Mary-Beth opened her eyes to the sound of the rising hum of household electronics. The alarm clock beside their bed was flashing 12:01, the fan was gaining momentum above them, and the specter of a prolonged period in a crowded house without digital distractions had lifted.
JJ woke a moment later. He rolled over to look at her.
“Power’s back,” she said.
“Mmm. That’s good.”
“What do you think it was?”
He rubbed an eye. “World War III? That’s what my head feels like.”
Mary-Beth ran a hand through his dirty hair. “You guys. You always drink too much the first night back. How late did you stay up?”
He squeezed his eyes shut in apparent pain. “Too late. We found tiki torches in the garage and played boccie until Charlie finally won.”
“So did you talk to Philip about his weird announcement? Is that for real? He can’t possibly want to be a priest.”
“Yeah, that was weird,” JJ groaned, his eyes still closed. “But we didn’t talk about it. I mean, no one brought it up.”
“You guys spent hours alone in the dark and didn’t ask your brother about his super strange plan? How does that happen?”
JJ opened his eyes and looked hard at his wife. “Do you think he was actually serious about it?”
“I think he was, JJ.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah, like, for real, though.”
He laughed a little and massaged his temples. “I kind of thought it was like when he joined that band in Oakland. He just did it for a little while and then stopped doing it. Like everything he does. He’s still a kid.”
“I don’t know. He never made a big formal announcement like that. And he’s many years away from being a kid. He’s twenty-seven! I think he might be serious about this.”
JJ considered the plausibility of this theory. “Oh my God.”
“I know. Maybe it’s not such a weird thing. Maybe this is what he needs.”
“What?” JJ sat up on his elbows and looked at her. “That’s ridiculous. He’s not going to be a fucking priest.”
“He could. It’s not that crazy. We’re all Catholics.”
“Mary-Beth, we’re barely Christmas Catholics at this point. Christmas Catholics aren’t priest material. It’s gotta be something else. I mean, did his dick fall off or something?”
She shrugged. It didn’t seem like such a crazy idea to Mary-Beth. Philip was forever looking for something purposeful, something to stick with. He’d had girlfriends in the past, but what did she know about those relationships? And for some reason, it wasn’t so hard to imagine Philip in those robes, praying quietly. It was possible.
JJ got out of bed and angrily pulled a pair of shorts on. “I think you’re wrong. I think this is one of his little whims, and I’m not indulging it.”
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.” Mary-Beth could hear the sound of feet padding downstairs and the gas stove clicking on. A distant coffeepot gurgled enticingly. “Did your dad ever get an answer from DC about the power?”
JJ rubbed his temples. “Yeah, it was almost certainly an attack on the grid. Apparently, it was supposed to be more widespread, but it was thwarted before it could affect other regions. They think it’s a terrorist organization working out of Europe. That’s all I know.”
“Oh my gosh, JJ. Is it safe to travel? The boys leave today.”
He nodded. “I know. And my father assured me that there is no indication of other attacks planned. The threat level has been raised as a precaution, but no one seems to expect anything more. Security will probably be higher at the gates, but that’s it.”
Mary-Beth swallowed and studied her husband.
Later that day, Lucas and Cameron would be on their way to Barcelona with the rest of their varsity soccer team. They were joining high school teams from upscale suburbs around the world to participate in a weeklong soccer clinic with the promise of some one-on-one coaching from the FC Barcelona players themselves. It was the sort of thing that Mary-Beth still found ludicrously extravagant, but she wouldn’t dare be the only parent at Our Lady of Mercy High School who denied her children the experience. And so, after coughing up four thousand dollars, they were preparing to ship their sons off to Spain.
“I don’t like this, JJ.”
He went to his wife on the bed. “I know. I don’t like it, either, but they’ve been waiting all year for this. The trip is still on. All their teammates will be there.”
“Are you sure they’re still going?”
“Yeah, the coach sent a confirmation email last night. They’re going to Barcelona.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“What time is the flight again?”
