“OK. I’ll try.”
“It takes a while,” Cleo added. “Eventually you’ll refuse to apologize even when you are responsible.” Cleo thought again of her parents in the kitchen, with her report cards hung on the refrigerator and a giant poster board from the science fair—an exploration of the hierarchy of a beehive—which had won first prize that month. Of how her dad had kept telling her to hit his palms harder and harder, then harder still, and how he was sweating by then, and Cleo was a little worried about him to be honest, but she put some muscle behind it, and then the phone rang, and her dad startled, and Cleo inadvertently hit him square in the jaw. He refused to allow her to apologize. She was just doing what he asked, he said. Cleo felt guilty for the evening but then resolved that he was right. He told her to assert her strength, and she did. She shouldn’t be sorry. He was the one who had jolted. (But she did check on him and bring him another ice pack. She loved her dad something fierce.)
“Also, Arianna, can you check my passport and ensure that everything is up-to-date? I am heading out on the delegation trip to the Middle East in a few weeks.” Technically all her papers were in order, but Cleo liked to be sure before each trip anyway. There was something methodical about her process that she found reassuring.
Arianna squeaked that she would and shut the door behind her, the hems of her pants swaying as she went.
“So,” Gaby said. “This story isn’t going away.”
“But I did Wolf Blitzer!” Cleo swallowed a bite of the muffin top and wondered if her assessment of banana nut was wrong. What else could it be? It wasn’t carrot; it wasn’t banana nut. “What kind of muffin is this?” She broke off a piece and offered it to Gaby.
“Technically I’m off gluten, but this is what you pay me for, so . . .” She placed it on her tongue, assessed. “It’s vanilla macadamia.”
Cleo was impressed not just with her palate but also with her certainty. Indeed, it was vanilla macadamia, which she’d never have sussed out on her own.
“It looks like MaryAnne has some clout up in Seattle. Turning this into a bit of a stink.” Gaby paused, still scrolling. “She was interviewed on their own local news today . . . and . . .” Scrolling. “She shared the ridiculous op-ed on Facebook, which I guess was seen by some of your old classmates.” She tapped her phone. “Hmm. OK, well, some of your classmates are defending you but . . . hmm, OK, wow, well, some of them are not.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
Gaby sighed. Rested her phone in her lap next to her takeout container with the half-eaten omelet.
“So, Cleo, I love you. You know that. I will work with you forever and tirelessly, and I believe that you can and should be president. Even before forty.”
“What’s the ‘but’ coming?”
“But we’ve never really had the conversation about your past.”
“I don’t have a past,” Cleo said. Her muffin was becoming much less appealing.
“Everyone has a past, Clee.”
“Well, obviously.”
“What I mean is, you didn’t have liabilities in your New York race because no one cared all that much. New York wanted you, and they loved you, and it wasn’t even close. But this time it will be different.”
Cleo nodded. This wasn’t her first rodeo. In fact, it would technically be her sixth. Three congressional races, two senatorial.
“I’m not a dummy,” she said. “I know what I’m in for.”
“Then I need to know what I’m in for,” Gabrielle said. “I can’t protect you if I don’t know. Why would MaryAnne mention some married professor? I get that the timing is off with Lucas, but that doesn’t seem pulled from thin air.”
Cleo laughed but not her normal laugh, and they both knew it. It was her nervous laugh that she’d use whenever she needed to give herself a moment to strategize. It wasn’t actually all that often that she needed it. She was almost always prepared (a cable commentator once said too prepared) and rarely caught off guard, and besides, she had other ways to distract and deflect. All politicians did. Point fingers elsewhere, blame the other party, cite oppo research, take a fact and spin it so dizzily that no one even really knows what you’re talking about by the end and thus drops it. But none of this would work on Gabrielle. She was too smart, she was too close, and also, she was one of Cleo’s few dear, true, trusted friends. Probably her only one, actually. Cleo did not have a wide network of girlfriends, for reasons MaryAnne’s only partially accurate op-ed made clear.
