Shannon knew the first time she saw him. His voice was soft and smooth and lulling, his build was fit and strong. As he spoke, her eyes went in and out of focus and she couldn’t make herself look away. He was on TV, but it seemed like he was in the room, talking only to her.
Dan sat next to her on the couch, staring at the TV screen, his eyes still and his mouth open. He shushed her when she started to say something. “Do you know who that is?” he asked her. His voice sounded hushed, like he was speaking in a church. “That’s our next president.”
“Do you really think?” Shannon asked. She rubbed the back of Dan’s neck. “It would take a lot for him to win.”
Dan finally turned away from the TV. He looked disappointed as he shook his head. “You’ll see, Shannon,” he said. “Believe me, you’ll see.”
Later, Shannon would tell everyone this story. She would explain the way Dan’s voice changed when he spoke, the way it made a little hop of worry enter her chest. Her friends would humor her. “I’m sure on some level you did know,” they would say. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” they would add. It didn’t matter. Only Shannon knew how she felt that day when she first saw the Candidate. Only she knew that his voice made her start sweating, made her heart beat fast, the way an animal reacts right before it’s attacked.
Dan had always loved politics. He was a cable news junkie who yelled along with the left-leaning political pundits as they got enraged about the state of the government, the failings of the current administration. He talked policy at parties and argued laws at bars. Shannon met him watching the 2004 presidential debates at a dive bar on the Lower East Side. Over Miller Lite drafts, he explained the details of the Swift-boating. Shannon nodded drunkenly and thought, “This guy is smart.” They stood outside and smoked cigarettes and talked about the ridiculousness of the last election. “It turned this country’s electoral system into a joke,” Dan said. And then Shannon kissed him.
Her friends approved. “I get it,” Lauren said. “He’s hot, in a nerdy, political way.”
“He’s nice,” Isabella said. “A little intense, maybe. But nice.”
Shannon didn’t care that he was intense. He was hers. Right after they met at the debates, they started dating and volunteering, urging people to get out and vote. For days before the election, they sat in the volunteer center and made phone calls until Shannon’s fingers felt numb from dialing. “I think we can do this,” Dan said. Shannon had never found someone so attractive in her life. They made out in a closet in the back of the volunteer center for ten minutes and then went back to their calls.
That night, they drank and watched as the Democratic candidate lost. “Four more years of this,” Dan said. “I don’t know if I can take it.” Shannon took his hand and held it in her lap. She wasn’t as upset as he was, but she tried to look like she was. “I’m so glad that I’m with someone who understands,” Dan said. Shannon just nodded.
Shannon and Dan moved in together and hosted dinner parties for their friends where political talk ruled the conversation and lively debate was encouraged. Dan sat at the head of the table and quoted articles he’d read, pulled out old New Yorkers to back up his point. He talked and lectured, raising his glass of wine when he made important points, as though he were their leader. Sometimes Dan almost crossed the line—like the time he called her friend Lauren ignorant, after she admitted that she’d voted for the Green Party candidate in 2000 because she’d felt bad for him—but most of the time, the dinners were free of fighting and full of wine, and Shannon was happy.
Dan worked in advertising, but his heart wasn’t in it. He sat around all day, writing catchy copy to accompany ads. “I want to do something that matters,” he always said. Shannon would nod in agreement. “I want a job I care about,” he would say, and Shannon would groan in sympathy. She thought it was just talk, just something people say to get through their day. But the more the young senator from Illinois showed up on TV, the more Dan talked about his discontent. He complained about his hours, his pay, his mindless duties. He slammed dresser drawers in the morning as he got ready for work, and drank a beer each night as he sulked in front of the news. And then one day he came home and announced that he was going to volunteer for the campaign.
“Do you have time to volunteer?” Shannon asked.
“The question is,” Dan answered, “how do I not make the time?”
Dan organized rallies and trained volunteers. He went door-to-door making sure people were registered to vote. He skipped three days of work to attend a volunteer training camp in Chicago.
“I asked you last week if we could go on vacation, and you said you couldn’t take any days off,” Shannon said.
“This isn’t vacation,” Dan said. “This is our country.”
He came home from the volunteer camp with a graduation certificate and newfound energy. “This is it,” he kept saying. “This is the time.”
“The time for what?” Shannon muttered.
“What?” Dan said.
“Nothing,” she said.
