The Future Mrs. Brightside
by Fiona J.R. Titchenell
Genre: Women's Fiction
After a year of making beautiful music together, Chloe Hatherly thinks she’s more than ready to make the age-old promise to her bandmate, Jon. In sickness and in health, for better or worse. When the sudden death of Jon’s father forces the couple to postpone their wedding in favor of a funeral, however, their relationship veers rapidly off course from the ever after they’d both envisioned. Now living in her intended father-in-law’s memory-steeped house and acting as round-the-clock caregiver for her fiancé’s worsening depression, Chloe finds herself afflicted with a songwriter’s block for which she’s only ever known one cure: leaving and writing a killer breakup song. Unlike the subjects of her past lyrical rants, Chloe can’t picture her life without Jon in it, and she begins to wonder if there’s a way to save the music she loves while keeping the vows she never had the chance to make — or if she and Jon have already been irrevocably parted by death, albeit not their own.
The Future Mrs. Brightside is an uncomfortably honest, sometimes hilarious, fiercely romantic prose ballad to the hideous beauty of love in good times and bad.
“Don’t forget this, okay?”
“What?” said Chloe.
“This.” Breanna pointed to her aching smile. “You’re his sunshine now.”
“His only sunshine?” Chloe sang jokingly.
“Maybe,” said Breanna.
Chloe laughed again, but the watering of her eyes wasn’t entirely a laughter reflex anymore.
Breanna put a hand to her floral hairclip, then dug around in her purse until she found another, this one a white carnation, decorated with a few delicate drops of hot glue made to look like rain.
“I always keep a spare, so I’m never without a reminder,” she said. “Sunshine and rainbows are a sacred responsibility.”
She couldn’t get the clip to stay in Chloe’s pixie-short hair, so after a few tries, she settled for clipping it to the neck of her sweater.
“Don’t forget to take care of you,” she said. “You’re no good to anyone else if you don’t.”
Excerpt 2:
“How is he?” Breanna asked.
“I don’t know,” said Chloe. “Surprisingly calm, at the moment.”
“How are you?”
“Okay, I think.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Probably nothing. Thanks for coming.”
Chloe helped Breanna carry the bags to the kitchen table and unpack them. There were tissues, M&M cookies, a block of cheese, a vegetable platter, and a gallon tub of Oxiclean with sponges.
“Did it happen on the carpet or the tile?” Breanna asked softly when Chloe unpacked this last item.
“Carpet.”
“Yeah. When my cousin OD’d, this was the only thing that could get him out of the padding.”
“Oh.”
This was another thing Chloe had subconsciously assumed someone else would do. Maybe if the room upstairs had been a crime scene, someone would have, but it was only a death scene, which she kept having to remind herself was different.
The morticians were only coming for the body itself, eventually. Once it was gone, the stains would still be there.
She needed to sit down.
It wasn’t even the prospect of cleaning corpse secretions out of white carpet that was specifically making her dizzy; it was the endlessly unspooling list of tasks to be done, more people to be contacted and met with, accounts to be settled, utilities to be notified, services to be planned. Chloe didn’t know how any of these things were done, how one even went about getting them started.
All she knew was that they existed in the abstract, needing to be taken care of, and that Jon probably didn’t know any more about them than she did. Even if he had known more, she didn’t want him to have to share a single ounce of the panic the to-do list was currently instilling in her, because no matter how overwhelming it got, what he was already dealing with was worse.
“Breathe,” Breanna reminded her. “You’ll be glad you have it later, but it’s not later yet.”
Excerpt 3:
“Buy you a drink?” she offered.
“Thanks, no, I don’t partake,” he answered, still blushing.
Chloe could tell that he’d already cycled through a lot of ways of saying this, before settling on one offbeat enough to force people to process and listen to the words.
“Wow,” she said.
“What, never met someone who doesn’t?”
“No, I just don’t see a lot of people pull out that kind of fearlessness without a little liquid assistance.”
The redness had seeped down into his ears.
“I do like cream soda,” he said.
The one woman left tending the bar gave Chloe a disbelieving stare when she asked to redeem one of her last two comp vouchers for a two-dollar soda.
“You know these are good for anything on the menu, right? So, it’s worth like, eight dollars?”
“Can I get four sodas then?” Chloe asked.
She’d meant to use this as a bargaining step to argue her way down to just one, but apparently this compromise sufficiently assuaged the bartender’s conscience, and she brought out four glass bottles of Sugarland designer cream soda, uncapping them one at a time and placing them in front of Jon, next to Chloe’s third beer.
