Eighteen Acres: A Novel (28 page)

She knew she was lucky to be alive. She also knew she was lucky Charlotte had created a circumstance that allowed her to be with
Peter. Charlotte had paid a hefty political price for doing so, one that might cost her the election. But Dale had not asked Charlotte to give up Peter for her. She wasn’t sure she knew how to be with him in the real world, and there was no one to turn to for advice. She didn’t have any friends or hobbies. Work had always crowded out everything else. Without it, she had no idea who she was.

More than anything, she hated that she was so cold to the one person who was truly there for her. Peter spent every waking moment trying to make her happy, and she knew she was wearing him down with her sulking. She had tried to recapture the excitement she used to feel with him during their secret meetings and brief encounters, but she didn’t know how to be excited about anything anymore.

She stopped to watch the fishermen pulling in their lines. The fog had come in, and a cool mist was blowing into her face. She closed her eyes and threw her head back.
Get a grip,
she said to herself over and over.

Watching Brian do the interview that she had been promised wasn’t torture, but it didn’t feel like her life anymore. She knew what she had to do. She had to reclaim something for herself. She needed a job. She’d call her agent again when she got home. There had to be someone in local news in San Francisco who would value her experience enough to put her on the air.

Charlotte

Melanie, these aren’t right, are they? I’m only down two points among likely voters? That can’t be, can it?” Charlotte asked as they jostled along the highway on a bulletproof, state-of-the-art bus somewhere in the middle of Ohio.

Since Charlotte had promised not to campaign, they’d embarked on a four-week “Conversation with America,” and even though it wasn’t a campaign trip, they’d decided to travel by bus. Her staff hated the bus, but Charlotte enjoyed seeing more than the airports and runways of the cities she visited.

In the weeks since the convention, Charlotte’s poll numbers had inched to within striking distance of her opponent. The crowds that came out to see Charlotte and Tara were huge. Donations poured in through her campaign Web site. Most of the contributions were returned because of Charlotte’s no-campaign pledge, but without the expense of television advertisements, they didn’t need the money, anyway. Besides, Charlotte and Tara were a media sensation.

Tara’s speech had electrified the Republican convention. Instead of walking out and refusing to nominate Charlotte for picking a Democrat, as some in the media had predicted when the news broke, the party faithful had been delighted by Tara’s tough line on terrorism and her sharp attacks on Charlotte’s opponent. While Charlotte’s speaking style was elegant and nuanced, Tara went for the jugular with blunt language and crowd-pleasing applause lines.

The network and cable news shows couldn’t get enough of the Charlotte and Tara Show. They ran packages on their clothes, their hairstyles, the significance of the first-ever all-woman ticket, and the impact on women and girls in America and around the world.

None of the staff on the bus paid any attention to the feel-good aspect of their all-female ticket. It was crunch time, and Melanie and Ralph were laser-focused on moving Charlotte’s numbers among the voters who’d delivered her original victory four years earlier. Those were the easiest votes to recapture, and with the choice coming down to two women, Charlotte or Fran Frankel, the “women’s story” had less impact on undecided voters than the idea of a bipartisan “unity ticket” running the federal bureaucracies.

Reporters and media outlets polled voters across the battleground states about their views on Charlotte’s selection of Tara as a running mate. Most of the reviews were positive, but voters remained skeptical that their leaders could do much of anything to change Washington. Charlotte didn’t blame them.

She looked around at the gaggle of staff, secret service agents, and political consultants traveling on her bus and concluded that she was either insane or brilliant for tapping Tara. She watched Tara as she listened intently to something her husband was saying. He was obviously her closest political advisor. Charlotte felt a flash of envy for what was clearly a seamless relationship between their personal and professional lives. Charlotte had experienced her happily married years, and they were followed by her professionally successful years, but she and Peter had never figured out how to be happily married and professionally satisfied at the same time.

“Look, look!” Tara shouted as one of the cable channels aired the newest cover of
Time
magazine.

“Look, Madam President—that picture was taken last night at the event,” Tara exclaimed.

It was a shot of Charlotte and Tara doing a “fist bump” on stage with thousands of supporters cheering in the background. Under the shot, in huge letters, it read: “Kramer’s Kryptonite.”