At night, all they talked about was the election. Dan analyzed every word that came out of every candidate’s mouth. He sat no more than two feet from the TV, so that he wouldn’t miss a thing. “Did you hear that?” he asked, pointing at a face on TV. “Did you hear the tone she used when she said his name? Unbelievable.”
Shannon learned how to knit and sat on the couch twisting yarn into rows as Dan muttered to himself. “How can you knit at a time like this?” he asked her once. He looked at her like her yarn was the reason his Candidate was down in the polls.
Dan pored over newspapers, websites, and right-wing blogs to see what the opposition was saying. When Shannon asked him if he wanted to go out to dinner, he just shook his head no. They ate takeout in front of the TV almost every night. More and more often, she found him asleep on the couch in the morning, his computer propped up next to him and CNN chattering in the background. He’d wake up and rub his eyes, then immediately focus on the latest news. “I can’t believe I missed this,” he’d say. He’d turn up the volume. “Shannon, can you move?” he’d ask. “I can’t see the TV.”
Dan applied for every job the campaign had. “How much does this one pay?” Shannon asked once.
“Does it matter?” Dan asked. “You don’t get this. I would do it for free.”
“It would be kind of hard to pay rent then, wouldn’t it?” Shannon asked.
Dan walked away from her and turned on the TV, to CNBC. Shannon followed him into the room, but he didn’t look at her. “I was kidding,” she said. “God, don’t be so sensitive.”
“This matters to me,” Dan said.
“I know,” she said. “It matters to me too.” Dan raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything more. Shannon sat down on the couch next to him and watched the wild-eyed political commentator scream. It was the blond man, the one who interrupted his guests and got on her nerves. “He spits when he gets excited,” she said. And then they watched the rest of the show in silence.
When Dan quit his job, Shannon was supportive. “It will be hard,” she said. “But if it’s important to you, it’s important to me.” She was pretty sure she meant what she said.
“I’ll be traveling a lot,” Dan said. “But it’s what I always wanted to do.”
“Of course,” Shannon said. She didn’t really know what she was agreeing to, but her answer made Dan happy.
Later, Shannon explained it to her friends. “It’s too good to pass up,” she said. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”
“Well, you knew this about him when you met him,” Mary said. “I guess this doesn’t come as a huge surprise.”
“It just sucks for you,” Lauren said.
“Yep,” Shannon said. “Yep, it really does.”
At first, Shannon still saw Dan about once a week. Then his trips started to overlap with each other and he didn’t seem to have time to come home in between. Soon, he was flying from stop to stop with barely enough time to call her and tell her where he was going. Shannon realized that if she wanted to see him, she’d have to go to him. And that’s what she did.
Shannon shivered in New Hampshire while Dan arranged an outdoor rally. She attended a fund-raiser in Chicago and then took a bus to Iowa and painted campaign signs in a high school, while a snowstorm raged outside and Dan worried that the old people wouldn’t be able to drive to the school. Shannon painted poster boards red, white, and blue. She painted the Candidate’s name in fancy block letters, and made signs that said “Davenport for Change.” She painted “Hope” over and over again, so many times that the letters started to look funny and the word lost its meaning.
Shannon went to Boston and followed Dan around to three different events in one day. She shook hands with the Candidate and nearly blacked out from excitement. She listened to him give the same speech over and over and she cried every time. He talked about the hardships people have to face, and he talked about wanting a better world for his children, and Shannon clapped and cried.
Shannon shouted that she was “fired up and ready to go” in seven different states. She passed out buttons and helped set up chairs. And sometimes, when she went to bed at night, she heard rally cries in her head, soft and far away. They sounded so real that she was sure there were people gathered outside her apartment, huddled together, chanting the Candidate’s name as she tried to fall asleep.
Dan returned to New York for an event and Shannon recruited all of her friends to come. They waited in line at Washington Square Park for three hours, getting crushed by the crowd. “Dan will be so happy that you came,” Shannon told them.
“Where is he?” Lauren asked.
“Up there.” Shannon pointed to the stage. Dan darted by.
“That’s fun that you got to see him last night,” Isabella said.
“Oh, well, I actually didn’t,” Shannon said. “He ended up working all night. He slept here.”
“In the park?” Mary asked. “Gross.”
“Tonight, maybe?” Isabella asked.
Shannon shook her head. “He’s off to Pennsylvania,” she said. The girls were quiet for a minute.
