Autumn Secrets

by Katie Winters

  Nancy had learned to believe in that. Janine seemed to do it naturally. She hadn’t needed the many decades of screw-ups and failed relationships and running-around-the-world, running-from-herself mentality to learn, like Nancy. When Janine had been a toddler, a woman outside of their apartment at the time had grunted, cigarette dangling from her lips, as she’d told Nancy, Janine would teach her far more than Nancy taught her. At the time, a teenager herself, Nancy had only laughed at the idea.

  Nancy sat in the grey light of the morning on the back porch with a green mug of coffee next to her. Far above the shoreline, a flock of Canadian geese crafted a perfect triangle formation and headed south. Nancy marveled at their ability to stick together, a constant team. She imagined herself, Janine, Maggie, Alyssa, Elsa, and even Carmella like those geese above: constantly headed forward through time, helping one another along.

  “Morning.” Janine stepped onto the porch in just a robe, her own mug of coffee in hand. Her dark hair cascaded beautifully across her shoulders, and her face remained clean and fresh, without the first layer of the day’s coming makeup.

  “How did you sleep?”

  Janine gave a half-shrug. “I slept like I’m about to see Maxine for the first time since everything happened. I feel so refreshed.” Her playful smile wasn’t the least bit believable, but it was still gorgeous.

  “Are the girls up yet?”

  “I heard Mallory, Alyssa, and Maggie giggling about an hour ago,” Janine said. “I can’t imagine Maggie’s finding it easy to sleep these days. Between the stress of the wedding and the excitement of binding herself to the love of her life forever.”

  “Yes, it’s not easy to sleep through all of that,” Nancy agreed with a laugh.

  Janine dropped her head to the side so that her neck cracked.

  “That sounds rough,” Nancy said.

  “Tense is all.”

  “Maybe we should have a yoga session,” Nancy said suddenly. “All of us. The way we do at the Lodge, but right here.”

  It was decided. Janine and Nancy moved the porch table to the side to craft the perfect yoga space for all the women — Carmella and Elsa and Nancy and Janine and Maggie and Mallory and Alyssa. The girls agreed to the decision easily; it was the perfect antidote to the nervous energy that permeated the air.

  Nancy stood like a ballerina before her tribe of women and lifted her arms joyously. A dull voice in the back of her mind reminded her that everything could very well go wrong, that one day soon, Doctor Morgan might report the horror that lurked within her veins. Perhaps soon, the earth wouldn’t belong to her any longer. But in the wake of that, she wanted to remind her women of their inner strength. She wanted to give them everything she could.

  “Remember. You are not your past,” she echoed again as they sat in a meditative pose. “But you can choose to mold your future however you please. Today, Maggie makes one of the biggest decisions of her life: one based on love and friendship and loyalty and hope. It is up to us, as the women who love her the most in the world, to uphold this decision and help her along the way— to ensure that she knows that for us, her happiness is paramount.”

  When the yoga session was over, Elsa retreated into the kitchen to brew another pot of coffee. Carmella headed off to the Frosted Delights bakery to grab some turnovers and croissants for breakfast.

  “Grab apple and raspberry. They’re the absolute best,” Maggie stated.

  “Those are my favorites. Just the fuel we need,” Nancy told her.

  “We need it to talk to all those people you don’t want to,” Alyssa reminded her. “Like Dad’s Aunt Stephanie.”

  Maggie shuddered. “She always smells like onions.”

  Janine burst into laughter. “Oh my, she really does. She was at my wedding a million years ago, and I remember recoiling from her smell.”

  “What is it?” Alyssa demanded. “Where does the smell come from? We’ve been to her apartment in Greenwich Village. It’s absolutely beautiful. Nothing smells like onions.”

  “It must just be her mean aura,” Maggie joked. “She’s spent all that time being judgmental of everyone around her, and it’s manifested as an onion smell.”

  “If only it happened like that,” Nancy smirked.

  “If so, Maxine would smell like—” Alyssa began.

