MaryAnne had repainted the door bright red, but otherwise, the looming Colonial was just as Cleo remembered. She hesitated before popping the handle to the car door, nausea cresting in her throat. She wanted to grab Lucas and Gaby and yank them back in the Uber and flee. Her misdeeds toward MaryAnne Newman weren’t even on the list! (She didn’t think.) Now, twenty years later, should she regret them? She swallowed, waited for the unease in her stomach to pass.
She remembered a sliver of a moment their junior year, AP French. She and MaryAnne had both struggled on an exam. It wasn’t a big deal in the scheme of their world, but it sure as hell felt like one at sixteen and with college applications looming. Cleo had never come naturally to the language, but she bore down, gutted it out. Neither of them knew what exactly went wrong on this test, other than for the first time in their academic lives, they bombed it. Each sat at her own desk, slack-jawed and stunned, Cleo battling back tears, staring at the C- on her blue book. When she’d told her parents that night, ashamed and disappointed, her mom said, “Well, sometimes you have to fail to know where you can succeed next time,” and her dad nodded along, saying nothing. If they shared her disappointment, and knowing them they did, they didn’t make it known. Which, in hindsight, Cleo could appreciate. She’d do the same for Lucas. But three days later, MaryAnne asked her to hold her bag when she went into the bathroom to change her tampon, and Cleo—who was not even snooping—saw a new blue book with an A- written on the cover in their French teacher’s handwriting. It turned out, Cleo found out by sniffing around, MaryAnne’s parents had called their teacher and raised a stink, and she had been allowed a retake during lunch two days before. MaryAnne had told her she was having cramps and had gone to the school nurse.
Cleo gazed out at MaryAnne’s manicured lawn, so green that it nearly felt like an optical illusion, like a painting where the artist had intentionally used a verdant green rather than a more realistic one. She replayed her own shortcuts, ostensibly, her own regrets—the internship essay, the glancing at MaryAnne’s notes before she ran for the paper, the various other small but cutting ways their friendship fractured.
Yes, she thought. I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.
So maybe not regrets after all.
FIVE
Gaby rang the doorbell, then scampered off the front stoop, so Cleo waited by herself, flanked by two towering potted ficus trees. It was an unusually sunny near-dusk afternoon—May in Seattle was hit-or-miss with the weather—and she reached for her sunglasses, an extra armor to shield her from whatever lay behind the door. When no one answered, Cleo allowed herself a small exhale, felt the knot in her stomach untangle.
“Ring it again!” Gaby stage-whispered from the side of the lawn. She was on the right; Lucas was on the left, their camera phones held high so as not to miss either angle of the blessed reunion. (Gaby had decided to film for backup.)
“No one’s home,” Cleo said. “Let’s go. There’s always tomorrow.”
“She’s in town!” Gaby whispered back, though Cleo was honestly not sure why she was whispering. The street was otherwise empty, and they didn’t have anything yet to capture on film. It wasn’t like this was an FBI raid, which, it occurred to Cleo, she would have been much more enthusiastic about. “Ring. It. Again!”
She pressed the buzzer one more time, praying feverishly that Gaby had gotten her intel wrong, and MaryAnne was currently enjoying the beaches of Maui or the mountains of Whistler or wherever she would whisk her family off to avoid the scrutiny of the press glare from the op-ed. Then Cleo recalibrated: MaryAnne would never shy away from the spotlight. She’d shared the op-ed on her Facebook page! Of course she was in town. Cleo was surprised the front door wasn’t flung wide open, with MaryAnne welcoming the inquirers with homemade shortbread and Earl Grey tea. She may have been planning a parade to celebrate. It was easy to envision this, after all, because if Cleo had charted the same course as MaryAnne (country club president rather than senator), it’s what she would have done exactly.
Before she could consider this, the Sliding Doors possibilities of their lives, she heard footsteps coming too quickly, then the lock unlatching (too quickly!), and then the bright-red door, so cheery and welcoming, flung open too quickly. Cleo squeezed her eyes closed. No! No, no, no, no, no! This was not the intention of her regrets list. This was not how junior senators from New York made apologies! She should have stood firm and had Gaby craft a statement of sincere apology and weathered the storm. Then she remembered that they’d tried that (kind of) with Wolf Blitzer, and in the age of social media, one juicy scandal has longer tentacles than an apology, particularly for women. Women couldn’t fuck up the way that men could. They were held to a higher standard, as if making mistakes weren’t part of the human experience. Cleo understood that she couldn’t change society’s preconceptions with one Wolf Blitzer interview. She’d have to do that piece by piece, bit by bit, as senator, maybe as president, maybe just by raising her son to be a good human being.
Regardless, here she was on MaryAnne Newman’s doorstep, just like she had been so many times in her childhood, and she may as well get it over with.
She opened her eyes, raised her sunglasses to rest on the top of her head.
A girl about Lucas’s age stood in front of her.
It was as if Cleo were in eighth grade all over again, and she was shocked to feel the tingle of tears building. She blinked quickly; Cleo McDougal was not a spontaneous crier, and she didn’t even know why she was so emotional in the first place. The girl had MaryAnne’s blue eyes, her straight, long brown hair with fraying ends, a nose like a ski jump. Her cropped shirt aired her belly button; her denim shorts put her gangly legs on display.
“Oh my God,” the girl said.
“Oh my God,” Cleo replied.
“You’re, like, you’re the senator.”
“Oh.” Cleo chewed on her lip. “Yes. That’s me. But I also know your mom. Obviously.”
“I told her not to write it,” the girl said, so easily betraying her own mother. “I told her it was petty, but . . .” She shrugged. “I think your generation is different from mine.” She twisted her hair into a spiral with her hand.
“Oh,” Cleo said again. None of this was what she had been expecting. Cleo was good at confrontation—she’d honed the art after so many years in Congress. But this softer, kinder, younger version of their misspent youth had her off guard, uneasy in a close-to-an-emotional-breakdown sort of way. She could feel it in the sweat building in her armpits, in the staccato of her pulse. Then: “Well, is . . . is she here? Your mom.”
The girl shook her head. “They go to the club every Saturday night for dinner.”
Cleo turned in both defeat and victory toward Gaby. “She’s not home! Can we quit now?”
“It’s just, like, a five-minute walk,” the girl said. “I can take you. But, I mean, I don’t blame you if you don’t want to speak with her ever again. It was shady, for sure. Like, the opposite of feminist. The affair stuff? Like, I said to her, Mom, no one cares who screws who anymore.”
Cleo tried to laugh. “Well, I’m not sure how true that is, but thank you.” A snapshot of Nobells scampering out of her tiny apartment in a rush to get home to his family flew through her mind. She shook her head, as if that could release him from her memory. “Anyway, I guess since I showed up at your front door, I do need to speak with her, but—”