“Well,” Lauren said. “It will be over soon, right?” Shannon started to agree, but the music came on and they all turned to the stage, and clapped and cheered.
As the primaries got closer, Dan traveled so much that Shannon didn’t even have time to go see him. He’d be in a city for twenty hours and then on his way to the next one. Even phone calls became rare. Sometimes, though, she caught a glimpse of his head on the border of the TV, running from side to side in a gymnasium after the Candidate finished a speech. She watched for him closely, waiting for his blond head to flash on the screen. “There he is,” she’d cry, although no one was there to hear her. And then as soon as she spotted him, he’d run off the other side, gone from her sight.
When the Candidate won Iowa, Dan called from the campaign center. He sounded muffled and far away. Shannon could hear screaming in the background and Dan had to yell to be heard. His voice was thick, as though he’d been crying or was just about to start.
When Dan did come home, he was exhausted and wrinkled. Sometimes, he’d been up for days. His hair stood up in clumps and his eyes were bloodshot. He’d come into the apartment, shower, and head straight for bed.
Shannon talked to him while he slept. She told him about her job while his eyes stayed closed. “Mmm-hmm,” he’d murmur sometimes.
Dan wore two BlackBerrys, strapped to either side of his belt. “You look like a nerd,” Shannon always told him. He didn’t care. Once when Dan was home and lying in bed, Shanon saw a red mark on his hip. “What’s that?” she asked. She touched it lightly.
“It’s from the BlackBerry, I think,” Dan said.
“You have a scar from your BlackBerry vibrating against you?” Shannon asked.
“I guess so,” Dan said.
“And that doesn’t strike you as strange? As not right?”
“Not really,” Dan said. He rolled over and turned out his bedside light.
“You’ve been branded,” Shannon said. But Dan was already asleep.
Every time Dan got ready to leave again, they fought.
“When will you be home?” Shannon would ask.
“You know I don’t know that,” he’d say.
“Do you even miss me?” she’d ask.
“Shannon,” he’d say. “Don’t start this now. You know I miss you. Don’t fight with me right before I leave.”
Sometimes she let it drop, but sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she’d poke and whine until they fought. It felt good to scream at him, to scream at someone. Once she asked him, “Let’s say that you got to have dinner with one person and you had to choose: me or the Candidate. And you hadn’t seen me in a month. Who would you pick?”
“You, of course,” he said. He came over and kissed her good-bye. It was a lie. She knew deep inside that she was his second choice. Always. He’d fallen for someone new. And infatuation was winning.
Once after he left, the dog jumped onto the bed, lifted his leg, and peed. Shannon didn’t even yell at him. “I understand,” she said to the dog as she stripped the sheets. “It’s a shitty situation.”
As months went by, Shannon forgot what it was like to live with Dan. Some nights she convinced herself that he was gone for good. If he did leave, she decided, she would take his TV.
Her friends were worried about her. They took her to brunch and brought over wine. “How are you doing?” they asked.
“Good, good,” Shannon always said. What was she supposed to say? That Dan would rather campaign in Texas than spend time with her? That she’d been abandoned? That the Candidate had stolen her boyfriend? It was easier to just say, “I’m doing great.”
“You’re such a good sport,” they’d say.
Shannon drank the wine and agreed. “Yep, that’s me.” It was better, she thought, than the truth.
At the end of August, Dan got four days off from the campaign. Shannon thought they’d have all sorts of time together, but when he was in the apartment, all he did was e-mail with his campaign friends. He was constantly looking at his BlackBerry. They went to dinner, and Dan remained hunched over, his fingers clicking away. Sometimes he’d laugh at a response he got, or nod in agreement.
“Don’t your fingers hurt?” Shannon asked him. He looked up, surprised.
“No,” he said. “They’re fine.”
“Do you think you could put that away for twenty minutes while we eat, so that I could actually talk to you while we’re in the same city for once?”
He whistled. “Whoa, Shannon. Calm down.” He put his BlackBerry down next to his plate and held up his hands in a fake surrender. “It’s away,” he said. “Okay?”
“No,” she said, holding out her hand. “Away, away. Give it to me. I’ll keep it in my purse.”
“Shannon, come on. Don’t overreact.”
She kept her hand out. “I’m not overreacting. You’re not even e-mailing about work stuff, are you? You just miss your little campaign friends.”
