Authors: Emma McLaughlin
“Babe?” Pax’s voice would come through in a whisper on my cell, waking me from where I had fallen asleep sitting up in the Davis’s den.
“Yeah?” I’d answer, checking the clock in the dark.
“Just wanted to see how you’re holding up.”
He called every night from DC, as if determined not to let me go an hour where I could be wondering if this was all too much for him—how we collided from estrangement to cancer in a single day.
“I’m the same,” I’d whisper back. “It’s the same.”
I’d stumble out to find Tom by himself on the living room couch staring at the wall, his expression inscrutable, and think,
who can he express his fear to? Who does he have? Belle?
That was laughable. Who could he fall apart on? He had to be the strongest of all of us.
While we waited for the test results to find out if the cancer had spread everything at the office came to a standstill, except a string of fundraising meetings that had been months in the making. After much agonizing, Tom decided it would be in poor taste for him to attend and that Brian should go to keep things moving, with me along to assist.
“You want the radio?” he’d ask, with a glance at the rental’s dashboard.
“No. Do you?”
“No.”
The circumstances having rendered us emotionally incapable of the chitchat necessary to mitigate the awkwardness, we travelled to the hulking residences of those who could line the Davis war chest in silence. One eye on my phone, waiting for the call, and struggling to focus, I sat beside Brian with what I hoped was an enthusiastic smile as time moved in increments the size of tea sandwiches. To his credit, Brian pitched each yacht-tanned face like Tom’s candidacy was just occurring to him, all while the prospect of losing Lindsay hovered over us like a seagull fixed on our poached salmon.
I was on the tour of one zillionaire’s unimaginably expansive cannonball collection when my phone finally buzzed with Tom’s number and I ducked out to the car to take it. “Amanda,” his voice was raspy. He was struggling to speak. Bracing myself, I got in and slammed the door.
“Okay,” I heard myself say faintly as I trained my eyes on the algae-glazed lips of the spouting dolphin at the drive’s center.
“She wanted me to call you. We just got confirmation—it hasn’t metastasized.”
I dropped my forehead to the steering wheel. “Thank God,” I kept saying. “Thank God, thank God.”
“Is that Mandy?” I heard her grab the phone.
“Lindsay, I’m so relieved.”
“Listen. I need you to let Brian finish the fundraising and get back here today. I’m going to have a double mastectomy—” I heard Tom say something in the background that sounded like, “Now hey, Linds.” “It’s aggressive. And there’s a division of opinion,” she added pointedly.
“I just don’t see why you have to do anything that radical yet,” Tom’s voice was muffled by her hand over the speaker. “Right as the campaign is gearing up—”
“But the boys aren’t even in first grade yet,” she said to me like that ended the matter.
“I understand,” I said, although I couldn’t imagine my mother making that kind of drastic decision with us at the forefront of her mind.
“Now,
here’s
the fuck of it. I can’t recuperate at this construction site. My oncologist says it’s a dusty, toxic, off-gassing hellhole—too much strain on my immune system. There’s no time to rent something so . . .” There was a pause, the first time in all of this I’d heard her gird herself to ask for something. What was it? “Can you help move us back to Riverside?” In all the talk of radiation, of chemo, it was the first time she had sounded defeated.
“Of course,” I rushed to reassure her. Because I knew what she was being forced to do. Recuperate in a bed just on the other side of the wall from Ashleigh’s.
She went through with the surgery and, to cope with the stress, Tom took up running. He announced he wanted to do a marathon in the fall to raise money and awareness for breast cancer research. While I sat with the nurse waiting for Lindsay to text us a request he’d take off and come back hours later, drenched in sweat like he was trying to outrun the specter of facing another loss.
One such afternoon, Lindsay called me up to her room. Their king-sized bed had been replaced with an adjustable hospital model and from beneath the bedclothes the clear plastic drain snaked like a tube of candy striped red and yellow. She was pale and had lost a lot of weight, her hair grown out to reveal a good inch of grey. “What can I get you?” I asked as she pressed down with her knuckles to try to sit up.
“I want him to go back to the campaign before he gets a bone spur,” she said, her voice still raspy from the tube they’d put down her throat during the surgery.
