Other People’s Weddings

Chapter 8

C HAPTER 8

Present Day

We were up bright and early to head to Milford Sound. We were caravanning in a couple of different vehicles, and I was riding with Quinn and Noah, and Trev. I felt a little bit railroaded. And as we got started on the road, I was beginning to feel more than railroaded. I felt sick. Extremely sick.

The road was so winding, completely ghastly, with sharp gouges taken out of the pavement, and turns that set my teeth on edge.

I hadn’t anticipated the amount of snow. There were practically glaciers rising up at the base of the mountains that we were driving around, and I felt like my heart was up in my throat.

It was a very long drive, and I had thought rather foolishly that I was going to be immune to the windy roads because these sorts of drives were common in rural Oregon, but this was another level, and I was in the backseat.

“You’re very quiet,” said Quinn.

Because I was trying to keep my breakfast firmly down in my stomach.

“I’m fine,” I said.

I didn’t want to slow us down. We were trying to make a boat tour that lifted at a specific time. I had heard nothing for days about how Milford Sound was one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I was amped to see it. I didn’t need to derail us with my vomit.

Really, vomit had been too big of a factor in my life lately.

Thankfully, though it took three hours, we made it relatively without incident to the harbor.

When we got out of the car, I felt instantly dwarfed by our surroundings. They defied photographs. The scale could never be readily translated. You really had to be there. I looked up, through the low hanging misty clouds, at the sheer rock cliffs that rose up out of the water. There were waterfalls trickling down the side of the mountains, in thin streams, pouring into the gunmetal ocean below.

And we were going to take a boat out in it.

It was freezing, but thankfully, I had come prepared. And staring at all this natural wonder, I didn’t feel quite so cold.

I felt small. Which normally made me feel afraid. Because it made me feel unimportant, which was potentially my most leading phobia. Being immaterial. Not mattering. But that wasn’t the small sensation I had standing there.

It felt like me and my problems weren’t quite so big. Like the world was wide enough to carry all of my concerns. Like my fears about losing Quinn, about love, about flying, were all petty in comparison to the stone that had seen millions of years.

It was just a moment. A blink and you miss it event. Yes, my problems were everything to me, but in the context of time, they were nothing.

I found that oddly cheering.

“It’s time to board the boat,” Trev said, putting his hand on my elbow. I looked up at him. He actually was hitting on me. He was cute. With a round, boyish face and dimples. Floppy blond hair and blue eyes. But I still didn’t want to sleep with him. I was very clear on that.

Still, though, I might accept the attention. Because who didn’t like to feel like they were beautiful?

I hadn’t felt beautiful in a long time. Well. I could remember the last time. Far too clearly.

“It’s like an airport,” he said.

“Have you been here before?” I asked.

“Ages ago,” he said. “I moved to Auckland for uni, but I grew up here. My dad took us down here a couple of times.”

“This must have been an amazing place to grow up.”

I realized how unusual it was for me to talk to a man who was completely disconnected from Pineville. Who didn’t know me at all.

I understood then, what Quinn had meant. Because he didn’t look at me and see years and years of history.

Solar systems and bowling balls.

Yeah. There was something slightly comforting about that.

A comfort that I hadn’t fully realized I wanted.

“Yeah, of course you don’t realize you’re living in one of the most beautiful places on earth when you’re a kid, you just want to get out and go somewhere bigger. So first it was Auckland, then I lived in London for a while. I came back a few years ago.”

“I went to college three hours from home. That felt pretty adventurous,” I said.

“What did you major in?”

“Business,” I said. “I . . . I have a bakery. And I make wedding cakes.”

“I thought you seemed sweet.” He wiggled his eyebrows, in case I’d missed the double meaning in his words.

I laughed. “Does that work?”

“You’re going to have to tell me.”

I felt warm. Not aroused really, but complimented, happy. I felt seen. And it was nice.

Just then, the hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I turned. Speaking of being seen.

Ryan was staring at us.

It wasn’t an angry stare, but there was an intensity there that jolted me.

I turned back to Trev. “Well, let’s get in this line.”

