Chapter 38
38
NOW
JUST BEFORE THE CEREMONY, THE bridal party assembled inside Sunny Sunday. I had finally pried myself out of bed and slipped on my bridesmaid dress, a delicate thing, light lavender, all lace and satin. It probably would have made me feel beautiful if I didn’t hate myself so much.
This was it, I decided. My last event with my family. I would get Taz married, get through the reception, go right to bed, take the first boat to town in the morning, drive back to Brooklyn, and never return. It wasn’t fair to my family. It wasn’t right, that they should have to associate with someone as disgusting as me.
When I walked into Sunny Sunday, the guests were already out on the deck. Clarence was yelling at his phone, which had chosen now to disconnect from the Bluetooth speaker system. The bride and her father had yet to arrive. Everyone else—including Taz—was ripping shots of champagne in the kitchen. I drifted around them and made my way toward the back of the cabin. Bedsheets dangled over the all-glass doors, hiding us from the guests. A makeshift curtain. I nudged the sheets aside and poked my head out to see how the decorations ended up.
Outside, the deck as I knew it was gone. Unrecognizable. No more tacky green lounge chairs or spindly plastic tables. In their place—a North Woods wonderland. Long chains of flowers, an aisle laden with blue-green satin, a massive arch made from oak branches that had been painstakingly braided and bent into an upside-down smile. I picked out the back of Mom’s head in the front row, with Dad’s chair parked to her left. The other guests—friends, cousins, ballerinas, acquaintances—milled about the remaining rows. The newcomers had only just arrived; their voices had floated into my cabin as I’d finished getting ready.
I gazed around. It was truly amazing; in just four hours, my family transformed a drab sundeck into a veritable paradise. All I did in that time was lie in bed and achieve a full-scale meltdown.
Manuel was seated in the second row. As if alerted to my gaze, he turned around in his seat. We locked eyes. I dropped the curtain and hastily backed away.
I bumped into Taz.
“Whoa, there,” he said, catching my shoulders. “You running from someone?”
I laughed idiotically.
He smiled and turned to walk outside. But before pushing open the curtain, he looked back. “Hey. Everything okay with you? I heard you weren’t feeling well earlier.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He seemed to be waiting for more. When I didn’t offer it up, he hesitated, then said, “Well, okay then,” and turned to leave again. I watched his shoulders slide through the flap in the curtain. Then, just before they disappeared, just before I could stop myself, I blurted, “No, actually.”
Taz turned back. He tilted his head and looked at me. “No? Everything isn’t okay?”
“No.”
“Is it…Manuel?”
“How’d you guess?”
He shrugged, smiled. “I might not say much, but I do pay attention.”
“Yeah, well.” I looked down. My eyes fell immediately on a wrinkle at the hem of my skirt that I hadn’t noticed before. Great. Now I could look forward to everyone staring at it during the ceremony.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I looked back up. Taz’s eyes—green, same as mine—squinted. Studied me. I was being watched by my own eyes.
“No. Well, maybe. Well…I don’t know.”
His cheeks were flushed a happy pink that didn’t match the concern in his eyes. Rose pink. The color of love , I thought. Love and alcohol. Immediately I felt selfish for saying anything to him at all. “Listen. Ignore me. This is your wedding day. I don’t even know what I’m talking about. Go out there and get married.”
I turned to leave, but Taz grabbed my wrist.
“Eliot, stop.”
I glanced back up at him. I could see he wasn’t going to let me leave. When did my brother get so strong? “I just…” I swallowed. Speech had taken on that slippery quality, the one that accompanies lack of food. Words slid from me without my consent. “How did you do it?”
He cocked his head. “Do what?”
“The soulmate thing. You and Helene. No fighting. No drama. Perfect relationship. How did you do it?”
To my surprise, Taz started to laugh. His grip slackened. “Jesus, Gup.” His eyes sparkled. “And here I always thought you were the smart one in the family.”
“What?”
