Everyone slept late the following morning. Three days had passed since the attack in Madrid. Mary-Beth and JJ were with their sons in Washington, DC. And the rest of the house was free to just sleep. When the Bright men and their extras finally emerged from their bedrooms around eleven, the spirit of their summer vacation had returned.
“We should do something big today,” Charlie announced as he piled onions and capers onto a cream cheese and lox bagel.
They were sitting around the kitchen table—Charlie, Chelsea, Spencer, Ian and Philip—satiating their returned appetites and feeling like children without chaperones. John Senior was on the phone in his study, while Patty weeded in the garden. Farah and her camera watched them from a corner.
“I was thinking about doing that hike at the east end of the lake,” Philip said.
Ian reached for the cream. “I’d love a hike.”
“Too short,” Charlie said. “Let’s do something that really makes us sweat. How about the Notch. Anyone up for that?”
Spencer nodded emphatically, his mouth full.
“Sure,” Chelsea said.
Philip shrugged.
“You coming, Farah?”
She pressed a button on the camera and looked out from behind it. “Sorry, no. I should stay with your dad here. And I’m not much of a hiker. I probably don’t have the right gear for it.”
“Chelsea can lend you something. Right, babe?”
“Totally.”
Farah hesitated. It was clear to Ian that she didn’t want to go, but these were not cues that the Brights understood easily. Declining a family outing and an outdoor activity were two sins too many.
“Do what you want to do, Farah,” Ian said.
“But the view is amazing. You can’t miss this. You can bring one of your little cameras.”
“We’ll find you some shorts after breakfast,” Chelsea said.
And poor Farah just smiled, ambushed.
Ian tried to send a sympathetic look her way, but she was back behind the camera. In his experience, people eventually resign themselves to move with the Bright tide instead of resisting it.
Two hours later, they were huffing up a knotty trail, two by two, under a canopy of evergreens and lush maples. The sun could barely reach them through the overhang, but they were dripping with sweat. Spencer and Charlie Bright were at the front, going way too fast for the rest of the group. Ian and Philip were behind, with Farah and Chelsea bringing up the rear. Farah took her camera out intermittently to capture the scene.
The pitch was steep, and Ian’s thighs burned, but it felt good to be out and moving his body. He would have gone faster if he didn’t feel an obligation to put a drag on things for Farah’s sake. She looked fit enough, but she wasn’t in the kind of shape that Brights expected. These people had completed triathlons, hiked the Swiss Alps and rafted the Zambezi. They didn’t know what it felt like to occupy an average American body.
“Please feel free to go up ahead without me,” she puffed from the rear.
Philip looked back. “We never leave a crew member behind.”
Farah rolled her eyes and smiled.
It sounded something like flirtation to Ian. His eyes met Chelsea’s then and it was clear that she saw it, too.
Chelsea and Farah began chatting from behind. They shared a love of documentaries and travel writing. They’d both lived in a bunch of different cities. It was impossible not to eavesdrop, so Ian and Philip didn’t bother resisting. They’d jump in now and then when they had something to add, but there wasn’t a lot of airspace between the two women. Ian heard both of them say more on this hike than in the previous days put together. That was the effect of the Bright household: it could shrink normally large personalities. He wondered what they were like in the rest of their lives.
“Water break!” Charlie stopped the train, and the rest of them caught up.
They passed around two water bottles and wiped sweat from their faces.
Ian leaned against a tree and rubbed his lower back.
Spencer turned to Charlie. “So how’d you swing a whole month off from work, brother?”
Farah quietly resumed recording.
“It wasn’t so hard, actually.” He sat down on a nearby log.
“What do you mean?”
Charlie sighed. “The Haiti project is over. For good. It’s a long story, but there was some malfeasance, and the State Department rescinded the contract. My boss is probably facing criminal charges. We were all sacked immediately.”
“Charlie, that stinks,” Philip said.
Spencer nodded. “Hey, man, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” His voice was quieter now, and he seemed to have forgotten about their race to the top of the mountain. “You, too, Chelsea?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
No one said anything for a minute.
“So what are you guys gonna do?”
Charlie shrugged. “I guess I’ll send my résumé around to some of their competitors, see what happens. I don’t really know.”
“I might look at a few NGOs back home in London,” Chelsea said.
Charlie looked at her. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“It’s a new idea.”
Ian took the water bottle back. “Well, at least you guys have a little time to figure it out, right?”
“Yeah, sure.” Charlie scraped dirt from the underside of his boots with a stick. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it. “Should we keep going?”
