Page 36 of Sunset on the Solstice

“You’re brave,” Rebecca said finally.

“I’m not,” Vivian said with a laugh. “But I want to be. And I think that’s what life is, sometimes.”

“Fake it till you make it,” Chad said, offering a crooked smile.

“Exactly,” Vivian said, reaching for another slice of pizza.

Rebecca had the sense that back when she’d been married, Vivian’s husband had closely monitored everything Vivian had eaten. Maybe that was why she let herself eat as much pizza as she wanted. She was hungry. She needed the fuel to survive.

Lily took another slice, too, as though she understood she needed energy to save her sister. Rebecca sipped her wine and narrowed her eyes.

“You said we can’t enter the house the front way,” Rebecca said.

Vivian nodded. “It’s too dangerous around here. Jared’s too much of a name. Everyone wants to be on his good side.”

Chad grunted. “Pathetic.”

“But she takes her kids to the stream,” Vivian said. “Especially when the air-conditioning goes out. We’re about to enter another heat wave. It’ll be over a hundred the next three days.”

“How do we make sure the air-conditioning breaks down?” Chad asked.

“Let me take care of it,” Vivian said. “I can be pretty handy when I need to be.”

“Don’t put yourself in danger,” Lily told her.

Vivian cast Lily a look of humor mixed with mischievousness. “My life has been filled with danger,” she said. “I made it through all of that. I can break an air-conditioning unit, no problem.”

18

End of Summer: 2026

It was eleven months to the day after Jared’s sailing accident that Shelby and Jared officially left Massachusetts and moved to Montana. It wasn’t perfect timing. Shelby was nearly eight months pregnant and lived her life in permanent discomfort. It was as though her body was constantly fighting her, sending aches and pains to areas she’d never even considered before. She was now twenty-two years old—but she felt maybe ten years older than she had last year, when she’d turned twenty-one. Life comes at you fast, she thought to herself as she taped up some of the final boxes and watched as the movers carried them to the truck.

Because Shelby was so pregnant, there was no option but to drive themselves all the way out to Montana. Shelby decided to try to make it fun. She’d always loved road trips, no matter the distance, and she made them several playlists, hoping that the music would help them bond again. Since Jared had secured this position in Montana, he’d felt even more foreign to her, even more domineering, as though now that he was going to be making “real” money, he had to act much more adult and much colder.

On the morning they planned to leave their place in Cambridge forever, Shelby and Jared sat on the porch and watched the sun rise over the little town. Soon, the new semester would begin—one without Jared involved at all—and Shelby guessed that Jared felt complicated about that. His grad school had been meant for another year or two, at the very least.

“I never wanted to go to Harvard in the first place,” Jared said darkly, sipping his coffee.

“What did you want to do?” Shelby asked.

“I wanted to travel,” Jared said. “I told my father that I wanted to go into the world and see what I wanted to make of myself rather than rush into anything. Obviously, he had other plans for me.”

Shelby wondered what her own father had wanted for her, back before he’d passed. She wondered what Fred and Rebecca had whispered about Shelby’s future, long after Shelby had gone to bed. They’d known she was an academic, that she needed to use her brain to be happy. Now that she’d moved so far away from all forms of learning, she struggled to make use of her days, and even reading a few sentences at a time exhausted her. It was as though someone had transplanted her brain for someone else’s. Or maybe it was just “pregnancy brain,” as so many women said.

Before they left Massachusetts, they stopped to see Jim and Monica one final time. Shelby sensed a frigidness between Jared and his parents, especially now that Jared had been kicked out of Harvard. She guessed that Jim was suffering the consequences in their social circles. But they managed to have a semi-civil breakfast together. A few times, Monica caught Shelby’s eye, and Shelby tried to figure out what Monica was trying to tell her. But Monica just shook her head and let her eyes drop to the eggs between them. What? Shelby wanted to scream. But instead, she just smiled and told Jim and Monica they could come out West whenever they wanted.

“You’ll be grandparents soon,” she said.

When they got in the car, Shelby waved goodbye to Jim and Monica until they turned the corner. Jared turned up the radio, then grumbled, “He thinks he knows so much better than me. But I’m doing exactly what he did, you know that? He took the job my grandfather gave to him. The only difference, I guess, is that my father wants me to move to Montana, while my grandfather wanted my father to stay here.”

“It’ll be good for us,” Shelby said. “We’re always talking about how we want to start over.”

Jared nodded stoically. “We need to start over. Start fresh. It’s the reason people came out West in the first place. They didn’t want their old religions or their old cultures or their old laws to get in the way of their visions.”

“Exactly,” Shelby said, smiling, although she felt she was going to throw up.

The house they’d bought was on many acres of forest, mountain, and stream. It was a five-bedroom house with far too much space for the two of them, but Shelby knew she was expected, via pregnancy, to fill the rooms. When they arrived, exhausted from the many days of driving, she moved from empty room to empty room, taking stock of what needed to be done and how each deserved to be decorated. She’d never had a keen eye for artistry, but she’d been reading online about color palettes and redesigns. Maybe this was a good way to use her brain?