Eight—Ivy
T
im.
I looked over at Mia in all her fit, long-legged, blond pony-tailed perfection and shook my suddenly heavy head.
“Sometimes unloading on a stranger can be a good way to vent,” she invited as we walked.
“I’m too embarrassed,” I whined. “That boy wrecked my life and turned me into the Pillsbury Dough Girl.”
“You mean you weren’t always this adorable?” Mia said—she actually said that, and I thought she was making fun of me, but she didn’t seem like she was. I just smiled even though I was crying, and Mia Sutton put her arm around me like a mother hen and said, “He hurt you.”
“He didn’t just hurt me,” I told her. “He ruined me.”
“What happened?” Mia said, turning serious.
I felt the tears and the familiar humiliation overtake me, and I breathed deep and shut my eyes. That’s all it took for the image of my most awful moment to bloom once again in fully pixelated detail. My wedding day. My friends. My love. My Tim…crying…walking away from me…with her…pregnant her. “I felt so small…” I said, a little surprised that I’d said the words out loud.
“Let’s sit. Should we sit?” Mia said, and I followed her to the bleachers, mostly because she was dragging me.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I’m a good listener. ”
I smiled. Mia Sutton really was so nice. “I’ve loved Tim Marsh since I was six, but in high school, he started falling in love with me…and out of love with me, too. So, it was a rollercoaster. But then last year, I guess it stuck because he asked me to marry him, which meant that I had finally won. It was always a competition between me and Angela—and I won…or I thought I’d won…”
“Was Angela…?”
I looked over at Mia. “Yep. The pregnant stealer of my husband-to-be.”
“Oh. Right. Continue.”
“It was supposed to be the perfect day. May 3rd in Savannah…you can’t really go wrong, and Geneva’s backyard is just huge with big old live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Palmettos everywhere. Big ol’ pots of spring flowers. Lots of lace, bouquets of camellias and azaleas. White balloons in the magnolia trees. It was all a bit over-the-top, but so, so pretty.
“My grandmother called it my stand-alone day,” I told Mia. “And I was so happy that it eclipsed even my nerves at being the center of attention. I’m not particularly comfortable in the spotlight. There’s always been a little too much of me, if you know what I mean—which you probably don’t—and now there’s a good ten pounds more of me. But Geneva said I should be proud and stick out what God gave me. So, in that fabulous dress, that’s kind of what I did.” I laughed a little, lost in the remembering.
“First of all, I’m loving your grandmother,” Mia said. “Second, we’ll talk about the too much later. Now, tell me about that dress.”
I swallowed over the knot in my throat. “It was gorgeous. It was a ball gown that started out a little big but because I was so nervous about the wedding, I lost a few inches, and it had to be nipped and tucked a bit. I was beautiful.” I shrugged at Mia. “Is that awful to say?”
“Absolutely not!” Mia said.
“My skin was great, and thanks to a bucket of toxic chemicals, my hair was shiny and straight, and I remember thinking that a stranger was looking back at me in the mirror. She was just beautifully… engineered : Spanxed and styled and highlighted into a polished version of the rather ordinary me.” Again, I laughed at the memory. “Well, you don’t live your life as Geneva Talbot’s granddaughter and come out unscathed.”
“She sounds completely and utterly amazing,” Mia said.
“She is. She’s the grand dame of Isle of Hope—that’s where I live in Savannah—well, the other place besides my mama’s. She fancies herself a bit of a mystic.”
“No way.”
I nodded. “She journals and maps the interventions of the Universe, ” I said. “And she keeps meticulous track of her predictions. She’s a big predictor. My mother, Bree—Aubrey—is more real-world; she’s an artist, like I told you. My mama is her own beautiful planet, spinnin’ to her own happiness, most of the time.”
Mia laughed. “We will be having a long, long conversation about them, I can promise you that. But right now I want to hear about Tim.”
I shook my head. “Like I said, we’d been best friends forever. All through high school, we were either in love, or I was nursing him through his break-ups, mostly with Angela Doyle—my villain. She left Savannah a couple of years ago—I thought—to make her way in the world as dancer—the naked kind.” I sighed. “Tim really needed me then. Actually, he’s always needed me. I soothed him when he lost the state championship for our high school team against Rowan Oaks.I let him climb in my window and cry all night when his parents split up and again when they got back together. I promised never to tell anyone that he flunked out of Georgia Tech after two semesters. I even cheered his promotion to assistant manager of Tire World over in Pooler. He promised one day he’d be regional director over radials.”
“What are radials? ”
“Radials. They’re tires. He wants to be Director of Tires. That sounds so stupid, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know, maybe,” Mia said, and it made me smile.
