Chapter Bex
Bex
I’ve only been back in New Jersey for a few days when we get word from Lars: they put together a pilot episode from the Iceland trip and the network bought the first season. They could still choose not to air it, but the odds are in our favor.
The show’s working title is Love in Plane Sight.
The title is even cringier than that tagline Emil came up with, but there’s not much to be done about it.
Cringiness aside, it means we’ve got at least five more trips to Europe this summer.
It doesn’t make sense to nearly double the length of my flight each way by remaining in California, especially when I could and should stay at my dad’s house for free.
Lars has arranged for a publicist to prep us in a conference room beforehand—probably because he’s scared Theo will bore everyone to death with phrases like “data points” and “market share.”
Or perhaps he’s worried I’ll talk about shocking a corpse’s penis, though it’s not like I’d discuss it twice.
Theo is already waiting when I arrive. He’s got his jacket off, and his tie is askew.
There’s a flutter in my chest, butterflies.
I would like to suffocate each of those butterflies individually.
I can imagine nothing worse than starting to take any piece of this fake relationship seriously.
It’s humiliating that I possess even a tiny impulse to do so.
I step through the door and his eyes slowly sweep over me, head to toe, before he reaches for his phone. “Brought in the fairy godmother again, I see,” he says, swiping across his screen.
“We’re about to be interviewed as a married couple for the first time,” I reply, settling into the chair two down from his. “I figured I’d better look like someone who’d choose to marry a ninety-year-old willingly.”
“For someone who can remember currency rates so easily, it’s puzzling that you consistently forget I’m only thirty-six,” he replies.
This would all be easier if you weren’t. If you were hideous and had a big stick up your ass the way I’d thought. Well…I guess the stick is there. It just doesn’t bother me the way it should.
“Have you met this Samia chick?” I ask, brushing my hair behind my shoulders. “Lars said she’s from London.”
“You realize we don’t all know one another? England is rather large.”
“Bro, all of the UK plus Ireland is still smaller than Texas. That’s not ‘rather large.’ So do you know her?”
He sighs. “Well yes, actually, we’ve met before, but saying we’re not large just because our combined area is smaller than your third-biggest state is still unfair.”
I picture her sauntering in, just the way Theo’s complication might. An English rose wearing a big hat and a dress with buttons down the front, her every glance at me screaming, Oh goodness, what drunken bad decision-making led to this?
“It’s an American show,” I grumble. “Why are there so many Brits involved? I feel ganged up on.”
He straightens his tie. “Samia is originally from India. Lars is from Sweden. Katrina’s French. So we’re basically from four separate countries. How is that being ganged up on?”
“You know you’re all united in your hatred of Americans. Oh, you’re too loud. You’re too friendly. You dress badly. You’re always shooting people. Why are your teeth so straight?”
“We don’t talk about your teeth. And you do have a lot of shootings.”
I spin his direction and make finger guns. “You’ll be glad I know how to fire a gun the next time we have to bail your asses out of a world war.”
“Rebecca,” he says, opening his phone again, “there’s no enemy in the world I find quite as terrifying as the thought of you waving a gun around in self-defense.”
I laugh to myself. That’s entirely fair. He’d definitely be at risk if anyone gave me a gun.
A few minutes later, Samia arrives. She is not wearing a big hat or a dress with buttons down the front, and she appears to dislike us equally. She introduces herself to me with a pained smile…and it’s barely even a smile when she turns to Theo.
“I’m not sure if you remember me,” Theo says, extending his hand, “but—”
“No one’s going to forget you, Theo,” she replies coolly. I glance between them. What did you do, Theo Porter? Because you definitely fucked up somewhere along the way.
“Shall we begin?” Samia asks, sliding into the seat across from us. “Bex, tell me how you met.”
“I came on to him at the funeral because I was upset my family was dead,” I chirp. Samia might as well know what she’s dealing with up front.
Theo groans and Samia shoots him a look. I can’t tell if she’s agreeing with his chagrin or asking him to silence it. “Bex,” she says with a strained smile. “Please.”
I shrug. “Fine.” I reach out to take his hand—large, warm, surprisingly calloused—and give him my most genuine smile, as if I adore him…
I have to remember him bringing me the donut holes in order to make it possible.
“I went through a lot after the train crash. It felt as if my friends all just wanted me to, you know, get over it, and my family was entirely gone. But Theo just cared. He tried to protect me as much as he could. And that meant something.”
This is bullshit. It’s what I wish someone had done, though the odds are I wouldn’t have allowed them to do it. Theo frowns, though I can’t imagine why. It was a decent answer.
“And you, Theo?” Samia prompts.
He hesitates before he finally looks up. “When I saw how gracefully Rebecca handled what was one of the worst things anyone can endure and how resilient she was, I just knew. She is able to find a silver lining in anything, and that’s the person you want with you for the long haul.”
There’s a strange thud in my stomach. Because it sort of sounded like he meant it.
I’m sure he didn’t, but apparently Theo is a better actor than I’d have guessed.
And if I was capable of falling in love with anyone, it would be with a man who answered that question exactly the way he just did.
Someone capable of loving me just as I am, rather than what I pretend to be.
When our training concludes, we walk into the studio, where Lars waits with Carolyn Clark, the reporter.
We’re led to a couch onstage and sit side by side, with Carolyn in a chair diagonal to us.
My thighs begin to sweat, my pulse humming in my throat.
I scoot infinitesimally closer to Theo—he might be my enemy still, but he’s the closest thing I’ve got to a friend here.