“I see they know you here,” said Jon.
“The endless glamour of turning semi-pro,” Chloe rolled her eyes at her nearly untouched display of CDs, halfway between the stage and the bar. “You don’t have to finish them.”
“Well, now I’ve got a challenge.” Jon raised one of the bottles, clinked it against Chloe’s glass, and polished it off in one go, before putting it down to clutch at his overcarbonated sinuses.
“Ow. I’m not going to try that again, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m Jon, by the way.”
He held out the hand that wasn’t nursing his face, and Chloe shook it.
“I know,” she said. “I’m coming to terms with that.”
“With what?”
“I’ve never drunk with a Jon before,” she explained. “I usually meet Malcolms and Spencers and Seths.”
She made it a joke, but the “Jon” factor was honestly unsettling her a little. That name was thicker camouflage than the glasses or unassumingly cuddly physique. How was she supposed to encapsulate the room-shaking significance of his particular presence in a syllable that he had to share with so many other people, plenty of whom had already flicked in and out of her life without a ripple?
“It’s spelled without the H,” he said, a bit defensively.
“Is it short for Jonathan?”
“Yeah, but don’t call me that, okay?”
“Is there a last name?”
“Miller.”
“Hmm.”
Chloe tried to imagine herself spearheading a search for this man if he were ever kidnapped.
Well, officer, his name is Jonathan Miller, goes by Jon, about six feet tall, wears glasses, can sound like just about anyone… Sure, run that through your system… What do you mean, two million matches? Damnit, officer, that’s not good enough!
This imaginary scenario wasn’t getting any more promising the further she followed it, but it was making her notice something. It might have been the beer talking, but she could swear the files stored in her emotional memory in the folders marked “Jon” and “Miller” were beginning to overwrite themselves.
The police records and social security name database would never agree with her on the subject of how many Jons or Mr. Millers there were in the world, but in the soft, immediate clarity of Dragonscale Pale Ale, she was already coming to understand that after tonight, for her, there would only ever be one.
Excerpt 4:
“So, the reality is that we’re not getting married next Saturday, right?”
There was no way to broach this subject without causing additional pain, but the plan had to be discussed at some point before they were due to walk down the aisle, and the opportunities had been slim. With all the people coming and going from the house, bringing condolences and unsolicited advice and food that Jon wouldn’t eat, Chloe felt like she was seeing less of the real him than she did when she was working all day and rehearsing at night.
She’d phrased the question the way she had for the purpose of keeping the pressure low, maybe even removing pressure that was already simmering, so Jon wouldn’t panic and claim he could go through with it, thinking it would make her happy.
He was always trying to make this easier on someone other than him.
The panic came anyway, but the claims were mostly kept at bay.
“I’m so sorry, love,” he said. “Is that okay?”
“Yeah, I just wanted to run something by you,” Chloe plowed her way into the next terribly practical point of discussion. “I called the hotel, and they’re definitely not going to refund our reservation.”
“Oh god,” Jon sat down across from her at Roger’s dining room table, where she’d spread out her laptop and a stack of bills to work her way through. He put his head in his hands. “Of course they’re not. Okay. Maybe we can still make it work. If I start getting in the right headspace now, and we just keep reminding everyone that it’s what he would have wanted—”
“Jon. No,” Chloe stopped him. “I may not be a drummer, but I know when my timing’s off. No. I was just thinking, the hall at the botanical gardens didn’t have any openings until April, right?”
“April twenty-seventh,” Jon muttered into his hands.
“And we already have a rose garden and a reception hall reserved for next week, whether we want them or not. Most of the same people who’d be going already have the date saved…”
Jon arched his back, palms flat on the table in front of him, envisioning this possibility in a space somewhere beyond the dining room wet bar.
“Shit, that’s horrible. It’s genius. It’s horrible, but it’s genius.”
Beyond wanting to be cremated and scattered on the beach, Roger had left very few specifications for his funeral, other than using the words “fun” and “minimalist” a lot. If it had truly been up to him, everyone interested in paying their respects probably would have met up at Sam’s Subs to swap stories about him and call dibs on his ’70s celebrity memorabilia. But there were too many interested people to fit inside Sam’s, and most of them hadn’t known him well enough to understand how appropriate an independent local sandwich shop get-together would be.
Altogether, in spite of the Millers’ sparse blood family, there were close to two hundred friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and assorted hangers-on all expecting a formal service. Some of them had started calling every few days to ask if there was any way they could help with it, which was less helpful than it was a transparent way of checking that they hadn’t missed their invitations.