“It does,” I said. “I know it does. Anyway, we started dating for real after high school, and when he asked me to marry him, he said he wasn’t good enough to ask me, but he was asking me anyway. And he said I was always his safe place, and I thought I’d never heard more beautiful words.” I swallowed over my swollen throat and did my best to not cry in front of Mia. But when I turned to her, she’d teared up, too, and I lost the battle. “So, we got engaged at Christmastime and set the date for spring.”
“Was the ring pretty, at least?” she asked me.
I chuckled through my tears. “Yes. It was two small diamonds set at an angle on a silver band. I loved it. I pawned it a few days after I got here. Got $270 for it.”
Mia laughed and then tried to apologize, but I stopped her. “I know. I think it was the prize from a cereal box.”
We laughed some more, and it actually felt good to be talking about my heartache with this girl who was feeling more and more like a friend. After we pulled ourselves together, I told her that my dad had made it just in time. “His flight was delayed,” I said. “But he made it.”
Mia nodded. “Oh, that’s good. Is that good?”
“Well, it made Mama happy. I hadn’t seen him for over a year. He lives here, in California, so our paths don’t cross too often. My parents were never married, but we stay in touch because he’s still madly in love with my mom.”
“Really?”
“Totally. She’s his forbidden fruit.” I nodded at Mia, who was just kind of digesting my story. “I know, it’s weird,” I said. “Anyway, he walked into Geneva’s bedroom that day and said to me, ‘You belong on the cover of a magazine, Ivy Lee.’ That was just so nice to hear. ”
“I’m sure it was,” Mia said. “Because I’m sure you did. Is Tim going to enter this story anytime soon? I’m dying here.”
I smiled. “So, Daniel is walking me down the aisle—my grandmother’s backyard, rose-petaled aisle—and he whispers to me, ‘This boy…he’s good?’ and I whispered yes. ‘Is he worthy?’ Daniel says, and I said ‘Dad, it’s Tim. It’s always been Tim—’ like Daniel had paid any attention to my life. And he says ‘Oh, right. Well, I’ll kill him if he ever hurts you.’ And then… Tim did .”
“What happened?” Mia asked.
For a minute I couldn’t really speak because my throat had closed over. “She was there,” I finally said.
“Who?”
“Angela.”
“Oh.”
“I wasn’t absolutely sure it was her because I was so amazed that everyone was there. It was almost standing room only, and it made me so giddy, I thought I might faint. But I was okay because just ahead, there was my Tim standing in the gazebo. That’s all I needed, Tim’s eyes on mine, pulling me toward him and our life together—my life as Ivy Marsh. But he wasn’t looking at me. And when I got to his side, he seemed a little surprised.” I was quiet for a minute as the details pierced me all over again. Tim’s sickly pallor, the way he wouldn’t look up. I looked over at Mia. “I asked him if he was okay, and he said he was just nervous. Father Dominic welcomed everybody, and my dad did his thing and gave me away, then he sat down, and I slipped my hand into Tim’s because he seemed to need it. My heart was pounding like it should have been, but I knew something wasn’t right. Tim was staring at his shoes, and it looked like he might throw up on them. Then in the middle of Father Dom talking about the sanctity of marriage, Tim started shaking his head.”
“Oh, Ivy…” Mia breathed.
“And when Father Dom said if anyone objects to this union, Angela stood up pregnant like no body’s business, and Tim started crying, and he wouldn’t look at me. He just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, Ivy, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ And then he just walked off the gazebo.”
“Ivy…”
“I just felt so small, like I was dissolving, almost. There was this big, collective gasp as everyone watched my almost-husband run away. He ran away. Then 100 faces turned back to me in…in total…and abject pity. And it only got worse when Angela Doyle—the naked dancer of his dreams—stood up and waddled out after him.”
Mia stared at me. “I have no idea what to say to you right now.”
I hung my head. “It was my very own Carrie moment. Pig’s blood pouring down on me as the entire yard sat gobsmacked at my devastation. It was the worst moment of my life. And, no matter what I do, I can’t seem to unlive it.”
We were quiet for a long time, then Mia said, “What did you do? Did you scream? Throw things? Did you get mad?”
“Not then,” I sniffed. “When I could feel my legs, I just went upstairs and crawled in my bed. I didn’t even take off my wedding dress, just dove in and pulled the covers over my head. But I wished I could have just taken a long walk in the ocean. I was pretty messed up, so Mama begged Daniel to bring me back with him to California to regroup —that’s what she called it. Regroup. It wasn’t supposed to take this long, just a few days, so he agreed. He wasn’t thrilled, but he did it for Bree. He put me in a hotel at first and gave me his credit card. He told me to go shopping, I’d feel better. He told me to get whatever I wanted. But there was nothing I wanted—except a pizza. So I ordered two. I figured if no one wanted me, I’d make the best of it with ice cream and pizza and Comedy Central.” I shrugged. “Junk food, twenty-four-hour laughs, and no one to bug me. And no one did.”
