by J J Arias
“I’m going to love this,” George said, her fingers pressed against her temples in advance of the headache that was sure to come.
“What if she moves into the mansion?” she blurted. “There would be no need to spend an extra penny on security, but there’s nowhere safer. It’s not unheard of. We have done it in the past. After all, it’s an immersive program.”
“But that girl’s house burned down,” George managed through tightly shut eyes and gritted teeth.
“The salient point is that there’s a precedent,” she countered. “We can offer it to all five of the fellows if you like.”
“I don’t like this idea, Jo,” she admitted after a long sigh. “Can’t you see all the ways this is going to blow up in my face?”
“Could you imagine the massive amount of attention this would get if something happened to her? Or if she decided to make up some story if the right amount of temptation was applied?”
George knew she had a point, but there was so much risk attached to every move. “We should have just admitted that Nathan was at that stupid club for a birthday and apologized for his tastelessness.” From the moment that woman, with her blonde hair and magazine quality face, stepped into her world George had regretted the entire scheme.
“And then you’d be dead in the water for sure. They are looking to run a family values conservative against you,” she offered. “Even if it’s bullshit and hypocrisy, they’d have a field day running that story into the ground.”
“While they frequent high-priced escorts and swallow ED meds like they’re candy,” she grumbled, giving in to the futility of her frustration.
“All we can control is what we do. They’re used to talking out both sides of their mouths and it wouldn’t slow them down a second if we tried to expose them for it.”
“I know, I know,” she said, waving her sentiments away like a sour smell. “What if this just fuels that ridiculous story that we’ve kidnapped her to impregnate her and sell the baby’s organs or something,” George quipped in an act of gallows humor.
“It can be temporary,” Josephine replied so quickly George was sure she’d already considered that possibility. She hated that her trusty chief of staff had such a head start mulling the issue over. “From the way Mila described, I don’t think it’s the media behind this at all.”
“It’s Blankenship,” she guessed but didn’t open her eyes to watch Josephine nod. “Alright.” She resigned herself to the most insane idea she’d ever heard. She was already committed to this road, what was another few feet. “Just don’t try to make it sound so appetizing to the others,” she warned. Even if they would be clear across the other side of the fifteen thousand square foot mansion, it was still too close for comfort.
Chapter Six
When Mila’s ride dropped her off at the security gate, with her clothing and shoes neatly arranged in three enormous suitcases, Tim was already standing on the cobblestone driveway gawking at the old colonial mansion.
“Can you believe this,” he exclaimed, an ear-to-ear grin on his face. “When Ms. Peters called me, I thought she was pulling my leg. I told her they were long enough, but she wasn’t joking,” he explained as if Mila had some kind of doubt.
“Come on,” she said, nudging him along. “We still have to get to work today.” She prodded his back. Once inside, Mila was overwhelmed by the outdated decor and mildly musty smell. “It looks like the set of The Golden Girls on steroids,” she muttered to herself as they were whisked from the public entrance to the main portion of the house.
“Everything is so floral,” she whispered to Tim, but his eyes were wide in fascination. Where Mila saw tacky old furniture picked out by a retiree who’d never lived in Florida, he saw the most amazing place on Earth. She loosened her cynicism.
As soon as Mila was starting to relax and trying to enjoy the experience with the excitement Tim was exuding, a voice called out from behind them.
“Sorry I’m late,” a dark-haired woman said. Jetsam, the female half of the horrible duo who’s name she refused to learn, hurried to them.
“Is this all of us then?” Mila asked without looking at her.
The house manager, who had been leading them on a tour, nodded. “I believe it will be the three of you,” she said with impatience. “Come along.”
As they walked, the manager explained that the public side encompassed most of the west wing. Governor Fernandez’s private quarters took up a good part of the east wing. Under no circumstances were they allowed to venture to that side of the building. Doing so would result in immediate expulsion. Mila rolled her eyes. As if she’d get dismissed when the entire charade was for her benefit. The pool and gardens were okay to use, but only until sundown and only if the governor and her family weren’t already using them.
“Tim, as the only male, you’ll have this guest area to yourself,” the house manager said with the hint of a smile. “Ladies, you’ll be upstairs. I don’t expect any fraternizing after hours,” she said with all the effervescence of a school marm.
Mila glanced at Jetsam, who wore an equally horrified expression. We don’t have to share, do we? The possibility made Mila second-guess her acceptance of Josephine’s offer. She’d rather take her chances with the harassment than share a room or bathroom with her. The opportunity to get closer to the governor and strengthen the ties she might rely on later in her career were great, but nothing was worth the loss of privacy.
“This is your room,” the manager said to Jetsam as soon as they reached the top of the stairs. Mila relaxed, knowing at least the rooms were separate and the hallway looked plenty long with half a dozen doors from end to end.
They continued down the hall all the way to the end. “Does anyone else live here?” she asked.
“Staff has permanent housing downstairs near the main kitchen. These rooms are typically reserved for guests, though you three are the only ones we have at the moment.”
Mila nodded for lack of a better response. The enormous place suddenly felt so sad and empty. “Thanks,” she said when the woman deposited her at the last door on the right.
