by Kerry Clare
“You can stop here,” she said to Nicole, even though they were only partway up the driveway. She didn’t want Nicole’s presence to complicate things—she might be hiding a hammer in her purse. And here there was still enough room for her to turn the car around. To go.
Nicole said, “I could wait for you. Just to make sure he’s home.”
“His car’s right there,” Brooke said.
She said, “It just seems really quiet.”
Brooke said, “I think it’s been a long week.”
“He knows you’re coming?”
“He asked me.”
“I’ve got my phone,” said Nicole. She patted her purse on the console between them. “Call me, and I can come right back and get you.”
“But you’re going back in the other direction,” said Brooke.
Nicole shrugged. It didn’t matter.
She was turned around watching Nicole drive away, because she wanted to make sure that she was really going, going, gone. She knew Nicole’s eyes were on the rearview watching Brooke all the way, so Brooke stood still and waited, and it was only once the car had disappeared down the road that she turned back around, and there he was on the side porch. He must’ve heard the car. He was smaller than life, which was what she always thought after not having seen him in a while, and this was the longest she’d been away from him since they’d met more than five years before. A quarter of her conscious existence. She’d almost forgotten that he was real, that he could just be standing there wearing an old blue sweater she recognized with the sleeves stretched out too long. Finally, they were where they were supposed to be, and she suppressed an urge to rush toward him and reach out and touch him, to hold him, holding back instead, sensing his hesitation, some discomfort. The look on his face, how his lips were pulled thin. It had been so long. She walked slowly instead.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, coming down the steps. “Whose car was that? How did you get here?” He sounded panicked, paranoid. Something wasn’t right.
She wanted to stop him and his string of questions, to reassure him. “It’s only me,” she said. But he was waiting for her answers. “The car’s my sister’s,” Brooke told him, her voice deliberately calm. “She gave me a ride.” What was she missing here? What exactly was he so afraid of?
He said, “I don’t get it.” Asking the question again, “What are you doing here?” As though he hadn’t been expecting her.
But he’d told her to come. “You wanted to talk.”
“On the phone,” he said. No, snapped. He could be mean, she knew he could be mean. He could be cruel, when he felt cornered. When he had been drinking. He didn’t come any closer, and Brooke stayed still, not because she felt threatened, but because she didn’t want to have to see him start to inch away from her. The old-fashioned word popped into her head again: besmirch. But why did she feel like she was the one who’d been besmirched now?
She said, “I didn’t realize.” Still calm. She’d been trained in dealing with unstable clients at the library, and this felt just like that. She didn’t want to set him off. No sudden moves. What had happened?
“This isn’t good,” he said. “Who else knows you’re here?”
“Just Nicole,” she said. “Listen, can’t I come in? I thought we could talk.”
“This isn’t good,” he said again. “Not good at all. And how are you supposed to get back?”
She’d barely arrived. “You could drive me,” she suggested. The simplest solution. Did she really have to go?
He said, “I can’t do that. And you can’t call a taxi—those guys talk.” He wasn’t wrong about that. The taxi dispatch was right next door to her dad’s pizza place.
Brooke thought of Nicole’s promise to come back and get her, but that would only compound her humiliation. Nicole didn’t need to be involved.
She took a chance. “Are you okay?” she asked him. “What’s the big deal? I mean, I’ve been here before.”
“This is different,” he said.
“Because of what happened? This week?” Derek was the first person she’d spoken to who she didn’t need to convince of Derek’s innocence, the only person who knew better than she did. You might have thought this would be a relief, some kind of alliance, but clearly Brooke had missed something along the way.
“The paper,” said Derek. “You’ve heard from the paper? The reporter said she was trying to reach you.”
“Shondra Decker. I got her emails.”
“You didn’t—”
“But it’s okay,” she told him, finally understanding. She started walking toward him again. His sleeves were so long, stretched, and he was clinging to them. He was anxious, in a really bad way. She could recognize when he got like this, and she also knew that when he was, she could be the one to make him calm.
But he said, “Stop.” He stepped away from her. “You don’t get it,” he said. “Everything’s on the line.”
“But what does it matter now?” she asked him. “Nobody else is here.”
He said, “No, you can’t be here. That reporter.”
Brooke repeated, “But it’s okay. I talked to her.”
“You talked to her.”
“I told her that you were one of the good guys.”
“But it wasn’t just a story about me,” he told Brooke. “That reporter—she was writing about you.”
Archive: Globe National, 2017
“DEREK MURDOCH: COMPLICATED OR NOT, HE’S THE REAL THING”
WHEN HE WON THE leadership race two years ago, Derek Murdoch’s name was unfamiliar to most of the voting public who, along with all the pundits, had been expecting the position to go to long-time politician Joan Dunn. Dunn had spent twenty-one years serving in three levels of government and brought considerable expertise and experience to the table.
“But what else I brought,” admitted Dunn in the race’s aftermath, “was baggage.” The party had been riven by years of infighting and frustrated by almost two decades of disappointing election results. “It really was the perfect moment for a sea change, and Derek Murdoch seized it. To be honest, we didn’t even see him coming.”
