“I think this is exactly what we need, don’t you?” Mary-Beth patted her husband JJ’s thigh just as his foot pressed harder on the gas pedal. She could feel the muscles beneath his chinos shift in sync with the transmission.
JJ Bright nodded and smiled faintly, eyes on the road.
“What do you guys think?” Mary-Beth spun around and looked at her twin teenage sons, Lucas and Cameron, both deaf to her at that moment, their heads moving almost imperceptibly to the sounds coming in through their headphones.
Lucas nodded in her direction.
Cameron looked down at the screen of his phone and laughed.
They were enormous mirror images of each other, obviously formed from the same genetic clay as their father in the front seat. Sometimes Mary-Beth felt her breath catch when she took in the substantiality of these humans she’d borne and the man she’d married. Everyone around her was giant and hungry, fresh-sweat-stinking and throbbing with an energy that could build civilizations and start epic wars. All these overwhelming men relying on her, Mary-Beth.
“Yeah, this will be fun,” JJ said finally. “Just what we need.”
“Once the boys are on the plane for their soccer trip, we can just float on the lake, read books in the sun... When was the last time it was just you and me, without the boys?”
JJ looked in the rearview mirror and smiled. “Unfortunately, it’s not going to be that kind of vacation, not with my parents, and brothers and their spouses there. Plus, there’s this documentarian...”
“Oh, right, I forgot.”
Mary-Beth hadn’t forgotten the documentary. She’d been obsessing over it for weeks now, ever since her father-in-law told them that there would be cameras following them around at the lake house for a documentary series on the personal lives of political figures. She wanted to be cool about it—the Bright men certainly would be—but how to be cool when you know you’re on camera all the time? It was thrilling and terrifying to imagine all the bad angles they’d catch, all the awkward moments. Bathing suits and puffy morning eyes. Exposed bra straps and chipping manicures. God, Mary-Beth wasn’t suited for this sort of thing.
And yet she couldn’t wait for it. To be watched all the time. It aroused something inside her that she hadn’t known was there.
“I don’t think it will be too imposing,” JJ said with confidence. “Remember, the camera is really there for my dad. They want to get a peek behind the curtain and see what he’s working on for a second act, I think. It will be a little weird, but we aren’t the subjects. Just try to ignore it.”
JJ knew about things like this, having grown up with some degree of political celebrity. If anything impressed or intimidated him, Mary-Beth didn’t know of it.
Her JJ (for “John Junior”) was the oldest of the four sons of now retired senator John Bright of Massachusetts. JJ was the spitting image of his father—brawny and dark haired, a football player in his youth and still, at forty-five, a damn good fit in a tailored suit. Even among their friends in Washington, DC—a town of practiced extroverts and politicians—JJ stood out for his confidence and gregariousness. He impressed everyone, none more than Mary-Beth. And he loved her ferociously for it. Mary-Beth didn’t need to stand out. She was content to simply bask in the light of her husband’s glow. And is there anything wrong with that? No, there is not, she reminded herself from time to time. There is nothing wrong with it at all.
So JJ was good at things like being watched by cameras; he’d done it quite a bit. But he had never been in a documentary. Mary-Beth worried that JJ hadn’t asked enough questions about this plan, that he’d been too deferential to his father, as usual. Details about this documentary were worryingly thin, and Mary-Beth suspected that there might be more to the story than they were privy to.
The production company behind the documentary was legitimate, as far as Mary-Beth could tell, if a little coarse. In anticipation of this trip, she had watched their docuseries on sweatshop labor in Bangladesh, which was impressive. But why them? she wondered. What was so interesting about John Bright Senior that someone would want to put him in a documentary? Mary-Beth had been around politics long enough to be wary of these things.
She flipped the car visor down to wipe the sweat-softened mascara smudges from underneath her eyes.
“I gotta piss,” Cameron said from the back seat.
JJ nodded and looked at his wife. “We should stop for lunch, anyhow. We’ve got six more hours ahead.”
Mary-Beth agreed. She studied her husband’s face as he navigated their SUV through two lanes of traffic to a nearby exit. His index finger tapped the steering wheel impatiently. A small line of beaded sweat sat just below his hairline. Unlikely as it was, her husband seemed anxious about this trip.