You discovered somewhere along the way that your parents had three daughters and loved all three, but only understood two of them.
It only hurt when you were little. Eventually, it became a matter of acceptance, and in time it was just a fact of your life. All three of you knew it, and you knew they felt bad once in a while, when your mother would look at you with those eyes that were desperately trying to figure you out, but always stopped just short of getting there. You would wonder sometimes when you were younger what it would be like to be one of them, to be unconditionally adored and accepted the way they were, but eventually you stopped thinking like that, because it never did anyone any good.
You�re happy in your career, and not so much in your love life, but every existence has flaws. There are problems that come with being in the public eye, and that is only the first in a long line of them. Over the years you�ve found yourself defending your parents more and more, and you often consider that it�s really supposed to be their job to be defending you. You know in your heart that your father would go to any lengths to help you�to help any of you girls, truth be told�but you�ve always tried not to give him a reason to have to. Because he is, after all, a powerful man, and you don�t really need to see the extremes that fatherhood will drive him to.
You�ve seen them enough in the past few years.
Those were, without a doubt, the worst days of your life, waiting helplessly to see if your sister was going to make it home alive, and whole, and herself. She did, in the end, but there are still nights over the holidays or on the rare occasions when you�re all staying up in the Manchester house, when you can hear her moving restlessly through the hallways at night. You know she still has nightmares. She hasn�t told you, hasn�t told anyone, except maybe Charlie. But you�re her sister, and you know.
You wished in those days that there was something you could do to help, something you could say that could make things better for her, for your parents, for everyone. Because that had always been your role. You had been the peacemaker of the house. Growing up in a home full of four such strong personalities, you were bound to be the weak one, bound to be the one who was stuck in the middle. And you didn�t mind, because you were born in the middle, and it was where you always seemed destined to be. But after the kidnapping there were no words to say that could make anything right again.
So you threw yourself into your work, and thought ruefully that there was at least one thing that you inherited from your father.
It makes you sad sometimes that their world is not yours, because if it was maybe you could find some kind of common ground with all of them. But they are politicians, all of them, even your mother. And one sister married a politician, and the other is going to someday, and you find yourself working in your lab late at night wondering how you could have possibly come from such a family. It was never your intention to escape from that life, not really, and you know that you�re never going to be able to escape it completely anyhow, even if you wanted to. You make a simple statement in defense of something, you work on a controversial line of study, and you are suddenly under a microscope of scrutiny because you are your father�s daughter.
You know that, in your position, your sisters would be using their heritage, using their birthrights inherited from a family determined to change the world. But it�s not your intention to change the world, not by your words anyhow, not by the stances you take on television, to reporters. You aren�t interested in a legacy, just in helping people, and you wonder if maybe this is why your mother got into the medical field in the beginning. Things change, of course, and she�s much more at home now in the nest of political vipers that she has wound herself into, but you know there�s still a spark of that idealism left in her, because there were times when she would go sneaking off out of the White House to work in rundown city clinics, just because she could.
You don�t think that it could ever be secondary to you, though, and sometimes you think that maybe that�s why your love life is such a wreck. Anyone you found would have to comfortable with not only your family, but also the idea that he might always be second to your work. You�re beginning to think that such a man doesn�t exist, and you�ve pretty much given up looking.
Tonight you went home to your tired apartment and you watched your father introduce his greatest friend as the candidate for vice president, and you smiled at the sight of them up there on that stage, remembering not too long ago when your father had been on the other side of that introduction. They�re older now, the two of them, and the man who had won the candidacy for president looked so young next to them that it made you a little sad. It had been a long eight years, for everyone involved.
But no matter who won in November, it would all be the same to you, because it would be an end to your days in the spotlight. You�ll never really escape it, you know, but you can�t help but feel a great sense of relief that your father�s terms are almost over.
You glance above the tv at that picture, the one that was taken on your first Christmas after the election, before your father was shot, and before your sister was kidnapped, in the days when the pressure of a country had not yet fully settled on all of you. You wonder if it�s selfish to wish that the last eight years had never happened, that Hoynes had won and you had all gone back to New Hampshire.
It probably is.
But you don�t really mind. Even the middle child has a right to be selfish once in a while.