she was never going to wander through the Guggenheim because she had a free afternoon or attend the ballet because the urge struck her. She just wasn’t.
A boat blared its horn in the distance, and something came to her, a surprise. That years ago—maybe ten, maybe five, she’d have to check when she was back in DC—Cleo had indeed added something to her list: I never learned to paint. Or sing. Or dance. Or anything. Maybe that could have been a nice thing.
Cleo stared up at the sky, thought of her mother, how strange it was that she had been gone for twenty years and only now Cleo was recognizing pieces of her in herself. She didn’t think she’d want Gaby filming her in an art class, but it couldn’t have been more embarrassing than what went down at the country club. Her gut twinged, and for the first time in a long time, she acutely missed her mother. When you lose your parents young, there is simply a blight on your psyche that becomes part of your being. Really, it had become background noise to Cleo: she knew the loss was there, but if she paid too much attention to it, it would override everything.
She turned to go, the memories both too poignant and just poignant enough. She’d cleared her head, felt a little more at peace with the mess of the day. Cleo didn’t believe in hokey things but maybe it was her mom looking out for her, like she would have back in middle school or high school. When Cleo would wind herself up over a spelling bee or, later, an algebra test, and her mom would stand behind her and rub her shoulders and pour her a glass of orange juice, and it didn’t make everything better, but it helped. (Incidentally, she was the spelling bee champion in fifth through seventh grades.) Also, she knew her success was a glue among the three of them, what with Georgie being such a mess, such—though her parents would never have said this aloud—a disappointment. Georgie required so much of her parents’ energy, Cleo just wanted to make it easier for them. And she liked how winning felt too.
Now, Cleo angled herself up the hill back to the Sheraton and breathed deeply, wondering if her mom could hear her breath, though she knew she couldn’t. But it was nice to pretend that she could. For a moment, Cleo wondered if maybe something was shifting in her, quaking inside.
Or maybe that was her phone notifications. By the time she arrived back at the hotel, with Gaby nowhere to be found, the YouTube video of her confrontation with MaryAnne had 100,000 views, and upon hearing her fumbling with her key card, Lucas swung open the door with a wide-eyed, “Holy shit, Mom, you’ve gone viral.”
SIX
Cleo had taken an Ambien and slept surprisingly well, though not long. She could get by on nearly no sleep—a by-product of training herself for late nights at work, fine-tuning legislation or reviewing details with her staff. Gaby was still unreachable by midnight (three a.m. Washington, DC, time), so Cleo popped the pill and away she went. Discipline was never one of her problems, so staying off YouTube and Twitter, where the video had of course also taken flight, wasn’t difficult. Actually, getting Lucas to put his own phone away was more of the battle, but then it always was.
Their room was dark, the sun barely up itself, when she woke. For a very brief second, she debated rising and going to the hotel gym, giving her that precious hour away from her screen. But then it lit up with a new text, and Cleo couldn’t help herself. Truth told, discipline was not her strongest suit until she’d at least had a coffee.
She couldn’t bear to read all the notifications, so instead, she focused on the most recent.
Georgie.
Cleo couldn’t remember when they’d last spoken. She closed her eyes again, tried to trace back. In the adjacent double bed, Lucas snored just loudly enough for Cleo to hear but not loudly enough to have woken her, and she remembered those early foggy baby days, when he’d get congested and snore and cry and snore and wail, and she’d wonder how on earth either of them would ever make it out of his infancy alive. Georgie had shed all her disaster years by then and had two toddlers at the time (twins), and sometimes Cleo would tentatively reach out