Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Instead, MaryAnne composed herself, rose to stand, and said simply, “No.”

  Maureen and Susan, in the back, gasped and looked a little delighted. Like a real live fight was going to break out right there at the Seattle Country Club among the blue bloods. Well, one blue blood and one just regular blood. (But senatorial blood!) Cleo did think that she could take her, thanks to her early-morning boxing classes, and God knows that with her marathon training, Gaby could deliver one cold knockout punch, but she also knew that physical violence on camera (because Gaby would surely keep filming while punching) would not be the ticket to her reputational rehabilitation.

  MaryAnne herself, in her sleeveless pink and green floral dress that highlighted her arms, was looking significantly fitter than in high school, even with her stellar track times. Probably spin classes, Cleo supposed. Maybe a personal trainer.

  “Mom,” Esme interjected. “Please sit down. This is ridiculous. She apologized.”

  MaryAnne raised her chin an inch, refusing.

  “Do you know what you did to my entire life?” she said.

  Cleo shook her head. “Your entire life? No.”

  “When you sabotaged that internship at the mayor’s office, you changed everything for me.”

  “Mom,” Esme groaned. “Please. Stop.” Then, to Cleo (and probably Lucas): “She and my dad separated recently. He became a cliché and literally ran off with a coworker.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, MaryAnne,” Cleo said, as if she bore responsibility. She did feel sorry for her, and God knew she understood the sting of being disposable.

  “And she’s spent a lot of time reading blogs about reclaiming her personal power,” Esme continued. “Righting what went wrong.” She rolled her eyes and looked so very much like Lucas when he did the same, as if a plague infected teenagers with a universal disdain. “And I keep telling her—move forward, but she keeps looking back.”

  “‘Only Forward’ would actually be my campaign slogan!” Cleo said, which, she immediately realized, was a stupid thing to say. “I mean, well, when I run for . . .” She flopped her own hand. “Never mind.”

  “Ugh,” MaryAnne replied. “Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.” She reached for her (fancy) drink and swallowed the rest of it until the ice rattled in the highball.

  “I shouldn’t have told you that writing about your dead dog was a great essay topic,” Cleo said. “OK? I shouldn’t have.” She quieted for a moment. “Really, MaryAnne, that was childish.”

  “But she should have known that too!” Esme said. “Don’t apologize for her stupid choice.”

  “I like you.” Cleo looked at Esme. “I like you very much.”

  Esme grinned, opening up her face into something wide and beautiful, and then Lucas grinned, opening up his face into something Cleo hadn’t seen in a while at home, even on the soccer field: joy. For a flicker, Cleo saw a different life, one where she and MaryAnne hadn’t detonated their friendship, and their children grew up together side by side, barefoot in their backyards, biking to the 7-Eleven for Cokes, best friends just like their mothers had once been.

  “I think you owe me a public apology, and not just for that,” MaryAnne said.

  From behind her, Oliver interjected: “MaryAnne, at what point do you just let twenty years go?”

  “Not at this point,” she snapped. “I could have been a senator; I could have done something with myself! That internship started something for Cleo, and the same thing could have happened for me.”

  “Like I was saying.” Esme sighed.

  “MaryAnne, you’re only thirty-seven,” Cleo started.

  “Thirty-eight,” Esme corrected. “Last week.”

  “MaryAnne, you’re only thirty-eight, and so many women reinvent themselves these days—”

  “No.” She cut Cleo off. “I’m not interested in you showing up here and being my therapist or patronizing me. You were my best friend, and you took something from me, and I’m sorry that your parents died and all of that.” She paused. “I am. But I don’t believe that people change, and you showed me your true colors, and I’m not going to absolve you of that.”

  That sliver of lament that Cleo had sewn up reopened. Barely, just detectable—not enough for Cleo to really try again with MaryAnne with a renewed openhearted apology—but there all the same. That on a few occasions, she had been small and petty and shitty to MaryAnne, who had sometimes been small and petty and shitty back, but not with the ferocity that Cleo had. Cleo wouldn’t really change anything—she loved her life, was proud of her life, and her straight line from Congress at twenty-five to a presidential run at thirty-seven required this linear thinking. But still. In this quiet moment, with her eyes locked with her old best friend, she could allow for the fact that things could have been done differently.

  Behind MaryAnne, Maureen and Susan and Beth had gone statue still, and Oliver was shaking his head, like he couldn’t believe that he was part of this high school drama. But Cleo still knew MaryAnne well enough to know that she wasn’t going to relent.

