Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 41

The day Doug announced his presidential run, the atmosphere at the rally felt less like an official political event and more like a carnival, or maybe one of those costumed Elizabethan fairs. There were vendors walking around shouting their offers of popcorn and hot dogs and crushed ice. A long line of pop-up souvenir shops bisected the parking lot and the event space. Every shop offered a different collectible version of my father-in-law: Christmas ornament Doug, T-shirt Doug, dinner plate Doug, bumper sticker Doug. By the look of it, all the shops had copyrighted the same official photo of Doug, which featured him looking much tanner and younger than he did in real life. Just beyond the souvenir stands, a long line of women and men were waiting for the porta-potties. One woman was wearing plastic sunglasses fashioned to spell out DOUG, her eyes behind the O and the U ; another man wore a shirt with a message in big block letters: Civil War Is Coming .

The man’s arms were folded. He was making jovial small talk with the DOUG-sunglasses woman in front of him in line. They both looked across the road at something, and I followed their gaze to see a man with a long beard standing on an overturned plastic milk crate, unfurling a poster with a message in all-caps Sharpie: Vote Mills to Save the Soul of America . “ Repent! ” he shouted to the people who walked past. “For He has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed—and that man, ladies and gentleman, is Doug Mills!”

The woman in the DOUG sunglasses whooped. A group of nearby men in matching motorcycle jackets gave a round of cheers, one man adding, “Hell yeah, brother!”

The man on the milk crate began to shout about the coming plague. “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed! Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…All these are the beginning of birth pains!”

There was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see Shannon. “Hey,” she said. “That bathroom line was crazy. The kids are almost done.” She followed my gaze to the man with the poster, who was now shouting about heroin in the drinking water. “Are Doug’s rallies usually like this?”

“No,” I murmured. “This is new.”

At that moment, a young mother walked past with her teenage daughter, and I caught half of their conversation. “—well, and if you think about what it means to be living in a city overrun with infected rodents…”

Oh.

I cast my gaze across the crowd with renewed awareness. It felt like I was stepping carefully through the small portal of Caleb’s computer screen and into the strange, alternate universe of his chat rooms. So this was who my husband was talking about when he mentioned his online buddies. So these were the things they spoke about: locusts and frogs and rats. A great cleansing plague.

It looked like Doug had finally found messaging that resonated.

Shannon said, “Did you hear what that woman just said about rats?”

I breastfed Junebug in the VIP bathroom, then handed her off to Nanny Louise. The nannies left with the children to mill around outside, and Shannon and I returned to the VIP room, which was filled to capacity. Each of Doug’s sons was here, along with their families. Doug had his arms opened to me, and I glided into his embrace. He gave me a tight hug, then clapped me hard on the back, enough to make me cough. I stepped back and looked at him curiously. He’d gotten a facelift, it seemed, and his teeth—had Doug gotten veneers?

“Great to have you,” he said strangely. “All of you, really.” He spun in a low circle. “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.” He pointed at Amelia. “You hungry, sweetheart? Need a water?”

Amelia was sitting in a folding chair in a tangerine-colored pantsuit that looked two sizes too big. She looked like a shriveled-up piece of fruit. Puckered and collapsing inward. “I’m fine,” she rasped. For a moment I saw not a face but a skull, a pile of bones beneath a worn canvas of skin. She looked like she was starving to death; like she was weeks into a hunger strike, but her warden had yet to notice.

“Jonathan,” Doug called to one of the security guards by the door. “Get Amelia some water.”

I’d never seen Doug like this. So nervous. So—anticipatory. Not that I didn’t understand. After years of preparation, Doug was about to step into the skin of another person, and he was going to have to hold that costume together—not just for the rest of the night, but for the next year. The next five years, if he won. The next nine, if you factored in a second term. It occurred to me that I might be the only person in the room who understood that feeling as acutely as Doug did. I wondered if he would survive the ordeal or die of exhaustion from the effort.

“It’s a big day, Dad,” one of the brothers said. “An exciting day.”

