So Close (30 page)

“Any luck?” I called desperately, my voice echoing as I marched Ray Lynne into the kitchen. 

Billy came in a patio door with Pax behind him,  “Pool’s full of leaves,” he said catching his breath.

“We just did a full lap of the property fence.”  Pax tugged off his tie to unbutton his collar.  “There’s nobody here.”

“There’s no way in hell I’m staying here.”  Cheyenne came in, obviously with the same findings.  She stepped over a line of ants coming from under the sub-zero to get to the sink.  “It’s filthy.  There’s nothing in the den except an algae rimmed fishtank.”  She turned the handle to wash her hands but nothing came out.  She turned the other handle.  Nothing.

“Does someone really live here?” Ray Lynne asked.

“I don’t think anyone’s coming,” Billy said it first as he slid down the wall and pulled his phone from his pocket.

              “Well, I need to eat now,” Cheyenne said testily.  “I haven’t had anything since we left Charleston,” she fretted while not lifting a finger. 

              “I’m hunnnngry.”  Ray Lynne wilted.

              I tugged open the huge cabinets—all empty—until I found a dusty box of Powerbars.  “Here.”  I put one on the gold granite counter for each of them as Pax lifted Ray Lynne to sit on it.  The place had obviously been customized for a man at least man seven feet tall. 

              “I want an omelet.”  Cheyenne slammed her phone down and pushed the bar away.

              “Well, we don’t have eggs, Cheyenne.  We have Powerbars.”

              “We don’t know what’s happening here.”  Pax gripped the counter.  “You need to call Tom and demand a wire transfer.” 

              “Pax,” I eyed Cheyenne.

              “Amanda, we have until midnight tomorrow to make that payment or I’m in default.  And she’s right, something’s really—we need to get out of here.”

              “I can’t eat that.”  Cheyenne pushed past me to open the empty cabinets.  Ray Lynne reached over to play with her phone.

              “Can’t we just ask your parents to cover it for a few days?” I walked over to press my eyes against the window and peer down the black driveway. Someone had to be coming for us.  They had to.

              “No, we can’t ask them to cover it because—a: how the hell am I going to explain it?  And b: I gave up that line of credit to marry you, remember?”

              I spun around.  Even Cheyenne, who’d bit off a huge bite of Powerbar, raised her eyebrows.  I blinked back tears. 

              “Your belly button looks sooo big,” Ray Lynne said of whatever she was looking at on the phone.  “See, Mandy?”  She lifted it to me.   

              “Put that down.”  Cheyenne spit crumbs everywhere.  I looked at the phone and saw the picture in her photo gallery.  The one from
News of the World
.  Only whomever she had emailed it to had re-cropped it before running it.               

“Guys.”  Billy scrambled to his feet and handed me his phone.  I looked at the headline “Davis aid shacking up with husband’s pregnant mistress.” 

              Oh.  My.  God. 

I raced to get Pax’s iPad from the car, powering it on as I ran back in.  There it was on CNN, the headline story.  I froze in the atrium.

              “Fuck,” I heard Pax behind me. 

              “Pax—”

              “They’re saying it’s mine?!”

“I’m sorry.  Oh God, I’m sorry,” I kept saying as I frantically called Michael.

              “Amanda,” he answered. 

              “Tom?”  Pax grabbed the phone from me and I reached to hit speaker. 

              “Michael, what happened?” I asked. 

              “It sounds like there were a lot of loose ends at the resort.”

              “But we didn’t talk to anyone!  Why would they—she leaked the bikini picture Michael, I just found it on her phone.  She probably concocted this as well—” 

We heard a scream from the kitchen and then Cheyenne came stumbling in.  “
Why
.”  She sank to her knees beneath the chandelier, her face contorting in tears.  “
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy
.” 

Pax shook his head.  He was white.  “Get off,” he mouthed to me. 

              “Michael, this is too much.  You have to make this right.”

              “I’m afraid we have no choice here, Amanda,” Michael said with the casualness of someone who doesn’t need to be harsh because he is making the rules. 

              “But we do,” Pax found his voice.  “I’ll drive right to the local news station and tell them—”

              “What?  That you put over fifty thousand dollars of charges on your credit card to frolic with her?  Took her to and paid for medical check ups?  Cared for her in front of countless witnesses for weeks?”