If Chloe and Jon could salvage some of the work from another set of plans that they were going to have to scrap anyway, it would make the task considerably less insurmountable.
“Will they let us do that?” Jon asked.
“I checked that too,” said Chloe. “Since we’re not bringing an actual body or any of those kinds of complications, it doesn’t make much difference to them if we use the space for a ceremony and reception or a service and wake. For an extra hundred dollars, they’ll switch out all the linens and table runners and stuff from red to black and get rid of the cake table. We’ll just have to let the DJ know separately to change the repertoire, see if the florist can tone back any of the colors last minute, and go to FedEx for a big glossy photo and a stand to put it on.”
“I think Dad had one of those stands somewhere around here,” said Jon.
“Just the photo itself, then.”
“Wait, you said a hundred dollars to get rid of the cake table?”
“And change the linens.”
“That’s so stupid.”
“Less stupid than paying them the cost of a lightly used car to do nothing at all, and then the same to someone else to do it all over again?”
“Yeah, less stupid than that,” Jon sighed. “And don’t they know it. Can we keep the cake table if we want?”
“Probably.”
“Dad wouldn’t deny anyone perfectly good prepaid cake. Let’s just tell the bakery to leave off the decorations and the little couple on top, and if they say it’s already too late for that, tell them we’re not paying for week-and-a-half-old cake.”
Chloe was taking notes to herself too fast to laugh.
“Do you want me to see if they can put something else on it instead?” she asked.
“What, like, ‘Wish You Weren’t Dead’? Sorry.” Jon shook himself and put his hand on Chloe’s knee, to avoid disturbing her scribbling hand. “I’m sorry. Thank you for helping me with this. Let’s just… let’s leave it blank. Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.”
“Never.” He squeezed her kneecap before folding his hands back on the table. “God, this sucks.”
“Yeah, I think the sucking is non-negotiable.”
“I still want to marry you.”
“I know.”
“I still can’t wait to marry you.”
“I can,” said Chloe. “Until I can see you grinning with delirious, unadulterated joy across the altar from me.”
Jon quirked an eyebrow. “Altar?”
“Across the dead January rose garden gazebo from me. Across the novelty Elvis chapel in Vegas from me. Across the county clerk’s desk from me, at that other window where you can hire witnesses for twenty dollars apiece. It’s the grin of delirious, unadulterated joy I’m set on.”
Jon managed a sad smile.
“As soon as all this settles down,” he said. “I promise.”
Excerpt 5:
“I could really use a friend right now.”
“Are you okay?”
“Jon and I had a fight.” The word seemed so small and imprecise. “He’s never been mad at me for this long. I don’t know how to fix it.”
“What’s he mad about?”
“He says nothing.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s he actually mad about?”
Chloe did her best to describe the fiasco of their second failed wedding.
“You got cold feet at the altar?” Breanna summed up.
What Chloe wouldn’t have given that day for cold feet.
“Sort of.”
Breanna whistled. “Sounds bad.”
“But I don’t think it’s just about that. He was already mad at me before I freaked out,” Chloe tried to explain. “That was part of what freaked me out.”
“What was he mad about before?”
“A million little things.”
Breanna took a breath, collating the unhelpfulness of this information.
“Well, if you just need to show him you’re sorry and let off some tension, there’s one trick I used to do with my brother, you just need a disposable pie tin, a can of whipped cream, and if you’re feeling creative—”
“Yeah, I don’t think letting him pie me in the face is going to cut it for this,” said Chloe, imagining the argument that could be solved this way with utter yearning.
“You have to present the pie with a grand, dignified speech about how it’s a symbol of your deepest love for him, put it right in his hand, and make it clear that you’ll slam your own face into it if he doesn’t help you, so he won’t have to feel guilty about letting his feelings out. Or you could get a couple of nerf guns, and—”
“He’ll barely even look at me, Bree.”
“Okay, let’s start with… hmm… what do you normally do when something like this happens?”
“I leave!” Chloe blurted out, not caring how many people in the Starbucks looked up to eavesdrop. None of them did. “I leave, and I write a song about it!”
The line was silent for a moment.
“Is that what we’re looking at right now?” Breanna asked gravely.
“I… god, I hope…”
Of the handful of words that had passed between Chloe and Jon each day since Vegas, not one had so much as paid lip service to the possibility that they might not pull through this together. Yet with so much time on her hands, time to do nothing but think about her predicament, it was impossible not to entertain a few flickering, abstract questions.
