Prologue: White Sands
Vera loved to drive.
Especially the empty big-sky country south of the city. Especially the stark and ethereal Tularosa Basin, where the sun rose over the rippled white gypsum dunes as they recarved themselves in the morning breeze.
If only she could absorb the peace of this gentle desert into the twisted knot of her soul.
She should have listened to her mother, who said law school would be the end of her.
She should have listened to her husband, who said, years after she passed the bar, “Get out while you still can.” When she said it was too late, he countered, “All the more reason.”
He never gave her an ultimatum. He knew the more he exhorted, the more she resisted. He was a seatbelt, bike-helmet, sunscreen man. Not that he pretended otherwise.
Wasn’t it time to tell him the whole truth? He already suspected the worst.
The drive to Alamogordo took three hours, even leaving before daylight, but they paid her full freight and then some, so she made a day of it. When they needed her to meet a new associate from Mexico, she didn’t blink. Lately, they preferred meeting in out-of-the-way places. It was a concern.
As she approached town, she passed the Pistachio Tree Ranch, where two workers on a crane painted a huge oblong blob of concrete that was billed to be “the world’s largest pistachio nut.”
She’d read about it. The local farmer, who also ran a winery, had written a science fiction novel about an alien adopted by New Mexican pistachio farmers. She’d pick up some wine on the way home. A peace offering.
She parked in the small lot behind the stone-gray two-story federal building, the largest structure in town until the pistachio came along. She checked her make-up, then her BlackBerry.
The law office was next door to the federal building, they told her. Take the passageway between them, then turn left.
She never got that far.
Boots clicked on the tiles, then arms grabbed her from behind. Before she could catch her breath, her assailants strapped duct tape around her mouth, and bound her wrists. They rolled her into a tarp and dumped her in the trunk of a car. There were two of them.
As the door slammed shut, plunging her in darkness, she heard one say, “Vamanos.” In the pinprick of light, she saw the trunk was empty except for her and the tarp. And the dank smell of a wet dog.
She tried to scream, but she could hardly breathe.
The car eased out of the parking lot and lurched onto the road, bouncing her shoulder into the trunk door. She kicked her legs, wriggled on her stomach, but only trapped herself tighter, the cold tarp smothering her face.
Especially the empty big-sky country south of the city. Especially the stark and ethereal Tularosa Basin, where the sun rose over the rippled white gypsum dunes as they recarved themselves in the morning breeze.
If only she could absorb the peace of this gentle desert into the twisted knot of her soul.
She should have listened to her mother, who said law school would be the end of her.
She should have listened to her husband, who said, years after she passed the bar, “Get out while you still can.” When she said it was too late, he countered, “All the more reason.”
He never gave her an ultimatum. He knew the more he exhorted, the more she resisted. He was a seatbelt, bike-helmet, sunscreen man. Not that he pretended otherwise.
Wasn’t it time to tell him the whole truth? He already suspected the worst.
The drive to Alamogordo took three hours, even leaving before daylight, but they paid her full freight and then some, so she made a day of it. When they needed her to meet a new associate from Mexico, she didn’t blink. Lately, they preferred meeting in out-of-the-way places. It was a concern.
As she approached town, she passed the Pistachio Tree Ranch, where two workers on a crane painted a huge oblong blob of concrete that was billed to be “the world’s largest pistachio nut.”
She’d read about it. The local farmer, who also ran a winery, had written a science fiction novel about an alien adopted by New Mexican pistachio farmers. She’d pick up some wine on the way home. A peace offering.
She parked in the small lot behind the stone-gray two-story federal building, the largest structure in town until the pistachio came along. She checked her make-up, then her BlackBerry.
The law office was next door to the federal building, they told her. Take the passageway between them, then turn left.
She never got that far.
Boots clicked on the tiles, then arms grabbed her from behind. Before she could catch her breath, her assailants strapped duct tape around her mouth, and bound her wrists. They rolled her into a tarp and dumped her in the trunk of a car. There were two of them.
As the door slammed shut, plunging her in darkness, she heard one say, “Vamanos.” In the pinprick of light, she saw the trunk was empty except for her and the tarp. And the dank smell of a wet dog.
She tried to scream, but she could hardly breathe.
The car eased out of the parking lot and lurched onto the road, bouncing her shoulder into the trunk door. She kicked her legs, wriggled on her stomach, but only trapped herself tighter, the cold tarp smothering her face.
1: No is a Complete Sentence
JUNE 23 (MONDAY)—135 DAYS UNTIL ELECTION
Tomas met Tory when he jabbed his elbow into her arm during an early morning walk in Santa Fe. Because of the squirrels.
The day was warm. Quiet enough that he heard the gurgling creek half a block away, and a bicyclist whistling as he glided by. The Russian olive trees were blooming, and he slowed his step to breathe in their angelic sweetness. Birds chattered. Thank God for life’s small pleasures. They were the only ones he had left.
He wore his navy blue suit, with a light blue tie and crisp white shirt. He carried the battered leather briefcase Vera had given him when he started his stint on the city council.
After driving up for a McCain fundraiser the previous evening, he had a morning meeting with the national campaign staff. He had long dreamed of playing on the national stage—now, as state chair for the McCain campaign, he was responsible for delivering New Mexico’s five electoral votes. He’d planned to work out at the hotel, but a quick peek at the closet-sized fitness center, and he opted instead for a brisk dawn walk. It would be hot later.
Ancient Navajo women were laying out jewelry on colorful blankets under the rough pine portico of the Palace of the Governors. Storekeepers swept sidewalks. A bakery truck jolted to a halt outside a row of restaurants and a stout man hopped out. His arms cradled a stack of baguettes.
Tomas turned into a narrow walkway behind the Loretta Chapel and stopped, startled, as two squirrels leapt across the path just inches from his nose. The first landed cleanly on a sturdy pinyon branch, the second fell short, clawing at a thin bough that bent under its weight. The squirrel lost its grip, dropped to the bricks and froze, before skittering through a small fissure at the bottom of the vine-covered wall.
Tomas lifted his arm to look at his watch as he resumed his walk, and before he looked up, he elbowed a woman walking toward him.
He jumped back.
She stood still, her mouth open wide, then relaxed and laughed.
Her eyes locked on his. Big, brown, soulful eyes. Like Vera’s.
“I’m sorry. I—there were some squirrels squabbling,” he stammered.
“No, I wasn’t paying attention.” She pulled out her little white earbuds, one at a time, and gave him such a friendly look he turned around to see if someone was behind him. Her face was bronzed from the sun and framed by lush black hair and silver earrings in the shape of crescent moons. She wore a striking gold vest over a black shirt, and bracelets on both wrists. Her teeth were straight and bright.
“Hi, I’m Tomas.” He extended his hand and she gave it a light squeeze. “Your smile is dazzling,” he said. She tilted her head and gazed at him so intently that it startled him. As if she could see inside him.
“I know this sounds corny,” she said, “but I’m so happy to be feeling happy. I’m Victoria. Tory.”
“Well, you look happy. Radiant. Beautiful.” He bit his lip, shook his head. He rarely flirted with anyone, except Rosario, his grandmotherly secretary. He had a well-practiced routine when meeting strangers, but she knocked him off autopilot. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You must get tired of that.”
She narrowed her eyes, as though she were confused, then leaned into a full-throated laugh. A young mother holding hands with a skipping little girl came out of the walkway and he stepped aside to let them pass. He was a step closer to Tory now, and saw the lines on her neck, a hint of crow’s feet around her eyes. Older than he thought. Older than he was.
“Why would you possibly think that?” she asked.
The bell in the church tower rang three times. A quarter to.
“You have to be somewhere?” she asked.
“A meeting by the Roundhouse.” He pointed behind her. “The capitol.”
“I haven’t seen the Roundhouse.” She was so stunning, he couldn’t get his mouth working, and couldn’t hold her eyes. It wasn’t like he had never talked with an attractive woman before, but he found himself suddenly shy, flustered.
He looked down. “Would you like to walk with me?”
She didn’t answer right away, but flashed her brilliant smile again. He held his breath.
“I would.”
She stepped back and swept her arm. “Lead the way.” She fell in next to him as he crossed the street. His heart leapt.
“You’re visiting.”
“Yes, though I seem to be living here for the moment.”
They entered the green ribbon park that bisected downtown, where a wooden pedestrian bridge straddled the narrow Santa Fe River. You could almost jump across it, though not in a suit and slippery-soled shoes. He told her that travelers on the Santa Fe Trail, some from as far away as Mexico City, used to camp here along the river.
She told him she had recently finished a month-long retreat in the desert outside Taos, and had spent the past week in an apartment in Santa Fe.
All too quickly, they arrived at the Roundhouse. He explained to her that it was the only round state capitol in the country, in the shape of the Zia symbol, rays of the sun shooting out in four directions. The four seasons, the four phases of life.
He stopped in front of a low-slung adobe law office, where his meeting was, across the street from the capitol. A couple men in suits waved as they passed. “Good morning, Mayor Zamara.”
“Mayor?” she said, with a tease.
“Guilty as charged. Albuquerque, down the road apiece.” He checked his watch again.
“You’re wearing a wedding ring,” she said.
He flattened his hand, spread his fingers, nodded, sighed. “Yes.” It had been some time since anyone had mentioned that.
“Five years ago, my wife Veronica left for a client meeting and never came back. Everyone tells me she never will, that I should move on. End of story.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, as if she meant it, “but it’s not the end of the story, not if you don’t want it to be. Only the end of a chapter.”
He hesitated, looked down at his shoes. “I need to go, but—” The words wouldn’t come.
She folded her arms across her chest. He looked up. That catching smile again.
He swallowed. Vera was never coming back. “Are you free for coffee in, say, two hours?”
“I could be.”
--
A few minutes later, in the foyer of the law office, his phone jangled.
“Tommy, que pasa?” His older brother. “Just checking in about the land swap. We’re running out of time.”
“Rob, I’m heading into a meeting.”
“Of course,” he said. “There’s always something more important than family.”
That same refrain. He was so tired of it. Rob and Sam, their father, were pushing him, again, to use his influence on their behalf, to get the city to purchase and annex some riverfront land out past South Valley, ostensibly to benefit the balloon owners who were looking for a landing area not yet gobbled up by suburban sprawl. Oh, and it so happened the adjacent parcel Sam and Rob owned would jump in value.
“Hold on.” Tomas checked with the receptionist. They weren’t ready for him yet. He went back to Rob, who repeated his question as if Tomas hadn’t already answered it dozens of times.
“Rob, what part of no, never, don’t you understand?”
“Tommy, what part of not screwing your family do you not understand? This is why Dad gets so pissed with you. You put yourself first, always, no matter how much the family suffers.”
That Rob believed this was what pained him most, the idea that by being an honest public servant instead of a corrupt hack, he was putting himself first and screwing his family.
“No.”
“All the credit’s drying up. You say you want to repair things with Dad. Backing out of your agreement is not going to help.”
Tomas shuffled through the stack of magazines on the side table. The Economist, New Mexico Today, American Hunter. He didn’t know why he even bothered having this conversation, but he truly did want to repair things if he could.
“There was no agreement. As long as he distorts what I say and do, nothing’s going to change. I have been clear from early on I wouldn’t be part of it.”
“You helped on the Baja deal,” Rob said.
They would never let him forget that. Less than a year into his first term as mayor. Fortunately, it had a short shelf life and most everyone else had forgotten about it.
