The Things We Wish Were True (2 page)

BRYTE

The moment her eyes opened, she went into planning mode, listing the responsibilities of the day ahead. Opening weekend at the pool meant making sure the bags were packed, the lunches made, the meeting time confirmed with friends, the ample supply of sunscreen readily on hand. She lay in her bed going over it all, ticking off the mental bullet points.

In the next room she could hear Everett talking with Christopher about dinosaurs, going over the different kinds again, answering the same questions he’d answered dozens of times before. Christopher couldn’t wrap his tongue around all the syllables in the long dinosaur names yet, and his mispronunciations were legendary. She could hear Ev laughing over Christopher’s butchering of the word
velociraptor
. Then she heard the unmistakable screech of his impression of one. The sound of the two of them pulled her from the cocoon of her bed, pushed her toward her son and her husband, the nucleus of their family, her very center.

“Mommy’s up!” Everett told Christopher. He gave her a grin over the top of the little boy’s head. Their hair was the exact same shade of brown, their eyes, though shaped differently, almost an identical blue.
My boys,
she thought, and her heart contracted with love.

“Tell Mommy where we went this morning while she was sleeping,” Ev prompted.

Christopher thought about it, his eyes lighting up when he seized on the right answer. “Krispy Kreme!” From him it sounded like “Kwispy Kweme.”

“And what kind of donut did you pick out for Mommy?” Everett coached.

“Chocolate with sprinkles!”

Bryte laughed along with Everett. She knew that “her” donut would be quickly devoured by a certain almost-three-year-old boy with laughing eyes and a love for dinosaurs. She scooped him up and pressed him to her, inhaling his early-morning smell the same as she had done since he was born. He was her precious, long-awaited baby, the child she’d feared they might never have.

“Hey, buddy,” she said. “What letter do
donut
and
dinosaur
start with?”

Christopher scrunched up his face, thinking hard. He was so smart, already linking sounds to letters, recognizing their distinct shapes. Behind them, Everett whispered, sotto voce, “D.” Bryte swatted at him as Christopher shouted out the answer as if he’d thought of it on his own.

“D!” he crowed, then laughed, looking around in victory as his parents joined in with him.

“I told everyone we’d meet them up at the pool around eleven,” Bryte said to Everett. “That’ll give us a few hours before
n-a-p
time. But one of us will need to go over and walk Rigby before we go.”

Everett nodded in agreement and motioned her into the kitchen, where a donut and freshly made coffee with cream awaited her. He’d made a big deal on Mother’s Day just a few weeks before, and Christopher had latched on to the concept of fussing over Mommy’s breakfasts ever since. She wasn’t complaining. But the thought of eating the sugary-sweet donut nauseated her.

She recalled those early-morning sprints to the bathroom while pregnant with Christopher, how she’d both loved and hated throwing up—loved that it meant that the baby was growing, hated that her life had been taken over.
There is no turning back,
she’d thought every time she crouched over the toilet and lost her breakfast.
This is happening,
she’d thought then.

But she knew it wasn’t happening now. She thought of the conversations she’d had with Everett lately about Christopher getting bigger, how he felt they should start trying again. “Remember how long it took?” Everett had pressed last week. As if she could forget.

How could she tell her husband she couldn’t do it again? That she wanted Christopher to be their only child? Could he ever understand or accept that? Would he still love her if she just said a firm, nonnegotiable no?

As if reading her thoughts, Everett asked, “You’re thinking about what we talked about, aren’t you?” He gave her that enticing grin, the one that could coax her into just about anything. It had been that way since they were in ninth grade and he’d talked her into making out that one time during night games in someone’s front yard, the other kids playing freeze tag and hide-and-seek in the dark, their disembodied voices calling out from the darkness.

She’d strolled by that very spot just yesterday, now pushing their son in his stroller as she walked their elderly neighbor’s dog. Another family lived in that house now, one of a string of families occupying and abandoning the house everyone called “the eyesore.” But she could still remember the way the house looked before the renters began destroying it. She could remember a lot about this neighborhood she’d called home all her life.