It was like an airport. We were moved through in boarding groups, and got onto the boat, which wasn’t massive, but had an inside area on the lower deck, and the middle deck, with outside railings, and then a full top deck outside.

The rain was beginning to come down, and the wind was intense.

“I brought ponchos,” said Trev, opening up his backpack.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s amazing. Great.”

It really was, because while I had clothing that would insulate me from the cold, the wet was another matter.

They were green with Bunnings Warehouse emblazoned on them.

“What’s Bunnings Warehouse?” I asked, looking down at the logo.

“It’s a home and garden store.”

“I’ll file that away in my New Zealand Lore folder. Along with the phrases ‘hard case’ and ‘good value’.”

“Very good,” Trev said.

“Don’t ask me to define them though.”

“Oh I would never. Same as I’d never ask you to try a Kiwi accent.”

“Why not?”

“Americans can’t do them. Don’t feel bad actually, no one can.”

“Choice as, bro,” I said.

“Yeah nah,” he said, laughing good naturedly at my terrible attempt.

I slipped a plastic poncho over my head as we boarded the boat. We entered at a lower-level deck, the interior old and covered in red carpet, with wooden benches and tables all throughout the space. There were windows to the outside, but the view wasn’t as good as I’d have liked inside.

There were other, larger boats that apparently did tours, but ours was a bit wee.

We were given a ticket for a drink and a sack lunch that we had prepaid for when we bought the tickets.

I stuffed mine in my pocket, and went upstairs to the top deck. I watched as the ship pulled away from shore, and we began to pitch and roll in the waves.

“It gets rougher when you get out toward the open water,” Trev said. “But if you keep your eye out, you might see fur seals, and maybe some keas.”

“What’s a kea?”

“It’s a parrot, actually. A big green one.”

Well, I was charmed by that.

Even though it was raining, I found myself completely captivated by the view. The walls of the sound were sheer rock, and the rain, as it increased, created even more waterfalls streaming down the side, joining in waterfalls that were more permanent, that roared loudly three quarters of a mile down those impossibly large cliffs.

Everything was great, and shrouded in mist. I could see why they filmed The Lord of the Rings here. It was truly otherworldly.

Normally, I would take my phone out. Normally I would try to capture it, but there was no point in trying.

I turned and saw that Ryan, of course, did not agree.

His camera was covered by part of a poncho, and he was carefully snapping photos even as the ship pitched and rolled, his feet braced on the deck, as he angled to get a good shot.

“Do you think those are going to turn out?” I called across the wind.

He turned to me. “I know they will.”

Trev was talking about wildlife, and about the history of the area, and I found myself drifting slightly away from him and the rest of the group, to where Ryan was. I wanted to know what he was seeing. What he was seeing that was so interesting it was worth looking through a lens. It seemed like a distancing thing, and I had never really thought about that before. If he put a camera between himself and everything else for a reason.

“Do you see anything other than waterfalls?”

He looked at me. “Not yet.”

I wondered if things were actually healing. If maybe we would be able to go back to town after this and . . .

No. Because he was leaving. Because he wasn’t going back to town. I had forgotten that.

“Trev said that there might be fur seals.”

“There are sometimes. I’ve been out here before.”

I hadn’t even thought to ask him that. “How long were you in New Zealand doing photography when you met Noah?”

“Six months. I left and came back. I spent quite a bit of time here.”

“Is this your favorite place that you’ve been?”

“One of them.”

“Why did you come back to Pineville?”

“My dad. When he got cancer seven years ago, it just seemed like the right thing.”

I had vaguely heard that his dad had cancer, but he had seemed to get through it fine, so I hadn’t really thought about it recently.

“Is he doing well?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Just like it never happened. But then, even if he did have some after-effects from it, he would never admit it.”

I tried to imagine his dad, who was fairly taciturn, acknowledging anything like the kind of trauma that came after an illness. I hadn’t experienced it personally, but my gran had suffered some strokes, and the aftermath, all the changes, the hospitals, the doctors, they took their toll.

“Yeah. I can see that.”

