Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Cleo McDougal was not going down without a fight.

  The applause was admittedly tepid at first, but then one table in the back started cheering, and so the one next to them started cheering and so on. No one in Washington liked to be outdone. Soon, just as they had with Bowen, they were on their feet, and goddammit, Cleo started laughing because she knew that she had just convinced them all that they’d farted in the elevator, and even if she didn’t win the competition, that was really something. Almost presidential.

  Bowen won, and Cleo, grateful that he had rescued her just moments before, hugged him and said, “At least it wasn’t Suzanne Sonnenfeld.”

  “That would have been the shame of my lifetime.” He laughed. “I think I was a bit of a ringer, though. My sisters used to make me go to ballet with them.”

  Cleo made a face like she wasn’t sure how much that had helped, because he really wasn’t all that good, and Bowen laughed and said, “Well, I guess I have bragging rights now.”

  “That’s no small thing in this town.”

  Bowen nodded. “Listen—”

  “Oh God, I’ve already humiliated myself enough tonight,” Cleo interrupted.

  “I was only going to say that I had a nice time in New York—I mean, right up until the bourbon.” His eyes met hers, and they were honest, and they were warm, and Cleo, having survived a true humiliation for the evening, realized that he wasn’t trying to spurn her or embarrass her as she’d assumed. Why she’d assumed this in the first place probably said more about her knee-jerk judgment of Bowen (and everyone!) than what had transpired between them in New York anyway.

  “Oh,” Cleo said. “Well, I should know better. Bourbon is my kryptonite, evidently.”

  “It renders you weak?”

  “Something like that,” Cleo said. “Last time I ended up dancing on a bar. So the rumor goes.”

  “So, worse than tonight?” Bowen laughed.

  “Possibly even worse than tonight.” Cleo managed a grin.

  “Well,” he said, leaning in close, resting his hand on her waist, then around it. “I don’t regret any of it. Not one bit.”

  The headline didn’t get much attention at first, which was why Cleo circulated around the ballroom with ease and allowed herself a (very) brief amount of small talk before she made an excuse to retreat to Veronica Kaye’s table, where Gaby sat beaming. In fact, no one at the fundraiser was any the wiser because their phones had been checked at the door, the better for privacy of the bigwigs. Inevitably a few people found their way around the rules because half the people in this room were paid to find their way around the rules, and one of those people was Cleo, who had tucked her phone into her gym bag, which was in the greenroom.

  Veronica had hugged Cleo and congratulated her on the triumph.

  “It wasn’t a triumph, but I appreciate that.” Cleo had laughed.

  “It was, my dear. You took absolute shit and turned it into filet mignon. That is a triumph.”

  So Cleo accepted her accolade, and when Veronica turned back to her table, Gaby gave her a double thumbs-up, which Cleo took to mean that a very big check and endorsement were on their way, and Cleo wanted to call Georgie and Lucas and share the news: that she was officially going to announce her candidacy as president of the United States. And she was going to do it without regret. If she could take a bow after a literal face-plant, she thought, she could do anything.

  Though she’d been away from her phone for only an hour or so, she had thirty-one missed texts and five missed calls, which was surprising, since Gaby was the primary one to blow up her phone, and for a moment she worried that something had gone wrong with Lucas, that he was back in the hospital. Her pulse throbbed and her heart raced as she punched in her passcode.

  The texts were from Lucas. The calls were from Georgie.

  She didn’t need to speak with her sister, though, to understand what had gone wrong. She read his very first message.

  Lucas: U have a list of regrets?

  Then:

  Lucas: Mom???

  Lucas: What the fuck?

  Lucas: What the actual fuck??

  She grabbed her bag, and she raced toward home.

  She knew, even without reading the rest, that it was already too late.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Cleo had gotten careless. The other night, when Lucas was sick and just after she’d been taken off the Middle East trip, she’d forgotten to lock her top desk drawer. And as she raced down the darkened streets toward Alexandria, she remembered exactly why she had started locking it in the first place. Because of the calamity that was unspooling in front of her.

