helped unhitch us from our everyday concerns, leaving us blissful and caught up in little more than the feeling of warm air on our skin and our daughter’s delight at absolutely everything. As the headlines kept reminding us, we were fast approaching the dawn of a new millennium. And we were in a lovely place to spend the final days of 1999.
All was going fine until Barack got a call from someone back in Illinois, letting him know that the senate was somewhat abruptly going back into session to finish work on the crime bill. If he intended to vote, he had something like forty-eight hours to get back to Springfield. Another clock was now ticking. With a sinking heart, I watched as Barack jumped into action, rebooking our flights to leave the following day, pulling the plug on our vacation. We had to go. We had no choice. I suppose I could’ve stayed on alone with Malia, but what would be the fun in that? I wasn’t happy with the idea of leaving, but I understood, again, this was the way of politics. The vote was an important one—the bill included new gun-control measures, which Barack had fervently supported—and it had also proven divisive enough that a single absent senator could potentially prevent the bill from passing. We were going home.
But then something unexpected happened. Overnight, Malia spiked a high fever. She’d ended the day as an exuberant surf kicker but was now, not even twelve hours later, a hot and listless heap of toddler-shaped misery, glassy-eyed and wailing in pain, but still too young to tell us anything specific about it. We gave her Tylenol, but it didn’t help much. She was tugging at one ear, which made me suspect it was infected. The reality of what this meant started to set in. We sat on the bed, watching Malia drift into a restless, uncomfortable sleep. We were only a matter of hours now from our flight home. I saw the worry deepening on Barack’s face, caught as he was in the crosscurrents of his opposing obligations. What we were about to decide went far beyond the moment at hand.
“She can’t fly,” I said, “obviously.”
“I know.”
“We have to switch the flights again.”
“I know.”
Unspoken was the fact that he could just go. He could walk out the door and catch a cab to the airport and still make it to Springfield in time to vote. He could leave his sick daughter and fretting wife halfway across the Pacific and go join his colleagues. It was an option. But I wasn’t going to martyr myself by suggesting it. I was vulnerable, I’ll admit, swimming in the uncertainty of what was going on with Malia. What if the fever got worse? What if she needed a hospital? Meanwhile, around the world, there were more paranoid people than us readying fallout shelters, hoarding cash and jugs of water just in case the worst of the Y2K predictions came true and the power and communication grids went on the fritz due to buggy computer networks unable to register the new millennium. It wasn’t going to happen, but still. Was he really thinking about leaving?
It turns out he wasn’t. He didn’t. He would never.
I didn’t listen to the call he made to his legislative aide that day, explaining that he’d miss the crime-bill vote. I didn’t care. I was just focused on our girl. And as soon as Barack got off that call, he was, too. She was our little human. We owed everything to her first.
In the end, the year 2000 arrived without incident. After a couple of days of rest and some antibiotics, what indeed had turned out to be a nasty ear infection for Malia cleared up, returning our toddler to her normal bouncy state. Life would go on. It always did. On another perfect blue-sky day in Honolulu, we boarded a plane and flew home to Chicago, back into the chill of winter and into what for Barack was shaping up to be a political disaster.
* * *
The crime bill had failed to pass the state legislature, losing by five votes. For me, there was no math to do: Even if Barack had made it back from Hawaii in time, his vote almost certainly wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Still, he took a beating for his absence. His opponents in the congressional primary pounced on the opportunity