“You’re breaking a promise.” Rob was not imaginative, but he was persistent.
“No.”
“What do you mean, no? You can’t just say no.”
“I can.” One of the most pertinent lessons Tomas ever learned was that no is a complete sentence. If you qualify—no, I’m not into gambling—you leave an opening. Well, come and watch the horses. No, it’s against the law. Come on, you’re the mayor, you don’t have to break the law, you can write a new one.
No is a complete sentence.
“Christ, Tommy, we’re out on a limb. You’re sawing the damn branch off.”
“You climbed out on that branch knowing the risks.”
“You like to say that, don’t you? Here’s something else you said, and I quote, ‘We can work something out.’”
Maybe at some point he had said something less definite than no. They wore him down. He never said yes—he was certain about that—but it was possible he said maybe.
No matter. A vague half-promise exacted under pressure was not worth honoring, especially when it was illegal.
He heard the door open behind him. There was fellow mayor, Vernon Donner, and a couple of men he hadn’t met before. He held up his finger to acknowledge them, turned back to the window.
“I’ve got to go now.” He paused, took a breath. “How’s Mama? Are you still there?”
For a second Tomas thought Rob had hung up, then he heard him cough. When he spoke, his voice was softer. Somewhere inside that bluster he was still Tomas’ older brother. “Mama heard you were out walking with some good-looking brunette.”
“How could she know that? That was, like, ten minutes ago.”
“Juicy news travels fast.”
--
When Tomas first met him, Vernon Donner had just been elected mayor of Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, back when it was nothing, and over the years, to hear him tell it, he sat back and watched it became one of the fastest growing cities in the country. Now he was the regional director of the McCain campaign.
Tomas sat next to Donner and across from two consultants from Cavanaugh and Associates, who were walking through various “contingency plans.” When Robert Cavanaugh, the older of the two consultants, launched into ways to cut down the Democratic vote, Tomas interrupted. “What are you saying? You really propose we focus on preventing people from voting, even from registering?”
“Calm down, Mayor Zamara. We would never suggest that. We’re only saying this is likely to be an extremely close race and we need to put in place all the contingencies we need to win. The liberals will stop at nothing—bring in illegal aliens and register them under false names, threaten them with deportation if they don’t vote a certain way. We know their playbook, so we have to play hardball.”
Cavanaugh’s partner, Jim Neil, built like a linebacker, nodded gravely. They both wore gray suits, striped Windsor ties—no bolos for this crowd—and heavy, glittery watches.
Tomas spoke carefully, with some hesitation in his voice, trying to express his skepticism without provoking an argument. “With all due respect, wouldn’t it be more practical to focus on getting out those voters who support us? The voters know John McCain. He’s from next door. He’s a war hero. A straight shooter. A maverick. Tailor made for New Mexico.”
“Pardon my reality check, sir,” said Neil, “but high mindedness is foolish when the Democrats are manufacturing fictional voters.”
He recounted the story Tomas had heard several times now, about how Acorn, a radical group claiming to advocate for poor people, had turned in registration forms in El Paso for the entire Dallas Cowboys offensive unit. “All we’re asking you to do,” said Neil, “is open some doors, raise some money, give a few pep talks. We need a team player.”
“I’m not sure I feel comfortable with this approach.”
Donner leaned back in his black leather chair and spoke as if Tomas weren’t in the room. “I’m sorry. I misrepresented Mayor Zamara. I thought he was sharp, ambitious, and committed. A local luminary with a future in state politics, maybe Congress. If he doesn’t want to play ball, we have to—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” interrupted Tomas, turning to Cavanaugh and Neil. “You guys sent me a GOTV scenario that sounded good. All I’m saying is I’d rather concentrate on that end of things. It’s what I know best.”
Cavanaugh pursed his lips. “You make out like it’s either/or. We work both ends. It’s a zero sum game—we get more votes than they do, any which way.”
Tomas looked down at his hands, folded tightly on the maple table, and squeezed them tighter. These outsiders didn’t know New Mexico like he did.
“You do intend to win, don’t you?” said Cavanaugh.
“Of course. Yes, of course.”
“Then we’re fine. We’re not going to have any problems.”
Later, as Cavanaugh and Neil slipped their papers into their briefcases, Tomas pulled Donner aside. “All this being on the team. I don’t mean to be dense, but exactly what does that mean?”
Donner shook his head. “Oh, you don’t need me to spell it out. It’s pretty obvious.”
“No, I do want you to spell it out. I want to understand my responsibilities clearly.”
“Look, I’ve run lots of campaigns. It’s simple. You do whatever it takes—short of murder.”
Tomas was about to leave when Cavanaugh took him smoothly by the arm. “There’s someone else we’d like you to meet.”
He steered Tomas into another room in the suite, where a tall white-haired man with gunmetal gray eyes rose from a chair and extended his hand.
Tomas immediately recognized him—his body reacted before his brain. His shoulders tightened. Not good. This is not good.
His name came to him just before Cavanaugh introduced him. Williamson. From that time seven years earlier, that Rob had alluded to during their phone call. The Baja real estate deal Vera helped engineer, his first, albeit brief, political scandal. Williamson had ridden into town from Phoenix to make it go away.
Tomas gave a friendly handshake and smiled. “Good to see you again.”
He looked directly at Williamson, who held Tomas’ eyes with an expressionless face. Not a flicker of recognition.
“Happy to have you aboard, Mayor Zamara,” Williamson said. Not a word about why he was there or what his role was. But Tomas knew. He felt a shiver run up his back.
When Williamson had buried the scandal, Tomas had been grateful. But everything in politics had a price.
Tomas met Tory when he jabbed his elbow into her arm during an early morning walk in Santa Fe. Because of the squirrels.
The day was warm. Quiet enough that he heard the gurgling creek half a block away, and a bicyclist whistling as he glided by. The Russian olive trees were blooming, and he slowed his step to breathe in their angelic sweetness. Birds chattered. Thank God for life’s small pleasures. They were the only ones he had left.
He wore his navy blue suit, with a light blue tie and crisp white shirt. He carried the battered leather briefcase Vera had given him when he started his stint on the city council.
After driving up for a McCain fundraiser the previous evening, he had a morning meeting with the national campaign staff. He had long dreamed of playing on the national stage—now, as state chair for the McCain campaign, he was responsible for delivering New Mexico’s five electoral votes. He’d planned to work out at the hotel, but a quick peek at the closet-sized fitness center, and he opted instead for a brisk dawn walk. It would be hot later.
Ancient Navajo women were laying out jewelry on colorful blankets under the rough pine portico of the Palace of the Governors. Storekeepers swept sidewalks. A bakery truck jolted to a halt outside a row of restaurants and a stout man hopped out. His arms cradled a stack of baguettes.
Tomas turned into a narrow walkway behind the Loretta Chapel and stopped, startled, as two squirrels leapt across the path just inches from his nose. The first landed cleanly on a sturdy pinyon branch, the second fell short, clawing at a thin bough that bent under its weight. The squirrel lost its grip, dropped to the bricks and froze, before skittering through a small fissure at the bottom of the vine-covered wall.
Tomas lifted his arm to look at his watch as he resumed his walk, and before he looked up, he elbowed a woman walking toward him.
He jumped back.
She stood still, her mouth open wide, then relaxed and laughed.
Her eyes locked on his. Big, brown, soulful eyes. Like Vera’s.
“I’m sorry. I—there were some squirrels squabbling,” he stammered.
“No, I wasn’t paying attention.” She pulled out her little white earbuds, one at a time, and gave him such a friendly look he turned around to see if someone was behind him. Her face was bronzed from the sun and framed by lush black hair and silver earrings in the shape of crescent moons. She wore a striking gold vest over a black shirt, and bracelets on both wrists. Her teeth were straight and bright.
“Hi, I’m Tomas.” He extended his hand and she gave it a light squeeze. “Your smile is dazzling,” he said. She tilted her head and gazed at him so intently that it startled him. As if she could see inside him.
“I know this sounds corny,” she said, “but I’m so happy to be feeling happy. I’m Victoria. Tory.”
“Well, you look happy. Radiant. Beautiful.” He bit his lip, shook his head. He rarely flirted with anyone, except Rosario, his grandmotherly secretary. He had a well-practiced routine when meeting strangers, but she knocked him off autopilot. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You must get tired of that.”
She narrowed her eyes, as though she were confused, then leaned into a full-throated laugh. A young mother holding hands with a skipping little girl came out of the walkway and he stepped aside to let them pass. He was a step closer to Tory now, and saw the lines on her neck, a hint of crow’s feet around her eyes. Older than he thought. Older than he was.
“Why would you possibly think that?” she asked.
The bell in the church tower rang three times. A quarter to.
“You have to be somewhere?” she asked.
“A meeting by the Roundhouse.” He pointed behind her. “The capitol.”
“I haven’t seen the Roundhouse.” She was so stunning, he couldn’t get his mouth working, and couldn’t hold her eyes. It wasn’t like he had never talked with an attractive woman before, but he found himself suddenly shy, flustered.
He looked down. “Would you like to walk with me?”
She didn’t answer right away, but flashed her brilliant smile again. He held his breath.
“I would.”
She stepped back and swept her arm. “Lead the way.” She fell in next to him as he crossed the street. His heart leapt.
“You’re visiting.”
“Yes, though I seem to be living here for the moment.”
They entered the green ribbon park that bisected downtown, where a wooden pedestrian bridge straddled the narrow Santa Fe River. You could almost jump across it, though not in a suit and slippery-soled shoes. He told her that travelers on the Santa Fe Trail, some from as far away as Mexico City, used to camp here along the river.
She told him she had recently finished a month-long retreat in the desert outside Taos, and had spent the past week in an apartment in Santa Fe.
All too quickly, they arrived at the Roundhouse. He explained to her that it was the only round state capitol in the country, in the shape of the Zia symbol, rays of the sun shooting out in four directions. The four seasons, the four phases of life.
He stopped in front of a low-slung adobe law office, where his meeting was, across the street from the capitol. A couple men in suits waved as they passed. “Good morning, Mayor Zamara.”
“Mayor?” she said, with a tease.
“Guilty as charged. Albuquerque, down the road apiece.” He checked his watch again.
“You’re wearing a wedding ring,” she said.
He flattened his hand, spread his fingers, nodded, sighed. “Yes.” It had been some time since anyone had mentioned that.
“Five years ago, my wife Veronica left for a client meeting and never came back. Everyone tells me she never will, that I should move on. End of story.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, as if she meant it, “but it’s not the end of the story, not if you don’t want it to be. Only the end of a chapter.”
He hesitated, looked down at his shoes. “I need to go, but—” The words wouldn’t come.
She folded her arms across her chest. He looked up. That catching smile again.
He swallowed. Vera was never coming back. “Are you free for coffee in, say, two hours?”
“I could be.”
--
A few minutes later, in the foyer of the law office, his phone jangled.
“Tommy, que pasa?” His older brother. “Just checking in about the land swap. We’re running out of time.”
“Rob, I’m heading into a meeting.”
“Of course,” he said. “There’s always something more important than family.”
That same refrain. He was so tired of it. Rob and Sam, their father, were pushing him, again, to use his influence on their behalf, to get the city to purchase and annex some riverfront land out past South Valley, ostensibly to benefit the balloon owners who were looking for a landing area not yet gobbled up by suburban sprawl. Oh, and it so happened the adjacent parcel Sam and Rob owned would jump in value.