He looked at me incredulously. “You think we have a perfect relationship? Christ. Nobody has that. I mean…we got in the biggest fight ever just a week before coming out here. We almost called off the whole wedding. Seriously.”
My mouth opened.
“Hardest day of my life. If you want to talk about fighting and drama—”
“But.” My lips dangled open in that idiotic shape they make whenever I’m wrong. “But.”
“But what?”
“But then…if things were so bad, why did you stay with her?”
“Oh, well, that’s easy.” Taz shrugged. “She’s my Person. When you find your Person, you don’t let them get away.”
He squeezed my shoulder, winked, and exited through the curtain, leaving me standing alone before it. Breath dragged itself in and out of my mouth. In, out, in, out. The sheet puffed in and out along with me, like an extra set of lungs. I spun around. Power walked to the bathroom. Shut the door behind me and started to cry.
—
BY THE TIME I WIPED my nose and walked out of the bathroom, Clarence had sorted out the sound system. The bridesmaids and groomsmen were now assembled into two lines behind the curtain. A new champagne bottle was making its way down the line. Everyone was nice and lubed up. Jazzed. Excited to marry the shit out of Taz and Helene.
The procession was led by a pair of high school groomsmen I recognized, part of the boatloads of people who had arrived while I hid in my cabin. After them came two pairs of friends I’d never seen before. Then Clarence and a long-limbed beauty, clearly a ballerina. Then Karma and Shelly. Shelly held her wife’s hand with three loose fingers, letting it dangle to the side. She stood at a slight remove, head turned, gaze out the window.
And me. Just me, no escort. Might as well be a flower girl.
The windows were open. Outside, I heard a chorus of birds. White-throated sparrows. Lots of them from the sound of it. The same call I heard that day in the woods multiplied half a dozen times. I smiled.
“What are you grinning about?” asked Karma.
I pointed to the window. “Do you hear the birds?”
She tilted her head. “Are those…? Those are the birds that Speedy likes, right?”
“Yeah.” I nodded.
Clarence passed the bottle of champagne back to Karma, who accepted it with a wink.
“So.” My sister took another swig of champagne. “You a bird freak now, or what?”
“What?” I asked. “Oh. No, no. No, not at all.”
She wiped her mouth and offered the bottle to me.
I waved it away. “Theirs is the only call I know. Manuel and I used to sit inside this hollowed-out old tree trunk and listen to them.”
“You mean the Fort?”
“What?” I stared at Karma. “How do you know about the Fort?”
She shared that look with my siblings—the Youngest Child look, the one that said, Must be nice to be so young and stupid .
“How could I not know, Boose? You talked about it all the time. Literally all the time. Nonstop monologue on the castle you were building for yourself. I finally asked to go see it just because I thought it would shut you up, but you wouldn’t take me. You wouldn’t take anyone. You called its location ‘cassified.’ I think you meant classified . It was cute. Annoying as hell, but still cute.” She ruffled my hair. “Guess some things don’t change.”
My brain tried to tick forward. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would Henry and I build a place we didn’t want to take anyone?”
“Henry?”
“Yes. Henry. Our dead brother.” I sighed. “Or have you caught the same strain of amnesia that Mom has?”
“No, that’s not what I…”
At the stereo, Clarence pressed play on the wedding CD. The first notes of “Come On Eileen” echoed through the cabin.
He jogged back over. “Bit of an odd song choice for a wedding, no?”
“Taz is nothing if not odd,” Karma said without looking at Clarence. She was still staring at me. “Eliot, you didn’t build the Fort with Henry.”
“Yes, I did,” I said.
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. We built it together. It took all summer.”
Her voice, when she spoke, was softer than usual. “Eliot, that’s impossible.”
What the hell was she talking about? She didn’t even know about the Fort back when I—when we —were building it. It was just Henry and me. Just us. Our little secret.
Right?
Taz poked his head inside. “Everyone ready to go?”
