Chapter 9
MARY CATHERINE
The blue door was unlocked.
I stood on the front step for three full seconds with my hand on the knob, the dress still gaping open down my spine, my bare feet on the worn stone threshold where I had stood a thousand times before—coming home from school, from Mass, from every ordinary Saturday of a life I had now irrevocably detonated—and I breathed.
Once. Twice. Then, I opened the door and walked in.
It was my parents' house. Still, at twenty-nine, my parents' house—my name on no lease, my mail arriving at the address I'd grown up in, my bedroom exactly as it had been at seventeen with small concessions made to adulthood.
I had been engaged and planning a future with another person and I had still been living at home, which had made sense in the way that things made sense when you were raised inside a particular gravity and never thought to question its pull.
The house was big enough and my parents had never pushed and Daniel and I had agreed it was practical to save money before the wedding, and now, I was standing in the doorway of it in a wet wedding dress with no phone and no plan and the full weight of that practicality settling over me like one more thing I had let happen without deciding.
They were in the sitting room.
All of them.
My mother on the small sofa with a handkerchief she wasn't using, posture still immaculate even now, which was so deeply Patricia Donovan that something in me ached.
My father in the wingback chair by the window, elbows on knees, the posture of a man holding himself together by main force.
Colleen on the ottoman near the door, and she was the first one to look up, and the expression on her face when she saw me—relief and grief and something else, something private and specific to us—nearly undid me before I'd gotten past the threshold.
And Daniel.
He was there, too. Standing near the fireplace with his hands in his pockets and his kind face doing its best to manage something it had not been built for. I felt the guilt come back in a clean, cold wave.
I took off the wet dress and placed it over the arm of the nearest chair with both hands. I stood in my wet underthings in my own living room in front of the people who loved me most and had just cost a great deal, and I said:
"I owe every one of you more than I know how to give right now. But I'm not sorry for leaving."
The room was very quiet.
My mother's chin moved. My father's jaw worked. Colleen looked down at her hands.
Daniel was the one who spoke first, which surprised me and then didn't, because Daniel was good and Daniel was decent and even now—even standing in my sitting room after I'd humiliated him in front of everyone he knew—he was trying to do the right thing.
"Are you okay?" he said. "Mary Catherine. Are you okay?
It wasn't quite a question. It was a man making sure before he let himself feel anything else.
"Yes," I said. "I'm fine. I'm—" I gestured vaguely at the dress situation. "I went swimming."
A silence of a very particular quality.
"You went swimming?” my mother asked.
"I needed—I needed some air. And then I needed the ocean. And it escalated."
Another silence.
My father stood up. He crossed the room and he looked at me for a long moment, this man with the steady eyes and the quiet that lasted three days, and he put both hands on my face the way he had since I was small. He said nothing because there was nothing yet that fit.
I felt two tears run down my cheeks before I could stop them, which I hated, because I was not going to cry in front of everyone and make this about my feelings when Daniel was standing ten feet away.
"Daddy," I said.
"I know," he said. "I know." He pressed his forehead to mine for one second. Then, he stepped back and let me have the room.
What followed was an hour I would carry in my body for a long time—not as a wound, exactly, but as a weight.
Daniel and I spoke in the kitchen while the others stayed in the sitting room. It was quiet and honest and genuinely painful in the way that honest things often were.
He was not angry. That was the part I hadn't prepared for.
He was—sad. Careful. Asking the questions a person asked when they were trying to understand rather than assign blame.
I answered them as truthfully as I knew how, which meant saying things I had never said out loud to anyone, things that had no shape until I found the words for them while my mother's clock ticked on the wall.
I hadn't been ready. I didn't know if I'd ever been ready.
It wasn't him. There was nothing wrong with him.
He was going to be fine—he was going to be more than fine, because he was good and kind and the world was full of women who would recognize that without needing to destroy a Saturday to figure it out, and he deserved one of them.
He left before my mother worked up to what she had to say about it.
Then, my mother said what she had to say about it.
I stood and received it, because I owed her that, and because she was not wrong about any of the practical devastation—the money, the guests, the Whitaker family, the parish, what people would think and say and assume.
She was not wrong. She cried twice and stopped herself twice.
By the end, she had run out of words and sat looking at the handkerchief in her hands like she was waiting for it to tell her something.
"I love you," I said.
"I know you do," she said. "That was never the question." She looked up. Her eyes were red but steady. "What do you need?"
That was the moment I loved her most fiercely in years. That she could arrive at that question inside this hour.
"Time," I said. "Space. I need to be somewhere that isn't here for a little while. I need to—figure out what I actually want. Not what I'm supposed to want. What I want."
She didn't like it. I watched her not like it, visibly, in real time—the way she folded and refolded the handkerchief. But she nodded. Once.