              For the second time in twenty-four hours I wished for a bomb.

              Even Cheyenne was struck silent.

Chapter Thirteen

Hanging up, Pax looked like the cartoons where the cannonball shoots through a guy’s torso and he bends to see clear thru himself.   It was sickening.  I was going to be sick.

              Ray Lynne appeared in the doorway.  “Get her your headphones.  Get her a video,” I implored Billy as I sucked back the salty saliva flooding my mouth.  For once, he hustled her away without questioning me.

“I don’t understand,” Cheyenne gasped between sobs, raising the hem of her oversized tee shirt and wiping her face with it.  “How is he going to marry me now?”

              “
Marry
you?” Disbelief bent me toward her at the waist.

              “Yes,” she shot back. 

              “He’s never going to marry you, you crazy bitch!  He has a wife!”

              “Okay fine.”  Cheyenne fussed with her phone.   “Here.”  She tapped the video page, swiped and swiped until she found what she was looking for, then thrust the phone up at me.  It took me a second to figure out what I was seeing: someone holding his camera over Cheyenne’s bobbing head working his erection with her mouth. 

              “Oh, God!”  I dropped the phone on the marble tile like it was scalding, but the audio kept playing.  Billy returned even though I waved him back.

              “Yeah, baby, like that.  You are . . . so . . . fucking . . . good.”  It was Tom’s voice. 

              “That doesn’t prove anything,” I protested, “—the sound could be spliced—doctored.” 

              Cheyenne, Billy and Pax all raised their eyebrows at me. 

              “Mmm, yeah, won’t be long now,” Tom’s voice snaked up from the floor like it was winding round my ankle.  “We got Illinois.  Lanier . . .
has
to… concede.”  Oh my God, this was really recent—this was the week of my wedding.  “
You . . .
are gonna . . . be . . . the First . . . Lady . . . of the . . . United States . . . of America.”

              “How?” I asked, my voice low and rough.  “How did he see that happening?”  It was the most irrelevant of all the new questions about Tom’s inner life, but I needed to know just how fucked up he was.

              Cheyenne’s tiny arms were crossed.  She unwove her right palm and gestured to the sound of grunts coming from the floor, allowing Tom to answer for himself, his voice coming in dreamy, grunting bursts.  “We’ll let the people grieve—”
Grunt, grunt. “
—who wouldn’t want a lonely President—”
Grunt.
  “—and father of two small boys to find happiness?” 
Grunt.
  “After I leave office I’ll adopt this one and we’ll tell him the truth—”
Grunt
.  “—if he hasn’t already inherited my winning smile—” 
Grunt.  Grunt.  Grunt.

              I dropped my face into my hands.  It was inconceivable—intolerable—that I had put my life, my future, my husband’s future in jeopardy for—this.

              The sound of Tom’s climax came from the floor, seeping into my ears like some Shakespearean poison.  Through my fingers I saw Cheyenne’s face on the phone next to Tom’s deflating penis, her smile as she said with the intensity of a zealot, “
You
are going to be king.”  The last thing to fill the frame was her pregnant belly before the video stopped. 

              I looked up, yanked back from stunned to incredulous.  “Wow,” I said, “So if you want to give the future President a literal and metaphorical blowjob you have to tell him he’s going to be
king
.  Or maybe a
fairy princess
.  Or an
astronaut
.” 

              “Amanda—” Pax stood.

              “Is this what men want, Pax?  You could have a woman like Lindsay—smart, accomplished, substantive—or get your dick sucked by a sycophant.  Is this what men want?!  Really?!  So badly that they’ll risk losing the White House?” 

              “Well, right now
he
hasn’t lost anything. 
I’m
not getting a job in politics anytime soon, but he’s riding high.”

              My phone rang and I lunged to take it from Pax.  Someone over there was coming to their senses.  “Mandy, hey, sugar, it’s mom!”

              “What?”  I couldn’t even process this. 

              “It’s mom!” She was exuberant.  “Are the kids still up?  Can you put them on?”

              “Um, yeah, I’m great, thanks for asking.”  Billy looked at me.

