“My five?”
“Five regrets. After this, we can be down to four. Though, to be honest, I expected to have the ten to choose from by now.”
“It’s been twelve hours!” Cleo snapped.
Gaby didn’t give her the dignity of a reply because they both knew that Cleo could damn well get anything accomplished in twelve hours if she really wanted to.
“Let’s go clean up so you’re camera-ready,” Gaby said instead.
“Wait . . . now? We’re doing this now?” Cleo clutched the handle of her roller bag, like this could anchor her to the floor of the lobby of the Sheraton. She wasn’t mentally prepared to show up at MaryAnne Newman’s doorstep while still reeking of stale plane air and with a stomach filled with only half a turkey wrap that cost eleven dollars on board. “I need . . . I need to shower! I need to think about what I want to say. I need . . .” She caught a glance of her reflection in the front windows of the hotel. Maybe it was the prospect of facing her old ghosts, but honestly, she looked like a ghoul.
Gaby waved her hand. “I want this truthful, and I want it as close to raw as it can get. This is what we need to tap into.” She jabbed Cleo in the chest, right where her heart was beating too loudly. “This—heart. We’ll get there right as the sun is setting, and it will be picturesque and cinematic and cathartic, and then everyone is going to love you. But yes, let’s go swipe some lipstick on.”
Cleo exhaled loudly, enough to let Gaby know that none of this pleased her.
“You don’t know MaryAnne. It is not going to be that easy.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because if she showed up and did the same to me, I’d never let her off the hook.”
MaryAnne Newman lived in the ritzy part of Seattle. Of course. Growing up, Cleo hadn’t been lacking, but she wasn’t part of the upper echelons of Seattle society. The kids who lived in Broadmoor or Windermere or just off the golf course of the country club were always kind enough—Cleo didn’t want to pin her ambition to class differences or bank accounts or that she drove a beat-up Jetta while they got new BMWs and Jeeps. Seattle was a town where, theoretically, everyone was welcome and embraced and peace, love, and understanding were taught and imparted and mostly put into practice too. Cleo never went without—her parents did perfectly well. But as the Uber wound through the wide, manicured streets, punctuated with high hedges and bursting rosebushes and blooming rhododendrons, Cleo so easily reacquainted herself with that steady bleat of “less than,” just like she had those first few times her mother dropped her at MaryAnne’s in elementary school. It was subtle, niggling—nothing that beat you over the head—just a small whisper of awe she felt walking into MaryAnne’s cavernous kitchen, eyeing the lush green backyard with a pool that had a waterfall. In the back of an Uber, she was nine again. Even though she was a senator. Even though she’d made something of her life that few of her high school peers could imagine. That she’d flown six hours across the country to apologize to MaryAnne Newman epitomized this: that despite everything, here she was, all these years later, hat in hand.
Cleo had dragged her feet all the way from the hotel restroom, where she’d polished her makeup and changed out of her merino wool sweater, which stank a little bit of perspiration. She’d snapped at Gaby as she touched up her eyeliner, run a brush through her blond-brown hair that was in need of new highlights that would return it to more blond than brown. She’d tried to pluck out three grays with her fingers but had no luck. She’d have to find time for a hair appointment before the next set of television appearances. Things like this mattered for women senators: shimmering highlights or too-long darkish roots or, God forbid, gray hair, could make or break your Twitter feedback. Cleo had never once seen anything of the sort for her male colleagues. In fact, one of the most reviled members of Congress (on both sides!) recently grew in some stubble, and rather than being met with disdain, this somehow made him more likable. Cleo had read headlines claiming he was now sexy. (!!!) All because of a fucking beard.
“Hold still,” Gaby had said in the Sheraton bathroom. “Please keep in mind that I’m not doing this because I want to embarrass you or make you eat crow. God, Cleo. When have I ever advocated for that?”
Cleo pursed her lips, because it was true.
“I’m doing it because I’m trying to protect you. My phone hasn’t stopped buzzing; your interview with Wolf didn’t tamp this down. MSNBC is talking about it now too; let’s not even get into Fox. Don’t you want to at least have the chance to be considered for the nomination? Because this could be over before it even begins.”
Cleo pursed her lips harder and met Gaby’s eyes in the mirror. Gaby was right.
“Apologizing is not my strong suit.”
Gaby handed her a pink lipstick that would ensure her pallor morphed from half-dead to at least having a steady pulse. “Tell me something I don’t know. And you know I don’t like you to apologize, not when it comes from a place of weakness. But there are all sorts of ways to say you’re sorry, and sometimes it can come from strength too. That’s what this is about. Besides, what’s the point of your list if not to make amends?”
“The list is for me! That’s what it was for. Who said anything about amends?”
“So your dad would hate that you are using it to become a better person?”
Cleo snapped the lid back on the lipstick and dropped it in Gaby’s bag. “I thought we were really doing this to have a shot at the nomination. Not because I needed to become a better person.”
“Touché,” Gaby said. “But maybe we can do both at the same time.”
And now the Uber was nearly at MaryAnne Newman’s house. It looked vaguely familiar to Cleo, and she realized MaryAnne must live in—or at least near—her childhood home, like so little had changed twenty years in.
“Wow. This is a super-nice area,” Lucas said, his head swiveling back and forth as he took in the old mansions from each window. “Did you grow up here?”
“No,” Cleo said, a seed of her old class insecurity kicking in, recalling the way that MaryAnne’s mom always looked like she had just come from the salon, with blown-out hair and perfectly pink polished nails. Cleo’s mom, even with her perfect dancer’s posture, was usually covered in paint splatter and wearing clogs. Cleo noticed only when confronted with the differences. “No. Another part of town. We’ll go there tomorrow.” She hesitated. “Well, I don’t know. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
Her old home had been sold shortly after her parents died, the money put away for college, with half of it going to her sister, who had by then gotten her act together, graduated from UCLA, and was working at some New Agey spa that Cleo scorned, even at fifteen when she and her parents last visited. So there was no house to tour in Seattle, really. What, exactly, was she planning—a slow drive-by of the beige ranch home that hadn’t been hers in two decades? Maybe that sounded more macabre than it needed to be. Maybe she could just park outside and say, “Hey, I was fourteen once too, and this is where I lived when I was.”
Their car rounded a curve and eased to a stop on the right side of the road, and Cleo couldn’t help but let out a little gasp of air. MaryAnne actually lived in her childhood home. She and Cleo had spent nearly every weekend here, because MaryAnne had a pool and a ping-pong table, and there was a brief stint in middle school, before they each respectively grew serious and cast all playful things aside, when her older brother convinced their parents to buy him a real-life Pac-Man machine, and that was really something.