Chapter Eight
Everyone holds secrets that no one else knows.
Everyone’s done something that no one else knows.
We all have things we hope never see the light of day, sometimes small, sometimes big.
Whether it’s stealing a candy bar, or peeing in your work enemy’s iced tea, or sabotaging another student’s science project because they dry-humped your boyfriend.
Oh, none of those examples.
All I did was keep a promise.
And I’m pretty sure if I believed in a hereafter it would mean my soul is damned for it.
As I settle into my role, it’s impossible for me to shake the quiet, ever-present clicks deep in my brain that won’t let me forget. When I can get a full night’s sleep not interrupted by nightmares, these clicks sometimes keep me awake and wondering if tomorrow will be the day someone finally points a finger at me and rightfully accuses me.
Leaving me unable to believe I made it through another day without being discovered.
I wish that I could honestly say being President is the most difficult thing I’ve ever undertaken in my life. My first couple of months, the “hundred days” that are a fixation of every news anchor, aren’t any bumpier than average. I don’t have to start any wars—military or trade—and I have one minor natural disaster to deal with when a blizzard hits the Northeast the second week of February and shuts down the New York City area and all surrounding airports for three days with record-breaking amounts of snow and ice.
I throw myself into my role because there is no other option. My first year is spent verbally jousting with outliers on both extremes of the political spectrum who try to hijack their parties’ respective attempts to find middle-ground with me to get along. A hurricane hits Texas and causes widespread flooding, and FEMA responds. Is it a perfect response? No, but no response ever is. We do the best we can, we learn from it, and we implement changes.
We don’t have any domestic terror attacks by foreign-inspired agents despite an uptick of them on the African continent, so yay.
We do have two mass shootings, however.
White Christian men.
It leads to yet another serious discussion about gun safety and universal background checks—and loonies insisting I’m going to ban guns although no, I’m not, even if I had that power—and while I’m on the phone calling survivors and the families of victims, there’s a lot of hand-wringing on both sides of the political aisle for different reasons.
I only half-joke about getting the NRA declared a terrorist organization, and Kev reminds me not to joke about that anywhere else, because it’s a horrible optic even if it is a pretty good idea. We’ve worked too hard to court GOP voters who are tired of the bullshit their party’s extremists try to shove down everyone’s throats, and we’re not interested in courting the extreme leftist members of the Democrats, because some of their talking points are just as toxic to our country as the far right.
We work our asses off to revamp the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Rights Amendment—the second of which covers nonbinary and transfolks, and includes protections based on orientation—and get new and improved versions of them passed with a heavy bipartisan vote.
We do a lot of good.
As I give my first State of the Union Address, I look out on the assembled lawmakers and realize this year has gone by damned fast.
Almost too fast.
I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface of our agenda. I know presidents are supposed to pick a couple of key issues and focus on those or risk getting nothing done, but it’s hard not to reach for everything.
To want to do it all.
I grew up with an unstoppable mother as my role model. I always envied and felt desperate to emulate her passion, her drive. She never made me feel like I was a disappointment, or that I wasn’t good enough.
I’ve done a pretty good job of that myself, though. I’ve noticed with age and wisdom and experience also come my self-doubts and recriminations. The farther I am from the point the woman who was my mother finally left this planet long before her actual body followed, the more garbage I pile on myself.
Have I lived up to expectations?
Have I made her proud?
Have I redeemed myself, even though all I did was keep a promise?
My mother was, in every way, the polar opposite of Kevin’s father.
Who still gets fucking re-elected despite a squeaker of a primary and general.
I mean, what the actual fuck, West Virginia?
Edwin Markos’ re-election, despite his terrible margins, invigorates him. He gets louder, more obnoxious, looking for every opportunity he can get to score what he perceives as a hit against us, all while basically trying to do as much as possible to fuck over the voters in his state while lining his pockets thanks to PACs and special interests.
He’s a shitstain.
How he managed to birth a human being as smart, funny, good-looking, and empathetic as Kev is a complete mystery to everyone, and frequently leaves Kev the subject of good-natured ribbing by his former colleagues.
Chris jokes with me in private that maybe Kev’s mother cheated on his father, and Kev really isn’t related to the congressman by blood, but we don’t say that around him.
Meanwhile, the citizens of the great state of Florida seem to have their shit together for once—they reelect Susa Evans for a second term as governor, so there is that. We all voted for her—because we’re all legal citizens of Florida. Chris and I have our legal residence listed as the house behind Kev’s, even though we rarely get to go there because of the logistics issues and not wanting to cost the taxpayers the expense.
Kev tells me to ignore his father, but that’s difficult when the guy seems bound and determined to virtually get right in my face as much as possible. He rails against me in long, rambling speeches he delivers to nearly empty chambers late at night, but which still get aired on C-SPAN, and the videos of those speeches are linked to by him and others sharing his skewed and vitriolic political views.
When I don’t tank the economy like he insisted I would, he tries to take credit for our strong growth himself, which even FNB and Fox gives him side-eye over.
Like, dude, you’re not that important. Get over yourself.
The more people ignore him, the louder he gets. One day, Kevin stumbles across an Internet article written by a clinical psychologist and which pegs Kev’s father as a narcissist, with a step-by-step breakdown, including real-world examples and quotes and actions to back him up. Kev shows it to Chris first because, as Chris tells me later, Kev breaks down crying.
Chris takes Kev up to the residence for an hour to de-stress.
I don’t find out about this until later, because I was at a luncheon in New York with union leaders. Kev had stayed behind for a meeting with lawmakers from the Hill to work on defining our agenda for year three.