“Wow…”
“I think Daniel thought some miracle was gonna happen, that some divine intervention would heal me, and he could send me home. He left me alone for a few days, but he called a couple times to express his heart-felt concern . When he finally came by and saw the state I was in, he just started yelling. Yelling about the food everywhere and that I hadn’t been out of bed. He said it was disgusting and he was planning to sue Tim for destroying my life. He called him worthless and other things—terrible things—but the way he yelled, it made it sound like I was the worthless one.” I looked over at Mia. “That’s when I got mad. After he left, I went crazy. I was stripping the bed and I got all tangled up and I just started screaming at the sheets because my foot was caught in the elastic corner. I was screaming and bawling and acting like a crazy person, completely out of control. And in the middle of this terrible tirade, I caught my reflection in the dresser mirror, and I couldn’t believe it was me. My dad was right—I was a disgusting mess, and I hated myself and Tim for making me that way. It was the most awful I’ve ever felt. I started to sob, and I didn’t stop till the next day. That’s when I pawned my ring. That was a bad day. It’s like I fell down and broke myself. And now I can’t seem to find all the pieces, so I can’t put myself back together.”
Mia’s mouth had dropped open, and she was shaking her head. “I’m so, so sorry that happened to you.”
I shrugged. “Me, too.”
“I don’t know you, Ivy,” she said. “But I don’t believe you’re ruined. I’m going to say something mean here—you will learn that about me, I can be blunt—but here goes: It takes an extraordinary man to actually ruin a woman, and Tim just doesn’t sound that extraordinary.”
I looked at her holding her breath and could not find fault with her reasoning.
She breathed. “You did get run over, though. Bad. You got hurt in the worst way. But I am one hundred percent sure that if you won the heart of a guy whose biggest aspiration is to become the tire director in a place called Pooler, there is someone with equal, if not better qualifications in your future. I’ll bet my hair extensions on it.”
I swallowed and started to laugh. Then I cried. Then I laughed some more. And Mia Sutton let me. Without platitudes or serious attempts to divert me, she simply let me feel her words. I’d spent the last month reliving the day: the images, the sounds, the pain, the brush of my dress against the heat of my embarrassment, and though I’d shared it all in my PTSD group, this was different. Mia wasn’t advising me, challenging me, pointing out the misplacement of my flawed affection or telling me I was better off. She just listened. Finally, I looked over at her. “Thank you for letting me get all that out.”
“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “That couldn’t have been easy.”
I wiped my nose and took a breath. “Now, you, Mia. Tell me about the time you were dumped in front of a hundred Georgians and a California lawyer.”
She smiled. “I like you, Ivy.”
I liked her, too. “You said you have a boyfriend? Tell me about him,” I said.
She pulled a thinking face. “Well, yes. Maybe I do. I think I do. I don’t know. You know that place just past boyfriend but not all the way to the next place?”
“I am familiar with that general region, yes,” I said.
She sighed. “His name is Derek Lehman.” She nodded. “He’s in Syria, with the Marines. He’s been there for three months.”
“How did you meet him?”
“I’m a photographer, you know that. Last year, one of my instructors asked me to help him with a family photo shoot. It was Derek’s family.” She looked at me. “They were all together for his grandfather’s 93rd birthday, and it was cool because Derek had just graduated from Camp Pendleton and was in full uniform—he looked amazing. His dad was in the Navy, and he was in full uniform, and his ancient little grandpa had been a pilot in WWII, and he was in full uniform. It was awesome.”
“Sounds awesome.”
“Yeah, so my job was to arrange people and make sure their faces weren’t in shadow and they were all looking where they were supposed to—nobody picking their nose. But instead, I was taking pictures. I couldn’t help myself. I’m very into random shots where people are just being themselves, no pretense, no posing. Derek happened to be hunkered down in front of a little girl—his niece, I found out later. She’s four, has Down syndrome—Lola, absolutely adorable—and that day she had little dark pigtails, and one of the ribbons had come loose. So, Derek—aka Mr. extremely sexy Marine boy—is trying to fix it. It’s cuter than cute. She’s laughing, he’s laughing. She’s barefoot and on her tiptoes, trying to reach his white hat, which is making his task impossible. He’s in full pressed-pleat blues down as low as he can go trying to tie this little, tiny ribbon with his big man fingers.” Mia shook her head. “It was the shot of a lifetime. Not to mention the perfect excuse to accost him.” She laughed. “And I accosted the hell out of him.”
I laughed, too. I had less than an hour of experience with Mia Sutton, but I could totally see her doing that.
She sighed. “He trained as a sniper. We’ve been together almost a year, and he’s been gone three months. And now I think I might love him.” She looked at me and got serious. “And I wish I didn’t—did I mention he’s a sniper? In Syria?” She shook her head and sighed. “I’m learning that it’s a lot harder to worry about a sniper you might love than a sniper who you just like a lot.”