Charlotte Kramer: Madam President Part 31

"He's not here, Char."

"Where is he?"

"He got a call from Marguerite a couple of hours ago. Brookie answered the phone, and Marguerite was hysterical. She said Dale was catatonic or something."

Charlotte nodded and sat back down.

"He'll be back," Mark a.s.sured her.

Charlotte smiled at him and looked down at her hands. They didn't look like hers - they looked like the hands of a much older woman. She examined them carefully and thought about all the years and all the effort she'd expended trying to be the things that she thought she was supposed to be to all the people around her. She knew that where Peter was concerned, she was finally done trying.

"I don't have the energy for the charade with Peter anymore."

"Every day won't be like today."

"It shouldn't be such an extraordinary effort for two people who were once very much in love to comfort each other."

"You're right about that."

"I asked him to break the news to Dale about Warren. It was Melanie's suggestion, but I thought it was a humane way to inform her that her boyfriend had died. I figured that she and Peter had the only relations.h.i.+p that was separate from work and that with him, she would be able to let her guard down."

"And?"

"Well, what I saw when I stopped by the medical office to check on her was that it was he who had his guard down with her. He looked like he'd been crying, or talking, or sorting through the chaos of the day with her. I don't know. Maybe I imagined that. Maybe he hadn't done any such thing. I don't know what I'm talking about."

"No, Char, I think your intuition is right. He doesn't have to try so hard with her. She isn't you. She's isn't the president. She isn't perfect and smart and funny and beautiful all at once. She's a mess. He needs that."

Charlotte smiled. "I think he's in love with her."

"Maybe, but not for the reasons you think."

"No?"

"I don't think he ever stopped loving you, Char. I think he just saw that you preferred to do things alone."

"It wasn't a choice."

"No? I remember thinking that the last time you guys were really partners was while you were governor. The jump from the governor's office to this place was one that you took all alone, honey. And I remember watching you guys once the presidential campaign got under way. You never really talked through what would happen to the lives you'd built in California. We were there. Peter's head never stopped spinning from the day you won the New Hamps.h.i.+re primary to the morning of your first inauguration."

"I wasn't paying enough attention to him to notice."

"Char, everything isn't your fault."

"But this one is. If I'd been satisfied serving out two terms as governor of California and then riding the wave as a popular former governor, we could have had a great life in San Francisco."

"That never would have been enough for you, Char."

She wanted to protest, but if he were wrong, she never would have left California and uprooted her entire family. Mark reached for her hand.

"Why do I feel so s.h.i.+tty about it all?"

"Because you wanted to have everything, but that's a bulls.h.i.+t fairy tale they tell women to make you dependent on Prozac and therapy. It's a f.u.c.king lie."

"What do I do now?"

"Whatever you want to do."

Charlotte hugged her friend and went into her bedroom, where she lay down, fully clothed, on the bed with the dogs huddled around her to wait for Peter.

It was after three A.M. when he finally tiptoed in.

"Where were you?" She shot out of bed to confront him.

"I took Dale to the blast site. I thought she needed to see it."

As they stood facing each other with the three dogs on the bed between them, Charlotte knew that if she ever had to recount the moment that she knew that spending any more time on her broken marriage would be a disservice to them both, it would be this one. Charlotte barely had the energy to say what needed to be said. Sensing this, Peter spoke first.

"I'm sorry that I couldn't be the things you needed me to be, Charlotte."

"Please, don't," she urged.

"What?"

"Don't turn this into a failure that you get to claim as your own. That's horrendously unfair, and I'm tired of being the person you simply can't figure out how to satisfy. I'm the one who's sorry that I couldn't become someone you could talk to. I'm sorry that I dragged you here twice. I know that you never wanted to live here."

"It's not Was.h.i.+ngton, Char. We stopped being us before we got here, but once you were here and the kids were in Connecticut and I was in California, I couldn't ever figure out how to put it back together."

He was trying to say the right things, but his words felt like an a.s.signment of blame to her for disa.s.sembling the family.

"And Dale?"

"You asked me to take care of Dale."

"Yes, today I did do that. But when you guys were together - you were happy, right?"

"I don't understand what you're asking me. I thought you had given up on me and on our marriage before I ever got involved with Dale."

