Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  She stood, exhaled, tried to compose herself. He wasn’t the first asshole who would shove her down the steps while pretending to outstretch his hand. In fact, that was Alexander Nobells.

  “Message received, Senator.”

  “I hope you understand, Cleo,” he said to her back, because she was already headed out. “I’m only suggesting what I think is best.”

  She almost turned and asked him: Best for whom? But why bother? She wasn’t going to change a privileged sixty-eight-year-old man. She’d rather save her breath for when she really needed to scream.

  She closed the door behind her, then spun and flipped him the middle finger with both hands. When she saw Albie’s eyes widen in shock, she said, “Oh, fuck him.”

  And he said, “Wow, that time of the month?”

  And then she got right up close to his acne-riddled chin and said: “Fuck you too.”

  And she didn’t regret that at all.

  Cleo was in an exceptionally bad mood by day’s end, even with the promise of dinner with her son, who had been avoiding her since her return and since the rise of the #pullingaCleo hashtag. As of that morning, more than a hundred videos of women confronting their superiors had been filmed and uploaded, and Arianna was squealing that Cleo had started a revolution. Lawsuits were being threatened all over, naturally, by many of the accused—and Cleo wondered if Nobells would dare to try. She supposed that Senator Parsons wasn’t entirely wrong—that by filming first, thinking later, she had gotten out ahead of Nobells’s right to defend himself but, she thought as she stewed at her desk, boo-fucking-hoo. It wasn’t the most prudent political thought, but she had it all the same. Cleo had learned that when dishonest men were faced with the unavoidable truths of their past, they tended to posture and point fingers (often while screaming in quite hysterical tones), but she also still knew that with Nobells, at the very least, she was right. She also recognized that women risked so much by speaking up that false accusations were rarely a reality, and she hoped that if the women were strong enough to face the men who had made them feel powerless in whatever form that took, they were strong enough to endure the threats.

  She hated, of course, that women were threatened in the first place. That it was simply understood that if you took your story public, you would endure not just scrutiny but public shaming and terror too. This was the price women paid to speak their truths. Cleo couldn’t change that. She could only speak hers.

  And then there were other prices to pay too: getting stripped of the delegation trip, being whispered about in the hallways when you walked by a huddle of men from the other side of the aisle, listening to Suzanne Sonnenfeld suggest that she had your home address and why don’t people show up and protest. Maybe Cleo should have seen all this coming because she was usually quite prescient, but this time she simply hadn’t.

  She had hoped Lucas would be proud of her defiance. She didn’t pretend to understand the teenage boy mind—she hadn’t even understood it back as a teenager; just look at how she dumped the very kind, tenderhearted Matty—but still, that was her aspiration. For her son to beam with pride in the way that Arianna had. Even Timothy, her deputy comms director, seemed impressed.

  Lucas, however, quite obviously was not. Thus, this morning on their way to school, before Senator Parsons sent her into a rage spiral, she gently asked him if he would skip dinner at Benjamin and Emily’s tonight and if instead she could pick him up after soccer and they could go to their favorite burger joint, PATTIES. It had been their regular thing since they’d moved to DC—mother-son midweek dinners, when Cleo would turn off her phone for the hour and before Lucas had a whole life of his own, and he wasn’t angry with her, and she wasn’t confronting ghosts of her past that made her angry with herself as well. They’d order three different types of fries (curly, sweet potato, and shoestring) and laugh about how Lucas liked mustard on his, which Cleo couldn’t believe and didn’t know where he’d gotten that from. She did, probably she did know—it must have been from his dad, but then, she didn’t know Doug well enough to be sure about that either.

  Lucas had begrudgingly agreed to dinner tonight, only after putting up a fight because Emily was making homemade meatballs and he loved them, but Cleo charged her voice with just enough authority to let him know that the invitation wasn’t really a request. Not unlike what Senator Parsons had done today. Lucas huffed “fine” and then put on his noise-canceling headphones that Cleo probably never should have bought him to begin with. Besides, Cleo worried that Emily might start to think she had nearly abandoned him. Also, she really hoped Emily didn’t hold this whole hashtag situation and general public outcry against her, not least because part of the impetus of the whole caper had been her rotten unfaithful husband in the first place.