He lifted his camera again, and took some more pictures. The water was starting to pitch and roll even more. But I was captivated by our surroundings. Every so often there would be a cloud break, and sun would pour through the holes in the mist, like a waterfall of light. I found myself leaning against the railing, looking at the scenery, ignoring my hunger, ignoring the cold. The wet.

And I didn’t worry. Not about anything. It was the strangest thing.

I wasn’t even aware that my stomach had been queasy on the drive over.

And it would’ve been reasonable for me to have my sickness compounded by the waves.

“There,” said Ryan, pointing off to the right. “Fur seal.”

I looked, and saw a brown animal draped over a rock, his head lifted toward the rain, toward the sky.

I laughed. “Incredible.”

“Better than a bear.”

I laughed. “Yes. Better than a bear.”

I looked up at him as the rain poured down on us, and I was instantly transported back to New Orleans. To that third wedding.

To that first time I . . .

And then I remembered everything else. I turned away from him. “I’m just going to go . . . Check out the other side.”

I moved to the other side of the boat, grateful for the distance, a little bit irritated at myself for being so painfully obvious.

I forgot to grab my sack lunch, and by the time the boat ride ended, I was starving, and we still had a long drive back to Queenstown.

“You should ride with Ryan,” said Quinn. “So you don’t get sick.”

“What?”

“I could tell that you weren’t well on the way. And I would let you have the front seat, but I will throw up. So, I just think maybe we should be in different cars.”

That was how I found myself sitting in the front seat of Ryan’s rental SUV, with just him and me. I had been on the verge of begging Trev to come with us, but I really didn’t want him to get the wrong idea.

“I’m a vomit hazard,” I said, as we got back on the road.

“I’m actually aware of that,” he said. “Though I didn’t bring any airsick bags from the plane.”

“Wow.”

I realized that this was the first time we’d been alone since the fifth wedding. We’d talked, but there had always been people around and within reach. Now it was just the two of us in his car and that felt different.

It felt dangerous.

It shouldn’t. I’d known Ryan for a million years. And there had been one . . . thing. Just the one and otherwise we’d been fine. Infinite disaster defined our relationship far more than that ever could.

“Did you enjoy the tour?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah it was amazing.”

We were doing small talk apparently. Maybe next we could talk about how cold it was.

“Oh look.” He suddenly slowed the car to a near stop and pointed out his window.

“What?”

He pulled off onto the side, which felt risky given how narrow the shoulder was and how icy it was.

“ What? ” I pressed.

“Kea.”

I straightened in my seat and he rolled the window down with his camera pointed out. I could see them then, two of them. Round birds perched on the rocks, walking around and picking at something in the cracks there.

“They’re so funny,” I said.

I watched, captivated, while he took pictures. But as the wonder of the birds wore off, I started to feel awareness. Of how close I was to him. Of his body heat. He smelled like soap and spice, even though we’d been out getting rained on all day. It was a scent that felt familiar even though I was sure I’d only been close enough to him to smell it one other time.

The strangest urge to move closer gripped me, right at the base of my throat.

It was so visceral, so unexpected, that I had to stop myself from gasping out loud.

I didn’t, thankfully.

I was already in a charity car ride due to my delicate stomach, so I didn’t need to go giving such clear signals regarding what was happening inside my body thanks to this man’s scent.

Slowly, he pulled back onto the road, and we left the little birds behind.

“Maybe we’ll see a kiwi,” I said.

“Not likely. They are very shy, and nocturnal. Though there is an aviary, if you really want to see a kiwi.”

“I’d like that. Where is it?”

“In town. I’m sure that Quinn’s itinerary isn’t quite so punishing that you can’t squeeze in a trip.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Did you go to the ice bar last night?”

He shook his head. “No. I went up to the ski fields at the Remarkables to take some pictures.”

“Oh.”

“I would have thought that you’d have gone.”

I shook my head. “No. I . . . I was just feeling tired.” Except maybe there was more to it than that. I was having a hard time saying for sure. If it was grief over Quinn leaving, then I needed to get it together. Though, rather than accepting that, I latched onto something else. “We really are the only members of the bridal party that have jobs.”

“True.”

