Notes: Written as a response to Pamala's challenge to write a story based on the characters in her Nasty Turn series, which you should probably read first if this is going to make any sense to you. Also, the title belongs to 3 Doors Down.
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The last thing on my mind the day I died was that it�s tiring living a lie.
I have one of those stickers on the back window of my car, the ones that parents buy just so that the people behind them can envy their brilliant children. Mine says Yale, and every time I catch sight of it, something inside me dies a little, because it reminds me that my life is not my own.
I am living another man�s life, and I hate myself for it a little more each day.
I wake each morning beside a woman he never stopped loving, a woman who never stopped loving him in return. I carry in my wallet photos of a boy, now a young man, who never looked like me. I go to work and I am haunted by echoes of the changes he made in this country, ripple effects from the days when he was the second most powerful man in the nation.
I try not to hate him, and once in a while it almost works.
There was a time when I didn�t live in the shadow of Josh Lyman, but it�s hard for me to remember those days now. I once won an election for a dead man, back before I sold my soul to the devil�s handmaiden in cowboy boots, and I find myself wondering sometimes what happened to that young man I once was, a man so impassioned by his convictions that he would stop at nothing to get his message across, to make the changes that this country needed.
I died in my car on a sunny afternoon in July, but by then that man had been dead for decades.
I thought in the beginning that maybe Donna would be my redemption. It wasn�t until years later that I realized I was already too far gone, and even she couldn�t save me. I guess I was an idiot to think that by helping her maybe I could find that man I had once been, but by then being an idiot was just starting to come naturally to me.
I was never fool enough to fall in love with her, not back then. She might has well have been wearing a sign around her neck that read �Josh�s Woman,� because that�s what she was. But then she came to me that morning, all big blue eyes and helpless tears, and I found that I couldn�t turn her away. She was pregnant, and it was Josh�s, and he had already left her. I asked her, just once, if she wanted him to know, and she laughed bitterly at me and asked if I thought she�d be talking to me if she did. I never asked again, because in the end it wasn�t my place to tell him.
I went into politician mode then, because I was never one of those guys who knew what to do in emotional situations. So instead, I strategized, and found that there was really only one way to get around the media backlash that was going to inevitably follow her in the aftermath of all this. When I pitched the idea to her, I got the first genuine laugh I had heard from her in a long time, but she agreed, because it was best for everyone involved.
We married in a small private ceremony, and I tried not to notice as we were saying our vows that her eyes never met mine. I knew then that in her mind she was saying his name, not mine, and it hurt, but I went through with it because it was never supposed to be about love.
But somewhere along the way, in all those years of waking up together and raising a son together and changing the world together, I discovered that I had fallen in love with her. And when I would lie in bed at night, holding her in my arms, sometimes I could almost forget that I was not the man she wanted there with her. Sometimes, when we would be sitting curled up together on the couch late at night when John was in bed, I could ignore the ghost that lurked in the quiet shadows of our house.
John, I believe to this day, was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I have made a living crafting words to shape a message, but the moment I first held him in my arms and watched him curl his tiny fingers around my thumb, I discovered that there were no words that would be adequate to describe that moment, to describe the complete and utter devotion that swept over me as I looked into those sleepy blue eyes.
As he grew, I could see Josh looking back at me through those eyes, and it scared me. John was a living reminder of the man I was not, and as he grew I knew that he realized it. Gradually, Josh became his ideal, because to be me was to be a disappointment. He could see it in his mother�s eyes, and even though we never told him the truth, I think that he wouldn�t have been disappointed to find it out.
In fact, he probably would have been relieved.
There was a scenario that started to play itself out in my mind early in our marriage, and the fear of it never truly left me, even after all those years together. It was the thought that someday Josh was going to come to his senses and realize what a fool he had been to leave Donna, and he would come to her and beg her to take him back. I was sure, in the dark corners of my heart that I tried never to acknowledge, that she would not be able to resist him, probably wouldn�t even want to.
Over the years, I found myself being thankful that Josh remained a fool, because I couldn�t bear to lose either of them.
Our arrangement was never supposed to be permanent. I was meant to be a cover for her for a few years, a blinder to throw off the suspicion of Josh as John�s father, and once that was established, she would have no more use for me. I thought in the beginning that I would be ok with that when the time came, but as the years passed and she started to get restless, I began to fear that day when she would come to me and ask for that planned divorce.
It came up a few times between us, in brief conversations, but I always steered us away from the topic, and she never pushed the issue. I think, over time, she became comfortable with me, became used to me, and began to forget that I wasn�t the man she should have married. I don�t believe that she ever loved me, and I don�t think she ever stopped loving him, but those were things that I learned to live with, just like I learned to live with the shadow of him looming over us.
The day John came to me and said that he was going to Yale, I felt something in me die. We had known pretty much since he started to talk that he would be a politician, so his career choice was no surprise. He had been surrounded by them his whole life. They were his aunts and uncles, his parents, and his inspirations. But somewhere along the way, he had discovered that he didn�t just want to be a politician�he wanted to be Josh.
That sticker caught my eye that day, as I was driving to work, the sticker that mocked the people behind me, telling them that they didn�t have a child brilliant enough to get into Yale. And yet it mocked me as well, because the child was not mine, and he went to that school in order to become something better than me.
It was tiring, I thought, living a lie, and maybe it was time to tell the truth for once. Maybe it was time for my son to know that he was not my son at all.
And you know, I might just have gone through with it. I might have gone home that night and sat down with Donna and asked her if we could tell him. And maybe she would have agreed, and we would have gone upstairs to the room he still sleeps in when he comes home, and we would have sat with him and talked to him, and told him all the things we had been hiding over the years.
Maybe he would have hated us, for lying to him his whole life. Maybe he would have been glad to know that his idol was actually his father. Maybe he would have felt guilty for his birth forcing his mother to live with a man she never loved, because irrational guilt, of course, is a Lyman family trait.
I�ll never know, because my heart chose that moment to stop beating.
The irony of life will never cease to amaze me.
I have this dream sometimes, now that I�m gone, and it gives me hope. I dream that somehow my death brought Josh back into Donna�s life, and that maybe John learned the truth about who he really is. They will never be a perfect family, because there are too many skeletons in their closets, too many years of deceit and lies, and there are things that even the greatest of loves cannot overcome. But they will be happy, in their own way, and that will be enough.
I took Josh�s place for far too long.
I think it might be time for him to take mine.