“It’s this afternoon, but we should leave soon if we’re going to get to Boston in time to get through international departures. The rest of the team is flying out of Dulles, but the boys will meet them at the gate in Madrid for the final leg.”
JJ nodded apologetically. “Right. Sorry, I knew that. I’ll go wake them up. You want me to take them and skip golf?”
What Mary-Beth wanted was for them all to drive to Boston together, to have a few more hours with her family intact before she sent her children to a foreign land. She was about to cut off two limbs and kiss them goodbye for ten days, and it didn’t seem like too much to ask to have her husband there with her.
What JJ wanted, as usual, was to be accommodating. He hated to disappoint her. But they were already there, in the grip of the Bright family, and JJ’s loyalty was divided.
“You go play golf with the guys,” she said. “I’ll take Lucas and Cam.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“I’ll have breakfast with the boys now and give them a pep talk.”
“It’s fine. Maybe Ian will come with me.”
“Perfect. Ian hates golf. Maybe invite Charlie’s girl along, too?”
“Yeah, I could ask Chelsea.” Mary-Beth didn’t want to take Chelsea along. If she had to forfeit her husband, she at least wanted Ian to herself.
“Thanks again, honey.”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
JJ pulled her in and kissed the top of her head. He smelled sour from last night’s liquor.
As he left the bedroom, he yelled to their sleeping sons, “Airport shuttle leaves in an hour, guys!”
Mary-Beth showered and dressed in the upstairs bathroom. She could hear the house waking up around her. In her real life, she’d be the first person up, the one to start the coffee and get the paper. She liked having the quiet dawn all to herself in her clean kitchen. But here, she was little more than a ward, a kid at summer camp. She didn’t have to worry about whether there were enough eggs in the fridge or the bagels had gone stale. She wasn’t even sure she knew how the coffee machine worked. It was at once freeing and suffocating.
When Mary-Beth got downstairs, Patty was buttering toast at the counter while the rest of the group quietly nursed coffees at the kitchen table. Through the window, she could see John Senior stacking cut wood against the wall of the garage while Farah filmed. She was pretty sure that John usually paid someone to deliver and stack the wood.
Ian looked up from a newspaper. He was dressed and notably fresher than the others. “Long night for the party boys, apparently.”
“So I heard.” Mary-Beth poured coffee into a mug and then picked up the national section of the New York Times. There were apparently still hundreds of thousands of people without power in New England. The faces of children sitting on a city stoop outside an unlit apartment building looked back at her. The headline read: “Cyberattack Contained. Government Officials Say No Immediate Concerns in Aftermath.”
Patty put a steaming platter of eggs on the table and sat down. “You’re all still going golfing with your father, right?”
JJ, Spencer and Charlie nodded into their coffees. Philip had the largest bags under his eyes, but he was smiling. Chelsea was there, looking hungover herself, which meant that she had stayed up, too.
Mary-Beth remembered those early days, when she did that one-of-the-guys thing and went along on every Bright brother adventure. It had been fun and spontaneous, until it wasn’t anymore. Eventually, she started to feel extraneous, nonessential to the fun. All the extras stop following the Bright brothers around eventually—not that Mary-Beth was sad about it. It was a relief, in fact, to stop pretending that she wanted to take the paddleboards out for a midnight adventure, or have another tequila shot or rent paintball guns on a Saturday afternoon. Being one of the guys had always seemed to her an annoying by-product of misguided feminism. Chelsea seemed like just the type to perpetuate it. But she didn’t blame her for it, not in the early stages of this relationship. Everyone starts out that way with the Bright boys.
Lucas and Cameron walked through the kitchen with full suitcases and sleepy eyes.
“Guys, throw those in the trunk and then come have some breakfast.”
They grunted and went outside.
Patty reached across the table and patted Mary-Beth’s hand. “Don’t worry about the twins. They’re going to have a great time on this trip.”
Mary-Beth nodded. “I know they will. I always feel nervous before things like this. They’ve just never gone this far. I’m entitled to be a little nervous.”
“Well, sure. Especially with everything that’s going on in the world.”