Charlotte smiled back at Tara. She had succeeded in changing the conversation.

Melanie

Melanie, can you or Ralph go through the polls with us?” Charlotte called.

“Coming,” Melanie answered from the front of the bus, where she was going over the data with Ralph and trying to read the bill from the stylist who’d helped Tara with her look for her convention address. After throwing a tantrum about how frumpy the elegant suits looked on her, she had stuffed all of the clothes into duffel bags and squirreled them away somewhere. Two weeks later, she was back to wearing cheap, tight skirts and blouses that looked as if they’d been purchased in the young teens section. Melanie put the statement into her bag and made her way toward the back of the bus.

“What are you two doing up there?” Charlotte asked. She was sitting at the head of the small table in the back. Tara and her husband sat next to her, and two of Tara’s aides from the AG’s office were on the other side.

“We’re trying to figure out where to steer this jalopy next,” Melanie said, growing dizzy from facing backward. “Hang on,” she said, looking down at her phone. “It’s Brian.”

Charlotte raised an eyebrow.

Then Melanie’s other cell phone rang. She looked at the number quickly. It was Michael from the
Dispatch
. She picked up Michael’s call. “I need to call you right back,” she said to him.

“Don’t hang up,” he told her.

Melanie was afraid she wouldn’t get Brian’s call in time. He was barely talking to her. “Brian, hang on one second,” she said, holding one phone on each ear.

“Roger shot himself,” Michael and Brian said in unison.

“What?” She didn’t know which one of them she was talking to, but she dropped one phone when the bus lurched suddenly to one side.

“The cleaning lady found him this morning in his apartment in Pentagon City,” Michael said. She’d hung up on Brian. “He’d been dead for hours, so it must have happened last night.”

“Jesus Christ,” Melanie said. Charlotte was eyeing her suspiciously.

“He left a note,” Michael said.

Melanie was silent. She was using all of her mental energy to command her body not to throw up the moon pie she’d eaten for lunch.

“For Charlotte,” he said.

“I’m going to need to call you back,” Melanie said.

“Hurry.”

Melanie stood in the doorway that separated the back section of the bus from the front. She looked around on the ground for her other phone. She didn’t see it. She took two deep breaths and turned around to face Charlotte. “Can I talk to you?” she said.

“What, what is it?” Charlotte asked.

“Why don’t you give us a minute?” Melanie said to Tara, her husband, and her two aides.

“They can stay,” Charlotte said.

“Fine.” Melanie’s mouth was watering, and her ears were ringing. “Roger killed himself,” Melanie said, turning and throwing up on the floor of the bus as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

Melanie apologized to the military aides who swarmed the area with 409, paper towels, and Lysol. She stepped over her mess to sit down next to Charlotte. Ralph followed, careful not to step in Melanie’s vomit.

“She needs to get back to the White House as quickly as possible to do a statement from the East Room. If we do it tonight upon arrival, it will air on tomorrow’s network morning shows,” Melanie said. “It needs to be somber—something along the lines of ‘My
thoughts and prayers are with his family, he was a dedicated public servant,’ and so on,” she said, typing the same thought in an e-mail to the speechwriters that she was sharing with Ralph, Charlotte, and Tara on the bus.

A nurse from the White House medical unit handed Melanie a ginger ale with a straw in it. “Melanie, drink this, and we’ll get more fluids in you once you keep it down,” the nurse said.

Melanie looked up briefly and mouthed “Thank you.” She put the soda down on the table without taking a sip.

“Do we cancel the next event, or do we do the event and go to Washington afterward?” Ralph asked as the bus continued down the interstate toward a five
P.M.
“Conversation with Ohio.”

Melanie looked down at her BlackBerry and noticed that her hands were shaking. She moved them under the table and tried to focus on what Ralph was saying. “I’m sorry, what was the question?” she asked.

“The next event—keep it or cancel it?” Ralph asked.

