Madam President (11 page)

“Char?” Peter called after her.

“What?”

“Weren’t you going to change your shoes?”

“What?”

“Aren’t those the ones you wore when you left this morning?”

She looked down at the shoes in her hand. She hadn’t changed them for others, and she didn’t want to. The ones she had went perfectly with what she was wearing.

“I changed my mind.”

She put the shoes down and stepped into them and then walked straight toward the elevator. Once inside, she reminded herself to breathe. Charlotte could handle political upheaval, public disapproval, and the ire of her staff. But it stung terribly to realize that her husband and daughter had developed a greater capacity for intimate conversation with each other than she had with either one of them. When she got off the elevator, her agent reminded her that the CBS film crew would be setting up on the South Lawn to film her departure to the Women’s Museum. She thanked him and pasted on a smile as she walked back down the colonnade toward the Oval Office for her call with the Brazilian president.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Melanie

A
fter spending forty-five minutes longer than her schedule had allotted on good-byes to troops, Melanie boarded the giant C-17 aircraft that would transport her and her entourage of press, handlers, and military aides the nearly seven thousand miles back to Washington, D.C. She settled into what was referred to by Pentagon insiders as the “silver bullet” for the first leg of the thirteen-hour journey. The silver bullet was a giant trailer that had been inserted into the middle of the plane to ensure that the secretary of defense rode in relative comfort. Members of the press and a handful of policy advisors and other staff sat in seats surrounding the giant installation. The plane was built for function, not comfort, but she’d managed to make her private cabin a sanctuary. She had a bathroom and a comfortable bed that she found herself using more and more. As soon as one of the military aides dropped off her lunch—tuna salad with crudité, Wheat Thins, and a large bottle of water—Melanie closed the door and collapsed into the oversized chair behind the desk. The bed was inviting, but she had a few calls to make while it was still early in Washington. She piled a forkful of tuna salad onto a Wheat Thin and was about to take a bite when she remembered that tuna had mercury in it, and mercury was to be avoided during pregnancy. She was starving, so she ate it anyway. As she wondered just
how much mercury was in canned tuna, she thought about the teensy being inside her. Most of the time, she refused to believe that she was actually growing a baby that she’d ever get to hold and kiss and love. She’d had two miscarriages, and they’d both devastated her. One had occurred at seven and a half weeks and the other at eight weeks. It sounded like such a short time, but to believe for two months that you were pregnant and then to find out suddenly and without warning that you were not was like having your heart ripped apart. Twice. Melanie had once been described as Washington’s version of an “iron lady,” but the two miscarriages had reduced her to dust. The first time, she’d just begun to tell a few close friends and family that the invasive IVF procedures she’d endured had finally worked when she learned that she’d lost the baby. People who were otherwise kind and intelligent had said the most idiotic things. Things like “Oh, you’re so lucky it happened so early,” and “It’s God’s way.” She vowed not to tell anyone ever again until she absolutely had to. She and Brian had muddled through the disappointment and sadness of the second miscarriage privately. Melanie had refused any further IVF treatments, and any discussion of pregnancy, fertility, and motherhood was strictly banned. Nearly six months went by, and Melanie was just starting to feel normal again. She tried to rationalize that perhaps motherhood was one blessing too many. Perhaps God only handed out a finite number of blessings to each person, and Melanie had used all of hers up on her charmed career and the sweet, handsome man she’d found to spend her life with. Maybe motherhood was a dream that would go unfulfilled.

Then, after a grueling trip to Asia in which she could barely stay awake for her bilateral meetings with defense ministers and foreign heads of state, she came home to Washington with what she was certain was the Avian flu. She was in bed for five days before Brian dared to ask if she could possibly be pregnant.

“Only if I was raped by a stork,” she’d retorted.

He’d actually winced at her remark.

