Chapter 13
HALLIE
Lauren got ready the way generals don't: calmly.
The bridal suite that afternoon was a documentary about other people's nerves: my mother steaming a steamed dress, Priss narrating the obvious, a bridesmaid crying about nothing in a lovely way.
In the middle of it Lauren sat still while Jenna pinned her veil, watching herself in the mirror like a woman confirming a reservation she'd made years ago and never doubted. I fixed her train. She caught my hand.
"The cake's perfect," she said. "I saw it this morning. I did cry, but privately, like a professional."
"That's all I ask."
"Hallie." Her thumb moved on my knuckles, once. That level look, going one beat too long, the way it does. "Thank you for this week. All of it. Whatever it cost."
"It's your wedding," I said. "Costs nothing."
Two lies for the price of one, and she knew it, and let me have them both, because it was four o'clock on her wedding day and some kindnesses are just letting people keep their receipts folded.
Then there was gravel, and lawn, and the arch with its flowers on now, and the music starting, and Elias Ravndahl in a dark suit offering me his arm at the top of a real aisle.
Practice, it turns out, does nothing.
"Okay?" he said, barely audible.
No. "Smile," I said. "You look like you're delivering a verdict."
"This is my wedding face."
The joke held us the first ten steps. That's what the jokes are for; they're load-bearing; I build them the way I build dowel structures, to get heavy things across open spans.
Ten steps, then the span ran out and there was just his forearm under my hand and every face turning and the flowers on the arch, and I did what I do: I counted.
Rows. Chairs. The petals on one peony, which have the decency to be numerous.
We separated at the mark. Left for me, right for him. Opposite sides of an arch, exactly the way we'd practiced, exactly the way we never got to.
I want to tell you I watched my brother get married.
I did… pieces. I have true, saved pieces: Theo's face doing its whole honest collapse when the music changed and Lauren came out of the light.
My mother's hand finding my father's without looking.
Lauren saying her vows like terms she'd negotiated personally and was delighted with.
Theo botching cherish, saying cherist, laughing at himself into the microphone with the crowd laughing after him, because everything my brother breaks becomes something better.
Those pieces are mine and I'm keeping them.
But the vows themselves, the actual words, the for better and the forsaking all others and the rest of that beautiful boilerplate, they belonged to another life.
Because the words were fine at a distance and unbearable at six feet, and six feet away, across the arch, on the groom's side, stood the man I'd once paid a deposit to say them to, in a dark suit, with his hands folded, being still.
He didn't look at me while they said them.
I know because I was watching him not look.
We'd divided the labor without discussing it, the way we do everything now: one of us watches, the other endures, trade at the half.
His jaw did its arithmetic. His eyes stayed on Theo like a man guarding something.
And on forsaking all others, I'm reporting this, not interpreting it, Elias Ravndahl closed his eyes.
Not long. A blink with weight on it. The way you do at a graveside when the line about dust stops being liturgy and starts being about your dead.
I looked at the peony. Eleven petals visible from this angle. Twelve.
The rings went on. The kiss happened to applause and one aunt's air horn, which will be litigated within the family for years, and the recessional swept them back up the aisle married — my brother, married, incandescent, mouthing something at me as he passed that was either thank you or the cake!
— and then the coordinator was moving us, pairs again, best man and maid of honor, his arm again, the aisle again, downhill this time.
Halfway down, quietly, through his wedding face, Elias said: "They got it right."
Four words. Flat as a delivered verdict. And every one of them had a basement.
"Yeah," I said, to the crowd of faces, to the gold light, to the arm under my hand that I would be returning at the end of the aisle like something borrowed. "They did."
We reached the end. I took my hand back. It came away easy, the way the ring had, years ago, no resistance anywhere, nothing but air, and I went to find the champagne, and did not count anything at all, because there are afternoons when even the arithmetic wants the day off.
"I do," my brother had said. Twice, actually: he'd jumped the officiant's cue, couldn't wait. The whole lawn laughed. That's the piece I'll keep longest: somebody in my family, on that island, saying it early, saying it twice, meaning it with his whole ridiculous heart, in front of everyone.
It's a good thing to see up close. I recommend it to anyone. Bring something to count.