tour of duty a month after his daughter was born, who didn’t want to reenlist but needed the twenty-four- thousand-dollar bonus for a down payment on a house; the nineteen-year-old from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who joined the army on his eighteenth birthday and was killed in a marketplace explosion; and the tens of thousands, or likelier hundreds of thousands, of civilians, a member of a local city council, a shopkeeper and his wife and three daughters, journalists and cameramen and translators working with the American military or the media, a bride and her new mother-in-law and twelve of the guests celebrating a wedding attended by a suicide bomber—killed and killed and killed and killed. If the blood of these people were on my hands, if there were something I personally could have done to prevent such carnage, the loss of so many adults and teenagers and children who presumably wanted, just as I always have, to live an ordinary life—if I believed I could have made a difference but instead remained silent, then how could I bear it?
____
“OKAY, THOSE THIRD-GRADERS are terrors,” Ella is saying. “Can we just establish that you’re eternally in my debt?”
“Belinda says you did a fabulous job,” I say. “She told Jessica you had them spellbound.”
“Seriously, this one boy tried to climb over the rope in the Red Room, and then this other kid pushed a girl into the wall in the Vermeil Room. You’d think they’d have some reverence for this place, but they were like animals. I can’t wait to see what they do onstage tonight.”
It is just past six on the East Coast, and I’m back on the jet, above the cloud cover; we’re half an hour from Washington, meaning that after the motorcade ride back to the residence, I’ll have an hour to dress for the gala. “Thank you for standing in for me,” I say. “You did your good deed for the day. Ladybug, there’s something I want to talk to you about tonight when I get home.”
Immediately, accusingly, she says, “Do you have breast cancer?”
“What on earth—No, honey, I don’t have cancer.”
“You just sounded so serious. Okay, so I picked out which shoes you should wear tonight—are you ready?”
Jessica passes me a note:
“Mom?” Ella says.
“Let me call you back in a minute.” When I’ve pressed the “end” button on one phone, Jessica passes me another, and I cover the mouth-piece. “He won’t say what it’s about?”
“He wants to talk to you directly,” Jessica says.
I hold the phone to my ear. “This is Alice.”
“Ding dong, the witch is dead.” Hank’s voice is unmistakably gleeful. “Gladys Wycomb bought the ranch an hour ago.”
“What are you talking about?”
Jessica mouths, “
Hank says, “The old ticker gave out, and no, I didn’t have her offed, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Did you?” A wave of horror passes over me. I’m not a conspiracy buff, but I’m quite sure things take place in any presidency that would shock most voters; I’ve never dwelled on what those things might be in Charlie’s case, because I am conflicted enough about the controversies that are known and legal.
“Alice, I swear to you I had nothing to do with it, and neither did anyone else except Mother Nature. Now, tell me this isn’t the best news you’ve heard since Van Halen announced their reunion tour.”
“But her helper, Norene—”
“Not a chance. Turns out in the mid-nineties, she was the go-to girl for dime bags in Cicero, Illinois, and she’s got a police record longer than your arm. The geriatric feminist avenger had nothing to lose, but Norene has plenty.”
“You’re telling me that Dr. Wycomb died of completely natural causes?”
Jessica is still standing in front of me, and her jaw drops. “Gladys Wycomb
“She was a hundred and four, Alice,” Hank is saying. “There doesn’t need to be foul play—unless it was you who slipped a wee thimbleful of arsenic in her afternoon tea.”
“I don’t find that funny.”
“In all seriousness, blackmailing you was probably physically draining. I’ve got to hand it to her that she went out with a bang and not a whimper, but the good news for us is it’s over—the abortion story is off the table. You ready to come home and be saluted by students and teachers?”
“How can you be sure she didn’t tell anyone besides Norene?”
“So what if she did? It’ll be hearsay, nothing but another urban legend. You’ve got a former physician claiming
“I’m assuming you’ve told Charlie?” I say.
“He said to tell you congratulations.”
When I’ve hung up, Jessica says jokingly, “What, he took out a hit on her?”
“I know. Maybe she sensed the end was near and that’s what made her act, but it’s awfully unsettling. Hank is dancing a jig because he thinks this gets me off the hook.”
Jessica is quiet, musing, and then she says, “It probably does.”
WHEN I CONSIDER the trajectory of Charlie’s presidency, when I try to pinpoint the moment its tone and direction were established irrevocably, I keep revisiting his choice of vice president. In the summer of 2000, the
