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  Anyway, the senator asked me to alert you that she is no longer moving forward with her push for the birth control bill. She told me to thank you so much for all of your hard work (she’d tell you herself, but she’s about to dash up to Albany), but that she doesn’t want to get into it with the Mississippi contingent, and she also said “I don’t think this matters very much right now,” in case that helps you understand. I think she meant that in the nicest way possible!!!! As in, we don’t need to worry about this for now!!!!

  Great news, right?

  Hope you’re feeling great!!!!!!!!!

  Blair

  From: Miller, Natalie

  To: Foley, Blair

  Re: re: The BC bill

  Blair—

  Please ask the senator to hold off her car to Albany, I’m coming into the office. And tell Kyle he better get his ass in gear: I expect to speak with him when I’m there. Tell him those words exactly.

  —Natalie

  I surveyed myself in the mirror. This wouldn’t do at all: the ratty, thinning hair, the pallid, blotchy skin, the protruding cheekbones that resembled Kate Moss at the height of her drug habit. Shit, I muttered, standing in my now much more spacious closet and looking for a magic suit that would somehow make me look not even polished but merely presentable. I’d settle for presentable. I grabbed a tweed skirt suit, tugged on my nude hose, and slipped my tingly feet (a side effect from the chemo) into my alligator-skin pumps. PETA would have a field day in my closet, despite the fact that Dupris (and thus supposedly her staff), at least on paper, was staunchly pro-animal rights. However, I suspected that if PETA took a closer look into Dupris’s wardrobe, they’d find it even more egregious than mine. A rabid fan of just about any accessory that required an animal skinning, she wasn’t quite the poster child she was thought to be. I took a more tempered approach. I loved dogs more than anything, tolerated cats, and only ate red meat when I’d already gulped down a minimum of two glasses of wine. Anything fewer, and I was a part-time vegetarian.

  I splashed cold water on my face and gingerly applied a layer of Stila concealer underneath my eyes. I stared into the mirror and saw myself for what I was, or at least what I looked like to the outside world: an exhausted, disheveled, thrown-together mess, nothing that even touched a reflection of who I was a month earlier. I stared until tears started to well. Hold it together, Nat, hold it together, I whispered to myself as a wet drop slithered down my cheek. This wasn’t who I was. This wasn’t who I should be. I focused in on my moist eyes and wondered if there would ever be a day again when I’d come close to being the person of my former life. And then I realized that my bruised-looking eyes aside, today could be that day. I, Natalie Miller, was going to the office. To get something done. To make a sweeping change to protect the uteri of women across the nation. And with a rush of adrenaline, I stuck my hand back into the pot of concealer.

  When one layer wouldn’t do, I slathered on another, then another, and then remembered a trick that Sally had written about for Allure: dotting the insides of your eyes with white eye shadow to make them pop and look more awake. I dipped my finger into a packed tub of shadow that sparkled like a field of morning snow and dabbed my eyes. I’m not sure I looked more alert or more like a dressed-up fairy on Halloween, but I didn’t have time to remedy it. The senator would be leaving any minute. I pulled my still somewhat tolerable, though slightly thinning hair back with a headband, slid on rosy pink lipstick and thick, black mascara, and dashed downstairs to a cab. Christ. Sally. I dialed her from the back of the taxi and told her I’d take a rain check for tomorrow.

  “You’re not going into work, are you?” she asked. “I thought you’d committed to taking it easy for a few months.”

  “Emergency, Sal, emergency.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told the cab driver to cut down Central Park West to avoid the traffic. He ignored me and turned up the hip-hop station on the radio.

  “Fine.” She sighed. “I’m working on a ridiculous story on infidelity, anyway. God, what I wouldn’t do to be able to actually cover a story that really matters.” She paused, refocusing on me. “Wait, Nat, define emergency.”

  “A situation in which I control the power to single-handedly save the future of your reproductive rights.”

  “Single-handedly?” I heard her sigh again.

  “More or less, yes.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not the actual senator are you?”

  “More or less, Sally. I don’t think she could survive without me.”

