Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  It was the least she could do, Cleo realized, to accept her friend’s grace with the same amount of generosity. And so she did.

  It was easier to do than she ever would have thought.

  Matty had found Doug Smith.

  He was pretty surprised himself, he told Cleo once Gaby had left her office and Cleo had shut her door. She had meant it—that this was personal, that Lucas deserved to know his story before anyone else, even before her best friend, and she intended to honor that.

  Matty sounded like he was on his bike again.

  “Have you turned into a cycling enthusiast?” Cleo asked. She never envisioned Matty, who had managed to be both skinny and doughy in high school, ending up as a jock.

  “What? No, I just commute to work this way,” he said. “I’ve really gone full-blown Seattle, I guess.” He took a breath. “Anyway, so there’s a reason you couldn’t track him down on Google.”

  “Because there are fourteen thousand Doug Smiths in the United States?”

  “Well, that,” Matty said. “But also, he’s a computer privacy expert. He’s the one Doug Smith who would never show up on Google even if you wanted him to.”

  “Well, fuck,” Cleo said.

  “Nah.” Matty laughed. “Not fuck. You have me, and it turns out not only did I find him, I have his place of business.”

  “You do?” Cleo had never really loved Matty enough in high school, but she was finding that she was a little bit in love with him now.

  “It’s a pretty small world,” he said. “He’s here. In Seattle. He works on our campus—Microsoft, I mean. A different division, I mean, of course, because I’m not cool enough to be black ops. I just do the programming, but—”

  “Hey, Matty, stop being so self-deprecating. You’re a hero.”

  He laughed into his headpiece. “No one ever calls my department ‘heroes,’ so thank you. Anyway, it all checks out. That’s him. Doug Smith. In Seattle.” He paused, and it sounded like he was slowing down, and Cleo pictured him pulling in to work. She didn’t want to take up more of his time. “So now what?” he asked.

  Cleo stared out her window of the Russell Senate Office Building at the dogwoods in full bloom. She thought about her regrets and how they shadowed not just her life but Lucas’s now as well. She thought about what parents pass on to their children: their burdens, their traumas, their complications. She knew her dad wouldn’t want her to be weighed down with his own stuff forever. She knew also that the gift she could pass along to Lucas was lightening her own load too.

  “Now, I guess,” she said to Matty, “I’m coming home.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Cleo and Georgie texted all week about how best to approach Doug. Cleo wanted to call him before their trip, but Georgie felt that Lucas should have the chance to introduce himself without her baggage. That this was her mess, but it was his future, and she shouldn’t fuck it up any more than she already had.

  Finally, they asked Lucas. Georgie was on FaceTime, and the twins waved on their way to soccer practice, and Georgie ran out of frame for a second to hand them organic protein bars before they left. It was funny, Cleo thought, how food really was a symbol for a nourished soul. She herself had eaten eggs every morning that week for breakfast, and it was a start.

  “OK, I’m back, sorry,” Georgie said. She was out on her deck in the Los Angeles sunshine, and Cleo had a flash of a whole different life she could have had. If she and Georgie had found a way to be closer through her childhood, been in better touch once they were grown. Maybe she would have been an entertainment lawyer and lived around the corner and dated broody celebrities and Lucas would be best friends with his cousins. Cleo loved her life, was proud of her choices, but now that she had opened new doors, she did from time to time catch herself envisioning what would have happened if she walked through them.

  “So, Lucas, you break the standoff,” Cleo said. “Do you want me to call Doug, um, your dad, and ask if we should come? Or . . . do you want to go out there and meet him and just see what happens?”

  “Wait, we could go to Seattle?” Lucas asked. He hadn’t been paying attention, evidently, when Cleo had proposed it.

  “Yes, if that’s what you want.”

  “So, like, I could see Esme?”

  This aspect of the trip had not crossed Cleo’s mind, but the brain of a lusty teenager never ceased to surprise her.

  “If . . . that’s what you want, I’m sure we could make that happen. This whole experience is your call,” Cleo said, and she smiled at Georgie, whose joy was practically bursting through the camera. They had discussed, leading up to the conversation, that this one time in Lucas’s life needed to be about him. Not about her needs, not about her job, not about her issues or regrets. Just . . . him. Lucas hadn’t quite forgiven her for her years of mistruths, and Cleo knew it would be a long time before she earned back his complete trust. That was fair. They had a lifetime together, and she also believed they could get there. Peas in a pod. They had to.

