When the last round of stuffing had been passed, and the cranberry sauce was gone entirely, JJ leaned back in his chair and put his arm around Mary-Beth. She was nursing a glass of port from Spencer’s special collection.
“Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday,” Ian said.
Everyone agreed.
It was just the four of them—Mary-Beth, JJ, Ian and Spencer—sitting around the dining room table in Ian and Spencer’s apartment. The twinkle of city lights illuminated the dimming room. Their place looked just as Mary-Beth remembered it, with bookshelves that overflowed onto threadbare rugs, art competing for space on the walls, and elegantly aged furniture. It seemed a shame that in all the years they’d lived there, Mary-Beth and JJ had visited only a few times. Until this year, all the holidays had belonged to John and Patty.
“Has anyone heard from them?” Spencer asked, one hand on his belly.
“Not yet.”
No one had spoken with John or Patty since their call two weeks earlier to announce they were going to Tulum for Thanksgiving and would have to miss the festivities. Of course, there were no festivities planned. Everyone was still recovering from the drama of summer. It was a wry move on Patty’s part—declining to attend a party she wasn’t invited to—and everyone played along. The Bright sons wished their parents well on their vacation, and said it was a shame to miss them this year. But their relief was plainly obvious. Surely Patty could see it.
The previous three months had brought unexpected opportunities for all of them, and they were in no mood to look backward. The fire itself, the one that crazy Patty Bright had started, had ignited new and good things in their lives. Things were changing for the better, and they were all a little nervous that reconnecting with their parents would break that spell.
The changes happened first for Spencer. Mary-Beth wasn’t aware of it at the time, but he’d made his television breakthrough as the now infamous fire was still roaring. When reporters were scrambling to cover the blaze from the Brights’ front lawn, Spencer had offered himself up as an international affairs expert. He went on every major network that morning, providing measured analysis of the fire and its potential links to terrorism. He was lauded for his depth of understanding and evenhanded presence as hysterical theories were taking off. He was also lauded for his strong jaw, great hair and winning smile, becoming something of an internet sensation. After that, Spencer was offered a contract as a regular national security analyst on CNN, and he’d appeared on TV weekly ever since. He seemed happier than ever.
JJ’s opportunity came days later when he received a call from the other Democratic candidate in the Massachusetts race for governor—his father’s former primary opponent. Mary-Beth had been reading a book in the living room when she heard her husband take the call from the kitchen. Thank you, he’d said three times. Yes, we felt strongly about that strategy, and Well, I don’t think I can take credit for that. It went on like that for a while, until JJ ended the call and came in to tell his wife that he’d just been offered the job of campaign manager for the other team. He was beaming. Apparently, they’d been impressed with the early strategy of John Senior’s campaign (despite it all) and thought that JJ had a good understanding of the political climate. They thought John Senior was out of step with the voters, but that the message and mechanics were on point. Your father wasn’t going to win, the man had said, but your approach was smarter than ours. JJ liked the guy. He was more liberal and less polished than his father. He wasn’t a natural onstage, but he was genuine up close. He was kind of like JJ.
Mary-Beth never brought it up, and JJ never suggested it, but she knew this was more than a great job opportunity for her husband. It was a breaking with his father, a declaration of his detachment. JJ was free.
Spencer looked around the table. “Are we ready for dessert?”
They heard Lucas laugh from the other room, where he and his brother were watching Christmas movies. It was just like all the other Thanksgivings in this way: Mary-Beth’s boys were still there; they were still hers. That would change soon, but for now, they were still hers.
“Let’s wait,” Ian said. “I’m so full.”
“That’s a good idea.” Spencer looked out the window and smiled. “Did I tell you I invited Farah?”
Mary-Beth looked at him. “Really?”
“Yeah, she doesn’t live that far from here. Too bad she couldn’t stop by. She said she was going to her folks’ place for Thanksgiving, then flying out tomorrow for some documentary about coral reefs. She was very polite about it, of course. Told me to say hi to everyone. She’s a good kid.”
JJ raised an eyebrow. “You know she had a little thing with Phil, right?”
