The Governor's Lady (31 page)

The district covered three counties. He was gone day and night, walking the towns, driving the back roads, managing somehow to keep up with his classes at the university. He left early, arrived home late. She saw almost nothing of him, especially during the last frenetic two weeks in May, when the semester was over and he could devote every waking minute to the campaign. She did her best to ignore it, or at least to hold it at arm’s length. She refused to even glance at the newspaper stories about what he was saying and doing.

He won, carrying his home county and splitting the other two with enough votes to avoid a runoff. On election night, she gave in to his pleading and went with him to his storefront campaign headquarters, where she spent the evening watching him win, meeting his supporters, hangers-on, political junkies. Six months along now, she felt huge and ungainly and unattractive and entirely out of place. But Pickett held her close, arm about her waist, making sure they all took note. She was polite. She shook hands and made enough small talk to get by. But she kept her emotional distance.

One of the people she met was Plato. He and Pickett had remained in touch since college. Now, he had quit his job and moved halfway across the state to run Pickett’s Senate campaign.

She would look back on that later and recognize it for what it was—the beginning.

On Thursday, she arrived home from work to find Pickett’s mother there, two suitcases standing by the front door. Pickett had made arrangements with her editor for a couple of days away.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Off. Together.”

She slept most of the way as they drove, awoke to the smell of salt water and then, as she struggled into awareness of the early evening, the sight of dunes, sea gulls, weathered cottages. She sat in a swing suspended by rusting chains from the roof of the open porch, watching kids splash in the gentle surf at water’s edge while Pickett brought in the bags and threw open the windows to the sea breeze. Then he sat beside her. She turned to look at him, examining him, framing thought.

He stretched his arm across the back of the swing, touching her neck lightly. “Could we just let it be us? None of the other? Just us?”

She nodded, then closed her eyes and leaned her head back against his hand. “Yes,” she sighed. “We have to.”

Through the long weekend, they made love, walked the beach, made love, cooked seafood, made love, slept the sleep of two exhausted human beings. They talked about the life growing inside her, the baby who seemed oddly calmer now that they were away. They had consciously avoided talking about names, not wanting to know if it was a boy or a girl, savoring the mystery. When he pressed her now for a guess, she said another girl, but she wasn’t ready to talk about a name, and Pickett quickly veered away from what neither of them wanted to deal with at the moment (though for different reasons, she later realized): her mother. If it was a boy, Pickett wanted to know, would she consider Carter, for his father? She thought that was fine. She then found herself hoping for a boy.

By Sunday evening, as they huddled together in a blanket next to a driftwood campfire in front of the cottage, the beach darkening, waves sliding with a soft rush over sand, moon playing tag with ragged patches
of clouds, she felt rested and renewed, something old and comfortable easing back into her soul. Pickett had given himself back to her, reaching to fill her need for warmth, belonging, being held and cherished. It was, at heart, all she had ever wanted.

It lasted until Monday, on the drive back home.

“How the hell did we get here?” he asked. “It all happened so fast. It’s a blur to me.” He looked over at her, but she was quiet, waiting. “I didn’t think I had a dog’s chance of winning.”

When she realized he was talking not about them but about his election, she felt the air go out of her.

“Are you going to make me do all the talking?”

“It’s your election, not mine,” she said, making no effort to keep the edge out of her voice.

“I had to try.”

His face was terribly earnest, as if he must make her understand. But she sensed something else, a holding back of some kind.
What else?

“And then it seemed like it got bigger than me, that I was being swept up and carried along. Things, people …”

“Who?”

He took a deep breath, held it, let it out through grim lips. “Mickey.”

She sat numb and shaken while he told her, rushing along in a torrent. Mickey had called the local party committee as soon as she heard about the incumbent senator’s disaster, and had leaned hard on the members to recruit Pickett. He hadn’t known anything about it until he accepted, he insisted. But once he did, Mickey called and told him what she had done and offered to help. Then she tutored him through the campaign—raising money, making connections, strategizing, lining up the advertising agency that had handled Cleve’s political work.

When he finished with the telling, she sat for a long time, listening to the whine of the tires, then rolling down the passenger window to let the rush of wind sweep through and fill her mind. But there was one sound the wind couldn’t muffle, a voice that said,
She is trying to steal him from me
.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to upset you. I didn’t want to get caught between you and your mother.”