  THREE

  It had started raining by the time I made my way through midtown traffic, so I pressed ten dollars into the cab driver’s hand and dashed to the revolving doors, leaving wet handprints on the glass as I pushed through. The elevator doors were closing, but I shouted “Hold it,” and bolted there just in time, sticking the tips of my fingers through and pushing back the doors. “Thanks,” I muttered to the lunch crowd, to really no one in particular, and offered a thin smile.

  When the senator won her seat after a fierce campaign six years ago, just after I’d come to work for her as an assistant, one of her first tasks was to purchase office space in midtown Manhattan. She liked to be “among the people,” as she liked to say, though her brushes with “real citizens” were usually limited to her walks to and from The Four Seasons for lunch or Frederick Fekkai for highlights. We sat on the thirty-first floor—too far above to hear the raucous din of the taxi horns or the clangs of construction or the buzzing of the pedestrians, and certainly too far aloft to make out any of the pedestrians’ faces or to see their problems or assess their woes.

  In fact, though my office had a sweeping window with a decent view of Third Avenue, most of the time the blinds remained firmly shut. If the sun bore down and spread its rays across my desk, I’d find myself missing the fresh air that I wouldn’t get to taste for another twelve hours. So generally, the blinds did the trick, casting an illusion of my insulated world, as if the only thing that mattered was the policy I was crafting on my computer, not the people below whom the policy might actually affect.

  I hadn’t been back to the office in the month since my diagnosis. Although I’d practically begged the senator to let me keep working, she personally fielded a call from Dr. Chin, and when she explained my long hours and my incessant travel schedule (and, I assume, my insatiable appetite for the office), they both agreed that I should tone it down a notch (or two) while my body acclimated to the chemo. Even my mother agreed—my mom who once decided, back when I was eleven, that she wanted to run the New York marathon, just to test herself, to see how far her body could sustain the pain (and most likely insanity), and thus trained for all of five weeks, and managed to cross the finish line at just under four hours. So it wasn’t as if my mother’s sympathy chip was finely honed.

  My parents had driven up from Philly for my first round of chemo. “You don’t have to,” I’d told them on the phone, wiping away the snot that poured from my nostrils after succumbing to a crying fit over Ned. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wailed so loudly; surely my neighbors thought that someone had died. But then I did remember it, of course. It was when Jake cut a wedge so deeply into my heart that I feared I’d never be able to successfully breathe, much less relish the life that comes along with that breath, again.

  But my parents arrived just three hours later, and my mom sat and squeezed my shoulder as I reclined in a blue recliner and watched General Hospital while liquid toxins filled my bloodstream. “That wasn’t so bad,” I told my mom in the cab ride home, and she rubbed my back and pulled my head to her shoulder, something she probably hadn’t done since I was about five.

  My parents stuck around through the weekend. Although Dr. Chin had warned me of the symptoms, sometimes words do little to warn you of the oncoming storm. Within a day, getting out of bed to pee seemed too big a task. To say that the fatigue felt as if I’d been plowed, flattened, pancaked by a Mack truck would be close to the truth. T
o say that the effort required to lift just my pinky or my little toe or even to crack open my eyelids felt Herculean would also be accurate.

  And of course, the pesky part of dealing with the exhaustion is that within twenty-four hours, I was also battling nausea. So the little energy I did have in reserves was spent running back and forth to the bathroom with the threat of constant vomiting. Finally, my mother matter-of-factly placed a stainless-steel bowl, one that Ned and I had bought at Bed Bath & Beyond when we moved in together, at the right side of my bed. What had been purchased with the thought of spending lingering hours whipping up gourmet delicacies as a new cohabitating unit now served to receive the pure bile purged from my stomach; it wasn’t as if I had the appetite to eat anything to barf back up.

  Five days later, I slowly emerged from the cocoon of my first chemo treatment, and my parents checked out of the Waldorf, ready to return to their now semialtered lives. I was gingerly stepping out of the shower when they stopped over to say good-bye.

  “We’ll be back in a few weeks,” my dad said, ignoring my damp hair and pulling me into him, as I clung to the top of the towel rather than return his embrace. He kissed the top of my head, and I heard his voice crack.

  “I spoke with your boss,” my mom interrupted, as I pulled back from my father. “She’s agreed that it’s best if you work from home—or really, don’t work at all—for a few weeks or even months.”

