The President Is Missing(30)

When I reach the top and the doors open, I step out carefully into a well-appointed hallway, the walls painted a light yellow, Monet prints guiding me toward the only door on the top floor, the penthouse.

When I reach the door, it opens without my doing anything.

“Charles Kane, at your service,” I say.

Amanda Braidwood stands inside the penthouse, her arm fully extended as she holds the door open and appraises me. A thin sweater hangs loose over a fitted shirt. She’s wearing black stretch pants and nothing on her feet. Her hair is long these days, courtesy of the movie she wrapped a month ago, but tonight it’s pulled back into a ponytail, with a few strands hanging down to frame the contours of her face.

“Well, hello there, ‘Mr. Kane,’” she says. “Sorry about the subterfuge, but the doorman at the front entrance is a little busybodyish.”

Last year, an entertainment magazine named Mandy one of the twenty most beautiful women on the planet. Another dubbed her one of the top twenty highest-paid actors in Hollywood, less than a year after she took home her second Oscar.

She and Rachel lived together all four years at Harvard and stayed in touch over the years—as closely as a North Carolina lawyer and an international movie star can manage. The code name Charles Kane was Mandy’s idea: about eight years ago, over a bottle of wine in the backyard of the governor’s mansion, Rachel, Mandy, and I agreed that Orson Welles’s masterpiece was the finest movie ever made.

She shakes her head as a smile slowly blooms on her face.

“My, my,” she says. “Whiskers, scruff,” she adds as she kisses my cheek. “How rugged. Well, don’t just stand there looking all outdoorsy—come in.”

Her scent, the smell of a woman, lingers with me. Rachel wasn’t much for perfume, but her bath gel and body lotion—whatever you call all those creams and lotions and soaps—were both vanilla. I will never smell that scent again, as long as I live, without seeing the image of Rachel’s bare shoulder and imagining the softness of her neck.

They say there’s no manual for overcoming the death of a spouse. That’s truer still when the survivor is the president and all hell is breaking loose, because you have no time to grieve. There are too many decisions to make that won’t wait, constant security threats that, with even a momentary lapse in your attention, can have catastrophic consequences. As Rachel hit the end stages of her illness, we watched North Korea and Russia and China more closely than ever, knowing that the leaders of those countries were looking for any hint of vulnerability or inattention from the White House. I considered temporarily stepping down as president—I even had Danny draw up the papers—but Rachel would have none of it. She was determined that her illness would not cause any interruption in my presidency. It mattered to her, in an intense way that she never fully explained and I never fully understood.

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?”