“It’s my fault,” she said. “If I hadn’t told you about Mama and the trailer….”
“No. No, Alexandra. You mustn’t think that.”
Daddy might have grabbed hold of her shoulders, so insistent was he, but there was an unspoken rule about touch. She had tried it once, in Boston, during those days she waited for Michael to return to her, but Daddy had simply faded. She hadn’t seen him since.
“Me leaving had nothing to do with you,” he said. “Or the trailer. It had everything to do with loss. I left the day your Mama finally stopped crying. I thought things would get better, that we’d been through the worst of it, but she went to a dark place where I couldn’t reach her. And she owned that loss, took possession of it like I had no stake in it, like I hadn’t lost a child right along with her. Said every time she looked at me, all she did was remember.”
Not unlike her, with Jonah.
“So you left. God, Daddy, don’t even tell me it was for her. You were selfish.”
“I was. She found out the truth about my job. I was worth more dead than alive. Thought things would be better.” He squinted at a flash from the lightning.
A cold shiver worked its way up her spine. It never occurred to Alex to be scared until that moment—not about the here and now but about then: the pier and the lighthouse in the background, gyres that drew a chill off the Atlantic, a man at dusk with tears streaming down his face.
“Freesia was right. You walked into the ocean.”
He took off his dark frames then, the way he used to when he needed a moment to think. The lenses were dry. Made her feel dry, too.
“It was cold, the current strong. The boggy sand slipped out from beneath my feet. Tide took me out further and further, but there was a voice—strong, high like a gull, persistent as hell. Went on for a good minute, maybe two. I couldn’t ignore it.”
“Camilla.”
“Strong swimmer, that woman. I felt so much shame at what I had attempted. We made an agreement over hot tea. She wouldn’t tell anyone I tried to end my life if I wouldn’t tell anyone that she had never been with a man and was so lonely in her sad house on the beach. She had a strawberry birthmark that covered much of her face, but she was young, captivating in a way I can’t even describe to this day. I’m not proud, Alexandra. Not proud at all. But she saved me in my darkest hour so I saved her.”
“Gratitude?”
“And loneliness. It happens.”
Alex remembered leaning over her kitchen sink, staring at a speck of dried oatmeal, a man she could barely remember rutting her from behind. Loneliness was a beast.
“Why wait to tell us?”
“Your mother and I hoarded the secret. At first, a test to rebuild trust. Years went by, neither of us told anyone. Protecting it drew us closer together, closer than before. And then there was the girl. Finding her became something we attempted together, a missing piece to replace what was taken from us. But we never found her.”
How could he not know?
“Mama found her. Brought her here. She has your eyes.”
He smiled, put his glasses back on his face, the way he did when he had solved the unsolvable.
“I don’t love her,” said Alex. “Hell, I barely love myself.”
“That’s going to have to change.”
“Which one?”
“Both.
“I’ve done bad things, Daddy. I’m not your perfect girl anymore.”
More bolts, closer than before. Alex turned inside out and didn’t right herself until the thunder rumbled away. The hood to her coat slipped off. Icy droplets penetrated to her scalp.
“Perfection is a moving target. Sometimes others can grab hold, help you slow it down a bit, if you let them in.” He snatched her nose, though she could not feel him, then descended steps where there was no longer brick. “I’m proud of you, Alexandra. Always will be.”
His words seemed final; her heart snapped. Numbness no longer had ahold of her. She felt everything at once: the air’s electricity, fathomless loss, the life squirming within her, the unconditional love of her father and the desperation of not wanting to say goodbye.
“Daddy, please don’t go,” she pleaded. Hot tears swelled and joined the rain.
He paused at the bottom of the stairs. “Your story ends differently, Alexandra. It isn’t too late.”
From somewhere, shouts, her name, awash, barely above the storm.
She glanced around. Three figures, running.
At the bottom of the grand staircase, nothing. Elias March was gone.
Between her hands, the last of the ink washed clear of the letter.
