reminded Cleo of her mother when she said this, which was maybe part of the reason they were such good friends. Cleo had discipline, to be sure. But Gaby had acumen beyond the rigidity and focus needed to become a congresswoman at twenty-five and a senator at thirty-one. Gaby had been the one to nurse the slow but steady drumbeat of support for a presidential run, molding Cleo’s messages and tone, which initially were more strident than necessary and probably more off-putting than Cleo realized. MaryAnne wasn’t the only one from Seattle who harbored a grudge. And probably Northwestern. And Columbia Law. Cleo was likable enough to get elected but not so likable that she ever would have won a popularity contest of her peers. She didn’t care all that much, but Gaby did, which was why Gaby had vision, just like Mona, Cleo’s mom, who’d had vision in a different way—she’d been part of the company at the Pacific Northwest Ballet until she first got pregnant, and then she picked up painting, as if that had been a natural course for her all along. She became fairly well-known for her work within the Seattle art scene—not because she was Georgia O’Keeffe or Frida Kahlo (the list of famous female artists was sadly significantly shorter than their male peers) but because she had a unique ability to capture a specific, piercing emotion in each of her works. As if she could see through not just her subjects but her audience too. Gaby was like this: a seer, and it made her extremely excellent at her job and dangerous too.

  “I didn’t mean to sound weak,” Cleo said. Her stomach growled as Gaby tore into her omelet. “And I don’t think I did. Isn’t part of the human experience admitting your mistakes?”

  “Human but not female.”

  “Disagree.” Cleo palmed her stomach, as if this would quell her hunger. “Part of being a good lawmaker is the ability to adapt.” Cleo thought of her dad, how he’d tell her to jab left if she couldn’t jab right. To dance, to move, to win. And her mom would laugh and laugh when she and her dad did this little jig in their kitchen—his hands up and Cleo punching them, as if her dad were an amateur boxer and not a nerdy Boeing engineer, and as if Cleo were a prizefighter, not a middle schooler who barely made the growth charts. And how happy it made Cleo to see her mom laugh and to please both of them. That laughter and approval and Cleo winning were all knotted together, especially after Georgie, her older sister, had been such a disappointment.

  Gaby’s phone buzzed before they could get into it further, which Cleo found to be a bit of a relief. She and Gaby so rarely disagreed, and she didn’t want to butt heads with her closest advisor, not over MaryAnne Newman.

  Gaby’s face grew still as her eyes raced over her screen.

  “Hmm,” she said, and it was not a hmm of ponderance. More a hmm of displeasure.

  Cleo’s stomach rumbled again, and she pressed her intercom, asking her executive assistant to bring her something, anything that they had on hand in the office. Someone had grabbed a tray of muffins a day or so ago, left over from a meeting. That could do.

  “Hmm,” Gaby muttered again, and this time Cleo could not wait.

  “What?”

  Arianna, in a blazing fuchsia sweater and wide-legged black pants that reminded Cleo of the shape of the Liberty Bell, entered with the picked-over plate of muffins and a bag of Bugles. This was surely not the job she’d had in mind when she graduated from Columbia Law last May, but everyone needed to start somewhere. (Cleo often worked on legislation with Arianna’s father, an environmental lawyer, and when he called her to say his daughter was graduating from Cleo’s alma mater and could she find room o
n her staff, Cleo happily did.)

  “This was all I could find. But I can run out?” All of Arianna’s sentences ended with a question mark, which Cleo made a mental note to dissuade her from. Women in politics didn’t have the luxury of ending their sentences on an upswing, as if they were asking permission, as if they couldn’t find the answers themselves, as if they were waiting for someone to guide them. Actually, Cleo thought, women everywhere couldn’t afford this.

  “Don’t worry,” Cleo said to Arianna, reaching for a nonspecific flavor that she thought might be carrot but proved to be banana nut. “This is great.”

  “I’m sorry,” Arianna said. She tugged at the hem of her sweater.

  “Don’t apologize,” Cleo replied. “Don’t apologize for anything if you’re not responsible for the problem.”