His wife laughed in disbelief. “What? How do you know that?”
“It’s true. I saw them kiss under that tree of his. I must have forgotten to tell you guys.” He shook his head. “God, what a week that was.”
“Do you think that’s why Philip is changing his plan?” Ian asked.
Philip, who’d said he couldn’t be there because of midterm exams, was in the process of transferring to a different theological program in the Boston area. In a brief email to the group, he’d said he wanted something more flexible and socially engaged, a mainline protestant denomination probably. He didn’t elaborate, but it was clear he was moving toward something that allowed for the possibility of a family someday. Maybe that’s why he was making the change. Or maybe that’s just what his family hoped. Either way, Mary-Beth was glad for him.
“I didn’t get the sense that things were going to continue with Farah, but who knows,” JJ said, “maybe she was part of that calculation.”
Spencer laughed. “Charlie still thinks Philip’s gay.”
“Maybe Charlie’s gay.”
“Charlie’s everything,” Spencer said. “He’s in love with everyone.”
“None more than himself.”
They toasted with admiration for their absent brother. At that moment, Charlie was in Costa Rica working on a conservation project for a new international development company. When Spencer invited him to Thanksgiving, he’d cheerfully claimed to be too busy, but they knew the real reason he wasn’t coming home: Charlie was in love. This new woman was Costa Rican, some brilliant botanist who lived in a yurt. Their brother’s capacity to fall frequently and intensely in love was a wonder to them all.
Charlie was elsewhere. And Philip was elsewhere. And it occurred for the first time to Mary-Beth that they weren’t at opposite ends of some Bright family spectrum, but quite alike one another. They were both out in the world in search of beauty: physical, emotional, spiritual beauty. Mary-Beth remembered what her mother had told her as a child: that everything beautiful was proof of God’s grace. And if that was true, then Charlie was exactly like Philip—giving up everything, over and over, in search of God’s grace. You had to believe it existed to search for it. And you had to believe it was worthwhile to follow it to extreme places. They both believed.
There seemed no stronger proof to Mary-Beth of God’s grace than the fact that hopeless cynics could beget great believers. All of them were proof: Philip, Charlie, Spencer and JJ. They were seekers of something beautiful. Patty and John shouldn’t have made believers of their children. And yet. What possible explanation for their goodness could exist but God’s grace?
Mary-Beth was happy with the thought.
The phone rang and everyone hesitated. Ringing phones produced anxiety in all of them. Even as the events of their summer faded from the public spotlight, the Brights were all still subject to random calls from magazine writers looking to do profiles and opinionated strangers who’d tracked down their numbers. The most anxiety-producing possibility of them all was the idea of a call from their parents.
No one was quite ready to talk to John and Patty. Patty was trying to rebuild their relationship in her own way. What she had done for them all—setting fire to the garage to kill the documentary—was breathtaking in its maternal heroism. They loved her for it. But their past was still there, complicating things. The Bright men needed time to redefine the concept of their family, to understand the new role that their flawed parents should occupy in their psyche. Mary-Beth thought it was emotional work they should have done in their teens, but better late than never, she supposed.
Ian picked up the phone. “Hello? Hey Philip! Hang on, let me put you on speaker.”
He set the phone at the center of the dining table and opened a bottle of pinot noir as the group greeted him.
“Hey guys! How was dinner? I’m sorry I couldn’t be there this year. Tell Lucas and Cam I miss them.” Philip’s tin voice talked excitedly about the program he’d be transferring to in January, about the friends he’d made in Boston and the studio apartment in the North End that he’d be moving into. Spencer and JJ took turns firing questions at him about when he was going to see a Pats game and who he’d bumped into from high school. They wondered if he was too wimpy now for East Coast winters and whether he owned a snow shovel. This was something new for all of them: genuine interest in Philip’s life. They wanted to know their brother.
Mary-Beth smiled to see Philip there—in absentia—at the center of the room, the center of the conversation. It was what he’d always deserved and never had. The revelations about his life were unimaginably difficult, and yet they were the things that freed Philip and his brothers to really see each other. It took their father’s fall to reinvent their relationships on their own, without their parents’ gaze. And so it was sad, but it was also not sad at all.
