After I finish tying my cover-up, I catch Connor grinning at me. I muster the hottest glare, and then reroute my gaze to torment him a little more.
Garrison and Willow sit close together on a patio couch beneath a tan umbrella. Their two-year-old daughter, brown pigtails and blue-green eyes hidden behind toddler sunglasses, sucks on a banana-flavored popsicle between her parents. Vada is more cooperative than every baby I’ve ever had. She will hum theme songs to video games and minds her own business on international flights.
I don’t think their baby is human. Vada is obviously some sort of deity. Like a Greek goddess. Like Athena—only I’d think Athena would have better sense than to transform into a little two-year-old.
Willow helps Vada hold the popsicle stick, and Garrison watches his wife and daughter with fondness. He whispers something to Willow, and then he kisses her cheek before kissing her lips.
I whip my head back to Connor. His attention is on the grill, not me, and I try to stifle my disappointment. You did the same to him. I did, but most commonly, he’s the one who chases after me.
My focus diverges anyway.
Splashes escalate from down below, and I can even hear combined exclamations from Moffy and Jane, the eleven-year-olds.
“Go, Sulli!” Jane shouts. “Overthrow our adversaries!”
“You got this, Beckett!” Moffy cheers. “Come on! Come on!”
In the shallow parts of the lake, Jane has Sullivan on her shoulders while Moffy has Beckett on his. The two eight-year-olds wrestle, attempting to knock one another off in a classic game called chicken.
We all fall hushed on the deck, observing the children for a moment. I nearly smile, sensing the years that have passed, seeing what our futures have become. This morning Connor said to me, “The lake house puts our lives in vivid perspective.” I didn’t quite grasp the full meaning until now.
Without background noise—the tabloids, cameramen, and our jobs—we’re left strong together, with simple moments that drum ferociously through us all.
Jane takes one hand off Sullivan’s leg and tries to push Moffy.
He dodges Jane and laughs, “What was that, Janie? Can’t get me!”
“Don’t be so sure, Moffy! Just you…ohhh…no.” Jane starts falling backwards with Sullivan, but Sullivan careens her weight forward and clasps Beckett’s shoulders, keeping them in the game.
I can’t pick an allegiance to either team. Jane and Beckett are my children, and my heart is with them both equally.
“Jesus Christ.” Lo grabs his megaphone and switches it on. “MOVE AWAY FROM THE DOCK!” They’re not close enough that they’d hit their heads. I never thought Loren Hale would be the most anal, but I did think he would be as overprotective as he is.
I quickly scan the backyard for all my gremlins. Eliot, Tom, and Luna are on the hammocks, strung between maple trees by the water. Three-year-old Xander and my four-year-old Ben play with Legos on the hill, right beside the red Adirondack chairs and an incredibly silly basset hound, leaping after air particles now.
I swing my head left and right. “Where’s Charlie?”
Connor sets down the spatula, his phone already in his hand. He calls our son, putting the speaker to his ear. My back arches, prepared to stomp around the entire house in search for our son. It wouldn’t be the first time. Yesterday, I found Charlie on the roof of all places. I truly wondered if he was my child until he pompously jabbered about physics and scientific theories like he discovered them himself.
He is a Cobalt, through and through.
“He’s not answering,” Connor tells me, incredibly calm since this is a common event. It’s why we’ve given Charlie his own cellphone.
“CHARLIE!” I shout at the top of my lungs.
“There goes my left eardrum,” Lo says with edge.
I point my nail at him. “You used that.” The megaphone.
“My voice doesn’t sound like cats are being slaughtered.”
I produce a hostile glare, and right when I go to rip the megaphone from Lo’s hands—about to use it myself—the sliding glass door opens.
Charlie, who looks more and more like Connor every day, barely acknowledges us before skipping down the steps and heading towards the dock. I love him so entirely, like all my children, that my hatred towards his disappearing acts diminishes to just a handful of worry.
“Is he okay?” Daisy asks, passing shucked corn to Ryke for him to grill.
“He’s mentally bored,” Connor says. “I’ll play chess with him later.”
Charlie sits at the edge of the dock. Maria, now eighteen, tans on a yellow inner-tube nearby, her Ray Bans blocking the sun. When I sweep all the children again, my jaw unhinges, and I take off down the steps.
He did not.
Oh yes he did.
“Ben Pirrip!” I shout, my heels sinking into the damp grass. I get stuck on the way to my four-year-old who has walked off the quilt, left Xander and the Legos, and found himself a giant sinking hole of mud.
I do what I never do.
I abandon my heels.
I free myself and go barefoot across the hill to this terribly disgusting muddy area near the tree line. “What are you doing?” I have never birthed a child more unpredictable than this one.
Ben rolls in the mud, giggles, and tries to remove all his clothes. I sense Connor reaching my side about the same time that our youngest boy frees himself of his pants.
“Are you sure he’s ours?” I ask Connor without tearing my gaze off Ben. His big blue eyes shimmer with an inordinate amount of light, the rest of him covered in mud.
I feel Connor’s blinding grin. “Most assuredly, he’s ours.”
“I’ll get the hose.”
Connor is the one who grabs the wiggling four-year-old, and he brings him towards the side of the house while I pull out the hose and twist the faucet. When Connor places Ben on the grass, our son tries to spring up and escape back towards the mud.
By the way, Ben is completely nude.
That’s my boy.
I snort at Connor. Ben put his little hands on Connor, who just wears navy swim trunks. So two muddy handprints decorate my husband’s chest.
Connor arches his brow. “Yes, darling?”
“Our son has marked his territory. You’re it.” I wield the green hose like a weapon, and Connor eyes the nozzle, then me, his eyes sparking with intrigue.
Ben smiles. “Let’s go play!”
“Not in the mud,” Connor says easily.
Ben pulls at the grass, even his lips caked in mud. “Don’t I get a choice?”
Connor kneels in front of Ben. “Your choices: if we wash you now, you’ll be able to play with Xander; or if you return to the mud, you’ll never be allowed inside ever again.”
“The mud!” Ben doesn’t miss a beat.
Connor shuts his eyes tight. This is the first child that always chooses the option with the worst personal benefit, and Connor has painstakingly tried to tell Ben to do what’s best for him.
“Ben goes with his heart,” I remind Connor.
“His heart chooses wrong.”
Our son tries to spring towards the mud, but Connor seizes him again.
“If you stay outdoors forever, you’ll miss Wednesday night dinners.” For the past four years, our children started counting down to those dinners. The most common question has become: is it Wednesday yet?
Ben hesitates.
“You’ll never see Pip-Squeak.”
“I’ll take him with me!”
“He’s an indoor bird.”
Ben, a little mud monster, gawks at Connor. “Thatsnotfair.” He slurs the words together.
“Every choice has benefits and costs, some greater and some smaller than others. It’s up to you to use this”—he touches Ben’s head to illustrate his brain—“to determine which is better for you.”
Ben plops on the grass, saddened. I’d feel worse if he didn’t look like a tiny creature from the bottom of the lake.
Matter-of-factly, I tell him, “Being clean is more fun than being dirty.”
“Mommy,” he groans and scoffs like I’m so wrong.
I’ll show him. I squirt him just a little, water spraying his body.
He instantly smiles.
“What about now?” I challenge. I spray him lightly once more.
Ben picks himself up and outstretches his arms while sticking out his tongue. As though I am Mother fucking Nature commanding a rain shower for my son. I smile in satisfaction.