“I have to bake a cake, you have to take the pictures. How are you even going to do that? You’re the best man, and you’re not going to be in any of the pictures?”

“Tripods and timers exist.”

“Sure. But that means you won’t be in most of them.”

He shrugged. “I prefer it that way actually.”

“Why?”

He shook my head. “I don’t know. I have never liked having my picture taken.”

I puzzled at that. “That seems . . . strange.”

“Why? I managed to get myself into a position where I’m rarely the one that has to have their picture taken. And so many people enjoy it.”

“Take the pictures so that you don’t have to be in them?”

“Something like that.”

“Pictures are such a weird thing.” I looked out the window. I felt . . . a little bit silly taking the conversation this direction, but also, it was either that, or we sit and marinate in silence, and the fact that he smelled good, and I didn’t want him to know that I thought so. “I mean, they’re such a common thing. Now. Now that everybody has cell phones. But they used to be a lot more work. And . . . it is weird, when you go to somebody else’s house, and there are all these family photos, but you don’t have anything like that.” I squeezed my face up just slightly, trying to mitigate the pressure building behind my eyes. Why was this making me emotional? Maybe it came back to the same question that I had been circling regarding not going to the ice bar.

“I don’t have any pictures of myself before I was seven. I don’t even really remember what I looked like. I remember I had very blunt bangs and a bob. But I feel like that was sort of a standard issue childhood haircut. I think my hair was lighter then. I remember I had a t-shirt with a smiley face and daisies on it. But I have trouble remembering some of the other things. And when you have friends who have baby pictures . . .”

“Yeah,” he said.

I’d had the thought that we had things in common before. But this very concrete thing, it was a strange realization. Neither of us had pictures from our early childhood. And I knew there had to be something tangled up in that for him. In the way that he captured everything now.

“Do you have any?” I asked.

“No. I can’t even remember . . . all the schools that I went to. The names of all the families I lived with. It’s strange. To not remember those things. I used to. I don’t remember quite when it all started to fade. It doesn’t really matter. I moved in with the Clarks, and that was my home. And I think maybe that was when all the other things started to fade away. But now . . . I wish I had a stronger hold on it, I guess. Or at least some fixed memories. Maybe I’m always trying to take all the photos I didn’t have of all the places that I go, because in my past, I didn’t have those. And there are all these places that don’t even make sense to me anymore. Like I remember going shopping at certain stores, but I don’t know what they are, and I can’t ask anybody. So I can’t go back to them. And I can’t . . .”

He couldn’t make sense of his past. I’d had just a piece of that, half of it, compared to him. And even though I’d lived with a certain level of instability, there had been one caregiver.

“When did you get taken away from your biological parents?” I realized I didn’t know that.

“I don’t remember them,” he said. “I think I got put into foster care before I was one. So . . . I moved all the time, starting from then. Sometimes more and sometimes less.”

“I’m sorry. You don’t have to . . . talk about it.”

“It’s just the way that it was. It’s not really good or bad. It just is.”

I sort of understood that too, because sometimes I felt that way about my own life. I did my best not to hold onto bitterness about it. It was the trauma responses to all the little things in life, that was much harder. Harder to banish, harder to cope with.

“I saw my file once,” he said. “I know that I got taken away from my mom because she was a drug addict, and she neglected her kids.”

“Kids?”

He nodded. “I have half siblings, somewhere.”

“Any interest in doing a DNA test of finding them?”

He shook his head. “No. I have a family. And they’re a good family, whatever your grandmother used to say about them.”

He was the one person who had been bold enough since my grandmother’s death to acknowledge the fact that she was a spiteful crone. I appreciated that. More than I could even say, because it was one of the things that I loved about her. Even if that didn’t make sense to anybody else.

“Yeah, she wasn’t a fan. But the great lettuce heist of 1980 . . .”

“That’s made up,” he said. “Why would anybody steal lettuce?”

“Apparently she caught it on the security camera. That was back when she served sandwiches at the bakery, and your grandfather’s restaurant was in a rough patch, and somebody was stealing the produce that got left outside during delivery time. He was stealing two heads of lettuce every week.”