Spencer started walking and everyone fell in line behind him. “You could always become a man of the cloth. Like Philip here.”
Philip kept hiking.
“That still your plan, Phil?” Charlie asked.
No answer.
They were goading him, trying to get him to bite. Ian had seen this before. All family deflections landed on Philip. There was a direct relationship between the anxiety the men felt in their father’s presence and their aggression with Philip. Philip usually took it in stride and laughed it off, but there was a bite to it now.
“Is that still your plan?” Charlie asked again. “Philip, can we talk again about how you’re still planning on taking a vow of celibacy, of telling people not to get divorced or use birth control?”
“No, let’s not talk about it,” Ian said.
Chelsea and Farah hiked quietly from the back of the hiking line. The camera was rolling.
“Yeah, Phil, I was thinking about that,” Spencer started.
“Guys, stop,” Ian tried.
“Does that really make sense to you?” Spencer went on. “Don’t rules like that give you pause about the whole enterprise?”
They all kept walking, waiting for his response. Even Ian, who wanted to stop the teasing, also wanted to hear the answer.
“Sometimes it does,” Philip finally said. “But I’m comfortable with my skepticism. The work is good if you do it right. How does anyone commit to anything that’s flawed?”
“So you’re like JJ, then,” Charlie said.
“How so?”
“JJ does the same calculation about his work,” Charlie explained. “It’s the net-positive argument. You think he’s lobbying to get solar panels on household rooftops all day? No way. I bet he spends at least half his time working for oil companies and mountaintop mining. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he does.”
“I’ve wondered about that,” Philip said quietly. “But JJ isn’t here to defend himself.”
Charlie went on. “And the thing is that JJ believes that the net result of his work is good—or more good than bad. And that’s how he lives with himself. So in that way, you’re just like him.”
Philip stopped walking, and then they all stopped with him. “It’s not the same thing,” he said softly. “I don’t think some arcane ideas about human sexuality are as bad as defending massive oil spills.”
“But it is, Phil!” Charlie was yelling now. “It is! Because you’re lobbying on behalf of shame and repression—two of the most destructive forces in human history!”
Philip’s hands formed tight fists at his sides. “Why do you care so much about this, Charlie? Don’t you have bigger problems right now? Didn’t you just tell us you’re unemployed?”
The two brothers stared at each other while the others watched. Finally, Charlie started walking and Philip followed. Everyone else fell in line. Charlie’s unemployment, of course, was the point.
Ian wished that Mary-Beth were here with him, to witness whatever it was he had just seen. It was the same old brother stuff, but with a sharper edge this time. There was a new fraying.
They huffed and dripped and hauled their aching bodies up the rest of the mountain in silence. Leaves swayed in a gentle breeze, and chipmunks darted across the path.
At the top, everyone collapsed on their own private patch of grass or flat rock. The view was glorious. Each tiny Berkshire town was now just a cluster of dollhouse figurines with a church steeple at the center. Their own lake was a blue puddle in a series of oddly shaped puddles, surrounded by cartoon-perfect trees. A miniscule paper sailboat floated across the largest.
“This is one of the prettier things I’ve ever seen,” Farah said as she zipped her camera into a pocket. Her face was blotchy with heat and exhaustion.
Charlie handed out apples from his backpack. “It’s worth it, right?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
Philip laughed to himself.
Spencer looked at his phone. “We got a note from Mom. Apparently JJ and Mary-Beth are going to be on Good Morning America tomorrow with the boys and a couple of their teammates. Dad’s going to be on, too. They’re all meeting in New York tonight.”
No one seemed surprised by this information. They nodded, as if appearing on national television twice in one week was the most normal thing in the world.
“We should head back,” Philip said.
Charlie stood up and readjusted his baseball cap. “I’ll take the lead.”
“No, I’ll take the lead,” Chelsea corrected. “This isn’t a race.”
He smiled and kissed the side of her sweaty head.
The walk down was mostly quiet. It went faster, but because the steep descent engaged a whole new set of unprepared muscles, it was still difficult. Their thighs wobbled and threatened to buckle every now and then.
This was one of the things Ian thought the Brights always had right: the impulse to walk it off. They pushed their bodies until uncomfortable thoughts dissolved in the exhaustion. It wasn’t a sophisticated theory of emotional well-being, but it worked more often than it should. It had gotten them this far in life.
When they got to the bottom, Spencer stopped and looked around at the group. “With Mom and Dad gone, we’re on our own for dinner. What should we do?”
Philip stepped forward without hesitation. “I think we should get drunk,” he said. “I think it’s time for that.”