She’s never smiling anymore, never wearing anything that falls less than three inches below her knees or that’s cut lower than just at the bottom of that concavity on her throat, the one I can never remember the name of. Supra-something notch. Her sleeves are unfailingly three-quarters length, like today, and the counter on her left wrist matches her dress exactly. It looks like a piece of antique jewelry, a gift from a great-grandmother.

The first lady is supposed to be our model, a pure woman, steadfast at her husband’s side in all things, at all times.

Of course, she’s at his side only during public events. When the cameras click off and the microphones are muted, Anna Myers, née Johansson, is promptly escorted back to her home by a trio of armed Secret Service agents. This is never filmed, but Patrick has been in attendance at more than one of the president’s appearances.

The trio stays with her night and day.

In other times, this constant supervision of the first lady would be accepted as routine security for her protection. The truth, however, is in Anna Myers’ blue eyes; they have the vacant, lusterless quality of a woman who now sees the world in shades of gray.

There was a girl in my dorm, five doors down on the left, who had Anna’s eyes. It seemed the muscles around them never moved, never contracted and stretched to match the smile she wore when we asked if she was okay, if she felt better this morning, if she wanted to talk. I remember when we found her body, eyes open and dull, like country wells or puddles of spilled coffee. If you want to know what depression looks like, all you need to do is look into a depressed person’s eyes.

Strange how I can remember the dead girl’s eyes but not her name.

Anna Myers lives in a prison with rose gardens and marble bathrooms and two-thousand-thread-count sheets on the bed. Patrick told me about her, after one of his visits as a favor to President Myers, about how the Secret Service men check Anna’s bathroom twice a day, how they search her bed for objects that might have migrated unseen from the kitchen, how they hold her prescription meds and dole out pills one at a time. There are no liquor bottles in Anna’s home, no locks on the doors except for those of the storage cupboard where the housekeeping supplies are. Nothing in her house is made of glass.

I switch the channel.