To anyone who knew Murdoch and was aware of his history, however, the victory seemed predestined. “He’s been doing incredible things right out of the gate,” explains political strategist Phil Phelps. “When he’s given a challenge or a proposition, Derek never wavers or asks ‘Why?’ or ‘How?’ He just gets down to work and says, ‘Let’s make this happen.’ And now he’s done it again.”
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. It didn’t sit well in progressive circles that this young upstart—who called himself “demonstrably a feminist”—had just unseated a female politician with decades of experience under her belt. It was a tricky place to be, although others pointed out that true equality was a man and a woman challenging each other on a level playing field, and to suggest Dunn should have been treated differently than other politicians was to undermine everything that made her deserving of the leadership at all.
There were also whispers about the membership drives that possibly delivered Murdoch his victory—he is well connected with local businesses that enticed newbie party members with booze and barbeques. There were reports of raucous behavior at nightclubs and pool parties, and an old photo surfaced of Murdoch with his arm around the shoulders of a topless woman, her bikini in his other hand as he twirls it like a lasso. It suggested the kind of scandal that most politicians would never recover from, but the woman came forward, unabashed, saying she’s an old friend of Murdoch’s, and they were only having fun. She was furious that any paper might publish the image.
The other problem for Murdoch with feminism is his stance on abortion, which he insists is nuanced. He grew up in a religious family with strict anti-abortion views, and members of his family’s church back in his hometown of Lan
ark are notorious for holding gory protests with dismembered baby dolls outside the local hospital where abortions take place. Murdoch is fast to distance himself from these displays—“I don’t think it’s fair to judge an entire congregation by the actions of a handful,” he says. He also reminds critics that he left that congregation as a teenager because of his discomfort with their hard lines on social issues, abortion included.
“I knew that point of view did not gel with the reality of women’s lives,” he explains. He wanted no part of a system working to restrict a woman’s reproductive choice. And yet, on a personal level, he doesn’t call himself pro-choice. “I just can’t,” he says. “It wouldn’t be honest. And I could sit here and lie to you, and tell you I’m just fine with it—it would be convenient if I could, you know?—but it wouldn’t mean anything. And I think we need to mean what we say—it’s the point of everything.”
He explains that he grew up in a culture that taught that all life is sacred. “And they weren’t wrong about that,” he says. “I still believe that to the core of my being, which is why I do the things I do. It’s why we support addicts and recovery, it’s why we want to introduce a universal basic income to alleviate poverty, it’s why school breakfast programs matter, and why people need good and safe jobs to be able to support their families. It’s why I spearheaded sexual health programs for at-risk youth almost twenty years ago. Because every life is precious. And I’m not going to ever be the one to draw a line between those that are worthy and the ones that fall outside that jurisdiction.”
He is adamant that he’s not interested in reopening a debate on abortion and would never use his political power for that purpose. “This is business between a woman and her doctor, and it’s got nothing to do with me. But I’m also not going to stand up here and tell you I’m pro-choice, that I’m just cool with it and don’t find abortion to be morally troubling as an issue.”
It’s a stance that doesn’t sit well with other demonstrable feminists. Earlier this year, activist Tanya Major of abortion-rights group Women for Choice started an online petition calling for Murdoch’s resignation unless he issues a statement in support of abortion rights. But others understand and even admire the thoughtfulness of his perspective.
“It’s a huge part of his appeal,” says his colleague Cindy Atwell, who was elected at the same time and has served with Murdoch on many committees. “He’s the real thing, and real doesn’t always mean ‘easy.’ Real doesn’t always work in soundbites or in 140 characters, but it’s genuine, and that resonates with people. Even if you don’t agree with him—and with this, I don’t agree with him—but I respect his point of view.”
The challenges that lie before Derek Murdoch now are about more than just capturing hearts. He is charged with repairing the divisions in his party after a particularly fractious leadership race, and then with winning over voters in a population that’s becoming more and more polarized all the time. What kind of a place is there for Murdoch’s socialist-based policies in this charged political atmosphere?
But Derek Murdoch will not be daunted. “Over my years in politics,” he says, “I’ve heard again and again that it can’t be done, but it’s all a matter of connecting with people and understanding that there’s a reasonable way to do things that takes into account how people really live and what they need. Nobody wants to live in the world so bitter and angry. There’s a place where those emotions are coming from, and if you really understand that, if you really listen, people are willing to open their minds up in return. I’ve learned to never give up on the amazing possibilities of people working together.”
Saturday Morning
Brooke didn’t look for the article online, because she knew she would find it in the paper in the morning, waiting on her parents’ doorstep. Rolled up, secured with an elastic, and she steeled herself as she picked it up to read the headline on display. A story not quite sensational enough for all-capital letters, but still larger than usual, clearly conveying something worthy of attention:
DEREK MURDOCH’S GIRLFRIEND SAYS HE’S “ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS”
And underneath it, once she’d removed the elastic and unrolled the bundle, a photo of her and Derek wearing tacky Hawaiian shirts from this one night everybody had gone bowling for somebody’s birthday. His arm around her shoulders and they were smiling. Brooke looked like she was falling-over drunk, because she had been. Other people had been cropped out of the shot, she realized, so it looked like just the two of them, an ordinary image of a couple laughing. She didn’t have a single picture of them like this. Not long after her relationship with Derek had become known in the office, she’d had to go through her social media and scrub all the photos where Derek appeared, no matter that her privacy settings were so high that no one would have been able to see them anyway.