It heaps more guilt upon me that I wasn’t there for Kev. I should’ve been. I feel like all the energy is flowing to me and I’m not sending enough back to my men despite how they reassure me that’s not the case at all.
Year three starts out with me having to deploy troops to Kharmaria, which has been a persistent pain in America’s ass for decades, but which finally devolved into civil unrest when the authoritarian regime pushed their hand a little too far and massacred a group of one hundred and fifty women and girls protesting the closure of a school in their region.
Reaction was swift and brutal from the citizens, who rose up en masse around the country in an action that made the Arab Spring look like a college die-in from the Sixties.
The dictator was not just overthrown, but arrested and publicly decapitated, along with his army officers.
You don’t want to see the pictures, trust me.
I wish I hadn’t seen the pictures.
Needless to say, the new government requested troops and assistance to root out the stray remnants of the old pro-murdering-assholes regime, so they’re getting them. It’s not only us sending troops—it’s a multinational coalition from the UN, but of course we’re providing a goodly chunk of troops and equipment.
Yet something else for Congressman Markos to try to come after us over. On the one hand, he claims he loves the military. On the other, he’s voted at nearly every turn to try to defund them, or defund the VA, or reduce money earmarked for supporting vets.
The man never served in the military. So I’m not exactly sure where he gets off trying to tout some mythical pro-military voting record that doesn’t exist anywhere except in his own mind. Unfortunately, his die-hard base doesn’t care about the truth, even when he’s caught in bald-faced lies about his voting record. They’re single-issue voters that usually only care about trying to ban abortion.
Fortunately, he’s only one voice out of five hundred and thirty-five—counting both the Senate and the House.
Since I’ve pissed off people on extremes from both sides of the aisle, I assume that means I’m doing something right.
Based on the reactions at the annual White House Correspondents Dinners, they have to stretch to find things to roast me on, and they tend to focus heavily on my marriage to Chris and his non-traditional First Spouse role, his former profession, my top two staffers being former conservative media, my bipartisan relationships with GOP lawmakers, and my justified reputation as a pretty horrible cook, which is fine.
Better that than they come after me for my relationship with Kev.
Or my mother.
Yes, I’m running for re-election. My poll numbers are pretty decent and running on the high side of average, we still have a lot we want to accomplish, and Elliot is already taking on a larger role in preparation to position him for his own run after my second term. If I’m reelected, which we have no reason to think I won’t be.
My own personal nightmares don’t get any better or worse during this time. I have Chris and Kev to help shut off my brain, and that goes a long way.
I try not to think about what happened that night. It’s been over twenty years now, but I can still feel her hand on mine.
I can hear her voice on the clear days when she’d ask me when, how she’d beg me to do it, to remember my promise. Even past those days, when she became mostly nonverbal and I knew I needed to free her.
Because I’d promised.
I remember the way the bed rattled a little as her leg kicked, how I cried and whispered I loved her, my apologies for waiting so long, begging forgiveness from a god I don’t even believe in until she fell still.
If I had to go back and do it again, I wouldn’t. Not like that, for sure. I would have found a better way to do it sooner for her.
She also begged me while she still was mostly coherent to not listen to anything she said if it sounded…wrong.
But isn’t begging your child to kill you…wrong?
How is it not wrong?
Unfortunately, she’d asked me to do that while still clear-minded, and guilt ate at me as I watched her growing fear and her tears, with her knowing there was something wrong with her but not always able to understand or remember what and why.
Until I’d go visit her and my Momma would be in command of her mind for a few precious moments, with her wit mostly intact, and a loving scolding to me that she was still “there” in the first place.
Another load of guilt heaped on me that I’d pray when I visited her the next day she’d be gone a little again, just enough not to ask me ten or twelve times when it’d happen.
I suppose I’m lucky I didn’t end up in jail, but none of the staff mentioned it to me if she said that around them, and if anything was going to come out, it certainly would have during my Senate runs, or even my first presidential run.
I don’t know.
I have no answers, only a recommendation that you don’t saddle your child with that kind of burden, no matter what your feelings on the matter.
Kev probably spends three or four nights a week with us in the residence, or close to it. No one’s caught on, Lauren has been amazing at her job, and I consider myself damned lucky. I couldn’t have asked for a better chief of staff if I tried. In public, he’s all business, but when we’re behind closed doors my Sir steps forward and helps keep me calm and focused and makes my job a lot easier than it otherwise might me. Just five minutes curled up in his arms can lower my heart rate and clear my mind so I can think straight.
Could I have done this job without him? Yes, but the stress levels would have been a thousand times worse, I’m sure. Kev doesn’t “control” me, either. Not the President Samuels part of me. But I can’t leave my work at the office and go home.
I usually take PDBs seven days a week, although Saturdays and Sundays happen closer to noon than first thing in the morning.
What Kevin gives me allows me to balance those stresses in a healthy way without me giving myself an ulcer. And during the times my stress hits a point I’m unable to eat because my body refuses to keep it down—something I’ve been plagued with all my life—Sir is usually the one able to coax me into eating again sooner than my own body would normally give up and allow me food.
Chris the sadist helps balance Kev to keep him mentally and emotionally healthy, and adds an extra boost to me, too.
Can’t say it’s not working. There have been other administrations that have done a hell of a lot worse with their circumstances and the amount of time we’ve been in office.
Except I should’ve known it wouldn’t last.
As we enter January of year four of my first term, something happens to jolt all of us to our core and rattle my family to its very foundation.