JJ looked up from the sports section and caught Mary-Beth’s eye.
She felt a lump forming in her throat.
Patty pressed on. “Especially given the power outage, and all this talk of terrorism. I just mean...it’s understandable to feel nervous. I’m sure I would.”
The lump in her throat was expanding to a grapefruit. Mary-Beth had been holding it all together, reminding herself of all the ways in which this was a great experience for her children and a worthwhile headache for her. She knew she couldn’t keep them in her orbit forever. They were sixteen—a number that could sound shockingly high or low, depending on the context. But this, from her mother-in-law now, was almost enough to unravel her.
JJ put his fork down. “Did dad hear something new about the power outage? Has anything changed, Mom?”
Patty shook her head. “No, it’s the same as it was last night. They don’t know who did it, but it was definitely something nefarious.”
Ian folded his section of the paper. “The world isn’t any more dangerous today than it was yesterday.” He gave his mother-in-law a pointed look. “And the FAA said flights are all on schedule, as usual.”
Patty nodded and said not a word more. She listened to Ian more than she listened to Mary-Beth, which Mary-Beth suspected had something to do with a Y chromosome. She tried not to hold that against Ian.
Mary-Beth and JJ looked at each other from across the table. Our children will be fine, they silently agreed. She wished he was coming with her to the airport, but she wasn’t going to make a big thing of it. Our children will be fine.
Twenty minutes later—after grandparent kisses, a run through the packing list, a round of preemptive warnings from JJ about drinking in foreign countries, and some unhelpful advice from Uncle Charlie regarding the liberated attitudes of European girls—they were off, driving east along I-90 toward Logan International Airport.
Mary-Beth was at the wheel of the SUV with Ian beside her in the passenger seat. Chelsea, who had reluctantly agreed to come along at Charlie’s encouragement, was in the back seat with the boys. Her forehead was pressed against the window, and her eyes were closed behind enormous sunglasses. Even hungover and asleep, she was maddeningly pretty.
Ian didn’t say anything for a while, out of respect for Mary-Beth’s apparent anxiety. They watched the hot pavement unfold at high speed, listening only to the distant buzz of music coming through the twins’ headphones.
“Tell me not to worry,” Mary-Beth finally said as they passed Springfield.
“Don’t worry.”
She squinted into the sun.
“Really. There’s nothing to worry about—nothing beyond the normal parent stuff.”
Mary-Beth sighed.
“Would it make you feel better if we stopped at the little airport church and said a few prophylactic Hail Marys? You know—Our Lady of the Orderly Tarmac, or whatever.”
“My mother always stopped in those airport churches. I loved them.” She smiled. “Saint Ignatius of the Window Seat.”
“Immaculate Heart of the First Class Lounge. The Cathedral of Complimentary Drinks.”
She was laughing harder now. “Stop. Our brother-in-law is about to become a priest. I’m not sure we can joke about things like that.”
“Then we’d better get it all out of our system now.”
“Seriously, though. What did you think of Philip’s announcement? Do you think he meant it?”
“Who knows with Philip. He might be serious.”
Mary-Beth looked in her rearview mirror to be sure the back seat wasn’t listening. They were not.
“Well, is anyone going to ask him about it? JJ said it didn’t come up last night. Can you believe that?”
“Are you really surprised?” Ian pressed buttons on the console until he found the air-conditioning. “I’m not. These people have Olympic medals in avoidance. They can go weeks before they say a word that means anything to each other. But I’ll tell you, this Philip announcement isn’t going away. He seemed really serious. And you know it’s killing Patty. They’re going to have to talk this one out.”
Bouncing all this off Ian—a sane person, an extra—was a relief for Mary-Beth. The opacity of the Bright brothers’ relationship was an enduring mystery to her. She had nothing to compare it to as an only child, but she suspected that most siblings had more beneath the surface of their relationships. There should be boundless loyalty, or simmering rage or cancerous regret. All of those things seemed like reasonable feelings for people with whom you shared a mother and father and childhood home. By her reasoning, the least plausible opinion for someone to hold about their siblings was uncomplicated contentment. No one just likes their siblings. But the Bright brothers all liked one another just fine, and it didn’t seem right to her.