And so her first reaction to the image, to the headline even, was a rush of tenderness. Because how much time had she spent longing for precisely what she saw on that page, above the fold, even? To be Derek’s girlfriend, posing laughing in photos for everyone to see. Imagining people picking up the paper and seeing this image made her feel marginally less humiliated than she’d felt in months. It was the opposite of the night before, when she’d been driven home from Derek’s house by Kirsti Ames, his best friend Brent’s youngest sister.
Kirsti was three years older than she was, and Brooke remembered her from school, although Kirsti didn’t know Brooke. She didn’t know what Brooke was doing at Derek’s, either, or that she’d ever meant something to him—that she wasn’t just another of his hangers-on, the kind of girl he used to pick up at the bars downtown.
Brooke was crying in the passenger seat as Kirsti turned out of the driveway. Once she was on the road, she pulled a wad of tissues out of the pocket of her hoodie and told her, “Hey, I don’t know what all this is about, but I promise you it’s not worth getting so upset about. He’s just a boy, like all of them. They’re never not going to break your heart, but they’re certainly not worth crying about.”
Brooke took a deep breath and recovered her senses, then told her, “Yeah, well, you don’t know.”
Kirsti said, “I bet I do, though. I’ve known these guys my whole life—Derek, my brother. And it’s always the same story. Some people don’t have to ever grow up.”
Brooke said, “It’s not like that. He’s not like that. There’s his job—”
“Oh, right,” said Kirsti. “His job. Which gives him a reason to put on a nice suit, and the means to afford it, and suddenly people are taking him seriously now. But it’s superficial. All of it is. Same with my brother.”
“You don’t like your brother?”
“I love my brother,” said Kirsti. They were driving back into town, cheap motels popping up on either side of the highway alongside discount shoe outlets and auto repair shops. “But I wouldn’t advise anyone to go out with him, or marry him. Any of his friends, either. They’re like the Lost Boys, all of them. And all these women imagining they’ll be able to rescue one of them or another. It never works. They only end up crying.”
“I’m not crying,” said Brooke, determined to stop.
“Well, good,” said Kirsti. “That’s a start. Don’t waste another minute of your time crying over somebody like him. You’re better than that.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Kirsti said, “Everybody is better than that.” She turned onto the main drag. “Now where are we going?” She really didn’t know anything. Derek had phoned Brent, who’d called his sister, who didn’t know what Brooke was doing at his place, or where she was supposed to take her.
Brooke gave directions to her parents’ house, because she needed to be the one to break this news before they found out in the morning. And also because this would be a night, she knew, where it would help to be less lonely.
BEFORE
When you are twenty-three, and yo
ur boyfriend is thirty-eight, there is a great deal of pressure not to seem childish, or teenaged. Like, you shouldn’t even call him your boyfriend, for that matter, because “boyfriend” is adolescent, and if he ever overheard himself referred to as such (like, say, when you’re on the phone to a lingerie store asking about the exchange policy on a birthday gift he bought you that was two sizes too small and which he hadn’t saved a receipt for), he’d raise the matter with you afterwards, leaving you feeling stupid, embarrassed, diminished.
“This isn’t high school, Brooke,” is something he’d remind you of a couple of times, and then ever after you’d hear the phrase in your head, never mind that you hadn’t been in high school yourself for years. Maybe there were even things you knew about adulthood that he had not yet begun to master, such as flossing, the basics of bicycle repair, buying his own shirts, and when it was time to start shopping for his nephews’ birthdays.
But you can’t press him on these points, because pressing back would only underline what you have been hearing from all sides, which is that you have a tendency toward childishness, to become hysterical, and there is much about the world you can’t possibly know yet. It’s not that he thinks you are stupid, or even annoying. In fact he just finds you completely adorable, and he loves your innocence, your energy, your willingness to engage with or consider new and wild ideas. Your freshness—he loves your freshness. You are spontaneous and up for anything. Unlike the women his age, who have already begun to wilt. Together you and he are unhappy for those women, all their petals falling off. You are in your fullest bloom, and he begins to command this performance. He doesn’t like you when you’re any other way.
Which makes it difficult on the days when you’re not up to performing, when you’re feeling nauseous and your head hurts, and you’re so tired that you curl up on the floor in the stationery cupboard and nap among the Post-its and file folders. Inconvenient enough, but also Brooke’s period was late—or, rather, it was missing altogether, because it had been two months since she’d last seen it. And she was working hard not to turn this into yet another crisis, just another excuse to be accused of acting like a child. Late periods were a thing, and it would turn out fine. She was on the pill, which was ninety-something percent effective, and she’d never been enough of an outlier in any respect to run afoul of those odds. The online pregnancy quizzes she kept taking were inconclusive—it could be mono, or influenza, and there was still a chance it would turn out to be cancer.