  Lucas was waiting for her outside the soccer field. Cleo had aimed to get there early and watch the last few minutes of practice, but naturally, she was running late. Gaby had exploded into her office as she was packing up to leave and announced with breathless abandon that Veronica Kaye was starting a Pulling A Cleo Legal Defense Fund to help any and all women who wanted to come forward about their own experience.

  “A legal defense fund!” she’d screamed. “This is basically an endorsement!”

  Then Arianna rushed in behind her, without any apology, and shouted, “Senator McDougal, another woman came forward about Nobells! You did it!”

  And Cleo lost her breath a little at that, at the solidarity that comes from establishing a sisterhood, and that maybe Nobells would get what was coming to him, even so many years later. But then she noticed the time, and she threw some files into her briefcase and didn’t even have a chance to celebrate all the news, much less tell Gaby about the Middle East delegation boot, which was maybe for the best, because Gaby might have considered literal murder of the majority leader once she heard. Instead, Cleo raced around them both and out the door, offering general remarks of enthusiasm, certain that if she were late for Lucas, any sort of progress she hoped to make with his overall demeanor and communication through grunting would be lost.

  But she was late anyway, and he was the last one to be picked up, so already she was behind in her quest for redemption.

  “I’m not feeling well,” Lucas said when he slid into the car. He groaned and curled over. “Can we just go home?”

  Cleo noted, unfortunately, that he likely had not used deodorant this morning as he promised but bit back her temptation to comment. She made a note to ask Emily Godwin how she got Benjamin to wear deodorant daily. It didn’t seem like such a herculean ask, and yet here they were.

  Lucas had always been an obstinate kid, and Cleo generally had never minded. She herself was obviously headstrong, and she thought it had served her well. You don’t become the youngest congresswoman in government without the ability to brace against a storm. During his toddler days, back when she was rendezvousing with Nobells about twice a week—in his office, at his place when Amy was away, the occasional hotel, but always during the day so she could be back with Lucas each night—well, that was the worst of it. The two of them, mother and son, trapped in an unending cycle of who could be more stubborn. Usually, because Lucas didn’t have the vocabulary that Cleo did, which meant that he screamed and screamed until she worried that someone in their new apartment building would call CPS, he won. He went through one particularly brutal phase when he refused—just refused!—to wear anything but shorts, even in the dead of winter. Cleo didn’t have any mom friends. It wasn’t like there was a gang of student mothers at Columbia Law, and how else was she expected to meet women who were raising young children? She didn’t have time for those weekday music classes where the kids sat around with dirty fingers and smacked bongos; she certainly didn’t have time to work with him on his flexibility or forward roll at gymnastics. They did take a mother-son swim class at the Columbia pool together, but Lucas hated the smell of the chlorinated air, and Cleo hated the very judgmental instructor who couldn’t believe that Lucas,
at two, did not want to learn to float, so they stopped going after the second lesson and instead got croissants and cocoa every Saturday morning. That was their moment of peace before he jutted his chin in revolt of whatever else Cleo wanted, and she sighed and sat on her couch and felt in over her head, even when she adored this willful creature more than anything else in the world.

  She could have called her sister, but she didn’t. Not because Georgie wouldn’t have helped. Cleo knew that she would have done more than help. She, then well on her way to becoming an A-list therapist, would have sent parenting books and recommended websites and probably shipped some bath oils and organic towels too.

  But Cleo didn’t want that sort of help.

