The Things We Wish Were True
Page 11
He wouldn’t have pictured Jencey as the consummate mother, and yet it suited her. He thought with a pang of Bryte’s resistance to having more children, of her recent announcement that she might just look for a job instead. He never thought it had to be one or the other and didn’t understand why she was making it sound like it had to be. But whenever he tried to bring it up for discussion, she closed up like a book slamming shut.
Jencey was sitting with Lance, the “hero.” Everyone had been making such a fuss over him all day, slapping him on the back and thanking him. Come on, Everett thought more than once, the guy just did what any man would do who saw a child drowning. It seemed as if Jencey had fallen under his hero spell as well. Everett would be lying if he said it didn’t bother him, seeing her at the pool where they used to watch fireworks, their fingers laced together and her leaning against him the way her daughters were leaning against her now. “Get a room, you two,” Bryte would tease. And later, after everyone had gone home, they would get a room of sorts, only it wasn’t a room at all.
He hadn’t gone to their spot in years, felt guilty visiting that place now that he and Bryte were married. It would hurt her too much to know he did that. And yet, sometimes he could feel it calling to him, the tree branches waving in the breeze, beckoning him to come . . . and remember. He shook his head and forced himself to look back at the fireworks, concentrating on the light arcing across the sky, feeling the explosions in his heart. Lee Greenwood sang “Proud to Be an American,” and on the other side of him, he could hear John Boyette’s mother singing along off-key but loudly. In his pocket, he felt his phone buzz. He looked at it. A text from Bryte: Took him home. Will you just bring everything when it’s over? I’m putting him to bed.
He texted back: Will do. Sorry you missed the rest of the show. Fireworks of our own later? and pocketed his phone. He would never admit what had put him in the mood.
After they’d started dating, Bryte had confessed to him that each time she saw him and Jencey together during high school her heart had broken a little more. He’d been so slow on the draw, unaware of Bryte’s unrequited love for him until Jencey was out of the picture and Bryte finally, after too much to drink one night, blurted it all out. Until that moment, he’d always thought of Bryte as his best friend, his confidante. And, actually, seven years of marriage later, she still was. “Today I marry my best friend,” their wedding invitations had said. And it was true.
The screech of chairs being slid back into place startled him out of his thoughts. He looked around as the floodlights around the pool came back on and people began the leaving process. He stood, stiff and sore, and stretched before gathering their things. It would take several trips to the car to get it all loaded. Someone poked him in the side, and he turned to find Jencey there, looking concerned. “Is Christopher OK?”
“Yeah. He just got scared.” He shrugged. “Funny because last year he loved them.”
She nodded. “That’s the age. One year they love Santa, the next they scream bloody murder if you get within ten feet of him.” She rolled her eyes playfully. “Kids.”
He pointed at Jencey’s girls. “They’re beautiful.”
She glanced over at her daughters and smiled proudly. “Thanks.”
“I guess it’s not really how I pictured you, when I pictured you as an adult,” he said.
She squinted at him while nudging her daughters in the direction of Lance’s kids. “What do you mean?”
Now he’d put his foot in his mouth. “I mean, you just always talked about this supersuccessful life, and I guess I thought you meant this high-powered career. You know, Sex and the City kind of stuff.”
She laughed and shook her head. “I probably thought that, too, but . . . then I met my husband, and well, he wanted the life we built and I . . . didn’t stop to question it.” She paused. “I didn’t question a lot of things.” The last bit seemed more to herself than him.
“And where is he now?” he asked, giving voice to something he and Bryte had discussed after Jencey left the night she came for dinner. Jencey still wore a wedding ring, so they didn’t think she was divorced, and yet she was there alone, and didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Bryte had told him she’d even asked about the schools.
Maybe it was due to the beers he’d seen her sip throughout the fireworks display. Maybe it was because, he hoped, she trusted Everett. Maybe it was the fact that none of the neighborhood busybodies were around. Whatever the reason, Jencey didn’t hesitate to answer his question. “Jail,” she said, the word almost flippant, but he detected a catch in her voice. “Federal prison, to be exact.” She raised her eyebrows. “For the next ten years at least.”
His eyes widened at the news. “What’d he do?” He thought of the big, bad things—murder, rape, bank robbery.
“Wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, and bribing city officials.” She ticked off her husband’s offenses as if it were no big deal, but her eyes gave her away. “Turns out he was not the prince I thought he was.”
He pointed at her ring. “But you’re still married?”
She twisted the ring around self-consciously, lowering her eyes. “Not officially divorced. Not yet. And, until I am, I’ve sort of kept it on for the girls. And, I guess, for me. Old habits and all that.” She glanced back up at him. “Had to get used to the idea.”
“And are you? Used to it?”
She shook her head. “Not really. Still not sure what I’m going to do next. I have to reinvent my life, make a new life for the girls. I came back here because I . . .” She looked around at the pool, and he wondered if she too had memories. She took a deep breath and turned back to him. “I would’ve told you I came back here because I had nowhere else to go. But I don’t necessarily think that anymore.”
“What do you think now?” he coaxed.
“I think I needed to come home.”