And now it seemed that they appreciated Philip in a new light, as the only one among them who hadn’t been under the spell of John Senior; the one who’d known who he was all along. In the end, being a Bright who isn’t defined by his Bright-ness had been a wise path. The others were still catching up to Philip.
“Phil, tell me you’re not just eating takeout in your living room,” Mary-Beth said.
“No, actually I have plans. I should go. We’re having a little Thanksgiving dinner over at my classmates’ house, for all the Thanksgiving orphans.”
A pause.
“Ha,” he added. “You know what I mean.”
A few laughs.
Spencer leaned in toward the phone. “We miss you, brother. It’s too bad you couldn’t be here.”
“I miss you guys, too. There’s still Christmas.”
“Absolutely.”
Everyone said goodbye once more, and then Philip was gone. He was their half brother now. Or maybe he wasn’t. The expression on JJ’s and Spencer’s faces looked sad in that moment, as they sat around the dirty plates and empty glasses, the ghost of Philip’s voice still there with them. But there was also an unmistakable sense that things were changing for the better.
The world had not blown itself up. It felt for a while as if it might, in those weeks after the Madrid attack, when they were counting their blessings and paying attention to every wrinkle on the world stage. But they’d been wrong about that. The world was no more or less dangerous now than it had been a year ago. Only their proximity to danger had changed, and only temporarily. Mary-Beth was sure now that, like joy, all the pain we endure in this life is almost always inflicted by those closest to us. All the comforts and threats are right here.
Ian stood up.
“Go relax,” Mary-Beth said. “You guys made everything. We’ve got the dishes.”
And so he and Spencer went to their couch that slumped at the center, where the paisley fabric had faded to a blur. The twins, who sat in armchairs on either side of their uncles, had briefly forgotten about the phones in their hands and were watching Linus deliver the Christmas monologue they’d seen dozens of times before. Spencer put his head on Ian’s shoulder. Ian put his arm around him. And Mary-Beth wanted to cast them all in amber forever because they were perfect.
JJ went to the kitchen with a stack of dirty dishes and began scraping what was left on the plates into a garbage bin. They had to get it all off because there was no garbage disposal and the old pipes in their building tended to get blocked up on busy days like these.
Mary-Beth filled the kettle at the tap and put the pies in the oven to warm.
It must have been eighty degrees in that cramped little kitchen. JJ took off his sweater and cracked a window. The heat in that old building had a mind of its own, but all you had to do was open a window and let the outside air in. Elegant solutions abounded.
JJ went to the freezer and tried to reorganize its contents to make room for more Tupperware. Mary-Beth crouched down below him as she wedged containers of sweet potatoes behind stuffing, and applesauce above that. “We’ll be eating leftovers for days,” she murmured.
JJ attempted to close the freezer just as Mary-Beth stood up, and in the moment before her head collided with the door, he put a gentle hand upon it, steering her to safety.
She felt the gesture as a reflexive two-step in their perpetual dance. She was conscious of it, but only barely. These were the things they did for each other every day—each one forgettable on its own, but when you added up all the averted collisions, fleeting squeezes and private looks, you got a marriage. And it was better and bigger than the periods of passion, the grand statements. Sometimes these moments were almost too breathtaking for Mary-Beth to fully consider, too beautiful to take in with her open eyes. She had to go just a little numb to survive the devastating beauty of it all over the course of a lifetime.
When the kitchen was clean, Mary-Beth and JJ joined the rest of their family in the living room. The movie had ended, and Spencer had fallen asleep in Ian’s arms. Below them, the boys were playing checkers on the rug.
They could hear the sounds of other people’s Thanksgivings through the walls and cars passing on the street. Someone was playing piano in an apartment above. The distant cacophony of a hundred different lives at the same moment.
There is no way to know what a marriage should look like; no way to know how a family is supposed to be. No one can be sure what they are going to want in ten or twenty or sixty years.
But neither are we mysteries. Ours are the needs of children.
And so we hold on to each other. We block the incoming threats. And we open a window when it’s time to let the outside air in.