  Janine arched an eyebrow as Alyssa snapped her lips shut tight. Silence brewed over them.

  “Sorry,” Alyssa said finally. “I didn’t mean to bring her up.”

  Elsa appeared on the porch again with a fresh pot of coffee. Hurriedly, the table was put back in its rightful place, and they gathered around to wait for Carmella with breakfast. The other bridesmaids had begun to text Maggie with excitement about the approaching hours. Soon, they would meet at the Harbor View Hotel, in the room they had set aside for the long preparation. Makeup, hair, perfect fine-tuning of body and mind and spirit prior to the wedding ceremony and the subsequent photos— it would all happen in the magical space of that room. To Nancy’s surprise, she’d been invited to the room as well, along with Janine.

  After they ate, it was time to pack up the cars. There was a frantic burst of energy. Maggie couldn’t find her wedding shoes and burst into tears, only for Alyssa to find the box shoved to the side of the closet. Baby Zachery joined her in crying a few seconds later; his face scrunched up and turned cherry-red as he wailed. Alyssa suggested that it was soon her turn to cry, then pretended to say, “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride!” Maggie just rolled her eyes and stepped into the passenger side of Janine’s car. Janine’s eyes found Nancy over the top of the vehicle.

  “Are you ready for this?” Nancy asked with a funny smile.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  Nancy joined Alyssa in the back seat of Janine’s car. Her dress had been packed up with the others in the larger vehicle, which Elsa agreed to drive over to the hotel. Maggie flicked through the radio stations, saying that she needed “only the perfect music” for the last morning of her single life.

  “She’s so dramatic, isn’t she?” Alyssa said to Nancy.

  Nancy laughed. “I think it’s good luck if you only listen to the things you love on your wedding day.”

  “See?” Maggie said pointedly to her sister. She then placed the cord into her phone and played what seemed to be some of her “favorite music,” songs of singers from long-ago days, songs that tugged at Nancy’s heartstrings.

  “Neal would have just loved that you liked these songs,” Nancy said during a pause between two of them.

  “Really?” Maggie’s eyes brightened in the rearview mirror. “Rex always teases me. He says I’m already an eighty-five-year-old lady.”

  “You look really good for eighty-five,” Alyssa told her. “What’s your secret?”

  Several hotel staff members waited for them at the entrance to assist them with unloading the vehicles. One burly-looking thirty-something-year-old man tried to carry the wedding dress by himself, only to ask for assistance from another muscular guy after Maggie screeched, “Be careful with that!” Now, the two of them walked the dress delicately toward the door as though it was made of glass. Maggie watched them like a hawk.

  The three bridesmaids awaited them in the preparation room, along with two women who had arrived to do their hair and makeup. One of the girls had brought a little stereo system and now played a bumping hip-hop track. She flung her arms around Maggie and said, “I wanted to remind you of our college days before you become a married woman.”

  “Oh gosh. This song? Remember when we...” Maggie trailed off.

  “Danced on the bar on Santorini to this song? How could I forget?”

  Nancy burst into laughter. “You girls. You’re just like me.”

  Maggie’s bridesmaid gawked at Nancy, whom she probably regarded as a “very old” woman. But Maggie took it in stride.

  “My grandma had a crazy life,” she told her friend. “She could probably teach us a thing or two about dancing on bars.”
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  “My bar-dancing days are over,” Nancy told them. “At the age of fifty-nine, I’ve finally grown up.”

  “She’s lying to you about that,” Janine told them brightly as she ruffled through a bag of makeup. “Nancy Grimson Remington will never grow up. Not really. It’s against nature itself.”

  Nancy and Janine agreed to get their hair and makeup done simultaneously. They sat before the same mirror as two women sculpted their hair beautifully, then smeared creams and foundation and perfect shades across their cheeks, eyelids, and lips.

  “Maxine and I used to always get our hair and makeup done together before big functions,” Janine said off-handedly, while the bride and her bridesmaids continued to gossip and giggle toward the far end of the room, near the stereo.