“Two heads of lettuce. In the eighties, what did that even cost?”

“It’s the principle of the thing, and anyway, it would’ve been commensurate cost wise to prices of other things. And wages. So anyway, that doesn’t matter.”

“Is that why the Loves hate the Clarks?”

“Oh no. It goes back to the Oregon Trail. Surely you know that.”

“I don’t know that, Poppy. You’re going to have to explain it to me.”

“You mean like I had to explain Shark Week?”

“Yes. Slowly, using small words.”

I felt a little bit better now that the conversation had moved away from trauma. “Apparently, there was a grand affair back on the Prairie, and it caused a degradation in the relations between the two families.”

“What?”

“Yes. Madeline Love had an affair with Ezekiel Clark. Brief, but passionate, and it nearly ruined their marriages, though in the end, the families decided to stay intact for practicality. After all, they had already uprooted their entire lives and moved across the country.”

“How do you know this?”

“My grandma had a bunch of old journals. She liked family history, because then you can keep track of grudges. And she loved a grudge. She maintained that Madeline was nefariously seduced.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes. Though I have to say, in my opinion, the journals make it pretty clear that she was a very enthusiastic participant in the affair. So, it’s difficult to try to pin the blame on Ezekiel entirely.”

“Well, if anybody would’ve tried.”

“Gran would have. Yes. She wasn’t a soft woman. But I didn’t need softness. I just needed somebody stubborn enough to see everything through.”

He nodded slowly. “I know your mom is Caroline Love.”

“Yes. Everybody knows that. I mean, around town. No one outside of town is aware my mom has a daughter.”

“You don’t talk about it.”

“No. Because she doesn’t talk about me.” I cleared my throat. “I’m not trying to be bitter or petty about it.” Here we were, childhood trauma. How did that happen? “But, she doesn’t even acknowledge that she has a daughter, not at all. And . . . I don’t know who my father is. She was trying so hard to make it when I was little. We moved all around California, and she would try to get auditions and go for acting jobs. And I think mostly there was a lot of exploitative stuff happening. A lot of modeling gigs that turned out to be more than she bargained for. And I don’t know if what she did was right or wrong. Because she achieved her dreams, didn’t she? And now she’s in charge of her own life. So maybe it was worth it. All of it.”

“Except there was a casualty.”

I looked at him, at his strong profile. It wasn’t really fair of him to try and compare our wounds. Because his mom had been a victim of her own addiction. Mine had made choices, and yes, there had been a cost, but there had also been real results. Maybe his mother wasn’t even alive anymore. That thought made me horribly sad. There were a lot of unknowns in my life, but . . .

Well, I guess with my dad it was like that. Whoever he was. Wherever he was.

“Yes. There was a cost. To her and to me. But life is like that. We can’t escape generational trauma, I don’t think. Because every single generation reacts to the trauma that they were given by the one before, but they have their own blind spots. And oftentimes that hits even if they don’t intend it to.”

“Explain.”

“I don’t know why my grandmother was the way she was. I mean, going back to her childhood. Because she didn’t talk about it. Which tells me enough. I do know that she married a man who abandoned her and her daughter. I know that it played a part in her bitterness. In her wariness. She scraped by, she was stubborn and prideful. She worked her fingers to the bone. And I know my mother didn’t want that. She felt like her own mother had trapped them both in this small-town existence. She felt like she hadn’t given them . . . enough, because she hadn’t been willing to leave her comfort zone. Because her loss of her husband made her contract in on herself, and all my mom wanted to do was expand. Dream. And her mother couldn’t do that. I am a product of both of those women’s successes and failures. The way that my mom raised her daughter . . . well, it landed me in the position that I was in. But then, she made it right by raising me. And I have my own baggage.”

“I don’t know. We all have a responsibility to try to do better than those people, I agree with that. But I don’t think it leaves us exempt from owning the consequences of our actions. Your mom is famous, what has she done for you?”

“Nothing. But she doesn’t have to.”

“She fucking does. You’re her daughter. I’m sorry. She chose to have you.”

