Sara's advisors gave her a hundred variations on the same apologetic-shocked tone.
Madam President, I never thought –
I know I said Bagwell was history, but you must realize, for an independent party to win elections is so rare –
In ways, she should have seen this coming. Wasn't it also rare for a twenty-eight-year-old woman to be voted into the highest office in the land?
The age-old dance of progress and backlash had started, and she had been so caught up in her job that she had missed the first few steps.
That's America for you, she thought. Just when you think it's about to turn into something really beautiful, it starts to act very, very ugly.
When Kellerman stood in her office the morning when the news broke out about Bagwell's reelection, she interrupted him before he could give her one more take on the I'm sorry I was wrong but all the facts said I should be right excuse.
"I don't want to talk about what we could have done to stop him," she said. "We don't have time. In two weeks, the gun reform bill is going into the Senate and it's going to pass. Every breath of energy in this White House will go into making sure of that. Is that clear?"
"Crystal."
"I'll sign that reform into law if it kills me."
Coldness crept into the room, but Sara didn't have mental space for regretting the words. Jokes about dying were probably in bad taste after the Washington Cathedral shooting. But the graveness on Kellerman's face told her he knew she hadn't been joking.
"How may I be of service?" he asked.
Sara slouched in her seat slightly. She'd been sitting in that chair all night, and for the main part of yesterday. If she didn't move soon, she might grow roots, but she simply didn't have the leisure to waste the couple of minutes it would take her to stretch her legs.
Maybe Kellerman mistook her silence for indecision. "I could pay a visit to Maine and Michigan." He didn't mean the places but the two of the senators from Sara's party who had expressed their reluctance to vote for the bill. "With a little buttering up –"
"We've buttered them up enough to bake a whole batch of cookies, Paul. If we were ever going to sway them, we would have by now."
"What other choice do we have? You need to secure at least one more vote if you want the bill to pass the senate floor."
"Doesn't matter. We've been too focused on the four Dems who've refused to stand with us. If they're getting free airplane tickets from the NSA on their holiday, or seats to expensive events, it doesn't matter how much we cater to them. If they haven't rallied to my side by now, their conviction's too deep-seated to budge, or they're getting too much money out of it. If the NRA's gone bipartisan in its corrupting practices – we'll just have to do the same thing."
Kellerman's jaw dropped.
At any other moment, it would have been funny. Sara was so tired, she almost laughed regardless of the context, but the dead-seriousness of his tone shook the mood out of her.
"You want to go bipartisan," he said. "Now? On a gun reform bill?"
"Like you pointed out, I'm out of options."
"If you think a single Republican will vote for that bill –"
"I must be desperate. I am."
"I was going to say, you must have lost your head."
"Republicans aren't the enemy, Paul," Sara said. "Some ten years ago, I practiced my politics to win a Republican from my father, and he's standing in the oval office with me right now. Tell me again bipartisan politics don't work."
"That was a different time," Kellerman said, not pausing for a smile of sweet reminiscence. His face didn't move, didn't show anything. "And it was you."
"The girl who rallied you to her side of the board can't win a single Republican vote?"
"Not for this bill. Not in this place and time. Not –"
"I've made my decision," she said, "and we both know you're going to help. Save your breath, you'll need that energy, because you and I aren't going to get much sleep until that bill's made into law."
Paul stood silent for a moment. They both knew there was nothing he could do. He'd offered his services, and she would use them as she cared to, no matter how much he disagreed with her.
"What's your idea?" he asked.
"I'm going to give a speech on the Senate floor."
Kellerman's lip twitched. The last of his resistance gathered in his eyes and for a second he looked so helpless, she almost took pity on him.
"For God's sake, Sara," he said. "The Republicans won't stand with you. You can't win them over with pretty words about democracy and the welfare of the nation. If there was ever a time when you could have, decades have run over it. We've seen the worst of them. They've seen what they think's the worst of us. You, Obama. You can talk about bridging the divide all you want, but the fact is there are blue states and red states in America. And sometimes Republicans are the enemy."
"Then how do you explain Wisconsin elected Theodore Bagwell to the U.S. Senate? If the Republicans were all that bad, Bagwell wouldn't have needed to create his own party, would he?"
