Eighteen Acres

by Nicolle Wallace

  Dale now snapped out of her reverie and looked at her watch: seven forty-five. She stood up and approached the gate agents. “Any updates on the seven P.M. shuttle?” she asked.

  “We made an announcement about ten minutes ago. The seven was canceled, but the eight o’clock shuttle will leave around eight-thirty,” the agent said.

  Dale knew it wasn’t their fault, but she couldn’t help glaring at them.

  “Ms. Smith, we’ve got you in first class on the eight o’clock. We’ll board in a few more minutes,” the agent said.

  “Thanks,” Dale said, returning to her seat. She didn’t want to start their weekend off with a meltdown, so she e-mailed Peter with her update: “7 pm shuttle is dead. I’m on the 8, which leaves at 8:30. See you when I see you.”

  He wrote back right away: “Stop stressing. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Dale hated how clingy she felt. It was as if she couldn’t get enough of him. They’d spend Friday nights together, and then he’d get up on Saturdays and drive the two hours to the Connecticut countryside, where his kids were at boarding school. She’d work all day Saturday and then get into the car after the newscast and spend Saturday nights with him at the house he rented in Washington, Connecticut, to be near the kids.

  On Sunday mornings, they’d stay in bed as long as possible. Dale would say, “I’m getting in the shower in five minutes,” over and over again, until she was so late she’d leave his house with wet hair and no makeup. Then she would return to the city to prepare for the Sunday evening newscast, and Peter would return to Kent to have lunch with the twins before he headed back to D.C. Sometimes he’d stay Sunday nights, too, and about once a month, Dale flew to California to meet Peter on her days off. Her weekend schedule meant that Monday and Tuesday were her Saturday and Sunday, so she’d get on a late flight out of JFK on Sunday night and meet him in San Francisco or Los Angeles, where he kept offices and homes.

  Dale saw the gate agents reach for the PA system and prayed for news that her flight was boarding. “Boarding all first-class passengers for the eight P.M. US Airways shuttle to La Guardia,” he said, smiling at Dale as he said it.

  She settled into her seat and stared out the window. She sent Peter a text: “on my way see you soon xo.” He wrote back instantly: “safe flight.”

  They were seventh in line for takeoff.

  Dale sighed and sipped the glass of wine that the flight attendant had brought her without asking. She closed her eyes and thought about all the little things she wanted to share with Peter—the everyday things that made her laugh or struck her as curious. They never had enough time to talk. But that had always been the case with them, Dale thought as her plane sat waiting to take off for the twenty-five-minute flight.

  More than two and a half years had passed since they’d first slept together. Dale looked out the window of the plane as it took off from Washington a few moments later, the White House and the Capitol shining beneath them. She wondered what her life would be like if she hadn’t fallen in love with the president’s husband.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Charlotte

  Charlotte spent the weekend much the way she’d spent most of her weekends as president. On Friday night, she and Melanie finished a bottle of wine and half a pack of cigarettes and talked into the night about what their lives would be like when they left the White House. Melanie had said something about needing to talk to her about the campaign, but then the twins called to ask where their ski stuff was stored up at boarding school, and Melanie never raised it again.

  On Saturday, Charlotte traveled to Camp David with Melanie and the dogs, where she’d conducted a meeting with her military commanders and national security team by video conference. They’d woken up Sunday to six more inches of fresh snow and taken a long hike in snow shoes around Camp David with the dogs. They’d returned to the White House at noon, and now Charlotte was in the Oval Office catching up on paperwork.

  “Down, get down. Get down right now!” Charlotte shouted at her three vizslas, who were trying to make mouth-to-mouth contact with her new Secret Service agents.

  “Get off the nice men. Sit down. Kennel!” She tried every command that the trainers had taught her, but while she commanded the United States military, she could not get her three dogs to stop jumping off the floor to try to kiss the agents on the mouth.

  “It’s OK, Madam President, really. I have two dogs at home, and they like to kiss humans on the mouth to see if they know them. It’s all in a book I read when I got my first problem dog. Not that your dogs are problems, they are not, of course, but, you know. I’m sorry…” He trailed off, embarrassed.

  “No, of course, they are problem dogs,” Charlotte said, “Look at them.”

  The smallest of the three dogs was peeing on the rug of the Oval Office, a habit she didn’t seem able to break despite Charlotte’s efforts to have her trained by the best dog trainers in the country. The last trainer had quit when the puppy bit her.

  “Melanie!” Charlotte yelled from the Oval Office. Charlotte’s assistant, Samantha, ran into the Oval Office just as the middle dog was squatting to pee on top of the wet spot created by the puppy.

  “Sam, please ask Melanie to get the trainer over here to deal with the dogs. Tell her Mika is still peeing on the rug in the Oval Office.”

  “Ma’am, I can call the trainer myself. Why don’t I take the dogs to the park for you? Have they been for a run yet today?” Sam asked.

