When they returned to the lake house that afternoon, Mary-Beth gasped, “Look at this place.”
Wet swim trunks and towels were slung over kitchen chairs. Lunch plates were stacked in the sink. Two flies buzzed around margarita goblets that were still sticky with old drinks.
The house was empty but for the flies. Everyone was down at the waterfront, lounging in beach recliners and bobbing in inner tubes. Three canoes were beached at cockeyed angles in the grass.
JJ, Mary-Beth, John, Patty and the boys scanned the house.
“I guess vacation is officially underway,” John Senior laughed, already headed outside to join them.
Cameron and Lucas plopped onto the couches and pulled out their phones.
Patty shook her head and got to work on the dishes.
“Patty, relax,” Mary-Beth said. “Let them clean this up.”
Patty ignored her, so Mary-Beth headed upstairs without another word. If Patty wanted to wait on these adults like a servant, that was her choice. Mary-Beth wasn’t going to do it.
Things weren’t like this at their home back in Maryland. JJ was a thoughtful partner, grateful to Mary-Beth for handling the vast majority of the housework and happy to pitch in where he could. But when he was with his mother, JJ and his brothers were like spoiled children, content to take full advantage of her amenities. In turn, Patty felt entitled to a level of intimacy with her sons that seemed wildly inappropriate to Mary-Beth. It was the kind of thing that drove her nuts in the early years of their marriage. She’d pick fights with JJ about it when they were back home, which only made her appear threatened and petty. Somewhere along the way, Mary-Beth stopped bothering with the arguments. She knew who her husband was. She wasn’t going to do the damn dishes, but neither was she going to shame Patty for doing them. She was exhausted and overwhelmed, and she had no interest in competing with her mother-in-law’s martyrdom.
Upstairs in their bedroom, Mary-Beth slipped out of her shoes, crawled under the covers and closed her eyes.
Three minutes later, JJ came in. He lay down over the top of the comforter and put his arms around her blanketed form. He sighed. “They’re home, honey. We can relax now.”
She breathed and let the weight of her body sink into the mattress. Her children were home with them. They were unharmed, and only a little traumatized. Cameron and Lucas had spent the majority of the drive back to Massachusetts recounting stories of silly, dumb ways in which they’d passed the time while they were stuck in the consulate with their teammates. They’d laughed and slept and complained about the length of the car trip. Things felt wonderfully normal all of a sudden, and Mary-Beth was beginning to believe that they were normal again, that she could relax. Still, she wished they were at home in Maryland, just the four of them.
“Can we leave the lake early, JJ? Let’s just go home.”
He kissed her forehead. “We talked about this already. I don’t think we should. I feel safer with my dad’s security detail around, just in case the attack really did have something to do with us. Plus, we made a commitment to the documentary people.”
“But we could probably get out of that now, don’t you think? I’m sure there’s some fine print in the agreement for extenuating circumstances. Let’s just go home and finish the summer together.”
“We might be able to get out of it, but I’m not sure that we should. If my dad is serious about running for office...”
Mary-Beth pulled back from him. “Do you think he was serious about that? What would he run for? His senate seat won’t be up again for three more years.”
“The governor’s race is next year, though.” JJ paused. “I think he should go for it.”
“God, that’s the last thing your father needs. You’re encouraging this? I thought that was just talk for the cameras, his usual stuff. Why would you encourage this? Your father needs to figure out how to be a retired person. If not for himself, then for your mom.”
“This is what they do, Mary. They like this life. And I think he could win that seat. Democrats are ready for someone with national security experience in the governor’s office. All these attacks make people hawkish.” JJ looked sheepishly into his wife’s eyes. “And I may have suggested to him that I could take a leave from work and be his campaign manager.”
Mary-Beth shot up in bed. “Are you serious? Were you going to ask me?”
“Of course I was going to ask you. This is all just talk right now. It doesn’t mean anything yet. I wouldn’t do anything without your blessing, or the boys’. Let’s just forget I mentioned it and get some rest, together, just the two of us.”
JJ peeled the covers back and tucked his large body underneath with his wife’s. He wrapped his arms tightly around her.
Mary-Beth wanted to sleep. She wanted only to feel him enveloping her and holding her until sleep washed over them both. This new talk of a campaign was too much to wrap her head around right now.