  “What? Who gave you the right to do that? We’re headed into the election, I’m not taking any time off.” I walked into the bedroom to get dressed.

  “Natalie, this isn’t negotiable,” she said to my back.

  I slung on a sweatshirt and pajama bottoms and reemerged with the towel wrapped around my head. “I can’t believe that you did this!” I was sixteen all over again and my mother had just called my swim coach and told her that they were pulling me from the team so that I could focus on my SATs. It’s not that I loved swimming, and truly, it wasn’t even that I didn’t want to focus on my SATs (after all, no one became president with lousy SATs…or so I thought at the time), but it was all so typical: her making decisions about me, for me, whether I wanted to quit swimming or not.

  My mother eyed me coolly. “The senator and I both spoke with Dr. Chin. And this is how it’s going to be, so don’t waste your energy screaming at me. You need to preserve what you have right now.”

  “Why are you butting in?” I pulled the towel off my head, throwing it on the couch. “This is totally ridiculous. It’s my life. I know what’s best for me, and cutting myself out at work is not what’s best for me.”

  My mom moved forward to kiss my cheek. “Honestly dear. I really don’t think that you know what’s best for you.” And then she took my father’s hand and walked out the door, leaving me there shaking from rage, damp hair, and the side effects of chemo.

  A month later, with nothing much to show for my time off other than accumulated knowledge of The Price Is Right, I knew with more certainty than ever that my mother barely knew me, much less knew what was best for me.

  Now, back at the office, as the gold-mirrored elevator doors opened, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the buzzing of the junior aides in their cubicles or the pulsing of the incessantly ringing phones. No, it was a foul, fetid rotting smell. I gulped down a pocket of air and tried to breathe through my mouth as I made my way through the maze of cubes to the senator’s office at the opposite end of the floor. When we first moved in, Dupris had attempted to make the space look luxurious—I convinced her that it certainly wasn’t illegal to allocate the extra campaign money for renovations—but regardless of how she dressed it up, it still looked like a drab, lifeless void…except for the toiling of the actual live bodies. Staid white cubes were laid out like honeycomb; bluish-grayish carpeting hid linoleum tiles on the floor; fluorescent bulbs glared down from above, highlighting our omnipresent purple under-eye circles.

  Blair was laughing into her earpiece when I reached her desk. She pushed her blond bob behind her ears, then held up a finger and mouthed, “One second,” when she saw me. “Love you, too,” she said, before she clicked off. “Sorry.” She looked up at me and beamed. Clearly a new boyfriend.

  At twenty-two, fresh out of Georgetown, Blair still had the naïveté to be caught up in the throes of young Manhattan love, which would inevitably get stomped into the ground as soon as one of them got too drunk one night and made out with another twenty-two-year-old in a basement bar with pulsing music and far too many candles to legally pass any sort of fire code. “I told him not to call me here, but, you know how it is…” She waved her manicured hand in front of her.

  “It fucking reeks in here. What the hell is going on?” I peered down, ignoring her idealistic romanticism.

  “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. Yes, yes, I know.” The blood drained from her face. “Um, a pipe burst three days ago, and um, water seems to have gotten underneath the carpet. So, um, it seems to have, um, mildewed. The cleaners are coming tonight after work.”

  “Whatever.” I sighed and looked toward Dupris’s door. “Can I go in?”

  Blair bit her lip. “You just missed her actually.” Her voice rose an octave, as she jumped out of her chair and tripped over one of the legs. “Natalie, I’m so sorry! I tried to tell her that you were coming in, but she said that she couldn’t wait, and I tried to delay her, but…”

  I pushed open the door and slammed it behind me before she could finish. Dupris’s office looked jarringly different from the hovel in which we plebeians toiled. Rich forest-green drapes hung from the picture windows, lush cream carpeting welcomed my pumps. Her deep ebony desk had been a gift from an Indian ambassador: He claimed that his son had made it so she didn’t have to refuse it as a potential bribe. And of course, for the senator, there were no fluorescent lights with which to highlight the damage from the previous evening’s all-nighter. Just brass lamps scattered throughout. If you didn’t know that you were in the office of one of the most powerful women on the Hill, you might have thought you’d inadvertently walked into an Ethan Allen catalog.