I should’ve been readying myself to walk, but I couldn’t. I was somewhere else. Stuck eleven years in the past. “No, it isn’t impossible,” I said, as much to myself as to Karma. “I remember. I remember yelling at him to slow down every time we ran out there. I remember digging chunks of dirt out of the ground with our bare hands and pinning up the tarp and…” The room blurred. The cabin was already pretty fuzzy, probably due to the fact that I had skipped both breakfast and lunch, but now it started to spin. A ring of light gathered at the edge of my vision. “And…and…” I put my head into my hands, forgetting they held a bouquet. Rose petals gagged the inside of my nostrils.
“Eliot.”
“I built the Fort with Henry,” I said into the bouquet. “I know I did. We built the Fort and then we sat inside it and listened to white-throated sparrows. We did.”
“Eliot.”
I lowered the bouquet slowly. Karma’s face emerged from behind its petals: first the blunt bangs, then the shiny forehead, then the eyes. Sad, drooping eyes.
“You built the Fort alone,” she said, “the summer Henry passed.”
Silence.
I breathed out. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t . That’s not possible.”
“Come On Eileen” ended. “Mrs.Robinson” began—the official cue to begin the procession. At the front of the line, Taz’s high school friends pushed back the curtain. Clarence tucked a flask into his jacket and straightened his lapel. “Another odd song choice. What kind of marriage are they expecting here, exactly?”
Karma ignored him. “It is possible. You worked on it all summer. Said it was a matter of ‘life and death.’ You used that exact phrase.” She laughed. “Little Eliot. So serious, right from the start. I tried to correct your grammar, to tell you it’s life or death, but you looked at me like I was insane. ‘No, Karma,’ you said. ‘You can’t have one without the other.’?”
The patch of forehead above my eye started to throb.
“God only knows where you heard that phrase. You were only—nine? Ten? I asked Mom and Dad if they thought I should go out there and check on you, make sure you weren’t building a bomb or something. They told me not to worry. ‘Everyone grieves differently,’ they said, ‘if this is what she needs to do, let her do it.’?”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“That’s not true .”
But the more I thought about it, the less certain I became. I’d never been able to trust my own eyes. Eyes filter through the mind, and my mind shows me only what it wants to see. And what it wants is almost never the truth. A noise somewhere between a gasp and a groan bubbled up my throat. I muffled it with the thorny pillowcase of roses.
“Eliot?”
I didn’t lower the bouquet.
“Are you okay?”
I felt a set of fingers wrap around my forearm. Karma’s voice whispered, “I gotta go, kid. Love you.” The fingers squeezed once. Then they disappeared.
When I looked up, she was gone. Everyone was gone. I stood alone behind the makeshift curtain. Just me and a lavender dress and a mangled fistful of flowers. Outside, the tempo picked up, as if Simon & Garfunkel knew I was lagging behind.
“Eliot?” said a voice behind me.
I jumped and spun around.
There stood Helene, stunningly beautiful in bare feet and a simple white dress, loose and embroidered, almost like a nightgown. The kind of dress you can actually dance in. On her elbow was her father. “Are you trying to keep me from marrying your brother, or do you just like a big entrance?”
“I…”
“Well, let’s get on with it,” said Tim. “Some of us are eager to get rid of their only child.”
Helene beamed. When she looked at her father, her eyes sparkled with more love in one glance than mine have emitted in the course of their entire existence. I didn’t know how to respond—whether I should laugh or cry or apologize—so I turned around and tripped over the flimsy curtain as I pushed out into the afternoon sun.
The first thing I saw after my eyes adjusted to the bright light was Manuel. Every face in the crowd had turned around to watch the procession, but my eyes fell on him immediately. As if I was already looking for him. For his wild curls and dark lips. We locked eyes. I looked away. Trained my gaze on the hem of Karma’s dress, which dragged along the patio’s mismatched slats of wood. The cloth dipped in and out of each crack.
I didn’t build the Fort with Henry.
I tried to remember. Tried to dig up memories of my brother in a way I hadn’t in a long time. I placed myself back in the center of the island. I flexed my fists. I tried to remember exactly what they felt like as we built the Fort. When I plunged them into the wet earth, fingers breaking soft dirt, arms ripped apart by juniper needles.
