Madam President (35 page)

“What is this?” she’d gasped.

“An incentive.”

Melanie had been speechless. Christopher had wiggled in her arms. Melanie had walked to the window and looked out at the South Lawn. She didn’t want Charlotte to see her face yet. She bounced the baby in her arms as he fell asleep. She looked into the crib and noticed that a soft swaddling blanket had been laid down.

“Everything has been washed with that baby detergent. What’s it called? Dreft, right?”

Melanie had nodded and laid the baby down. She’d stood there looking at Charlotte. The woman who never thought that she deserved to have it all was trying to hand it to Melanie. She’d walked over to Charlotte and hugged her.

“Thank you,” she’d whispered.

“Thank
you
.” Charlotte had hugged her back.

Now Melanie forced herself not to stop at the nursery, where she heard her son cooing at the nanny she’d hired to watch him while she worked steps away. She walked into the Oval Office and sat down in a chair next to where Charlotte was making her own final edits to the speech.

“I put the Carmichael section back in,” Charlotte announced.

“I took it back out,” Melanie countered. She settled in for what she knew would be a contentious battle of wills.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Dale

W
hat are you wearing for your final briefing?” Lucy asked.

Dale made a face. “I don’t know. Do you think I need a special outfit?”

“It will be on all of the newscasts. You know, ‘White House Press Secretary Dale Smith conducted her final briefing from the podium today, ending her reign of terror, blah, blah, blah,’ ” Lucy taunted.

Dale swatted Lucy with her napkin. “You are so
nasty it borders on distasteful.”

“Next to you, I’m Mother Teresa,” Lucy deadpanned.

Dale made another face and then returned her focus to the plate in front of her. “What is this? I didn’t order this.”

“It’s called a detox salad,” Lucy explained.

“Why is it in front of me?”

“I ordered one for each of us. You’re going to get scurvy if you don’t start eating fruits and vegetables.”

Until now, female friendship had proven elusive to Dale, and Lucy was an unlikely gal pal. As with all of the meaningful relationships in Dale’s life, she was terrified that she’d do something to screw things up with the person who’d come to occupy a previously uninhabited place in her heart.

Lucy finished her salad and then started stabbing at the radishes on Dale’s plate. Dale leaned back and drank her iced coffee with an amused smile on her face. They were having lunch at the Four Seasons in Georgetown.

“Did you turn down the CNBC job yet?” Lucy asked between bites.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t have any other offers.”

“When you get to New York and start talking to people, I’m sure you’ll have better options.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Fox will hire you.”

“I’m not pretty enough to work at Fox—or Republican enough.”

“Are you Republican at all?”

“I play a Republican on TV, don’t I?”

“That’s debatable. Maybe you should take the CNBC thing.”

“Does anyone watch CNBC anymore?”

“I have no idea, but they pay for your clothes, not that you need any more clothes.”

“You’re one to talk,” Dale retorted.

Lucy smiled.

Dale had taken the first step toward winning Lucy over when she came through on her promise to grant Lucy and Richard the first interview with the president following the attacks. It had taken longer to schedule than Dale anticipated, but when the president finally sat down for the interview, she had made it worth their wait.

It took place in the Oval Office twelve days after the attack, and Dale had held her breath when Lucy and Richard asked the president how she learned about Warren’s death. Instead of clamming up, as they’d all expected her to do, Charlotte had walked around to her desk and pulled out a notepad from the top drawer.

“These are my notes from that call to his parents,” she’d revealed.

“Was that the most difficult moment of the day for you?” Lucy had asked.

“I’d thought that it might be, but it was the moment that gave
me strength for everything else that followed. Not just that day. I’ve drawn strength from that call every day since. Mrs. Carmichael read me a passage that I used in my speech that night.”

“The Longfellow quote? I thought Melanie found that.”

“It was her idea to include it, but Mrs. Carmichael recited it to me. ‘And the mother gave, in tears and pain, the flowers she most did love; she knew she should find them all again in the fields of light above,’ ” Charlotte read from her notes.

