Madam President (13 page)

“Dale, you can tell the press that Penny and I spoke and everything is fine. We plan to spend some time talking politics when I visit later this month. I also spoke to Harry.”

Dale was scribbling furiously in her notepad. “Do you want us to address whether she intended for the post to be made public?” Dale asked.

Charlotte thought for a moment. Penny had said that she intended the post for her friends, but certainly, she must have known that it would get out. “You’d better not,” Charlotte said.

“Madam President, would it be all right with you if we touched base with her to make sure that she and her friends know how to send every inquiry from the press to us, no matter where it comes from?” Craig asked.

“Yes. I told her to expect a call from the press office. Peter, maybe you can hold her hand through the process?” Charlotte asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“Mr. Kramer, we’ll need you to make clear to her that she needs to be highly suspicious of every e-mail, text, and Facebook message she gets today. The press will be relentless in their efforts to engage her. Perhaps Dale can jump on the line for a quick second just to assure
her that the press office is here to field all of the calls on this today,” Craig suggested.

Peter nodded and looked at Charlotte.

“That’s fine,” she said.

“Madam President, Marguerite and I will come with you to the speech. We should leave as soon as possible,” Craig said.

“I’m ready.”

Sam handed Charlotte a fresh copy of her speech, and a Secret Service agent held the door open. Brooke and Mark headed straight to the president’s limo, affectionately called the Beast, for its size and weight.

As Charlotte walked toward where her motorcade had been idling for the last forty-five minutes, she resisted the temptation to look over her shoulder at Peter and Dale. She couldn’t believe that an eighteen-year-old with an overactive social media habit and a grudge against her mother had managed to screw up the most carefully scripted day on Charlotte’s schedule in months
and
reunite her father and his mistress. Charlotte would have laughed if the thought didn’t sicken her.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Melanie

M
elanie was in a deep, dreamless slumber when the sound of a gentle but persistent knocking and a vaguely familiar voice calling her name woke her.

“I’m coming. Give me one second,” Melanie mumbled. They’d be landing in Turkey soon. It was difficult to fly straight home without making a stop to either change planes or refuel. She popped a mint into her mouth and wrapped her favorite long sweater coat tightly around her body before cracking the door open.

“Sorry to bother you, ma’am. We’ll be taking off for Washington from the other plane in about twenty minutes,” her military aide reported.

“Thank you.”

That would mean they’d already been on the ground for close to an hour. The C-17 was what she preferred to fly into Iraq, but they’d be making the trip home to Washington on the “Doomsday plane,” a flying command center that could refuel in flight if it needed to. She wondered who’d suggested that no one interrupt her while they made the switch. Perhaps she wasn’t keeping her pregnancy as secret as she thought.

Melanie brushed her teeth, dabbed concealer under her eyes, and applied lip gloss before tossing her personal items into a large canvas tote bag that her aide would move from her private quarters on the
C-17 to her more comfortable cabin aboard the modified 747. She proceeded out to the air base’s lounge, where the press and a few members of her staff were assembled. Most of the reporters had their laptops in front of them, either to file stories or check the latest news. A few of them were chatting on cell phones.

“Did you see the first daughter’s f-you to her mother?” Sandy Malkin, the AP reporter who always traveled with them, asked.

“I missed that. What happened?” Melanie reached for an oatmeal cookie from an oversized tray of baked goods.

“I’d send my kids to one of those boot camps in Utah if they pulled this crap,” she added.

“I don’t think you can send college kids to boot camp. What did she do?”

“She took to Facebook to point out that her mom’s pro-choice speech today is the first thing she’s ever been proud of and a bunch of other snarky crap about how Kramer has always backed choice but never had the guts to say so,” Malkin reported.

Melanie grimaced. “That doesn’t sound like Penelope Kramer.”

“Do you want to put that on the record?”

“Of course not. I was tied up on calls about the Pentagon budget for the entire flight. I haven’t seen any news out of Washington.”

“Here it is, if you want to read it.”