“Hold on.” Tomas checked with the receptionist. They weren’t ready for him yet. He went back to Rob, who repeated his question as if Tomas hadn’t already answered it dozens of times.
“Rob, what part of no, never, don’t you understand?”
“Tommy, what part of not screwing your family do you not understand? This is why Dad gets so pissed with you. You put yourself first, always, no matter how much the family suffers.”
That Rob believed this was what pained him most, the idea that by being an honest public servant instead of a corrupt hack, he was putting himself first and screwing his family.
“No.”
“All the credit’s drying up. You say you want to repair things with Dad. Backing out of your agreement is not going to help.”
Tomas shuffled through the stack of magazines on the side table. The Economist, New Mexico Today, American Hunter. He didn’t know why he even bothered having this conversation, but he truly did want to repair things if he could.
“There was no agreement. As long as he distorts what I say and do, nothing’s going to change. I have been clear from early on I wouldn’t be part of it.”
“You helped on the Baja deal,” Rob said.
They would never let him forget that. Less than a year into his first term as mayor. Fortunately, it had a short shelf life and most everyone else had forgotten about it.
“You’re breaking a promise.” Rob was not imaginative, but he was persistent.
“No.”
“What do you mean, no? You can’t just say no.”
“I can.” One of the most pertinent lessons Tomas ever learned was that no is a complete sentence. If you qualify—no, I’m not into gambling—you leave an opening. Well, come and watch the horses. No, it’s against the law. Come on, you’re the mayor, you don’t have to break the law, you can write a new one.
No is a complete sentence.
“Christ, Tommy, we’re out on a limb. You’re sawing the damn branch off.”
“You climbed out on that branch knowing the risks.”
“You like to say that, don’t you? Here’s something else you said, and I quote, ‘We can work something out.’”
Maybe at some point he had said something less definite than no. They wore him down. He never said yes—he was certain about that—but it was possible he said maybe.
No matter. A vague half-promise exacted under pressure was not worth honoring, especially when it was illegal.
He heard the door open behind him. There was fellow mayor, Vernon Donner, and a couple of men he hadn’t met before. He held up his finger to acknowledge them, turned back to the window.
“I’ve got to go now.” He paused, took a breath. “How’s Mama? Are you still there?”
For a second Tomas thought Rob had hung up, then he heard him cough. When he spoke, his voice was softer. Somewhere inside that bluster he was still Tomas’ older brother. “Mama heard you were out walking with some good-looking brunette.”
“How could she know that? That was, like, ten minutes ago.”
“Juicy news travels fast.”
--
When Tomas first met him, Vernon Donner had just been elected mayor of Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, back when it was nothing, and over the years, to hear him tell it, he sat back and watched it became one of the fastest growing cities in the country. Now he was the regional director of the McCain campaign.
Tomas sat next to Donner and across from two consultants from Cavanaugh and Associates, who were walking through various “contingency plans.” When Robert Cavanaugh, the older of the two consultants, launched into ways to cut down the Democratic vote, Tomas interrupted. “What are you saying? You really propose we focus on preventing people from voting, even from registering?”
“Calm down, Mayor Zamara. We would never suggest that. We’re only saying this is likely to be an extremely close race and we need to put in place all the contingencies we need to win. The liberals will stop at nothing—bring in illegal aliens and register them under false names, threaten them with deportation if they don’t vote a certain way. We know their playbook, so we have to play hardball.”
Cavanaugh’s partner, Jim Neil, built like a linebacker, nodded gravely. They both wore gray suits, striped Windsor ties—no bolos for this crowd—and heavy, glittery watches.
Tomas spoke carefully, with some hesitation in his voice, trying to express his skepticism without provoking an argument. “With all due respect, wouldn’t it be more practical to focus on getting out those voters who support us? The voters know John McCain. He’s from next door. He’s a war hero. A straight shooter. A maverick. Tailor made for New Mexico.”
“Pardon my reality check, sir,” said Neil, “but high mindedness is foolish when the Democrats are manufacturing fictional voters.”
He recounted the story Tomas had heard several times now, about how Acorn, a radical group claiming to advocate for poor people, had turned in registration forms in El Paso for the entire Dallas Cowboys offensive unit. “All we’re asking you to do,” said Neil, “is open some doors, raise some money, give a few pep talks. We need a team player.”
“I’m not sure I feel comfortable with this approach.”
Donner leaned back in his black leather chair and spoke as if Tomas weren’t in the room. “I’m sorry. I misrepresented Mayor Zamara. I thought he was sharp, ambitious, and committed. A local luminary with a future in state politics, maybe Congress. If he doesn’t want to play ball, we have to—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” interrupted Tomas, turning to Cavanaugh and Neil. “You guys sent me a GOTV scenario that sounded good. All I’m saying is I’d rather concentrate on that end of things. It’s what I know best.”
Cavanaugh pursed his lips. “You make out like it’s either/or. We work both ends. It’s a zero sum game—we get more votes than they do, any which way.”
Tomas looked down at his hands, folded tightly on the maple table, and squeezed them tighter. These outsiders didn’t know New Mexico like he did.
“You do intend to win, don’t you?” said Cavanaugh.
“Of course. Yes, of course.”
“Then we’re fine. We’re not going to have any problems.”
Later, as Cavanaugh and Neil slipped their papers into their briefcases, Tomas pulled Donner aside. “All this being on the team. I don’t mean to be dense, but exactly what does that mean?”
Donner shook his head. “Oh, you don’t need me to spell it out. It’s pretty obvious.”
“No, I do want you to spell it out. I want to understand my responsibilities clearly.”
“Look, I’ve run lots of campaigns. It’s simple. You do whatever it takes—short of murder.”
Tomas was about to leave when Cavanaugh took him smoothly by the arm. “There’s someone else we’d like you to meet.”
He steered Tomas into another room in the suite, where a tall white-haired man with gunmetal gray eyes rose from a chair and extended his hand.
Tomas immediately recognized him—his body reacted before his brain. His shoulders tightened. Not good. This is not good.
His name came to him just before Cavanaugh introduced him. Williamson. From that time seven years earlier, that Rob had alluded to during their phone call. The Baja real estate deal Vera helped engineer, his first, albeit brief, political scandal. Williamson had ridden into town from Phoenix to make it go away.
Tomas gave a friendly handshake and smiled. “Good to see you again.”
He looked directly at Williamson, who held Tomas’ eyes with an expressionless face. Not a flicker of recognition.
“Happy to have you aboard, Mayor Zamara,” Williamson said. Not a word about why he was there or what his role was. But Tomas knew. He felt a shiver run up his back.
When Williamson had buried the scandal, Tomas had been grateful. But everything in politics had a price.
2: The Year of Barack Obama
JUNE 23 (MONDAY)—135 DAYS UNTIL ELECTION
One block from the Columbia Heights Metro Station in Washington, D.C., twenty-five year old Sierra León rolled groggily out of bed, stretching her arms and yawning. At that moment, with her matted hair and worried eyes, she did not look like someone about to play a decisive role in determining the next president of the United States. Of course, she would be the first to say that every vote counted and so anyone who showed up at a polling place held that power. But this was bigger than that.
She knew how big it was. Which is why she slept so fitfully. Which is why she threw up twice before dawn. Which is why she couldn’t eat anything more than a banana.
She could function tired, sometimes even better, but the waking up was brutal. All her discipline went out the window when she was sawing away in the morning. Sleep, delirious sleep, she could never get enough of it. Even the baying wolf alarm on her cell phone, which used to frighten Cliff, didn’t do the trick. She would put the phone across the room, and slither in her blanket from the bed to the floor, hug the phone to her chest, turn the alarm off, and crawl back to bed.
But the magnitude of this particular day trumped her lust for sleep. Her interview was not until eleven, but she wanted to walk the two-plus miles there, clear her mind, and still have time to freshen up beforehand.
As she waited for the shower water to heat up, she practiced her smile in the mirror. Too young—that would be their first thought. On paper, she looked older. Her résumé showed more than ten years experience in electoral politics. She did say, in her cover letter, that she started working campaigns before she was old enough to vote, so they knew she was in her twenties. But they would expect late twenties.
Sierra had a round pretty face and long thick black hair. She had only a hint of her mother’s Mexican heritage—which you might never guess at had she not decided after college to shorten her hyphenated last name and keep only the León of her mother. Her friend Romy ribbed her about that incessantly. “What, are you trying to remake yourself into some downtrodden minority?”
Well, no, but just because she had only a pequeño fraction of Mexican blood didn’t mean she couldn’t be proud of it. If it also made her more desirable in the work world, so be it. León. The lion. Fierce like a lion. King of the beasts. Sierra León. Mountain Lion. What was not to like? Other than the usual questions about being named after a country, which she had learned to shrug off.
She had spread out her clothes over the back of the wicker chair the night before, knowing how difficult it would be to decide in the morning. She wasn’t crazy about her blue pants suit—it was so not her, but that was the point, right? With her librarian glasses instead of contacts, her hair clipped behind her back, and a simple, crisply pressed white blouse under the jacket, she would look the consummate professional, even with the baby face.
She added a thin turquoise necklace she had bought in the plaza in Santa Fe from a Navajo woman who looked a thousand years old. They were interviewing her for a job in New Mexico, after all.
They would notice her weight too. She was, let’s be honest, twenty pounds overweight. If she lost half that, she could hide the rest with her loose Moroccan shawl or her untucked polo shirt, even the suit. Would they look at those extra pounds and read lazy or undisciplined? She didn’t know anyone as disciplined as she was. She ate well. She was physically active, though she didn’t climb on those boring elliptical trainers and sweat for half an hour every day like Romy did.
After she dressed and brushed her teeth, she smiled at herself in the mirror again, first feeling confident, pleased with herself, and then laughing and shaking her head at all this self-absorption. She picked up her thin canvas briefcase and checked again to be sure she had her recommendation letters and résumé. What, they were going to sneak out of the file folder when her back was turned? Then she slipped out the door into the next chapter of her life.
--
Washington, D.C., sweltering even this early in the day, had always been fiercely divided, and in the summer of 2008, as Sierra walked down Columbia Road past still-shuttered Ethiopian restaurants, the divide could hardly have been deeper. With the unpopular, unrepentant President George W. Bush at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue and the Democratic-controlled Congress at the other, the political partisanship was as bitter as ever. As for the city residents, the young men lounging on the stoops in Anacostia may have shared the same steamy summers and zip code digits as the lycra-wearing joggers on the towpath, but little else.
Except. Except.
This year, a young Harvard-educated lawyer, with big ears and a funny name, son of a Kenyan doctoral student and a white Kansas-born anthropologist, had captured the imagination of both. Sierra too.
For her, 2008 was the year of Barack Obama, and now, here she was with an opportunity to help him win the presidency. Even get paid for it.
Though Obama had wowed Sierra four years earlier with his “not a red state, not a blue state, but the United States of America” speech at the Democratic convention, she had initially supported Hillary Clinton, and had worked for her in Iowa. She would have continued but for a brutal flu that knocked her out for the final weeks before the primary. She was usually more than fine with the intensity of campaigns, even thrived on the running-on-fumes craziness of them, but her body shut down.
Of course, Barack Obama wasn’t going to be interviewing her, and if she were hired, she wouldn’t be working for the Obama campaign, but for a third-party group called the Democracy Project.