Jonah, Charlotte, and Freesia rushed past the draped-chain, knee-height barrier, the signs of warning, the first row of decayed plinths.
“Don’t.” Alex stood, put a hand out. Her muddy, bare heels backed against the step above, the grand staircase’s final precipice. “Don’t come up here.”
Jonah skidded to a stop at the bottom, where her father had been moments earlier. Charlotte stopped beside him. Freesia stood apart, at a distance. For all the frigid moments in Alex’s life that she wanted to escape, always to leave, Freesia compelled her to stay. She couldn’t say why—the visual warmth she brought from the nothingness, her stare, her absolute proximity to the chaos. She was here for Alex in a way Alex hadn’t been for her. Where her father left, Freesia stayed.
Alex choked out a sob but it was lost to the gale. She was grateful the pelting rain hid her weakness. She deserved the assault. Her gaze tracked closer, back to Jonah. His face was nurturing. She supposed being away from her all those years did that.
“Bear’s gone,” said Alex.
“I know,” said Jonah. “I’m so sorry. I know how much he meant.”
“You’re all gone. Even you.”
“Come down so we can talk.”
“I have these thoughts…about everything…all at once.”
“I know that, too,” Jonah said. “You told me so, the night we were here.”
“But I can’t write them down anymore. I tried.”
“Then tell me—tell us—what’s real. The columns, the staircase here at the heart of the mansion, all that’s left and real after the shiny fixtures and polished surfaces are gone.”
Alex shook her head. “You don’t want to talk to me. I’ve made a mess of everything. All because I wanted everything to be perfect, because I wanted to be perfect. But you know what? Perfection doesn’t exist. Not for me. Maybe for people who don’t get pregnant by a man who no longer wants to be married. Maybe for people who don’t run away at eighteen because having a child wasn’t part of the plan then, either. Maybe for people who don’t keep the lie going because the shame eats away at them until there’s barely anything left.”
His expression shifted, ever so slightly because the downpour masked the authentic play of muscles, the workings of the eyes, but Alex saw it. He blinked back his confusion, but she saw his realization, his hurt, as surely as if the rain had washed dirt clear off a warning sign. It was in the way his body took a backward step, his neck no longer stretched to see her, his overwhelming distraction with the ground as if it were moving, spinning, just like hers. Something else they shared. She wanted to take it away for him, but she had paddled out too far. He had to know the depths of her self-loathing.
“I didn’t want the baby. I didn’t. I tried everything to make it go away. I even tried to swim in the creek, deprive myself of oxygen, if only for a little while. Nothing worked. And then one day, I got so mad, I ran. Across the field out back, to where you used to pick me up in the middle of the night. I ran harder than I ever had and when I fell, hard, and I saw the blood between my legs, I made a deal with myself that if it were to just go away, I would never stray from my plans again, that I wouldn’t disappoint anymore, that I’d be perfect. That if I achieved enough, climbed the ladder high enough, manipulated the metrics of my life enough, that I would be worthy of the deal I had made. But the moment I kne
w the baby, part of you and the part of me that I loved, was gone, I wanted to take it back.”
She had. Jesus, she didn’t realize it until this moment when the words left her lips that everything that came after she lost the baby wasn’t a prize for being good, for meeting expectations, but a penance for trading away herself and the deepest parts of her that believe she deserved love. Her knees felt empty, incapable of sustaining her under the weight of truth.
Jonah’s loose, blond waves were saturated dark; his frown was darker. He still wouldn’t look at her. He was as stiff as the seventeen rising columns, as drenched as the earth around them. It was as if he hadn’t heard her, so she made it clear, screamed it.
“I killed our baby.” Alex’s throat scorched out the words despite the cool rain drizzling her open mouth. “And now I have another life growing inside me. A second chance. And all I can think is how much I’ll mess this up, too.”