“Oh, Lindsay, I think he wants to be here. I’m sure he couldn’t concentrate if he tried to put his mind on anything else.”
“Well,” she said, eyes closed, “Let’s find out.”
The next day Tom and I returned to campaign headquarters at The Davis Institute and Jeanine and Michael rounded us up to discuss Tom’s official announcement, only a few weeks away, and what they brashly termed the ‘Lindsay Factor’. While she had thankfully slipped from the memories of talk show comedians, everyone was anxious about introducing her to the public after the first attempt had inarguably failed. Half the staff thought it imperative that she be there. Jeanine, speaking for the others, adamantly disagreed, worrying Lindsay’s presence would be “a fucking downer.”
“She lost all this weight.” Jeanine’s highest compliment. “But now her skin just looks—deflated.” Jeanine’s faith in the power of weight loss was visibly shaken. “Spotlighting Lindsay’s ordeal will just plant doubt in the public’s head about Tom’s ability to focus on them. We have to face it—she could be a fatal liability.”
After all those nights of finding him catatonic in his den I thought for sure Tom would leap in to reprimand her—point out the inappropriateness of such hyperbole given the actual fatality Lindsay had just escaped. Instead he simply asked, “What do I do?”
“Well, I think, like it or not, we need her. A politician runs with his wife, that’s just the fact of it. And no one more than the President,” Michael said, and that was somehow the final word.
When the day arrived Lindsay appeared exactly five minutes before go time, having been subjected to Jeanine’s ministrations. Newly blonde, freshly bronzed and perched atop thin heels she looked anxiously to Tom. But he seemed too nervous to notice—or perhaps he had already pumped her confidence at home.
Fighting the Percocet enabling her to endure the wool crepe against her fresh scars, she reached out for his hand to keep steady and, with a final powder of their noses, the two walked out as if the last three months were just a bad movie they’d seen on a plane. She smiled adoringly as he spoke, waved emphatically as the crowd cheered—and collapsed into the car as soon as she was offstage.
I ran over to her, my heart still pounding in time to everyone chanting Tom’s name.
“Do you want me to get him?” I asked.
“We did it,” Lindsay breathed, a sheen of sweat on her forehead.
“You did,” I corrected her. It was hard to hear each other over the screaming. I pulled her back gently to rest. She lolled her head to me on the seat.
“No, he did.” She closed her eyes, giving into the adrenal crash. “Despite me.”
Online chatter was instantaneously enthusiastic—as we’d so hoped, the resounding public response seemed to pick up right from where Merrick’s concession speech had left off. The private funders started to throw their weight behind Tom. Our Super PAC’s website went live and those critical grass roots donations started to trickle in—what we would depend on to keep ad buys going through the primaries.
Jeanine ordered the crepe dress in four colors and planned to rotate Lindsay through them for Tom’s upcoming appearances. The Lindsay Factor now had a protocol, hand her a Percocet and keep it brief. It seemed we finally had momentum on our side then, just weeks after Tom’s announcement, the former Secretary of State made her own.
Meredith Lanier’s arrival to the primary race posed a formidable threat to Tom. He polled well with elderly and minorities, but women made up his strongest voter block. For the first time since her diagnosis, Michael invited Lindsay to join the team in full crisis-management mode. She sat quietly on her old living room couch as Jeanine explained to a packed room that, moving forward, Lindsay would need to shift center stage.
“What?” Tom balked.
“You know what the Secretary has?” Jeanine asked.
“Both her breasts,” Lindsay answered in one of the old Oxford shirt of Tom’s she’d come to favor with her drawstring pants.
“Exactly.
And
a vagina. Tom, your only shot here is to reintroduce Lindsay into the narrative and make the Secretary run against both of you.”
“
Both
of us?” Tom balked. “What is Lindsay running for?”
“We’ve marginalized her for obvious reasons, but now we need to rebrand you as a package deal.”
Tom and Lindsay both took this in. “I don’t know.” Tom shook his head. Everyone watched him, waiting for him to continue. “She’s still tired from the radiation. I don’t know that I’m okay with asking that.”
“
She’s
right here,” Lindsay said.