She had learned everything she could about her prospective employer. She remembered one of her mentors back at the University of New Mexico telling her, his head shaking in disapproval, that he was shocked how few job interviewees took the time to do the most basic homework. With so much information only a couple of search words away, it was practically criminal, he said.
If anything, she was afraid it would seem like she had done too much research, as if she was over-eager. Though really, how could that be a strike against her?
After she applied for the job, she had called Ed Winters, who was on the board of the D-Project, as it was commonly called, and he was bursting with enthusiasm about the idea that Sierra León might be offered a leadership role. She had interned for him in the summer of 2002 when he was a congressman, but he got defeated that fall and decided that teaching at a university suited him better anyway. When he said he’d put in a good word for her, she asked him if he would call right now.
“Now, while I’m on the phone with you?” he asked.
“Yes, now. You have a second line. I’ll hold.”
He chuckled, and made the call. As did three other references. So her reputation preceded her, and that had to count for something.
She felt fine on her walk downtown, despite the wilting heat, but as soon as she arrived at the building the D-Project had recently moved into, her stomach wrenched into a knot and her first stop was the bathroom, where she threw up in the sink.
What was going on? What was her body telling her? Why was she nervous? She was as prepared as was humanly possible.
She washed her mouth out with cold water, rinsed her face—and the sink—and took deep breaths in front of the mirror. She popped a mint, smelled her breath. Not too bad. Then she walked down a short hallway to Suite 108. The door was open and the reception desk empty. On the gray-carpeted floor were five phones lined up in a row.
“Hello. Anybody here?”
Her stomach lurched again and she swallowed the phlegm that backed up in her throat. She turned the corner and saw a young man—he couldn’t have been much older than she was—stride towards her smiling. He reached out his arm.
“Sierra León?”
She nodded, gave a vigorous handshake. She didn’t grip tightly, but she always put some oomph into her motion. Four or five ups and downs before letting go. She didn’t understand why so many women gave such tepid handshakes.
“I’m Adam Silverman. Welcome to our humble offices. As you can see, we’re still moving in. Let me put you in a conference room and find Greg. You need any water? Coffee?
“Water would be great.”
He took her into a long room with a table and six new folding chairs. She could smell the paint and carpet glue. Above, she could see it was an old building—the pipes and ventilation tubing were all exposed, and the plaster on the ceiling looked like it had been applied with a waffle iron. A braid of blue cables snaked around the tubes and pipes.
She hoped they didn’t ask her about Iowa. Not that there was anything wrong with working for Hillary, and they certainly wouldn’t know anything about her meltdown, but she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to talk about it with confidence.
She had never been that sick before. Probably all that traipsing around in the bitter midwestern winter. It wouldn’t happen again, especially in the desert where the air was light and dry.
Finally, here they were. Adam in the lead holding two water bottles in one hand and a notebook in the other, followed by another earnest-looking curly-haired guy who didn’t look much older than Adam. He wore a crisp white shirt with thin green stripes, but didn’t tuck it in. Maybe her youth was not going to be a problem.
Greg started by explaining that the Democracy Project, a 527 group, was not affiliated with the Democratic Party, and was barred by law from coordinating its campaign activities with the Democrats, but it included representatives from labor and environment and abortion rights and the usual progressive constituents who tended to support Democrats. Sierra nodded her head, trying to strike a balance between listening intently and signaling that she knew all this.
Greg couldn’t be more than thirty, she thought. His cheeks were downy as a child’s. It would take him months to grow a beard despite his black hair, though his eyes displayed some world-weariness.
“Enough about us,” he said. “You said on the phone you’ve worked campaigns in New Mexico and have a good sense of the political landscape. Tell us more.”
“Way back before I could vote,” she said, “I canvassed, phone-banked, and crunched spreadsheets for Governor Richardson’s congressional campaign—I also took a con law class from him at University of New Mexico. I had a mentor of sorts there—you may know him, Phil Shepherd, he also—”
“We didn’t.” Greg gave his succinct sentence an exclamation point with his index finger. “Know him, that is. Now we do. He called on your behalf, as did three other impressive people, including one of our board members. Who is this woman who’s got so many people saying good things about her?”
“Yeah, I really hoodwinked them.” She shrugged off the praise with a herky-jerky move of her shoulders. Those recommendations got her the interview, not the job. “I guess I’ve given away the fact that I’m really interested in this opportunity. Anyway, after that, I worked for the coordinated campaign, and did just about everything. Two separate times I sat across from some consultant or staffer who slid a manila envelope toward me on the desk. I didn’t touch it, but I knew there was money in there.”
Why am I leading with that, thought Sierra. What am I trying to say, that I was important enough to be offered bribes?
“Anyway, I know there’s corruption out there, but I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe that with a robust field operation and an inspiring candidate, like we have in Senator Obama, we can win with a clean campaign. So, the political landscape: I could write a book on it. In fact, I pretty much did, my senior thesis. But I assume you want the three-minute version.”
“Take five if you need it,” said Greg, leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. “Give us the big picture.”
“Let me start with the cultural makeup of the state because that’s what makes New Mexico unique. There are about six different cultural groups. First, the ruling class, mostly of Spanish descent. They’ve been there for generations, and they snap at you if you refer to them as Hispanic. That implies Mexican. I remember talking with this one old guy at a fundraising event, last name Peralta, and I was saying something about Hispanics becoming the biggest minority, and I must have used the word ‘we’—I mean, I have only a bit of Mexican on my mother’s side—and this man did this sniff, and he folded his arms across his chest and hissed, ‘I am not Hispanic. My family is from Spain.’
“I felt offended actually. Like what’s so wrong with being from Mexico?”
She was rambling. She had to focus. But they were paying rapt attention. Adam had his chin on his fist like the Rodin sculpture, his other hand supporting his elbow. The room was cool, but she was sweating. Her pants legs stuck to the chair.
“Anyway, the elite Europeans are mostly moderate, pro-business, more Republican than Democrat. They’re more about power than anything. There are still remnants of the padrones system from a century ago, where the patriarchs took new immigrants under their wing, and helped them as they were exploiting them.” She stopped. “Is this what you want?”
They both nodded. “Exactly,” Greg said. “Go. Talk. We need to know this.”
“So there’s also this strong conservative current, more in the libertarian anti-regulation, pro-rancher sort of way, not the right-wing fundamentalism you have in Colorado or Texas. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s an influential progressive culture that goes back a long way, to union organizing among the mine workers, Catholic worker types, peace activists. They’re active, though fractious. This is your Democracy Project crowd. Then there’s the suburban soccer mom types, mostly Dems, the closest we have to swing voters.”
Sierra talked with her entire body, emphasizing her points with her hands flat and fingers wide, sometimes with her palms facing outward, other times her fingertips curled, opening from her chest, scrunching and unscrunching her shoulders, and ending with a gesture that looked like she was holding a big coffee table book. Her hand gestures were almost all symmetrical, the left and right hand mirroring each other.
“Native Americans make up almost ten percent of the state—they’re also mostly Dems—and there’s all the issues that come with that. Preserving the indigenous cultures and languages, dealing with drunk drivers on the pothole-filled tribal roads, and so on. Now that every tribe wants a casino, that brings in some unsavory bedfellows and unexpected alliances. Finally, there are the immigrants, new and not so new, many of them citizens who don’t vote, even though they can. Whoever gets the immigrants to the polls wins—that’s been the conventional wisdom for years, and who better than Barack Obama to bring them out?”
Greg was leaning so far back in his chair, balancing on its back two legs, that Sierra was afraid he would fall over. At first she thought he was in charge, but she noticed that Adam, with his eyes scrunched behind thick glasses, wasn’t just listening, but checking her out. Thinking. Greg seemed engaged, but too relaxed, carefree, as if he had the luxury of soaking up her stories without having to decide whether to hire her.
“There’s also a lot of rural poor. Not like the urban ghetto poor we have here in the district. You’ve got your conspicuously wealthy enclaves in Santa Fe and Taos, but actually, of all the fifty states, only Mississippi is poorer.”
She continued with the history—New Mexico had been settled for centuries, but only a state for a hundred years, the live-and-let-live attitude towards drugs and sexuality, the controversy over oil drilling at Otera Mesa, more than her promised five minutes. She couldn’t stop herself. But then she did stop.
An awkward silence, but she willed herself not to fill it. Greg did.
“What about the local politicians?”
She talked about the congressional shuffle going on in the state—Heather Wilson, the current congresswoman from the 2nd District, had lost the primary for Senate, so now there was a real possibility the state congressional delegation could turn 100 percent blue. She stopped herself again. They knew all this. Everybody did.
“There’s not as much gossip as here inside the Beltway, but the state has its share—the most noteworthy is about Albuquerque Mayor Tomas Zamara, whose wife mysteriously disappeared several years ago. There was all sorts of talk that she was murdered because she crossed some big drug traffickers. Anyway, she’s never been found, and now Zamara’s a rising Republican star, chair of the state McCain campaign, and, if he keeps his fingernails clean, maybe governor or congressman someday.
“That’s more than you wanted, probably.”
“No, no,” said Greg. “It’s a pleasure to hear from someone who knows the territory.” He leaned back in his chair, grimaced, paused. “This is a tedious, difficult job. You know that, right? Endless phone-banking, canvassing. Long days. Cold pizza. A lot of responsibility. Why are you interested?”
“That’s easy. Because it’s important. Because I thrive on challenges. Because I have an opportunity to make a difference on a huge scale. Because I like being a leader. My job is to inspire people to do these tedious things because they’re important. And to make them less tedious by creating community, by making them fun. In Annapolis, we used to do phone tally lotteries. Everyone would sign their tally sheet, and we’d pick one or two every week for dinner at some local restaurant, which someone would have gotten donated.”
Greg nodded, then glanced at Adam with a grim tightness to his lips. Adam, who had more of a poker face, cleared his throat, took off his glasses, and pinched his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “We’ve got other people to interview,” he said, “but we are impressed with you and you are definitely a front-runner.”
Sierra clasped her hands on the table, gave them a squeeze. Here came the other shoe.
“If we were to hire you, well, we’re not going to Albuquerque. We’d be sending you on a mission and staying behind. The situation on the ground, with the coalition, is, well, some of the groups are actively hostile to each other. The unions aren’t talking with the enviros. The women’s groups are having their own internal fights. You used the word ‘fractious.’ It’s a little worse than that—”
Greg interrupted. “A little? It’s downright toxic.”
Adam glared at Greg. Now Sierra knew who was in charge.
“Hey, ‘toxic’ is the word Maria used.” Greg said, looking down.
Adam didn’t look happy. “Maria was the person we hired originally,” he explained. “She lasted four weeks. We didn’t make the right decision. It is a volatile environment. So when smart young Sierra León parachutes in from her elite Washington, D.C., political consulting world, some people are not going to be happy to see her. They’re going to see her as a threat. How are you going to handle that?”
Sierra smiled. “Tough question.” Though she felt her stomach tighten, and a hint of bitterness at the back of her throat, she also noted a change in the dynamic, like a wrestling flip where all of a sudden she was on top. They wanted her. Now it was up to them to convince her to take the job. But toxic—that did not sound good.
“I appreciate your honesty about this, and I don’t have a pat answer other than listening and validating people goes a long way, as does being disciplined and clear about expectations. What kind of authority would I have with these people?”