“The beginning of a great adventure,” one of the wives added.

Doug nodded slowly at his boys, his face frozen in a joyless grin. “Big day,” he repeated. “Absolutely. And you know: we’ve done it all, the testing and the surveys and the studies, and we know it’s the right time.” His lips stretched wider. “And if it isn’t—”

“Don’t say that, Dad,” two brothers said at once.

But Doug seemed not to have heard them. He sat down with a groan. He looked suddenly like he might throw up.

The room was still.

“Really,” Doug said suddenly, “it doesn’t matter if I win or I lose. Same organizations funding everyone. Creeps. I told them, if you want to see me win, give me all the money, but that’s not how they work. They hedge their bets.” He sniffed. “I’ll get what I want, either way. The only difference is if I win, I’ll get the credit.”

“Dad, you’re going to win,” Caleb said.

Doug looked up, about to say something, and then he froze. He was looking at me. No—he was looking at Shannon. “Are you—are you filming me right now?”

She was standing there with her arms folded, her phone tucked flat against her chest in a decidedly strange way. Her face went white. “Of course not.”

“You are,” Doug said incredulously. “You’re filming me.”

In the next moment, half a dozen bodies lunged toward Shannon, toward me. In a flash of instinct, or maybe possession, I stepped forward too, so that I was standing directly in front of Shannon, blocking the path. “She works for me,” I hissed. “She films all the time. The footage isn’t going anywhere.”

At that moment, a young man in a suit stepped into the room. “Sir? They’re announcing you in five.”

Doug stood up. His face was set in an expression of grimly terrified determination. “All righty,” he said quietly. He looked like he was preparing for the electric chair.

As the final round of good lucks to Doug ensued, I flashed a look at Shannon. She mouthed to me, It’s fine .

Right as Doug was leaving the room, Amelia said from the corner, “Knock ’em dead, sweetheart!” Doug threw up a hand in response, and then he was gone, and all of us were standing there, like a storage room of puppets, eyes blinking wide at one another while we waited for the sudden crush of dark.

“America!” Doug roared a minute later, his voice echoing through a thousand speakers. “How long have we waited for a new dawn?”

Later that night, news panels and editorial boards alike would agree: it was the kind of flawless moment that reinvigorates a dying campaign. Doug was a roaring triumph. Exactly the kind of man to put this country back on track. And his family—weren’t they lovely?

Natalie I just saw u at your dad’s campaign rally and youare so pretty in person!

OBSESSED WITHTHE MILLS FAMILY OMG

Do u have anything to say about ur father-in-law’s speech tonight???

Wait is she a nazi lol

It seems like anyone can be called a nazi these days for anything!!!! No one can just celebrate traditional femininity anymore without being called a nazi!!!! You cannot acknowldege the basic facts of the invazion of our borders with out sum fucking whore saying youre a—

Two hours later, we were walking back to the car, moving in a slow march along with the crowd, people with folding chairs and soup thermoses and rolled-up Confederate flags tucked under their armpits. “That was terrifying,” Shannon said quietly next to me.

I laughed crisply. “You’re telling me. Try being legally bound to him.”

“No. Natalie, that speech was terrifying. I mean, I know your father-in-law is…intense, I always knew he was intense, but that was—don’t you think that was different?”

I looked behind me. Caleb was walking with his brothers, the excitement of the night having afforded a brief moment of shared camaraderie with them. The nannies were about a hundred feet away from us with the kids. Clementine was getting a piggyback ride from Aimee. Louise had Junebug strapped to her chest and was saying something to one of the littles—I couldn’t see through the crowd—and from her expression, I could tell that the child was crying.

“Natalie.”

I turned back to face Shannon. “What?”

“Tell me what you’re thinking! About”—she gestured wildly here—“all of this!”