But JJ wasn’t tired; he wanted more of her that day. It was so rare that JJ wanted more than Mary-Beth. Their desire was usually mutually reinforcing; she was aroused by his arousal, and vice versa. Even when things felt distant between them, they could find each other in bed. Their bodies could span the distance first, then their minds.
But it suddenly felt as if there were too many Brights in bed with Mary-Beth and JJ at that moment, as he pressed himself against her. They weren’t alone. Senator John Bright was with them in bed, running the show; and Patty was there keeping things tidy; Spencer was competing with them; and Charlie was teasing them; Farah was recording it all; and George Stephanopoulos was breaking news about it. Mary-Beth couldn’t have sex with her husband without feeling like she was sleeping with all of them, all at once. She wanted to be home, in private, with her family.
“JJ, I have to sleep.”
“Okay, I love you.” He kissed the back of her neck.
JJ stayed with her until she could feel the hazy fog of afternoon sleep pull her away from reality. When she had almost succumbed to it, she heard him creep quietly out of the room.
When he was gone, Mary-Beth tried to fall back to sleep, but she couldn’t stop thinking about JJ. She had the disturbing sensation that his arousal had nothing at all to do with her. It was this moment: the television appearance and documentary film cameras, the onslaught of social media attention, and now the possibility of John Senior throwing his hat in a gubernatorial race. It all excited him. JJ’s ego—which had been so bruised in recent months—was recovering with all this new possibility.
It was all Mary-Beth wanted for her husband: to feel appreciated and purposeful again. But she didn’t want it this way. She didn’t want the tether connecting her family to her in-laws growing shorter, the remaining boundaries dissolving. The reason Mary-Beth could come to the lake house each summer and enjoy it was because they had their own life far away for the rest of the year. Distance was essential to this formula. Without the distance, these trips lost their usefulness. So while JJ was mistaking this campaign idea for a professional win, Mary-Beth couldn’t help but feel that it was a regression—or worse, a coup led by John and Patty.
She fell asleep in her in-laws’ bed, surrounded by people, and utterly alone.
When Mary-Beth awoke, the sun was low in the sky and her stomach was growling. It must have been dinnertime, though she heard not a peep from downstairs.
She slipped into flip-flops and went down to the kitchen. It was sparkling clean again. A bowl of peaches sat on the counter, a handwritten note tucked beneath it.
Went with Dad and the guys to the wine store. Mom’s at yoga. We’ll get takeout for dinner on our way home. Love JJ.
Mary-Beth fished her book from her purse and decided to head down to the waterfront to do the only thing she wanted to do at the lake house this summer: read in peace. But when she walked through the back door to the deck, she saw Chelsea standing down at the shore. She sighed to herself and kept walking toward the water.
“Is everyone gone?” Mary-Beth asked as she approached the shore.
Chelsea jumped and turned. “Jesus, you scared me. Most of them are gone, yeah.”
“Sorry.”
Mary-Beth stood beside Chelsea and tried to see whatever it was that she was looking at on the water. “It’s nice when it’s quiet here, huh?”
She hated how square she felt beside Chelsea, how neat and orderly her appearance seemed against Chelsea’s messy coolness. It felt like a false advertisement for the person Mary-Beth was. She wasn’t as prim as she seemed. And yet here she was, dressing and speaking and acting like a middle-aged prude. How, Mary-Beth wondered, does a person get so accidentally swept up in a tide that she doesn’t know she’s in? She didn’t mind aging, but she hated to think she’d been passive in the trappings of age. Seeing Chelsea made her feel that way. Chelsea made her aware of all the old-person habits she’d mindlessly adopted over the years without questioning their necessity.
Mary-Beth was about to sit in the lounge chair and open her book when Chelsea turned to her.
“Mary-Beth, I feel like I need to say...” Chelsea looked at her toes in the wet sand. “I’d like to say that I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Just for being here. I know that what happened to your boys is a big deal, and I feel like you deserve some privacy now that you’re all back together. You don’t need some random outsider here right now. And, for whatever it’s worth—which probably isn’t much—I’m working on leaving. Anyway, I’m just sorry for crashing this private family thing.”
Mary-Beth smiled slightly. Chelsea had apologized for precisely the thing that Mary-Beth had been resenting her for. But as she articulated her apology for the non-crime of her presence, Mary-Beth realized that Chelsea wasn’t the impediment to her privacy. Her husband was—he and the rest of his family. Because privacy was the thing that none of them wanted, even under these circumstances. They were the ones who’d invited a documentary filmmaker there, and gone on Good Morning America and answered the phones to dozens of reporters. If Mary-Beth was going to feel mad at her open-book family life, it shouldn’t be at Chelsea.
