So Close (31 page)

              Billy took Ray Lynne and got her settled and I climbed onto the one stool at the kitchen counter with my feet dangling off the floor.  I turned on my laptop and stared at it like the answer would pour forth from its screen like a Genie. 

              Eight weeks until the election.  Enough time.  But barely.  I had one chance to do this.  I couldn’t wound.  I had to kill. 

              The Vice President Reisling had been put on the ticket eight years ago to balance out President Hopkins with his gravitas.  If that’s how you’d describe Darth Vadar.  A major shareholder in arms manufacturing he had personally made over a billion dollars during the administration’s multiple incursions.  While overseeing the gutting of public education.  In other words if I stumbled in the next forty eight hours and only did enough damage to Tom’s reputation to ensure Riesling’s victory I would have to kill myself. 

              There was no other option.  I needed to present enough evidence—publically or privately—to force Tom to fully resign the nomination.  And with enough time to convene a special election to select Lanier in his place.

              I tried to log into the campaign’s virtual office and was immediately told in red bold letters that there was no user with my email.  Fuck.  I had to see exactly what they planned for the next few days.  I look a breath and entered Jeanine’s email.  She had a handful of passwords she had shouted over the heads of everyone when she needed an errand run.  I typed in l-a-b-o-u-t-i-n. 

Nope. 

Okay.  I wiggled my fingers.  N-o-r-m-a-n.  Jennifer Anniston’s old dog.  For some reason the name tickled Jeanine. 

Not that either.  I blew out.  I had one more chance before I was locked out and I’d never be able to guess Michael’s.  Tom’s, maybe.  It was probably k-i-n-g-d-a-v-i-s.  I concentrated very hard, like I was trying to see Jeanine’s brain.  I imagined it looked like a smoker’s lung.  Suddenly it came to me.  Praying I was right I typed a-s-s-m-u-n-c-h. 

Access granted.

I went to the calendar and my eyes sprung wide.  The next night Tom was scheduled to film a one-hour interview with Diane Sawyer at the—wait for it—Mandarin Oriental.  I wondered if he planned to show Diane the seat in the lobby where Cheyenne had first been ‘waiting for him’ as he’d put it?  

This was my shot.  I didn’t know exactly what I was going to be able to convince Cheyenne to do.  But I added my name and Coco Saunders to the check-in list for security.

“Mandy . . . Mandy?” 

              I startled, my face aching from where I’d fallen asleep on the keyboard.  “Mom?”  I jumped down from the stool, stumbling on a leg that had fallen asleep tucked under me.   A man was standing besides her, holding her hand.  He was wearing a plaid flannel and work boots.  His hair was thining.  And he looked like a grown up—that was my first thought about Daryl.  Nothing sheepish or shifty.  As exhausted and car-rumpled as they both were, there was something solid about how he stood there. “What are you doing here?”

              “Pax called me,” she said, looking more concerned than I could ever remember.  “He said you needed help.”  At the word my eyes instantly dampened. “Daryl and I drove all night.” 

He dug in his back pocket and produced a folded bandana.  “It’s clean.”

              I stared at it in my hands, my vision blurring with tears.                                           

“Oh, baby.”  Delilah wrapped me in her arms and I let her.  She smelled nice.  It was a dumb thing to notice, but she had always smelled like a deep fryer—or a bar fight.  Always sad.  Now she smelled like fabric softener and some kind of perfume she’d put on the day before.  It made me want to curl against her.  Crying, I pulled back.  “They’re sleeping somewhere around here.” 

              “I’ll find ‘em,” Daryl said reassuringly.  He squeezed Delilah’s hand.  We heard his boots squeaking across the marble foyer to the staircase. 

              Delilah wiped my hair from my face.  “You know it’s going to be okay,” she said and I saw myself at fourteen, holding her shoulders on the couch, rocking her as she cried.  Billy’s dad already long gone.  A few hundred bucks for an abortion sitting in an envelope on the table. 
It’s going to be okay
, I’d said.

              “Pax is done,” I sputtered.  “I’ve fucked it up.  I’ve fucked everything up.”

              “Shush now,” she said, taking the damp bandana and refolding it to find a dry corner for me.  “You haven’t.”

              I took it from her.  “I have, Mom.  I have.  You don’t understand.  You never came this close.”

