Now, even in the open air, their cleaning-fluid smell was making my nasal passages want to scream. But when I looked up to see the nervous, hopeful expression in Zach’s eyes, I not only smiled in thanks but, as punishment for lying to him in the first place, lifted the bouquet to my face and took a long, hard inhale. He smiled back, and for a second or two, relaxed, but then, as if they had a mind of their own, his fingers began to flutter like a keyboardist’s against his thighs, and he said, “Remind me never to ride in a car for two hours with my brother again, okay?”
“Let me guess. Late Coltrane. No, wait. Ornette Coleman.” Like his father before him, Ian listened almost exclusively to jazz, the more beboppy and experimental the better. Zach avowed that, also like his father, Ian only did it to demonstrate his esoteric taste, not because he actually liked the music. “No evidence of pleasure whatsoever. Zero. No head nodding or toe tapping. It’s like he’s listening to white noise.” Whatever the effect on Ian, the wild, asymmetrical dissonance never failed to run like a razor blade over Zach’s nerves.
“Worse,” said Zach. “He snapped off the music. And lectured, declaimed. About marriage.”
“But Ian’s never been married.”
“Yeah, as if not knowing shit about a subject ever stopped him. Like the clone of my father he is.”
“So what did he say?”
“No idea. I blocked him out completely. All I heard was blah, blah, blah, and whenever he pointed at me or banged his palm on the steering wheel, I nodded. Worked pretty well, actually. God, at least Uncle Lloyd and the bad seeds were in the car behind us. If they’d been there, I might have had to slit my wrists.”
“Or theirs,” I said, cheerfully. The bad seeds were Uncle Lloyd’s horrible twin sons, Jerome-called-Jeb and Ralph-called-Rally.
“Good idea, but I don’t think you can bleed to death when you’re bloodless.”
By now, his finger thrumming had reached such a crazy tempo that it was probably leaving bruises. I took one of his hands in mine.
“Just try to relax and forget about them,” I said, softly.
Zach’s gaze went blank then flared; he yanked his hand away as if he’d touched something rotten. “Don’t tell me to relax!” he almost shouted.
I took five or six quick, backward steps away from him. I may even have skittered, like a frightened mouse. The movement had to be entirely reflexive, some leftover, evolutionary fight-or-flight thing, since I knew—of course I knew—that Zach would never hurt me. And the bongo drumming of my heartbeat in my ears, that was reflexive, too. For a moment, we stood like statues, before Zach’s taut face slackened and paled and he shut his eyes.
“God, I’m sorry,” he said, and he opened his eyes and reached his arms out to me, and even though I knew he really was sorry, I didn’t walk into them. Instead—another reflex—I tossed him the flowers.
“Oh, stargazer lilies!” said a voice. “You know, I’ve always admired them. Their total refusal to be self-effacing or shy. I’ve always thought the stargazer was an audacious kind of flower.”
It struck me as such an unexpected and wondrous thing for someone to say that for a moment, I forgot to worry about whether or not she’d witnessed my and Zach’s argument. She stood on the path a few feet away, beaming at the bouquet and leaning on her cane, looking oddly glorious, with her green shoes and blue dress and silver hair, as if she’d been spun together out of the land and sky that surrounded her: the old lady from this morning. I saw that she wasn’t holding the book anymore, and, flustered, I wondered if she’d finished it. Her eyes met mine and held. She smiled. Nothing in the smile said she’d overheard our conversation, but, even though we all stood about the same distance from each other, right then, the points of our triangle seemed to shift—equilateral to isosceles—with the old woman next to me and Zach far away, alone.
“They’re Clare’s favorite,” he said, brightly.
I turned and saw him standing there, gripping the bouquet in both hands, his fingers crumpling the brown paper, exhaustion and tension sapping him of his usual glow and making his handsome face look old. And because I knew he loved me to the absolute best of his ability and, more important, because no one should ever look that way the day before his wedding, I walked over to him and took the flowers back.
“Yes, they are,” I said.