"Don't do this, Sara," Kellerman said. "Please, don't make me watch you move mountains for a bunch of men you'll never convince you're worthy to be in this office, because you don't have the right set of genitals between your legs."
Sara didn't blink at his crassness. When you don't sleep, filters become dependable. "These are your two minutes of opposition, right? You've got about thirty seconds left. I don't mean to be a jerk, but we really can't spare more than that."
He sighed.
"I don't need to convince all of them," she said. "Just one. One vote, and this country changes forever. It's worth the risk, and I don't have any other cards to play."
"One vote to prove me wrong," he said. "You know your reelection hinges on that vote?"
It was so Paul talk to her about reelection when she was thinking of the thousands of lives that wouldn't be lost in the next school shooting.
He wanted to make her look strong for reelection. She wanted to make history.
And both these desires now depended on the Republican party.
…
Her speechwriter came up with half a dozen different drafts Sara ended up dismissing. Each time, a different approach: I am your president and I am asking for you to do your duty. "Wrong," Sara said. "The authority argument won't work on them. Odds are, they see me as illegitimate, and illegitimate authority is tyranny." Approach number two: the NRA is the real enemy, let's stand together against that hellish organization. Sara shook her head. "Republicans are the masters of fear politics. They'll know what I'm doing and think it's clumsy and pathetic from a Dem."
The other options didn't fare much better. Painting them a pretty ode of democracy? Trying to move them with the lives that would be lost in the years to come if they didn't pass that bill? Maudlin. They'd not only hate her for it, they'd think one really had to be a woman to vote for it.
"Well," her speechwriter pointed out, "you do have to choose an angle. What are we going for?"
Sara thought about this for a long time. Time was running out and still she couldn't decide. The words her speechwriter came up with were fine, but they weren't right. So she decided they'd have to be hers.
Something like stage fright squeezed her insides as she walked to the podium of the U.S. Senate. At this point, Sara felt rather surprised than terrified that to talk in front of an audience could still rattle her nerves. Was it stage fright, though? Butterfly wings fluttered inside her tummy, adrenalin flowed through her veins, but her hands held steady and when she clenched the mic, they didn't smear it with sweat.
An acutely clear awareness carried each of her movements.
The future of my country depends on this moment.
In the back of the room, her eyes looked for Bagwell, and they found him before she could stop herself. A cocky grin made his face even more repulsive than she remembered. It had been a long time since she'd stood in the same room as him. Back then, she had been on the verge of getting elected, and he was trying to blackmail her out of the race. Why was it that every time she saw this man, he seemed to hold her dignity in his filthy toad hands?
The Republicans sat on the left side of the room, as tradition would have it, and Sara faced them so her meaning would be unmistakable when she said, "You don't like me."
Hushed chatter died out inside the room. Republican senators exchanged glances. Had they heard her right?
"You don't have to like me," Sara continued. "That goes beyond anything I'd ever ask you. It's your right to criticize, to disagree. To find fault in what I do."
They started exchanging words as well as looks. Almost none could bear the awkwardness dead on and simply look at her.
"It's your right," she said, "and it's your duty to the people who elected you. So we can fight one another. What I'm asking is we stop being at war with one another. That we stop opposing one another out of principle. When the founding fathers of this country crafted the Constitution and invented the U.S. government, they made it so we could not function if we didn't compromise. I'm not about to tell you there isn't such a thing as a red and blue America –" she smiled, thinking Kellerman would like that. "But I'd like to think there are these moments when we go beyond that. I'd like to think when emergency arises, we can all occasionally respect one another as Americans who love their country and their government, and who care about doing right by those who voted us into office.
"And when over ninety percent of your people asks you to do something, I'm asking you to consider it. We can keep fighting these age-old battles like children – or we can make history. I'd like you to take me up on that offer."
A rattle erupted in the back of the room and Sara was so startled that she fell silent for a second. Interruptions during a president's on the Senate floor were the kind of thing you could count on the fingers of one hand.
