Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [8]
He was giving no room, but I could see that he was losing this argument to unnamed voices on the other end of the line. Someone would recite the latest numbers from Ohio, and John would counter. But he was alone, and the fight was lost. John’s staff sat silently, glumly, at the table around him. Jay and Cate were eating breakfast, watching the muted television and listening to the phone conversation behind them. I kissed Cate, then John, and I wandered out into the hall, still barefoot. I checked on the children, who were happily eating breakfast in their room and watching cartoons on television, then I headed back to the hallway.
The hotel was strangely silent. “Do you know where my staff has gathered?” I asked the Secret Service agent guarding our room. He pointed to the room of Lori Denham, my chief of staff. Inside, Ryan, Hargrave, Kathleen, and all the others who formed our little family were gathered. The campaign had originally budgeted the vice presidential candidate’s spouse for no staff whatsoever, and I had always considered them the miracle staff. The team had been pulled together on a moment’s notice, staffed with people who’d thought they would sit this one out or wouldn’t be tapped for the campaign. Like many an accidental family, we had lashed ourselves to one another so we couldn’t and wouldn’t be torn apart. These women—except for Ryan, they were all women—had had more contact with me in the last months than I did with my own family, and now here they sat, spread out on the beds and floor of Lori’s room, around the telephone. Mary Beth Cahill, the Kerry-Edwards campaign manager, was already on the speakerphone. She had organized a conference call to tell everyone that the election was over and we were conceding.
Mary Beth’s voice broke as she trailed to a close, and Kathleen reached over and hung up the phone. There were tears, but no one said a word. I broke the silence.
I told them that they had my admiration, my appreciation, and my affection. No one had a staff smarter, or more dedicated, or harder-working than I did. They had given up their lives and jobs and families at the drop of a hat to join this staff, but they were more than that—they had become like family. “And, like family, I want to tell you something first that I will talk about publicly later.” I explained that I had found the lump in Kenosha, that it was almost certainly breast cancer, and that immediately following Kerry’s speech at Faneuil Hall I was going to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston to meet with a surgeon for a biopsy and, if it was positive, as I suspected it would be, to decide on a strategy for treatment.
The room immediately dissolved once more, and although I had managed to hold it together since Des Moines, I could feel my eyes fill up again. I didn’t know how much these young people knew before I talked to them, but for the last four months they had fed me and briefed me and planned for me and awakened with me and slept only after I slept, and I felt terrible for them. This time yesterday, we’d been winning the election and I’d been healthy. Today, we had lost and I had breast cancer. Someone had yanked a giant brake somewhere, and their lives had come to a jolting stop. I couldn’t diminish the importance of the loss; I had no way to make it better, so I simply went to each of them and hugged each one tightly. And though these women were all a group and in some sense I was at the center of it, I was also the absent center. They had functioned