  “OK,” she said. “Fine. You can’t say I didn’t try.”

  “But you didn’t really,” MaryAnne snapped. “And I can say whatever I damn want.”

  So Cleo bounced her shoulders and looked to Gaby, who finally dropped her phone and stopped recording. And then, perhaps for the first time in her life, Cleo McDougal acknowledged her loss and retreated.

  At the hotel, Gaby and Cleo lounged on the king mattress in Gaby’s room. Well, Gaby lounged, leaning up against the headboard, and Cleo got up and paced. They’d given Lucas his space; he was already half-mortified that he had to share a room with his mother, so Cleo suggested he treat himself to room service, and she’d be back in a bit. She didn’t know what he expected—they’d always been a unit, just the two of them, and simply because puberty held him in its grasp didn’t mean that she was booking him a separate hotel room. She’d avert her eyes; she’d never enter the bathroom while he was in there. She was doing her very best.

  Gaby had ordered two burgers and two fries for them respectively, but Cleo didn’t have much of an appetite. She nibbled on a disproportionately long fry (she’d always been drawn to outliers) and considered what came next. She didn’t think that MaryAnne was going to stop, and in fact, Cleo was scared to check her Facebook page now. Surely her ex–best friend had teed off about their evening, saying God knows what to God knows who. Gaby stared at her phone while it buzzed and buzzed and buzzed, biting her burger thoughtfully, as if it held the key to their mess.

  “Ooh!” Gaby said, a grin appearing on her face, even while she chewed. “Ooooh.”

  “Good news?” Cleo stopped midstride and hoped for a bit of a miracle. “Did she forgive me?”

  “Hmm, no.” Gaby looked up from her screen. “But that Oliver guy just texted me asking if I wanted to get a drink.” She righted herself off the bed and reached for her suitcase. “And you know what, Oliver Patel? I do.”

  “Wait, he texted you?” Cleo groaned. She wasn’t even sure when they had time to exchange numbers.

  “You wanted him for yourself?” Gaby was in her bra now, throwing on a bright-yellow silk shirt that complemented her skin tone perfectly and which, Cleo suspected, Oliver would never be able to resist.

  “Well, I didn’t not want him. He was cute in high school—I didn’t really know him well, but my Lord, look at him now.”

  “I know.” Gaby raised and lowered her eyebrows, then did it three more times. “I know.”

  Cleo flopped on the bed, muttered into the pillow, “I’m happy for you.”

  “It’s just drinks,” Gaby said, but then she laughed, rich and decadent, and they both knew that it wasn’t.

  “It’s fine,” Cleo said, face still in the pillow. “I’ll go hang out with my teen son who has more romantic interests than I do.”

  “Clee.” Gaby turned to her, serious now. “If you want . . . I can set up a profile on Tinder.” She laughed again, gleeful, and Cleo
threw the pillow at her head.

  “Don’t wait up.” She grabbed her purse from the arm of the desk chair and dropped her room key into her back pocket. “Oh, also,” she added, like it was an afterthought, “I just uploaded the video to YouTube. So buckle up!”

  “You what?” Cleo jumped to her feet at a pace that would very much impress her boxing instructor. “It was a fucking disaster; why would . . . Seriously, Gaby, this has to stop!”

  “No, it wasn’t. I reread all of your internals, and the electorate wants to see growth. They don’t expect perfection.”

  Cleo sat back down on the bed.

  “Hey, chin up, Senator McDougal. We’re just getting started.”

  “Honestly.” Cleo fell backward and stared at the ceiling. “That’s what worries me.”

  Cleo had the YouTube app on her phone but had never used it. Why would she? Sometimes Lucas watched . . . she thought they were called “vloggers”? And he for sure caught up with some soccer stars, watching their foot skills, cheering their goals, salivating for whichever products they hocked.

  She knew she could head back to their room and ask him to find the video and read the comments, but really, what good was going to come from that? It was disorienting being back here in her hometown, seeing her old friends. Well, maybe not friends. Peers. But at some point, she and MaryAnne had truly loved each other like sisters, and there was no way around that fact, even in the wreckage of what came next.