How much money was still in her personal savings account?
Whose doorstep could she try turning up on first, if she simply walked out the door and didn’t come back?
Would she even be thinking these things if Roger had clung to life just a few weeks longer, and she and Jon had sworn on schedule to stick it out for better or worse?
Was having been ready and willing to say those words the same as having said them?
Or was this what people meant when they talked about dodging a bullet?
It would have been naïve to assume that such questions didn’t flicker for Jon too.
“Normally, the guys make it easy,” she told Breanna. “Normally, I pick guys who’ll make it easy. They’ll rage or cheat or kick me out, so it’s barely even a choice, and when it happens, I’m ready.”
She hadn’t put this in quite those terms before, but there it was.
In the seven years following her non-destiny with Seth, she’d honestly thought that this was the adult version of love, strong enough to be felt, but never strong enough to embarrass her or overwrite her certainty that she could always walk away and carry on with her life not too much the worse for wear.
And then, suddenly, there’d been Jon.
How long into knowing him had she lost that certainty?
A year?
An hour?
“One mocha and one caramel Frappuccino for Chloe!” the barista at the bar called out. Chloe thanked her and moved the drinks to the nearest free stretch of counter by the window, wondering how much longer she could claim the delay of a long line before the drinks would melt and give her away.
“I think there’s something wrong with me,” she told Breanna, never lowering her voice for the bustling room of people arguing about their orders or the wait.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Breanna answered.
“I finally love a guy for not making me want to cry, and less than a year and a half later, he’s become someone who makes me want to cry all the time.” Chloe sucked in a wet breath and blew it out again irritably, unwilling to illustrate the point then and there. “Apparently, if I can’t be with the one I hate, I’ll find some way to hate the one I’m with. Or make him hate me. It’s like I managed to will the dysfunction into existence and give it to him like lice.”
“Did you give his dad a heart attack?” asked Breanna, as sharply as the question could be asked without meanness.
Chloe said nothing, staring at the caramel on top of her drink, resisting the urge to stir it and ruin the illusion that it had just that second been handed to her.
“You know I mean this in the best possible way, Chlo, but sometimes it’s not all about you.”
Chloe leaned over to snatch a napkin from the nearest dispenser and pressed it to her moist eyes.
She knew there should have been some comfort in the thought that this mess might not be entirely of her own making, but it didn’t change anything for the better. It only made her perversely nostalgic for Roger’s death day, when Jon’s pain had probably been no less severe, no less beyond her power to soothe, but at least she’d been allowed to put her arms around him and try.
“Turn left on Wilshire Boulevard,” said a faint echo on the line.
“Are you driving?” Chloe asked, clearing her throat to a steady tone.
She hadn’t even checked the time or the day of the week before calling, hadn’t thought far enough ahead to guess where Breanna would be or what she’d be doing.
It was a couple minutes past two on a Wednesday. Breanna would normally have been at CCS, reconciling patient charts.
“I’ve got an interview in a bit,” Breanna admitted, as if this were something to be admitted to.
“Did you quit?” Chloe asked, feeling instantly a thousand miles away from the other end of the line.
“Thinking about it,” Breanna answered, “if I get this tour guide spot.”
“Well, I’m… I’m crossing my fingers for you,” Chloe told her, determined not to dissolve into much stupider tears. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Uh, ‘hey, Chlo, by the way, I might get to start spending my days showing people around the most paranormally active areas of downtown, which would be super awesome. Oh yeah, and sorry you had to cancel your wedding for a funeral.’ I kinda figured you had enough on your mind lately.”
Chloe let out a sharp breath that tried to sound darkly mirthful.
“Who, me?” she touched the white carnation clipped to her sleeve, which now stung her with her failure at sunshine-bringing, and almost equally with the thought of Breanna’s life marching onward without her there to cheer it on. “Seriously, though, that’s fantastic. I hope it works out.”
“Dude. Ditto. Don’t take this wrong either, but are you a hundred percent safe right now? Because I’m coming to pick you up if you’re not.”
“It’s Jon,” Chloe answered.
“I know,” said Breanna. “Had to ask. Best friend code.”
“I know.”
Chloe did know, though she wondered if Breanna had picked the term “best friend code,” and maybe even the question that had led up to it, just to assure her that those words still applied to them.
“Go,” said Chloe. “Break legs, knock socks off, et cetera.”
“Sure you’ll be okay?”