Colleen stayed.
She helped me into dry clothes—finally, mercifully—and while I began to gather what I needed, she sat on the edge of my bed and watched me with that careful expression and didn't ask where I'd been or how I'd gone swimming in March with a wedding gown. I loved her for the restraint.
"I'm going to the studio," I said. "For a few days. Maybe more. I'll call from there."
She didn't ask which studio or where. She was the only person in my life who knew it existed—the only one I'd ever trusted with it—and the fact that she didn't make anything of it now, didn't say I told you so or I always knew or any of the things she had every right to say, made me love her even more.
"Okay," she said.
I stopped. Looked at her. "Are you all right?"
She met my eyes and held them, and there was something in her face that was beyond the events of the afternoon—something older and more private, some struggle of her own that I didn't have words for and she wasn't offering words for.
We stood in the middle of it together the way sisters stood in things, without requiring them to be named.
"I'll be all right," she said.
I believed her, mostly.
She left, and I stood in my childhood bedroom alone, and for a while I just—stopped. Let the silence have me. Let the exhaustion and the grief and the wild impossible events of a Saturday in March settle down through me like sediment through still water.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Then, I lay back on it, staring at the ceiling I had stared at for twenty-nine years. The familiar geometry of a room that had held every version of me.
I should have been hungry. I'd had a piece of toast in full bridal hair and makeup while my mother watched to make sure I didn't drop anything on the dress, and that had been the entirety of the day's food.
By any reasonable accounting, my body should have been staging a protest. But hunger felt like a language I wasn't currently speaking—too far down the register of ordinary needs, buried under everything else.
I thought about going to the kitchen and decided against it. I thought about the rehearsal dinner leftovers my mother had carefully wrapped and stored in the refrigerator last night, which now had the quality of artifacts from a previous civilization.
I stayed on the bed.
I thought about the corner. Midnight.
And the sediment stopped settling and something else entirely started up.
Later, I went to the bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as it would go. I stepped under it and stood there while the heat worked through the cold the Atlantic had put into my bones, and I thought about—
I thought about his face. Without the hat, without the glasses, the water coming down it.
I thought about his forearm under my hand.
I thought about no place I'd rather be and how he'd said it and immediately looked like a man who'd walked into a screen door, surprised by his own sentence.
I thought about the way he'd held the dress. Carefully. More carefully than the situation required.
I thought about his hand over mine on my knee in the car, the jolt of it, and then—
I tipped my head back under the water and laughed at the ceiling, because I had left my wedding mere hours ago and here I was in the shower thinking about a man I'd met in an alley.
That was either the most alarming development of a very alarming day or it was the most honest thing that had happened to me in years.
Possibly both. Probably both. The alarming and the honest were operating as a unit.
I hadn't felt this about Daniel. That was the thought underneath all the others, the one I kept approaching and then veering away from.
Standing under hot water after a day like this one, I had run out of things to veer with.
In three years, I had never once stood in a shower thinking about Daniel Whitaker's forearm.
I had never had to try not to look at him.
I had never felt something electric move through me at the press of his hand.
I had thought that meant we had a mature relationship. A partnership. The kind built on compatibility and shared values and the practical affection of two adults who made sense together.
What it meant, I was beginning to understand, was that I had never been knocked sideways by someone before and had mistaken the steadiness for love.
Brock. I turned his name over in my mind the way you turned something over in your hand—testing the weight of it, the edges.
Just the one name. I didn't know his last name.
I didn't know where he was from or what he did or who he was to anyone in this city.
I only knew that he'd been outside a church at the right moment and had driven me to the beach and jumped off a pier after me and told me I wasn't hitchhiking anywhere as if that were simply a fact he was informing me of.
He'd said it'll keep about whatever had brought him to Charleston. He'd said we'll figure it out when I told him I needed a plan.
I turned the water off before I went any further down that road, because I had things to do and twelve years of Catholic school had given me a fairly well-developed sense of when a thought was about to become a problem.
I dried my hair. I found clothes—jeans and a soft top and the flat shoes I kept by the door. I felt myself exhale.
The rest of the bag took twenty minutes.
I was good at packing, had always been—one of the competencies of a woman who spent her career assembling the right things in the right order under pressure.
Clothes for several days. My charcoal pencils and the small sketchbook I kept in the nightstand.
The photograph of my grandmother that lived on the dresser, the one where she was nineteen and arriving somewhere, her face carrying the expression of a person who had already decided.
I set the photograph in last.
I looked around the room once—the room I'd grown up in, the narrow bed and the bookshelf and the cross above the door that my mother had hung there when I was seven and never taken down—and I thought: I am going to be okay. I don't have evidence for that yet. But I believe it.