The sound of something falling to the ground outside her room shook Mary-Beth from sleep. She gave JJ a wake-up shove and ran out of the bedroom toward Lucas and Cameron’s room, because that’s where her instincts took her first. But before she arrived at their door, Mary-Beth realized the danger wasn’t with her sons, but at the other end of the hall, with her in-laws.
Mary-Beth turned at that moment, just in time to see Patty Bright emerge from her bedroom and snatch a small camera from Farah’s hands. She was wearing a pale blue nightgown with a halo of furious bed hair. Patty threw the camera to the ground and stomped her delicate bare foot onto the device, over and over. The small sound of cracking glass and breaking plastic crunched with each new stomp.
Farah was frozen for only a moment, just long enough for Patty’s foot to break an external microphone and send it sailing across the floor. Farah stepped back, away from Patty, and pulled her cell phone from her pocket to resume recording.
“Leave this house,” Patty said. Her voice was low and hoarse.
Farah said nothing. She held her cell phone out before her.
“Leave now.”
JJ emerged from their bedroom. “What’s going on?”
Patty glared from Farah to JJ to Mary-Beth. She swallowed and clenched her fists at her sides.
Spencer’s door swung open. “Mom, are you okay?”
Patty’s lips pursed together and her body began to shiver. She crumpled to the ground all at once as a lacy, formless ghost. She began to sob.
JJ and Spencer ran to their mother and held her.
Philip and Charlie were there now, too, hovering around Patty while the rest of the family looked on.
Mary-Beth walked toward them to peek into the bedroom. And there, sitting on the bed with his face in his hands, was John Bright Senior. He wasn’t crying or speaking, just holding himself motionless, in shock or fear. He must have heard his wife’s sobs, but he didn’t go to her.
Mary-Beth felt all the blood in her body drain away as she watched him. Nothing shook John Senior or Patty. In her eighteen years of marriage to JJ, she’d never seen them respond to anything with such dramatics. Not the public revelation of John’s affair, and not the revelation of more affairs. Whatever this was must be worse.
Ten minutes later—after Patty collected herself and was pulled off the floor, after John asked everyone but his children to go downstairs and the sun finished its ascent from behind the mountains—the original Bright family gathered in their parents’ bedroom.
This meeting was for Brights alone, not Brights-by-marriage or Brights-by-association, just blood. Only John, Patty, JJ, Spencer, Charlie and Philip were in the bedroom. Farah was left to lurk in the hallway. The rest of them drank coffee downstairs and speculated in the meantime.
“I can’t even imagine...” Mary-Beth said to Ian from across the kitchen table.
He shook his head. “It’s got to be something bad. I’ve never seen her like that.”
“No one has.”
Chelsea looked up from her phone and back down again.
Every now and then there was a creak in the floorboards above them, like someone was pacing in the bedroom. Mary-Beth thought she heard a pounding—maybe a fist, though it could have been her imagination.
Lucas smeared cream cheese onto a bagel at the counter, while Cameron played with the puppy in the living room. Even they knew to stay quiet and agreeable that morning.
Birds chirped outside, and they could smell the dewy grass as its scent wafted through the open windows. A Weedwacker buzzed from another corner of the lake, apparently unaware that the world was ending somewhere else.
“Guys, come in here!” Cameron yelled from the living room. “Guys!”
Ian frowned at Mary-Beth and they rushed in.
Cameron was pointing the remote control at the TV screen, adding bar after bar to the volume.
The chyron was clear as day: “Bright family sex scandal update: former senator’s wife had alleged affairs of her own.”
A young man in a suit and tie explained it all. One of John Bright’s previous mistresses was claiming that Patty cheated, too, and that she had proof. Nothing had been substantiated yet, but this woman—tired of being hounded by media about her affair with John—promised to produce it soon. She said the fact of their affairs was an “open secret” between the Brights, some kind of agreement.
“Turn it off, Cam.”
He did as his mother said.
Mary-Beth, Ian, Chelsea and the boys stared at one another in silence.
“This is gossip,” Mary-Beth reminded them. “We can’t believe everything we hear right now.”