“Yeah. And if I’m not, for fuck’s sake, don’t let me spread it, okay?”
“Sunshine, rainbows, and CDC standard precautions in effect,” Breanna promised. “Let me know how it goes.”
“You too.”
And then Chloe was alone again at the busy window counter, holding her darkened phone.
She thought for only a moment about calling her mom or dad next, or even Allison. There was a chance they’d be less busy, but Chloe couldn’t imagine how they’d be more helpful, how anyone would be.
Layers of liquid were beginning to form below the blended ice in both cups.
If those layers got thick enough for Jon to notice, he wouldn’t ask questions, but he would know that she had wanted to get away from him, and that would hurt him, probably.
Even if he didn’t notice, the thought of him sitting alone in his current condition, wondering when she was coming back, maybe if she was coming back, made Chloe’s chest ache enough that she made the return trip at a jog.
“Thank you,” Jon said, when she set his drink on the coffee table.
That was all.
She nodded and sat back in her spot at the other end of the couch, inside the encroaching walls of that palatial house, sipping slightly melted caramel coffee in silence, watching candy canes being mixed and colored on the TV screen.
Chloe spent the better part of those weeks fantasizing about places other than that couch. She imagined the relief of being at her parents’ dining room table, or at some bar where no one knew her, or in the front seat of Spencer’s car, screaming back at him in the throes of a vicious fight, unafraid of ruining her life with a few spitefully chosen words because she already knew they had no future. She even dreamt of being back at her old desk in the CCS office, listening to the righteous fury of a cheated patient caregiver, or back in Calico Park walking across the hot coals, just so long as Jon wasn’t there to look gravely disappointed if she failed.
If there had been something she could do with those weeks, however, somewhere she could go that would make her feel the slightest bit better, she wouldn’t have tried it. She wouldn’t have chased a shred of happiness on her own, because for the first time in her life, there was someone she had no desire to convince that she didn’t need him.
The only place in the world Chloe truly wanted to be was with a happier Jon.
Sitting next to what was left of him on that couch was like sitting on perfect magnetic north. No matter how insistently her compass pointed toward anywhere but there, she knew perfectly well that the moment she took a step in any direction, it would point her right back again.
In my total fantasy land, Jennifer Lawrence would play Chloe. She can sing, she can do a sort of beaten-down surliness that’s a lot like what I see Chloe retreating into when she’s feeling her most isolated, and she does a really amazing fake-happy/fake-friendly that Chloe needs a lot of. But then, Lawrence is one of the biggest actresses in the world, deservedly so, so her ability kind of goes without saying.
My second thought would be that I’d absolutely love to see what Melissa Benoist would do with the part. I’ve mostly seen her do lighter things, but she can channel some really intense vulnerability, and I think she’d be able to show the audience both Chloe’s inner life and the front she presents to the world at the same time, which would be vital to telling the story without the inner monologue you can have in a book. And obviously her musical credentials are through the roof.
My first instinct for Jon would be Elden Henson. He’s got the look, he can do the sweetness, and I imagine he could do the edge that Jon takes on as he’s fighting through his depression. I don’t know if he can sing or do impressions though. Honestly, the part is specialized enough that they’d probably have to find an actor I’ve never even heard of who has just the right combination of skills.
Breanna, Chloe’s best friend and lifeline, doesn’t have to sing, and her physical description is vague, so filmmakers would have a lot of flexibility here. The important thing is that she radiates positivity, confidence, and the sense that she’s living a full, wild life of her own whether Chloe (or the audience) feels like paying attention or not. My personal pick would be Sarah Yarkin.
For Roger, Jon’s late father who features prominently in the flashback timeline, this is kind of an out-there choice, but I’d really, really want Kenneth Branagh. He can do an American accent, and even if he couldn’t, you could rationalize it and it would be worth it. He could bring all the bombast the part requires, but with the little bit of sadness that makes him such a conflicting figure for Chloe and, I hope, for the audience.
FIONA J.R. TITCHENELL is an author of young adult, sci-fi, and horror fiction, including Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir, The Prospero Chronicles, and the Summer 2018 Feminist Book of the Month, Out of the Pocket. The Future Mrs. Brightside is her first foray into contemporary women’s fiction. She graduated with a B.A. in English from Cal State University Los Angeles in 2009 at the age of twenty. She currently lives in San Gabriel, California, with her husband and fellow author, Matt Carter, and has also published under the initials F.J.R. Titchenell. Find out more about her and her books at http://www.fjrtitchenell.weebly.com.
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