In a book I loved as a kid, a girl named Randy plays a game in which she wanders around the wide yard of her family’s big, quirky, wonderful house and pretends that she is a traveler, far from home and alone in the world. It’s nighttime, so, through the windows, she can see the family—brothers, sister, father, housekeeper, dogs—moving around in their warm, interior light, going about their evening rituals, while Randy, outside in the cooling air, can hear bathwater running, a dog’s bark, a radio, the father’s typewriter, all the blessed and ordinary music of a happy family, and she stands in the grass, getting sadder by the second, aching with longing and loneliness. And then—whoosh—she allows herself to suddenly remember that the house is hers, the family is hers, and flooded with the sweetest relief, she runs inside.
Maybe because from the time I was a baby until I turned eleven, in what I still think of as the BC (Before Cornelia) era, it was just me and my mom, a dyad that felt whole but fragile, I never played this game. But after that, once I had at least four different houses that felt like home, I played it a lot. A lot, a lot and for way longer than I’d admitted to anyone, except for Dev, and even he didn’t know that, occasionally, I still played it. It was a way to remind me of my own luck, I think, and I guess I got a little addicted to it all: how thoroughly my imagination could fool me, the stinging loneliness, the rush of joy.
But on the day before my wedding, as I walked out of a side door of the hotel in my rehearsal dinner dress to see most of my family—blood relatives and otherwise—coming toward me, instead of me playing the game, the game played me. They were moving in my direction in pairs or threes, rising like suns over a gentle green-furred slope, clear as day, but it was as if I saw them through a thick pane of glass. My mother and Gordon; Cornelia and Teo and Dev’s mother, Lake; Teo’s parents; Cornelia’s parents; Teo’s sister, Estrella-called-Star; Cornelia’s brother Toby and his son, Jasper; Cornelia’s other brother, Cam, and his husband, Niall; Hildy with Dev’s and my friend Aidan; and finally Dev with Cornelia and Teo’s children, Rose and Simon. All in summer dresses or pastel-colored shirts open at the neck, clean and gleaming and tidy haired, with seven-year-old Simon barefoot in the soft grass, Dev carrying his shoes.
I stood in the sun in my rehearsal dinner dress, shivering, besieged by the loneliest thoughts in the world. They aren’t mine; they will never be mine again; they’ll go on being together and happy and a family without me because I’ll be gone. I have lost them.
It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t true. People got married all the time without losing their families. Marriage was addition, not subtraction. But everything about their casual togetherness hurt me: a tan arm draped over a shoulder, a hand in a pocket, smiles, and eye rolls, and headshakes, a light, teasing slap, their voices all in a jumble.
Teo saw me first. He stopped in his tracks, pressed his long brown hands to his heart, and then broke into a jog.
When he got to me, he kissed my cheek and gave me a smile. Half Swedish, half Filipino, Cornelia’s husband, Teo, is a toffee-colored, green-eyed genetic miracle with a smile that could melt a glacier. The fact that it didn’t quite melt the thick glass between me and everyone I loved scared me so much that, for the second time that day, I started crying. Luckily, this time there was no sobbing, just cold in my throat, and heat in my eyes, and a few meandering tears.
“Hey,” said Teo. “You okay?”
I pressed my lips together and nodded.
“Really? Because I think you’re crying.”
I brushed at my damp cheeks and swallowed hard. “Nope. I’m fine. It’s just that—well, you just—smell really good.”
It was true, li
ke honey and limes and barbershop powder.
Teo laughed. “I get that a lot.”
And then they were upon us, a hugging, kissing, joking, fragrant flock of family. First Aidan and Hildy, arm in arm. They kissed me. Same time, different cheeks.
“Hold on. Synchronized kissing?” I pushed them both to arm’s length and eyed them. Aidan and Hildy had a long-standing if sporadic “thing” between them, one that they both enjoyed but that neither ever quite followed through with. “You can’t be flirting again already. You just got here!”
“I’m irresistible is why,” explained Aidan.
Hildy shrugged. “It’s true.”
She leaned in and whispered into my ear. “How’re you holding up?”