He nodded, swallowed, thinking of why and how she’d left, how he’d failed to protect her. He could still see one of those damn hearts, this one under his windshield wiper, fluttering in the breeze. The crowd had thinned out. Jencey’s girls were chasing Lance’s kids around the pool, and no one was stopping them. He could see Lance waiting for her, off to the side, shuffling his feet as he tried to be polite. Everett still had to gather their things, make the multiple trips to the car, go home to his wife and son. “I’m glad you did,” he said.
She reached out, grabbed his hand, and squeezed it lightly before letting go. “Me, too,” she said. She gave him a little wave and was gone. To his credit, he did not watch her go.
JENCEY
She watched Everett leave. He gave her a weak smile as he passed by, then trudged out of the pool and toward the parking lot. Lance cleared his throat, and she turned to face him. “Is there a story there?” he asked, pointing at Everett’s retreating back.
She raised her eyebrows. “You could say that.” She worked to make her voice playful and light. This was flirting, as best she could recall.
He shook his head. “Something tells me you’re a woman of many stories.”
She nodded and gave him a sage look. “You could say that, too.”
He glanced down at her wedding ring but said nothing. She had to take it off, and soon. She’d told herself that the moment the final papers came from her attorney, that would be her signal that it was time. It was really and truly over.
“I better get them to bed,” she said, indicating the girls, who’d left the pool area and were swinging in the adjoining playground with Lance’s kids. She heard their giggles ringing out in the night air. Other than the lifeguards and a few teenagers, they were the only people left.
Lance ran his hands through his hair, and when he did, she took in the muscles flexing in his arms, the obvious strength there. She found herself wanting to feel those arms around her, and wondered if that was just a normal reaction for someone who hadn’t had physical contact with a man in months, or if she was actually attracted to this one.
She nodded. It had been fun. They’d talked and laughed and teased each other. He couldn’t believe she’d never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail and tried to express the many, apparently hilarious one-liners from the movie. But hearing him attempt a British accent was what really made her laugh. They’d socialized with the neighbors, met some new folks, eaten potluck with her parents. He’d talked for a long while with her dad. Her mother, to her credit, had not asked any questions, though Jencey suspected she was dying to. Their kids had played together most of the day, sinking into the chairs beside them as the fireworks began. They’d made a little unit, him with his kids and her with hers, yet all together, looking up at the night sky, their chins tilted at the same angle. She’d watched the colors explode and expand across the blackness, unable to keep herself from recalling the last time she’d seen fireworks.
Last Fourth of July she’d been with Arch and had no idea of what was coming. They’d gone out of town without the girls, leaving them behind with a college-age sitter she used from time to time. She and Arch and their friends had eaten gourmet small plates and drunk champagne on a yacht anchored in the Charles River as fireworks exploded over Boston. They’d gone to hear the Boston Pops and taken a historical tour of the city where much of America began.
It had been a quintessential Fourth celebration, and Arch had delighted in showing her all that money could buy. She had, as he’d so kindly pointed out to her from behind bars, reveled in it all. Gushing to her girlfriends about the experience after it was over had been almost as much fun as doing it. She and her friends had each tried to outdo one another with how they’d spent the holiday in a never-ending game of one-upmanship that, in hindsight, kept her breathless and anxious a lot of the time. But she’d been too immersed in the game to even know she was playing it.
It was only sitting there, relaxed and at ease, flanked by her girls, wearing an old T-shirt with grape Popsicle dripped down the front, that she could see her former life for what it was. Exhausting. Soul sucking. As empty as her former home now was. She hadn’t really missed any of the women she once called friends, hadn’t heard from even one of them after Arch was exposed and arrested. They avoided her as though she’d caught a plague. She supposed she had—the plague of poverty. And yet, sitting there by the pool with normal people observing a normal Fourth of July, she didn’t feel poor at all. She felt fairly rich.
“So,” Lance said as they walked together to their cars, the kids lagging behind, complaining that they had to leave. “Think you might want to come over sometime and watch The Holy Grail?” Continuing to kid around about being named Lancelot, he’d joked that the knights in that movie were more like the kind of knights he would be. Jencey let him joke, but she sensed that his self-deprecating humor was an attempt to deflect all the compliments and kudos he’d been receiving from neighbors who’d heard about him saving Cutter. She’d felt proud to be beside him, but not proud like she used to be beside Arch. She was proud of who Lance was, not what he had.
Now he raised his eyebrows at her. She tried to process just what he was asking with his invitation. Sure, they’d flirted and spent the day together. Now he wanted to see her again. But was this a date? Or was he just being neighborly?
“I mean, you really shouldn’t go much longer without seeing it.” He kept his voice nonchalant, which didn’t exactly help her figure things out. He pressed the latch on his trunk and stowed the bulging bag of pool paraphernalia, then slammed the liftgate shut and turned back to her.
She nodded. “I’m not sure how I’ve survived this long without it.”
“Well, then, we need to get it scheduled as soon as possible,” he said. She knew he hadn’t dated since his wife’s departure. She’d come upon that information courtesy of Zell, who seemed to be matchmaking. Jencey had laughed Zell’s insinuation off, assuring Zell that the last thing Jencey needed was a relationship. What she needed was a plan for getting on with life. But in the meantime, she told herself for the hundredth time, he was good company, another grown-up to pass the time with.
