The Department of Lost & Found (9 page)

Still no word from you. Please don’t make me come down there again—I don’t think anyone wants that. We’re ten days out—why the hell aren’t you guys being more pro-active? I’ll tell you what needs to be done: You need to promote Dupris’s generous donations to cancer charities.

She made some, right? If not, pretend that she did. On this short notice, the press won’t be able to dig up any records anyway. Compared to Susanna Taylor, she’s coming off like Satan.

—Nat

From: Miller, Natalie

To: Richardson,

Kyle

Re:

I’m coming into the office

K—

At the risk of sounding condescending, you still work for me. Why the hell am I being ignored? We have just over a week left, and something has to be done. Fine. If you don’t want to fabricate cancer donations, you need to launch a full-scale attack on Taylor’s record. Call Larry Davis: Get anything you can (other than the hooker stuff ) and put it out there to demonstrate that he’s a shit decision maker.

Once people see that the hookers are just one of his many bad choices, the polls will swing back in our favor. If I don’t 76

a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

hear back from you by this afternoon, I’ll be in the office tomorrow. Don’t make me come down there.

—Nat

From: Richardson, Kyle

To: Miller,

Natalie

Re:

I heard you the first time

Natalie,

Chill out. Your incessant messages and e-mails aren’t helping. I’m under a bit of pressure here, you know. The senator told me directly not to retaliate to Taylor, despite his increasing numbers. She thinks that we botched the hooker thing so badly—and thanks so much, it’s been a lovely few weeks here dealing with the fallout—that she doesn’t want to touch another thing.

Btw, I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I’m truly sorry to hear about your diagnosis. So really, shouldn’t you be focused on something other than this right now?

KR

I sat at my desk, struck by his comment. I remembered that Janice had not so subtly intimated something similar to Kyle’s remarks at our last session.

“Being kind to yourself and taking time to enjoy that kindness is very important right now,” she said, lacing her hands in front of her and leaning forward toward me as if to make her point.

I rubbed my temples and told her that I wasn’t sure if I were cut out for this therapy thing; that the only reason I was there to begin with was that I’d checked the “counseling” box on my forms (when
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I was clearly not in my right mind), then answered her introduc-tory phone call at the precise moment when I felt like throwing myself out the window, not because I really gave any thought to the counseling or even believed in it much.

She nodded the way that I assume all therapists do—it must be something they teach them when they get their degree—and told me that anything I chose to do with myself during this ailing time was acceptable. “As long as it’s done out of a kind place,” she added. And then she urged me once again to find someone else to be kind to me: a survivor’s group (as if ), a website (I’d rather watch TV), my mom (ha!).

I reclined in my desk chair and closed my eyes to try and ward off the oncoming chemo headache that I felt leaking into my cra-nium.
Kind
. I snorted out loud.
Clearly Janice didn’t understand my
line of work. Or what sort of armor you had to build to succeed in it
. I mulled over what to say back to Kyle, whether or not to make the
kind
choice, the one over which Janice would award me a figurative gold star, much like the literal gold stars my mom tacked on the fridge when I’d bring home an A in elementary school. And then I decided, much like I suspected back when I was seven, gold stars are overrated.

From: Miller, Natalie

To: Richardson,

Kyle

Re: Big

mistake

K—

I appreciate your concern, but I’m doing just fine. With all due respect to Dupris, she’s acting like an idiot. What’s the first thing we learned on this job? Protect yourself above ev-78

a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

erything else. And what’s she doing? Leaving herself open to be shot. Taylor is within nipping range of the polling margin of error. Do something. Now.

—Nat

From: Richardson, Kyle

To: Miller,

Natalie

Re: No

go

Nat,

I agree. But this is the senator’s choice and I’m not going above her. Maybe you would: I wouldn’t put anything by you (no offense . . . okay, maybe a little). But I won’t on something as important as this.

Just go vote, isn’t that the mantra—“use your voice to be heard at the polls” (or something ridiculous like that), and hopefully, we’ll all still be employed at this time next week.

KR

k y l e wa s r i g h t, of course. They were
all
right. Given my floundering health, I damn sure should have directed my energies elsewhere. So I tried to. At least for a day. Rather than harass him, I committed to an afternoon of pampering. I knew that there wasn’t much of a point of getting a haircut, but I booked one anyway. Along with a manicure, a pedicure, and a shiatsu massage.

I hadn’t seen Paul, my stylist, since my diagnosis, and when I walked through the glass doors and inhaled the peachy scent of shampoo and candles, I saw his eyes widen in the way that one’s might at the climax of a horror movie.

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“Darling!” he said and gave me a hug. “Are we okay?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat, and said, “Cancer. I have breast cancer.” I looked down. “I know, I know. I’m going to lose my hair, but I’d like to do something with it, anyway. Even if it’s just for a few weeks.”

He waved his hands with a flourish. “Done! Consider it done!

Can we finally make you the redhead I’ve always wanted to?”

I paused and thought of the reaction on the Hill. Flaming red was hardly professional: considered more stripper than senator, really. And I know that Dupris most certainly would not have approved. “It’s all in the presentation,” she once told me when I was just starting out. Still though, the tug of something fresh, of something new, of something that was entirely not me, pulled at me.

I opened my arms widely and smiled. “Do with me what you will.”

Paul led me over to the sink, and I arched my back, leaning my neck on the cool porcelain and closing my eyes as he massaged my scalp. Neither one of us commented on what I knew to be true: that as he ran his hands over my head, more strands of hair were coming undone than should have. And that when he was done with shampooing, surely, his fingers would be tangled with knotted, dying reminders of my ordeal.