Inside, Mila’s bags had already been brought in and placed on luggage racks near the closet. The room wasn’t nearly as tacky as the others she’d seen. The walls were painted a pastel mint color with thick, cream-colored crown molding around the ceiling, floors, doors, and the two windows overlooking one of the gardens. The bed, a vintage canopy with blue damask fabric over the top, was a decent double size.
“Thank God,” she muttered without hyperbole when she noticed a door in the room led to a private bathroom, complete with a stall shower and clawfoot tub.
Jumping on the task of putting away her things, Mila went first for the only two possessions that meant anything to her, a dented pocket watch that she propped up on the nightstand and a small framed photo of a blonde, porcelain-skinned girl sitting between two dark-haired and olive-skinned adults.
* * *
“Are we heading to the office, Governor?” the driver asked as they set out from the secure garage at the end of the property.
“I’d like to stop in and check on my father first,” George replied as she relaxed into the SUV’s backseat, saying nothing of her wanting to avoid the invasion of her home that morning.
A half hour later, they were at George’s childhood home. She ran her fingers through her straight-ironed hair and needlessly straightened her navy-blue jacket and pants. Her white silk blouse was as wrinkle-free as it had been when she pulled it off the hanger, but she fussed with it anyway.
“Hello, hello,” George announced as she slipped inside the house. A framed picture of her, her mother, and her father taken some time before her high school graduation, greeted her before anyone else did.
Her dark eyes lingered on her mother’s photo resting on the foyer console, her white and gray hair framing a lovely wrinkled face. The glass was cold against her fingers as she touched the last picture taken of the matriarch. I miss
you.
“Good morning, Governor,” a woman in pink scrubs said as she appeared from around a corner. “So lovely to see you.”
“Oh please, Ellen, call me George,” she insisted as she had for the last two years. “How’s the old man today?”
“A little sentimental,” she replied with a restrained smile that was sadder than she’d expected. It instantly filled her belly with dread.
With high heels clicking over the terrazzo floors kept pristine for forty years, George followed the private nurse back to the sunroom where her dad usually sat until lunch. Basking in the streaming light, the once tall, dapper man sat in a reduced pile. Bent forward in his green armchair, his white mustache thinner than it used to be, George’s dad smiled as he studied a large photo album.
“Hi, Dad,” she murmured as she stepped onto terracotta tile.
“Georgie.” The white-haired man in the baby blue linen shirt looked up at her like a child meeting Santa Clause. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said with an enormous grin. “Has school been keeping you busy? It’s been so long,” he added as George leaned in to leave a plum colored kiss on his forehead.
“I was here a couple of days ago, Papi,” she said through the lump in her throat, but made no comment on his impression that she was still in college.
“Bah.” He grumbled something unintelligible while waving an arthritic hand in the air.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, pulling a footstool up alongside his chair. She didn’t recognize the thick, leather-bound album.
“Your Mami calls them my memories.” He laughed as he pulled the unlit cigar from his mouth. He hadn’t smoked in years but never lost the habit of keeping one with him.
George scrunched together her sculpted eyebrows as she accepted the tome he handed over. It was a shrine to her achievements. There were photos, newspaper clippings, copies from her high school yearbook, every scholarship offer and college acceptance letter, pictures of her winning rowing trophies and one of her mid-row during the final day of a championship race. Her eyes stopped on the cropped, blurry picture, her muscles bulging and the vein in her neck pulsating as she powered through the tear in her rotator cuff. Her shoulder ached with the sensation of pain remembered.
“That’s my daughter,” he said proudly, his eyes, turned dull blue by old age, sparkled with pride. George smiled and pretended his loss of recognition didn’t wound her. “She’s smart as a whip, that one,” he added. “That’s her,” he said excitedly when she’d absentmindedly turned the page to her high school graduation. “She’s the taller one in the middle,” he added helpfully as he pointed to a smiling George in white cap and gown standing in a group of girls.
The photo transported George to a time long gone. Her own face was so young and thin she hardly identified with the seventeen-year-old version of herself. She averted her eyes from the girl posing next to her. There was no need to recall her emerald eyes or her deep dimples.
“That’s her best friend. Carmen her name is,” he said with a finger tapping over the girl’s face. George nodded, as if she could ever forget. “You should stay and meet my Georgie. She’ll be home from school soon,” he said as he slumped back in his chair, his eyes closing of their own accord.
George closed the album and put it back on his lap before kissing him on the forehead again and slipping out of the room.
“It’s the new medication,” his nurse whispered as soon as she was back in the living room. Ellen had the decency to look away while she dried her eyes and collected herself. “It will take a couple of weeks to even out.”
“Yes, of course,” she said out of habit when she didn’t know what else to say.
“It’s nearly the afternoon. The longer the day goes on, the worse—”
“Yes,” George interrupted, not wanting to engage in a conversation about her father’s dementia. “I know, thank you,” she added to salvage the polite tone of the conversation, and secreted her hands in her blazer to conceal the trembling.