Charlotte scaled the steps, reached her side, gathered her into an embrace. Alex heard her exhale, like she had worried after a different outcome. She was warm, like when they were girls under a magical carousel blanket. The sky lifted. Sprinkles remained but the worst of everything had moved on. Freesia produced a dry blanket from somewhere. With a nod of encouragement from Charlotte, Freesia joined them at the top of the grand staircase and wrapped the blanket around them all.
Jonah was gone.
After a time, Elias March’s three daughters climbed into his 1978 Ford pickup, headlights due north, toward home. They passed the miles with their bodies touching, swaying with the road, their collective silence the most enduring answer to truth that Alex could have asked for. No longer numbness. Just peace.
* * *
Julia Downer-Jacobson was on point, blest, immaculate, and a dozen other words inspired by Merriam-Webster. Quite possibly, the bride’s photographer, Antonio, did die when he saw her, but not nearly as much as the groom. It was the most eclectic wedding Alex had ever seen—everyone barefoot on the manicured grass, lush and green; a white llama ring bearer; blindfolded groomsmen; dance music consisting exclusively of vinyl records donated by guests; a gazebo lined with cut peonies to signify healing before life together began anew—but somehow, it worked.
When the bride took the first dance with her father, Alex slipped away. Tears came often now, the consequence of an adulthood full of buried emotions. She walked home from the park, shoe straps dangling from her fingertips, something she hadn’t done since she was seventeen. The textures of Devon awakened her soles. A splinter was a welcome reminder that the day at the ruins was not an anomaly. She felt everything now, the good and the not so good.
Four days had passed since Kingsley. Alex didn’t remember everything about that day. She barely recalled careening down country roads, paying the vet to bury Bear at the far end of their property by the creek, purchasing a travel size libation at a gas station—Jim Beam or Chivas or Firewater—then tossing it out the window before she opened the cap. The important stuff was there: how love came to her, in so many forms; how she answered that love with a transfer of burdens; the conviction that she may never stop hurting people. At least, for now, she had stopped trying to hurt herself.
Charlotte and Freesia delivered her that night in a cocoon of sorts—the warm ride home, milk in the midnight kitchen, finding sleep in the living room, together. In the morning, Charlotte stroked Alex’s hair and Freesia found a pen that made the most powerful lines just before Alex signed the divorce papers. The two disappeared then, out of sight, and took the papers with them. Charlotte was always efficient about emotional bombs like that. Alex spent the next days on the property, sitting among cobwebs in the trailer, napping in the overturned dirt by the creek. In all that time, she never once pictured her future without a child, even if it was Michael’s. She would start again, small, with companies she sought out. Beyond that, the plan was no plan at all.
The April Experiment was almost up. She would tell Charlotte and Freesia her vote was to sell the bridal shop. Final ledgers told a story of subsistence, not flourish. At least, not yet. Maybe not ever. Logic still dictated Alex’s financial decisions. Money from the sale would help her get established somewhere, set up a life for the new life to come.
Alex crossed the road and lingered outside her childhood home. After the brilliant light of day, the sprawling ranch house’s dimness held no promise to keep her spirits. The garage drew her; she pressed the opener. She didn’t expect Daddy to be there, but the smell of axle grease and cut grass brought the memories anyway.
This time, she wasn’t afraid of them.
She knocked around the shelves, found her parents’ box of artifacts from Match Made in Devon’s second floor—the map, the Evangeline oak leaf, the tassel from a woman with nothing except the richness of compassion that had saved her father, and a fourth item Alex had forgotten until now. A cassette that fit into an old video camera labeled vow renewal.
Alex rearranged junk and placed a ladderback chair adjacent to an old television, a cinema for one. Cables and false starts and the meat of the afternoon nearly gone, she settled in with a wine goblet full of orange juice to watch her parent’s last best testament to marriage.
She was ten, Charlotte six. They wore matching pink dresses, held ribbon-tied clusters of white roses, and looked up at their parents like they had everything figured out. Not a year after Daddy returned from those sixteen lost days, a still-youthful Stella Irene and Elias married each other again. Alex watched through the vows, all the way through the toast.