“This isn’t live, so there’s nothing to stress about,” Carolyn assures us. “We can edit errors out later.”
“Cameras in three…two…one,” says a voice overhead. Our hands link because they’re supposed to and for no other reason.
“Last December,” a suddenly somber-faced Carolyn says to the camera, “the world watched in horror as it learned about the crash of a New Jersey Transit commuter train heading from Newark to New York City.” She continues offering details about the crash I choose to tune out, focusing instead on the screen to the right, which shows a photo of us from much younger days: Jessie and Bronwyn, pink-cheeked blondes, posing beside my dad in the sand.
I’m there too, but slightly off-center, smaller and darker than the rest, hugging my knobby knees to my chest.
I look exactly like what I was: the child who didn’t belong.
The child they’d have preferred wasn’t there.
I remember that year—fourth grade. It’s when Jessie persuaded my dad to call me Rebecca instead of Bex because she thought my mother’s nickname for me was tacky.
Insisting on that nickname at school was the only rebellion I could mount back then, and now she’s gone, and it’s too late to mount any rebellion at all.
It shifts to a video of Jessie speaking, my dad behind her. “When we founded the company,” Jessie says into the microphone, “we were simply a young family who loved to travel and wanted to do so safely.”
Acid burns my throat.
Jessie got away with everything, and the fact that she felt comfortable stepping onto a stage and saying, “When we founded the company”—about a company she had nothing to do with—is a testament to this fact.
She hated the real reason Families Travel began: that my dad was so destroyed when my mother died that he quit a lucrative job and took his four-year-old daughter on a disastrous RV trip through North and Central America—so disastrous that he decided to come home and create a travel company just for families.
It wasn’t Jessie and her kid who arrived at a national park after weeks of driving to discover passes sold out a year in advance. It wasn’t Jessie’s daughter who emerged from a campsite bathroom excitedly waving a used hypodermic needle as if it were buried treasure.
But Jessie hated that we had something of our own, and what she hated most was that my dad had loved my mother enough to be destroyed by her. So she revised the story until it became another tale entirely, one that put her at its center.
By the time Carolyn’s montage gets to a photo of a cap-and-gown-clad Bronwyn holding her Cornell degree with Jessie and my dad by her side—a photo I’m not in because Jessie asked me to take it, and later used as their holiday card—I’m just fucking over this.
I’m over a lot of things, things I should have been over a decade ago or more.
The lights in the studio go up again and Carolyn angles herself toward us. “Let me begin by offering you both congratulations. I understand you’re newlyweds?”
We nod. It’s funny…the part I dreaded—the fake part—is easier than the truth about my family.
I’m pretty sure it will require less acting.
“We’re going to get to that,” Carolyn continues, “but I’d like to start at the beginning if I could? Rebecca, Jessie began raising you when you were six, yes?”
Theo squeezes my hand, a warning, which is when I realize I was squeezing his first. “Seven,” I reply. “I was six when they met and seven when she and my dad got married.”
“What was that like for you, having a new mother and sister?” Carolyn’s leaning forward, hands clasped as if she’s about to pray. “It must have changed everything.”
This is my cue to gush about how nice it was. There are a thousand stupid things I could say: how it made our family complete, about how much easier life got. I just can’t seem to say them. “Yes, it changed everything. It was an adjustment.”
Carolyn blinks, the only visible sign of disappointment. “After so many years, I imagine Jessie felt more like a mother to you than your own did.”
My hand tightens into a fist beneath Theo’s. I really thought I could do the interview, and that I could not only do it, but do it far better than Theo. I was ready to hear Jessie turned into a saint, rushing in to care for a motherless child with hugs and warm cookies and bedtime stories.
But I refuse to let this bitch put Jessie ahead of my mom simply because one of them died first.
“To be honest,” I say, “Jessie never felt like a mother to me at all.”
The rush of air from Theo’s chest is audible.
“Can we take a minute?” he asks, and without waiting for an answer, he leads me off the stage.
He’s seen a fair amount of rude Bex and TMI Bex, but he hasn’t personally witnessed the version of me who loses her shit—and if he says one critical fucking word, he’s going to.
He drops my hand and rounds on me the second we’re out of view. “What the fuck, Rebecca? She was spoon-feeding you and you decide to rip on a woman who just died tragically?”
“Sorry,” I say, my arms folding over my chest, “but there’s a limit to the number of lies I’m willing to tell and the degree to which I’ll let people exploit the situation to ensure a good return on your investment.”
“Our investment—you stand to gain just as much from this as me.” He is infuriatingly calm.
And correct. “You knew at the outset that this was what’s required.
You’re also not the only one doing it. You know how many bloody times I’ve had to discuss my brother’s death over the years?
You’ve done it before, so why is it a fucking problem now? ”
“Because it’s bullshit,” I hiss.
He blinks. “What is bullshit?”
“All of it,” I reply, heading for the green room. “The whole story is bullshit and I’m really sick of telling it.”
He doesn’t try to follow. Apparently, I needed more media training with Samia than we realized, or maybe, just maybe, there could be one part of this story that isn’t a lie.
Jessie wasn’t Mother Teresa. She wasn’t some saint who swept in to care for an abandoned little girl. She was a single mom who was barely getting by, saw a very simple fix to the whole thing in my father, and didn’t care who she hurt in the process.
I’m not saying she didn’t do good things. I’m not saying she was a terrible person. I’m just saying that there are people in the world you could ask to sing her praises, but I’m not fucking one of them.