Gwendy’s Final Task

19

AS SPRING APPROACHED, GWENDY threw herself into the 2020 Senate campaign with what Wolf Blitzer from CNN described as “fevered abandon.” Even with the coronavirus raging across the country—with more than 175,000 and counting confirmed deaths by mid-August—she spent the majority of her days and nights connecting face-to-face with the people of Maine. Masked, she visited hospitals and schools, daycare centers and nursing homes, churches and factories. While the incumbent (and defiantly unmasked) Paul Magowan focused the majority of his attention on big business and corporate incentives and continued to hammer strict borders and the Second Amendment, Gwendy went straight to the people and their day-to-day struggles and concerns. Tip O’Neill once said “All politics are local,” and she believed that. Any place of commerce or education that would have her—as long as masks and social distancing were in place—she went. She even spent a blisteringly hot August afternoon walking door-to-door in Derry. At one house, a man in a wife-beater tee told her “to get outta my face, you fucking harpy.” It made the news, with the obscenity bleeped … for all the good that might do.

When she came down with a 102-degree fever and a nasty bout of diarrhea a few days later, most members of her campaign committee were convinced that she’d finally caught the virus and this would mean the end of her run. But, as often was the case, they underestimated her. A negative test and two days of bed rest later, Gwendy was back out on the road and speaking to the men and women stationed at Bath Iron Works. She told a couple of “old Maineah” jokes, which got big laughs. Her favorite was the one about moose-shit pie. In the current version, she changed the name of the lumber crew’s cook to Magowan.

Gwendy’s father—who’d moved to the first floor of the Castle Rock Meadows Nursing Home earlier in the summer—worried about his daughter, and told her so on more than one occasion. He faithfully watched her appearances on the morning and evening news programs and spoke to her almost every night on the telephone, but he couldn’t convince her to slow down. Brigette Desjardin—now taking care of Pippa, Alan Peterson’s elderly dachshund—pleaded with her best friend to make time to see a grief counselor, insisting that she was self-medicating with her hectic work schedule, but Gwendy wouldn’t hear of it. She had places to go and people to see and undecided voters to win over. Even Pete Riley, the driving force behind Gwendy’s Senate run, grew concerned after awhile and tried to talk her into easing up. She refused.

“You got me into this. No backing out now.”

“But—”

“But nothing. If you don’t want me to block your number—which would be bad, with you being my campaign manager, and all—let me do my thing.”

That was the end of that.

What her family and friends and work colleagues didn’t understand was that the engine driving her wasn’t grief over Ryan’s tragic death. Yes, she was still sad and lonely and maybe even clinically depressed, but if there was one thing Gwendy had learned during her lifetime it was that you had to move on; honor the dead by serving the living, as her mentor Patsy Follett used to say. Nor was it an inflated sense of political importance. It was the button box, of course, still hidden away on the top shelf in her garage. One day soon she would have to step up and save the world. It was ridiculous, it was absurd, it was surreal … and it seemed to be true.

On the last Friday of August, new poll numbers came out showing Gwendy only seven points behind Paul Magowan. This was cause for mighty celebration, according to an ecstatic Pete Riley and the rest of the Maine Democratic Committee. Many members of the media attributed the surge to a wave of sympathy for the recently widowed challenger. Gwendy knew that was some of it but not all of it. She was reaching out to people and a surprising number were reaching back.

By late September, the gap had narrowed to five and Gwendy realized that people weren’t just listening—they were starting to believe. As Pete Riley had predicted more than a year ago during that first exploratory meeting, the tightening poll numbers soon snagged Paul Magowan’s attention and his campaign began to play dirty. Step One was an updated series of television spots highlighting the proliferation of profane language and explicit sex scenes in several of Gwendy’s novels. “I guess they’re not big on originality,” Gwendy snarked to the press after one campaign appearance. “I thought they already ran with the ‘Peterson Is A Pervert’ angle last August?”

She wasn’t nearly as flippant two weeks later when a follow-up commercial aired on prime time television, depicting Gwendy’s late husband as a raging anarchist, offering as proof a photograph of Ryan standing next to a burning American flag on a riot-ravaged urban street, as well as his arrest two years earlier at a Chicago protest. What the ad failed to mention was that Ryan had been in Chicago on a work assignment for Time magazine, had stopped to take photographs of the burning flag and rioters, and despite having proper press credentials displayed in plain view, had been taken into custody. In the Magowan campaign photo, the credential hanging around Ryan’s neck had been artfully blurred out. Nor did the Magowan ads say anything about any charges being almost immediately dropped.

From there it only got worse. The third wave of TV and radio ads shined a glaring spotlight on Paul Magowan’s large and successful family—five children, three boys and two girls, plus sixteen grandchildren; all of whom still called the state of Maine their home—and questioned the fact that Gwendy had never had any children of her own.

“If Gwendy Peterson is such a true believer of the good things in this state and country—as she so often claims—then why hasn’t she bothered to bring new life into it? Too busy writing smut and jet-setting around the world?”

As recently as a decade ago, such a despicable ad would have torpedoed any chance of Paul Magowan holding onto his Senate seat. But this was a brave new world, populated by a brand new breed of seemingly shameless GOP candidates.