Elias raised his champagne flute. “The second time around? It isn’t designed to put things right. It’s a chance to prove how much better things can be after we fall.”
The camera panned to Stella Irene. Her bottom lip trembled; her eyes glistened. The Devon attendees of twenty years earlier—including Bernice with a t-shirt that read Drink Triple, See Double, Act Single—might as well have been invisible for all Stella Irene and Elias saw of them. They only had eyes for each other. After a miscarriage, an affair, darkness that took them half a continent apart and back together, betrayal beyond belief, they made a choice that love—messy as it was—would always win. Not only win for them but thrive for other couples whose choppy waters lie ahead. The hopeful, the young, the Charlottes and Katherines, the ones who married blindfolded with llamas and those who wove wreaths from human hair and every vow in between.
The crowd applauded the end of the toast. Daddy kissed Mama and they danced to Etta James’ do-wap love anthem “At Last,” the song that had played through the car speakers all those years before by the riverbank when they met each other at the Evangeline oak as children. And when the lyrics came to the part about smiling, how the spell was cast, about “here in heaven, for you are mine, at last,” Alex pushed a tear from her cheek, emotions brimming and raw and real-time as they happened, the way they should have stayed.
Charlotte bounded up and down in the background, not understanding the density of the moment but being joyful inside it just the same. Alex laughed, that line between bliss and sadness so tenuous.
“Sounds mighty good.”
Jonah’s voice warmed her, ears to toes. His evening shadow stretched tall into the garage.
“Mmm,” said Alex. “One of Daddy’s favorites.”
“I meant the laugh.” Jonah snagged a small toolbox on wheels, sat astride it, his feet bare beneath dress slacks. Turned out, he knew the groom from his days in California.
She’d seen Jonah twice at the wedding. Each time, he watched her. After the ruins, she walked in a glass bubble, those who had endured the storm ridiculously fragile around her.
He handed her a photo album, the kind that was twenty pictures and done, meant to capture a micro movement of life. “Ibby asked me to give you this.”
While the gaiety of the party continued in another time, another place, Alex opened the cover. Black-and-white photos. One flip after another, Alex the subject of all. Not the Alex of her executive photos or h
er photos as a politician’s wife, not even her life at Brown or Paris after. No, these were distorted and chaotic and sublime—rolling her eyes during the squirrel debate, with hungover sofa-hair, a wide-mouthed selfie Jonah had snapped during karaoke, looking out Taffy’s diner window the way Stella Irene used to. The last one: Isabel asleep beside Bear on the rug.
Alex’s throat squeezed again.
“Nothing more perfect than real.”
“She’s talented. Could do wedding photography if…”
“If…?”
“If Devon was a place people came to find their perfect dress.”
“You say it like it ain’t so.”
She couldn’t bring herself to say the words, so she just shook her head.
“Ibby and I want to help you, any way we can, with the baby.”
Alex watched the dancing because it was safe. Her daddy had placed her Mary Janes on his loafers. They were swaying to the music.
“How can you say that? After what I did? After what I kept from you?”
Jonah leaned forward, spine bent, hands steepled. “It was an accident, Alex. And sure, a couple of the days were hard, but Ibby came in with those pictures and said, ‘we have to make Miss Alex feel right again,’ and I knew right then that if you had made a different choice back then, I wouldn’t have Ibby. What you call imperfection ended up perfection all along.”
The video was awash; the smiling faces adrift in happiness. Alex was leveled.
“What about Jackson?”
“That thing I’ve been searching for—that thing that made me restless? It stopped the moment I knew the truth. That’s all I ever wanted. For things to make sense.”
“I’m sorry, Jonah.”
“Only way I’ll accept your apology is if you consider staying. Your place is here, with the people who love you. That includes me.”
It was the kind of moment that forced a choice between breathing and talking. Everybody got at least one in a lifetime—a moment to figure out who they wanted to be, all-out clarity. She blinked to clear her vision and met his gaze. Tears charged south. She didn’t bother moving them. They felt cleansing.
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 20