"Peter, stop trying to hold yourself harmless from any responsibility. I'll take the hit for this - don't worry. Everyone will still think you're a great guy. I am trying to figure out if I ever had a shot this time around. Were you ever really invested in our marriage, or was I just conveniently standing there begging for another chance at the very moment things fell apart with Dale?"

"Char, I would have liked nothing more than for us to have become a family again."

She felt like screaming. He was so pa.s.sive-aggressive he didn't even know how to have an honest conversation with her. "I know, but I need to know if you ever really thought it would work."

"I wanted to think that it would, but everything felt like such an effort."

She almost laughed at his statement, but it answered a lot of questions. Being married to someone with a job like hers most certainly would require an extraordinary effort, but that wasn't something that interested Peter, at least not where the marriage was concerned. Charlotte was hurt and angry, but she knew those feelings would recede.

She surprised herself, and him, by starting to cry. The marriage she'd been toiling away at for two decades was over, and the emotion that overtook all others was relief. Peter pulled her into a hug, and they stood there like that for a long time. When he left, Charlotte fell into a deep, dreamless sleep until she was awoken by a call from Tim.

"We've got a tape, Madam President."

"Who?"

"The guys who launched the attack on the s.h.i.+p taped a celebratory message before the attack. It was uploaded on an Al Qaeda Web site, and Al Jazeera has been airing it for the last twenty minutes. I can bring it up to the residence if you want to see it."

"That's OK. I'll meet you in the Situation Room in fifteen minutes."

Charlotte clicked on the TV and watched a live report from outside the Air and s.p.a.ce Museum. The reporter cited the death toll, twenty-four, and the number of injured, thirty-nine. Charlotte sat on the edge of her bed while they aired a photo of the CNN reporter who'd been injured and her cameraman, who'd died. They aired a photo of Warren, whom they described as a close presidential advisor and friend. The correspondent finished her live report by speculating that the president of the United States might venture the less than half a mile to the site later in the day. Charlotte hoped that her Secret Service director wasn't watching. He'd get nervous if he thought it had been broadcast that she'd be there. Charlotte showered and dressed quickly and made her way to the West Wing.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE.

Melanie One year later I've made this edit three times. Why is this section still in here?" Melanie grilled the chief White House speechwriter, who was sitting on the other side of her desk.

"She specifically told us to leave it in when we met with her in the Oval last night after you left," he explained.

"And I specifically asked you to take it out. Three times."

The speechwriter rubbed his red-rimmed eyes. He looked like he'd been awake for a week. "Maybe you and the president should discuss it and get back to us."

Melanie raised her eyes from the printout to appraise her favorite speechwriter.

"Why do you want it out, anyway?" he probed.

"Because the president won't be able to get through it."

"What do you mean?"

"She can't talk about her call with the Carmichaels without getting choked up, especially with them sitting in the front row, and that's not what I want for the opening paragraph of her first speech of the day. I don't want the country to see her cry on the one-year anniversary of the attacks. I want them to be touched by the tributes and inspired by the stories of survival and resilience. For that to happen, I need the president to be able to read the entire address, and if you start with the call to the Carmichaels, she won't be able to get through it."

"And in your estimation, she will be able to talk about her first trip to Miami the week of the attack without crying? I've never even seen her read through that section of the speech without getting choked up."

"I cut out the whole section of the speech that went into her first visit to the Port of Miami and her private meetings with the family members. She may decide to ad-lib it when she gets down there and stands at the port again, but I don't want to put her in the position of reliving that."

"If you take out the Carmichael section, too, do we have enough of her emotional journey in here? Wasn't that part of what you wanted to accomplish with these speeches?"

"It was, but I just don't want her to fall apart at the first event."

"Fine. Can you do me a favor and tell her that you took it out?"

"I'll handle her."

"You're fine with the rest of it?"

Melanie nodded.

"DOD doesn't want us to describe the attacks as limited in nature."

"I'll deal with them. Is there anything else giving anyone heartburn? CIA is fine with the line about stepping up recruitment efforts? We may as well say that we're hiring spies and have her give out a G.o.dd.a.m.ned eight hundred number for interested applicants. I can't believe they want that in there."