She had not gone far, geographically speaking, yet she’d gone to lengths she’d never thought herself capable of. She thought of her solitary visit to the doctor’s office, of the things she’d had to do after. She would never do those things again. Another child wasn’t in the cards for them, and that was all there was to it. Now she only had to make her husband understand her resistance without explaining just how deep it ran.

Everett was looking at her, watching in his wary way. “What do I have to do to convince you that this”—he gestured to Christopher sitting in his little booster seat, a ring of chocolate coating his mouth—“is a very good idea? We can’t have too much of this.”

The bite of donut she’d forced herself to take turned to glue in her mouth. She took a gulp of her coffee, feeling the mass lodge in her throat, making it hard to speak. “Christopher was a very good idea.” She glanced at her son as she said it, ready to give him a wink. But he wasn’t listening, engrossed in driving a toy car through the sprinkles that had fallen off his donut. She continued, “But one’s a gracious plenty right now. I mean, we’ve also talked about that e-mail from work wanting me to come back, and with him starting preschool in the fall . . .” She picked at what remained on her plate, scattering more sprinkles onto the table as she did. She could not look Everett in the eye.

“Mommy, you are making a mess,” her son observed. He pointed at the colorful sprinkles now scattered across the table and began attempting to get out of his booster seat, ostensibly to clean up her mess. She watched as Everett stopped him, settling him with soothing words and promises that Mommy would take care of it. She met Everett’s eyes and blinked back her understanding. Taking care of things was her job.

JENCEY

Jencey swung into the McDonald’s parking lot and navigated the huge SUV into a narrow parking space, throwing the vehicle into park with a flourish, projecting a confidence she didn’t possess. She turned around to find two pairs of wide eyes blinking back at her, the looks on her children’s faces akin to the time she took them to the circus—incredulity with a trace of fear. “You guys hungry?” she asked.

“We’re . . . eating
here
?” Pilar, her older daughter, asked.

“Sure!” she said. She tried to keep her voice light, breezy. “Let’s go see what they have.”

Pilar rolled her eyes, trying out her newfound tween attitude. “Mom, it’s McDonald’s. They have burgers.”

“And french fries!” Zara, her younger daughter, added. She leaned forward, lowering her voice as if she were going to tell a secret. “Can we get french fries?”

“Sure!” Jencey replied. She opened her door, throwing the interior light on as she did, the glow of it emphasizing her daughters’ faces in contrast to the oncoming night.
Everything that’s precious to me is in this car,
she thought. “We can even get milk shakes!” She waved at them to follow her and climbed out of the car.

Pilar opened her door just a crack and gave Jencey a look that reminded her so much of Arch she had to look away. She fiddled with stowing her keys in her purse, right beside the roll of money Arch had hidden for her. She would have to use some of it to pay for this dinner. It was all the money she had left in the world. “Mom,” she heard Pilar say, her tone parental, “you never let us have McDonald’s.”

She turned back. “Well, there’s a first time for everything, now isn’t there?” She began walking, trusting that the girls would follow her. They did.

Inside, they took their places in line. She scanned the menu, tried to remember what she used to get at McDonald’s back when she and Bryte considered it a treat to go there. They used to get the hot fudge sundaes, she recalled. With nuts. She scanned the board and found that they still served them. This brought her an inordinate amount of comfort. Some things didn’t change. She wondered if Sycamore Glen had.

Zara tugged at Jencey’s elbow to get her attention. She looked down. “Yes?”

“Were you serious about the milk shake?” she whispered.

Jencey laughed. “I was totally serious,” she whispered back. She tried to catch Pilar’s eye, but her daughter was ignoring her. She was angry about having to leave her home, her friends, her life behind. Jencey didn’t blame her. She was angry, too. Angry and sad.

She thought of Arch behind the glass partition that had separated them, his mouth moving as his voice came through the phone. “You have no idea,” he’d said. “No idea at all what it took to keep all of it up.” His spittle had hit the glass, leaving a pattern, a constellation. “I did it for you!” he’d added, as if she were somehow complicit in his crimes. She’d turned then, hung up the phone that connected them, and walked away. If he’d said anything else, she hadn’t heard it.