He ushered me to his station and went to the back to mix up the perfect blend of color: less Little Orphan Annie, more Julianne Moore by way of Nicole Kidman. I was listlessly flipping through an old issue of
Vogue
when I noticed the background music.
Of
course
. I thought.

Jake’s voice hummed out from the speakers that were built into the walls of my all-too-hip salon. I stared into the mirror, my limp and thinning hair strewn over my shoulders, and won-80

a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

dered how you ever escape someone who never left you in the first place.

Paul emerged from the back, and ninety minutes later, my hair, that which I would surely lose anyway, no longer looked like my own. I was gleaming, glamorous, and for a minute, underneath the flattering lights of my chichi salon, I didn’t look like who I was: namely, a cancer patient who wanted to pretend that she wasn’t.

Paul kissed both of my cheeks good-bye, and I pulled my coat tight as I walked three blocks south to the nail salon. I should have felt relieved, reborn almost, even though I knew that it was fleeting.

But the only thing I felt was heavy. Lonely, really, and achingly hungry for alpha dog. I stared down at my feet as I walked, unable to shake Jake’s latest song from my head, replaying it in beat with my steps.

Dangerously close. Dangerously close to the ledge.

Take a step further, and we’re off the edge.

Take a step back, and we don’t know where we’ ll be.

But maybe we’ ll find we’ ll set each other free.

I looped my scarf around my neck and kept moving. And as I always do when I hear one of his songs, I wondered if he wrote it about us.

t h e day o f beauty worked well enough as a distraction. At least for twenty-four hours. Still though, six days before election day, I was pacing even more frantically around my couch, and neither my newfound discovery of the Game Show Network, nor my scary knowledge of the intricacies of the
Passions
plotline could distract me. Taylor’s steam train was moving full speed ahead, and
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thus my pulse was increasing at approximately the same rate. So you’ll understand why I woke up the Wednesday before election day, and before I even brushed my teeth, clicked away on my BlackBerry until I found what I needed.

I wasn’t surprised to catch her at her desk, even if it was 7:30 in the morning.

“Jodi. Natalie Miller, how are you?”

“Natalie! I was wondering when I’d hear from you. This call’s about two weeks later than I thought it would be.”

Jodi Baylor was one year ahead of me at Dartmouth and currently one of the top scoop-getters at the
New York Post
. The beauty about having a friend in the media was that while the media was almost never to be trusted, I trusted her about 7 percent more than other reporters. Not to mention that she prided herself on never revealing her sources, which was critical when you were said source. And when your boss had explicitly asked you not to be.

“I know. Things are in the crapper, right?” I sat down in my desk chair and looked out the window to the dim late-October skies.

“Well, you’re still up 6 percent. But you guys really screwed the pooch with the hooker debacle.”

Pretending I didn’t hear her, I picked up the card of the wigmaker, Mrs. Seidel, which was tucked next to my pen holder, and flicked it with my fingers. “So here’s the deal. And you didn’t hear this from me. But honestly, the senator is getting an incredibly unfair rap here. She’s donated over twenty-five thousand dollars to cancer research this year. Why isn’t anyone printing that? I mean, I know that Susanna Taylor is suffering through it herself, but it’s not as if Dupris has turned a cold shoulder to the cause.” I got up to make some chamomile tea in the kitchen, but found no clean mugs, so started scrubbing a dirty one from the sink.

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“I hear you, Nat. But Susanna comes off like a martyr. She gives the campaign a sympathetic face. Dupris needs to muster up some sympathy of her own.”

Distracted, I turned the water up too hot and dropped the mug into the sink.

“Ow, fuck! Sorry. Okay, well, I can inject a bit of sympathy to the story. But this didn’t come from me, you got it?”

“Got it.”

“You want sympathy to match Susanna Taylor? One of Dupris’s top aides may or may not be dying of cancer herself. And Dupris is so sympathetic that she’s doing everything she can to help out.” Not quite true, but the senator had vaguely mentioned a connection at the NIH if I needed it, and she certainly was paying me for my time off. Oh, and let’s not forget those orchids that she sent over, which now, unfortunately, were doing about as well as the limp hair strands on my head. I filled my semiclean cup with fresh water and plopped in a tea bag.

“So, what you’re saying is that you want to play up this aide’s cancer so that you guys can garner some votes?” Jodi asked, as she typed in the background.

“Whatever works. And reminder: This is
off
the record,” I replied and popped my mug into the microwave. “And don’t forget her donations.”

“Will do.” She paused. “Do you mind me asking who it is?

Who’s the one with the cancer?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s me. I’m the one with the fucking disease.”

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From: Richardson, Kyle

To: Miller,

Natalie

Re:

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt
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83

Nat,

I’m sure that you saw today’s paper. You’re mentioned in the leading story. I know that we discussed that the senator didn’t want any PR, so I’m going to assume that you didn’t plant this. I CAN assume that, correct? Because I’m hoping that you didn’t go public with your disease just to turn public sympathy.

KR

From: Miller, Natalie

To: Richardson,

Kyle

Re: Never

K—

Not only did I not go public, I’m terribly upset that someone did. I feel like a pawn. Truly. But I bet it helps us at the polls.

—Nat

R o u n d T h r e e

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November

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s e v e n

he first Tuesday in November, just as I had on every other Telection year, I made my way to the voting booth. The only difference was that today, I couldn’t make it there myself.