"Yeah, they asked if you could get POTUS to give out the Web site."

"Seriously?"

"No."

"Smart-a.s.s. You're lucky that I happen to think you are brilliant, because you are a huge pain. You creative geniuses are all the same - high-maintenance."

"Right back at you, Mel. Are we done here? My omelet is getting cold."

"One more thing."

"What?"

"The speech is beautiful."

Melanie could see his face break into a smile before he rose and walked slowly toward the door of her West Wing office. "I had money on this, you know."

"On what?"

"That you'd come back."

"Get out of here. And I'm not back. It's a short-term, limited appointment," Melanie insisted.

"Keep telling yourself that, Melanie. I'll see you on the flight back to California on her last day."

"Bite your tongue!" Melanie yelled after him as he walked down the hall and back toward the mess, where the rest of the speechwriters were huddled over hot breakfasts and pots of coffee to fuel their twenty-four-hour days.

Melanie liked to think that she'd held out for a respectable amount of time before agreeing to come back to the White House staff, but Brian had been right. She'd been sucked back in almost immediately following the attacks. Charlotte hadn't made a single move in the last year without discussing it with Melanie.

Two American citizens, an Egyptian on a student visa, and two green card holders from Qatar had carried out the attacks that occurred the previous July. Charlotte couldn't consider military retaliation against Egypt or Qatar, but she had used the occasion to force America's allies to pick a side in the battle raging in the Middle East against extremist groups like ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood. When the president declared war on the groups that had hijacked the democracy movements of the previous two decades to usher in regimes with close ties to terrorists, she did so with the leaders of France, Germany, Great Britain, China, Jordan, Egypt, and the UAE standing next to her in the Rose Garden. She'd played hardball with the tools at her disposal - by cutting off foreign aid, imposing tough economic sanctions, and bombing targets across the region with the help of Arab allies. Charlotte had also directed the CIA to engage in more aggressive recruitment in the region. The president accepted the public's limited appet.i.te for another military engagement, but she refused to accept that America couldn't make the attackers and their supporters suffer.

Melanie was not surprised by the president's shrewdness or decisiveness, nor was she alarmed by Charlotte's decision to permit the use of enhanced interrogation methods for the two bombers captured in Miami. But she did find Charlotte's capacity to sit still amid the country's grief astonis.h.i.+ng. Losing Warren had given all of them, especially the president, a toehold on the grief that the victims' families were experiencing. Melanie had watched the president hold hands with the children and parents of the victims, and instead of losing herself in the retaliatory military and economic measures, she'd remained invested in their healing. It was a remarkable transformation for a woman who had spent her entire political career projecting emotionless strength and control. Melanie felt more proud of Charlotte in those months than she could ever have imagined she would.

For her part, motherhood had rendered her helpless over her emotions. She felt everything these days. She'd been almost five months pregnant at the time of the attacks. The realization that the days of asking other people's sons and daughters to protect the country from harm were far from over had filled her with a grief so profound that even the joy of her perfect, beautiful son's birth four and a half months later hadn't completely erased it.

She lived two lives now. Her joy-filled life was made up of the tight circle of love that she and Brian created with and around their seven-month-old son, Christopher. Her heart expanded every single day, and sometimes she'd watch him sleep at night and wonder how much more love her heart could take before it burst. She wondered if it was possible to love him too much. Melanie would catch Brian's eye, and without speaking, she knew that he was thinking the same thing. She'd never loved Brian so much. It felt as though they could exist as an island unto themselves, sustained by the wonder and joy they felt at each sound and smile and kiss from their magical little boy.

Instead of feeling that Christopher's birth was a reason to retreat from her professional obligations, she'd felt more compelled to serve. After the attacks, she'd rea.s.serted herself as the guardian of Charlotte's deepest confidences. Melanie had also resumed her role as the president's surrogate on Capitol Hill and around the world. The president never had to ask Melanie to do anything - Melanie simply knew what she wanted done and did it without ever seeking credit and without ever discussing it in the press or anywhere else.

After the shock of the attacks started to fade into something that could only be described as the new normal, the president started asking Melanie about her plans for returning to work after the baby was born.