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 one 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.
It was a notebook she’d started, and kept with an embarrassing devotion, all about Everett. She had written down any information she gleaned about him—his favorite teams and hobbies, the names of his childhood pets, and his favorite flavor of ice cream. She’d written down the sizes he wore and what clothing he liked to wear, and on what days. She’d written down his daily schedule and what his dreams and aspirations were. None of those dreams or aspirations included her.
She’d been both surprised and horrified to find this document, this proof of just how much she’d pined after him, and for how long it had gone on. It was clear she would’ve done anything to have Everett, and to keep him once she had him. Embarrassed, she’d quickly shoved the notebook into a trash bag and fled the room. Downstairs, she’d found her mother in the kitchen, frowning over a basket of tangled yarn.
“Did you find anything you wanted to keep?” her mother had asked, her attention still on the yarn.
She’d shaken her head and smiled, the taste of vomit still lingering in her mouth. “It’s just old stuff,” she’d said.
“So you just want me to toss it all?” her mom had asked, looking up from the basket with surprise registering on her face.
“You know what they say,” Bryte had quipped and rubbed her belly. “Out with the old, in with the new.”
She hadn’t believed herself then, and she didn’t believe it now. Especially not this summer.
She was about to stand up and get her phone to call Everett when she saw headlights swing into their driveway. She exhaled breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, and felt her stomach settle. She took another sip of wine and waited for Everett to find her instead of calling out to him. She waited in the dark as he entered the house and searched for her, feeling like a child playing hide-and-seek. He finally did, rushing onto the deck, panicked. “What are you doing?” he asked, a note of accusation in his voice. “You scared me.”
She wanted to tell him that he’d scared her, too, that she’d imagined Jencey sending her girls home with her mother so that she and Everett could go find their old hiding place in the woods by the lake. But she couldn’t say those words out loud even if she could picture it fully in her head, Jencey’s late-night whispered confessions when they were girls coming to mind unbidden. She knew it all: how Everett and Jencey had dragged a blow-up mattress out to the woods. How they would lay there and stare up at the stars at night, talking and dreaming.
Bryte didn’t think that mattress could possibly still be there after all these years. She resolved to venture into those woods again. Just to see.
“I just felt like sitting outside,” she said.