Cleo exhaled, long, slow, measured. “I mean, listen, I have moments of regret.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Right, so? So what? Then there’s nothing.”
Gaby’s phone buzzed, then buzzed again, but she didn’t even peek. “So if I peel back this onion with MaryAnne and the rest of this, there’ll be nothing there? I personally don’t care whom you’ve slept with. The electorate . . . may.”
“MaryAnne is, like, the president of her country club,” Cleo said, as if this had anything to do with anything.
“And those women are exactly who you need,” Gaby said, not incorrectly. “Thus . . . the affair?” She squinted, capturing a thought. “But I knew you in law school, and I swear, you were never getting laid.”
Cleo raised her eyebrows as if to say: Exactly. She hoped Gaby would let it go at that.
“Fine, whatever, but even you mentioning ‘regrets’ raises the hairs on my neck.” Gaby leveled her gaze, and Cleo knew she was giving her one chance to tell her version of the truth before this went any further: into a real campaign launch, into a confrontation with MaryAnne, into a war with the press. Gaby was not the type of woman who liked to be caught unaware in the middle of a fistfight.
“Fine. Listen. My dad. He and I started something when I was younger. My mom thought it was . . .” Cleo hesitated, remembering. “Well, my mom thought it was ‘a tornado of negative energy,’ that’s what she would always say. ‘Why are you getting caught up in that negative energy? Go focus on just being a superstar!’” Cleo smiled at this because her parents had been diametrical opposites who also fit together perfectly. They’d had her late—Cleo always assumed that she was an accident, but she was never old enough or bold enough to ask. And they loved her so very much, so what did it matter? She was, they always told her, their shining star.
And then they were gone.
“So what was the negative energy?” Gaby brought her back.
“It’s just . . . it’s a way of sort of . . . tracking my mistakes.”
“We don’t make mistakes.”
“Fine. A way of tracking my regrets.”
Gaby inhaled. “I don’t even know what that means, and frankly I’m scared to ask. It’s not . . . I mean, please tell me that you don’t, like, have some sort of Excel spreadsheet for regrets?”
An Excel spreadsheet sounded exactly like something she would keep. Cleo loved Excel spreadsheets.
“It’s nothing. I mean, it’s something, a list. But it’s mine. And it’s private, and no one knows.” Cleo said this stridently, like she would in a debate or on the Senate floor while pushing a bill, but she couldn’t totally be sure of the list’s secrecy. Had she shared it with MaryAnne during one of their hundreds of childhood sleepovers? Had she drunkenly mentioned it during the rare college party she attended when she blew off too much steam to deal with dead parents and a black hole of loneliness and a wandering ambition that she didn’t know how to tame now that her parents weren’t there to guide her?
Maybe she had mentioned it once or twice unintentionally. She wouldn’t hold her hand on the Constitution and swear to it.
“Still waiting for this big reveal.”
“My dad, he just . . . he encouraged me to write down all my regrets, so I could look back and see if they truly were mistakes, and if so, learn from them, and if not, learn from that too.” Cleo paused. “You never knew them, my parents. They were just encouraging me to be my best. This was one of my dad’s
tricks.”
“Oh!” Gaby looked both mystified and confused. “Most people write down their goals. Or aspirations.”
“Right. This was kind of the opposite of that but with the same end result. I think. I mean, I’ve never done anything with it other than add to it.”
“Hmm,” Gaby said. Again. Then: “I wonder if we can use this.”
“Use this?” Cleo felt something unfamiliar rise in her: panic.
“Yes . . . yes!”
Gaby was on her feet now, towering in her heels, dumping the remains of her omelet in the trash to the side of Cleo’s desk.
“Let’s tackle some of these regrets publicly!” Gaby was practically shouting now. “Let’s build a road trip around this. Your summer recess. Film it, bring a crew, no, wait . . . home video on our phones so no one thinks it’s too orchestrated! Could there be anything more humanizing?” She clapped her hands together three times, as if she were applauding herself.