“I’m not one-hundred-percent sure we should cancel it, but if we go forward with an event, how does she handle a question about the suicide? I’m worried that she gets a question, answers it, and then the tape that they run in a continuous loop about the suicide is from a campaign-style event. That would be bad,” Melanie said, frowning at her BlackBerry. It wasn’t getting a signal and had not transmitted her e-mail to the speechwriters. She held it above her head at various angles until it transmitted.

“If we pull the plug on the event, the local Republican committee will go crazy,” Ralph said.

“So you suggest we go to Washington after the event?” Melanie said.

It wasn’t like Melanie to solicit Ralph’s opinion. He looked at her to determine whether she was patronizing him. “If we cancel,” Ralph said, “we would need to promise that this is the next event we do when we return to the ‘Conversation with America’ tour. The tickets were gone in fifteen minutes, and the crowd has been waiting for four hours.”

“My gut says cancel it, but I could be convinced that canceling
would be interpreted by the press as an overreaction. I don’t know. It’s a close call,” Melanie said with uncharacteristic indecision.

“Why can’t she just stand alone outside Air Force One and read a statement in front of the cameras?” Tara asked. “That way, it would look presidential, and it would separate her from the day’s campaign activity, but we could stick to the schedule.”

Melanie shot Tara a look that said,
Stay out of this,
and sighed loudly before she spoke. “Because she can’t. Roger was her secretary of defense, and they went through a lot together. This morning, he shot himself. He has a wife. He has kids. And he left a suicide note—not for his wife or his kids but for Charlotte. That’s why she can’t just walk out of a campaign rally with hay in her hair from some state fair and say, ‘I sure am going to miss old Roger.’ This is a presidential moment, Madam Attorney General,” Melanie said.

“I see,” Tara said.

Melanie was sure she’d back down. But she didn’t.

This time, Tara faced Ralph when she spoke. “Isn’t this also a moment when we risk turning the discussion back toward the past and everything they didn’t like about Charlotte’s first term? And aren’t we moving up in the polls and succeeding in making the election about the future?” Tara asked.

Melanie was furious that Tara assumed she had a seat at the table for presidential decision making. So what if Charlotte’s numbers had surged since Tara had joined the ticket? It didn’t give her the right to weigh in on the things Charlotte did in her capacity as incumbent president. That was squarely Melanie’s domain.

Melanie pasted a smile on her face and cleared her throat. “Madam Attorney General, with all due respect, the voters expect a leader to stand by her friends when the situation is this dire,” she informed her.

“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” Charlotte said.

She’d been sitting at the table staring out the window, and it wasn’t clear to Melanie whether she’d been listening to the exchange. If she had been listening, Melanie was irritated that she hadn’t chimed in sooner to take her side.

“I mean, if I were inclined to stand by him when things were dire, I wouldn’t have forced his resignation or agreed to all the recommendations
from the panel,” Charlotte said. “If I were inclined to stand by him, I would have called him when the report came out to see if he was doing OK. I would have called Stephanie. She was my friend at one time, too.” Charlotte spoke in a voice that was so soft Melanie had a hard time hearing her. “I don’t know why I drew such a bright line. I don’t know why I hardened so completely against him,” she practically whispered.

“Madam President, this isn’t your fault,” Melanie said quietly.

And she meant it. Roger’s suicide wasn’t Charlotte’s fault. It was hers. He had called her nearly a dozen times.

Melanie still hadn’t found her other cell phone. How was she supposed to manage the situation without her phone? She looked under the table, but every time her eyes moved to the floor of the bus, she felt as if she would vomit again. She shifted her gaze to the window and saw Tara whispering quietly to her husband. They looked as if they were conspiring.

“Madam President,” Tara said, “I don’t know if this is of any help, but I could pick up the ‘Conversations with America’ for a while if you want to go back to Washington to make a statement like Melanie suggests.”

“Thanks, Tara. I appreciate that,” Charlotte said. “Let’s see what Melanie and Ralph decide. And I really do appreciate your offer.”

“It’s the least I can do,” Tara said.

Charlotte returned her gaze to the view outside her window, and Melanie caught the look that Tara gave her husband. Tara looked satisfied that she’d infiltrated the inner circle, and her husband appeared to nod slightly, as though things had gone exactly as they’d planned. Melanie was tempted to say something to put her in her place, but she had too many other things to handle.