Sandy moved her laptop in front of Melanie. The Huffington Post had posted the story under the headline “President Takes Incoming Fire from First Daughter.” Melanie’s heart sank as she read the story. Despite the fact that their relationship had chilled, she and Charlotte had been close enough to talk about nearly everything during the years Melanie had served as Charlotte’s chief of staff. Charlotte had often confided that her greatest regret in life was putting a political career into motion that she knew would leave all of the parenting of her then very young children to Peter and the small army of nannies, tutors, and housekeepers they’d employed.

“I knew that I could be in this place if I said yes to running for governor of California. I knew it was possible, Mel,” Charlotte had said during one of their late-night talks during the first year of her first term.

It had struck Melanie as supremely confident at the time, but Charlotte hadn’t said it in a boastful manner. In fact, it was the first time Charlotte had ever opened up to Melanie about her decision to take the leap from the governor’s office to the race for the Republican nomination for president.

“I knew that the national media would focus on our tax reforms and our budget overhaul, and not just because California has the sixth-largest economy in the world but because we were doing it faster and with bipartisan support,” she’d said. “And I knew that if I picked my issues carefully and made sure to keep my foot on the gas in terms of rebooting California’s economy, I could get away with being more liberal, or, as I liked to say to the press, ‘aligned with the party’s libertarian wing’ on issues like gay marriage and choice.”

Melanie had been fascinated by Charlotte’s bluntness in discussing her political calculations. It went against everything Melanie had ever heard or read about Charlotte Kramer. Melanie realized that the narrative about how Charlotte had reluctantly agreed to dip her toe into the presidential waters simply for the good of the party, out of a sense of obligation to the party elders who had supported her and permitted her to break barriers, had been carefully manufactured.

“Here was my mistake, Mel. Here’s where I was just as arrogant as every other human who thinks he or she can be president: I actually thought that I would be strong enough to take the trips to New Hampshire, Iowa, and Michigan and attend the Gridiron and Alfalfa dinners and revel in all of that adulation without taking the next obvious step. I thought that I could just flirt with the idea of running for president and that I would be the
one
person who could pull back and turn it down to be a better parent than that path allows,” she’d said during one of those late-night chats with Melanie more than five years earlier.

Melanie remembered thinking at the time that if she could be a good enough friend, a good enough chief of staff, she could unburden Charlotte from what was obviously a mountain of guilt.

“You know what, Mel?” Charlotte had continued that night. “I was like every other ambitious big-state governor. I fell for the whole thing—the praise from the press and the pundits, the excitement
of the crowds, the meaningless polls in the early states. And at that point, the kids had been too little to know what was happening, and if Peter understood what was happening, he didn’t let on. He was my biggest supporter in those days, my partner. Can you even imagine that now?”

“Excuse me, Madam Secretary, are you done reading?” Sandy Malkin snapped Melanie out of her nostalgia. The AP reporter looked desperate to get her laptop back from Melanie before they had to board the plane for Washington.

“I was just thinking back to when the president’s twins were younger. They grew up so fast.”

“It happens. Listen, if you decide to comment, you know, as the former White House chief of staff or something, you’ll come back on the plane, right?”

“Don’t hold your breath. I’m out of the Kramer family psychoanalyst business.”

Melanie boarded the bigger plane and settled into her cabin. She picked up the phone and asked to be connected to her personal assistant at the Pentagon, Annie. Annie had been with her since her days as White House chief of staff.

“Hi, Annie.”

“You saw the news about Penny?”

“Sandy Malkin just showed it to me. Is the press making a big deal out of it?”

“It has knocked all the abortion protests off the air.”

“Can you see if you can get the president on the phone for me?”

“Sure. Hang on. Do you want me to tell her it’s urgent?”

“No, it’s not urgent. But I don’t want my call returned by the chief of staff or the national security advisor. Just tell Sam that I called to check in about Penelope. Actually, don’t say that. Just tell Sam I called about a personal matter. Not personal related to me, just personal. No, not personal. You know what? Just tell Sam I called, and the president can call me back anytime if she’s busy right now.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

While she held for the president, Melanie returned to her memories of the conversations she used to have with Charlotte late at night
in the residence. She remembered one night when Charlotte spoke about the move from the governor’s mansion in Sacramento to the White House.