Dan handed over the BlackBerry, but looked at Shannon with narrowed eyes. “You’ve really got to figure out how to deal with your issues,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s totally the problem.”
The last night Dan was home, he wanted to go on a double date with his campaign friend Charlotte and her boyfriend, Chet. “Why?” Shannon kept asking. “Why do we have to go out with them?”
“I want you to meet her,” Dan said. “I think you’ll really hit it off.”
“I kind of doubt it,” she said.
“Come on,” Dan said, and finally she agreed.
On the way downtown, Dan told Shannon that Charlotte and Chet were having some problems. “Chet’s not thrilled that Charlotte’s traveling so much,” he said. “He’s not taking the campaign too well.”
“Who is?” she asked.
“Shannon.”
“What?”
He just shook his head.
They went to a tiny Mexican place in the West Village that served mango margaritas that tasted like candy. Dan and Shannon got there first, and stood at the bar drinking their margaritas. “Oh,” Dan said, “there they are!” He waved his hand up in the air and a tall blonde waved back.
Charlotte was almost six feet tall and very thin. She was the kind of person you don’t think is that pretty at first, but upon closer examination, you realize that she’s gorgeous. Her angular nose was striking and her long limbs were graceful. She could have been a model. When Shannon stood next to her, her head came right up to her boobs.
“Shannon, hi!” she said, and she surprised Shannon with a hug. Shannon’s face smooshed into Charlotte’s chest and she could barely breathe. Finally she let Shannon go, but still held on to her shoulders. “It is so nice to finally meet you.”
Shannon finished her margarita and shook the empty glass at Dan. “I’m ready for another one.”
They waited a long time for a table and got two more rounds of margaritas. Chet and Shannon drank while Charlotte and Dan talked about the people they worked with.
“And Kelly,” Charlotte said, rolling her eyes. “Can you believe the way she sets up the events? I mean, putting the chairs in a semicircle? Where does she think she is?”
Dan doubled over with laughter and Chet and Shannon looked at each other. Shannon licked the salt off her glass. “Semicircles, huh?” she asked. “Crazy.” Dan stopped laughing and tilted his head at her. She smiled back.
By the time they sat down, Shannon could feel mango margaritas sloshing around in her stomach. The waiter put a basket of chips on the table and everyone grabbed for them. Charlotte took a handful and shoved them in her mouth. Then she started waving her hands around like, Wait, don’t talk! I’ve got a story to tell! Chet looked at her from the sides of his eyes, and Shannon wondered if he hated his girlfriend too. Charlotte swallowed her chips and wiped the grease off her lips. She took a sip of her drink and smiled.
“I forgot to tell you guys,” she said. “Last night, I had the most graphic, realistic, and extremely satisfying sex dream about the Candidate.”
“Well, it looks like we know who the next Monica Lewinsky will be,” Shannon said. She laughed and no one else did. Dan looked at her with his mouth open. “What?” she asked. “She can talk about the next president of the United States giving her an orgasm and I can’t make a Lewinsky joke?”
Charlotte looked down in pretend embarrassment. “Oh my God,” Shannon said. “You brought it up. With your boyfriend sitting right there.” Shannon meant to point at Chet, but he was closer than she thought and she ended up poking him on the cheek. He jumped in surprise. Shannon got the feeling he hadn’t been listening to anything they’d been saying.
They finished their enchiladas quietly, with pleasant, bland conversation. On the way home, Dan reprimanded Shannon. “I can’t believe you said that,” he told her. “Charlotte was pretty upset.”
“Oh, was she?” Shannon asked. “Do you think that Chet and I were upset that we went to dinner with our significant others that we never see and all they talked about was the random people they work with on the campaign? People that we don’t know and have never met. It was so boring. And it was rude.” Shannon’s eyes started to tear up and she sniffled. Dan let his shoulders drop.
“I’m sorry, Shannon,” he said. She shrugged and he grabbed her arm until she looked at him. “I mean it. I know this is hard for you and I really appreciate your support. You know that, right? You know how much that means to me.” Shannon shrugged again and let him hug her.
“We shouldn’t have gone to dinner with them,” she said. “That’s not fair. You’re leaving tomorrow.”
“You’re right,” Dan agreed. “It should have just been us. Charlotte suggested it and I didn’t know what else to do. She’s having a hard time with Chet. I’m not sure they’re going to work it out. I feel really bad for them.”
“Yeah,” Shannon said. “How sad for them.”