Zara ordered a chocolate milk shake, and Jencey added, “Make that three!” her voice full of false cheer. Pilar started to argue about the milk shake, but she gave her a look to silence her.
We need this,
she wordlessly implored her oldest.
Play along.

The cashier rang up their total, and she counted out the money to pay for it. A penny got away from her and rolled lazily along the counter until it fell to the sticky floor at the cashier’s feet. The girl blinked at her from underneath a brown visor, managing to look both bored and busy as she waited for that last cent. Jencey handed over another penny. Her life before hadn’t included pennies.

After their so-called dinner and a quick stop at a nearby station for gas, they got back on the road. She intended to drive straight through to her parents’ house as the girls slept, the highway numbers changing from 95 to 40 to 85. She used to know how the highways were numbered, and now she tried to remember. Were the odd numbers for east to west or north to south? It had to be odd for north to south. Fitting: odd numbers for this odd journey from one former home to another. She thought of the home she’d left behind, the yellow crime-scene tape barring her from ever having access to it again.

JUNE 2014

ZELL

Somehow that one impromptu offer to Alec Bryson on Memorial Day weekend had turned into a standing obligation. (John had been right about her getting sucked in, though Zell was loath to admit it.) Three weeks later she was schlepping up to the pool almost every day with Alec and Lilah in tow, seeing to their sunscreen and snacks, hollering at them not to run, keeping an eye on them when it seemed the lifeguards weren’t doing an adequate job.

She scanned the circumference of the pool, hoping to spot a friendly face like she used to find whenever she came here with her own kids. Back then she’d had friends, peers in the same boat as she was. They’d share sunscreen, slathering it on one another’s kids without even noticing which child they were tending to. They’d make enough food to share, too, passing out peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches that had fermented in the heat. On Fridays they’d bring cans of beer and toast the weekend, sharing recipes for marinades and macaroni salad, the foods of summer.

They’d sit together for hours on end, griping about money and children and, always, husbands. But it was the kind of griping that brought comfort, that told her she was part of something bigger. In those endless days at home when she felt isolated and forgotten, she’d think of her pool friends doing the same thing in their respective houses and feel less alone. In the winter she’d find herself counting the days until the pool reopened. They just didn’t keep up with one another during the school year like they did in the summer. They were their own little summer society.

This summer she found herself lured back into the world of mothers and children, sitting on a lounge chair in the vicinity of these younger women (for it was mostly women, still, in spite of all the advancements society had made) because that was where Alec and Lilah wanted to be. Well, Lilah did, at least. Alec kept to himself mostly. She worried about him, wondered what kind of damage he’d sustained in all that had happened.

She felt a presence and opened her eyes, squinting from the glare of the sunlight reflecting off the pool. Alec stood over her as if she’d conjured him up. He was still dry, and the intensity of his expression was so much like his mother’s she had to look away. He’d refused to get into the pool today, sitting off to the side and watching instead. “When are we going to leave?” he asked.

“Well, Alec, we just got here,” she responded. She pointed to a group of kids in the pool, all playing some sort of strange game that involved swimming from one side to the other very fast. “Why don’t you go play with the other children? They seem to be having a good time.”

Alec glanced in the direction she was pointing, then shook his head. “Don’t wanna.”

Zell spotted a young woman in the pool playing with her little boy, and wondered if that was why Alec wanted to leave. “Well, we just got your sunscreen on, and we haven’t had the nice snacks I packed for us, and your sister seems to be having a good time. So we’ll have to stay for a little while.”

Alec sighed deeply. “OK,” he said, then started to shuffle away. He stopped short and shuffled back. “Can I go over to the playground?” A note of hope had returned to his voice.

They’d replaced the playground since her children were little. The old playground had been deemed “unsafe,” though Lord knew her kids had played there for countless hours and never been hurt. But parents these days worried about every living thing under the sun. It made her thankful that her children hadn’t had their own children yet. She wasn’t sure she was ready for all their rules and regulations when she kept her grandchildren. She’d heard stories about the special formula shipped on dry ice that cost as much as gold, the car seats that could practically drive themselves, the allergies and sensitivities and diagnoses, everything with a fancy name to it. This new generation of parents just had too much information, if you asked her. It was that Internet, fueling their neuroses, empowering them. And don’t get her started on all their devices, their heads bent down over their phones so much they could barely be sociable.