“Linds.” Tom took her hand and looked at Jeanine. “No,” he said firmly. “Right now she needs to rest.”
“The twins are starting kindergarten. You’re never here. What I
need
is a project.” Lindsay squeezed his hand and released it to wipe her hair from her face. “And badly.”
“Well, I’m not letting you travel. Unless you guys have some magical way of her doing it from bed—”
“That’s it.” Jeanine extended a Bordeaux-colored nail at him. “She’ll do a book. Tell your story through hers.”
“A book?” Lindsay repeated, sitting up.
“Absolutely not. You don’t have the energy for a book,” Tom dismissed it.
“To tell my story? Our story? To get you to the White House? I can do that. I would love to do that, actually.”
“The truth of the modern wife, the modern marriage—you’ve been a working mom, a stay-at-home mom, you know Tom better than anyone.” Jeanine decreed. “Done and done.”
The journalist Karen Fousard, who penned the bestselling “as told to” memoir of the female astronaut, was selected as Lindsay’s writer. In addition to giving approval on everyone Karen wanted to interview, the campaign had sign off on every question Karen planned to ask. The only veto I ever saw was a name Tom crossed off Karen’s list—Shannon Burkheart. Whoever she was her side of things would not be making it to Karen’s ears.
Each Monday Karen submitted a chapter for Jeanine and Michael to mark with red pens, followed by conference calls, which I only ever heard their end of. I wondered how Karen fared writing at break-neck speed while being screamed at on a daily basis to make the ‘truth’ Jeanine was so excited for “more fucking flattering for fuck’s sake!” When the last word was vetted the manuscript was rushed to the presses and a fresh prescription for Xanax was rushed to Jeanine.
Tom’s copy arrived via Fed Ex to the Wyoming ranch where he, Brian and I, had flown at the behest of a billionaire wanting to kick his tires. After a day of shooting, riding and roping, Tom was icing his shoulder when I found him in the guest wing. He slipped on his glasses to gaze at the handsome picture of Lindsay sitting on their front porch adorning the book’s cover.
“Tom, he’s waiting,” Brian called from the doorway. “Drinks in the study.”
Tom quickly flipped the pages until he came to a stop, his eyes darting back and forth to read. “Mm,” he murmured and then handed it hastily back to me. As he walked away, re-buttoning his shirt beneath a canopy of antlers, he called over his shoulder. “Have at it, Amanda. I know you’re dying to.” I flipped open to the page that had gotten crushed down.
It was the details of Ashleigh’s passing, limited to a succinct paragraph and I re-read it as if the few sentences would magically expand with details.
Neither Tom nor Lindsay had been home the night Ashleigh took her dad’s car out, despite the restrictions of her Learner’s Permit. Her best friend—Shannon Burkheart—had been buckled into the passenger seat so she hadn’t gone through the windshield as Ashleigh had. I flipped to the middle of the book to find a photograph of Ashleigh and Shannon holding triple ice cream scoops with their arms around each other. I couldn’t help but imagine them getting the news—two sets of parents cleaving on opposite journeys of indescribable gratitude and indescribable grief. What had they done to get through the minutes, hours and days that followed? Lindsay concluded by saying that she didn’t share anything more because there was nothing more to share. “We have found it in our hearts to forgive the driver who ran that red light. He is God’s responsibility and only God can judge him, We’ll never know why Ashleigh decided to go out without our permission—or not to buckle her seatbelt. And our journey has been one of making peace with that.”
Going back to the beginning, I sat by the fire and read every word. Even though Karen had done the actual writing it captured what I loved about Lindsay. Simply told, but with her dry wit and unflinching gaze she shared about how it had been to manage her illness for her family, equating her terror that it might deprive her children of a mother to the prospect that her honesty about the experience might deprive her country of Tom’s leadership.
The sky was star-strewn beyond the windows when Tom returned from dinner and a moonlight cigar. “It’s so good.” I held it to my chest. “You’re going to enjoy it.”
“I don’t need to enjoy it, Amanda,” he muttered as Brian indicated with a head-shake to me that our trip had been a fool’s errand. “I lived it.” Tom closed his door, leaving a trail of dusty footprints in his wake.