  Georgie was pacing the kitchen when Cleo threw open the door and raced in.

  “Where is he?”

  “His room,” Georgie said. “But, Cleo, I think he’s very upset. Maybe take a minute and compose yourself. Generally, when you match hysteria with hysteria, it doesn’t calm the waters.”

  “Please stop treating me like a patient and treat me like your sister!” Cleo screamed, though she hadn’t meant to raise her voice.

  Georgie wasn’t fazed. She’d probably seen this all a million times. Not this specific thing but parents betraying children. Theirs wasn’t a new story.

  “I am treating you like a sister,” Georgie said. “Two things can be true at once.”

  This phrase reminded Cleo of Gaby, and it occurred to her that Gaby must be responsible for this mess. She couldn’t believe that she’d do such a thing—share Cleo’s most vulnerable admissions with the world. But perhaps she loved Gaby so much because they were so alike—she’d do anything for the win. Maybe Gaby just thought the list was another tool to use to her (and their) advantage. None of this rationale made Gaby’s betrayal sting any less. Cleo thought of MaryAnne and wondered if this wasn’t how she felt when her parents had called their connection at the mayor’s office and learned that she’d have been in contention for the internship if not for her terribly trite, unimaginative essay.

  Cleo blew out her breath. She was used to problem-solving, and she knew that the best way was to tackle one issue at a time. First Lucas. Then Gaby. Maybe, eventually, MaryAnne too.

  “Can you walk me through what happened?” she asked. “And look, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to yell.”

  Georgie accepted the apology by pouring her a glass of merlot from an open bottle that was sitting on the counter.

  The long and the short of it was that while Georgie was watching the YouTube feed (and presumed that Lucas was doing the same in his room), a story broke and spread on Twitter that Cleo McDougal kept a list of regrets, which was not a particularly lurid story in and of itself. But one fringe website grabbed the piece and posited that it was actually a hit list on her political enemies, and that was all the internet needed—the scent of the potential gossip was too much for the Twittersphere to resist. Never mind that this was incorrect; never mind that very little of Cleo’s list had anything to do with politics, at least not in recent years once she’d hit her stride as a senator.

  Of course, from there, Twitter blew the story into theoreticals, what-ifs, and I bets—it didn’t take long for people to leap from her confrontation to Nobells to postulating on Lucas’s paternity, that perhaps the father was a powerful political figure, that perhaps Cleo had been protecting him all these years, that perhaps the personal and the political were all tied together and they resulted in her son.

  Georgie explained to Cleo that she hadn’t initially seen the story and grew concerned only when she heard loud thuds coming from Cleo’s office, where she discovered Lucas upending her files and bookshelf, which he shouldn’t have been doing for a variety of reasons, not least because of the delicate state of his surgical incision.

  “He was understandably quite upset,” Georgie said. “But the twins have their moments too. It was all very . . .” She took a long swallow of the wine. “Well, I thought it was a fairly reasonable reaction.”

  “To learning that his mom has
made mistakes?”

  Georgie leveled her with a look. “You know that’s not what he was upset about, Cleo. You do him a disservice by pretending that he is naive enough to believe everything you’ve told him.” She paused. “I just think it didn’t take him long to connect the dots, you know. To hear about your list and then hear the speculation on the paternity stuff, to, well . . . here we are.” She sighed. “I am always supportive of my clients writing down their mistakes or composing letters to those who have wronged them. But, Cleo, then they burn them or toss them in the trash. They never send them! I told you: there’s a danger in carrying your past around with you.”

  “I don’t carry my past around with me. That’s half my problem! That’s why I am always on my own.”

  “But you do, Cleo.” Georgie nodded as if this were fact. “You do, in not telling Lucas about his father or not acknowledging your role in whatever stupid teenage stuff happened with the girl who used to be your best friend. You can act like it doesn’t exist by shutting it out, but then it just takes up more space, not less.”