There had been moments in the past that served for Mary-Beth as little glimpses into darker corners of their familial memories, things that the Brights had edited from their canon of stories and their collective understanding of who they were. The Brights worked hard to ignore the dark corners, but they couldn’t erase them entirely. Even if everyone silently conspired to forget them.
They couldn’t erase the fact that one Thanksgiving, years ago, Charlie had punched Spencer in the face and broken his nose. And they couldn’t erase the fact that when they were in high school, JJ had walked in on Spencer engaging in a sex act with JJ’s best friend. And it was still devastatingly true that JJ had once observed his father having cocktails with a woman who was not their mother at a Washington bar, and that when he reported this to his brothers they laughed off any possibility of their father having an affair, although it was utterly clear to JJ that an affair is precisely what he’d witnessed. Those things had all happened, and Mary-Beth wouldn’t be complicit in their erasure.
All of those true stories—the multitude of stories she’d never know—should have been fodder for sibling angst, for the pain that accompanied all the joy. And that was sometimes what Mary-Beth craved from these people. Mary-Beth just wanted all of the trappings of a big, boisterous familial experience, and then she wanted to die feeling like she’d lived family life to the very fullest, and that the immense joy had made all the pain worthwhile. Without the pain, there was nothing to measure the pleasure against.
“These people...” Ian said, shaking his head. Only Ian understood how it was possible to love a human so thoroughly and also be driven to near insanity by his family’s tendency to bury all unpleasantness. Ian knew.
“JJ was really mad about this priest idea,” Mary-Beth said.
“Spencer was, too.”
“Why do you think it bothers them so much?”
Ian raised his eyebrows conspiratorially. “I think it all seems a little too...ethnic.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. The Brights, with their Anglicized name and their WASPy tastes...their sailing.”
Mary-Beth burst out laughing, causing all three passengers in the back seat to look up at her briefly. “Are you serious?”
“I’m dead serious, Mary! Senator Bright might invoke his Irish roots on the campaign stump in Southie, but he hasn’t been to Mass on a non-Christmas day since he was in high school. He’s been kind of phasing religiosity out.”
“That’s basically what JJ said. But I just figured the church doesn’t mean anything to him anymore. I thought it was kind of organic.”
Ian shook his head, entirely sure of the point he was about to make. “I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think John Senior even knows what he believes. He’s too calculating about his image to believe anything. There is no inner John Bright. There is only John Bright the public figure. He is whatever he chooses to project. John Bright is the sentient version of his own resume.”
Mary-Beth sighed in agreement.
“My point is,” he went on, “it’s unfashionable. Church on Christmas is fine, but it’s unfashionable in certain circles to be too intense about it. The Brights think about things like that...even our husbands, whether they know it or not, are very aware of that stuff.”
Mary-Beth had never relied on her own ability to recognize what was and was not fashionable, but the suggestion that her Catholicism wasn’t came as a slightly bitter surprise. She didn’t attend Mass regularly, either, but she still prayed. She still genuflected when an ambulance passed and avoided taking the Lord’s name in vain. She still felt a little tugging in her heart when she encountered an old nun in a habit, and she made vague plans to give up meat each Lent even if she didn’t do it. Catholicism was to Mary-Beth an old blanket that could comfort or itch like hell, but it was a part of her identity. And she liked the fact that her boys were at a Catholic school, even if the reasons for it were mostly academic. Her husband had no such relationship to the religion he’d passively inherited, but it hadn’t occurred to her that he was embarrassed by it.
“I don’t know, Ian.”
He shrugged. “I don’t want to overstate the point. I just think it makes them squirm a little... John and Patty just want four children with normal jobs that pay in social currency and actual currency. That’s their religion—currency.”