              She looked at me for a long moment.  “You think I don’t know what that feels like?  I was supposed to marry Freddie after high school.”

“You were?  I thought you just worked for him at the dealership.”

She shook her head.  “
I
was supposed to have the split-level ranch with the fenced-in pool.  But I got in a raging fight with grandpa one night, had too many beers and fucked some guy in the parking lot behind the Clover.  Suddenly I wasn’t marriage material any more.  He was ready to forgive me, but his parents weren’t going to see their son supporting some kid that wasn’t his.  I was so pissed.  At Grammy and Grandpa, and his folks, at him for not standing up to them, but mostly at myself.”

              “Exactly, you fucked up.”

              “But I didn’t—that’s the point.”  She took my chin in her hand.  “You’re not my fuck up, Amanda Beth.  And I’ve loved you the best I knew how.  I’m sorry if you thought it wasn’t enough.  That’s the last damm thing I wanted you to think.  I may not have had the fancy meals or the shopping trips but I have fucking loved you from the second you were handed to me in that hospital.”

              “Why couldn’t you just work a job, get promoted, get us a house.  Why did you have to run around looking for something better in the back of cars.”  My lips twisted against the pain as I arrived at the core of it.  “Why wasn’t I enough?”

              “You were perfect.  It didn’t have a thing to do with you.  I just—wanted to be chosen.  I had a right to want that.  Even if I went searchin’ in some pretty dumb places.  But look.”  She held her left hand out to me and there it was—a gold band on her fourth finger.  She smiled so softly—I had never seen her smile like that.  “We’ve rented a little house near the rig.  Three bedrooms so they can each have their own.  BP’s put a lot of money into the area for goodwill so the schools are good and the other wives I’ve met so far are really kind—they welcomed us with casseroles.  Can you imagine?”

              I looked at her.  I hadn’t ever thought of her as a woman, not really, not beyond my defensive posturing to show people I could judge her before they did.  I hadn’t ever let myself see her as a girl whose parents ran out of love.  A girl completely alone who watched other people get what she had every right to—someone to choose her. 

              “Daryl seems nice.”

              “He’s already painted their rooms.  He put Hello Kitty decals on Ray Lynne’s wall and Harley Davidson on Billy’s.  He’s a real good guy, Mandy.  Better than I deserve.”

              “Don’t say that.”

              “I want to do it different with Ray Lynne.”

              I nodded, wanting that so badly, too.

              “It feels so good just to be out of Tallyville.  It was like women used to just come by the diner—or the bar—to watch me grow old.  Oh, look there’s Delilah Luker, used to think she was such hot shit in high school, now she can’t even get a decent guy.  And Grammy always standing with her arms crossed every time I turned around—like I’d get flustered thinking I wasn’t doing anything good enough and then, boom, I’d wash a dark sock with your favorite shirt, or forget milk.  And I’d just picture her shaking her head.”

              “You deserve to do this on your own terms,” I said, meaning it.  It was the flame under the air that had blown me to Tom in the first place. 

              Daryl walked in with Billy and Ray Lynne.  “Found these two on a couch the size of a tar pit.”

              “Mommy!”  Ray Lynne ran and jumped into her arms. 

              “Oh, baby, baby, baby.”  She squeezed Ray Lynne tightly.

              “Hey, handsome,” Mom called over to Billy.  She reached out her hand to him.  Billy looked at it uncertainly.  He looked to me and I gave him a small shrug.  I had meant it, this was his call.  He walked to her and shook it.  That’s all he was up for.

              “Okay, then,” she nodded.  It was a start.

              “What is this place?”  Daryl asked. 

              “The end of the road,” I answered.  “Let me go find Cheyenne and we’ll all get out of here.” 

It took all five of us two hours of opening every door, every closet, pulling back every curtain, walking every inch of every acre before I’d accept the truth.  Cheyenne was gone.  My only proof—on her phone and in her belly—with her.

Chapter 14

Tim packed up the car and they drove me to the airport, where they dropped me off.  Two parents with a son and a daughter.  They looked like the dream nuclear family.  Billy even managed to drop his scowl long enough to hug me goodbye. 

              “Are you okay with this?” I asked him, touching the stubble on his face.