              “Oh, Mandy, you know what I mean, I’m just so excited to talk to them—”

              A sound escaped my mouth like someone had forced air out by thumping me in the chest.  Which, in a way, she just had.  “Today,” I finished the sentence for her.

              “Yes, today.”  I was confusing her. 

              “Not yesterday.   Or any of the other yesterdays since you took off—”

              “Mandy—”

              “No!”  Billy took a step forward then back, like he was torn between grabbing the phone and running out of the room.  Twenty-eight years of swallowing my words because she couldn’t take it, because it only made her mean, because it was pointless, were coming to a hot end.   “You don’t get to decide what the job is!  You don’t get to decide it’s crackers for dinner some nights because you forgot the fridge was empty.  You don’t get to decide not to come home because you think nine is old enough.  You don’t get to pick half the responsibilities and decide you got a pass because you were only sixteen!  I don’t care!  I don’t care that you were fucking sixteen.  You were the only mom I had and I deserved better.  The kids deserve better.  And no, you can’t have them.  You gave up.  And I don’t forgive you.”  I threw my phone down in the foyer next to Cheyenne’s.   

              “Whoa, whoa, whoa!”  Pax scrambled for it.  “Call her back, Amanda.”

              “No!”

“So, what?  We’re raising them now?”

              “Thanks a lot,” Billy said.  “Fuck you, too.”

              “Dude, sorry but you know what I mean.”  He glared at me.  “You have
one
job right now and that’s to fix this shitmess—you get that, right?” 

              “Pax, I will.  I will fix this.  But she just doesn’t get to decide how this goes!”

              “She doesn’t—or Tom doesn’t?”

              “Both of them!  There are rules!  You don’t want to be a husband anymore—get a divorce!  You don’t want to be a mom, use a condom!  But you don’t get to be a husband or mom on your half-assed terms.  That’s not how it works.  I have never half-assed a single fucking thing in my entire life.” 

              “Except us.”   He stared at me with such sadness my breath left me.

              It felt like nettles on my cheeks.  Across my chest.  Because he was right.  A thousand reasons burst through my brain: the demands of my fucked-up family—of trying to get a man elected president—of his wife was on death’s door—but as exhausting, and painful, and relentless as it all had been, it had still been more comfortable than truly letting myself land in us.  Because cookies get eaten and men disappoint and even mothers eventually reach the end of their love.

He pulled out the car keys.  “Where are you going?” I asked, panic raising my voice.

“I need to not be here.  You can get that, right?  I need to be—I don’t actually know yet.  Do I show up in public saying this story is bullshit?  Do I lay low?  I seriously wish this wasn’t my problem eight weeks before an election when
my
job—if you give a shit and if I even still have one—is supposed to be helping raise money for candidates who are pro financial reform.  But I know I’m not sleeping here tonight.”

“Are we over?” I asked, barely able to make the sound. 

              He ran a hand through his hair.  “As we are—as we have been—yes.  Can we find a way to be different?  I honestly don’t know.”

“Pax.”  I was about to beg him to stay, but then I realized I couldn’t ask for a single thing.  I was the ship slipping below the waves and he had to get off or drown.  “I love you.”  It was the last thing I said before we heard the door shut.

I turned to Cheyenne, whose tears were drying as mine were starting.  She looked so different than she had a few hours ago on the plane, all triumph, certainty, and entitlement drained from her.  “Cheyenne, you have to help us.  You have to help me fix this.”  I wiped off my face with my hands and went over to help her to her feet.  “You have the only proof.  On your phone—in your belly.”

              “I just need to sleep.”  Her response was frantic.  “I’m pregnant—I can’t be undergoing this kind of—I just need—to sleep.”  She wandered up the stairs and I was left alone with Billy, his face blotchy the way boys’ get when they’re trying not to cry. I just wanted to hug him but I knew he wouldn’t stand it.  “Ultimately, this is about what you guys want, Billy.”

              “Why now?”

              “What?”  I couldn’t follow.

              “Well it’s never been about what we want—ever.  For even a second.  So why would it suddenly be now?” I had no answer.  For him or myself.  I thought of Lindsay.  Had she even
wanted
a political life?