“That may all be true. But I have a different theory.” Mary-Beth kept her eyes on the road as she passed a Subaru with the glad head of a golden retriever sticking out the window. “I think it also makes them nervous in the way that Philip has always made them nervous—he’s too good. He’s so kind and nonjudgmental and guileless. Worst of all, he has never been impressed by John and Patty’s accomplishments or their stuff. There’s something about him that makes John and Patty feel kind of exposed, by comparison. And I think that effect would be amplified if he was a clergy member...assuming he would be the good kind, which of course he would be.”
“Of course.” Ian thought about this for a moment. “Yeah, that’s not a bad theory. But what about our husbands? Why do they care so much?”
“I really don’t know. Everyone just feels tenser this summer.”
“They certainly do.”
Twenty minutes later, they were standing in the long TSA line at Logan International Airport. Cameron and Lucas had their carry-on suitcases and tickets in hand. They were dressed up for the occasion in new soccer jerseys and sneakers. Both were bouncing on their heels, nervous and excited to be free in the world, unconcerned about any recent global events.
Mary-Beth checked and rechecked the flight number. Everything was on time.
Uncle Ian consulted with an airline steward about where, precisely, the boys could find the rest of their soccer team when they arrived at their layover in Madrid.
And Chelsea had volunteered to fetch neck pillows from a nearby kiosk.
There was nothing left to do but rip this Band-Aid off.
“You both have passports and boarding passes?” Mary-Beth asked (again).
“Got it.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re sure that Coach Brett is going to wait for you at your gate in Madrid?”
Lucas held up his phone, with a confirming text message from Coach Brett.
“Okay, bring it in,” Ian said, holding his arm out for hugs from his nephews. They were both taller than him.
Mary-Beth’s eyes filled.
The boys hugged Ian, one after the other, as travelers jostled them from every side.
“Don’t pick up any bad footballer habits,” Ian instructed.
The boys smiled impatiently.
And then it was Mary-Beth’s turn. She reached up to Cameron and put her hands on both sides of his smooth face.
He kissed her forehead and said, “Don’t worry, Mom. It’s going to be fine.”
Lucas put an arm around her and pulled her toward him. She leaned into his strong teenage body, adult in every way but still smelling like the bath soap she’d been buying for him since he was a baby.
“We love you, Mom.”
And then the tears came—not a lot, but enough to spill over onto her cheeks and make Mary-Beth wish that she had the will to contain them, to save them up for only truly sad or miraculous moments. She didn’t want to be the kind of woman who cried at all the mundane little turns in life, but she found herself crying fairly often these days. It was just that her boys were so big, and still so baby-faced, and she couldn’t reconcile her helplessness in time’s passing. And the sentiment itself was embarrassingly trite, but knowing that didn’t mitigate the heartache of it one bit.
“I love you guys.”
They turned and filed into the bustling security line, looking back once more for a final, half-assed wave.
“C’mon,” Ian said, putting an arm around Mary-Beth and leading her back toward the sliding doors. “They’re just going on vacation.”
She laughed and wiped the running mascara from beneath her eyes. “I know, this is ridiculous.”
Mary-Beth could feel Chelsea trailing behind them, trying to keep her distance from all this emotion.
As they were about to walk through the automatic doors toward the parking garage, all three of them turned to the wall of television screens to their right.
The CNN crawl read: “No leads yet in the North American blackout. US and European security officials in talks now.”
Mary-Beth paused to read it again.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Ian said, pulling her shoulders through the door. “Let’s go.”
They walked out into the hot summer air. Mary-Beth tried to breathe, but it felt too thick. Maybe she was making a mistake in letting the boys go. Maybe there really was something to be nervous about with these blackouts. And why would they put news programs on in airports? Aren’t people nervous enough?
“Crazy world,” Chelsea said to no one in particular. “I guess this is just the kind of thing that happens now.”
Mary-Beth glared at Chelsea, who looked suddenly apologetic. She hadn’t wanted to bring her, didn’t want to make the effort to know Charlie’s latest in an endless string of flings. And now Mary-Beth wished she’d spoken up and left her behind. She decided that she didn’t like this Chelsea one bit.