  “Yes, we hiked for more than an hour this morning. They just don’t tire out. I don’t know what to do. Mika peed all over Camp David. And Emma followed suit, but just to outdo her. The only one who is still behaving like a good girl is my sweet Cammie. Come here, peanut.” Charlotte summoned Cammie, her seven-year-old vizsla. Cammie jumped into her lap and curled into a small ball of cinnamon-colored fur and licked Charlotte’s face—eyes, nose, mouth, and chin.

  “That’s my good girl. That’s my best girl. Why aren’t your sisters good girls like you?” Cammie looked at the other two dogs with disdain as she settled in for what she obviously hoped would be an afternoon nap on her mistress’s lap.

  Charlotte never thought she’d be the type to collect pets, but Cammie was such a special dog that when the breeder had called three years later with a puppy from his final litter, she couldn’t say no. That was how Emma had joined her family. The youngest, Mika, was a gift from the Hungarian ambassador, who was thrilled to learn that the American president was a fan of the Hungarian vizsla. Charlotte took the dogs everywhere. The best thing about being president these days, Charlotte thought, was being able to travel with the dogs. She knew people suspected she was becoming eccentric, but the dogs provided more companionship than anyone could imagine.

  Melanie helped create the image of a working mom with photo ops of Charlotte and Peter at official White House functions with the kids or traveling together to Camp David over the holidays, but the presidency had a way of isolating even the most well-rounded individuals. Charlotte stroked Cammie’s soft fur as Cammie let out a loud sigh and shut her eyes. Charlotte glanced at her briefing papers and started in on a lengthy report from her director of management and budget about the size of the deficit.

  Everyone always has an explanation for why they can’t do what I want done, Charlotte said to herself. Everyone except Roger.

  Roger Taylor was the defense secretary. She was having dinner with him and his wife at their home in Wesley Heights that evening.

  I’ll bring the dogs, she decided, feeling better instantly at the thought of her three vizslas running around with their two standard poodles. Roger was just as nuts about his dogs as she was about hers.

  Roger and his wife, Stephanie, were rarities in Washington. They were happily married, liked by everyone—Democrats and Republicans—and seemingly oblivious to their status as power brokers. Roger drove the secretary of state and the national security advisor crazy, but Melanie had a way with him. The rest of the national security team
called Melanie the Roger Whisperer and counted on her to mediate interagency power struggles. Melanie had worked closely with Roger when he’d served as deputy secretary of state for President Martin and she was press secretary. During the transition, when Charlotte was interviewing candidates for defense secretary, Melanie had suggested Roger for the job. After a brief phone conversation, Charlotte had offered him the position without a single face-to-face meeting. He’d roared with laughter when she’d made the offer.

  “So, Melanie’s got your ear, I presume from this phone call. That’s a good thing. A very good thing,” Roger had said.

  He was smarter than the others, and he wasn’t intimidated by Charlotte’s strength or lack of female charm. He was never disappointed by her, as all the others seemed to be, because he never expected more than her focus on his issues and her complete loyalty, and he had both in abundance.

  Together, they’d done what the two men who had come before Charlotte hadn’t managed to do: they’d won a war.

  Roger and Charlotte had traveled to Iraq three days after Charlotte’s inauguration. He’d shown her where all the insurgent strongholds had been and where the most deadly fighting had taken place following the original invasion. They’d driven the roads that had been lined with deadly IEDs for the first six years of America’s occupation. He’d shown her where the “Sunni awakening”—the turning point in the war—first took hold. Iraq was still in tatters, but the worst was over, and American troops were on their way home with a victory under their belts.

  They’d traveled from Iraq to Afghanistan on that first trip, and for all the progress that had been made in Iraq, it seemed that the situation in Afghanistan had deteriorated. It was not for lack of effort or for lack of popular support—the war in Afghanistan had always maintained higher levels of popular support in America than the Iraq war. It seemed to lack a strategy, but what strategy could be crafted to get young boys out of caves where they studied bomb making and adhered to the radical teachings of the madrassas so they could grow up and fly airplanes into buildings? Charlotte and Roger had been back to Iraq and Afghanistan more than a dozen times to meet with local leaders, diplomats, commanders, and U.S. troops. Iraq, while ghastly and heartbreaking, at least seemed to have a pulse. Afghanistan felt as if it had been flatlined since the Dark Ages.

  Charlotte couldn’t help thinking about her son when she traveled to the war zones. In every speech she gave, she praised the men and women of America’s military and their families. Yet in order to get through every speech without showing emotion that could be interpreted around the world as weakness, she forced herself never to contemplate sending her own son off to either of those godforsaken places. She knew herself well enough to know that she could never send her child to fight against faceless enemies on hostile terrain. She was deeply ashamed of her thoughts, and she’d even started going to church with Roger and Stephanie to ask forgiveness and to offer extra prayers for the mothers who did have the courage—and most likely did not have the choice—to send their baby boys and girls into battle. She let herself cry for the mothers when she was alone at night. The dogs were the only witnesses to the tears she shed when she wrote the letters.