  Cleo didn’t feel like being psychoanalyzed. She set her wine down too hard on the counter, where it sloshed over the lip of the glass and spilled. It would leave a stain if she didn’t attend to it, but oh well. Regret. Maybe that would just be the permanent reminder of this entire terrible night. The red blot on her marble counter—just look at that metaphor! she wanted to scream at Georgie, but instead she turned and plodded up the stairs toward her son.

  Lucas was back in bed with his navy duvet pulled up to his neck and his noise-canceling headphones on his ears. Her yellow sheets of paper, torn from the pad, were scattered on the comforter. Cleo paused in the doorway at the sight of the list, out in the world, and she didn’t think she’d ever felt more exposed.

  His eyes were closed, and she wasn’t sure if he were sleeping, so she sat delicately on his bed and gathered up the papers and tidied them in her lap. She knew she was buying herself time. She stared at her son, so handsome and nearly an adult, for an inhale of a beat. His long eyelashes, his lanky body that extended almost the length of his bed, his bone structure that wasn’t hers, she knew, his near-black hair that wasn’t hers either.

  Cleo touched his arm, then let her hand rest there, and he stirred, opening his eyes but unwilling to look her way. She could feel her heart beating and wished, so very much, that it hadn’t come to this. That of the millions of ways they could have discussed the truth of his father, it didn’t come down to him seeing the entry from the spring of fifteen years ago that read:

  So stupid!!! Why would I not insist on a condom!! Thought getting drunk would help but when does it ever help??

  And then, eight weeks later:

  Pregnant. I can’t believe it. Now what.

  And then, a decade later:

  Hate lying to Lucas. Hate it hate it hate it. But remember it is for the best.

  And then a year after that:

  Dad questions again. Maybe I should have told him the truth about Doug from the beginning.

  “Lucas.” Cleo shook his arm. “Please talk to me. I want to talk.”

  Lucas stared at the opposite wall. Cleo could see he’d been crying, which shattered her already fragile heart. Lucas, like Cleo, had never been a crier, though it was clearly a habit that she had taken up lately. But looking at his ruddy cheeks and pinkish eyes, she knew how wrecked he must have been, and she also knew that she alone was responsible.

  “Is your music on?” she asked.

  He firmed his jaw, and she knew he could hear her.

  “OK, I just . . . You don’t have to say anything,” Cleo started, then couldn’t imagine what to say next. She didn’t know what she thought—that they could go their whole lives, just the two of them, their peas in a pod, and she’d never be honest with him? Maybe, selfishly, yes, that’s what she had thought. When she made the decision fifteen years ago, she hadn’t been clear-eyed on what it would mean, the ramifications of the choice she made as her zygote became an embryo, which became a child who became an inquisitive teen. It was easier to just say: he hadn’t wanted to be involved, which Lucas accepted, often begrudgingly, but accepted all the same, until now. Cleo considered that it was easier for her, not for Lucas, and the shame of her selfishness spread through every cell.

  “I didn’t really know your father,” she said, then corrected herself. If she were going to tell Lucas the truth, it needed to be whole. “No, I should say, I didn’t know him at all.”

  Lucas registered something like disgust at the notion of his mother’s one-night stand. Fair, Cleo thought.

  “It, well, I . . . I did not have an active social life in college or really an active romantic one,” she continued, and Lucas rolled his eyes and returned his stare to the wall. “I was very singularly focused on my next steps and my future, and I just didn’t see the point of fun.” Cleo knew he was still listening because his eyebrows rose and lowered as if to say: what a surprise.

  “Well, my suitemates were going out one night, and they invited me. And I’d already gotten accepted to law school, but I had had a terrible day—my thesis professor had told me he thought my work was subpar and that I was going to have to redo four chapters . . .” Cleo drifted at the memory of how personally she had taken the criticism. How much she spiraled, how in hindsight, her professor was just trying to prepare her for law school by demanding excellence. “Anyway, I guess I needed to blow off some steam, to just . . . not be Cleo McDougal for a night, and so when my roommate, Anna, begged me to go out with her—I mean, she didn’t have that many friends either—I let her convince me.”