“I was such an idiot, Mel. I thought that we could turn the move to Washington into an exciting new chapter for our family. Of course, that idea was squashed once we decided to send the kids to boarding school in Connecticut. God, the house was so empty. Peter missed them so much, and I was never around, and it was all so devastatingly quiet. Peter blamed me for dismantling the family he’d always wanted. And after that, the whole thing fell apart. Peter did what he had to do to survive. I really believe that. I think he almost died of loneliness.”

Melanie shivered at the memory of Charlotte’s pain and realized that soon she’d have a family of her own that could inflict that much pain on her.

“Melanie, are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Sam said that the president is en route to her speech at the Women’s Museum, but she’ll have her call you as soon as she’s back.”

“Thanks, Annie. Please be sure to tell Sam that it’s nothing important.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Dale

A
s Dale watched Craig, Marguerite, Brooke, and Mark follow the president out the door of the Oval Office and into the motorcade, she had the unnerving feeling that Peter could read her mind. Despite the fact that she had spent almost two years trying to get over him, she was certain that she could slip back into love with him in sixty seconds if he offered the slightest hint that he still had feelings for her. She closed her eyes briefly and reminded herself that she was in a relationship with a wonderful, available man who adored her. When she opened her eyes, Peter was staring back at her without any of the intensity or lust that Dale was feeling. In fact, he was looking at her with an ambivalence that suggested either that he’d forgotten the most passionate moments of their affair—the ones Dale replayed in her mind over and over again—or that he was so completely in love with his wife again that he regarded his relationship with Dale as one that had helped him pass the time while he and Charlotte sorted through their complicated union. Either way, it was clear that he wasn’t eager to relive any of it. Dale, on the other hand, had spent hours upon hours during the first lonely months after their breakup committing to memory every detail of their romance. The one thing she’d never been able to recall was their last kiss. Dale couldn’t remember where or when it took place and whether she’d had any idea that it would be the
last time they were that close. Now, with only a touch of self-awareness about the lunacy of her thought process, she wondered whether he might kiss her right there in the Oval Office.

“Do you want to do this in here or in the private dining room?”

Peter’s voice jolted Dale from her deranged fantasy. “What?”

“Would you prefer to talk in here, or would you rather go into Charlotte’s private dining room?”

Peter was standing as far away from her as was physically possible inside the Oval Office. He was probably appalled that he had to spend any time with her at all.

What is wrong with you?
Dale asked herself.

She told herself that
nothing
was going to happen between them. He was with his wife now, and his wife was Dale’s boss.

Her boyfriend was one of the most sought-after bachelors in Washington, and for reasons she didn’t entirely grasp, he wanted her.

Most important, it was Dale’s job to help the first family through their first major political crisis involving one of their children.

As soon as the assignment to stay behind and work with Peter had escaped Craig’s lips, he had looked as though he wanted to take it back. The president’s face betrayed nothing, but her best friends, Brooke and Mark, had nearly gasped.

She hadn’t been alone in a room with him since the day they’d broken up at his home in Pacific Heights almost two years earlier. She remembered the day the way people often describe their memories of a car crash. The frostiness that she’d created between them by complaining all morning about the lack of cell-phone coverage had turned what was supposed to be a romantic weekend reunion into a tense standoff. She’d been working for the vice president at the time, and she was under constant pressure from the West Wing and from the vice president’s husband to shield the vice president from mounting scrutiny from the press. Peter had picked her up from the airport and taken her for a hike at Stinson Beach, one of her favorite places. After their hike, he’d surprised her by taking her to a beach house he’d purchased and renovated as a retreat for their rare weekends together in California. Dale had reacted like a spoiled two-year-old. She’d complained about him putting too much pressure on their re
lationship by buying a home without discussing it with her first. Her reaction had caused the fraying ties between them to come undone once and for all. In an instant, the most passionate love affair of her life came to a crushing end. They spoke a few times afterward, but she’d hurt him too deeply for him ever to reconsider any of her efforts at reconciliation. Less than a year after his breakup with Dale, Peter and Charlotte had reunited. Peter moved back into the White House to give his marriage to Charlotte another try.