Nevertheless, she’d dragged herself from the bed and pulled a leftover home-pregnancy test out of her medicine cabinet. She’d peed on the stick and waited for the test to show that she was not pregnant so
she could show Brian. When it came out positive, she threw it away and took another. And then she took another. After five pregnancy tests all said the same thing, she crumpled into a ball on the bathroom floor. When Brian came in and found her, she’d held up all five of the tests. He took them from her and placed them on top of the toilet bowl. He’d wiped her tear-stained face and carried her back to the bed. She couldn’t look at him. She wasn’t sure that either one of them could handle another loss. Brian lay next to her and wrapped his arms around her tightly. They stayed like that until the sun went down, and then he called in sick for both of them in the morning. They made an appointment to see Melanie’s fertility doctor at eleven. She didn’t even have an obstetrician, because she’d never stayed pregnant long enough to need one. They sat in the lobby with all of the other couples, who probably had very little in common with Melanie and Brian other than the desire to have a child regardless of the cost—monetary, physical, emotional, and otherwise. Melanie was afraid of every possible outcome that morning. She feared that between the five pregnancy tests she’d taken the day before and her morning appointment, she’d miscarried this pregnancy, too. She was also afraid that perhaps the tests were wrong, and she wasn’t even pregnant. But most of all, she feared that she was pregnant with another baby that wouldn’t survive. She was afraid to hope for anything other than heartbreaking news. She knew exactly what the doctor would say if she wasn’t pregnant.

“Melanie, we know you can get pregnant. Keep trying.”

She had decided that they were selling the cruelest kind of false hope she had ever encountered. Brian never complained, but she knew it was also taking a toll on him.

“You should have married someone with younger ovaries,” she’d said to him on several occasions.

The nurse who’d seen them for all of their appointments came out to retrieve them.

“Dr. Fishbourne wants to visit with you first,” she said.

Brian had nodded and pulled Melanie up by the hand. She felt like she was sleepwalking. The doctor was waiting for them in his office.

“What’s going on, guys?”

Brian spoke. “Melanie thought she had the flu, but after five days in bed, she took a pregnancy test.”

“This was yesterday?” he asked.

“Yes. And it was positive. Actually, there were five, and they were all positive.”

“Do you remember when your last period was?”

Melanie shook her head. “No idea. A while ago. I figured everything was still screwed up from the fertility treatments.”

He jotted some note in her file and then looked up. “I’ll have a nurse take some blood from you, Melanie, and then I’ll be in to examine you.”

Melanie had tried to numb herself against everything that would happen next. The nurse had her make a fist while she took blood. Then she undressed from the waist down and squeezed her eyes shut so she wouldn’t be tempted to look at the monitor while the doctor performed the ultrasound. She didn’t hear anything, and that alone was a bad sign. She felt a lump forming in her throat. She turned to look at Brian, and he was staring intently at the monitor.

She shifted her gaze to Dr. Fishbourne’s face. He was smiling. “Melanie, I’d say you’re about thirteen and a half weeks pregnant.”

Then he had turned up the volume on the giant ultrasound machine. The sound of a very fast heartbeat filled the room. The sound filled her with hope. Tears spilled from the corners of her eyes, and when she looked over at Brian, he was choked up, too.

“How do we know that everything is OK?” she’d whispered.

“It’s a good sign that you’re this far along. We’ll do all of the testing you want to do. There’s an early test that’s as accurate as an amnio. It will give you peace of mind. I can schedule it with some of my colleagues for later this week.”

“Tomorrow,” Brian had insisted.

“Tomorrow,” the doctor promised. “Congratulations,” he added.

“Don’t say that yet,” Melanie pleaded.

When the results came back one week later, the doctor assured her that everything was fine. He also asked if she wanted to know the sex. Melanie still refused to believe that she was having a baby, but when he’d said, “You’re having a son,” something inside her shifted. She
realized at that moment that the whole undertaking was an exercise in losing control. She’d decided to do her best to be brave—for her son’s benefit.

More than a month had passed, and the nausea and exhaustion were giving way to indigestion and a more general fatigue. She finished her lunch and pulled a blanket over herself. She had plenty of hours of travel ahead of her. No one would notice if she snuck in a short nap.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dale

D
ale ducked into Marguerite’s office so she could have a conversation without being filmed by the CBS crew.

