The Wives

‘Hey, Siri! Play “Yeah” by Usher!’ Harry called from the back of the Suburban. A chorus of cheers went up from the boys when Siri chirped, ‘Okay, playing “Yeah” by Usher,’ and the bass blasted through the speakers.

Karolina smiled. Never in a million years would she have thought having a car full of twelve-year-old boys could be fun. They were loud and rowdy and even sometimes smelled bad, yes. But Harry’s friends were also sweet and quick to laugh and made an attempt at manners, at least when she was around. They were good kids from nice families, and once again she felt grateful for the move that had taken them from New York – the city of social land mines – to Bethesda, where everyone seemed a little more easygoing.

Sweet boy, Karolina thought for the thousandth time as she sneaked a look at Harry from the rearview mirror. Every day he was starting to look more and more like a teenager: broadening shoulders, dark fuzz above his lip, a smattering of pimples on his cheeks. But just as often he seemed like a little boy, as likely to spend an hour playing with Lego as texting with his friends. Harry was outgoing and confident, like his father, but he had a softer, more sensitive side too. Right around the time they moved to Bethesda, Harry started asking Graham more about his late mother: where she and Graham had met, what she liked to read, how she’d felt when she was pregnant with him. And always Graham put him off, promising to tell Harry about his mother later. Later, when he was finished with a report he needed to read. Later, that weekend, when they had more free time. Later, during their ski vacation, because his mother had loved to ski. Later, later, later. Karolina wasn’t sure if it was laziness or avoidance or genuine pain causing Graham to put off his son, but she knew Harry needed answers. It took her nearly three days while Graham was at work and Harry at school to assemble all the scattered pictures and letters and clippings she could find, but when she presented Harry with the memory box of his mom, his relief and joy made every minute worthwhile. She reassured Harry that his mom would always be his mom, and that it was okay to talk about her and remember her, and Karolina’s big, strong tween had collapsed into her arms like a kindergartener returning from his first day away from home.

‘Guess what?’ Nicholas, a lanky lacrosse player with shaggy blond hair, called from the third row. ‘My dad got us tickets to the ’Skins/Eagles game next weekend. First playoff game. Who’s in?’

The boys hooted.

‘Hey, Mom, do you think Dad will take me?’ Harry asked.

‘My dad said tickets weren’t that expensive,’ Nicholas said.

Karolina forced herself to smile, though the boys couldn’t see her in the driver’s seat. ‘I’m sure he’d love that,’ she lied, and sneaked a peek at Harry to see if he could hear it in her voice. Despite the fact that Harry was passionate about professional football in general and the Redskins specifically – and Graham, as a sitting U.S. senator, could name his seats anywhere in the stadium – father and son had never attended a game together. Every year Graham swore to Karolina and Harry that they’d sit in the owner’s box, fly to an important away game, or invite a bunch of Harry’s friends and get seats on the fifty-yard line, and every year another season went by without the Hartwell boys in attendance. Harry had been to a game exactly once, two years earlier, when Karolina took pity on him and bought tickets off StubHub. He’d been thrilled and cheered like crazy in his head-to-toe gear, but she knew he would have preferred to go with Graham: Karolina had unknowingly gotten tickets on the visitor side, and she couldn’t totally follow who had the ball, and in spite of her best intentions, she kept cheering at the wrong times.

‘Mom! Hey, Mom!’ Harry interrupted her thoughts. ‘There are cop cars behind us with their lights on.’

‘Hmmm?’ Karolina murmured, more to herself. She glanced in the rearview and saw two police cruisers with their lights ablaze, so close to the Suburban that they were nearly pushing up against the bumper. ‘My goodness, it must be important. Okay, okay, give me a second,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m moving over.’

She was grateful Harry was safely beside her, because she always got nervous when she saw an emergency vehicle in her neighborhood. Their house might be on fire, but so long as Harry was safely in her sight, she could deal with anything. She put on her blinker and eased the unwieldy truck onto the side of the road as gracefully as she could, sending a silent apology to the Crains, who lived five doors down and owned the beautiful lawn her tires were probably digging up. Only the cruisers didn’t quickly pass her on the left, as she’d expected; they too pulled to the side and came to a stop directly behind her truck.

