So Close (32 page)

              I tucked back into the suite’s foyer and watched her cross the living area to one of the other bedrooms.  “I need a minute alone.”  She waved off Jeanine and I waited until everyone was engrossed in their BlackBerrys to follow her, praying the door wouldn’t be locked.

              It wasn’t.  She was sitting on the bed in a hotel robe, her silk blouse in a heap on the floor.  Her eyes swung to me and for a split second she looked as relieved as if I’d been dismounting from my steed.  But then she visibly caught herself and her guard went up.  “What do you want, Mandy?”

              “What do I want?”  I was unprepared for the directness of the question. 

              “Well, you always want something.  From the beginning you were showing up around us like a stray dog looking for scraps and a pat on the head.”

              “Is that how you see me?”

              She shrugged, her face hard.  “I just can’t believe you’d have the gall to put everything in jeopardy like this and then show up here.”

              I squared my shoulders.  “Is that what you’re all saying to each other until you believe it?”

              She looked away. 

“I want him to resign the nomination.  Today.  In time for the DNC to get behind Lanier.”

“No.”  Her voice swung like a steel pipe. 
              “He
has
to.”

“Huh.”  A rueful smile.  “This from the girl who went so far as to help him hide his pregnant mistress?”

“You have to know I was trying to protect you.”  It sounded so flimsy now.

“Me?  Or your job prospects?”

My hands flew up.  “It’s not about that.”

“Isn’t it?  Isn’t everything?  You have worked your way
up
,” she sliced.  “You have married
up
.  But I know people like you and it will never be enough.” 

“You mean Tom?”

“You were
always
ganging up on me.  The two of you.  You
always
took his side.  And he let you do whatever you wanted—left me to be the bad guy.”

“What do you mean, Lindsay?”  I couldn’t follow.  “That never happened.”

“She almost ready?” someone shouted on the other side of the door. 

I walked to her, dropping my voice.  “Lindsay, you
have
to talk sense into him.  The truth will come out.  It always does.”

“No.  It doesn’t,” she said with cutting conviction.  She was crying.  “It doesn’t.”

“He doesn’t deserve this.  He doesn’t deserve you.”

“How about what
I
deserve?  I have put up with too much, forgiven too much, given up too much not to get all the way.  We’re so close, Amanda.”

“What would you tell Ashleigh to do?”

“
Ashleigh left me
.”  Her rage plumed like a fireball. 

There was a knock.  “Lindsay, you ready?”

“Give me two!” she called back.  She stood, dropping her robe.  She was wearing prostheses in her bra.   

“He isn’t a good person, Lindsay.  He might have started out as one, but you have to see that five years of this has—warped him.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”  It was a whisper. 

I bent and picked up her blouse.  I smoothed it out and handed it to her.  She slipped it on and buttoned it up.   Then she looked at me and when she spoke her voice was soft with a sorrowful knowing. 

“Forget what you know.  Forget what you’ve seen.  Go away.  Don’t contact us.  Try to make something of your life.  Start over.”

She walked past me.  But I could sense her hesitating at the door, her back exposed to me, my bull’s eye.  Could I do it?  “What do
you
want, Lindsay?”

There was a moment of silence and I thought she might leave.

“I just don’t want to die alone.”  She didn’t turn around.  “I want to—I
have
to do right by her.  I want there to have been a point to it.”

“If I were your daughter—”

Her eyes caught mine and I fought to keep my voice steady.

“I would want you to know that you deserve love, honest love, without agenda.  I would hope that your last breath would be with those whose care has not demanded sacrifice, packaging and lies in return.  I can’t begin to imagine what you have lost.  And with all due respect, nothing is going to give that a point.  But doing right?  It’s on the table here and now.  If you can’t trust him with your heart, Lindsay, how, in good conscience, can you entrust him with this country?” 

I heard the door shut behind her and the flurry on the other side as she was re-powdered, re-concealed.  Cheeks blushed.  Fly-aways tamed.  I heard her ask the makeup artist about his tattoo.