Chapter Seven
The five o’clock alarm blessed George with the solace of her pre-dawn routine. With a full body stretch and a deep cleansing breath, she slipped out of bed and into her work-out clothes.
“Come on, girls,” she muttered, her husky voice made raspier from disuse. The dogs stepped over each other to be the first out of the bedroom and down the hall.
George yawned as she lifted her dark, shoulder-length hair in a ponytail. “Okay, okay,” she said with a smile as she let the dogs out into the garden. Turning down the usually empty hall and toward her gym, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. The sound of purposeful exhales shattered the silence of her sanctuary and set her blood ablaze.
From the open door, George gawked in stunned disbelief. In one of her most private places on Earth, a blonde woman in nothing but a sports bra and tiny shorts was suspended on yellow training straps with her feet planted on the wall as she did pushups while several feet off the ground. Her muscled body hardly trembled as she held herself up like a marble statue. Each dip sent the muscles in her biceps and back rippling. A layer of perspiration over her fair skin hinted that she’d been at it for a while. If George hadn’t been furious, she would’ve been impressed.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” she asked as sharply as she could without screaming. The anger tightening her jaw made it nearly impossible to speak normally, and the surging adrenaline didn’t help.
Mila didn’t so much as look up in her direction. George’s nostrils flared with indignation. She wouldn’t be ignored in her own fucking house.
“Hey!” she bellowed, shedding any ounce of serenity she had left.
Mila looked up mid pushup, her face flushed and confused.
“I’m sorry. Have a disturbed you?” she quipped sarcastically, barely unable to contain the volcanic eruption threatening to burst from her being.
Mila did three more pushups using the same methodical, controlled movements as if George had never spoken. When she’d apparently completed her rep, she jumped off the wall and landed on the balls of her feet like a practiced gymnast.
Once she was upright, George noticed thin scars all around her body like a giant jellyfish had wrapped itself around her, leaving a mark everywhere its stingers touched. It reminded George of the damage desiccated vines did to stucco when pulled off the side of a house. She’d have asked about them if she wasn’t so overwhelmed with head-splitting agitation.
Mila calmly pulled a wireless earbud out of her ear. As soon as she did, the room was filled with the sound of damagingly loud music. “Yes?” she asked just calmly enough to cause total devastation to the governor’s professional foundation.
“Yes?” she echoed, enveloping the word in righteous indignation. “You barge into my private space without permission and all you have to say for yourself is yes?” George’s vision was blurring as the base of her skull pulsated with unreleased pressure. “I’m sorry. Am I bothering you or something while you’re in my home?” Her words dripped with sarcasm and disdain.
“Technically, this room is on the public side of the building,” Mila replied before popping her blaring earbud back in. “I checked,” she added loudly over her shoulder as she fired up the treadmill next to the rower. My rower. My treadmill. My goddamned gym!
George followed her to the other side of the small room. “This is not open to the public. You need to leave. This experience does not allow you unrestricted access to the entirety of the building. This is my home and you have not been invited,” she said with heavy pauses between words to make sure the impossible woman understood her clearly.
“Technically,” Mila repeated as she ratcheted up the speed on the treadmill. With a cold stare fixed on the wall ahead, she continued. “This room, which used to be a viewing room for traveling artistic displays, is designated for public access. It had been public until around 1975, when the then governor turned it into his pottery room. The mansion’s historian says it�
��s been all kinds of things since then,” she explained, maintaining even breaths as she ran. “You know the only thing it hasn’t been?” she asked rhetorically before casting her light blue eyes down at a visibly pissed off head of state. “Officially designated part of your private quarters. You can change that, but it would require the commission in charge of the mansion to make a recommendation to the legislature, who would in turn have to pass a law to effect the change. Until that happens, you cannot oust me without notice and an opportunity to be heard.”
George couldn’t alter the expression on her face. It was like watching herself from above. The frustration had caused her feet to fuse with the floor and her mouth to slam shut. “How dare—” she started in a low growl that emanated from the depths of her fiery soul.
Mila interrupted her with softer eyes and a belatedly apologetic expression. “We don’t have to be enemies, Governor. I want to work out and so do you. With that reporter, or whoever he is, hounding me, I don’t want to risk going to my usual barre class. It wouldn’t be fair to the other members of the class. This is my only option, and I’m guessing it’s yours too. I won’t tell the other fellows if I can just exercise here in the mornings. Neither of them would be desperate enough to research the origins of this room, so you don’t have to worry about that.”
George fought the urge to barrel into the arrogant young woman and strangle her. It wasn’t that she knew about the room or its origins, it was that she was being blackmailed in her own home and robbed of a sacred space. In that moment, there was nothing she wanted more than to fire her. To be rid of her forever and deal with whatever consequences ensued. But Josephine’s voice was in the back of her mind. Getting rid of a present irritant wasn’t worth the potential trouble for the campaign. Nothing was more important than her re-election, not even her own peace.
“This is more talking than I usually do in a month at the gym, okay?” Mila continued before taking a swig from her water bottle and slowing down her treadmill to a fast walk. “I’m not going to annoy you.”