“Can you imagine? At the moment you learn that your precious son—your bright, beautiful, strong warrior of a son—has perished, your mind turns to the person on the other end of the phone? I don’t understand where that sort of strength, if that’s the word, or resolve, or calm, comes from,” Charlotte said.

Richard had launched into a line of questioning about whether military action was inevitable. After a few questions that Charlotte mostly dodged, Lucy interrupted.

“Do you believe that quote?”

Charlotte looked surprised by the question. She’d gazed out the window for a long time. It had felt like an eternity to Dale, who was watching from a spot just outside the president’s line of sight near the fireplace in the Oval Office.

“I have to believe that, Lucy. I have to believe that for the hundreds of men, women, and children who died in the attacks. I have to believe it for the men and women who die serving their country in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have to believe that as a mother. We all have to believe that, or . . .” Charlotte had returned her eyes to the view out the window again for a few seconds.

“Or what, Madam President?” Lucy pushed.

Charlotte had turned her clear blue eyes directly at Lucy and seemed to consider what she was about to say carefully.

“Otherwise, Lucy, it’s unbearable,” she had admitted.

Charlotte had conducted the entire interview as though there were no cameras in the room—just the three of them, having a conversation about what the country had endured and about what she had endured. When it was over, the president had left Dale, Lucy, and Richard alone in the Oval Office.

“I can’t believe that she spent over an hour with us. She was incredible!” Lucy gushed.

“And very generous with her time,” Richard added.

The interview had marked a turning point in Charlotte’s presidency. She’d lost something, too. Her friend Warren had died, and she wasn’t merely channeling the nation’s grief—she felt it, too. Her marriage had ended, and while Lucy didn’t know that at the time of the interview, Charlotte had made no attempt to dodge a question from Lucy about the strain on a family that accompanies a career in national politics. People felt they knew her better after the interview, and they trusted her more. She’d needed that trust to muscle through a controversial package of new laws that included unprecedented intrusions into people’s electronic lives that made the contentious debates about NSA wiretapping from the previous decade seem quaint. She’d sided with Republicans who’d pushed through an immigration policy that critics claimed amounted to profiling. And she’d demanded that nations with which the United States had had prickly relations for much of her tenure choose a side.

The president had unveiled the legislation in a second address to the nation the night before her sit-down with Lucy and Richard. It was twelve days after the attacks, and divers were still pulling bodies out from the sunken ship in Miami. The country was grieving and racked with anger, and Charlotte spoke to both sentiments in her interview with Lucy and Richard. Many observers had credited the interview with marshaling the public support needed to get her agenda through Congress. Dale was skeptical that Charlotte had gone into the interview having made the calculation ahead of time that she could have her way with Congress if she bared her soul. It had felt like a genuine moment of reflection, but Dale would never know for sure.

“Are you going to miss D.C.?” Lucy asked now, jolting Dale from her memories of the days after the attack.

“I don’t know. One minute I can’t wait to leave, and the next I’m standing in my bedroom thinking about being here with Warren, and I’m a wreck.”

“That’s understandable.”

Lucy didn’t offer advice, but she always made Dale feel as though anything she was going through was normal.

“Did you ever call that shrink?”

“No.”

“They’re mostly useless, anyway.”

Lucy paid the check, and they walked out together. Heads turned as they walked through the lobby. Neither of them noticed.

“I’ll see you tonight,” Lucy said. Dale didn’t respond immediately, so Lucy added, “At your good-bye party.”

“I’m still pissed at you for doing that.”

“Don’t be late,” Lucy ordered, before disappearing into a black Suburban.

Dale climbed into her car for the short ride back to the White House. She watched a crew team practice on the Potomac and wondered if any of them ever worried that their loved ones would get killed in a terrorist attack. It was something Dale never would have contemplated, either, but she’d started saying it out loud when she was alone at night. In Washington, everyone knew who she was, and they knew what had happened to Warren. But in New York, she’d undoubtedly meet people who had no idea that her boyfriend had been killed in the attacks the previous summer. She kept reminding herself that that was why she was moving there.