  “Yes,” Lucas said. “That’s the one I choose.”

  Cleo disconnected with Georgie and called Arianna at the office and asked her to book two tickets for the next day.

  “Should I let Gaby know?” Arianna asked.

  Cleo and Gaby had settled their differences, though it would take a while for the feelings to subside entirely. But that’s not why Cleo said what she said next.

  “It’s OK,” Cleo said. “This isn’t a work trip. This one is for family.”

  Gaby, of course, wanted to come. Likely to see Oliver Patel but also, Cleo surmised, to make sure that nothing more could go awry. The hashtag protesters had cooled off; their office hallways were no longer clogged with angry, often pimply men and the confused women who ran behind them; the phone lines were starting to quiet too. The Dancing with the Stars video was still hot as ever, but Cleo never expected to get through life in politics as a woman without being laughed at once or twice. It would pass. And the regrets list? Well, Cleo had personally written a press release about it. And she knew that it had landed and made its mark when she watched Bowen read it on-air.

  (Incidentally, he still hadn’t replied to her email in which Cleo proposed a drink [her treat].)

  The gist of it was that of course she had regrets. That made her human. She didn’t think that it made her less of a senator or less presidential, she’d said. If anything, she’d written, it made her a better one. She had thought that the list was her form of confession—to jot down the error of her ways and be absolved simply by acknowledging her mistakes. But that wasn’t restitution; that wasn’t taking a wrong and making it right. And over these past few weeks, she said, she’d learned the difference between recognizing that she could be fallible and accepting ownership of it. And wasn’t that, after all, what the point of this whole thing was? Not governing, she noted. But living. The point of all this was to try to be as good as you can while you can. And she had regrets, but who didn’t? All she could do now was apologize, sincerely, to those she had aggrieved and try to hold herself accountable for the future.

  Bowen held his breath for a moment when he finished reading it, and then he smiled and looked into the camera and said, “That, my friends, is the most we can ask of anyone.”

  Cleo told Gaby that she wanted her to stay in DC, that this trip was just for the two of them, mother and son. Gaby looked a little disappointed and asked Cleo again, as she had done all week, if she really wasn’t still angry over the list leak.

  Cleo wasn’t. And she told her as much. She called Veronica Kaye instead and told her that she welcomed her endorsement, but not if it meant that she or someone on her staff was willing to sell her out. Gaby had relayed Cleo’s distress, so Veronica was not put off by Cleo’s bluntness.

  Veronica quieted on the other end of the line, then pressed a button, and Cleo heard her call Topher, the man who always lingered one step away from her, into her office.

  “Topher,” Veronica said into the speakerpho
ne. “Did you leak the confidential information about Senator McDougal’s list to the media?”

  “No,” Topher said.

  “Topher,” Veronica repeated with seemingly significantly less patience. “I spoke with the editors at two sites, and they forwarded your email that you sent to them, explicitly leaking said information.”

  Cleo did not hear Topher reply because Topher had not, in fact, thought of something to say.

  “You’re fired,” Veronica said, and Cleo slapped her hand to her mouth in disbelief.

  “Ms. Kaye,” Topher started to protest. “Her regrets and behavior made her a liability. You couldn’t see that! The intentions behind my actions were to protect you.”

  “Oh, Topher,” Veronica said with even less patience than before. “Only a man would think that regrets were a liability.”

  “Ms. Kaye—”

  Veronica cut him off. “I don’t like telling anyone something twice.”

  Cleo, a little bit reverent, didn’t dare to speak until Veronica took the phone off speaker.

  “Veronica,” she said. “I . . . I didn’t ask for that.”

  “No,” Veronica agreed. “But you and I both know that an office with one less duplicitous prick is already a better place of work.”

  Cleo laughed. Then Veronica said: “Oh, fuck him.” And Cleo laughed harder.

  Gaby did drive them to the airport on Saturday morning, just to be there for support.