  I pulled out her chocolate leather chair and sat down, grabbing the gold calligraphy pen that was perched on the right corner.

  Senator Dupris—

  I’m sorry that I missed you. I know that you don’t check e-mail, so wanted to leave you a note. I strongly urge you to reconsider your stance on the birth control referendum. I know that we can avoid the Mississippi contingent—I looked into it and have some tactics and information to quiet them.

  Please keep this in mind.

  —Natalie

  PS—Thanks for the orchids last week. They are wonderful and thriving in my living room.

  “Good God, Blair,” I said as I left Dupris’s office. “How can you even work with this rancid smell?”

  “You get used to it. I can’t even smell anything, actually.” She burrowed around in her purse. “Want a piece of gum?”

  “No. Thank you.” I craned my neck around to peer into the cubes. “Where’s Kyle? Did you give him my message?”

  She folded the piece of gum into her mouth and turned the color of a spring beet. “Um, I forwarded your e-mail to his BlackBerry, but he hasn’t been in all morning, and he didn’t write me back. I wasn’t sure what to do.”

  I inhaled and exhaled just like Janice told me to do. But this deep breathing thing really didn’t seem to be working. So after three goes of it, I slammed my hand down on her desk and stared until she pressed herself as far back as was humanly possible to press oneself into a swivel chair without actually becoming one with it.

  I started to open my mouth, to chastise her for a job so inadequately done, but all at once, I was exhausted. Bone-crushingly exhausted. Crawl-under-the-desk exhausted. I broke my gaze from Blair, massaged my temples with my now-stinging hand, and leaned back into her desk.

  “Natalie, are you okay?” Blair asked meekly, cocking her head to the side and putting on a worried face.

  I blew out my breath and
stood up straight, tugging at my jacket to ensure that I didn’t wrinkle.

  “Fine, Blair. I’m fine.” And with that, I turned and walked toward the elevator before it became apparent to anyone besides me that I wasn’t fine at all.

  ROUND TWO

  October

  FOUR

  I had the dream again. The same one I had during the first week of my first cycle. I was at a deserted amusement park at dusk, and when I looked out from my perch atop a roller coaster, I saw that the only people left on the grounds were the clowns. Thousands of them. Bright red wigs bobbing up and down, silly plodding shoes leading their way. I sat on the roller coaster and at once felt my car, one in the very back, lurch forward, and soon I was flying so fast that tears unwillingly came to my eyes. The car slowed as it approached the big incline upward, and suddenly (because this can happen only in dreams), I was squished in my seat by dozens of clowns. Overflowing even. Pressed like sardines up against me with a saccharine smell of cotton candy. I tried to undo my seat belt to jump, to release myself before my claustrophobia set in, but it was as if the ride itself wouldn’t set me free. We reached the top of the climb, and I felt it—the panic that comes right before a dead drop, the kind that I imagine pilots sense when a plane has gone into a nosedive.

  “Please,” I shouted to the clowns below. “Please, pull the lever and make it stop!” But all I heard was merry-go-round music, oompa-loompaing in the background, my voice bouncing off it and echoing back. And besides, it was already too late. We’d crossed the hump of the hill, and gravity was already pulling us down. I tried to grab hold of the clown pressed up to my right, but my grip went right through him, like he was an apparition and bore no weight. The car was flying, and I was going with it. We went fast, faster, faster still until we tore off the track, skidding against the paved grounds and leaving smoke in our wake. We landed on a mound of sand, a flattened beach in the middle of the park, and though I should have felt relief, what I felt was only increasing panic. Because all at once, like a tentacle around my calves, a sucking force pulled me down, deeper, deeper until I was in the sand up to my thighs. I frantically flailed over crimson clown wigs, oversized buttons, and suffocating cotton candy, but no matter how much I willed it to be so, I couldn’t gain solid footing. And I couldn’t make it stop. Just as I was about to give up, just as I was about to surrender to my fate, a hand reached out and pulled me up. I tried to see who it was, see who saved me, but all I saw was a faceless shadow, and then, even that was gone.