After Six
They married in a beautiful pagan spot, in the hills above the fjord, at sunrise. It had to be done early—Allie and Van were
flying back to the States with Allie’s parents before lunch. BA had offered them first-class tickets, but they had declined.
George Bush Sr. had sent the Gulfstream, was happy to lend his plane for a day. He and Allie’s father were old friends, had
golfed and prayed together, shot ducks with Dick Cheney, talked legislation and football over T-bones.
Donna and Colin and Gwen and Arthur, and Arthur’s mother, the Reverend Dr. Erin Oakes, would be on the plane with them. They
were all in Greenland by then, for the wedding, for the friends they had almost lost. They meant to see Allie and Van marry,
and then the bunch of them would pile onto the private jet for a hop back to the coast of Maine. Allie and Van had decided
to do some driving for their honeymoon, spend a night in Bar Harbor, another up on Prince Edward Island. After a week in Greenland,
Allie had a taste for the cold, salty sting of sea air, for austere rocks and the cry of seagulls.
Allie was taken unawares by her own emotions when she saw a serious man walking out of the spring rain and into the lobby
of the hotel on the day before the wedding. He wore a camel-colored wool overcoat that fell past his knees and an old gray
sweatshirt beneath, the hood up. When the automatic door thrummed open for him, he had his hands in his sleeves, and his sleeves
pressed together, and Allie had the wild idea that a monk had wandered in from the twelfth century. This man of the cloth
would take her hand, would take her confession, would pray with her and dry the tears from her face.
But then the man smiled and took his hands out of his sleeves and pushed his hood down and she saw it was Arthur. He had shaved his head but grown out a thick, springy black beard to compensate. He crossed the floor to her, watching her with his dark, grave eyes.
He took her in his arms and squeezed her, and suddenly she thought she was going to cry. She couldn’t help being emotional
maybe. He smelled so good—like a library, of course—and held her so fiercely and looked so stricken.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to him. “I know I was stupid, it was all so stupid. I know I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I was
trying to fix it, Arthur, I swear. Don’t be mad at me.”
“As if that was even possible,” he said. “Just promise me you didn’t get on that plane hoping you could die with Horation.
That would just about kill me, Allie. It would kill me if you left the rest of us behind.”
The idea shocked her. It left her so stunned, she couldn’t reply. Of course she hadn’t wanted to die. She had been on the
plane—well, because she had to be on it. Only in the days after BA set down in Greenland, with its fuselage half peeled open, it had become increasingly
hard to believe that she had ever let King Sorrow talk her into the air in the first place.
When she boarded the plane in New York, her logic had the certainty of simple arithmetic, seemed unassailable. Now she couldn’t
see any logic in it at all, only desperation and fear. Grief, even. She had known, from the moment King Sorrow made his false
promise, that she could die on that plane. That the passengers of BA 238 were going to die because of her. And under those
conditions, she could not quite bear to go on living herself. The only way to make it right was to be there with them. Arthur
saw this straightaway, the thing she had tried not to see. And why had Van climbed on the plane with her? Because he didn’t
want her to fly alone, no matter where the plane landed—in Heathrow, or in a rain of fiery scrap over the Atlantic.
The other reason to marry at dawn was the church, which Allie and Van had found on a hike together, a cool, wet tramp in the steep hills over the fjord.
It was a fifteenth-century stone pile, the roof long gone, the walls mossy, uneven, knocked half away in places.
The floor of the chapel was a tumble of mossy boulders and old slates.
The rough, gaping doorway faced east, and when the sun kissed the edge of the hills, it would fill the old stone chamber with light.
The idea excited Allie. She yearned for it: to be clothed entirely in the brightness of a fresh day, to kiss her husband in that bold, innocent light, to say their vows before the world had a chance to wake up.
She felt sure it was the right new beginning for both of them.
He would quit doing coke and she would stop thinking gay thoughts and they would get their drinking under control and they’d have polite, eco-conscious children.
Donna had been up all night, with staff from the hotel, carrying in benches, putting baskets of wildflowers up and down the
aisle. She had arranged the dress too somehow, a sleek and modern white wedding dress, like a sheath of silk for a blade,
no train at all, arms bare, but with the most extraordinary tulle veil that spilled all the way to the floor and uncoiled
across the rocks behind her. It might’ve been too cold for such a dress before dawn in Greenland, but Donna the Reverend Dr. Oakes watched her approach from behind the simple podium heisted from the hotel.
The chapel was open to the last of the stars and a green dragon’s-tail shimmer of aurora and smelled richly of the dew-soaked
moss. People turned their heads to watch the bride approach, walked up the aisle by her best friend and her father.
“BA gave us a hundred and fifty airline-size bottles of Johnnie Walker for the guests,” Donna whispered. “And a hundred and
fifty air sickness bags to put them in.”
“That’s so nice,” Allie said. “If you have enough of one you’ll definitely be glad to have the other.”
“Oh, oh! And silver British Airways pens. And Concorde silk ties for the men, ascots for the women. And those tasty shortbread
cookies they give you with tea. They were very generous. Gregg and I were out here packing gift bags for hours last night,”
Donna said.
“Gregg?”
Donna nodded to Gregg Pinet, who sat at the end of one bench, looking at Donna with a simple, slightly stupid happiness, as
alert as a trained dog waiting for a treat.
“This might be a cute spot for a wedding,” Donna said, her breath smoking. “But it’s ideal for a spot of pagan fuckery. I
got grass stains on my knees.”
Robin Fellows and Gwen Underfoot waited to the left of the podium, Allie’s other bridesmaids.
Robin was the best-dressed woman in the whole ruin.
She wore a cream-colored gown stitched all over with butter-colored silk roses, as if she had somehow dressed herself in the wildness around them.
Robin and Gwen wore crowns of flowers, dryads at a ceremony for the faery folk. Gwen threw Allie a wink.
“Ain’t you fetchin’,” she whispered, sounding for all the world like she had just stepped off a Maine lobster boat.
“I came this close to getting married in a pair of jeans,” Allie said. “God knows where Donna found a dress like this with
five days’ notice, here at the end of the world.”
Robin said, “The only thing you really had to put on today is a ring, darling. The rest of the wardrobe is optional.”
“I like where she says your wardrobe is optional,” Van said. “I feel the same way.”
Colin Wren, looking smooth in a black suit with a skinny black tie, said, “I’m more worried about how she’s going to feel
when you take your clothes off, Van. But she survived the flight here, I suppose she has plenty of practice dealing with traumatic
experiences.”
“Is everyone here? Are we ready?” said the pastor, looking from Van to Allie and back and smiling in her kindly way.
“Almost,” Van said, holding up two fingers and looking back through the uneven stone maw that served as the door to the ruin.
He glanced at his watch, then turned his gaze to the doorway again. “Just waiting on one more.”
Beyond the door: green hills, wearing white wedding silks of dew. A flock of small birds darted across the plum-colored sky.
People shifted on their benches.
A blade of red flame appeared on the rim of the highest hill, and that white gown of dew became a rippling sheet of brightest
gold. A spear of sunlight angled through the opening and fell upon Allie’s bare shoulders and bare face.
“Ah,” Van said. “There he is. Right on time to kiss the bride. Lucky bastard.”
BA provided an airplane-shaped cake for them too for the reception afterward, but one wing fell off as the chef was rolling
it across the dining room. Everyone laughed.