              He nodded.  He said he was tired.  We had both used so much energy keeping the fear at bay that she wasn’t coming back for us.  I think he wanted someone else to step in and figure things out for awhile.  God knows I did.

              I kissed Ray Lynne and Mom came around the car to me.  “I have no proof.  No game plan.  I’m probably going to have to tell Lindsay.  She’s the only one who

can make him do the right thing.”   

“You’ll figure this out.”

              I smiled ruefully.  “You’ve always thought that.”

              “And I’ve always been right.”

              I nodded, not really hearing her, needing to get on that plane to New York and hoping a plan was waiting for me at thirty thousand feet.

It wasn’t. 

No one had left one in the taxi either. 

I checked into a small hotel a few blocks away from Columbus Circle, showered, changed and then went straight to the Starbucks across from the Mandarin.  Here’s what I had learned in my years on the trail, no one bothers the crew girl on the coffee run.  I ordered a large tray, the most cumbersome-looking thing I could walk out with.  In the lobby I walked up to the security detail holding the list.

“Delilah Murphy.”  I flashed him Mom’s license and he checked me off the list, before pointing me to the elevator filled with lighting equipment being ferried to the penthouse.  I rode up with some guys from the ABC crew, gaffers tape dangling from their belt loops, wondering if this was going to the last time I ever went so high. 

              Ducking my head behind the coffee I tried to walk briskly enough that I looked like I knew where I was going, but not so fast that I couldn’t pick up where I should be heading.  At the end of the hall was an open door.  I prayed I wasn’t about to come face to face with Tom or Lindsay.  Instead I saw Jeanine and Michael’s backs clustered around the suite’s breakfast bar, where a monitor was displaying the feed from the other room. 

              “Now, Tom, we’re going to shift gears here a little bit.”  I heard Diane’s signature professional warmth, like Sambucca over ice.  I took a few silent steps forward and stood on my toes so I could see Tom’s face on the screen over Jeanine’s shoulder.  “Were you surprised when the story surfaced yesterday that your aid, Amanda Luker, has been living on the lam, as it were, with Cheyenne Russell, your stylist?  Who is purportedly pregnant by Amanda’s husband, a Pax Westerbrook.”

              “Frankly, Diane, no I was not.”  That’s true, he was not.  “Amanda grew up in a trailer park outside Tallyville, Florida—an area of our state, like so many, that has faced the scourge of methamphetamine.”  He shook his head sadly—paternally.  “We have tried to give Amanda, and so many people like her, a chance on every campaign since my first for senator.  But sometimes people cannot rise to the opportunity.  Addiction is a disease.”  My toes gripped in my shoes, my calves cramped. 
Was he implying that I was a meth addict?
  “But that does not mean we should not keep giving people chances.  That is my platform.  Washington’s not creating enough opportunities for people who want to work their way out of poverty.”

              Oh my God, this was such transparent bullshit—even for a politician.  Lindsay had to be going ballistic somewhere.  Did he have her sedated—locked in a closet?

              “And what do you say to rumors that have surfaced today that the only factor these people have in common is you.  That you must be the father of this baby.”

              I leaned forward like I was on skis. 
Admit it, asshole.  Admit you’ve been cheating on your dying wife.  Admit it and pass Lanier the ball. 

             
“If I may, Diane.”  The camera pulled back to reveal—Lindsay.  My jaw flopped open on its hinge.  She took his hand, smiled at him adoringly.  “I’d like to answer that.  Please tell me how he could possibly be the father of a child, judging from the pictures of this woman, conceived during a time I was so sick Tom never left my side? Tom is a loyal husband.”  Again the adoring smile.  “Pax Westerbrook, however, has not been loyal.”  Loyal must be Jeanine’s word.  Lindsay had been instructed to say it three times.  “Pax was unfaithful to his wife.  Any other suggestion is simply just a story trumped up by some Super PAC, you mark my words, to distract everyone from our message of helping make lives better.  We remain loyal to our mission and each other.” 

So it was ‘our’ message now.  Was that the trade-off?  She’d help him pave this over in exchange for what?  A spot on the king’s dais? 

              “Cut!” the director called.  “Lindsay’s getting a little shiny.”  Shiny was a euphemism.  In seconds she’d become drenched in sweat like a hot flash.  “Let’s break.”