‘Ohhh, Mrs. Hartwell, you’re busted!’ Stefan, another of Harry’s friends, yelled as all the boys laughed. Karolina did too.

‘Yes, you know me,’ Karolina said. ‘Going twenty in a residential neighborhood. Crazy!’ She watched in the rearview as the officers stood next to her license plate and appeared to type it into an iPad-like device. Good, she thought. They would see the United States government plates that were on all three of their cars, and this whole silly thing would be over.

But the two officers who approached her window weren’t laughing. ‘Ma’am? Is this your vehicle?’ asked the female officer, while the male cop stood behind her and watched.

‘Yes, of course,’ Karolina said, wondering why they’d ask her such a ridiculous question. She was driving it, wasn’t she? ‘Officer, I really don’t think I was speeding. We literally just pulled out of the driveway. See? We live right back there. I’m just taking my son’s friends—’

The female cop looked hard at Karolina and said, ‘I’ll need your license and registration, please.’

Karolina checked the woman’s face. She wasn’t kidding. Karolina carefully removed her driver’s license from her wallet and was relieved to find the car’s registration tucked neatly in the glove compartment. ‘I, um, as you may recognize the name from my license there … I am actually married to Senator Hartwell,’ Karolina said, giving her best smile. She wasn’t usually one to name-drop, but then again, she wasn’t usually being pulled over by angry-looking cops.

The male officer furrowed his eyebrows. ‘Ma’am, have you been drinking?’

Karolina was vaguely aware of the boys going quiet with this question, and her mind flashed back to an hour earlier, when she’d deliberately opened a bottle of Graham’s outrageously expensive cabernet that he’d been buying by the case lately. Harry and his friends had been polishing off pizzas, and of course she’d known she’d be driving them home shortly, so she’d had half a glass. If that. She hadn’t even wanted it, really, but it had been satisfying to open the bottle and know that it would likely go bad before Graham got home from New York. He’d asked to join him for a New Year’s dinner at a friend’s penthouse in Manhattan, but Karolina didn’t want to leave Harry behind on New Year’s Eve. She’d been upset that he’d gone without her, although she wasn’t completely surprised.

Summoning her most dazzling smile and her most direct eye contact, she said, ‘Officers, I have children in the car. I assure you that I have not been drinking. I didn’t think I was speeding either, but I suppose it’s possible. If so, I’m very sorry about that.’

At the mention of children, the male officer took his flashlight and began walking the perimeter of the car. He didn’t seem to care that the light was shining directly in the boys’ eyes. Karolina could see them all squint.

‘Mom, what’s happening?’ Harry asked, sounding nervous.

‘Nothing, honey. I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding. Just let them do what they need to do.’

With this, the male officer called to the female officer and gestured to something with his flashlight. They exchanged looks. Karolina felt her heart do a little flip-flop, though there wasn’t a reason in the world she should be nervous.

‘Mrs. Hartwell, please get out of the car. Slowly,’ the female officer said.

‘Excuse me?’ Karolina asked. ‘Why on earth would I get out of my car? I’m not even wearing a coat—’

‘Now!’ the male cop barked, and it became immediately clear that this wasn’t a routine traffic stop.

Karolina jumped out of the driver’s seat so quickly that she didn’t bother to use the running board, and as a result she twisted her ankle and had to grab the door to keep from falling.

The officers exchanged another look.

‘Mrs. Hartwell, we have observed both reckless driving and empty bottles of alcohol in the backseat of your vehicle. Keeping your arms down by your sides, please walk in the middle of the street for a distance of approximately twenty feet. Our officers are stationed down the road, so there will be no oncoming traffic.’

‘Wait – you found what? In my car? You must be mistaken,’ Karolina said, trying not to shiver. ‘My husband is going to be livid when he finds out about this!’

The female officer gestured toward the very road Karolina lived on, now slick with rain, and motioned for her to walk. Immediately and without thinking, Karolina wrapped her arms around her chest to keep warm in her too-flimsy silk blouse and began to stride confidently toward her house. If there was one thing Karolina could do better than nearly anyone else on earth, it was work a catwalk. But what she hadn’t expected was seeing her neighbors’ doors and curtains open, their familiar faces squinted toward her, recognition dawning on their features as they realized who was performing a field sobriety test like a common criminal on their beautiful, quiet street.