Theodore Bagwell stood up, and Sara locked eyes with him before she could help it. The smile on his face boiled her blood with disgust. How easy it was to be so far on the exchequer margins that all you had to do was get noticed – in whatever way you managed.
The eyes of all senators turned to him, which seemed to suit him just fine.
He stood silent for a moment until the tension soared to a climax and he said, "I choose war."
…
"It was a fiasco."
Sara closed her eyes. She and Kellerman sat in the Beast as it drove them back to the White House. "Thanks, Paul. I really needed that. Do you want to tell me you told me so?"
"In a couple of days. Right now, that'd be plain cruel of me, and I don't like beating on people when they're down."
"Thank god for me you're the merciful kind."
He handed her a steaming cup. Coffee? Soup? She'd been too nervous to eat all day and couldn't blink without her brain trying to switch off and steal five seconds of sleep. Either would work. She took a sip and burned her tongue on the drink so she couldn't taste it and make up her mind as to what it was.
"You want to hear about Twitter's verdict?" he offered.
"Uh – not just now."
"Look," he said, "you tried."
"Yeah."
"People will remember that."
"They'll remember I made a fool of myself and tried to appeal to the commonsense of a room full of people who wanted to rip my guts out and watch me bleed."
Kellerman's eyes softened. For a second, he was that older guy and she was an eighteen-year-old who burned with passion and a hunger to change the world.
"Politics' a jungle, Sara. You're going to say 'I know that,'" he mimicked her tone, and because she had opened her mouth to say just that, she laughed, choked on her drink, and kept silent. "But really, sometimes – you don't know it. You think, these people will have to hear me because I'm right. Sara – they wouldn't care about right if it bit them in the ass. You extended a hand to them, created a breach in your defenses, and they will bite that hand and take down your fences with machine guns if you give them the chance."
"You're saying I just committed political suicide?"
He shrugged.
"Tell me the truth."
"Getting shot in the heart made you very popular," he answered. "But to some people, it also made you look weak. Kennedy didn't have that problem, but he died, and he was a guy, so he had the mean combination of tragedy and balls on his side. What you did today – it made you look weaker."
Sara stared at her steaming cup. "Everyone told me I shouldn't do it. That it was madness."
"Sometimes history remembers you right for standing against the grain at the right moment. You did the right thing. At the wrong moment."
"Fuck mercy, Paul. Talk ruthless to me. Did I completely lose it?" she looked steadily into his eyes. "I don't sleep. I don't listen to my advisors much. Am I turning into an egomaniac who's so obsessed with passing my bill that I don't see what's right in front of me?"
"You asked for ruthless," he said, "so I'll be very clear that I don't mean this as a compliment – but I think you went before the Senate today because you're a better person than you are a politician."
Sara took another sip of her drink. It was soup, after all – vegetable broth – which must be Paul's way of playing the comforter. "Wow," she said.
"You asked."
"So, do you take it as a compliment if I say I think the reverse of you?"
"Sara," he shook his head, as if to scold her for teasing. "It would insult me if you ever insinuated otherwise. If you ever look for a way to hurt my feelings, you only have to call me 'nice'."
"Nice," Sara repeated.
Through all her tiredness and the burning humiliation of her speech, a sudden window opened for a brief moment of clarity.
The bill will crash. I won't get reelected.
And surprise snaked in at the way her lungs filled with new air, like she was breathing for the first time in two years.
She couldn't believe how relieved she felt.
"I think I'd like nice," she said.
"Please, don't send me a postcard."
"I wouldn't. Unless it's the kind with kittens on it."
"Drink your soup."
Sara did.
…
"It's not that you were bad."
"Please, Michael. I could have danced on one of foot wearing a clown outfit, and you still wouldn't say I was bad."
Michael visibly carried out the scenario in his head, with such seriousness that Sara kissed him.
They both lay on the hotel room bed, naked, and Sara hoped after a few more hours of lovemaking, she would find sleep.
"Let's not talk about it."
Michael shook his head. "I can't."
"You can't not talk about it?" She smiled roguishly. "A few minutes ago, you were doing a fine job not talking." But the graveness on his face didn't go away. "You know," she said, "humiliating myself in front of all Congress – not to mention on live TV – really put things into perspective for me. If the bill fails, it fails. I've tried. I've given it everything I had."
