Madam President (32 page)

“Will that work?” Charlotte asked.

Melanie was about to respond when Sam walked in.

“Excuse me. You have an urgent call out here, ma’am.”

Charlotte closed the door to the Oval Office, leaving Melanie and Dale alone, and stood at Sam’s desk to watch the networks announce that Warren had been killed in the attacks on the Air and Space Museum. She stayed until they read her statement in its entirety and then turned slowly back toward the door to the Oval. She felt wearier than at any other point in her presidency.

“Ma’am.” Sam gently touched her arm.

“What?” Charlotte said, more curtly than she’d intended.

“Madam President, your hair and makeup folks are here.”

Charlotte sank into the chair next to Sam’s desk to catch her breath.

“How much time do I have?”

“You have about half an hour until the speech.”

“Tell them I’ll be with them in five minutes.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Melanie

M
elanie and Dale both watched Charlotte leave the Oval Office. Melanie could tell by Dale’s reaction to being left alone with her that she presumed that Charlotte was doing something related to Warren.

“She and I worked on this together,” Melanie revealed. She reached into a manila folder and handed Dale a copy of the president’s statement. Dale sat down on the sofa and read it. She wiped a couple of tears from her cheeks and then looked at Melanie and smiled.

“Thank you.”

“Thank the president,” Melanie said.

“Please thank her for me. I’ve got to get down to the briefing room before her address.”

Melanie watched Dale push herself up from the couch as though it were as difficult for her in her one-hundred-and-five-pound body as it was for Melanie in her growing form. She walked toward the door that opened to the hallway between the Roosevelt Room and the Oval Office so that she wouldn’t bump into the president, who had exited to the reception area on the other side of the Oval. Dale turned to face Melanie before she left.

“I know that you and Brian knew him better and longer than I did, but I was falling in love with him, and I always knew how important
you and Brian were to him. I’m sorry that we didn’t all spend time together,” Dale said in a near whisper.

“Me, too,” Melanie admitted, even though she remained skeptical that Dale and Warren ever would have had the kind of relationship she knew Warren yearned for. Even in her grief, there was something unfeeling about Dale that Melanie couldn’t ignore. The news of Warren’s sudden death had undoubtedly shaken her, but Dale’s sadness seemed more akin to what someone might feel at the news that they’d missed out on something exciting, rather than the loss of one’s soul mate.

When Charlotte returned to the Oval Office a few minutes later, it was apparent that the public announcement of Warren’s death had added a layer of personal loss to the day for her. While it was important that the president appear emotional and connected to the enormous sense of loss that the victims’ families would be experiencing, Melanie worried that she might be feeling too much.

“Have you eaten anything today?” Melanie asked.

“I don’t remember. Have you?”

“I had a Luna bar when I got here. Sam gave it to me. Why don’t I order you a cheese plate or something?”

“No. Let’s run through the speech one more time.”

Charlotte clasped a copy of the speech in her hands. When she went for her black Sharpie, Melanie stopped her.

“It’s too late for that. If you want to change anything else, I’ll do it myself in the teleprompter.”

“What time are we doing this?”

“You’ll go on the air at eleven-oh-two to give the anchors a couple of minutes to set things up and announce that you’re addressing the nation live from the Oval Office.”

“What time is it now?”

“It’s ten minutes before eleven, Madam President.”

There followed a familiar scene in the Oval Office. The president lashed out, and Melanie listened and tried to absorb as much of her negative energy as she could. When the time came for the president to be seated behind her desk in the Oval Office, she seemed to adjust her mind-set and put on a “game face.”

Now, as Melanie watched the president deliver the address that
she’d carefully crafted, she wondered what would happen in the days to come. Surely their collaboration on this most extraordinary day meant that Charlotte still trusted Melanie more than all of her other advisors. However, it was possible that the president simply needed her too much to leave Melanie on the outside of her inner circle.

One thing was certain: there was no way Melanie would return to the White House if the president allowed Craig to stay on. Other presidents had prosecuted government officials for leaks like the ones he was guilty of. Without an assurance from Charlotte that Craig would face consequences for his actions, Melanie was overcome with an almost urgent desire to flee the Oval Office. But Charlotte had insisted that they be left completely alone for the address to the nation. It was irrational for a president to ask to be left alone without any technical experts, but Melanie had agreed to the assignment. She made sure that everyone she would need if anything went wrong was stationed on the other side of the door.

Melanie was following along by watching the words displayed on the teleprompter. She noticed that Charlotte was nearing the Longfellow excerpt. She touched her stomach lovingly. The passage fit the occasion perfectly. Melanie looked directly at Charlotte as she delivered the final line and smiled. All politicians needed that instant approval at the moment a performance ended, and Charlotte needed it more than most. As soon as Melanie got a signal from the producer speaking in her ear that they were clear, she gave Charlotte a thumbs-up and rose to praise her.

“I couldn’t have done it without you,” Charlotte replied.

Melanie offered Charlotte more compliments on her performance as they moved into the dining room to allow the crew to break down the lights and other equipment. She wondered where everyone else on Charlotte’s staff was. Her entire body ached, and she wanted to see her husband and feel his arms around her for a few minutes before she returned to the Pentagon.

“Madam President, that was very strong!” Craig exclaimed, bursting through the door.

As soon as he arrived, Melanie made her getaway. She stopped briefly in the hallway outside the Oval Office to send Brian a text
message. She asked him to meet one of her agents outside the briefing room. After he finished his live shot, the agent led him to her SUV, which was parked on West Exec. It was all she could do not to cry with relief when he opened the door and climbed in next to her. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d been more comforted by his presence.

“How’s my wife?”

“I’m exhausted.”

He put his arm around her, and she leaned into him. Her agents were waiting outside the car.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” she said.