Is that Mrs. Lowell? Karolina wondered, seeing an elderly woman peek out behind a crisp linen curtain. I didn’t realize she was visiting now. I can’t believe she’s seeing me like this. Karolina could feel her cheeks start to color despite the cold, and somehow she must have missed the small pothole in the road, because the next thing she knew, she’d stumbled and nearly fallen.

‘Did you see that?’ Karolina said to the officers, who were watching her closely. ‘We’ve been telling the town forever that this road is badly in need of repair.’

They gave each other that look again. Without a word exchanged, the male cop approached Karolina and said, ‘Ma’am, you’re under arrest for suspicion of driving while under the influence. You have the right to remain—’

‘Wait – what?’ Karolina shrieked, before noticing that Harry had stuck his head out of the Suburban’s window and was intently watching the entire scene. ‘Under arrest?’

‘— silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to …’

The words were familiar, of course. So many police procedurals she’d watched with Graham, and nights of Law & Order marathons in her single days, but who knew they actually said those things in real life? Was this actually happening? It seemed so surreal: one moment she was just another mom driving home her son’s friends, and then next she was being escorted into the backseat of a police cruiser.

‘Wait, excuse me! Sir! Listen please, I can’t just leave the children in the car!’ Karolina called as the car door slammed closed. She was alone in the backseat, entirely cut off from the world with a thick layer of presumably bulletproof glass.

The officer’s voice came through some sort of speaker. ‘Officer Williams will look after your son and his friends and ensure that everyone gets home safely. I’ll be taking you to the station now.’

The engine started, and with it, the sirens went on. She couldn’t hear Harry, but she could see that he was screaming ‘Mom’ and trying very hard not to cry. Hand against the window, she mouthed to him, ‘Don’t worry, everything’s fine,’ but Karolina knew he couldn’t see. With lights and sirens blaring in the quiet night, the cruiser pulled away from Karolina’s son.

‘How dare you!’ she screamed at the officer, before noticing a camera with a blinking light mounted in the corner right above her window, but the officer didn’t so much as glance up. Never in her life had she felt so completely helpless. So totally alone.

They hadn’t allowed Karolina a phone call until nearly two hours after she’d been arrested. Was that even legal? she wondered, trying to keep calm. At least the woman officer had come by the holding room to tell Karolina that Harry and his friends were all home. The parents of the boys had each come to the station to retrieve their sons, and when Graham didn’t answer his phone, Harry had suggested they call his grandmother Elaine, who had swept in to take Harry back to her house. Karolina was relieved that Harry was safe, but she was filled with dread at the idea of retrieving him from her mother-in-law.

‘My husband isn’t answering,’ Karolina said to the officer overseeing her phone call.

He was slumped over a desk filling out paperwork. He shrugged without looking up. ‘Try someone else.’

‘It’s almost midnight on New Year’s Eve,’ Karolina said. ‘Who am I supposed to call to come pick me up in the middle of the night from the local police station?’

With this, the officer looked up. ‘Pick you up? No, sorry, Mrs. Hartwell. You’ll be staying here tonight.’

‘You can’t be serious!’ Karolina said, nearly certain he was joking.

‘Strict orders from above. All DUIs have to sober up for at least five hours before they can be released. And we only do releases between the hours of seven a.m. and midnight, so I’m afraid you’re out of luck.’

‘Do I look drunk to you?’ Karolina asked him.

The officer glanced up. He looked barely old enough to buy beer, and the blush that spread across his neck didn’t help. ‘Sorry, ma’am. Those are the rules.’

She dialed the only other number she had memorized. Trip, who was their family lawyer and Graham’s best friend, answered on the first ring.

‘Lina? Where did you say you’re calling from?’ he asked groggily. Leave it to Trip to be asleep before midnight.

‘You heard me, Trip. The local drunk tank at the Bethesda County Jail. Sorry to wake you, but I figured you’d understand. I tried Graham, but he’s nowhere to be found. Surprise, surprise.’

Trip and Graham had been roommates at Harvard Law and best men at each other’s weddings and were godparents to each other’s children. She’d always thought of Trip as almost an extension of Graham, an extra set of eyes and ears, an acceptable substitute, a brother figure. Usually they shared a warm, mutual affection. But tonight she didn’t even try to mask her displeasure that she was talking to Trip and not Graham.