Shannon dreamt of the Candidate. She dreamt that they ran into each other at the grocery store and laughed about buying the same pasta sauce. “You like Ragú too?” Shannon said to him, and they laughed and clutched arms. She dreamt that he came over for dinner and she told him how he was making her life so hard. He smiled. He shook her hand. He talked about hope and belief and getting fired up! Shannon awoke from these dreams feeling exhausted and confused, until she noticed that she’d left the TV on CNN. They were showing a tape of the Candidate at some campaign stop. He was smiling and frowning, laughing and tilting his head to show concern. Shannon looked at him closely while he talked and gestured. Did he know? Did he know that he had stolen her boyfriend? Did he know that he was ruining her whole life plan? Did he know that he was making her miserable?
He finished the speech and a Stevie Wonder song came blaring out of the speakers. He clapped his hands toward the audience, gave a serious look, and then smiled and went to shake hands. He swayed his shoulders and hips to the song. She decided that the answer was no. He didn’t know any of it.
Everyone asked about Dan; people at work, friends, family, even the neighbors wanted to know what he was up to. “How’s he doing?” they would ask. “How’s the feeling on the campaign? Do we have this one wrapped up?”
Shannon knew they were all nervous. They were scared that they’d wind up with an old man and a crazy-booted gun lover in the White House. “It’s going great,” she would tell them. “Everyone’s feeling positive.”
“But what about this Muslim rumor?” they would insist. “Do you think we can shake this? What about the flag pin?” they asked. Shannon looked at their wrinkled eyebrows and tried to reassure them, but she barely had anything left.
As the election went on, the rumors got nasty. People tried to paint the Candidate as anti-American, finding incriminating old footage of a reverend he knew, and playing it on what seemed like a twenty-four-hour loop. When this news broke, Shannon didn’t talk to Dan for a week. He was jumping from event to event, trying to make people forget they’d ever heard the words “God damn America.”
When Dan finally did call, it was in the middle of the night and Shannon wasn’t sure if she was dreaming.
“I just wanted to say hi,” he said. He didn’t sound like he knew she’d almost put out an Amber Alert on him.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just tired. I keep thinking they can’t do it again. They can’t steal another election from us.”
“That’s good,” Shannon said. She was still half caught in sleep.
“They can’t take this away,” he said. “The Candidate deserves this. We need him. The country needs him.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Shannon said. “They can’t take it away,” she repeated.
“That’s right,” he said. “And if they do, we’re moving to Canada.”
One evening in early fall, Shannon walked the dog up Broadway with her friend Lauren. The air was starting to turn and the wind made Shannon shiver just a little. The two of them were deciding where to get a drink, and Shannon was trying to hurry the dog along, pulling him past hydrants he wanted to sniff, when a smiling boy with a clipboard stepped in front of them. “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you have a minute for the Democratic candidate?”
Lauren started to say something, but Shannon spoke first. “Do I have a minute for the Candidate?” she asked. The boy nodded and smiled and Shannon felt heat rush into her eyes. The dog sniffed the boy’s leg and stood very still.
“Yes,” he said. “If you have just a minute for me, I can tell you about how you can help—”
“Do I have a minute for the Candidate? Do I? Have a minute? For the Candidate?” The boy nodded again, but now he looked nervous. “Let me tell you something,” Shannon said. “I have given the Candidate weeks—no, months—of my life. No, I don’t have a minute for him. You want to know why? My boyfriend has left to travel around with him. He quit his job to work for the campaign, and I haven’t seen him in a month. A month! I’m not sure if he’s ever coming back, and the thing is, he doesn’t even care! He doesn’t care because all he wants is to work on this godforsaken campaign that is just so important. More important than anything else, including me!”
The boy began to back away. “Okay, then,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t mean to what? Interrupt my walk? Stop me on a cold night and make me listen to you tell me how amazing this Candidate is? Yes, you did. And I’ve heard it. I hear it all the time. From my boyfriend, from everyone. I get it. He’s amazing.”
“Yes, he is,” the boy said quietly. Shannon narrowed her eyes. Lauren tried to pull her arm and make her walk away, but Shannon stayed right where she was.
“Why are you even here?” she asked.
“To inform people about the change we want to see in the world,” he said.
