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ChapterFive
Brennan
Then
Does any president sleep on their first night in the White House?
I bet not. I bet it’s one of those secrets former presidents share once they’re out of office and can trade stories about their days in the most exclusive club in the world. Did you sleep your first night? Nope. I didn’t sleep for the first week.
Of course, nearly all of them have, or had, families. It’s been over 160 years since there was an unwed president in the White House.
They all had spouses and children, lives that filled the Residence when they finally pulled back from the West Wing. Lives they could turn to, escape to, away from this job.
When I walked up those carpeted stairs, I walked into a wall of silence so heavy, so absolute, I heard my own blood pumping. The carpet shifted beneath the leather of my shoes. Every breath I took was as loud as a train.
Dinner was a club sandwich, and it arrived on a silver tray with a side salad, still-warm potato chips, and a crystal glass of ice water in the formal dining room, at the head of a twelve-foot-long table.
Tealights flickered in glass candleholders. Eight feet of roses in low-cut arrangements lined the center of the grand table. It was devastatingly gorgeous. Romantic, even. But the clink of my silverware and the ding of my crystal water glass echoed far too loudly, and I bailed after eating only half my sandwich.
Reese said this would be an adjustment.
Maybe so, but I don’t think I’ll ever be used to the emptiness of the executive mansion and the way this house almost haunts itself.
I’ve never liked the empty spaces in large homes. They only put an exclamation point on the holes in my own life, and the place beside me where someone warm and wonderful could be.
In California, I shunned the governor’s mansion for a high-rise condo in downtown Sacramento, and I kept my father’s place in San Francisco that I lived in when I was mayor.
That little home in the Presidio has been my life’s cornerstone. I made all my biggest decisions there, listening to the cries of the gulls and the rumble of the Pacific, or with the silent shroud of the fog wrapping its arms around me. I decided to leave for my first humanitarian mission while I watched the waves crash on Baker Beach, and I decided to stay in the United States and attempt to fix the brokenness I’d found in the world while I walked from one end of the Golden Gate to the other.
And it was there I fell head over heels for the first time in my life. I was in high school, and I held hands with a boy two years older than me. We shared a joint before making out on the frigid sands edging the Bay.
He put certainty in my mind, taught my hands and my lips the truth of who I longed to caress and kiss.
Ten years later, on that walk across the Golden Gate, I told myself I would put those desires away for good.
How far could my dreams extend, I’d wondered. I wanted to try to scrape this broken globe back together, but, at least back then, who I was put a hard limit on how far I could go. There was never a future where who I wanted and what I yearned to dream into existence could ever coexist.
Was helping people worth a quiet life and sacrificing the chance of a relationship? If I could help change the world in some meaningful way, make this a better place for others, did it matter that I was lonely?
It’s been years. Decades. So long that I thought I’d starved these desires, or that part of me had withered away.
Not in this life, but your next one. It’s a whisper that’s helped me through the long nights when my arm reaches across the cold mattress and questions rise like flames. Loneliness has no bottom.
In this life, I’m not meant to find love.
A dusting of snow gathers on the edges of the windowpane in the West Sitting Hall. My breath fogs the glass when I rest my forehead against it.
Stillness isn’t the answer. Stillness spins webs of what-ifs inside me. Nights like this, I end up pacing, trying to escape my descending thoughts. Up and down I go, one foot falling in front of the other for the length of the Center Hall, until I find the staircase going to the third floor of the Residence.
The third floor was the old White House attic, and it’s less opulent, more creaky. The ceilings are slanted, and the rooms are dark. Winter moonlight spills through a glass door at the far end of one black hallway.
That door takes me outside to the Promenade, a porch with a chest-high solid railing meant to shield presidents from eyeballs and bullets alike.
It’s like I’ve been dropped into the bottom of a moat. All I can see are the stars above me.
Voices murmur in the darkness, far too close. My heart lodges in my throat. Reese said—
A red flashlight flips on, pooling on the ground in front of me. “Mr. President.”