  Each night, she brought with her to the residence the names and details of the lives and deaths of every U.S. soldier killed on her watch. She spent hours crafting handwritten notes to mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sons, and daughters. Sometimes she went through several drafts. No two letters were the same. This was the least she felt she could do. The letters to the mothers were the hardest for her to write, so she separated them and worked on them last. She stayed up all night sometimes, until just the right words formed on her personal stationery in her messy cursive. She always finished the letters emotionally drained and aching for her own children.

  Charlotte revisited the decision to send the twins to boarding school every morning when she woke up to an empty house.

  “This is the last year at Kent,” she’d often said to Peter and the twins. The problem was that the kids were thriving at Kent. They were growing into clever, kind, and daring young people who cared not at all for material items (other than their iPhones) and very much about the world around them—just what every parent of teenagers prays for. Peter traveled to Kent every weekend to watch their soccer games in the fall, hockey in the winter, and water polo in the spring and summer. Sometimes he brought his players with him, and the kids loved introducing the famous athletes to their friends. Charlotte wished she could pop in on them and surprise them for a weekend, but she made such a commotion with the motorcade and security. It was best to have Peter visit and allow the kids to pretend that they were just like the rest of the students.

  When this is all over, the kids and I will travel around the world, Charlotte thought while stroking Cammie’s belly.

  She finished her briefing papers, having made notes and written questions all over them that she knew would leave her economic team peeling themselves off the ceiling when they got in the next morning. She gathered some reading on intelligence reform for later that evening and walked the dogs across the South Lawn back toward the residence.

  It was quiet on Sundays. A large crowd always gathered to greet her and the dogs upon their return from Camp David, but now all the staffers were home with their families or out with friends, and all the tourists had made their way back to the train stations or airports or bus stations where they’d arrived days earlier.

  Charlotte was claustrophobic; she never took the elevator. She loved to look at the art, so she and the three dogs made their way toward the grand staircase. She glanced into the room where the portraits of the former first ladies hung. She often wondered if they’d been happy here, if they’d seen much of their husbands, or if the weight of the office had come between them.

  Not that the presidency was what had come between Charlotte and Peter. They’d begun to drift apart years before, but the formality of life in the White House had made their distance official. His living quarters were separate from hers. She didn’t even know when he was in the residence. And since he was the first-ever first man, he was afforded more latitude to maintain dual roles as first husband and working spouse. No one expected him to host teas for visiting spouses of the leaders Charlotte met with. She had hoped that the move to Washington would be a new start for them, that they could laugh together and re-create the chemistry that had drawn them to each other nearly twenty years earlier. He’d always been keenly aware of the roles that spouses played in the success of politicians such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Charlotte’s predecessors, Presidents Martin and Harlow. But instead of bringing them together, the move to Washington and the new and inflexible demands on Charlotte’s time extinguished any hope for the recovery of her marriage.

  She passed the East Room, where all major White House events and ceremonies were held, stopping briefly to scoot Mika along. She greeted everyone on her personal staff with a smile and a wave and entered her suite of rooms. She had an hour to kill before the motorcade would take her to Roger and Stephanie’s.

  She turned on the television and flipped around looking for Dog Whisperer. Sometimes she heard something helpful, and the dogs always stared intently at the television when it was on. She looked at her elliptical machine and contemplated a quick workout but decided against it and called the twins instead. She tried Harry’s cell phone first. When he didn’t pick up, she tried Penelope.

  “Hi, Mom,” Penelope said on the first ring.

  “Hi, honey. Are you with Dad?” Charlotte asked.

  “No, he left after lunch for a meeting in New York tomorrow,” Penelope said.

  “Oh,” Charlotte said.

  “There’s another storm coming in, and he didn’t want to drive in the snow, which is smart, because there were a lot of accidents last week because of black ice,” Penelope said.

  She always worried about her father. Charlotte didn’t realize that Peter was spending Monday in New York, but he d
idn’t tell her much of anything these days.

  “Did you have a good time with Dad?” Charlotte asked.

  “Yes, we went skiing yesterday afternoon and out to dinner. I brought Rebecca, and Harry brought Jason. We went to fondue.”

  “That sounds great, sweetie. Where’s your brother?”

  “He’s at study hall, but he’s probably just listening to his iPod,” Penelope said.

  “Tell him to call me before bed,” Charlotte said. “I love you.”

  “Love you, too, Mom.”

  Charlotte thought about calling Peter, but she didn’t want to bother him. She’d check in on Monday to ask him about the kids. Then, thinking she was being ridiculous, she changed her mind and decided to call. He was still her husband. Surely, she could call him without worrying about bothering him. She dialed his cell phone. After five rings, he picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Peter, it’s me.”

  He paused.

  “Charlotte,” she said.

  “Of course, I know. Is everything OK?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I just wanted to see how the kids are doing. Penelope says you went skiing and then to fondue,” Charlotte said.

  “Yeah, they are getting really good, and if they learn to ski out here on the sheets of ice that pass as ski runs, they’ll be incredible when they get out to Tahoe later this season.”

  “I’m so glad they still enjoy skiing. I was afraid they’d lose interest when we pulled them out of ski team.”