When Gwendy’s father saw the commercial for the first time during Game Three of the American League Divisional series, he became so enraged he climbed out a first-floor window at the nursing home and tried to call a taxi to pick him up. When one of the counselors escorted him back inside a short time later and asked where he had planned to go, Mr. Peterson responded, “To Magowan’s campaign headquarters to whup his fat ass.”

Gwendy reacted much more diplomatically, at least in pubic, largely because, at the age of 58, she’d already had years to come to terms with the reality of the situation. She’d always adored children and wanted kids of her own one day, even before she’d met Ryan and fallen in love. For years after they were married, they tried with no success. It was the fault of neither. They visited the right doctors and took the right tests, and the results always came back the same: Gwendy Peterson and Ryan Brown were two immensely healthy human beings and according to the rules of medical science, perfectly capable of producing healthy children. But for some reason, despite all the trying—and they tried a lot during those early years—it never happened.

There was a time, not long after the final artificial insemination attempt proved unsuccessful, that Gwendy, alone in the silence of her bedroom, broke down and allowed the tidal wave of grief and anger to crash over her. She’d kicked and screamed and thrown things. Later, after the crying stopped and she’d cleaned up the mess, she called her mother to share the sad news. Mrs. Peterson told her what she always told her: “God works in mysterious ways, Gwendy. I don’t understand why this is happening any more than you do, but we have to put our faith in the Lord’s hands.” And then she added, “I’m so sorry, honey. If anyone in this world deserves to be parents, it’s you and Ryan.”

Gwendy thanked her mom and hung up the telephone. She walked to the bedroom window overlooking the front yard and street below, and watched as a young curly-haired boy pedaled a bright yellow bicycle past their house. She watched until he disappeared around the corner.

“I understand why this is happening,” she said to the empty house around her. “I think I always have and just didn’t want to admit it. It’s because of the button box. I was only a stupid kid, but I took and I took and I took. And now it’s the box’s turn.”

In October 2020, with mail-in voting underway and physical voting sites opening their doors in just under three weeks, Gwendy Peterson and Paul Magowan met at the Bangor Civic Center for a long-anticipated televised debate. For ninety minutes, the incumbent Senator was rude, arrogant, and condescending, the same behavior that had gotten him elected just four years earlier. His challenger was humble, well spoken, and polite. Except for one fleeting moment in her closing remarks, when she turned to face her opponent and said, “And as for my late husband, you sir, may try your very best to disparage his good name and reputation, but you know and I know and every person sitting in this auditorium and watching from home on television knows, that you, Senator Magowan, are not enough of a man to shine Ryan Brown’s shoes or wash the sweat out of his dirty jock strap.”

The majority of the audience in attendance roared their approval and rewarded Gwendy with a standing ovation as she walked off the debate stage. When the new poll numbers came out early the next morning, Magowan’s lead had shrunk to a paltry three points.

But even with such impressive results, Gwendy knew it would take a miracle to overcome a three percent deficit in as many weeks. There were no more debates on the docket, and after the public drubbing he’d taken, little chance that Magowan would agree to add one. Word on the street was that he planned to lay low for the rest of the campaign and lick his wounds until election night when he would resurface and take the stage to accept a surprisingly narrow victory. Gwendy had events planned for every day leading up to the election—sometimes two or three in the same twelve hour block—but even taken as a whole, she knew it wasn’t enough to move the needle three percentage points. They were simply running out of time.

Gwendy believed there was only one sure-fire way to guarantee a miracle, and it was sitting on a shelf inside her garage at home in Castle Rock. Over the course of the next two weeks—usually while tossing and turning in one hotel bed or another; after awhile, they all looked and smelled the same—there were at least half a dozen instances where she convinced herself that pulling out the button box was the right thing to do. Presto! Push the red button and make Paul Magowan disappear like a rabbit in a magician’s hat! But each time, her conscience and Richard Farris’s words of warning stopped her: You must resist. Don’t touch the button box or even take it out of the canvas bag unless absolutely necessary. Every time you do it will get more of a hold on you.

And then, on the Thursday night before Election Day, Gwendy got her miracle.

Like most of his longtime GOP counterparts, Paul Magowan’s bread and butter constituency was made up of Pro-Life, Pro-Religion, Pro-Build-The-Wall, loud and proud NRA members. As a proclaimed Christian and father of five, he spoke often and passionately of his abhorrence of the ungodly and downright evil practice of abortion. He called the doctors that performed such procedures “soulless butchers” and “devils in blood-smeared white coats.”

On that Thursday evening word leaked to the national press that a front page article in the next morning’s edition of the Portland Press-Herald would be outlining in great detail and providing written documentation that proved Paul Magowan had not only had a year long dalliance with a young woman from his local church, but that he’d also paid—using illegal campaign funds, no less—for her to abort their unborn child.

Magowan’s campaign immediately scheduled a late night news conference to try to get ahead of the story. But it was too late. The ball had already dropped—right on top of Magowan’s arrogant and hypocritical bald head—and started rolling downhill. Fast.

When the final votes were tallied a few days later, New York Times bestselling author Gwendy Peterson became Senator Elect of the great state of Maine. She won by a margin of four points, which meant that thousands of full-time residents had still punched their ticket for Paul Magowan.

Life in America, Gwendy thought when she contemplated all those Magowan votes. Life in pandemic America.