  “Wow.” Nancy could imagine the two of them in another era: Maxine and Janine, absolute beauties, making their way through the wealthy world of Manhattan socialites, even with their colossal secret: that they’d been born poor and grown-up without anything, down in Brooklyn.

  “But I’m glad it’s you, now,” Janine admitted. She tilted her head slightly to catch Nancy’s eye in the mirror. “Really glad.”

  Nancy’s heart swelled with gladness.

  “The two of you look like sisters,” one of the makeup artists recited then.

  “I had her when I was just sixteen years old,” Nancy said. “You can imagine what a mess that was.”

  The makeup artist chuckled, and Janine joined in, her eyes light.

  “Things always work out the way they’re supposed to, don’t they?” the makeup artist said as she fluttered a brush across Janine’s cheek.

  “That’s what I have to believe,” Nancy said.

  “So you’re the mother of the bride. And you’re the grandmother,” the artist continued.

  “That’s right.”

  “And how old were you when you got married?” she asked Janine.

  Janine’s cheeks lost a good deal of their coloring. “I was very young, maybe too young to know what I was getting into.”

  “What did you think?” the artist asked Nancy. “About the wedding at the time?”

  Nancy arched an eyebrow. Her throat tightened with sorrow. She hadn’t been around for Janine’s wedding. It was now one of her greatest regrets.

  “I have always known Janine to have her head on straight,” she said, as brightly as she could. “She loves better than anyone I know. And she created two beautiful, intelligent women— people I can hardly believe are part of my lineage. How pleased I am that it all happened the way it did. I only wish I could go back and do it all over again.”

  Janine’s eyes filled with tears. The makeup artist scolded her playfully.

  “I don’t want to have to re-do all this makeup,” she said. “So just try to hold in the waterworks until after pictures, okay?”

  “I’ll do my best,” Janine offered. “But no promises.”

  Chapter Six

  “You look remarkable.”

  The words echoed from behind Nancy as she focused her attention on the mirror before them, where a fifty-nine-year-old woman in a dark blue dress with perfectly manicured nails and glorious, shiny hair peered back. The makeup and hair artist had performed a miracle. Nancy had never felt herself describe her form as “beautiful” before, yet here it was— this description.

  Yet even as she stood, another wave of crashing fatigue came over her. Alyssa, who stood behind her in a pair of leggings and sweatshirt, placed her hand on her grandmother’s shoulder to steady her.

  “Whoa, Grandma. Just because I complimented you doesn’t mean you can faint like some actress in a movie from the fifties,” she teased. “But really, you should eat something! Those pastries will make all of us crash. I think we should order sandwiches.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Janine agreed from the corner, where she had begun to fluff out Maggie’s wedding dress.

  “I’ll get on that,” Alyssa said dutifully. “I am the maid of honor, after all. I’d better take some responsibility.”

  Nancy winked as Alyssa cut away from them and lifted her phone to her ear. Again, the wave of fatigue pummeled against her heart. Nancy splayed a hand over her chest, closed her eyes, and then counted to ten. During those ten seconds, she couldn’t focus on the conversations that swirled around her; she could hardly hear Janine’s voice as she hollered, “Mom? Mom!”

  Nancy forced her eyes open to find her daughter before her. She blinked as the color returned to Janine’s cheeks.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “She’s just hungry,” Alyssa said as she dropped her phone back into her purse. “But I’m on it.”

  Janine’s eyebrows lowered. “You’re sure it’s just hunger?”

  “I didn’t sleep that well last night.” Nancy waved her hand as though it didn’t matter at all.

  “Mom! What do you think of this?” Maggie hollered from the far end of the room, where she turned her face toward them to reveal a monstrous amount of makeup, caked over her eyebrows, her eyelids, and her cheeks.

  “Oops.” Janine and Nancy both winced.

  “One second.” Janine eased back toward her daughter and the makeup artist, who’d apparently listened too intently to Maggie’s description of “dramatic” makeup, “like a movie star.”