“You’re late,” Marguerite scolded when she walked back into the press office. Dale was still lost in her thoughts, but she’d promised Marguerite she’d run through the questions and answers for the next day’s briefing.

“I thought we were meeting at two-thirty?”

“One-thirty,” her deputy corrected.

“I’m sorry.”

“I still can’t believe you’re leaving me,” Marguerite complained.

“We both know that you’ve been running the press office since the day I arrived. No one will notice my absence for days.”

“They only like me because I’m the good cop to your bad cop.”

“I thought I was the good cop? That actually explains a lot. Give me a minute to check my messages and return a few e-mails.”

Her deputy was taking over for her as press secretary and would
deliver her first official briefing the following morning. Dale looked out the window of the office she’d inhabited for a year and a half. The view of the North Lawn was the one she’d miss most. She could see everyone who entered the White House complex through the Northwest Gate. She’d watched members of Congress come in for confrontations with the president, heads of state and their unruly delegations unload for meetings with their American counterparts, and family members and friends of White House staff members arrive for after-hours West Wing tours.

She also remembered watching Warren walk down the driveway and into the West Wing lobby once. They’d just started seeing each other. The president and the vice president had invited him to brief them on the most recent public opinion polls before the State of the Union. It was a blustery January day, and he wasn’t wearing a coat. Dale had watched him stride down the driveway with a smile on his face. She remembered wanting to know what made him smile so much and wondering—and hoping—that she had something to do with it. As he’d neared the West Wing lobby that day, she’d rushed to greet him.

“Hi,” he’d said, bending down to kiss her on the cheek.

“Where’s your coat?”

“I left it at the office.”

“You’re here for the president?”

“Yeah.”

“Just a meeting?”

“Actually, we’re having dinner,” he’d said sheepishly.

Dale had felt a pang of jealousy over the intimate nature of his relationship with her boss. “Must be nice,” she’d mused.

“Can I take you out for a drink after?”

“Maybe. Call me when you’re done.”

He’d spent the next three hours in the White House residence. Dale didn’t have a work reason to be at the office, but she had waited for him to finish. When he’d texted her that he was done, she replied that she was still in her office. He’d walked in with his “A” badge around his neck and a smile so warm that Dale remembered being overcome with hope that her dark, tortured relationships with men were finally a thing of the past.

Now, as she listened to Marguerite bang around impatiently outside her door, she thought about how much time she’d spent over the previous twelve months hating herself for spending part of the day that Warren was killed trying to seduce Peter. She wasn’t sure which had proven more consuming, the self-flagellation or missing the life she almost had with Warren. Peter had tried to reach out to her on a couple of occasions over the last year. She hadn’t spoken to him since the night he took her to the spot where Warren had died, but something about the way he had looked at her when she’d turned back toward the car had shaken her. He still loved her; she was sure of it. There was a time when that would have been enough to pull her back into his orbit, but losing Warren had changed things. Perhaps it was the realization that while Warren was helping people he’d never met and saving a boy he wouldn’t live to know, she’d been engaged in her final act of disloyalty. Even though she knew that Warren would want her to be happy, she couldn’t bring herself to see or talk to Peter after that night. Warren would probably want her to be with Peter if it made her happy, as long as it didn’t make Charlotte
unhappy
. Dale spent a lot of time now trying to do things that she thought would make Warren happy, which was ironic, because when he was alive, she didn’t try very hard to do that at all.

Warren was the reason she’d stayed on as press secretary. It made her feel closer to him to be here, and the president had made clear that the job was hers as long as she wanted it. She’d urged Dale to take some time off after the attack, but Dale had refused. The inflexible routine of life in the White House had sustained her during the first weeks after the attacks. She arrived at the office by six
A
.
M
. and worked until nine or ten at night. The only hours she found excruciating were the ones she had to occupy on her own.