Adam looked up at the ceiling, as if there was some cue card up there on the waffle pattern, then replied carefully. “That’s part of the problem. Technically, we work for them. It’s their money. And they’re our foot soldiers. These people are ‘us.’ We run into this dynamic everywhere to some extent, but it’s manageable, and a lot comes down to what you said, making people feel heard, giving them respect. But in New Mexico, it’s out of hand.”
“Let me add one thing,” said Sierra. “One thing that can change that dynamic is to bring new people in. People who are excited, motivated, fresh.”
Adam nodded. “You understand how big this job is?”
“Bigger than anything I’ve ever done.” She immediately regretted saying that, but of course it was true. Adam and Greg knew it too.
Two hours later, as Sierra left the building, she called Romy. “Hey girlfriend, call me. I just now finished my interview. Interviews. I met five people. They want me. But, a big, big but. Call me.”
She headed back up Connecticut towards Dupont Circle and across the Dumbarton Bridge into Georgetown past red brick row houses with ivy climbing the walls. Her stomach growled. She picked up a grilled eggplant sandwich from a deli on Wisconsin and sat in the shade. Thinking. Waiting for the day to cool down. Waiting for Romy to call her back.
When Romy called, they made a date to meet at Zucchabar on Columbia for Happy Hour. Sierra arrived an hour early. It was close to empty. Her throat was dry and she ordered iced coffee. Kicked off her shoes. She sat at one of the outdoor tables under an umbrella, and was so absorbed in reading a story in the Post about comedian Al Franken’s run for Senate in Minnesota that she didn’t see Romy sneak up behind her.
A petite woman with long red curly hair and a light gray summer dress, Romy stood quietly, holding her breath, then slowly reached around and put her hands over Sierra’s eyes.
Sierra jumped.
“Damn, you scared me. Why did you do that?”
Romy mussed up Sierra’s hair, then plopped into the wrought iron chair across from her.
“I have to have at least a few seconds of fun today. After another day from hell with Cruella de Ville.”
Romy was ambitious and blindingly smart, with an East Coast edge and a glut of nervous energy. Less composure than Sierra had in her little finger.
“So I’m halfway through my first cup of coffee, sifting through my inbox and she charges into my cube and snaps at me, ‘Romy, why did you send that draft to the FinCom without telling me?’
“As calmly as possible, I say, ‘I explained the plan in the email yesterday, subject line, Finance Committee Letter.’ How much clearer could I be?
“She hesitates for a second, then barks, ‘Well, I didn’t have time to read it. It was too long.’ And then she storms out. I didn’t have time to read it? And that would be my fault? If I don’t—”
“Hey!” Sierra waved her hand in front of Romy’s face. “Look, I’m sorry to hear about your boss, again, but maybe this once, could I be the one with the emergency and you be the one who listens with compassion?”
Romy froze with her mouth open, then cleared her throat. “What, and upset the delicate equilibrium we’ve established, where I engage in all the histrionics and you’re the voice of reason. I think not.”
Then she turned to Sierra with a wink and said, “OK, girl, but if you had troubles like me, we could never be friends.”
That might have been true—Romy always had drama and Sierra did the lion’s share of listening. But in D.C., where Harry Truman had famously said if you want a friend, get a dog, Sierra was grateful for how unabashedly enthusiastic Romy was about her.
Sierra met Romy in her second week in Washington at a conference on women in politics. They sat next to each other and passed notes as if they were in grade school. Two nights later, Romy called her to share her day and Sierra listened and was thrilled to find a lively friend so quickly.
Romy described herself as a lipstick leftist. Unabashedly progressive, she also loved her high-heels and dressed to kill on the weekends. Sierra was no hippie—she shaved her armpits and wore makeup now and then—but thought the whole obsession with style and fashion was a superficial distraction. Romy said Sierra had beautiful skin and classic cheekbones, so she could afford her disdain, but Romy had to work at it.
As Sierra described her interview, she could see Romy checking out the men in the bar—it was starting to fill up now—and she thought, not for the first time, that maybe Romy wasn’t the best choice in friends. She was not a good listener. She followed each new arrival with her eyes. Didn’t move her head. But when she craned her neck to look at a tall blond guy with his tie loosened, Sierra stopped and said, “you’re not paying attention.”
“They liked you, it was all good, but then they had to sell the job to you. I can look at guys and still listen. Can you smell those garlic fries? I’m going to order some.”
“It was weird. It was like they were trying to scare me out of the job.”
“You don’t scare easy.”
“I like a challenge, but this sounds like an ordeal. I’m—”
“You can't not do it. End of discussion.”
“I want to discuss it. There will be other opportunities easier than this.”
“Girl, you are an amazing woman. Don’t forget that. And meanwhile, check out that guy in the purple shirt over by the bar. Don’t turn too quickly, just slide your chair toward me a little. I’d get on my knees for him.” Romy ran her fingers through her hair, turned her attention to Sierra. “You know you want to do this. If you don’t do this, you’ll kick yourself. I'll kick you.”
Sierra slid her chair along the concrete floor and shifted her eyes to the guy in purple. More than cute, especially his smoldering eyes. Too preppy for her taste, but maybe she could forgive that. “Cliff was saying the other night that the only reason I have a shot is that it’s late in the season and all the A-list people have been snapped up.”
“He’s a dick. You want to get on that A-list, right? You know the territory, and you’re awesome!”
“What did I do to deserve such ardent cheerleading?”
“You listen to my bullshit. You’ve been accumulating points, you know, like on a bank card. Reward points.”
“What do you think Cliff will say? I don’t actually know. He’s not predictable.”
“Sure he is. He’ll be jealous and try to undermine your confidence, but he’s not going tell you to say no. Come on. No one is.”
One block from the Columbia Heights Metro Station in Washington, D.C., twenty-five year old Sierra León rolled groggily out of bed, stretching her arms and yawning. At that moment, with her matted hair and worried eyes, she did not look like someone about to play a decisive role in determining the next president of the United States. Of course, she would be the first to say that every vote counted and so anyone who showed up at a polling place held that power. But this was bigger than that.
She knew how big it was. Which is why she slept so fitfully. Which is why she threw up twice before dawn. Which is why she couldn’t eat anything more than a banana.
She could function tired, sometimes even better, but the waking up was brutal. All her discipline went out the window when she was sawing away in the morning. Sleep, delirious sleep, she could never get enough of it. Even the baying wolf alarm on her cell phone, which used to frighten Cliff, didn’t do the trick. She would put the phone across the room, and slither in her blanket from the bed to the floor, hug the phone to her chest, turn the alarm off, and crawl back to bed.
But the magnitude of this particular day trumped her lust for sleep. Her interview was not until eleven, but she wanted to walk the two-plus miles there, clear her mind, and still have time to freshen up beforehand.
As she waited for the shower water to heat up, she practiced her smile in the mirror. Too young—that would be their first thought. On paper, she looked older. Her résumé showed more than ten years experience in electoral politics. She did say, in her cover letter, that she started working campaigns before she was old enough to vote, so they knew she was in her twenties. But they would expect late twenties.
Sierra had a round pretty face and long thick black hair. She had only a hint of her mother’s Mexican heritage—which you might never guess at had she not decided after college to shorten her hyphenated last name and keep only the León of her mother. Her friend Romy ribbed her about that incessantly. “What, are you trying to remake yourself into some downtrodden minority?”
Well, no, but just because she had only a pequeño fraction of Mexican blood didn’t mean she couldn’t be proud of it. If it also made her more desirable in the work world, so be it. León. The lion. Fierce like a lion. King of the beasts. Sierra León. Mountain Lion. What was not to like? Other than the usual questions about being named after a country, which she had learned to shrug off.
She had spread out her clothes over the back of the wicker chair the night before, knowing how difficult it would be to decide in the morning. She wasn’t crazy about her blue pants suit—it was so not her, but that was the point, right? With her librarian glasses instead of contacts, her hair clipped behind her back, and a simple, crisply pressed white blouse under the jacket, she would look the consummate professional, even with the baby face.
She added a thin turquoise necklace she had bought in the plaza in Santa Fe from a Navajo woman who looked a thousand years old. They were interviewing her for a job in New Mexico, after all.
They would notice her weight too. She was, let’s be honest, twenty pounds overweight. If she lost half that, she could hide the rest with her loose Moroccan shawl or her untucked polo shirt, even the suit. Would they look at those extra pounds and read lazy or undisciplined? She didn’t know anyone as disciplined as she was. She ate well. She was physically active, though she didn’t climb on those boring elliptical trainers and sweat for half an hour every day like Romy did.
After she dressed and brushed her teeth, she smiled at herself in the mirror again, first feeling confident, pleased with herself, and then laughing and shaking her head at all this self-absorption. She picked up her thin canvas briefcase and checked again to be sure she had her recommendation letters and résumé. What, they were going to sneak out of the file folder when her back was turned? Then she slipped out the door into the next chapter of her life.
--
Washington, D.C., sweltering even this early in the day, had always been fiercely divided, and in the summer of 2008, as Sierra walked down Columbia Road past still-shuttered Ethiopian restaurants, the divide could hardly have been deeper. With the unpopular, unrepentant President George W. Bush at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue and the Democratic-controlled Congress at the other, the political partisanship was as bitter as ever. As for the city residents, the young men lounging on the stoops in Anacostia may have shared the same steamy summers and zip code digits as the lycra-wearing joggers on the towpath, but little else.
Except. Except.
This year, a young Harvard-educated lawyer, with big ears and a funny name, son of a Kenyan doctoral student and a white Kansas-born anthropologist, had captured the imagination of both. Sierra too.
For her, 2008 was the year of Barack Obama, and now, here she was with an opportunity to help him win the presidency. Even get paid for it.
Though Obama had wowed Sierra four years earlier with his “not a red state, not a blue state, but the United States of America” speech at the Democratic convention, she had initially supported Hillary Clinton, and had worked for her in Iowa. She would have continued but for a brutal flu that knocked her out for the final weeks before the primary. She was usually more than fine with the intensity of campaigns, even thrived on the running-on-fumes craziness of them, but her body shut down.
Of course, Barack Obama wasn’t going to be interviewing her, and if she were hired, she wouldn’t be working for the Obama campaign, but for a third-party group called the Democracy Project.
She had learned everything she could about her prospective employer. She remembered one of her mentors back at the University of New Mexico telling her, his head shaking in disapproval, that he was shocked how few job interviewees took the time to do the most basic homework. With so much information only a couple of search words away, it was practically criminal, he said.
If anything, she was afraid it would seem like she had done too much research, as if she was over-eager. Though really, how could that be a strike against her?
After she applied for the job, she had called Ed Winters, who was on the board of the D-Project, as it was commonly called, and he was bursting with enthusiasm about the idea that Sierra León might be offered a leadership role. She had interned for him in the summer of 2002 when he was a congressman, but he got defeated that fall and decided that teaching at a university suited him better anyway. When he said he’d put in a good word for her, she asked him if he would call right now.
“Now, while I’m on the phone with you?” he asked.
“Yes, now. You have a second line. I’ll hold.”
He chuckled, and made the call. As did three other references. So her reputation preceded her, and that had to count for something.
She felt fine on her walk downtown, despite the wilting heat, but as soon as she arrived at the building the D-Project had recently moved into, her stomach wrenched into a knot and her first stop was the bathroom, where she threw up in the sink.
What was going on? What was her body telling her? Why was she nervous? She was as prepared as was humanly possible.