Cleo was on her feet now too (albeit in one-inch wedges). “You literally just told me that admitting weakness is a terrible strategy! Why would I air all of my mistakes?”
“Because you are owning them. You are showing up at MaryAnne Newman’s doorstep and sharing your regrets, not apologizing as if she were the victim, rather making amends because you have realized you have grown. People love growth in a candidate, people crave growth.” Gaby went still. “I guess I should ask . . . these aren’t egregious? I mean, there aren’t any dead bodies anywhere, are there?”
Cleo glared.
“Anything short of murder I can work with.”
“I think this is a terrible idea,” Cleo said, plunking back in her chair, which squeaked again. “Arianna, please get me some goddamn WD-40!” she shouted toward the door, not even bothering with the intercom.
“You’re wrong,” Gaby shot back.
“I’m very rarely wrong.”
“True,” Gaby conceded. “But you pay me to tell you the rare times that you are.” She paused. “How long is this list? Twenty? Thirty?”
“Two hundred and thirty-three. I think. Give or take a few.”
Gaby’s eyebrows skyrocketed to the top of her forehead. “Holy shit.”
“Some of them are small! Most of them are small. Like, I didn’t have enough cash on me, so I couldn’t properly tip the Starbucks guy, so I wrote it down so it wouldn’t happen again. And in my defense, it hasn’t!” Cleo felt a little indignant. Also a little hysterical.
Gaby waved a hand. “We’re not filming you returning to tip the Starbucks guy. Although . . .” Her focus wandered to the ceiling as she considered it. “No, not that.”
“I just don’t see how pointing out all of my flaws makes me electable,” Cleo said in as close to a whine as she’d ever emitted.
“Because we’re beating everyone to the punch. They’re going to pull you apart if you run—for a lot of reasons, but also because of your XX chromosome. You are going to go on a ‘no regrets regrets’ tour and show everyone how likable, how relatable you are, even when you’ve made mistakes, stepped in the figurative shit.”
Cleo probably looked unconvinced. Because she was.
Gaby softened. “Cleo, the easiest, cheapest shot is for them to paint you as unlikable. If you were the majority leader, who cares; no one would give a shit. That’s the luxury of having a dick.”
Cleo groaned.
“This will make people fall in love with you. It will be your armor against the inevitable other stuff—the less-than-kind stuff—that will come your way. It’s already starting with MaryAnne’s op-ed.”
Cleo started to protest but then stopped because what Gaby said was the truth.
“We’re going to make them love you,” Gaby said. “Then we’re going to round them up to vote for you.”
Cleo audibly sighed, which Gaby correctly took as a concession.
“Narrow it down to ten,” Gaby said as her phone blew up again. “I want a list of ten regrets—juicy enough to be appealing but not so juicy that charges will be filed. And then I’ll pick five. Maybe more. We’ll see how it goes.”
“First of all, no charges can be filed! I’m not a criminal! I’m a senator.”
Gaby laughed. “You know those aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.”
“Fine,” Cleo huffed. “I’ll narrow it down to ten. But we get to agree on the five. Because this is my life out there, not yours.”
She squeezed her eyes closed. There was no point in arguing this further. Cleo had been brilliant at law school—she’d graduated number two. But Gaby was number one.
Gaby’s phone was on fire now, and she was on her feet, pointed toward the door. “Shit, I need to take this. MaryAnne Newman has officially become a pain in my ass.”
She headed toward the door just as Arianna in her blinding sweater rushed in, still pale, still nervous, with the WD-40.
“I’m sorry,” Arianna said to no one, to all of them.
Cleo did not correct her.
THREE
The condo was dark by the time Cleo got home. She’d made the decision when Lucas was starting kindergarten to move to DC full-time and commute back to New York, her representative state, on the weekends. With no coparent and no grandparents, there was simply no other way to do it and still provide him stability and also be a (relatively) present mother.
The day the movers came, though, she did jot the move down on her list of regrets. She thought she was doing the right thing—adding her voice to the political landscape—but she was twenty-eight and a single mom and, honestly, though she trusted her decision-making, she didn’t totally trust all her decision-making.