  She’d been on her own, emotionally if not practically, since her senior year in high school, and frankly, she’d learned to navigate it. It didn’t mean that she didn’t need help. She knew, empirically, that she did. But she’d figured out enough shortcuts to get along by herself that she simply couldn’t bring herself to tolerate Georgie’s kindnesses. Even when she had to take Lucas out in the snow wearing shorts and endure the withering glares from other self-righteous mothers, she knew she would have found these kindnesses oppressive. Not because kindness wasn’t wonderful, but rather because Cleo would have, like so many other times, taken them as a signal that she was less than. That she was a less good mother than Georgie. All these years later, Cleo considered this excuse and how stupid it sounded. No one knew how to be a great mother in all ways on instinct. Why had she assumed otherwise?

  In the car, Lucas’s stink had muted a bit. Maybe Cleo just adjusted to the smell. She wasn’t sure.

  “I really don’t feel well,” he said again. “Can we please just go home?”

  Cleo had pinned her night on their dinner. She wanted to talk to him about juggling two girls: Marley and Esme. She wanted to talk to him about his life. And, she supposed, she needed to talk to him about hers. About Nobells, about the shitty decisions she made in law school, about everything that was blowing up.

  She reached over from the driver’s side, felt his forehead. She had never been good at assessing temperatures. Once, when he was in second grade and she was a freshman senator, he was whining at breakfast; she couldn’t find the ear thermometer, and she was late for a meeting with, ironically, Senator Parsons (prick!), so she palmed his forehead and scoffed and stuffed him into the car and sent him to school. Ninety minutes later, the nurse called and said he had a 102 fever and couldn’t she come right now to pick him up? Cleo remembered, even now, the criticism in the nurse’s voice. Of course no one knew how to be a perfect mother on instinct!

  “You do feel a little warm,” Cleo said. She had no idea if he was warm or not, but his cheeks were drained of color, and she supposed that they could go to PATTIES another time. Lucas groaned and sank lower in the car seat. Cleo didn’t want to give him an out, another missed day of school just because—and she wondered if this weren’t part of a longer con that would stretch into the morning—but she didn’t want to be negligent either.

  She made a U-turn and headed toward home.

  Lucas immediately got into bed, mumbling that he was going to sleep for the night, and then slammed his door. Cleo poured him some orange juice and brought him two Tylenol and hoped that he could shake this or admit he was being melodramatic, because she was supposed to go on Bowen’s show tomorrow, and Gaby was going to hit the roof if she bailed. He pulled his duvet up to his neck and moaned, and then he told her to get out, so she did.

  She wound her way back into the kitchen and made herself a PB and J, then padded to her office. The free evening meant that theoretically she had time to review all the files she’d brought home, and yet after she eased into her chair and sat in silence without her phone or computer and devoured half the sandwich, she unlocked her top drawer and reached for her list.

  She flipped the pages and found herself suddenly and unexpectedly missing her mom, who had always been excellent at assessing a fever just by the touch of her hand. Cleo guessed that Georgie was the same: even in her chaotic teen years, she was always more of their mom while Cleo was always more of their dad. And though their parents were a perfect pairing, she and Georgie just so rarely found common ground, as if a romantic partnership worked when it came to opposites but the same was not true of siblings or even friendship. Cleo ran her fingers down her list, searching for the entry. She’d told Gaby she’d consider some sort of public dancing (eek) and she would, but she needed to see it there again, concretely, on the page, as if not just to commit to the follow-through but also as a reminder of her lament in the first place. How much more of her mother she could have been. How much she regretted that she wasn’t. Cleo thought back to her trip to Seattle not even two weeks prior, down by the waterfront, of those times her mom dragged her out to watch her paint and how antsy Cleo had been. How she considered it time wasted, how she thought it was wholly unproductive, just staring at the land and the lights across the water and committing it to canvas.

  She returned to the second page, which had been penned during college. Nearly the entirety of the entries were devoted more to achievement—an American history exam she appeared to have gotten an 84 percent on—or pursuit of a future achievement—not making enough friends on the student government to be nominated for class president—than anything personal. Obviously, her senior year at Northwestern, there was an extremely personal, terribly intimate entry—two, actually.

  She flipped forward and back and then forward again, and there it was: I never learned to paint. Or sing. Or dance. Or anything. Maybe that could have been a nice thing.