“No,” Shannon said. “Why are you here?” she pointed to the sidewalk. “Why are you in New York? You think you need to convince people here to vote for him? Let me give you a heads-up, buddy. He’s got New York, okay? We got it. We’re Democrats here. And you’re on the Upper West Side, of all places. For God’s sake. Don’t waste your time. Go somewhere else! It doesn’t even matter if I vote. I might not even bother. Did you hear that? I might not vote!”
The boy kept walking backward and then turned and ran down the street, clutching his clipboard to his chest. He kept glancing back to see if Shannon was chasing after him. A few people stood on the sidewalk and stared, and Lauren took five steps to the right, trying to pretend that she didn’t know Shannon.
“Every vote counts,” an old lady said to Shannon. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she said. The dog hung his head. He looked embarrassed. Shannon started to walk down the sidewalk toward her apartment. She walked quickly, and Lauren had to jog to keep up.
“Are you okay?” Lauren asked.
Shannon stopped. “Yeah. I guess maybe I’m not handling this whole thing as well as I thought.”
“Really?” Lauren said. “Do you think?”
“Whatever,” Shannon said.
“Hey, I get it,” Lauren said. “If you want to go back and push down that old lady, I’m all for it.”
“Maybe later,” Shannon said. “Drinks first.”
On Election Day, Shannon slept in. She got coffee and took her time walking to the public school where she would vote. Everyone at work would be late because of voting, and she might as well take advantage of it. She at least deserved that much.
Shannon had butterflies in her stomach as she walked, but they weren’t from excitement. She’d been counting down to this day for months, and now that it was here she didn’t quite know how she felt about it.
As Shannon turned on Ninetieth, she saw that the line stretched all the way down the block. People were laughing and waving to their neighbors. Moms from the school were selling baked goods and hot chocolate. “All the proceeds are going to the school,” they kept saying. The group at the front was rowdy and slaphappy from standing in line for so long, and they started cheering as people came out of the building. “Whoo!” they yelled. “You made a difference! Good for you!”
Everyone was acting like this was some strange election-themed street fair. Shannon debated going back to bed and not voting at all. She could just tell everyone she had. What was the difference? In the end, she stayed put, but she put on her sunglasses and refused to smile at anyone around her.
Shannon saw a guy she knew from work walking down the line. “Hey!” he said to her. He held up his hand for a high five and Shannon gave him a weak slap. “What a day, huh?” he asked. He turned his face to the sun and smiled. Like it was Christmas. Like there was a miracle to observe.
“Yep,” Shannon said. “What a day. Where did you come from? Were you in the front of the line?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I gave my place to an elderly lady. I told her I’d go to the back of the line, you know? It’s the least I can do.”
This wasn’t the New York that Shannon loved. These weren’t the people who normally lived here. Everyone had gone crazy. Dan was gone and maybe he was never coming back. Shannon thought, as she waited in line, that she was crazy too, that she should have never waited for Dan in the first place. She should have made him choose: “Me or the Candidate,” she should have said.
Shannon thought this as she stood in line and as she voted. What had she done? Why had she chosen to stand by and support Dan as he’d left her? When she came out of the building, the group of people waiting to get in smiled and waited for Shannon to smile back. She didn’t. Finally, one of the women said, “I hope you made the right choice.” Shannon just looked at her and said, “Me too.”
That night, Shannon sat in a bar with her friends to watch the returns. Everyone was anxious, and they drank quickly. “So, our feeling is hopeful but cautious, right?” Mary said.
“Sure,” Shannon said. She was drinking faster than any of them. Vodka went down like water. No one really noticed until she fell off her stool.
“Whoa,” Isabella said. “Are you okay?”
“Maybe we need some chicken fingers,” Lauren said. She held up her hand for the bartender.
“She’s just really excited,” Shannon heard Mary telling someone at the bar. “Her boyfriend’s been working on the campaign and now he’ll finally come home.”
“He’s not coming home,” Shannon tried to say. But it didn’t come out right and no one seemed to understand her.
When the Candidate gave his speech that night, Shannon cried, of course. Everyone did. The whole bar watched in tears because it was amazing and inspiring and they were all relieved. But Shannon didn’t cry like the rest of them. She didn’t have little tears dripping out. No, Shannon had flared nostrils and she heaved and hyperventilated and her face turned red. It was the way she used to cry when she was little, when her mom used to say, “You need to calm down” and would send her upstairs to do just that. Shannon sat in the middle of everyone and cried like a red hog.