Thus, she supposed, the list. A way to track her decisions when they went awry.
That’s all her dad was trying to say from it, she was sure. She couldn’t ask him now. He had a brother who lived in . . . she wasn’t quite certain . . . she thought maybe Bozeman, and maybe she could have reached out over the years and asked if he kept a list too and why it started and if it gave him peace of mind, but her father and her uncle hadn’t been close, and she hadn’t heard from him since just around the funeral. Cleo wasn’t the type to chase down estranged relatives in Montana if they didn’t want to be involved in the first place.
She flipped on the lights in her kitchen. There was an abandoned half-empty pizza box on the counter, which meant Lucas was home from soccer practice and, she hoped, doing his homework, not rewatching Stranger Things, which he had now binged three times this spring and was actually beginning to concern her. She grabbed a slice, shoved the box in the fridge, and tiptoed to his room, devouring half the piece before she even reached his door. (The vanilla macadamia muffin had not been sustaining.) She didn’t want to eavesdrop, but she didn’t want to burst in there without knowing what she was getting herself into. Teenagers harbored all sorts of secrets.
His room was silent but the light was on, so she knocked, and he grunted, so she entered.
He was sprawled on his bed with his laptop open and his palm curled around his phone, which he immediately shoved under the covers. Cleo hoped he wasn’t looking at porn.
“Hey, how was your day? Soccer go OK?”
“Yep.”
“Your coach being nicer?”
While Lucas shared relatively little with Cleo (very, very, very little, in fact, but who knew what was normal, since he was her only child and she didn’t have very many mom friends), he had confided that his coach this year was being “a total dick.” Lucas had been blessed with a bit of a godly foot, something Cleo assumed he must have gotten from his father, who she thought she remembered had indeed been an athlete. Her son’s natural athleticism had been seamless until middle school, when his legs grew faster than the rest of his body, and he had to reconsider his gait and his balance, and also the other kids were bigger and shoved and elbowed, and everything about Lucas’s game had to be recalibrated. He was up for it, Cleo knew, but he had also had the good fortune of the game always coming easily. And s
o when he had to exert the effort, he was not pleased.
Which subsequently did not please Cleo. She didn’t want to raise someone who got by with half efforts. She would have to add it to her list of regrets in that case, and it would stay there forever. Cleo saw half-efforted people all the time in Congress, and frankly, they disgusted her. Not because you should apologize for being born into a dynasty or for being carried into your position on a wave of charming popularity, but because if you didn’t do the work once you held the golden ticket, what use were you to anyone?
This privilege reminded Cleo of MaryAnne Newman, who felt entitled to plenty of things, including evidently publishing disparaging op-eds on SeattleToday! about her former best friend. And now Gaby was toying with the idea of Cleo making amends with her? Cleo acknowledged her culpability in the detonation of their friendship, but the salaciousness of the paternity angle was a bridge too far. Really.
“Coach was fine today.”
“Mrs. Godwin dropped you off after practice?”
Lucas finally looked up and met her eyes. “I mean, I’m here, aren’t I?”
Cleo sighed. She’d learned in debate and law school to avoid stupid questions.
“I just wanted to be sure. My day got hectic, and I forgot to check in with her about carpool.”
“She asked me if you were OK after that . . . article.”
“Oh!” Cleo didn’t quite know what to say to this. Emily Godwin was one of her few mom friends at Lucas’s school, but they weren’t friend friends. She couldn’t call her up and say: My chief of staff wants me to expose all of my regrets; can I come cry into a giant vat of wine with you and watch shitty TV to distract myself?
In fact, she had no such friends like that, and maybe she should add that to her list of regrets too. It would be nice to have a normal, nonpolitical friend who didn’t have an angle and who you did more than text about carpool or covering for you at a PTA meeting. (Cleo had never attended a PTA meeting, my God!)
“I’ll text her right now,” Cleo said. “And thank her and tell her that I’m fine.”
Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel Page 3