  She thought she’d give Lucas a bit more breathing room, and besides, she could use some air herself. She shot Lucas a quick text that she was taking a walk (he wouldn’t care, but she was still a responsible parent), then slid on her flats and strode through the Sheraton lobby and out into the Seattle night. The city had changed so much since she’d grown up here—it was a vibrant boom of a town now, expansive and glittering, but still, so much of it felt pregnant with memories—of shopping trips to Nordstrom with MaryAnne’s mom’s credit card, where they bought electric-blue eyeliner at Clinique or frosty glossy lip shellac at Veronica Kaye, of a field trip to the aquarium in middle school where Cleo had stood so long in front of the shark exhibit that the bus back to school nearly left her, of the scent of Benihana lingering on their clothes after MaryAnne’s birthday every year. Cleo could feel the smudge of the kohl eyeliner, smell the scent of the aquarium, taste the fried rice and egg.

  She turned right toward the waterfront. She wished that she’d brought her yellow pad of paper with her 233 regrets on the trip because she’d add today to it: 234. She hadn’t thought much about how she sabotaged MaryAnne in a long time, probably since . . . college? She didn’t know. She’d thought of MaryAnne, sure, from time to time, but not about her role in how, maybe, she had changed MaryAnne’s life as much as she changed her own. Though she didn’t think it was quite that easy. Cleo had worked her goddamn ass off to be the youngest congresswoman and then the youngest senator, and honestly, mayoral internship or not, school newspaper editor or not, it was entirely possible she’d have landed in the exact same position. But could she be certain?

  She crossed the street from Second Avenue to First, the incline dropping perilously as if beckoning pedestrians to Pike Place Market. No, she told herself. I can’t be certain. And maybe that made her shitty or maybe that made her ingenious. She didn’t know. She knew only what she did and where it led her, and also that she had been sixteen or seventeen, and sixteen-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds made mistakes. She didn’t know what Oliver Patel was doing with his life now (other than being gorgeous), but she hoped that he wasn’t paying the price for that time his senior year when he went streaking across the baseball field when he got accepted to Berkeley. (He probably wasn’t. Men are forgiven much more easily and much quicker than women, Cleo knew. Hell, everyone knew.) Cleo had not been part of that streaking crowd. In fact, now that she thought of it, MaryAnne hadn’t really been either. Or maybe MaryAnne had been after she and Cleo broke apart, and MaryAnne had forged on without her.

  Cleo reached the Waterfront Park right on Elliott Bay, leaned against the concrete ledge, gazed into the black horizon, which shone with lights from homes across the way. Her mom, who never seemed to begrudge that she hung up her pointe shoes when her children arrived, used to come here and paint at sunrise. By middle school, Cleo was always awake—even set her alarm for six a.m. because she’d read that successful people were early risers, so it seemed like a good habit to get into—and sometimes her mom would make her tag along. “Make” because Cleo had never been creative or interested in her mother’s art beyond a simple appreciation for her talent and a bit of reverence for the fact that she had once been a star dancer and had somehow also now honed that spark into a different form of talent. Cleo didn’t much see the point of creative fields. She never said as much to her mom, though her mom was often nudging her to tap into something, even when it was obvious that Cleo’s skill set lay elsewhere.

  “It doesn’t have to be painting,” her mom would say, and they knew damn well that it wasn’t going to be dance. At two, Cleo had evidently run screaming from her first ballet class, and her mother, having endured blisters and broken toenails and pulled hamstrings and fractured ribs, all by eighteen, didn’t push it again. Instead, as Cleo grew older, she said: “Anything, anything, sweetheart! Music, art, or pick up a camera! All of this opens you up to new possibilities.” But Cleo had already learned that her parents’ praise was so intertwined with her success, and even though her mother pushed her to simply dabble, dabbling didn’t earn approving murmurs and an extra twenty dollars for spending money and sometimes, a special night out where they all dressed up in fancy clothes and toasted her with wine (her parents) and Shirley Temples (her).

  Now, of course, because she was a member of Congress who needed to appear well rounded, she tolerated music and art and theater, and God knows she read too much (usually nonfiction, most often biographies). She supported arts funding and all that, but she was never going to wander through the Guggenheim because she had a free afternoon or attend the ballet because the urge struck her. She just wasn’t.

  A boat blared its horn in the distance, and something came to her, a surprise. That years ago—maybe ten, maybe five, she’d have to check when she was back in DC—Cleo had indeed added something to her list: I never learned to paint. Or sing. Or dance. Or anything. Maybe that could have been a nice thing.