“Can I?” Alec repeated.

She glanced over at the play structure, a large wooden thing with all kinds of complicated platforms and ladders but just two little swings, located over the fence from the pool and adjacent to the neighborhood lake, which was really just a glorified pond.

“I suppose so. Does your—” She caught herself. She’d almost said “mom.” “Does your dad let you go over there?”

Alec nodded vigorously. “I’ll be careful,” he said. Lance had at least gotten Alec’s bangs cut, so now she could see his huge, brown puppy-dog eyes.

“OK, just listen out for when I call you,” she instructed. He gave an absentminded nod and walked quickly away. She wondered if perhaps he was putting one over on her, if this was something that Debra would’ve allowed. She sighed and threw her arm over her eyes. Debra had left, and Zell was here. So what Debra wanted didn’t matter anymore. It was Zell who was making sure their skin didn’t burn and that they got fresh air and had milk for breakfast. It was Zell who was worrying about Debra’s husband and making her own husband cut their grass so poor, overloaded Lance didn’t have to. It was Zell who was keeping one eye on Debra’s son on the playground and one on her daughter in the pool. It was Zell who was responsible. Sometimes she thought of just telling Lance the truth about Debra, but instead she focused on helping with the children. She told herself that was enough. Because telling Lance the truth about Debra would be telling the truth about herself.

The lifeguard blew his whistle. “Adult swim,” he hollered, then climbed down out of the lifeguard stand with a relieved look on his face. In unison, the kids all groaned loudly and exited the pool, making their way over to where the parents were congregated, the lounge chairs clustered in odd arrangements that were far from the nice rows they started out in every day.

Lilah and two of her little friends came over to Zell. “Can I have a Popsicle?” she asked, her voice sweeter than normal. Ten years old and she already knew how to manipulate. Her little friends hung back, wary, their bathing suits dripping steadily onto the cement.

“We didn’t bring any Popsicles, dear,” Zell answered.

“My friends did, though.” She gestured to the two girls with her, who tittered in response. “They said I could.”

“Well, I guess if their mother says it’s OK, then that’s fine,” she said. She reached into her pool bag and pulled out a bright-orange visor with the name of some drug written across it, a leftover from one of John’s many pharmaceutical conventions. She popped it onto her head. The sun was brutal. But her skin was getting tanner, and that made it all sort of worth it. She would have tan fat at least. She looked down at the expanse of her stomach housed in blue Lycra. Too bad John’s company never made a drug that made people lose weight without killing them in the process.

The girls squealed with glee, their voices nearly piercing her eardrums, and ran toward where the mother of the other two sat. She looked as uncertain and out of place as Zell felt.

Two chairs over from where Zell sat, a young mother walked back to a chair with a little boy, who was dripping wet and crying softly. “This is adult swim,” the girl patiently explained. “That means the mommies and daddies get to swim with no kids in the water.” She pointed to the empty lifeguard stand. “See? There’s no lifeguard to protect the little children.”

The little boy was not placated by this explanation. “But I want to swim,” he whined, his voice teetering on a tantrum. Zell recognized the warning sound.

“Well, right now we’re going to have a juice box and some strawberries. And by the time we’re done eating, it’ll be time to go back in the water.” The girl’s voice was singsongy, as if she was attempting to sound kind, but bordering on losing it. Zell recognized that as well. Parenting might’ve changed since she’d done it, but some things were still the same.

“Excuse me,” a voice interrupted her eavesdropping, and she looked up to find a nicely manicured hand hovering in the air between them. Reflexively, she reached up to take it.

“Yes?” she asked as her hand was pumped up and down a few times. There was something familiar in the face that belonged to the hand, but she couldn’t place it.

“My girls are Pilar and Zara?” She pointed at the two little girls Lilah had run off with. The three of them were wrapped in towels in a circle, eating red, white, and blue Bomb Pops. “Are you Lilah’s . . .” She let her voice trail off, uncertain just who Zell was to Lilah.