Cameron and Lucas nodded, and then they took their bagels and their puppy out to the back deck to escape the tension.
Mary-Beth fell back into the couch.
“This is what they’re talking about upstairs,” Ian said. “It has to be. Do you think it’s true?”
Mary-Beth didn’t know if it was true. She couldn’t imagine that it was. Not Patty. But, then again, why not? Was it so impossible to imagine that a woman married to a serial cheater would seek closeness—or revenge—with another man? Patty Bright may have been the model politician’s wife, but that’s why it was plausible: she was just a model. So much of what they modeled was revealing itself to be little more than a performance now, and Patty’s authenticity suddenly seemed as unlikely as her husband’s. So why hadn’t it occurred to her that Patty Bright might be capable of an extramarital affair? They were both, apparently, capable of anything.
“I don’t blame her, if it’s true,” Chelsea said. “Who could blame her?”
If Chelsea were her child, Mary-Beth would have reminded her that two wrongs don’t make a right, and that marriage isn’t measured by a scorecard and infidelity harms a whole family. She would have said “wrong is wrong”—an inane phrase she used far too often with the boys. But Chelsea wasn’t her child, and she agreed with her, in a way. It made intellectual sense, and a shallow kind of feminist sense, too. Why should we expect goodness and purity from Patty but not her husband?
But still. Mary-Beth couldn’t imagine a mother doing such a thing to her family...if she had done it. And she probably had.
They heard a door unlatch and footsteps upstairs.
Mary-Beth, Ian and Chelsea stood up and exchanged glances, waiting.
JJ appeared in the doorway of the living room first. When Mary-Beth saw his face, she felt as though she might burst into tears. His eyes were red and his head was hanging low. He was still in the old basketball shorts that he liked to sleep in, and his T-shirt had wet spots on it.
JJ shook his head and went to his wife, who put her arms around her husband. He curled his body around hers and buried his face in her neck. Neither of them said a word.
Farah followed, cameras rolling.
Upstairs, a door slammed. And then another. Ian and Chelsea left to find their partners in their respective bedrooms.
Philip was the next one to come down. He looked the worst of them all. His face was blotchy and wet, his eyes wide and unblinking. With slow, robotic motions, he walked through the house and out the back door. Mary-Beth wanted to say something to him, but she didn’t know what to say.
Through the window, they watched him march straight to his oak tree, where he curled up in a fetal position and hugged his arms around his legs. It seemed to Mary-Beth like he was rocking slightly.
She looked up at JJ. “What happened up there? Is Philip going to be okay?”
JJ shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“This is about your mother’s affair?”
“It’s worse than that. It’s about Philip, too.”
Patty Bright’s statement was released to the press within the hour. She’d typed it herself in her husband’s study. JJ sent it to their press lists, and Spencer turned off the phones. As soon as it was out there, Patty disappeared upstairs for a long time.
Hardly anyone said anything.
Mary-Beth went back upstairs and got into bed with JJ. She could hear the shower running and the sound of two bodies moving about in the master bedroom nearby. She heard Patty’s closet door open and close and John Senior’s bare feet pad around. Mary-Beth heard Ian and Spencer’s voices grow distant as they went downstairs and out the back door toward the lake. She heard the sound of her own car ignition turn over, and of Charlie and Chelsea drive away in her SUV. And she heard the heavy rise and fall of JJ’s breath beside her in bed as he slept, the hoarse rasps of a man who’d surprised himself with his capacity to cry.
It was barely noon.
A digital machine gun fired in the distance, and Mary-Beth was grateful to have her sons preoccupied with video games at that moment. She’d have to talk to them eventually, of course. She’d tell them some of what JJ had told her, but not all of it.
Mary-Beth would tell her children the parts that were factually true and irreversibly public by now: that more than twenty years ago, Patty Bright had an affair with a man, and that man was Philip’s biological father. She’d tell them that their grandmother and grandfather had made a choice when Philip was born to keep this secret from Philip and the rest of the family. She’d remind her boys that families are complicated, and adult choices are sometimes difficult.