“Medium,” I whispered back.
“Are you lying?”
“No fair asking.”
“Sorry. I love you, and Aidan and I can have the getaway car ready at a moment’s notice.”
“It’s been all of, what? Fifteen minutes? And you two are already at the joint-getaway-car stage. Sheesh, you move fast.”
Hildy winked. “You know it, girly.”
Toby caught Hildy in a headlock from behind.
Hildy grimaced. “Guess it’s Toby’s turn.”
Toby gave me a bear hug, like the big teddy bear he was. “So what happened to the plan that you’d marry me when you grew up?”
“Who says I’m grown up?” I said.
They came to me, one by one. Gorgeous Rose-never-called-Rosie, nine years old and already Grace Kelly elegant, turning up her cheek for me to kiss before throwing herself into my arms. Cornelia’s mother, Ellie, pressing a pair of antique blue topaz earrings into my palm (“My grandmother’s. Your something blue.”). Cam bowing low over my hand and kissing it, duke-like, then chucking me under the chin. My stepfather, holding my shoulders, saying, “Best girl in the world. The best, best one,” his eyes full of tears. And so, little by little, touch by touch, word by word, they drew me back to them. There was no rush of relief, no sudden reentry into the world of my family, but by the time my mother was tucking a stray lock of hair behind my ear, the glass barrier between us had grown so flimsy I almost—almost—didn’t notice it was there at all.
Last came Dev in a blue-checked shirt, holding Simon’s white sneakers, his face still like a story I’d read so many times I could recite it—slate-blue eyes, black lashes that went all the way around like a ruffle, a thin scar cutting a straight line through the outer tip of his right eyebrow (bike accident, age sixteen), another under his chin that I couldn’t see right then but knew was there (swing-jumping-off accident, age six). And now, here, his smile, guileless as a little kid’s, sudden as a lit match. Back when we were in love, even after we’d been together for years, that smile never stopped taking me by surprise. It was found money, an arrowhead, a shooting star, a great, shiny stroke of luck every single time. Dev flipped one of Simon’s shoes into the air, caught it with his usual unconscious grace, and, still smiling, said, “Hey, Clare.”
I should have answered right away, but I didn’t because—and I guess this is the downside of knowing someone by heart—right then, without meaning to, I noticed what wasn’t there: no pink flush down the center of his cheeks (“like Hawaiian Punch stains,” I’d once told him); no shifting from foot to foot; no slight lift of his shoulders; no faint abstraction in his eyes, as if he were silently reciting the multiplication or periodic table, a trick he used to steady himself. Not one of Dev’s telltale signs of discomfort or sadness. And if he wasn’t uncomfortable or sad, he must have been comfortable and happy, and, as someone who cared about him, this should have made me happy—obviously it should have—but all I could think was that on the eve of Dev’s wedding, teetering on the very edge of his future with another woman, I could never have greeted him, tan and bright eyed and grinning like a ten-year-old, without even a trace of regret, a wisp of wistfulness. I could not have flipped shoes, for God’s sake. Honestly, despite the fact that the two of us had broken up years ago, I probably would not even have come at all.
“You came.” The words just fell out—clunk, clunk—but because there were only two of them, even in my annoyed state, I hoped Dev had missed the note of accusation in my tone, and an outside observer, even one who knew him pretty well, probably would have sworn he had. His smile held steady for sure. But there was the pink flush, two streaks about an inch and a half wide, running down the exact center of each cheek, and if the rush of satisfaction I felt upon seeing them made me a bad person, I didn’t care. Our five-year romance aside, Dev and I had been best friends for years, although to be perfectly honest, for the past few months, our once rock-solid best-friend status had felt shaky. Even so, the thought of my marriage as being barely a blip on Dev’s emotional radar screen was just too much to bear.
But there they were: two pink streaks. Blip. Blip. I was so busy rejoicing in those blips that I neglected what was clearly my duty at that moment: to bail us both out of our awkward silence with a joke.
Finally, Dev said, “Hey, how could I not be here? I sent back the RSVP card with the yes box checked, which basically amounts to a blood vow in your mom’s world, right?”
