in the room, had taken a seat on another couch next to my mother, who was dressed that evening in an elegant black suit and silver earrings.
“Are you ready for this, Grandma?” I heard Barack say to her.
Never one to overemote, my mom just gave him a sideways look and shrugged, causing them both to smile. Later, though, she’d describe to me how overcome she’d felt right then, struck just as I’d been by his vulnerability. America had come to see Barack as self-assured and powerful, but my mother also recognized the gravity of the passage, the loneliness of the job ahead. Here was this man who no longer had a father or a mother, about to be elected the leader of the free world.
The next time I looked over, I saw that she and Barack were holding hands.
* * *
It was exactly ten o’clock when the networks began to flash pictures of my smiling husband, declaring that Barack Hussein Obama would become the forty-fourth president of the United States. We all leaped to our feet and started instinctively to yell. Our campaign staff streamed into the room, as did the Bidens, everyone hurling themselves from one hug to the next. It was surreal. I felt as if I’d been lifted out of my own body, only watching myself react.
He had done it. We’d all done it. It hardly seemed possible, but the victory was sound.
Here is where I felt like our family got launched out of a cannon and into some strange underwater universe. Things felt slow and aqueous and slightly distorted, even if we were moving quickly and with precise guidance, waved by Secret Service agents into a freight elevator, hustled out a back exit at the hotel and into a waiting SUV. Did I breathe the air as we stepped outside? Did I thank the person who held open the door as we passed by? Was I smiling? I don’t know. It was as if I were still trying to frog-kick my way back to reality. Some of this, I assumed, had to be fatigue. It had been, as predicted, a very long day. I could see the grogginess in the girls’ faces. I’d prepared them for this next part of the night, explaining that whether Dad won or lost, we were going to have a big noisy celebration in a park.
We were gliding now in a police-escorted motorcade along Lake Shore Drive, speeding south toward Grant Park. I’d traveled this same road hundreds of times in my life, from my bus rides home from Whitney Young to the predawn drives to the gym. This was my city, as familiar to me as a place could be, and yet that night it felt different, transformed into something strangely quiet. It was as if we were suspended in time and space, a little like a dream.
Malia had been peering out the window of the SUV, taking it all in.
“Daddy,” she said, sounding almost apologetic. “There’s no one on the road. I don’t think anyone’s coming to your celebration.”
Barack and I looked at each other and started to laugh. It was then that we realized that ours were the only cars on the street. Barack was now president-elect. The Secret Service had cleared everything out, shutting down an entire section of Lake Shore Drive, blocking every intersection along the route—a standard precaution for a president, we’d soon learn. But for us, it was new.
Everything was new.
I put an arm around Malia. “The people are already there, sweetie,” I said. “Don’t worry, they’re waiting for us.”
And they were. More than 200,000 people had crammed into the park to see us. We could hear an expectant hum as we exited the vehicle and were ushered into a set of white tents that had been put up at the front of the park, forming a tunnel that led to the stage. A group of friends and family had gathered there to greet us, only now, due to Secret Service protocol, they were cordoned off behind a rope. Barack put his arm around me, almost as if to make sure I was still there.
We walked out onto the stage a few minutes later, the four of us, me holding Malia’s hand and Barack holding Sasha’s. I saw a lot of things at once. I saw that a wall of thick, bulletproof glass had been erected around the