I sighed. Tried to think back on the speech. Something something coastal cities. The world, so clearly losing its way. Nuclear families disintegrating, and the children— the children, my mother gasped in memory, the children, the children! —and the women, and certainly the men, but Doug had spoken so quickly, and the speaker system, echoing and reverberating in on itself, had warped everything so quickly. America, Doug roared in my head still. America, America—how long have we—how long till we—America—oh, where are You?

It was a combination of a thousand conversations I’d heard throughout my life. The only difference, in my mind, was that it had been dumbed down a bit, and maybe sharpened at the tip.

“He’s going to win, Natalie,” Shannon said, when I didn’t say anything. “You do realize that, right? That he’s going to win?”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s a performance, Shannon. It’s political theater. Not real.”

“How is a political election not real?”

“I don’t mean that, I just mean”—I gestured at the crowd around us—“all of this. The showmanship. The bravado.”

“Do you honestly think there are no consequences to performance?”

“Listen. You’ve known from the very start who my father-in-law is—”

“Right,” she snapped, “but the person I haven’t known is you.”

I paused. Looked at her.

“These people are talking about the same bullshit Caleb talks about,” Shannon said. “All that crap about rats. And then what Doug said onstage, about returning to the ‘days of Yesteryear.’ He was practically quoting your Instagram captions word for word.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said immediately, and I didn’t. I’d noticed how Doug was changing his messaging to fit the atmosphere of Caleb’s forums, of course I’d noticed that—but I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t even considered, that he would ever be plagiarizing from me.

He couldn’t possibly.

“I’ve never been more certain in my life about anything,” Shannon said. She was frustrated now, speaking more loudly. A few people nearby were starting to whisper and point in our direction as she added, “This is bad, Natalie. This is wrong .”

Calm her down, Online Natalie intoned, de-escalate, right as a teenage girl said behind me, “Ohmigod, that’s freaking Yesteryear Ranch!”

My stomach turned. I was exhausted. This had already happened twenty or so times tonight. Still, I rearranged my expression, then turned around to face another fan, my sensors flashing red. Battery low.

Hello! Yes—oh, you’re too kind—thank you so much for—no, thank you for—

When I turned back around, Shannon was gone. I was alone in the crowd, more and more people recognizing me, saying my name— It’s Yesteryear Ranch! —asking for a picture, touching my hands and my arms and my waist, closing in—

“Excuse me,” I said brightly, my throat closing with fear, “if I could just—I really just need to find my children—”

A lesson it had taken me much longer to learn: sometimes the love of strangers is much more terrifying than the hate.

I hadn’t realized how many parking lots there were at the rally, and I got lost for fifteen minutes. By the time I saw the van parked halfway across the correct parking lot, I was teary-eyed from so much attention, so many grabbing hands. My body felt sore to the touch. I was half-panicked and half-relieved about Shannon’s disappearance. Maybe it was for the best, the relieved half of my brain suggested. I’d been wanting to fire her since she arrived, and surely we could find another producer of her skill level. But the panicked half of me railed back: she had complete control over our content by then, not just password access to the account itself, but access to all our scheduling software, our business email, our photo-creation files. She was capable of locking me out of my own account. She could post a message, or a video. She could ruin my life in five seconds. A handful of clicks.

She would never do that.

But technically speaking, she could.

Then I saw Shannon seated in the middle row, already buckled, arms folded while the nannies buckled the kids in all around her.

“Shannon,” I said quietly, leaning against the open car door. “Can we talk?”

She unbuckled herself and crouch-walked past me. “Excuse me,” she muttered. “I’m feeling carsick.” She crawled over the median and into the passenger seat, where I usually sat. Caleb gave her a surprised look but didn’t say anything.

“All right,” Nanny Louise said from the back seat. “We’re good to go.”

I hesitated. Should I tell Shannon to get out of my seat? No. Too confrontational. I crawled into the front row of seats, next to the nannies. As Caleb started the engine, Shannon turned to look at him, her face silhouetted by the cheap yellow light of the parking lamps overhead. “Caleb, will you tell me more about the forums?”

His face brightened in the darkness. It was the first moment all night that anyone had asked him for anything. “What do you want to know?”