“You renege on the yes box and you’re blacklisted for eternity. The party planner code of conduct is pretty clear on that point.”
Two semidecent jokes. And still the air fizzed with tension.
“Which is why,” said Dev, gamely, “you shouldn’t tell her that I considered, and I mean strongly considered heading to Reverend Wiley’s Salvation Nation instead.”
On our drive here, my mom, Cornelia, and I had passed six billboards advertising Reverend Wiley’s fundamentalist megachurch, each bearing a different antiscience message, and every one had made me think of Dev.
Now, I said to Dev, “Big Bang Equals Big Bust.”
“Christians Are the Real Endangered Species,” said Dev.
“Adam and Eve Weren’t Swinging from the Tree of Life.”
“Jesus Didn’t Have a Tail.”
“Except.” I stabbed my finger into the air. “The photo with that one was actually a chimp crossed out with a big red X, not a monkey. And chimps don’t even actually have tails.”
Dev shook his head sadly. “After that, I’m not gonna lie, doubt crept in.”
“You lost faith in Reverend Wiley?”
“By the time we got to the Salvation Nation exit, I thought, hey, he might even have been wrong about God’s wrath instead of climate change melting the ice caps.”
I laughed, and, just like that, we were normal again.
“So you kept driving,” I said, smiling. “And came here.”
“Plus, I figured you’d want to see my haircut.” He ran a hand over his uncharacteristically cropped head.
“I was dying to see your haircut. How did you know?”
Dev shrugged and grinned. “I know everything.”
I am a person who usually pays attention. While strikingly un-Zen in most ways, I spend most of my time being fully present, watchful, so tuned in to the people and things around me that it can get exhausting. Maybe it comes from having spent most of my childhood alone with my mother, who even before her breakdown and subsequent bipolar diagnosis, was all quicksilver, mutable brilliance, and so necessary to me that I kept track of her with what could only be called vigilance, half worried she’d disappear in a puff of colored smoke and sparkles. Or maybe it’s just that I am one of those people who believes that at least half of love is simply paying attention. In any case, I don’t drift in and out. I don’t float. Life doesn’t go by in a blur.
Except that on the eve of my wedding day, at my rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, that’s exactly what life did. The practice ceremony itself was an almost total loss, memory-wise, less like something I experienced than like something I caught out of the corner of my eye. Faint music; people moving around; mouths stretching into smiles; the linen-clad crook of my stepfather’s arm under my fingers my only certainty.
The edges of the dinner stayed a little more crisp, but even that was mostly impressions. I remember the red, green, and gold of a tomato tart, the miniature lake effect of mist rising from my just-poured champagne, Zach squeezing my hand hard and harder under the table as Ian gave a toast that I swear featured—although how was this possible?—Winston Churchill’s quotation about never, never, never giving in. Fairy lights spread out in constellations against the white canopy, the pinch of my new high-heeled sandals, my wistful envy as I watched Hildy and Aidan’s playful flirting. The bell of Rose’s dress as she whirled, solo and in perfect self-containment, on the dance floor. Cornelia’s cheek against mine, her voice whispering, “Courage, dear heart,” into my ear.
There was one stark moment of clarity. Near the end of the evening, I headed toward the dessert table, which someone had decorated with Zach’s stargazer lilies, now in a towering green glass vase, and at which Dev stood, scarfing chocolate-covered strawberries with the happy oblivion of a six-year-old. Just before I reached the table, Zach materialized at my side. I watched Dev spot us, swallow his berry, and wipe his fingers on a napkin so that he could shake hands with Zach, which he did, firmly. Zach clapped him on the shoulder and thanked him for coming.
“Having a berry or six, are you?” I said.
“Me?” said Dev. “I was just admiring this large and impressive vase of large and impressive flowers.”
Zach slipped his arm around my waist. “Can’t take credit for the vase, but I brought the lilies this morning. Had to make sure my girl had her favorite flowers.”
I'll Be Your Blue Sky Page 4