‘Can you please get me out of this hellhole?’ she whispered into the phone. ‘They said they won’t let me out of here until morning, but that can’t be possible.’

‘Sit tight. I’ll call a few people and get this sorted out,’ Trip said with reassuring confidence.

‘Hurry, please.’

But either he didn’t hurry or there was nothing he could do, because Karolina didn’t speak to Trip again until he showed up to bail her out at seven the following morning. Without Graham.

Trip read her face immediately. ‘Graham wanted to come, of course. I was the one who advised against it.’

Karolina took a seat in one of the plastic chairs next to Trip. Her entire body ached from lying on a bench in the holding room – not a cell, exactly, more like an outdated boarding gate at an old airport.

‘I’m not an idiot, Trip. I understand pretty clearly that the optics of a sitting senator walking into a county jail to bail out his wife aren’t great. But you can’t blame me for wishing he’d done it anyway,’ Karolina said, trying to hold back tears. ‘Can you tell me what the hell is going on?’

Trip’s cell phone bleated, and he silenced it without looking at the screen. ‘I’m going to be honest with you, Lina. This is a first-rate shit show.’

‘You think I don’t know that? I’m the one who slept in jail last night. In jail. And where is my husband?’

Trip’s brow furrowed. He cleared his throat. ‘Lina, it’s not—’

Karolina held up her hand. ‘Don’t. First I want to know who has Harry. Who’s getting him to school?’

Another throat clear. Karolina almost felt bad for directing her anger with Graham at Trip. Almost. He looked so miserable. ‘Harry stayed the night at Elaine’s house.’

‘He’s still there?’

‘You know Harry called her when they arrested you last night. Naturally, some of the journalists picked up the story from the police scanner, and a few cameras were waiting outside your house when Elaine went to drop Harry off. She just kept driving and took him back to her place. The media has staked out your house, and we didn’t want to put him through that. At least now no one knows where he is.’

Karolina nodded. As much as she disliked her mother-in-law and the idea of her son having to hide out at Elaine’s house, she had to agree it sounded like the best option. ‘Fine. Now, how are we clearing up the rest of this nightmare? This is entrapment! False arrest! We should be talking lawsuit!’

Trip coughed, looked at Karolina, and coughed again.

‘Trip? What’s going on?’

‘It’s just that … Well, it’s complicated.’

‘Complicated? That’s a funny word. I would say confusing, perhaps. I’m certainly confused that I was arrested for drunk driving when I was not driving drunk. And even if I were driving drunk – which I absolutely was not – my husband happens to be a United States senator with more connections than a teenager on Instagram, and I know full well that if he wanted this to disappear, it would have already,’ Karolina hissed.

A garbled announcement came over the loudspeaker, and a female police officer hurried past them and out the front door.

‘Why don’t you take me through it, Lina? Tell me exactly what happened.’

It was only now, many hours into her ordeal, that Karolina felt like she may not be able to control her tears. She’d been stoic through the arrest and braver than even she would have predicted when she realized that no one was coming for her. But in the face of Trip’s familiar kindness, his obvious concern – even though it should have been her husband sitting there – it was all she could do not to weep.

‘Sorry,’ she said, swallowing a sob. ‘I’m just … overwhelmed.’

Trip cleared his throat. ‘Did you and Harry go out at all last night?’

‘Out? Of course not. I mean, only if you count running to the grocery store at about five to stock up on chips and salsa for the boys. He invited four friends over to hang out. I ordered them pizza, and they played Xbox and God knows what else twelve-year-old boys do. FaceTime girls? Each other? I don’t know. I’m not proud of it, but out of spite, I opened one of Graham’s thousand-dollar bottles of cabernet and poured myself half a glass. I knew that was all I was having, but it felt very satisfying to stick the barely drunk bottle into the fridge – he would have a heart attack when he saw it, and truthfully, I was looking forward to it. But that’s all I had. Half a glass.’

‘Okay, and then what?’

‘And then nothing! The boys wolfed down an entire Carvel ice cream cake in like thirty seconds, and they all piled into the Suburban around nine-thirty. Before I got to Billy Post’s house less than a mile away, two cop cars appeared out of nowhere. Full lights and sirens, like a real emergency. I pulled over to let them pass, but then they came up to my window.’