"You're saying it's not the end of the world?"
"Like it or not, that's the way the world has been for millennia. I tried to change it. You know what else I've learned since I was voted into the White House? I can't change the world on my own. If the world won't follow my lead, then that's the way it is. I can't make them."
Michael's eyes bored holes into the ceiling. Sara lay her palm on his chest – his heartbeat was still quick from their recent activities. "What?"
She didn't expect such a direct answer. "After all that's happened," he said, "Theodore Bagwell can't be the one to seal your political fate. It's too – too fucking unfair."
Sara blinked in surprise. Had Michael just said fucking? Also – did he expect the world sometimes stopped spinning on its own wheels when a certain line was crossed? Was there some bespectacled old patriarch watching over from the sky who'd frown his bushy brows and the situation and say, Wait, Theodore Bagwell won? Reel this back in boys. We can't have that in a decent world.
"Lots of unfair going around," she said, cautious despite herself. He was taking this very seriously. "You and I can't be together in the open, because I'm president and you have a wife. I almost lost the race because of a sex scandal. I got shot in the chest."
"Don't," he said. "You can't tease about that."
A flash of fury flooded her vision red. Funny how emotions came out sharper and sudden when eight hours of sleep didn't stand as a buffer between you and them. Part of her wanted to reply she had gotten shot, not him, and she could use humor as a defense mechanism as much as she wanted – bad humor though it may be.
Instead, Sara took Michael's hand and merely let the anger roll out of her in waves. With his fingers, she traced the scar that ran along her upper body.
"Kellerman said something, after the speech."
"Mmm."
Sara didn't know what to make of that. Michael was good at hiding what he felt, but in the way he never bounced back with questions when she mentioned him, she suspected he disliked him – maybe hated him, even. Why not? There was plenty to hate about Kellerman, Sara supposed, when you hadn't been his friend for so many years. Also, it was reason enough that he could be seen at Sara's side in public, and Michael couldn't. Didn't part of her hate his wife – the wife she'd never met, and who was only looking for a way to stay in the country – just because she breathed the same air as Michael on a daily basis?
Sara went on, "He said I was a better person than I was a politician."
Michael's eyes didn't deviate from the ceiling. She wanted to shake him. Though she did all she could not to let him hear how important this was to her, she wanted him to guess it, to feel it.
"You loved me, almost before you knew me," she said. "When we met at the center. It all fell into place like – like you'd been waiting to fall in love with me forever."
Relief punched the air out of her chest as he finally looked back at her. "So?" he said.
Until she said the words, she was sure she wouldn't put the question so plainly to him. "So do you love the person I am, or do you love the politician?"
His eyes darkened, like he couldn't make sense of what she was trying to say. "You make it sound like they're two different people. Like I could fall in love with one and not the other."
"Maybe what I'm trying to ask is, will you forgive me for not changing the world?"
She had meant the question as her joke, but stopped breathing when his blue gaze stared coldly at her. For a second, she found it extremely plausible that he'd answer, No. After all, could she ever forgive herself?
"You think I don't know that I fell in love with a woman," he said, "not some force of nature? You think I blame you for all the things you can't do, all the people you can't save?"
Though her mouth opened, no words came out.
"It's them I won't forgive, Sara. I fell in love with you – I didn't fall for the jungle."
She held her breath still. He may not think he was lying, but she knew it in her bloodstream. Considering where he was now, what he did for a living – who could believe him?
The alarm of her cell phone burst alive into the room and she started. Surprises, loud noises – they were all a special hell to Sara, since the shooting.
Her hand fumbled for her clothes on the floor until she grabbed her phone, more to shut it up than because she wanted to answer. "Hello?" she picked up.
What was it now? Some Twitter trend, a nasty rumor? Did her family have a history of female hysteria, did a sneaky Republican lobotomize her while she was at the hospital?
"Get your ass out of bed," Kellerman said. "Henry Pope's in your office. And he'd like a chat."
...
AN: Please share your thoughts in the comment section! Take care!