  Cleo lost herself for a moment, as she used to in the immediate months following the positive pregnancy test, considering all the ways her life would be different if she hadn’t said yes to the invitation, if she hadn’t gotten sloppy for the first time in her life that March evening and had turned in a better first draft of her thesis, if she hadn’t been so reactive to what was really just constructive criticism.

  “Anyway, Anna knew of this party on campus. She said it was the computer geeks, so I wasn’t expecting much—but then, I wasn’t in a position to adhere to any social hierarchy.” She thought of Anna and how they immediately lost touch after graduation. Who knew what happened to her; who knew if she had any idea how that night changed Cleo’s life? “And we got to this house, and the boys weren’t nerdy at all. They were playing beer pong, which I didn’t know how to play, but, well, I’m competitive—”

  Lucas sniffed at this, and Cleo stopped to see if he had something to say, but he didn’t, so she continued.

  “Right, well, I mean, obviously I started taking the beer pong too seriously, because, I mean, I’m me. And a cute boy I’d never met paired up with me, and . . . Look, four hours later, I was very drunk, and so was he, and, well, one thing led to another . . . I don’t want to spell it out for you—”

  Lucas finally interrupted and said, “Please don’t.”

  “Sure. Sure.” Cleo exhaled. She didn’t know what she was getting right about this story and what she was getting wrong. “Anyway, I was so embarrassed the next morning. It was so out of character for me, and honestly, I just wanted to put it behind me and go home and rework my thesis.”

  Lucas, God bless him, turned to her and said (with enough disdain that Cleo understood this wasn’t a peace offering): “Wait, you’ve told me my whole life that girls can do whatever they want with their bodies.”

  “Sweetie, I didn’t know what I was doing. Women then, well, I mean, we were strong, I guess, in our ways, but we weren’t like your generation—or I wasn’t, at least. Like Marley having two boyfriends or Esme speaking up to her mother.” Cleo hesitated. This wasn’t what she wanted to say. “This isn’t about that, though. This was about the fact that I was so ashamed of myself for doing something reckless, for not being in control, that . . . I think I wanted to pretend that it never happened.”

  “So you wanted to pretend that I never happened
?” Lucas said, his face a mix of heartbreak and rage.

  “No, no!” Cleo wanted to get through the rest of the story now. “This had nothing to do with you and only to do with me. Lucas, I had spent so long making sure that everything was in alignment and propelling me to the next step that I couldn’t forgive myself when I believed that I’d screwed up. And that screwup ended up being the best part of my life.” Cleo thought of her dad, how similar they were—but different too; Georgie was right about that, and she reached for Lucas’s hand. “I promise. There was never any doubt about what I was going to do—keep you, I mean. If anything, you made me realize that I couldn’t be on my own forever.”

  Lucas didn’t reply, and Cleo quickly realized that framing the pregnancy as a screwup was exactly what she didn’t intend. This was why she was always prepared. Accidents happened, mistakes were made when she was not.

  She swallowed. She knew what she had to say next, and she knew that however he reacted, she deserved it. All she wanted to do was stand and leave and close Lucas’s door and slink back to the kitchen and not ruin the past fourteen years she very well realized she was about to ruin. But she owed him more than that; she owed her son his truth, even when it meant he would finally see her as she really was: flawed, deceitful, human, but also, his mother who tried her best. She really thought she had. She could see now why she hadn’t.

  She said it quickly, before she lost her nerve. “Anyway, this isn’t your father’s fault. I left Northwestern without telling him. He never knew. He doesn’t know.”

  Lucas started crying then, his chin quivering and giving way to real tears, and Cleo wished she could go back and redo the entirety of his life.