I realized I was trembling.  And I was feeling something I had never let myself experience before.  Not when I realized somewhere out there was a man who had chosen not to know me, his daughter.  Not even when Grammy closed her home to us.  Not even when Pax walked out the door in Atlanta.

              The pain under my breastplate was acute.  My heart was breaking. 

              I waited until I heard someone call, “Rolling!” before I cracked the door and tiptoed to the exit.  Over Jeanine and Michael’s backs I heard Diane say, “Lindsay, you have written extensively in your memoir about partnership and sacrifice.  How dependent you are on Tom.   What are the qualities that Tom possesses as a husband that would make him a great President?”

              She looked at Tom.  Then back at Diane.  Then back to Tom.  Then back to Diane.  “Fuck if I know.”

              “Cut!” shouted Jeanine.  But it still said RECORDING on the bottom corner of the screen.  They’d be insane to stop.

              “Excuse me?” Diane asked while Tom coughed until his hair flopped. 

              “He’s a terrible husband, Diane.  So if that’s the criteria we’re basing this on I think the American people should look elsewhere.” 

              Michael and Jeanine were trying to move in multiple directions at once like cartoon cats dropped in water. 

              “Here’s what I know, Diane.  Losing a child.  Doing IVF at forty-five.  Breast cancer.  I can speak to any of that.  And I hope to continue.  So if you’re looking to me for insight into Tom Davis I obviously don’t have a fucking clue.  But if someone can pass me my phone I have a very interesting video of him getting a blow job I could show you—” 

              That’s when Jeanine tackled the camera. 

It was simple to slip out unnoticed in the chaos that ensued, to find myself back in Columbus Circle at dusk. 

              Starting over.  It was familiar.

              Just like I did when I found Diego had taken my money.  Just like I did when Kurt fired me.  Or Mom lost a job.  Or I had to drop out of college.

              I knew from scratch.  And finally, after anticipating it for so long, I’d arrived at worse-than-scratch.  I had a forty thousand dollar debt to repay.  And I was the woman who had hid Tom Davis’s mistress. 

              I thought back to that day in South Beach, the day I met both of them.  The one I could never completely give myself to, even when I swore to before God and man and the state of Florida.  The one I gave everything to. 

              I realized in my own way—hiding in the illusion created by power pumps and hose, BlackBerrys and conference calls—I’d still just been looking to be chosen in the back of cars, too.

              I shook my head, done with judging Delilah. 

              Taking a breath I pulled out my phone.

              “Hello?” he answered tentatively.

              “Is this Pax?” I asked.

              “Yes.”  

              “This is Amanda.  We met at the—”

              “I know who you are.”

“You remember?”

“It’s not like your name’s Dave.”

              “Right.”  I smiled.  He remembered.

              “Calling to make sure I’m well-and-truly fired?” he asked.  “I am.  I’m well-and-truly fired.” 

              “I wanted to see if you were okay.”

“Why?”

“I feel super shitty about what happened—I can be a bit of an asshole sometimes.”

              “When you’re not rescuing orphans and feeding the poor?”

              “I want to make it up to you,” I said hastily down the line before he could disconnect. 

              “Make it up to me?”

              “Please.  I want to.  I have to.  I’m in Columbus Circle—not far away—I can come get you.”

“You want to make it up to me?”

              “Yes.  A new dress.  Shoes.  Whatever you want.”

              “A do-over?”

              “A make-up to the make-up.  Forever.”

              “Get your ass to DC, Luker.  I have a threshold I’m supposed to carry you across.”

It wasn’t how I wanted to leave Florida.  Hanging from my wedding ring like a gymnast. 

No one wants to travel by tornado either.  But the important thing, as Dorothy would probably tell me, is to just get where the adventure begins.

Find the starting line.

Then go. 

Epilogue

My daughter, waiting patiently at our kitchen table for her toaster waffle, has just asked me why I’m crying. 

              “Crying is overstating it, honey,” I say, switching off the image of Tom on the news and getting the syrup down from the cabinet. 