  “I know I didn’t get to all five regrets,” Cleo said on the sidewalk outside departures. “I think this is a first—you and me not crossing a finish line.” She pulled her into an embrace. “But thank you for pushing me into the others. And thanks for understanding why I’m doing this one without you.”

  They disentangled, and Gaby actually looked a little moved.

  “And if I see Oliver, I’ll tell him hello,” Cleo added.

  “Oh God,” Gaby groaned. “I like him too much.”

  “Fine, can I also tell him that I know you have FaceTime sex nightly or is that overstepping?”

  “Jesus Christ, Mom!” Lucas shrieked from the sidewalk at Dulles. “I mean, seriously!”

  The doctors had cleared Lucas for flying, but Cleo was nervous and doting anyway. She insisted on checking both bags because she didn’t want him carrying his duffel, and she indulged him and bought him two scones and a vanilla Frappuccino at Starbucks, which reminded her of Bowen. She checked her email again, but there was no reply, and she assumed that maybe that was just how it was going to be. Bowen had twenty-four-year-olds throwing themselves at him, for God’s sake. He certainly didn’t need to sign up for the mess that Cleo dragged along with her. And she wasn’t going to chase him. Cleo was a thirty-seven-year-old single mom, likely candidate for the president of the United States. Her story wasn’t going to begin and end and hang the moon on a man.

  Still, though, they were boarding the plane in search of a different boy, and Cleo didn’t know how to feel about that. Doug Smith was as much of a stranger as the person sitting in the aisle seat next to her, and she had no way of knowing how he’d react, if he was married, if he had children, if he’d want another one. If he’d be angry, if he’d be resentful, if he’d be happy. She and Lucas had discussed all this, and he was still OK flying, literally, into the unknown. Her boy was braver than she was, but then she reconsidered and thought of how far she’d come from the seventeen-year-old girl who had been orphaned, and she gave herself credit because she was pretty brave too. Not perfect. But brave and perfect didn’t have to be synonymous.

  Matty picked them up at the airport, which was sweet of him, because, well, Matty was still Matty, and too good in some ways for her. Cleo could see how wrong she’d gotten that. Lucas FaceTimed Esme the whole ride to the hotel, and they made plans to meet later at the same coffee shop of their first date later that night.

  “So you chose Esme?” Cleo asked, because she couldn’t help herself. “I mean, not Marley?”

  Lucas rolled his eyes. “God, Mom, I told you. We don’t have labels.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Why can’t it just be that we are happy in the moment, and as long as no one is being dishonest, that’s what it is?”

  Matty reached over and squeezed her leg, a grin on both their faces, as if the notion were both completely preposterous and ridiculously endearing.

  “OK,” Cleo said. “I won’t ask again.”

  “Thank you.” Lucas sighed, but Cleo suspected that it was better to ask too many questions of your child than not ask enough.

  Matty helped them with their bags and lingered after they checked in to the Sheraton (again).

  “Want to grab a bite?” he proposed.

  “How don’t you have plans for the night? I saw those photos at Snoqualmie Falls and the Coldplay concert. Doesn’t your girlfriend want you to herself?”

  Matty turned a shade that looked familiar because he was often turning such a shade—deep scarlet—in high school.

  “Oh!” he said. “You go on Facebook now?”

  Cleo smiled. “Not really. But I had to see what else MaryAnne was saying about me. And I had to verify that this so-called girlfriend was real. I mean . . . twenty-seven? You?”

  Matty laughed. “I know. Who’d have thought?”

  Cleo hugged him. “I bet a lot of people did, Matty. I wish I had too.”

  Cleo begged off dinner because she had other plans. She made sure that Lucas was settled and knew how to get to the coffee shop (“oh my God, Mooooooom,” he’d whined before he slipped under his sheets for a nap), then hailed an Uber outside the hotel.