  Cleo stared up at the sky, thought of her mother, how strange it was that she had been gone for twenty years and only now Cleo was recognizing pieces of her in herself. She didn’t think she’d want Gaby filming her in an art class, but it couldn’t have been more embarrassing than what went down at the country club. Her gut twinged, and for the first time in a long time, she acutely missed her mother. When you lose your parents young, there is simply a blight on your psyche that becomes part of your being. Really, it had become background noise to Cleo: she knew the loss was there, but if she paid too much attention to it, it would override everything.

  She turned to go, the memories both too poignant and just poignant enough. She’d cleared her head, felt a little more at peace with the mess of the day. Cleo didn’t believe in hokey things but maybe it was her mom looking out for her, like she would have back in middle school or high school. When Cleo would wind herself up over a spelling bee or, later, an algebra test, and her mom would stand behind her and rub her shoulders and pour her a glass of orange juice, and it didn’t make everything better, but it helped. (Incidentally, she was the spelling bee champion in fifth through seventh grades.) Also, she knew her success was a glue among the three of them, what with Georgie being such a mess, such—though her parents would never have said this aloud—a disappointment. Georgie required so much of her parents’ energy, Cleo just wanted to make it easier for them. And she liked how winning felt too.

  Now, Cleo angled herself up the hill back to the Sheraton and breathed deeply, wondering if her mom could hear her breath, though she knew she couldn’t. But it was ni
ce to pretend that she could. For a moment, Cleo wondered if maybe something was shifting in her, quaking inside.

  Or maybe that was her phone notifications. By the time she arrived back at the hotel, with Gaby nowhere to be found, the YouTube video of her confrontation with MaryAnne had 100,000 views, and upon hearing her fumbling with her key card, Lucas swung open the door with a wide-eyed, “Holy shit, Mom, you’ve gone viral.”

  SIX

  Cleo had taken an Ambien and slept surprisingly well, though not long. She could get by on nearly no sleep—a by-product of training herself for late nights at work, fine-tuning legislation or reviewing details with her staff. Gaby was still unreachable by midnight (three a.m. Washington, DC, time), so Cleo popped the pill and away she went. Discipline was never one of her problems, so staying off YouTube and Twitter, where the video had of course also taken flight, wasn’t difficult. Actually, getting Lucas to put his own phone away was more of the battle, but then it always was.

  Their room was dark, the sun barely up itself, when she woke. For a very brief second, she debated rising and going to the hotel gym, giving her that precious hour away from her screen. But then it lit up with a new text, and Cleo couldn’t help herself. Truth told, discipline was not her strongest suit until she’d at least had a coffee.

  She couldn’t bear to read all the notifications, so instead, she focused on the most recent.

  Georgie.

  Cleo couldn’t remember when they’d last spoken. She closed her eyes again, tried to trace back. In the adjacent double bed, Lucas snored just loudly enough for Cleo to hear but not loudly enough to have woken her, and she remembered those early foggy baby days, when he’d get congested and snore and cry and snore and wail, and she’d wonder how on earth either of them would ever make it out of his infancy alive. Georgie had shed all her disaster years by then and had two toddlers at the time (twins), and sometimes Cleo would tentatively reach out for advice. But childhood and sibling impressions are tough to break, and Cleo never quite trusted Georgie’s advice and also resented that she had to ask for help in the first place. That part wasn’t Georgie’s fault—she’d forward her articles on sleep training and why Cleo shouldn’t beat herself up when breastfeeding didn’t take—but it was hard to bridge the gap between them. Not just the age gap, not just the distance gap, but that elusive sense that though you were blood, sisters even, you really were more or less strangers. Through Cleo’s formative years, Georgie had been a disruption around the house, a stressor for her parents, a blight on their family dynamic. Those weren’t things that you glided over just because your parents were gone and you really only had each other. Maybe in the movies; maybe in fiction. But the truth was that genetics took you only so far, and Cleo didn’t know Georgie any better than she knew anyone else. It’s just how it was, with them virtually strangers when they shared the same house and then with Georgie having moved out by the time Cleo was eight. Also, as complicated as their relationship was from Cleo’s perspective—that she couldn’t help but see her sister as a permanent fuckup, even though Georgie was a heralded success in adulthood—Cleo also knew that Georgie held her own view: that she had been an only child for ten years before the baby came along and upended things. And as Cleo aspired to be the perfect child, Georgie was rebelling against it. Magnetic particles who repelled one another rather than grew closer.