She washed her mouth out with cold water, rinsed her face—and the sink—and took deep breaths in front of the mirror. She popped a mint, smelled her breath. Not too bad. Then she walked down a short hallway to Suite 108. The door was open and the reception desk empty. On the gray-carpeted floor were five phones lined up in a row.
“Hello. Anybody here?”
Her stomach lurched again and she swallowed the phlegm that backed up in her throat. She turned the corner and saw a young man—he couldn’t have been much older than she was—stride towards her smiling. He reached out his arm.
“Sierra León?”
She nodded, gave a vigorous handshake. She didn’t grip tightly, but she always put some oomph into her motion. Four or five ups and downs before letting go. She didn’t understand why so many women gave such tepid handshakes.
“I’m Adam Silverman. Welcome to our humble offices. As you can see, we’re still moving in. Let me put you in a conference room and find Greg. You need any water? Coffee?
“Water would be great.”
He took her into a long room with a table and six new folding chairs. She could smell the paint and carpet glue. Above, she could see it was an old building—the pipes and ventilation tubing were all exposed, and the plaster on the ceiling looked like it had been applied with a waffle iron. A braid of blue cables snaked around the tubes and pipes.
She hoped they didn’t ask her about Iowa. Not that there was anything wrong with working for Hillary, and they certainly wouldn’t know anything about her meltdown, but she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to talk about it with confidence.
She had never been that sick before. Probably all that traipsing around in the bitter midwestern winter. It wouldn’t happen again, especially in the desert where the air was light and dry.
Finally, here they were. Adam in the lead holding two water bottles in one hand and a notebook in the other, followed by another earnest-looking curly-haired guy who didn’t look much older than Adam. He wore a crisp white shirt with thin green stripes, but didn’t tuck it in. Maybe her youth was not going to be a problem.
Greg started by explaining that the Democracy Project, a 527 group, was not affiliated with the Democratic Party, and was barred by law from coordinating its campaign activities with the Democrats, but it included representatives from labor and environment and abortion rights and the usual progressive constituents who tended to support Democrats. Sierra nodded her head, trying to strike a balance between listening intently and signaling that she knew all this.
Greg couldn’t be more than thirty, she thought. His cheeks were downy as a child’s. It would take him months to grow a beard despite his black hair, though his eyes displayed some world-weariness.
“Enough about us,” he said. “You said on the phone you’ve worked campaigns in New Mexico and have a good sense of the political landscape. Tell us more.”
“Way back before I could vote,” she said, “I canvassed, phone-banked, and crunched spreadsheets for Governor Richardson’s congressional campaign—I also took a con law class from him at University of New Mexico. I had a mentor of sorts there—you may know him, Phil Shepherd, he also—”
“We didn’t.” Greg gave his succinct sentence an exclamation point with his index finger. “Know him, that is. Now we do. He called on your behalf, as did three other impressive people, including one of our board members. Who is this woman who’s got so many people saying good things about her?”
“Yeah, I really hoodwinked them.” She shrugged off the praise with a herky-jerky move of her shoulders. Those recommendations got her the interview, not the job. “I guess I’ve given away the fact that I’m really interested in this opportunity. Anyway, after that, I worked for the coordinated campaign, and did just about everything. Two separate times I sat across from some consultant or staffer who slid a manila envelope toward me on the desk. I didn’t touch it, but I knew there was money in there.”
Why am I leading with that, thought Sierra. What am I trying to say, that I was important enough to be offered bribes?
“Anyway, I know there’s corruption out there, but I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe that with a robust field operation and an inspiring candidate, like we have in Senator Obama, we can win with a clean campaign. So, the political landscape: I could write a book on it. In fact, I pretty much did, my senior thesis. But I assume you want the three-minute version.”
“Take five if you need it,” said Greg, leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. “Give us the big picture.”
“Let me start with the cultural makeup of the state because that’s what makes New Mexico unique. There are about six different cultural groups. First, the ruling class, mostly of Spanish descent. They’ve been there for generations, and they snap at you if you refer to them as Hispanic. That implies Mexican. I remember talking with this one old guy at a fundraising event, last name Peralta, and I was saying something about Hispanics becoming the biggest minority, and I must have used the word ‘we’—I mean, I have only a bit of Mexican on my mother’s side—and this man did this sniff, and he folded his arms across his chest and hissed, ‘I am not Hispanic. My family is from Spain.’
“I felt offended actually. Like what’s so wrong with being from Mexico?”
She was rambling. She had to focus. But they were paying rapt attention. Adam had his chin on his fist like the Rodin sculpture, his other hand supporting his elbow. The room was cool, but she was sweating. Her pants legs stuck to the chair.
“Anyway, the elite Europeans are mostly moderate, pro-business, more Republican than Democrat. They’re more about power than anything. There are still remnants of the padrones system from a century ago, where the patriarchs took new immigrants under their wing, and helped them as they were exploiting them.” She stopped. “Is this what you want?”
They both nodded. “Exactly,” Greg said. “Go. Talk. We need to know this.”
“So there’s also this strong conservative current, more in the libertarian anti-regulation, pro-rancher sort of way, not the right-wing fundamentalism you have in Colorado or Texas. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s an influential progressive culture that goes back a long way, to union organizing among the mine workers, Catholic worker types, peace activists. They’re active, though fractious. This is your Democracy Project crowd. Then there’s the suburban soccer mom types, mostly Dems, the closest we have to swing voters.”
Sierra talked with her entire body, emphasizing her points with her hands flat and fingers wide, sometimes with her palms facing outward, other times her fingertips curled, opening from her chest, scrunching and unscrunching her shoulders, and ending with a gesture that looked like she was holding a big coffee table book. Her hand gestures were almost all symmetrical, the left and right hand mirroring each other.
“Native Americans make up almost ten percent of the state—they’re also mostly Dems—and there’s all the issues that come with that. Preserving the indigenous cultures and languages, dealing with drunk drivers on the pothole-filled tribal roads, and so on. Now that every tribe wants a casino, that brings in some unsavory bedfellows and unexpected alliances. Finally, there are the immigrants, new and not so new, many of them citizens who don’t vote, even though they can. Whoever gets the immigrants to the polls wins—that’s been the conventional wisdom for years, and who better than Barack Obama to bring them out?”
Greg was leaning so far back in his chair, balancing on its back two legs, that Sierra was afraid he would fall over. At first she thought he was in charge, but she noticed that Adam, with his eyes scrunched behind thick glasses, wasn’t just listening, but checking her out. Thinking. Greg seemed engaged, but too relaxed, carefree, as if he had the luxury of soaking up her stories without having to decide whether to hire her.
“There’s also a lot of rural poor. Not like the urban ghetto poor we have here in the district. You’ve got your conspicuously wealthy enclaves in Santa Fe and Taos, but actually, of all the fifty states, only Mississippi is poorer.”
She continued with the history—New Mexico had been settled for centuries, but only a state for a hundred years, the live-and-let-live attitude towards drugs and sexuality, the controversy over oil drilling at Otera Mesa, more than her promised five minutes. She couldn’t stop herself. But then she did stop.
An awkward silence, but she willed herself not to fill it. Greg did.
“What about the local politicians?”
She talked about the congressional shuffle going on in the state—Heather Wilson, the current congresswoman from the 2nd District, had lost the primary for Senate, so now there was a real possibility the state congressional delegation could turn 100 percent blue. She stopped herself again. They knew all this. Everybody did.
“There’s not as much gossip as here inside the Beltway, but the state has its share—the most noteworthy is about Albuquerque Mayor Tomas Zamara, whose wife mysteriously disappeared several years ago. There was all sorts of talk that she was murdered because she crossed some big drug traffickers. Anyway, she’s never been found, and now Zamara’s a rising Republican star, chair of the state McCain campaign, and, if he keeps his fingernails clean, maybe governor or congressman someday.
“That’s more than you wanted, probably.”
“No, no,” said Greg. “It’s a pleasure to hear from someone who knows the territory.” He leaned back in his chair, grimaced, paused. “This is a tedious, difficult job. You know that, right? Endless phone-banking, canvassing. Long days. Cold pizza. A lot of responsibility. Why are you interested?”
“That’s easy. Because it’s important. Because I thrive on challenges. Because I have an opportunity to make a difference on a huge scale. Because I like being a leader. My job is to inspire people to do these tedious things because they’re important. And to make them less tedious by creating community, by making them fun. In Annapolis, we used to do phone tally lotteries. Everyone would sign their tally sheet, and we’d pick one or two every week for dinner at some local restaurant, which someone would have gotten donated.”
Greg nodded, then glanced at Adam with a grim tightness to his lips. Adam, who had more of a poker face, cleared his throat, took off his glasses, and pinched his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “We’ve got other people to interview,” he said, “but we are impressed with you and you are definitely a front-runner.”
Sierra clasped her hands on the table, gave them a squeeze. Here came the other shoe.
“If we were to hire you, well, we’re not going to Albuquerque. We’d be sending you on a mission and staying behind. The situation on the ground, with the coalition, is, well, some of the groups are actively hostile to each other. The unions aren’t talking with the enviros. The women’s groups are having their own internal fights. You used the word ‘fractious.’ It’s a little worse than that—”
Greg interrupted. “A little? It’s downright toxic.”
Adam glared at Greg. Now Sierra knew who was in charge.
“Hey, ‘toxic’ is the word Maria used.” Greg said, looking down.
Adam didn’t look happy. “Maria was the person we hired originally,” he explained. “She lasted four weeks. We didn’t make the right decision. It is a volatile environment. So when smart young Sierra León parachutes in from her elite Washington, D.C., political consulting world, some people are not going to be happy to see her. They’re going to see her as a threat. How are you going to handle that?”
Sierra smiled. “Tough question.” Though she felt her stomach tighten, and a hint of bitterness at the back of her throat, she also noted a change in the dynamic, like a wrestling flip where all of a sudden she was on top. They wanted her. Now it was up to them to convince her to take the job. But toxic—that did not sound good.
“I appreciate your honesty about this, and I don’t have a pat answer other than listening and validating people goes a long way, as does being disciplined and clear about expectations. What kind of authority would I have with these people?”
Adam looked up at the ceiling, as if there was some cue card up there on the waffle pattern, then replied carefully. “That’s part of the problem. Technically, we work for them. It’s their money. And they’re our foot soldiers. These people are ‘us.’ We run into this dynamic everywhere to some extent, but it’s manageable, and a lot comes down to what you said, making people feel heard, giving them respect. But in New Mexico, it’s out of hand.”
“Let me add one thing,” said Sierra. “One thing that can change that dynamic is to bring new people in. People who are excited, motivated, fresh.”
Adam nodded. “You understand how big this job is?”
“Bigger than anything I’ve ever done.” She immediately regretted saying that, but of course it was true. Adam and Greg knew it too.
Two hours later, as Sierra left the building, she called Romy. “Hey girlfriend, call me. I just now finished my interview. Interviews. I met five people. They want me. But, a big, big but. Call me.”
She headed back up Connecticut towards Dupont Circle and across the Dumbarton Bridge into Georgetown past red brick row houses with ivy climbing the walls. Her stomach growled. She picked up a grilled eggplant sandwich from a deli on Wisconsin and sat in the shade. Thinking. Waiting for the day to cool down. Waiting for Romy to call her back.