  She pressed her forehead against the car window as they wound through the wide, beautiful streets of Broadmoor, the spaces of her memory plugged with nostalgia. She thanked the driver and stood outside MaryAnne’s house and stared up at the cloud-streaked sky and remembered how braided they’d been, the two of them, their own peas in a pod, until Cleo detonated it. And for that, she owed MaryAnne an apology. Cleo couldn’t know if she’d ruined MaryAnne’s life, if her decision to sabotage her essay or undermine her for the school paper position or any of that stuff had thrown her off her anointed course, if instead of being president of her country club she’d be mayor or serving in Congress alongside Cleo. Life happens, Cleo thought. You make a million decisions in the moment that may change your trajectory. And sometimes you get lucky, like when Cleo got Lucas, and sometimes you don’t, like when MaryAnne chose to listen to Cleo’s truly terrible advice to write her internship essay about her dead dog or when Cleo gave in to her petty jealousy of MaryAnne’s blue-blood connections and offered her that advice to begin with and wrecked their friendship. The point of life wasn’t to go back and litigate all those mistakes. The point, Cleo supposed, was to do better.

  So here she was. At MaryAnne Newman’s literal doorstep. Trying to do better.

  She rapped the brass knocker against the red door three times, then stepped back and waited. A Range Rover was in the driveway, so she figured MaryAnne was home, and if not, Cleo knew she’d be at the club. But before she had to reassess, however, she heard footsteps, and then the door swung open, and then her old ex-friend stood in front of her, speechless.

  “Hi, MaryAnne,” Cleo said. “I’m back.”

  “What are you . . . ?” MaryAnne was dressed down in yoga pants and a tank top, with a messy bun atop her head. She looked more like Cleo remembered her than when she was made-up and tailored at the club. MaryAnne peered over Cleo’s shoulder. “Are you filming me again? Is that what this is?”

  “No, could I, can I . . . would it be OK if I came in?”

  MaryAnne took a second long look around the front yard, as if she couldn’t take Cleo at her word, which, frankly, was fair. “Fine,” she huffed. “But I was working out, so you have, like, a minute.”

  MaryAnne had redone the house since her parents lived there. Their walls used to be bright yellow and the wood a rich mahogany. Now it was all crisp white, even the couch
es, even the rugs. But the bones were the same, the high beams and the arched doorways, and Cleo felt as if she were stepping back in time. She realized how it must feel to MaryAnne—to never, literally, have left home. Not that staying home was a wrong decision for plenty of people—Cleo wasn’t judging. But for MaryAnne, with her ambitions, maybe it had been, and Cleo could see why MaryAnne blamed her, though we all make our choices, and even with Cleo’s misdeed, MaryAnne chose to stay. She couldn’t hold Cleo accountable for that. The world was pretty vast, and even if it had been the harder path, MaryAnne could have gone anywhere, done anything.

  MaryAnne sat at her kitchen table and stared; then, because she was a debutante even all these years later, she exhaled and said, “I suppose I should offer you some lemonade.”

  “I’ll get it,” Cleo said, and MaryAnne didn’t protest, so Cleo found the glasses exactly where she knew they would be, and she found the pitcher in the refrigerator, and then she grabbed two coasters because she knew that MaryAnne wouldn’t want rings left behind, and then, finally, she sat across from her old friend to drink some lemonade.

  “I owe you an apology,” Cleo said. “A real one. I was a true asshole, and I justified that to myself for a long time, but it really doesn’t make me any less of an asshole.”

  MaryAnne bristled, and Cleo didn’t know what she had said that was untrue. She was determined to be honest, and she felt that she was.

  “I don’t . . . I don’t really like that language in the house,” MaryAnne said.

  “Oh, well then, I apologize for that too.”

  MaryAnne wrinkled her nose like she thought Cleo was being snide, which she wasn’t.

  “MaryAnne, I am here without agenda. I think . . . You know, for a long time it was only me. Then it was Lucas and me. And that’s just how it’s always been.” Cleo thought of those two girls who had approached her at the Central Park fun run, best friends who never wanted to be apart, and how she told them that at some point they might have to choose themselves. And then she thought of Mariann, the kind nurse who admitted Lucas into the ER, who told her that no woman was an island. “For a long time, I just thought that I had to . . . pick me. I thought that was strength. And all I wanted to be was seen as formidable. But what I didn’t know is that out there on my own, I was actually making myself less formidable. No one can do anything in this life alone. Asking for help when you need it—that’s the real strength. So is apologizing when you’ve really stepped in shit.” Cleo stopped and worried that she’d screwed it up again. “Sorry, crap, not shit.”