“Neighbor. I’m her next-door neighbor. Her dad was busy today, so I said I’d take the kids off his hands.”

“Oh, well, that’s . . . nice.” She glanced over at the girls and back at Zell. “I think that Lilah had invited the girls over to play, and I had said yes, but then I thought I better find out whether you would approve, but now I see that . . . that’s probably not possible.”

“Yes, I doubt Lance—that’s her dad—would want extra kids over. He’s working from home these days, and well, it’s a bit of a difficult situation.”

The woman gave a cynical laugh. “Oh, I understand that,” she said, then more to herself, added, “All too well.” The little boy a few chairs away delivered a belly laugh as if on cue.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Oh, sorry, where are my manners? Jencey Wells.”

Zell squinted at her, trying to make sense of the different last name and the grown-up face. She had known a Jencey once, a girl the same age as her son Ty. That girl had been the little queen bee of the neighborhood, calling all the shots and determined to take the world by storm. All the boys had crushes on her, including her own son, though he would never admit it. Then all that unpleasantness had occurred, and she’d been spirited away in the night by her parents, hidden away in some college up north. Zell heard she’d turned into a Yankee, married some man up there with tons of money, and hardly came home to visit. Folks said her mother, Zell’s old friend Lois Cabot, barely knew her own grandchildren. Jencey Cabot was a cautionary tale passed around among the grandmother set.

“You’re not . . .” Zell started to ask.

Jencey gave her a wide, false grin and said, a little too loudly, “Yep, it’s me! Jencey Cabot.”

“Well, Jencey, how nice. You here visiting?” she asked. “I’m sure your mama is just tickled!”

“Yes,” Jencey said. “We, um, came to visit.”

“I’m Zell Boyette. You knew my sons, John Junior and Ty?” She almost said, “I think Ty had a crush on you,” but held her tongue. No one cared about that now.

“Oh sure, Mrs. Boyette, how are they?”

“They’re fine, doing fine. JJ’s married to a lovely girl. They’re both building their careers and absolutely refusing to have any grandchildren for me.” She didn’t mention Ty, and thankfully, Jencey didn’t ask after him. Ty wasn’t as . . . upwardly mobile as his brother.

“Well, please tell them I said hi,” Jencey said. She glanced over toward the bathrooms with a grimace and took a step in that direction. Her girls were coming out, laughing and jostling each other. One of them turned on the outside shower and stuck her head under it, being silly.

“Jencey?” Zell heard the young woman with the little boy say, stopping Jencey before she could make her exit. The girl was up off her chair and over to where Jencey and Zell were in no time. She wrapped her arms around the startled Jencey, then stepped back to give her a good look. “I can’t believe it’s you! You’re here! You’re back!” she marveled.

“Bryte?” Jencey asked, looking as stunned as her friend. Zell was witnessing a reunion. “Bryte Bennett? I can’t believe it!” Jencey reached out and gave her friend another hug then pulled back to give her a good look. “You’re all grown up.”

The other young woman, another child whose mother had once been one of the women Zell whiled away her summer days with, laughed and said, “So are you!” Zell couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognized her, either. But now that she heard the name, she thought,
Of course
.

“You look just great!” Jencey said to Bryte. “I mean, really beautiful.” There was a note of incredulity in her voice, overshadowing the compliment, if you asked Zell. But both young women had all but forgotten she was there.

Bryte colored. “Um, thanks.” She looked down at the little boy hovering at her knee, taking the chance to veer the conversation away from the uncomfortable fact of her beauty. Zell remembered this girl as being sort of plain as a child. She’d certainly grown into the name; light emanated from her now.

“This is my son, Christopher,” Bryte said. “He’s almost three. And you? I heard you have kids?”

Zell started to speak, to point out something that would loop her back into the conversation, to make her presence in their midst necessary. But she thought better of it. She listened to the two younger women talk, feeling superfluous not unlike the discarded towels, the crumpled juice boxes, the wet footprints that appeared on the concrete, then just as quickly faded away.