  She stood suddenly. At seventeen, Cleo had happily given the bulk of her mother’s paintings to Georgie; she didn’t have the wall space nor the decorator’s vision for them. They weren’t what she anticipated hanging on her dorm room walls (she didn’t end up hanging much), and now Cleo could see that they were reminders of her loss and, even back then, she preferred to look only forward. But when her grandmother died, Cleo took three paintings from her home, and over the years they’d traveled from house to house with her, never once leaving their Bubble Wrap. That was enough for Cleo until tonight—knowing they were in a closet somewhere, a hidden reminder of her mother and her gifts and that maybe somewhere, deep inside Cleo, she had a tiny, microscopic bit of an artist in her too.

  Not an artist artist, Cleo thought as she rounded the corner in her hall, on the way to the storage space in her foyer. Just . . . that there was room inside her for something beyond the rigid and the logical and the straight and narrow. Her mom’s paintings were always a little off, a small bit askew. Her dad used to rib her about it, the slightly awry perspectives. But her mom would just laugh because of course this was intentional; she was seeing things differently than everyone else, and she wasn’t about to apologize for that.

  She had to move all of Lucas’s soccer gear and a bunch of snow stuff that he’d outgrown, but she found the paintings in the back of the darkened space. She tore the tape away, then the padding, and she lost her breath a little bit once she had. Her mother’s artworks weren’t glorious masterpieces. Cleo didn’t need to study art history to know that. But they were masterpieces to her mom—and to her father too—and Cleo sank to the dirty floor of her storage space and considered that this had been enough for both of them. To make a little art, to paint a landscape that only your brain and imagination could, and to share it with someone you loved.

  EIGHTEEN

  Lucas was still sick the next morning.

  Cleo had hammered a hook into the wall to hang her favorite of her mother’s paintings, and he hadn’t even woken. Finally, ten minutes before they needed to leave for school (and work), she shook him awake and felt his forehead, which seemed clammy but she didn’t think feverish. (But who really knew?) Overnight, forty-six more #pullingaCleo videos emerged, which meant thousands upon thousands of retweets and comments, which also meant that Gaby had texted her six times before she
even showered, to ensure that she unequivocally absolutely would not back out of Bowen’s show.

  Cleo very much wished her home were better organized so she could find the thermometer and gauge whether or not she should force Lucas to school or if this was food poisoning or if this was just him wanting to skip. He’d been known to be an extremely excellent faker too.

  “Lucas, please, buddy. You already missed school for our Seattle trip.”

  Lucas grunted again, then rolled away from her and pulled the pillow over his head.

  “OK,” Cleo conceded. “It will be a mental health day. Your last one. I’ll call you around lunch to check in.”

  She retrieved the bottle of Tylenol and left another glass of orange juice on his nightstand.

  Lucas was back asleep before she was out the door.

  Cleo was due on Bowen’s set in the early afternoon, which gave her the morning to get her ordinary business out of the way.

  “First of all,” she said to Gaby as they waited for their coffee order near her office, “Parsons booted me from the trip this weekend.”

  “He what?” Gaby barked loudly enough that the barista stopped foaming the milk and stared. Gaby met his eyes and barked, “Does it look like this concerns you?” The barista took heed and kept foaming.

  “It’s fine,” Cleo said. “Not fine but . . . I have some other things to deal with anyway. I’ll have a quiet weekend. Lucas has a school retreat.”

  Cleo had second-guessed her decision to leave Lucas home alone sick the entire drive into the office, but what else was she supposed to do? In addition to the Tylenol and orange juice, she’d left him a note (which she realized too late he’d never read, so she texted him the same note verbatim) that said there was more orange juice in the fridge and bagels in the bread bin, and he should feel free to order in chicken soup. She couldn’t help herself and added a tip that doctors had found real research on the fact that chicken soup was a natural remedy. Lucas hated soup and would probably find her suggestion incredibly annoying, but oh well, she had to try.