“And what about my mother coming between you and me? Have you thought about that?”

She could tell by the look on his face that he had indeed, and that it had been gnawing at him—but not enough to make him tell her what was going on. That was the worst of it, not what Mickey had done in his campaign, but that he had kept it from her. It was
the withholding
. They had, so she believed, made a compact to be open with each other. No secrets, no hidden agendas. What he had told her just now was a betrayal of that.

“Cooper,” he tried, reaching across the seat to her.

“Just take me home.” She began to cry, surrendering to the hurt and disappointment. She turned her face from him, into the wind.

After days of icy silence, he came to her, miserably remorseful. “Cooper, I’m sorry. I should have talked to you from the first, from the minute I found out about Mickey. What can I do?”

“It was a lie, Pickett.”

“Yes,” he confessed. “It was a kind of lie. I know how you feel about Mickey. I didn’t want to upset you.”

“Don’t ever do it again,” she said.

“I won’t. I promise, I won’t.”

Still, things were altered. A sea change for both of them.

Politics on a larger stage, the winning and all that went with it, opened a new and tantalizing world to Pickett. He was young, attractive, articulate, untarnished. He could go places. He could win things, maybe even big things. But if his potential was great, there was also a price to be paid. More and more, it was about the prize. Cooper watched with a sinking heart as the part of Pickett that was original and genuine was slowly but steadily replaced by an all-too-familiar sameness, the mask politicians wear and lurk behind, part artifice, part guile. He had been, at the beginning, a free-flowing stream. But as the stakes became higher, he turned cautious, guarded, abhorrent of surprise, fearful of losing control.

He became, in short, political, in the timeworn way. Having rejected Woodrow, she had gotten …
Woodrow
.

Pickett’s successes fed one on another until they became the central dynamic in their lives. During his two terms in the State Senate, the competing demands of his office and his teaching job left less and less time for anything else. The university made allowances for his time in the capital. Cooper was much less willing. She struggled against the current that tugged at them all, concentrating her energies, her life, on Allison and Carter while still clinging to her job at the paper. But then he got elected lieutenant governor, and that changed everything again. Pickett would have to be in the capital almost constantly. She was first inclined to simply let him go. But the more she thought about it, about all the loss she and the children had already endured, she decided she would fight to keep what of him, of them, she could. She and Allison and Carter might have to give up the comfortable ordinariness of their lives in an easygoing college town and adapt in ways she knew from her own girlhood, but by God, they would all sit around the dinner table together.

It came to her starkly, how profound the change, on a day when she
was packing for their move to the capital. Tucked away in the back of Pickett’s closet, behind the suits and wing-tip shoes, she found the motorcycle helmet and his guitar case. The motorcycle was long gone, sold in the days they were trying to cobble together enough money to buy the house and were determined to do it on their own without help from parents, especially (and she was fierce about this) Mickey. He hadn’t played the guitar in years. She pulled the case from its hiding place, laid it on the bed, flipped the latches, and opened it. It gleamed up at her, the wood rich and deep except for the place where he had strummed away the varnish. She brushed her fingers across the strings, and it came back to her in a rush, the picture she saw from the window of her upstairs apartment that long-ago evening, Pickett slouching against the seat of the motorcycle, long legs splayed across the sidewalk, jeans and T-shirt and black boots with buckles on the sides, fingers drumming the guitar case, swaying to some tune in his head.
He sang, he wrote songs, he was crazy about me
.

That was the moment she realized she could not have what she wanted, to be loved irrevocably, and that she might never again be able to love unreservedly in return. There were things about him she still cherished, and she knew there were things about her he still valued and honored. But it was not the same. Large, important parts of him—and the ways they fit together—were gone. If she made do, as she intended, it would have to be with far less than she longed for.

She had a good cry. Then she calmed herself and finished packing.

Pickett was spectacularly good at what he did. He had a special ability to entice people to believe him and believe
in
him, to want to work for him. He gathered an inner circle, led by Plato, that was fiercely loyal and protective. His people were, he said candidly, his Teflon coating.
But he also had an incredible, almost unbroken run of luck. The economy was bustling. The old fights over things like civil rights were mostly over. He didn’t have a great deal of need for Teflon. Inevitably, his inner circle became more and more like a family, demanding his time and attention. Inevitably, it bore him away.