“Thanks for saying that...and don’t worry about it. I’m kind of glad you’re here, actually.”
The sound of bare feet padding through grass approached from behind, and both women turned around.
“Nice evening,” Philip said. He was smiling in swim trunks.
“Hey Phil,” Mary-Beth said. “You didn’t want to go with Farah and the guys to get wine?”
“Actually, I was looking forward to a little quiet time.”
The faint sound of children splashing in water drifted down from the east side of the lake. Mary-Beth imagined those children as JJ and his brothers not so long ago; it wasn’t hard to do.
Philip heard it, too. “Do you remember that time we went skinny-dipping here, Mary-Beth? It must have been ten years ago. Lucas and Cam were so little.”
“Actually, you guys went skinny-dipping. Only the Bright men were naked that night.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that makes more sense. I must have forgotten.”
They stood three abreast at the water’s edge, listening to the sounds of someone else’s children. Chelsea drew circles in the sand with her big toe, and eventually the sounds faded to silence.
“Of course I hadn’t gone skinny-dipping on that day,” Mary-Beth said to no one in particular.
Philip and Chelsea studied her face. She could feel their eyes on her as she watched the indigo water ripple in the dusk light.
A small fury was growing inside Mary-Beth at that moment, for all the time wasted on modesty and discretion and a practiced, ladylike smallness. All that privacy had left her only alone. Whether here or at home, her reward for it all was always just a shrinking self.
Chelsea turned to walk back to the house. “Anyway, I should...”
“No, wait.” Mary-Beth reached out and held her forearm. “Let’s go swimming.”
Chelsea’s eyebrows rose. “Okay.”
Mary-Beth stepped out of her shoes first. Then she pulled her shirt off. Shorts went next, leaving only her bra and underwear, both formerly pretty items that had done too many rounds in the washing machine. Frayed threads at the waistband fluttered in the wind. And then she took those off, too.
Philip and Chelsea hesitated for only a moment, to be sure that Mary-Beth was proposing what she seemed to be proposing. And then they joined her, letting shorts fall to puddles at their feet and tossing shirts off in one stroke. They were both entirely comfortable in their bodies, but in different ways.
Mary-Beth stood naked for a moment beside her brother-in-law—the maybe future priest—and this pretty woman she barely knew. A breeze moved past them, and she became aware of the parts of her body that hadn’t felt a breeze in decades—her breasts, which she still liked a lot; her stomach, which remained disappointing no matter what she did; and the tuft of hair that she didn’t know what to do with as she approached middle age. It all felt surprisingly lovely in the wind. Parts of her body were enjoying the exposure without waiting for her permission.
“Do you think those cameras can see us?” Philip wondered.
All three of them looked back at the house, where a camera mounted to the deck was doing the work of recording them in Farah’s absence.
“I don’t know,” Mary-Beth said, still naked.
Philip and Chelsea, and even the sounds of nature around them, waited reverently for her to initiate the next move.
And then Mary-Beth ran straight into the water, laughing along the way.
It wasn’t particularly cold, but the chill hit some parts of her body harder than others. She swam out farther and let the work of treading water warm her muscles. Her unobstructed skin was silk against the water’s pull. Heavy limbs transformed to something weightless and gossamer. Nothing was old; everything was new and vital.
The other two followed and swam out to meet her. Moments later, the three of them were bobbing in a perfect triangle in the lake.
“We should do this every day,” Mary-Beth said.
“Definitely,” Philip agreed.
Chelsea went under and came back up like a seal. “I’m in.”
“I knew you had this in you,” Philip said.
Mary-Beth laughed and shivered, and she felt at that moment so deeply in love with her extended family, these Brights and their extras. They might never do this again, but forever and ever, it will be a thing that they did.
The screen door squeaked open and through it came JJ, Charlie, Spencer and Ian. Farah and her camera were a few steps behind.
“What the hell?” someone said.
There was a whoop and a laugh as the men approached. Mercifully, her children were nowhere to be seen.
Mary-Beth closed her eyes and went under once more, holding her breath for ten seconds in that dark other world. And then she came up. Her hair was slicked smooth against her head, water falling from eyelashes and lips. Mary-Beth swam to the shore and emerged from the lake renewed, still herself but lighter.