“OK, so when would be good for you?” she asked.
“Well, today’s Wednesday—it is Wednesday, right? I never know what day it is since summer started. So . . . maybe Friday? Bring the girls and we’ll put them in front of a movie in our playroom while we watch our movie? Order some pizzas?” He was doing a good job of looking spur-of-the-moment about it, but she had a suspicion he’d worked out the details of this invitation before extending it.
She pretended to think about her plans, though of course she had none, unless she counted her nightly jaunts to the hideaway in the woods, a habit she should probably break. “Sounds great,” she said. “What time?”
“Six thirty?”
“We’ll be there,” she said. “And thanks. For saving me a seat today.”
He smiled. “No problem.” He held out his arms for a hug and raised his eyebrows in question.
It was only a hug. What harm was there in it? She walked into the same strong arms that had pulled that boy from the bottom of the pool, letting them encircle her for a brief moment, pulling her into an embrace she hadn’t known she needed until she stepped inside it.
BRYTE
Christopher’s meltdown over the fireworks was a blessing in disguise, in spite of the embarrassment. There’d been a message waiting for Bryte on her cell when she got home. If Everett had been with her, he might’ve asked her who’d called or, worse yet, played the message himself, not out of suspicion but just curiosity. A strange out-of-town number might raise questions. And she wasn’t ready to answer them.
She listened to his voice mail twice, which was a purely professional response to her own. Yes, of course he remembered her. Yes, he would still like to talk to her. Yes, he had some thoughts about her options. She could call whenever she wanted, and he hoped she had a nice Fourth of July.
Had she had a nice Fourth? She thought back over the day, culminating in her flight from the pool with a screaming boy in her arms as people watched her instead of the fireworks. The day, she concluded, hadn’t been bad or good. It had been a day like any other, another bead in a very long string. Working would add a variety to her days, challenge her, broaden her outlook past her own front yard. She’d been good at what she did. She’d had friends to chat with, respect from coworkers. She just had to ignore the pang she felt when she thought about being away from her son all day.
She opted to put Christopher to bed without a bath, dodging feelings of guilt as she did. He’d been in water that day; he was clean enough. The meltdown had exhausted him, and he needed to get to bed lest anything else set him off. She moved slowly and gently, keeping the lights and her voice low as she soothed and eased him. He was high-strung at times, unfamiliar to her, unfamiliar to Everett as well. But still she had learned how to approach him, how to be his mother. She was good at it. Mostly.
She managed to get him into bed without a story—he was so tired he didn’t even ask for it. She smoothed the covers over him and hummed the same lullaby she’d sung to him since that first night in the hospital when she’d been left alone with him. The lullaby worked then, and now. He closed those eyes of his and blissfully drifted off to sleep as she sang, surrendering the fight for another day. Bryte was relieved every time this happened.
She went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. She took the baby monitor with her and went to sit on their back deck. At this time of year, the trees were full of leaves and blocked her view of the neighbors behind them. In the winter, she could see right into their kitchen. She sipped her wine and listened thoughtfully to the night noises around her—cicadas and frogs and other summer creatures all singing to one another, making their own kind of music, a nature symphony.
She finished o
ne glass, then poured another, noticing as she did that the fireworks should’ve been long over by now. She wondered what was keeping Everett. Her heart quickened at the thought of Jencey being at the pool. Jencey was back and Everett wanted another child and she was thinking about going back to work and had called Trent Miller about it—she’d actually done it—and he’d returned her call, on a holiday no less. And now she was sitting outside, drinking alone on the Fourth of July, wondering where her husband was. Her stomach rumbled, but she didn’t know whether it was from nerves or from Jencey’s mom’s potato salad that she was sure now had sat out in the heat a bit too long. She thought of the food she’d piled on her plate—barbecue and watermelon and potato salad—and regretted it.
She’d passed her parents’ house on the way home from the pool; a light was burning in her old bedroom window despite the late hour. She’d wondered what crafting project her mother was into. After she and Everett had bought their own house in the neighborhood, her mother had decided to turn her old bedroom into a craft room and called her over to get anything out of it she might want to keep. She’d been hugely pregnant then but had dutifully waddled over, sinking awkwardly onto the floor, wondering as she did if she would ever get back up again. The baby had been due in mere weeks, and the activity had been a good diversion from the rabid thoughts chomping away inside her brain as his birth neared.
Alone in her old closet, she’d pulled out the boxes of birthday cards and letters exchanged between her and Jencey, paged through the yearbooks on the shelf, rereading what her husband had written to her on the page she reserved just for him. She’d laughed at how banal his note to her was, reflecting over just how smitten she’d been and how utterly oblivious he’d been. She’d put the yearbooks back and pulled out a single spiral-bound notebook resting on the shelf beside the yearbooks, there in plain sight, just waiting to be discovered. She’d looked at the cover and hoped to God her mother had never seen it. There, written in bold, black Sharpie were the words EVERETT MICHAEL LEWIS and nothing else. “So hokey,” she’d said aloud, then turned the cover.