When Romy called, they made a date to meet at Zucchabar on Columbia for Happy Hour. Sierra arrived an hour early. It was close to empty. Her throat was dry and she ordered iced coffee. Kicked off her shoes. She sat at one of the outdoor tables under an umbrella, and was so absorbed in reading a story in the Post about comedian Al Franken’s run for Senate in Minnesota that she didn’t see Romy sneak up behind her.
A petite woman with long red curly hair and a light gray summer dress, Romy stood quietly, holding her breath, then slowly reached around and put her hands over Sierra’s eyes.
Sierra jumped.
“Damn, you scared me. Why did you do that?”
Romy mussed up Sierra’s hair, then plopped into the wrought iron chair across from her.
“I have to have at least a few seconds of fun today. After another day from hell with Cruella de Ville.”
Romy was ambitious and blindingly smart, with an East Coast edge and a glut of nervous energy. Less composure than Sierra had in her little finger.
“So I’m halfway through my first cup of coffee, sifting through my inbox and she charges into my cube and snaps at me, ‘Romy, why did you send that draft to the FinCom without telling me?’
“As calmly as possible, I say, ‘I explained the plan in the email yesterday, subject line, Finance Committee Letter.’ How much clearer could I be?
“She hesitates for a second, then barks, ‘Well, I didn’t have time to read it. It was too long.’ And then she storms out. I didn’t have time to read it? And that would be my fault? If I don’t—”
“Hey!” Sierra waved her hand in front of Romy’s face. “Look, I’m sorry to hear about your boss, again, but maybe this once, could I be the one with the emergency and you be the one who listens with compassion?”
Romy froze with her mouth open, then cleared her throat. “What, and upset the delicate equilibrium we’ve established, where I engage in all the histrionics and you’re the voice of reason. I think not.”
Then she turned to Sierra with a wink and said, “OK, girl, but if you had troubles like me, we could never be friends.”
That might have been true—Romy always had drama and Sierra did the lion’s share of listening. But in D.C., where Harry Truman had famously said if you want a friend, get a dog, Sierra was grateful for how unabashedly enthusiastic Romy was about her.
Sierra met Romy in her second week in Washington at a conference on women in politics. They sat next to each other and passed notes as if they were in grade school. Two nights later, Romy called her to share her day and Sierra listened and was thrilled to find a lively friend so quickly.
Romy described herself as a lipstick leftist. Unabashedly progressive, she also loved her high-heels and dressed to kill on the weekends. Sierra was no hippie—she shaved her armpits and wore makeup now and then—but thought the whole obsession with style and fashion was a superficial distraction. Romy said Sierra had beautiful skin and classic cheekbones, so she could afford her disdain, but Romy had to work at it.
As Sierra described her interview, she could see Romy checking out the men in the bar—it was starting to fill up now—and she thought, not for the first time, that maybe Romy wasn’t the best choice in friends. She was not a good listener. She followed each new arrival with her eyes. Didn’t move her head. But when she craned her neck to look at a tall blond guy with his tie loosened, Sierra stopped and said, “you’re not paying attention.”
“They liked you, it was all good, but then they had to sell the job to you. I can look at guys and still listen. Can you smell those garlic fries? I’m going to order some.”
“It was weird. It was like they were trying to scare me out of the job.”
“You don’t scare easy.”
“I like a challenge, but this sounds like an ordeal. I’m—”
“You can't not do it. End of discussion.”
“I want to discuss it. There will be other opportunities easier than this.”
“Girl, you are an amazing woman. Don’t forget that. And meanwhile, check out that guy in the purple shirt over by the bar. Don’t turn too quickly, just slide your chair toward me a little. I’d get on my knees for him.” Romy ran her fingers through her hair, turned her attention to Sierra. “You know you want to do this. If you don’t do this, you’ll kick yourself. I'll kick you.”
Sierra slid her chair along the concrete floor and shifted her eyes to the guy in purple. More than cute, especially his smoldering eyes. Too preppy for her taste, but maybe she could forgive that. “Cliff was saying the other night that the only reason I have a shot is that it’s late in the season and all the A-list people have been snapped up.”
“He’s a dick. You want to get on that A-list, right? You know the territory, and you’re awesome!”
“What did I do to deserve such ardent cheerleading?”
“You listen to my bullshit. You’ve been accumulating points, you know, like on a bank card. Reward points.”
“What do you think Cliff will say? I don’t actually know. He’s not predictable.”
“Sure he is. He’ll be jealous and try to undermine your confidence, but he’s not going tell you to say no. Come on. No one is.”
3. Hurricane Tory
JUNE 23 (MONDAY)—135 DAYS UNTIL ELECTION
After his meeting with the campaign bigwigs, Tomas hustled to the Coyote Café, near the plaza, noting the clouds gathering for a midday thunderstorm. Tory, sitting at a round table facing the door, stood to greet him when he arrived, and started asking questions about his disappeared wife before she sat back down.
He gave her the basics, hardly more than what any local who watched TV would know. Then he asked her about the retreat she had alluded to earlier, and she took it from there.
He was relieved she didn’t ask more about Vera. Or him, for that matter. Too many people were too interested. He was happy enough to watch her sip her tea and talk. She was so lovely and effusive.
“I have never lived in the present this much. It’s as if my past never existed.” She laughed as she spoke, as if the mere act of talking gave her immense pleasure.
He gazed at the steam rising from his rough-hewn periwinkle and black mug, and then looked up, as if Tory had leaned her face into the fog of his tea and pulled his gaze to hers. She demanded his eyes, locked hers to his. She kept touching him on the arm with her fingers as she talked.
His elbow too. A couple minutes later his forearm. A fleeting touch, only for a second. He felt himself shrinking back. “I know I can’t live this way forever,” she said, “but why not try is what I say. I don’t need to rush back to the grind. I have transformed myself. I can feel it deep inside. At first, I didn’t believe that true transformation was possible. I was destined to keep making the same mistakes. But that lack of faith in myself, that was my con. As long as I believed that, I had an excuse not to change.”
He inhaled the intense smell of roasting coffee, asked Tory what she had transformed from. He enjoyed the smell of coffee, but not the taste.
“A long story,” she said, as if she weren’t going to elaborate, but then she did. She married young, divorced young, and had a daughter named Gina, now in her twenties, who had accompanied her mother for the retreat, and had returned to Los Angeles earlier in the week. “Somehow I got myself an MBA from Stanford, a ticket that opened doors. I got in management young in the defense industry, cruised along, working my heinie off, and well, maybe you’ve experienced the bitchy boss. Hell on wheels? The perfectionist who makes everyone’s life miserable?”
“I know what you’re talking about.” Vera on a bad day.
“I had bosses like that at Hughes. It was an informal place, more like the dot com world than the military, but the work ethic was brutal. No baby-faced kids playing foosball in the break room. Hard driving. This one woman boss, she was vicious, mean, cold, competitive. She had to break you. Break me, because I was young and confident. She gave me assignments and then tore into my work. I could never understand how someone could be so horrible.”
She kept on smiling as she talked, her upper lip stretched high enough he could see the pink line of her gums above gleaming teeth.
“On the weekend, when I was drinking with friends, when I had friends, I would complain about her, and one friend would say that she must be miserable herself to put others through this. I didn’t care how miserable she was. There was no excuse for the way she treated me. Fast forward, I became her—the imperious bitch on the warpath. Hurricane Tory is what they called me. I had a ruthless rival in another division, nine people reporting to me, and they all hated me. My daughter was living with her father and I had grown tired of the succession of golden boys, young alpha males who would sweep me off my feet and well, these guys were the kind you think you want.”
“I have to warn you,” said Tomas, his fingertip to his chest. “That’s what they used to call me. Golden boy. Mostly my sister Bella.”
“One of these guys is a multi-millionaire now, barely forty years old. On his third company. It seems so simple looking back. I was scared I was going to fail. I was scared these incredibly bright people would find out I was in over my head. So I became a bloody terror. I wanted people to like me, but no one did.”
“I find that hard to believe.” Tomas could turn on the charm when he wanted to, but he had not allowed himself to do so since Vera vanished.
“I would still be on that path if it weren’t for these Benvenue seminars I started on in Santa Monica, and then here in New Mexico. Do I seem like a bitchy type-A person now?”
She held up her palm. “Don’t answer that.”
“You have the serenity of someone who has meditated for forty days and forty nights in the desert.”
“It hasn’t been that long, but yes, I escaped.”
--
Tomas had another meeting back in Albuquerque, so left Tory after an hour. He turned the radio off when he got on the interstate, so he could absorb more fully the events of the morning. The meeting with the campaign was already forgotten, but Tory had catapulted herself to the center of his universe. She took his breath away and terrified him at the same time. They had made a date for Saturday and he didn’t know how he could wait that long.
The thunder rumbled and the purple skies opened up as he sped through the outskirts of Santa Fe. He flipped the windshield wipers on high and slowed to about forty-five miles per hour. Ahead, in the lowlands, the skies were clear, so he could make up time once he descended from the mountains.
The fat raindrops fell with a fury, and then, as if unleashed by the storm, the painful feelings and images from his tumultuous marriage and Vera’s disappearance came flooding over him in waves.
Tory had cracked him wide open.
He knew he couldn’t hold on forever to the hope of Vera reappearing. To be honest, he no longer had hope. But he wasn’t ready to move on. His friends, his mother, even strangers on the street urged him to get on with his life, and he didn’t argue with them. His secretary Rosario assured him that there would be a line of women who wanted him once he decided he was ready. Maybe he finally was.
Vera wouldn’t let him go. Even now. He wanted to savor the easy conversation with Tory, relive the simple pleasure of watching her smile, feeling her fingers on his elbow. Memories of Vera pushed those thoughts aside.
He was surprised by the vividness and intensity of these feelings, which were not new by any means, but had faded from the inky darkness of that first year, ever so slowly, into translucence. But God, it had taken so long to climb out of that abyss.
There was one day in particular he recalled as the storm raged. Two months after he met Vera, they were play-acting a young house-hunting couple on a Sunday afternoon, strolling through obscenely expensive houses in the picturesque back streets off Canyon Road in Santa Fe. They were sizzling with desire then, couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and they stopped to make out under the shade of a leafy cottonwood, oblivious to passersby the way young lovers can be.
They stumbled on an open house listed at $1.4 million, which was, according to the flyer on the long elegant rosewood dining table, “perfect for part-time residents who demand living in a fabulous location.” The house was mostly one big room—a “great room,” the ad called it—with the kitchen, dining room, and living room all open to each other and one imposing rough-hewn wooden post in the middle holding up four intersecting beams in the ceiling. The room smelled of orange blossoms.
While he was feigning interest in the trusses and hardware, Vera called him in from the master bedroom, gushing about the quality of the light. Sí claro, this was Santa Fe. It was all about the light. A wall of french doors opened into a garden, and on the opposite wall was a kiva fireplace, framed in glossy rust and black tiles. Tomas nodded in interest, but was paying more attention to Vera than to the house, noticing her shapely legs as she leaned forward to run her hand across the sandstone hearth. I want her. Today, tomorrow, and forever. Oh God, do I want her.
But then Vera turned and berated him for not paying enough attention to the house-hunting process. She spoke in a low, seething voice so the real estate agent couldn’t hear the actual words, but loud and exasperating enough that she turned toward them anxiously as they walked back into the great room.
“This is such an incredible property,” said Vera, now addressing the agent, her voice earnest, plaintive. “It’s got everything on our wish list and then some, but my husband, my indecisive, vacillating, sorry-ass of a husband will not take this process seriously.”
