Three days before Rachel passed—by that point, we’d returned to Raleigh so she could die at home—North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile off its coast, and I ordered an aircraft carrier into the Yellow Sea. The day we buried her, as I stood at her grave, holding hands with my daughter, our embassy in Venezuela was attacked by a suicide bomber, and I soon found myself in our kitchen with generals and our national security team considering options for a proportional response.
In the short term, it’s probably easier to deal with personal loss when the world around you constantly demands your attention. You’re too busy to be sad and lonely at first. Then the reality drops in—you’ve lost the love of your life, your daughter has lost her mother, and a wonderful woman was denied the chance to live a long, rich life. Now you’re grateful for the demands of your job. But there are moments of intense loneliness, even when you’re the president. I’d never felt it before. I’d had plenty of tough decisions to make in my first two years, plenty of times I could do nothing more than pray that I’d made the right call, times when it didn’t matter how many aides I had because the buck stopped with me and me alone. But I never felt alone. I always had Rachel there with me, giving me her honest opinion about how I was making the decisions, telling me to do the best I could, then wrapping her arms around my neck when it was over.
I still miss Rachel all the time, in every way a man can miss his wife. Tonight I miss her uncanny sense of when to dress me down and when to back me up, make me believe that no matter what, everything will turn out all right.
There will never be another Rachel. I know that. But I do wish I weren’t alone all the time. Rachel demanded that we talk about what would happen after she died. She used to joke that I’d be the most eligible bachelor on the planet. Maybe. Right now I feel like a clueless nerd about to let everybody down.
“Drink?” Mandy asks over her shoulder.
“No time,” I say. “I don’t have very long.”
“Honestly, I don’t even understand why you want to do this,” she says. “But I’m ready. Let’s get to it.”
I follow her into the apartment.
Chapter
18
This feels weird,” I say.
“You’re doing fine,” Mandy whispers. “Nobody’s ever done this to you?”
“No, and I hope nobody ever does again.”
“It will be more enjoyable for both of us,” she says, “if you’d stop complaining. For God’s sake, Jon, you were tortured in a Baghdad prison and you can’t handle this?”
“You do this every day?”
“Most days. Now hold…still. It’s easier that way.”
Easier for her, maybe. I try to stay as still as possible, seated in a pink chair in the dressing room inside Mandy’s bedroom suite as she uses a makeup pencil on my eyebrows. To my right, Mandy’s vanity is covered with makeup supplies, bottles and brushes and powders and creams and clays of all different sizes and colors. It looks like something on the set of a B movie about vampires or zombies.
“Don’t make me look like Groucho Marx,” I say.
“No, no,” she says. “But speaking of…” She reaches down and pulls something out of a bag and shows it to me—Groucho Marx glasses, the bushy eyebrows and mustache.
I take them from her. “Rachel’s,” I say.
When Rachel started getting really sick, it bothered her how sorry for her everyone felt. So when friends would come to visit, she had a little routine to lighten things up. I’d warn people that “Rachel isn’t really herself today.” And when they’d walk into the room, they’d see Rachel in bed, wearing the Groucho glasses. Sometimes it was a clown nose. She had a mask of Richard Nixon, too, which really got a laugh.
That was Rachel, right there. Always worrying about everyone but herself.
“Anyway,” says Mandy, before things get too misty, “don’t worry about your eyebrows. I’m just thickening them a little. You’d be amazed how they can change one’s appearance. Eyes and eyebrows.”
She scoots back in her chair and looks at me. “Honestly, kiddo, that beard you showed up with was half the battle right there. And it’s so red! It almost doesn’t look real. You want me to color your hair to match?”
“Definitely not.”
She shakes her head, still studying my face like it’s a lab specimen. “Your hair isn’t long enough to do much with,” she mumbles, talking to herself more than to me. “Changing the part from the right to the left wouldn’t help. We could forget the part and comb it all forward.” She puts her hands in my hair, gripping it, finger-combing it, mussing it. “At least you’d have a hairstyle that matches this decade.”
“How about I wear a baseball cap?” I say.
“Oh.” She draws back. “Sure, that would be easier. Does that work? Did you bring one?”
“Yeah.” I reach down into my bag and pull out a Nationals baseball cap, put it on.
“Reliving your glory days, eh? Okay, well, between the beard and the red baseball cap, the eyebrows, and…hmm.” Her head bobs back and forth. “The key is in the eyes,” she says, gesturing to her own face. She lets out a sigh. “Your eyes haven’t looked the same, honey.”
“What do you mean?”
“Since Rachel,” she says. “Your eyes haven’t looked the same since she died.” She snaps out of it. “Sorry. Let’s get you in some eyeglasses. You don’t wear glasses, do you?”
“Reading glasses when I’m tired,” I say.
“Hang on.” She goes into her closet and comes out with a rectangular velvet box. She pops it open and reveals about fifty pairs of eyeglasses, each perched in a small divot.
“Jeez, Mandy.”
“I borrowed these from Jamie,” she says. “When we did the sequel to London last year. It’s coming out this Christmas.”
“Heard about that. Congrats.”
“Yeah, well, I told Steven that was the last one I’m doing. Rodney couldn’t keep his paws off me the whole time. But I handled it.”
She hands me a pair of eyeglasses with thick brown frames. I put them on.
“Hmph,” she says. “No. Try these.”
I try another pair.
“No, these.”
“I’m not trying to win a fashion award,” I say.
She gives me a deadpan look. “You’re in absolutely no danger of that, my sweet, believe me. Here.” She removes another pair. “These. These, yes.”
She hands me a pair with thick frames again, but this time the color is more of a reddish-brown. I put them on, and she lights up.
“It blends in with your beard,” she says.
I make a face.
“No, I mean it throws off your color completely, Jon. You’re fair. Dirty blond and fair-complected. The glasses and beard highlight a deep brown-red.”
I stand up and go to the mirror over her vanity.
“You’ve lost weight,” she says. “You were never overweight a day in your life, but you’re looking skinny.”
“I’m not hearing a compliment in there.”
I check myself out in the mirror. I’m still myself, but I see her point about the change in my coloring. The cap, the glasses, and the beard. And I never realized how much slightly thicker eyebrows could change the look of a person. All that and no Secret Service entourage. Nobody will recognize me.
“Y’know, Jon, it’s okay to move on with your life. You’re only fifty. She wanted you to. In fact, she made me prom—”
She stops on that, some color coming to her face, a sheen over her eyes.
“You and Rachel talked about that?”
She nods, placing a hand on her chest, taking a moment to let the emotion dissipate. “She said to me, and I quote, ‘Don’t let Jon spend the rest of his life alone out of some misplaced sense of loyalty.’”
I take a sharp breath. Those words—some misplaced sense of loyalty—were exactly what she said to me more than once. They bring Rachel right back into this room, as if her breath is on my face, her head angled as it always was when she had something important to say. Her vanilla scent, the dimple in her right cheek, the smile lines by her eyes— Her hand clutching mine, that last day, her voice groggy from the pain meds, so weak, but strong enough to squeeze my hand tight one last time.
Promise me you’ll meet someone else, Jonathan. Promise me.