              I’m always still surprised when missing Lindsay catches up with me.  But on a day like today I shouldn’t be. 

Once it had been verified that Lindsay had learned about Cheyenne at the same time as the rest of the world—and had not spent months stumping for a liar and a cheat—her credibility survived the end of Tom’s campaign.  Lindsay was even asked to endorse Lanier and did a popular YouTube video for her. 

              So Lindsay lived long enough to see the first female President of the United States sworn in.  I’m sure it was nothing like what standing on the dais herself would have felt like, but she did help make it happen.  She mattered. 

              To me as well, of course. 

Once word got out that I was with Lindsay in the moments before her on-air meltdown no one who had been involved with the campaign would give me a recommendation.  As if I had introduced Tom and Cheyenne, inseminated her personally, all with the goal of sabotaging his candidacy.  The one line on my resume was a punch line.  I couldn’t even get an interview. 

              Pax’s faith in me, however, was unwavering.  Even when I abandoned the hunt and threw myself into moving my stuff up to DC, finding us an apartment we wouldn’t trip over each other in, acquiring winter clothes, in other words putting one foot in front of the other as Lindsay had taught me to do.

              I bought a slow cooker.  I stenciled a wall.  I got bangs. 

              And just when I decided going off the pill was my only option to keep busy until an election cycle passed and Tom was just an embarrassing international footnote to our electoral process, I got the call.

              From the head of Lanier’s transition team.  Someone had submitted my resume—was I interested?  I said yes before even asking in what, simultaneously dialing my pharmacy for the Ortho Nova refill with my toes. 

              Now I think back on those three months of seeming free-fall and snort.  If I had only known that would be my last bit of down time, possibly
ever
, I would have enjoyed it.  Now my nanny uses the slow cooker.  I put my daughter’s crib against the stenciled wall so you would think that only one out of four being done was deliberate.  And I’m lucky that my grey kind of blends into my blonde as highlights.

              Pax has been incredibly supportive, leaving work at five thirty, doing the pediatrician appointments when I can’t.  I still sit on the edge of the bathtub some mornings, watching him help our daughter with her potty training, amazed that I managed to find a real partner, when that was pretty much a unicorn to me. 

              And, speaking of, Delilah and Daryl are still together.  Of course my absurdly fertile mother managed to squeeze one more out.  But even that couldn’t stress them.  They watch Duck Dynasty.  Daryl enters regional gumbo cook-offs and Mom discovered, after Grammy died, that she actually likes to iron.  They just get a kick out of each other. And I’m happy for her.  Everyone deserves to have someone like that, someone who answers the phone laughing, saying, “You’ll never guess what your mom just did.”

              Billy goes to UT and loves it, although, true to his word, reading is not his ‘thing’.  Ray Lynne turned out to be a total jock and mom spends most of her nights getting grass stains out of her uniforms.  I hope she can get an athletic scholarship to Georgetown.  I’d love to have one of them close by.

              “Mommy, will I need my frog umbrella?”  Fwog umbwella. 

              “Maybe.”  Outside the glass doors of the family room we can see the rain coming down in the garden—a hard, late summer rain.  It was just like this the day that Lindsay’s sister called to ask me to return to Jacksonville. 

I hadn’t seen Lindsay in person since I walked out of the Mandarin.  I was surprised by the address she gave me, but she said Tom kept the ‘dream house’ in the divorce and she had remained at the old one. 

              Shannon opened the door, a child on her hip.  Her eyes immediately went to my bump, the way a mother’s do—sonogram vision.  “Congratulations,” she said. 

              “Thank you, but you can hold your applause until it’s out of me.  How are you?”

              “Good.  I’ve been looking in on Lindsay most days.”

              “How is she doing?”

              “Not good.”  Shannon walked away down the hall and I followed.  “She was glad you’re coming, though.  She was really anxious to see you.”

              “I’ve missed her,” I said.

              Shannon paused at the top of the stairs.  “They have her on a lot of pain medication,” she said.