The agent nodded her head, her lips pursed with a look of maternal concern.
“He’ll spend our hard-earned money on sports cars and ski trips and exquisite bottles of wine, and what’s not to like about a little luxury,” she said, and here her voice turned hard, “but there comes a time when a boy puts aside his childish things and becomes a man, and I’m still waiting.”
Tomas stood there with his mouth agape, wanting to interrupt, but not knowing what to say. Or feel. And wondering how far Vera would take this.
He gripped her by the arm and pulled her toward the door. “I’m sorry we’ve wasted your time,” he said to the agent.
Outside, when he asked her what that was all about, she silenced him with her baby finger on his lips and said, “Take me home right now and have your way with me.” They laughed and made love that afternoon, again that night, and then again sometime before dawn, fumbling and slipping and sliding in the dark, and it all seemed like a dream now, as if it never happened.
He knew he was going to marry her that night, and he also bolted awake at daybreak with a migraine building and sweat beading on his forehead, perhaps in anticipation of the roller-coaster ride ahead. He lay awake, his neck tight, his heart pounding in his temples like a sledgehammer on a rock pile while she slept soundly next to him. Luscious and naked under a silk sheet. Until that afternoon, he’d been worried that he was far more enamored of her than she was of him, so he was ecstatic when she referred to him as her husband, and perversely excited at how effortlessly she jumped past the marital bliss to condescending impatience. The lording tetchiness his mother so frequently expressed to his father—that was how he knew this was for real.
They married a year later, and he thought they were happy, but all too soon, her augury had come true and she was as short and belittling as she had been “acting” on that house-hunting foray in Santa Fe. Then one day she drove to Alamogordo to meet a client and never came home. The police found her car parked in a lot half a block from the law office where her meeting was scheduled. She never signed the visitor log. The guard never saw her. She never appeared on the video monitor in the lobby.
He still thought of Vera every day, but it was like listening to a CD that skipped—the same notes over and over again. Along came Tory Singer from Los Angeles, California, who shook that CD player and, with no warning, he was listening to music he’d never heard before, reliving painful memories with a new intensity, a new soundtrack. But also possibilities he had never let himself entertain.
A life after Vera. A new life. Imagine.
After his meeting with the campaign bigwigs, Tomas hustled to the Coyote Café, near the plaza, noting the clouds gathering for a midday thunderstorm. Tory, sitting at a round table facing the door, stood to greet him when he arrived, and started asking questions about his disappeared wife before she sat back down.
He gave her the basics, hardly more than what any local who watched TV would know. Then he asked her about the retreat she had alluded to earlier, and she took it from there.
He was relieved she didn’t ask more about Vera. Or him, for that matter. Too many people were too interested. He was happy enough to watch her sip her tea and talk. She was so lovely and effusive.
“I have never lived in the present this much. It’s as if my past never existed.” She laughed as she spoke, as if the mere act of talking gave her immense pleasure.
He gazed at the steam rising from his rough-hewn periwinkle and black mug, and then looked up, as if Tory had leaned her face into the fog of his tea and pulled his gaze to hers. She demanded his eyes, locked hers to his. She kept touching him on the arm with her fingers as she talked.
His elbow too. A couple minutes later his forearm. A fleeting touch, only for a second. He felt himself shrinking back. “I know I can’t live this way forever,” she said, “but why not try is what I say. I don’t need to rush back to the grind. I have transformed myself. I can feel it deep inside. At first, I didn’t believe that true transformation was possible. I was destined to keep making the same mistakes. But that lack of faith in myself, that was my con. As long as I believed that, I had an excuse not to change.”
He inhaled the intense smell of roasting coffee, asked Tory what she had transformed from. He enjoyed the smell of coffee, but not the taste.
“A long story,” she said, as if she weren’t going to elaborate, but then she did. She married young, divorced young, and had a daughter named Gina, now in her twenties, who had accompanied her mother for the retreat, and had returned to Los Angeles earlier in the week. “Somehow I got myself an MBA from Stanford, a ticket that opened doors. I got in management young in the defense industry, cruised along, working my heinie off, and well, maybe you’ve experienced the bitchy boss. Hell on wheels? The perfectionist who makes everyone’s life miserable?”
“I know what you’re talking about.” Vera on a bad day.
“I had bosses like that at Hughes. It was an informal place, more like the dot com world than the military, but the work ethic was brutal. No baby-faced kids playing foosball in the break room. Hard driving. This one woman boss, she was vicious, mean, cold, competitive. She had to break you. Break me, because I was young and confident. She gave me assignments and then tore into my work. I could never understand how someone could be so horrible.”
She kept on smiling as she talked, her upper lip stretched high enough he could see the pink line of her gums above gleaming teeth.
“On the weekend, when I was drinking with friends, when I had friends, I would complain about her, and one friend would say that she must be miserable herself to put others through this. I didn’t care how miserable she was. There was no excuse for the way she treated me. Fast forward, I became her—the imperious bitch on the warpath. Hurricane Tory is what they called me. I had a ruthless rival in another division, nine people reporting to me, and they all hated me. My daughter was living with her father and I had grown tired of the succession of golden boys, young alpha males who would sweep me off my feet and well, these guys were the kind you think you want.”
“I have to warn you,” said Tomas, his fingertip to his chest. “That’s what they used to call me. Golden boy. Mostly my sister Bella.”
“One of these guys is a multi-millionaire now, barely forty years old. On his third company. It seems so simple looking back. I was scared I was going to fail. I was scared these incredibly bright people would find out I was in over my head. So I became a bloody terror. I wanted people to like me, but no one did.”
“I find that hard to believe.” Tomas could turn on the charm when he wanted to, but he had not allowed himself to do so since Vera vanished.
“I would still be on that path if it weren’t for these Benvenue seminars I started on in Santa Monica, and then here in New Mexico. Do I seem like a bitchy type-A person now?”
She held up her palm. “Don’t answer that.”
“You have the serenity of someone who has meditated for forty days and forty nights in the desert.”
“It hasn’t been that long, but yes, I escaped.”
--
Tomas had another meeting back in Albuquerque, so left Tory after an hour. He turned the radio off when he got on the interstate, so he could absorb more fully the events of the morning. The meeting with the campaign was already forgotten, but Tory had catapulted herself to the center of his universe. She took his breath away and terrified him at the same time. They had made a date for Saturday and he didn’t know how he could wait that long.
The thunder rumbled and the purple skies opened up as he sped through the outskirts of Santa Fe. He flipped the windshield wipers on high and slowed to about forty-five miles per hour. Ahead, in the lowlands, the skies were clear, so he could make up time once he descended from the mountains.
The fat raindrops fell with a fury, and then, as if unleashed by the storm, the painful feelings and images from his tumultuous marriage and Vera’s disappearance came flooding over him in waves.
Tory had cracked him wide open.
He knew he couldn’t hold on forever to the hope of Vera reappearing. To be honest, he no longer had hope. But he wasn’t ready to move on. His friends, his mother, even strangers on the street urged him to get on with his life, and he didn’t argue with them. His secretary Rosario assured him that there would be a line of women who wanted him once he decided he was ready. Maybe he finally was.
Vera wouldn’t let him go. Even now. He wanted to savor the easy conversation with Tory, relive the simple pleasure of watching her smile, feeling her fingers on his elbow. Memories of Vera pushed those thoughts aside.
He was surprised by the vividness and intensity of these feelings, which were not new by any means, but had faded from the inky darkness of that first year, ever so slowly, into translucence. But God, it had taken so long to climb out of that abyss.
There was one day in particular he recalled as the storm raged. Two months after he met Vera, they were play-acting a young house-hunting couple on a Sunday afternoon, strolling through obscenely expensive houses in the picturesque back streets off Canyon Road in Santa Fe. They were sizzling with desire then, couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and they stopped to make out under the shade of a leafy cottonwood, oblivious to passersby the way young lovers can be.
They stumbled on an open house listed at $1.4 million, which was, according to the flyer on the long elegant rosewood dining table, “perfect for part-time residents who demand living in a fabulous location.” The house was mostly one big room—a “great room,” the ad called it—with the kitchen, dining room, and living room all open to each other and one imposing rough-hewn wooden post in the middle holding up four intersecting beams in the ceiling. The room smelled of orange blossoms.
While he was feigning interest in the trusses and hardware, Vera called him in from the master bedroom, gushing about the quality of the light. Sí claro, this was Santa Fe. It was all about the light. A wall of french doors opened into a garden, and on the opposite wall was a kiva fireplace, framed in glossy rust and black tiles. Tomas nodded in interest, but was paying more attention to Vera than to the house, noticing her shapely legs as she leaned forward to run her hand across the sandstone hearth. I want her. Today, tomorrow, and forever. Oh God, do I want her.
But then Vera turned and berated him for not paying enough attention to the house-hunting process. She spoke in a low, seething voice so the real estate agent couldn’t hear the actual words, but loud and exasperating enough that she turned toward them anxiously as they walked back into the great room.
“This is such an incredible property,” said Vera, now addressing the agent, her voice earnest, plaintive. “It’s got everything on our wish list and then some, but my husband, my indecisive, vacillating, sorry-ass of a husband will not take this process seriously.”
The agent nodded her head, her lips pursed with a look of maternal concern.
“He’ll spend our hard-earned money on sports cars and ski trips and exquisite bottles of wine, and what’s not to like about a little luxury,” she said, and here her voice turned hard, “but there comes a time when a boy puts aside his childish things and becomes a man, and I’m still waiting.”
Tomas stood there with his mouth agape, wanting to interrupt, but not knowing what to say. Or feel. And wondering how far Vera would take this.
He gripped her by the arm and pulled her toward the door. “I’m sorry we’ve wasted your time,” he said to the agent.
Outside, when he asked her what that was all about, she silenced him with her baby finger on his lips and said, “Take me home right now and have your way with me.” They laughed and made love that afternoon, again that night, and then again sometime before dawn, fumbling and slipping and sliding in the dark, and it all seemed like a dream now, as if it never happened.
He knew he was going to marry her that night, and he also bolted awake at daybreak with a migraine building and sweat beading on his forehead, perhaps in anticipation of the roller-coaster ride ahead. He lay awake, his neck tight, his heart pounding in his temples like a sledgehammer on a rock pile while she slept soundly next to him. Luscious and naked under a silk sheet. Until that afternoon, he’d been worried that he was far more enamored of her than she was of him, so he was ecstatic when she referred to him as her husband, and perversely excited at how effortlessly she jumped past the marital bliss to condescending impatience. The lording tetchiness his mother so frequently expressed to his father—that was how he knew this was for real.
They married a year later, and he thought they were happy, but all too soon, her augury had come true and she was as short and belittling as she had been “acting” on that house-hunting foray in Santa Fe. Then one day she drove to Alamogordo to meet a client and never came home. The police found her car parked in a lot half a block from the law office where her meeting was scheduled. She never signed the visitor log. The guard never saw her. She never appeared on the video monitor in the lobby.
He still thought of Vera every day, but it was like listening to a CD that skipped—the same notes over and over again. Along came Tory Singer from Los Angeles, California, who shook that CD player and, with no warning, he was listening to music he’d never heard before, reliving painful memories with a new intensity, a new soundtrack. But also possibilities he had never let himself entertain.
A life after Vera. A new life. Imagine.