Trip nodded as though Karolina were confirming a script he already knew. ‘What did they say?’

‘They asked if I’d been drinking. When I said of course not, they said I was driving very erratically. Which is ridiculous, because I was actually driving very slowly in our residential neighborhood.’

‘They said they saw empty bottles of champagne rolling around in the back of the Suburban.’ Trip said this quietly, looking down at his hands.

‘Oh, did they? Well, that’s impossible. Because I don’t even like champagne. Neither does Graham. It gives us both headaches—’ She paused. Unless the kids had gotten into it? Karolina scrunched her nose in consideration. Was it possible? Twelve was hardly too young to try sneaking alcohol for the first time. Was she being delusional in thinking Harry would never try a drink? No, she knew her kid. She knew he’d be exactly like every other teenager and experiment with all kinds of things, but she was also positive that he wasn’t there yet. And even if she was completely off-base and the boys had gotten into Graham’s prized wine cellar, there was no way five twelve-year-old boys could even open a bottle of champagne undetected, much less polish off two bottles. She remembered back to the night before. Both Harry and his friends had all seemed completely normal: rowdy, yes, but certainly sober. ‘No. That wasn’t it. I have no idea how the bottles got there.’

Trip placed his palm over the top of her hand, and it felt warm, comforting. ‘I’m so sorry, Lina. This can’t be easy.’

All it took was that small expression of sympathy for the tears to start freely flowing again. Karolina was certain she had dragonlike streams of mascara running down her cheeks, but considering she’d just spent the night in jail, she figured it wasn’t the worst of her appearance problems.

‘But here’s the part that makes absolutely no sense. They brought me back here. Then without giving me a Breathalyzer or anything, they throw me in that room for the night. On what grounds? Empty bottles in my car? How is that even allowed?’

Trip’s phone rang again, and the force with which he pressed ‘decline’ startled her. He cleared his throat. ‘The police said you refused both the Breathalyzer and a follow-up offer of a blood test. Maryland is an implied-consent state, which means that by even having a driver’s license, you consent to be tested. Refusal to participate in all chemical testing immediately results in a DUI.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘I do mostly corporate work, Lina, you know that. Barely any litigation and certainly no criminal. But I did consult with a colleague before coming here, and he took me through the laws.’

‘No, I mean you can’t be serious that they’re saying I refused a Breathalyzer. It was the exact opposite, actually – I asked for one. Begged for one. I knew it would put this entire misunderstanding to rest if I could just …’

‘Lina? You know Graham and I will have the very best people on this. So long as we all stay calm, I know we will work through—’

The rest of his words garbled together as the repercussions of what had happened began to play slowly, full color, in her mind. She could practically see the headlines – SUPERMODEL–TURNED–SENATOR’S WIFE DRINKS WHILE DRIVING KIDDIES – and predict the intense media scrutiny and the humiliation of people believing she would do something like this. And Harry. Mostly Harry. Twelve-year-olds should be embarrassed by their stepmothers because of the jeans they wore, not because they were arrested for driving a car full of kids around drunk.

Then another feeling, one that surprised her with its brute strength: a yearning for her husband that was so visceral, it nearly took her breath away. How had they gotten here? To a place where she’d spent the night in jail and her husband – her lifelong partner – had left her there and then sent his friend to retrieve her in the morning. No, this couldn’t be right. Something was going on, something out of their control. Yes, there had been some distance lately. She’d felt more disconnected from Graham than usual. There was less intimacy. She even suspected he might be cheating on her again. But this was Graham. The man who had made meticulous arrangements to ensure her entire extended family’s financial security. The person who told her at least ten times a day how gorgeous she was. She could remember their wedding like it was yesterday. The vibrant green vineyards had provided a gorgeous backdrop to the unexpected rain, which might have ruined the day for another couple, but not for them. They’d barely noticed, they were so wrapped up in dancing and laughing and each other. She’d sat at their shared table and looked up at her strong, handsome husband as he thanked everyone for celebrating with them. When he’d turned to her and extended his hand, she could see the tears in his eyes, and the toast he gave was so clearly heartfelt and true. And now this.