All of her friends sat around her, taking turns patting her on the back. Finally, Lauren took her home and made sure she got into bed and took some Advil.
“Just go to bed,” Lauren said. “You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“Nothing will ever be the same,” Shannon said.
“That’s right,” Lauren said, misunderstanding. “It’s all different now.”
Dan was offered a job in D.C. shortly after. Shannon cried and they fought, and he took the job and moved there. They tried to make it work for a while. She took the train to visit him, and he drove up to New York on free weekends. But it wasn’t working. Shannon couldn’t shake the feeling that she was his second choice, that Dan had chosen someone else over her. She couldn’t forgive that.
One of the last times Shannon visited Dan, she ran into an old friend from college. He was sitting in a bar, drinking beers with a friend. He told her that his longtime girlfriend had joined the campaign and then gotten a job with the administration. She was in charge of finding hotels for the president and his staff and was currently in Germany. “I haven’t seen her in two months,” he said.
“Are you still together?” Shannon asked. He shrugged and took a long drink.
“How can you be with someone if you never see them?” he finally responded.
“That,” Shannon said, “is a great question.”
Dan and Shannon broke up over the phone about two weeks after that. She blamed the Candidate for their breakup. (She didn’t call him the president, like everyone else. To her, he would always be the Candidate.) When Shannon thought about it, the Candidate was probably responsible for all sorts of breakups. She and Dan were just the tip of the iceberg. All over America, boyfriends and girlfriends had been ripped apart in the name of Hope.
Shannon was angry that no one was covering this news story. People were talking about health care, but no one was talking about the Relationship Misery Phenomenon that the Candidate had caused. She started writing an op-ed for the New York Times but she didn’t get very far. She couldn’t put into words what had happened.
Shannon stopped reading the newspapers. She stopped watching CNN and MSNBC. Every day that she woke up seemed to matter less. It was Tuesday or Monday or Friday or Wednesday. What difference did it make? She didn’t care who the president was or what changes he was going to make to the country. She was alone and that was all she had room to think about.
Her friends tried to cheer her up. “Come on,” they said. “Come out. Forget about Dan.” But Shannon refused.
“You know,” Lauren said, “you were too good for him anyway.”
“That’s just something people say,” Shannon said.
“Shannon,” Lauren said, “the guy wore two BlackBerrys on his belt. He wasn’t perfect.” But this only made Shannon cry.
In her darkest moments, Shannon wished it had gone another way. Lying in bed at night, with her head under the covers, she wished that the Candidate had lost. She never admitted this to anyone, and she wasn’t sure that she really meant it. But maybe she did. She felt reckless when she had these late-night thoughts. She was a lifetime Democrat and here she was wishing that the Republicans had squeaked out another one. Sometimes she laughed by herself, feeling giddy, the same way she’d felt when she’d stolen a candy bar in the fourth grade. How ashamed her parents would have been if they’d known. How ashamed she was of herself when she looked in the mirror in the morning.
She thought of calling Dan just so she could say, “I wish he’d lost,” and then hanging up. But she couldn’t do it. She was afraid it would only reaffirm his belief that he was right to choose the Candidate over her, that it was the smartest thing he’d ever done.
Shannon wished that she were a stronger person, a more selfless soul that would be happy to put the needs of her country ahead of her own. But maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was nothing more than a weak and selfish brat who wanted what she wanted. Oh yes, she was ashamed.
She started watching a lot of reality TV. She watched it for hours at a time, surprised when she looked up at the clock and found that a whole day had slipped by. It soothed her to see people eat bugs and search for love in rose ceremonies. It gave her peace.
Shannon used to judge people who watched these shows, this trash TV. Now it was all she could stand to do. She watched whatever was on—dysfunctional famous families, snotty teenagers at reform camp, even a couple with a litter of in vitro babies that squabbled and screamed. But her favorite one of all, the one she waited all week to watch, was a weight-loss show where morbidly obese people were sent to a ranch and forced to exercise and starve themselves to a healthy weight.
These people cried and fought. They fell down on the gym floor and begged not to be sent home. They tried to undo all of the bad choices they’d made. Shannon watched in her bed, curled up under the blankets, bawling at the big people as they struggled to break out of their giant bodies. She wept along with them as they ran on treadmills and lifted weights. She cried for their struggle and the goals they wanted to reach. She understood them, after all. All they wanted was a new beginning. All they wanted was some hope.