She wouldn’t tell them most of what had happened in John and Patty Bright’s bedroom earlier that morning, though. She wouldn’t tell them that Philip had scratched long tracks of grief into his forearms when he learned this all from his mother. Or that Patty had moaned like she was dying as she stroked Philip’s head. Or the blank way that John Senior just sat there while everyone cried and raged around him. JJ had explained the entire scene from his parents’ bedroom to Mary-Beth, knowing that she’d know which parts to pass along to their children.
Mary-Beth imagined that she’d shake her head in astonishment as her sons listened to the facts of the story, and she’d remind them that, while this was all very shocking and sad, they were still a family and would get through it. She’d repeat the same line she’d used when their close friends adopted a baby from China, about how family is something you do, not something you get. All of that would be true and easy enough.
But the why of it all would stump Mary-Beth as it stumped her heartsick husband. Why had Philip been denied the opportunity to know his biological father? To know the truth of his identity? Why had they all, even in adulthood, been lied to? Mary-Beth understood the appeal of the lie; it was tidy and uncomplicated. It was peace. But it came with such catastrophic risk and potential pain. And it wasn’t true. Doesn’t truth have inherent supremacy over untruth, even if it’s messy? If Philip had gone his entire life never knowing what they knew, would they have been vindicated in withholding the truth?
Mary-Beth went to the window and looked out at Philip as he lay flat on his back under his oak tree. The leaves of the tree, which were as broad and green as they’d be all year, kept his body in complete shade. He’d been out there for hours. Mary-Beth wanted to bring him something to drink and a snack, but she decided to wait just a little longer. Philip was doing what he needed to do, she supposed. She couldn’t imagine the depth of his pain and confusion. She didn’t know what he needed.
Everything was different now, too. Mary-Beth couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that made Philip unlike the rest of his family. There were so many: his facial features, his placid temperament, his slow way of moving through the world, the distance he’d always maintained from the rest of the family. Was it all explained by divergent genes? She didn’t want to believe that it was. These were the things about Philip that Mary-Beth most loved, and she realized now that she’d always found hope in the idea that a person can become something entirely new. It meant that her husband’s and sons’ fates had not been sealed by the men who preceded them. She wanted to be surprised by these men.
JJ stirred and opened his eyes. He looked like a worn-out child with his face pressed into the pillow and the covers pulled high. He slept exactly the way Lucas always slept; or rather, Lucas slept as he did.
“How are you feeling?”
JJ rubbed his face and sat up. “I feel bad for Phil.”
She nodded and glanced again at her brother-in-law through the window.
“I’m angry, too,” he added. “I’m really angry.”
“That seems right.”
“What kind of people do this, Mary-Beth?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know the craziest part? I think my dad is still planning on continuing this campaign.”
She gasped. “What?”
“Yeah. I mean, he didn’t say it, but I could tell. No one has said anything about it, but I bet you he’s thinking right now about a way to salvage this.”
“Well, that’s just nuts.”
“It sure is.” JJ got out of bed and rolled his stiff neck around twice. “This is all so messed up, Mary. I don’t even know how to talk about it yet. My head is pounding. But I’ll tell you this, we’re packing our stuff and leaving later tomorrow. You and me and the boys. We’re going back home to our life. I can’t be here anymore.”
Mary-Beth walked over and put her arms around her husband and rested her head on his chest. He ran a hand through her hair and held her there. And, although it seemed petty and she was ashamed of herself for thinking it, Mary-Beth was a little bit happy in that moment. She listened to the thrumming of his heart and smelled the funk of his old T-shirt. JJ belonged to her and the boys. As much as he admired his father and needed this campaign job, there was no question at all about whether he would stand by them after all this.
JJ’s moral compass was sound. He wasn’t made up entirely of this Bright material.
He kissed the top of Mary-Beth’s head and squeezed his arms around her so tight she could hardly breathe. Like his brother—his half brother—all the words seemed to have drained from him. He was only the soft flesh of a body, and his hurt, wrapping itself around another, tight enough to blur the lines between them.