GRACE FULLER TUCKER, former First Lady of Ohio, daughter of a prominent family from the Midwest and current First Lady of the United States, is resting on her side on a creaky bed with a thin mattress inside an old, rural building, her left hand throbbing from the pain of her severed pinky.
She doesn’t dare move.
Not at all.
She takes a deep breath, feels tears trickling down her cheeks. She’s cold, hungry, and thirsty. She’s still wearing her riding gear from two days ago—black stretch jodhpurs with stirrups, tan turtleneck sweater, and short black cotton jacket. Her boots have been stripped off and her helmet tossed aside.
Grace looks at her thick-bandaged left hand, again feeling the horror of seeing her arm stretched out, fastened so she couldn’t move, hearing the clink-clink of the instruments, looking away and thankful that at least some anesthesia had been administered. There had been that dull sensation, feeling the sawing movement, still looking away, her stomach cold and empty, and even throwing up and not being able to move.
So here she is.
Why is she here?
She thinks back and knows it’s because of the choices she’s made, even all those years ago, when she had attended a charity event at the Cleveland Clinic, where her family had been the primary sponsor, and a newly elected state senator called Harrison Tucker had caught her eye.
Decision.
She could have turned away from that smiling and charming face, gone somewhere else, but she had stayed.
Even with the Extra Strength Tylenol trying to do its work, the painful throbbing continues in her left small finger.
She had stayed.
Grace thinks that if she were to die in the next twenty-four hours, the inscription on her tombstone could read:
SHE STAYED.
Stayed with Harrison while he rose through the ranks of the Ohio State Senate, when he became a two-term governor, got his party’s nomination to be President, and then was the winner-takes-all, getting the keys nearly four years ago to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Oh, yes, she stayed, while he made promises, compromised, and made more promises. She had come along with him, her burgeoning career in education and early childhood development dying along the way, until she found herself in a place that had always horrified her—being a politician’s wife. The type of woman who laughed at bad jokes, who kept a smile on her face while slicing through yet another chicken dinner, and who would make small talk with thick men with smelly breath who had the ability to write huge checks to campaigns and PACs.
Then…her own illness. When, some years back, the annual mammogram—at the same Cleveland Clinic her father and now deceased mother were prominent in, ironically—had shown something suspicious, and then a follow-up had done the same, and then a needle biopsy had shown cancer cells, well, Governor Harrison Tucker, running in the primaries, had said all the right words, had made all the right gestures.
But that damn black slug Parker Hoyt, she had caught him meeting with Harrison, about the sympathy vote Harrison could count on when the news came out about her illness.
And that had been that. A nasty argument had ensued, and for once in her life, she had won a victory against Harrison and against being the perfect political wife, and she had suffered in silence during those months of surgery and chemo and the ultimate realization that she could never, ever bear children.
Grace hears footsteps outside of her cold and plain room.
Then there was the presidency, with the thoughts that she could circle around to where her life had once been, to really make a contribution to the health and safety of children—especially the ones who were homeless through no fault of their own—and that had been a four-year struggle of budget compromises, setbacks, and defeats.
Because she had stayed.
The door to her room creaks open.
A gruff male voice says, “I want to look at that hand.”
Grace doesn’t say a word, doesn’t move.
As she has always done, she stays.