My hands plunge into the wet earth. Dirt squeezes into the cracks of my fingernails. Juniper needles rip at my skin.
Karma’s dress drifted left and Clarence’s shoes turned right.
A stack of bracelets jangle on my wrist, a rainbow assortment of little plastic circles. This year’s fashion trend. Everyone has them. I begged my parents to buy them for me. By the end of the school year, I had over thirty. By the start of next year, all will be in a trash bag.
I made it to the end of the aisle. I looked up and took my place at the very end of the bridal party, farthest from the altar. The music changed. Simon & Garfunkel were gone. The wedding march began. From the center of the curtain, Helene emerged with her father. All eyes followed as she approached. In the crowd, my mother beamed. Helene reached the front. The music ended and Caleb began to speak.
I look up from the bracelets on my wrist and see Henry’s smiling face. He laughs as he throws tufts of grass over his shoulder.
I glanced at Speedy, who was parked right before me in the first row. His knees jiggled. Was that possible? Could unmoving legs move of their own free will? His face smiled up at the ceremony with the kind of peaceful contentment only accessible to those who have seen death.
Caleb was saying something about everlasting love. Love and the work that goes into maintaining it. I tried to listen, but my mind kept spiraling through distant memories. I blinked.
I blink. Henry’s face disappears. In its place is an empty clearing.
At that moment, somewhere in the trees that hang over the roof of Sunny Sunday, a white-throated sparrow let out its call. I shivered. There it was again, that ghoulish feeling, the sense that I was standing directly atop my brother’s ashes.
I look down. I’m still digging. My bracelets still rattle. When I look back up, the clearing is still empty. Henry is still gone. White-throated sparrows cry in the trees above.
How idiotic. How impossible. Henry’s remains couldn’t be on that porch, with its many slats and holes to slip through. I tried to ignore it, to focus instead on Caleb’s speech. But my focus didn’t want to go there.
I’m a little girl afraid of death. I’m a little girl who does not understand the idea of souls, the idea of rest. Who needs a place to mourn her brother. Who needs to believe that he is safe underground, that his ashes will stay warm. That she’ll always know where to find him.
My knees buckled.
“Whoa, whoa.” Karma grabbed me by the elbows. The service stopped. Thirty pairs of eyes turned to me. Karma squinted into my face, which I can only imagine was the color of a young corpse. “You good, dude?”
I am a little girl who sees the consequences of her actions. I see them in the shape of a father curled up in the middle of a bedroom torn to pieces. I hear them in the mangled sounds spewing from within him.
I twisted my mouth into a smile. Shallow breaths dragged in through my lips. “I’m fine,” I heard my voice say.
The service resumed. Manuel’s eyes remained on me.
I’m not fine.
My hands plunge into the wet earth. Dirt squeezes into the cracks of my fingernails. Juniper needles rip at the skin of my arms. White-throated sparrows cry in the trees above.
When at last the hole is deep enough, I lift the heavy plastic bag at my feet, the one I pulled out of the errrn that morning—the one stuffed with the lifeless grey powder I’m told is my brother. My arms quiver as I lower him into the hole.
I find my father on the floor of his bedroom, crippled by the weight of something he believes to be his fault. I understand that I can never tell him. I understand that telling him means digging Henry back up. I cannot allow that to happen. I let my father carry a burden he should never have had to bear. I let him carry it for more than a decade.
I build a fortress atop the ashes of my brother.
The crowd erupted, jerking me out of my trance. At the altar, Taz draped Helene over his arm and planted a spectacular wedding kiss onto her lips. Speedy whistled through two fingers. The porch shook with joyous shouts. I clapped feebly. Clarence produced a champagne bottle from nowhere and popped the cork. It flew over the porch railing, into the waves below. The happy couple clung to each other and sprinted down the aisle. The audience unleashed a shower of snow-white rice, the grains of which would surely slip through the cracks in the porch and plunge straight into the water. It was over. They were married.
In the trees above, white-throated sparrows cried.