“Me, too. How do you feel?”

“Everything hurts.”

“You need to tell Charlotte about the baby. She’s going to call on you all the time. It’s going to be around the clock. I can see it happening already. And you’re going to get sucked in. You can’t help it. It’s what I love about you. You don’t even see it; you can’t say no to her. You have to tell her you’ll be there for her, but it can’t be like before,” Brian pleaded.

Melanie nodded. She couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down her face.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m so sad about Warren. He was trying to help. And all of those people on the ship—do you think they knew they were going to die? And can you even imagine getting a call about your kid getting killed at the Air and Space Museum?”

“Do you have to go back to the Pentagon, or is the next meeting something you can call into? I think you need a couple hours of sleep.”

“I can call in. When can you come home?”

“I’ll come with you. Let me go grab my bag and tell them I’ll be back for
GMA
.”

While she waited for Brian and the agent who accompanied him, she rested her forehead against the window. She dozed off and woke up a few minutes later when they were driving up Foxhall Drive toward their home in the Wesley Heights neighborhood of Washington.

“I’m not sure what time I’m going to go in tomorrow, but it will be early,” Melanie told the agents as Brian helped her out of the vehicle.

“We will be here all night, Madam Secretary,” they assured her.

Brian thanked them and guided Melanie into the house. He led her straight to the bedroom and plugged in all of her devices while she brushed her teeth and then crawled into bed.

They sat up together watching the news coverage. When Melanie saw the early footage from Miami for the first time, tears streamed down her face. She couldn’t believe what she was watching. They’d bombed a cruise ship as long as a football field and as tall as a building as though it were a battleship. It lay on the bottom of the bay.

“The first footage that everyone aired had the images of people jumping off the ship—just like the Towers on nine-eleven. We all stopped using it as soon as people figured out what they were looking at, but it’s all over the Internet,” Brian said.

“Can you imagine what the horror must have been like aboard that ship for a mother and father to look at each other and take their children by the hand and jump into the water? I can’t imagine it.”

Melanie lay with her head on Brian’s chest, watching the coverage. When she woke up a few hours later, Brian was in the shower. She swung her legs around and started to get out of bed but was hit with a wave of nausea and exhaustion so strong that she immediately lay back down. This baby had opinions all of a sudden. Melanie rubbed her stomach and promised him that if he let her get to work for the next few weeks, she’d slow down afterward. He seemed to listen.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Dale

W
ill the briefing room be open all night?”

“Yes,” Dale promised.

“How about the North Lawn?”

“I’ll check with the Secret Service,” she called over her shoulder.

Dale hurried back to her office to avoid having to talk to any of the reporters who were lining up to offer their condolences. Marguerite walked next to her and stopped just before they arrived at Dale’s door.

“We need to pull our staff into a meeting. You don’t need to say anything about Warren, and they won’t, either, but they need to see that you’re all right.”

Dale agreed.

After the meeting, she went to the West Wing lobby to offer Lucy and Richard the first sit-down interview with the president in exchange for halting their live reports from the West Wing lobby and other off-limits locations. For the first time all day, they were satisfied with Dale’s offering. They immediately packed up their things and marched out to the stand-up location on the North Lawn to report on their exclusive. The White House counsel had pulled Dale aside at one point during the day and suggested that she had the legal authority to throw all of the press off the premises under the same set of laws
that granted the president of the United States extraordinary powers during times of war.

“The nation has been attacked. If we can justify a national security threat that the press being underfoot creates, we can send them packing,” the gray-haired White House lawyer had said.

Before Dale could respond with her full-throated defense of the press’s right to cover the president’s actions at a time of grave national importance, the president had inserted herself into the conversation.

“Thanks, Bill, but that would be the worst thing that we could do. The press is so accustomed to knowing everything about everyone in their government that if we suddenly shut the doors and turned off the lights, the public would be more terrified than they are watching the same men and women they watch every single day of the year stand in the same exact spot reporting what usually amounts to complete nonsense from out there. Today, of all days, is a day to let them do their jobs.”

Dale had been stunned, but she shouldn’t have been. Charlotte had always understood the modern presidency better than anyone, especially the rest of her White House staff and the reporters who covered her. It was why Dale had always had such a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for her. It was why today, even after learning about Warren, she pulled herself together and tried to do her job.

She’d promised the president that she wouldn’t watch any of the news coverage about Warren, but when she got back to her office after the president’s address to the nation, she turned on the televisions. The picture they kept showing of Warren was one that Dale had never seen before. In the photo, he was walking next to the president as they approached the stairs to Air Force One. It had been taken during her reelection campaign. Dale didn’t recognize the airport, but there were palm trees in the background. Warren was dressed in khaki slacks and a white button-down shirt. Charlotte was in light gray pants and a sleeveless silk tank the exact same shade of gray. She was holding her hair with one hand and had the other on Warren’s shoulder while she spoke to him. He was listening intently to whatever she was saying. It looked like the kind of photo the press snapped after the last campaign event of the day.

Dale hadn’t even met Warren yet when the photo had been taken, but there he was with the president. She tried to listen to what the news anchor was saying about him. It was something about how he was one of President Kramer’s most trusted advisors and also a personal friend. Dale wondered if perhaps they were reading the statement from the president. She couldn’t focus for long enough to make out the words. She wondered what he and Charlotte had been talking about at the instant the photo was snapped. Was she suggesting a new campaign message or soliciting his feedback on her stump speech?

Dale started to feel a sense of panic about all the things she still didn’t know about him. She’d rarely asked him about his work for Charlotte. Dale hadn’t realized how close they’d been during the campaign. Her chest tightened. She slid to the floor and continued to stare up at the television. She wasn’t sure how long she was sitting on the ground before Marguerite came in and found her.