Gwendy’s Final Task

7

THIS IS THE THIRD time the button box has come into Gwendy Peterson’s life. The first time it was in a canvas bag with a drawstring top. The second time she found it in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in her Washington D.C. office. During her freshman term as Maine’s second district Representative, that was. The third time was in 2019, while she was running for the Senate, a campaign that Democratic Committee insiders felt had as much chance of succeeding as the Charge of the Light Brigade. Each time it was brought by a man who always dressed in jeans, a white shirt, a black suitcoat, and a small bowler hat. His name was Richard Farris. On the first occasion, the button box was in her possession all through her adolescence. On the second, her custodianship was much shorter, but she believed it saved her mother’s life (Alicia Peterson died in 2015, years after cancer should have killed her).

The third time was … different. Farris was different.

Gwendy retired from the House of Representatives in 2012, although she could have gone on getting elected well into her eighties, perhaps even into her nineties, if she had so chosen. “You’re like Strom Thurmond,” Pete Riley, head of the Maine Democratic Committee once told her. “You could have gone on getting re-elected even after you were dead.”

“Please, no comparisons to that guy,” Gwendy had said.

“Okay, how about John Lewis? Whoever you use for a comparison—hell, Margaret Chase Smith from right up the road in Skowhegan spent thirty-three years in D.C.—the point is the same: you’re the fabled automatic. And we need you.”

But what Gwendy needed to do was write books. Fiction was her first love. She had published only five novels, and time was marching on. Retirement from public service opened up that side of her life and made her happy in a way life under the Capital Dome never had. She published Bramble Rose in 2013 and then, in 2015, a serial killer novel called Desolation Street. That one, featuring a charming maniac who harvested the teeth of his victims, was set in D.C. but based on certain events in her hometown.

She was considering another book, one full of romance and family secrets, when Donald Trump was elected president. Many in Maine’s Second District rejoiced, feeling the Washington swamp would be drained, the budget would be balanced, and the flood of “bad hombre” illegal immigrants from South America would finally be dammed up. For lifelong Democrats—the kind of people who avoided Fox News as if it might give them rabies—it was the beginning of a four-year nightmare. Gwendy’s own father, perhaps the most apolitical member of the Democratic Party in the entire state of Maine, looked at Gwendy with sober eyes the day after the election and said, “This is going to change everything, Gwennie. And probably not in a good way.”

She was deep into the novel, this one set in Maine at the time of the Bradley Gang massacre in Derry, when Pete Riley came to see her again. The poor man looked as if he’d lost 20 pounds between election night in 2016 and that early winter day a little over two years later. He kept it simple and he kept it brief. He wanted Gwendy to run against Paul Magowan for the Senate in 2020, which he called “the year of perfect eyesight.” He said only Gwendy would have a chance of beating the Republican businessman, who expected his campaign to be little more than a formality on the way to a foregone conclusion.

“If nothing else, you could slow his roll and give some hope to all the good folks suffering TD.”

“Which is what?”

“Trump Depression. Come on, Gwendy, open your mind to this. Give it fair consideration.”

Fair consideration was one of her trademark phrases, used at least once at every town hall gathering during her political career. If Pete expected it to turn the key in her lock, he was disappointed. “You’re joking. You have to be. Aside from the fact that I’m writing a new book—”

“And I’m sure it will be as good or better than the others,” Pete said, flashing his most winning Clark Gable smile.

“Don’t bother blowing smoke up my skirt,” Gwendy said (who that day was wearing a pair of old Levis). “Better men than you have tried and failed. What I was going to say is that aside from the new book, where there’s a lot of hot sex that I’m enjoying vicariously, that idiot Magowan won by fifteen points in ’14. And after spending two years with his lips firmly attached to Donald Trump’s ass, he’s got an 80 percent approval rating.”

“Bullshit,” Pete said. “Republican propaganda. You know it is.”

“I know nothing of the kind, but let’s say it is. I was quite popular during my run in the house, I’ll give you that, but memories are short. Magowan is the man of the hour and I’m the woman of yesterday. There’s a tide in politics, and right now it’s running strong conservative. You know that as well as I do. I probably wouldn’t lose by fifteen points, but I’d lose.”

Pete Riley went to the window of Gwendy’s small study and looked out with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. “Okay,” he said, not looking at her. “Barring a miracle, you’d lose. I think we’ve settled that point. So lose. Make a pretty concession speech about how the voters have spoken but the fight continues and blah blah blah. Then you can go back to writing about Derry, Maine in the 1930s. But this isn’t the ’30s, it’s 2018, and you know what?”

He turned back to her like a good defense attorney addressing the jury.

“Yeat’s blood-dimmed tide is also running. People are turning away from women’s rights, from science, from the very notion of equality. They’re turning away from truth. Politics aside, somebody needs to stand up and make them look at all the stuff it’s easier and more comfortable not to believe in. You always did that, always. I’m asking you to do it again.”

“To be your noble Joan of Arc and let the good people of Maine burn me at the stake?”

“Nobody is going to burn you alive,” Pete said … not knowing that eight years later Gwendy would be atop a flaming torch called Eagle Heavy and more than half-expecting to be transformed into superheated atoms at any moment. “You’re going to lose an election. But in the meantime, you could make that fat prick Magowan sweat bullets. Get him on the debate stage and make people see that he’s sticking up for ideas that aren’t just bad, they’re unworkable and downright dangerous. Then you can go back to writing your books.”

Gwendy had been ready to be angry with Pete, but she saw he was at least partly right. She was being melodramatic. Which, she supposed, went with writing fiction full of secrets and hot sex. “Take one for the team, in other words. Would that be accurate?”

He gave her the big Clark Gable grin. “Hole in one.”

“Let me think about it,” she’d said.

Probably a mistake.