“I’m happy to be alive. I don’t know that she owes me beyond that. Yes, we hope for more from our mothers. But we don’t all get it. So . . .”

How weird that bickering with Ryan Clark about my mother could make me defensive of her.

“I don’t even have enough of a concept of my mom to feel like she owed me.”

“How old was she? Do you know?”

“I think sixteen. It’s hard to hold a sixteen-year-old accountable.”

I nodded. “That’s a little bit how I see my mom. She was eighteen when she had me. And she didn’t want it to define her life. Everything I’ve heard about motherhood suggests that it does define your life. So, I guess I can’t really judge her, for trying to make it work differently, and when she couldn’t . . . I have to believe that she did it a little bit for me. Even though I suspect it was mostly for her. But, it doesn’t help me to think that way.”

I cleared my throat. “I do think that I would have ended up in foster care if not for my grandmother. We were probably on the verge of it. We moved all the time.”

“Is that why you were so nice to me when I moved to Pineville?”

I was startled by that. Because I thought that his memory of our interaction was entirely colored by the disasters that had occurred in the intervening years. I had been nice to him. And he had been mean to me. Cold and abrasive and standoffish. It had made me so nervous around him that . . . well, bowling balls.

“Kind of. Even though I moved to Pineville when I was in second grade, I know what it’s like to be the new kid. I know what it’s like to be the outsider. I really do.”

“I couldn’t be nice to you, because I didn’t think that it was going to last. If you thought I was a dick to you, you should’ve seen how I was to Mary and Michael. They were trying to prove to me that they meant it, that adoption was forever. That it was different than what I had experienced before, but I couldn’t take that on board. I couldn’t see . . . I couldn’t see a way that things were going to be secure. So, when you walked up to me, and you were friendly, friendlier than anybody else in the whole school, I decided that you were part of the scam.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. Because so much of our relationship was rooted in those difficult first interactions. Yes, we were adults now. There was no reason for me to hang onto irritation about that on the level that I had. But that wasn’t really the point. I had thought that Ryan had hated me on sight. But in reality, it was a lot more complicated than that. And I had allowed my simple, middle school take on him to continue to be the level of understanding that I had. When actually, he and I had more in common than anybody else that I knew in town.

This conversation had driven that home.

“I just thought you didn’t like my face.”

The only sound then was the tires on the road.

“I liked your face a lot, actually.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. So I didn’t say anything. And he turned the radio on, for which I was grateful, because apparently we had gone from having nothing but shallow conversations that consisted mainly of us sniping at each other, to this. This deep uncovering of old wounds. This excessively difficult bracketing with the truth about what we were and why.

Things that I didn’t even like to think about when I was alone.

We stopped in a very small town and bought some coffee at a place that also had an outdoor store attached, and I was bemused to find elk mounts and rifles on sale in small town New Zealand, when my perception had been that this place would be entirely different to my experience of rural Oregon. When I could have been convinced that I was back home in that moment. Except that in the pastry case at the coffee shop side, they had something called a sausage roll, which we absolutely did not have in Oregon.

I bought one, and we spent the rest of the drive making small talk about sausage rolls, meat pies, and other foods that he thought I needed to try while I was in the country.

“We can find out if everybody wants to go to FergBurger or FergBaker tonight?”

“What is that?”

“Very famous hamburgers and meat pies.”

“Well, I’m interested in that. Which is funny, because a lot of times famous things just trigger my fight or flight.”

He smiled at me, and I realize that we had just gotten perilously close to making a date.

Well, a date by the standards of the middle schooler, since we were going to be with the whole group, from the sounds of it.

It was dark by the time we pulled back into the vacation rental, and when we went upstairs, the group was laying down on couches, arrayed about the living room.

“Is anybody interested in heading to town for meat pie?” Ryan asked.

“I think we’re going to order UberEats,” said Quinn. “Exhausted.”

I was starving. Because I had not eaten the sack lunch on the boat, and it had really caught up with me.

“Do you still want to go to town, or do you want to do delivery?”

“I want the famous meat pie. And a burger.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

Well. That was a plot twist.

It was entirely possible that I had a date with Ryan.