“Marguerite, I’m going to go to the Women’s Museum with the president so I can be there for the interview with Richard and Lucy, unless you want to go?”

“No, you go. I’ll get the VP interviews set up so she can do those as soon as you guys are back.”

“Is there anything breaking that I need to prepare the president for before the interview?”

“Everyone is covering the speech and the trouble it’s causing for the president with conservatives. Fox is running a banner that says ‘busting the base.’ ”

“That’s not surprising. She can handle that. I like her language on the generational divide on social issues. She’ll broaden the discussion and call for tolerance of the entire spectrum of views on the life-versus-choice debate. Warren said that the polls show that every time she’s forced to defend herself against the Republican base, her numbers go up among women and independents.”

“The deciders,” Marguerite joked. Whenever they wanted to make the case for the president or the vice president to do an interview or a media avail, they appealed to everyone’s desire to see the president’s
political capital remain intact. Women tended to be the biggest group of swing voters, and not simply in general elections. They watched the most news and were the most persuadable on nearly every major policy debate. Dale and Marguerite had taken to simply calling them the “deciders.”

“The president will do fine. Take a deep breath, Dale.”

Dale smiled appreciatively at her deputy. “I’ve been called an idiot by the secretary of defense, and I’ve lost an anchor team in the West Wing only to find them in the Oval Office. There really isn’t too much more that can go wrong, is there?”

“Don’t say that. You’re going to jinx us!”

As if on cue, Dale’s assistant knocked on Marguerite’s door.

“Adam Leary from Buzzfeed said that you’d want to take his call,” Clare said.

“When have I ever wanted to talk to Buzzfeed?” Dale scoffed.

Marguerite picked up the phone. “This better be good,” she demanded. Dale watched Marguerite’s face morph from annoyed to concerned. “I haven’t seen it. Send it to me. Isn’t her Facebook page private? How do you know it’s legit? OK, OK, fine. I’ll check it out as soon as you send it to me. I don’t know how long it will take me. I’ll call you back when I know something.”

“What was that?” Dale asked.

“Hang on.”

“Marguerite, I have to get in the motorcade in ten minutes.”

“I’m waiting for his e-mail.”

“What did he say?”

“Buzzfeed is claiming that Penelope Kramer posted something snarky on her Facebook page about how today is the first time in her life she’s been proud to be Charlotte Kramer’s daughter.”

“You are kidding me, right?”

“Let’s see if it’s real before we freak out. I don’t think kids her age use Facebook anymore, anyway.”

“It might be the only social medium she’s allowed to use.”

The Secret Service was uncomfortable with the twins using social media. When the twins put up a fight and enlisted their parents’ support, the head of the Secret Service had argued that Twitter and
Instagram offered too many details about the twins’ exact locations and could reveal security vulnerabilities. After extensive negotiations between the president, Peter, and the Secret Service, they’d finally agreed to let the twins use Facebook.

Clare stuck her head into Marguerite’s office again.

“Dale, Craig is holding for you, and Marguerite, I have CNN, AP, and
Politico
holding. Do you want any of them?”

“No!” shouted Dale.

“No to Craig?”

“No, yes to Craig. I’ll get it in here. No to the others until we know what the hell is going on.”

“Hi,” Dale said to Craig, trying to sound calm.

“How’s it going with CBS?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Just checking.”

“How does the president think it’s going?”

“She’s having more fun than she’ll admit.”

“That’s good.” Dale was peering over Marguerite’s chair to catch a glimpse of the e-mail from Adam.

“I heard you lost Lucy and Richard.”

“Not exactly. The president brought them up from the Situation Room with her, and we temporarily misplaced them.”

“In the Oval?”

“Was she upset?”

“I assured her that it wouldn’t happen again.”

“It won’t.”

“Dale?”

“What?” She could barely hide her impatience.

“Is there anything else cooking?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Just checking.”

Dale considered telling Craig about the possibility of a social media crisis with the first daughter, but she’d learned to gather all of the information before she broke bad news to the White House chief of staff. She hung up before Craig detected anything else in her voice.