  Nancy might have laughed to herself. She felt the humor rise from her belly, before it faltered and crash. The fatigue was a constant cloud in the back of her skull. With everyone occupied, Nancy stepped into the hallway and ducked down toward the elaborately designed foyer, where she leaned heavily against the wall and forced herself to take deep breaths.

  “If I’m going to leave this world, can I at least let this beautiful wedding day remain drama-free?” she begged the universe.

  The woman at the reception rang the bell at the desk. Nancy opened her eyes to find her peering at her, curious.

  “Can I get you anything, ma’am?”

  “Some water would be wonderful if you have it.”

  The woman nodded, bent down, then reappeared with a fresh bottle of water, chilled from a hidden fridge.

  “Just put it on your room number,” the woman said as she passed it over.

  Nancy made a mental note to give cash to the woman later, as she wasn’t a guest at the hotel. But in a moment, even that thought was gone. It was replaced with the glory of the sparkling drink in her hands, which now cascaded down her throat, giving her the sweet relief she needed. Maybe she hadn’t been drinking enough water all these months? Maybe that’s all this illness was?

  She padded away from the foyer and back toward where the wedding would be held. The weather had cooperated, and three-hundred and fifty chairs had been set up on either side of the outdoor aisle. The decoration was elaborate and autumnal, with plenty of deep ochres, belle époque tulips and butterfly ranunculus to fit the beautiful season. Nancy stepped into the fresh air, directly in the space where her granddaughter would begin her march toward her beloved in just a few hours.

  “Mom. I’m going to marry him.”

  It was a rogue memory. It assaulted Nancy’s mind suddenly.

  And the images, they came next.

  Nancy gripped one of the chairs in the back row and closed her eyes tightly as the visions took hold of her.

  “MOM. I WILL MARRY HIM. Just you wait.”

  This was Janine— a seven-year-old little girl, whom Nancy had just picked up from school, approximately forty-five minutes late, which wasn’t so bad in Nancy-terms. After all, she had been hungover and had had to work a waitressing shift till three-thirty. What did the school know about “making ends meet”? It was either pick up her kid on time or put food on the table.

  “Who are you talking about?” Nancy asked this of seven-year-old Janine. “Who are you going to marry?”

  “Mom, I just told you. Gosh. Do you ever listen?”

  Janine’s haughty tone wasn’t typical of a seven-year-old. Nancy stopped short on the sidewalk and glared at her
daughter. “Excuse me. What did you just say to me? Do you want to get grounded again?”

  Janine’s nostrils flared. Nancy couldn’t help but notice how much the girl looked like herself at that age. She only had a few photographs, but there in front of her, her face was illustrated in a different era.

  “You just never listen!” Janine yelled, then cast herself forward, ripping down the sidewalk.

  “Get back here!” Nancy didn’t have time for anything like this. She burst through the crowd as the colossal weight of her hangover barreled back down upon her. “Janine! Where are you going!”

  Janine whisked from sight. Nancy continued to run until her thighs screamed. When her breath ran out, she stopped at the corner and cried toward the sky above. Janine had escaped her, and in the core of Nancy’s heart, she knew that Janine would probably be better in this world without her.

  Nancy just wasn’t equipped to care for her. She wasn’t equipped to show her the love she so deserved. She just couldn’t find it within herself. She was too damaged.

  Suddenly, there was a tug on her elbow. Nancy whipped around to find Janine in the midst of a giggle. It seemed like she had watched her mother tear through the crowd ahead of her, and she had poised somewhere behind, lying in wait until Nancy fully broke down. Nancy wanted to scream, but instead, she dropped down on one knee, wrapped her arms around her daughter, and shook with her sobs. This scared little Janine all the more.

  “Mom, it’s okay! It’s okay!”

  But it wasn’t. Nancy knew it wasn’t. She leaned back as her cheeks caught the chill of the autumn wind. When was the last time Nancy had even known what day of the week it was? Why was her life such a mess?