Chapter 54
SHAY
Shay told men she’d never pictured her wedding day, but of course she had.
Not often, but when she was with Joel, she saw a priest in heavy robes marrying them in an ornate church in Mexico, both of them laughing at all the words they did not understand.
She imagined marrying Andrew at sea, an ivory skirt suit making her look like Jackie Kennedy.
But when she was a girl, when men were only fathers, she’d wanted to be married in a forest. Lanterns hanging from conifer branches, her train pooling across a bed of pine needles.
It must have come from a book, but she did not know which one, and whatever the source, it never inspired a husband.
She was always alone in a dense copse of evergreens. A white figure surrounded by the dark.
“Just another minute,” she told whoever was rapping on her door.
Everyone wanted to be in the room with her.
They wanted to ask her how she was feeling and comment on how she looked and feed her grapefruit and poached eggs, but having a lot of people in one room constantly circling and pecking made her feel like she was back at Riverside.
There was nothing left to do. When your hair was as short as a boy’s and you only wanted to brush on some mascara and blush, the hours reserved for bridal primping made no sense. She lay down on the floor. There was another rap at the door.
“I said I need another minute,” she snapped and covered her face with her hands. She had always been comfortable alone, but now she needed these moments in a way she hadn’t before.
In June, Andrew had told her she should talk to someone, when she’d made yet another excuse for not going to the party of a friend.
I know I was suspicious of therapy before, but one of my colleagues said the talking really helped his wife after they had their baby, he’d said.
She’d almost laughed. Talking was all she’d done for those seven months.
It had been therapy, in its own way, so now she just needed silence, and even then it was difficult at times not to hear their voices.
But she told him she’d consider it. He’d been through so much, and she often felt overcome with guilt at how little she could give him in penance.
Andrew’s love had always felt safe in its simplicity.
Her love for him was simple too. His parents modeled the idea that men and women were different species, and that there were things about your wife, about your husband, that you’d never understand.
His father never changed a diaper. His mother never wrote a check.
And though Andrew was slightly more modern, open to law school, to living together before marriage, he still didn’t ask too much of Shay—enamored with her intelligence and how beautiful he said she was, content to let her mysteries remain mysteries.
He didn’t even like to watch her shave her legs.
And though Shay loved his kindness, his quiet competence, she also loved him for seeing her as perfect, in only the ways she wanted to be seen.
But then, last summer, she’d lost her ability to hide how she was unraveling.
As a little girl, she’d loved to light matches, dropping them into a small saucer of water right before the flame reached her fingers.
This was what her thefts reminded her of, how she stopped showering, stopped studying.
She was seeing what in her life would burn.
Which was why she didn’t turn away when Simon began speaking to her on the 1 train, asking her where she was going and what she was looking for, and why she walked with him for two hours through Central Park instead of going to her course on constitutional law.
There was another rap on the door, tentative this time.
“I’m coming,” she said.
There was a parade of women on the stairs.
Each of them wore a dress in buttercup yellow, their faces seized in the same smile.
Did she even know all of them? Did she know what they actually thought of her (you’re with him for his money you’re just a common thief )?
She hadn’t used to care quite so much, which was confidence or ignorance—it was difficult to tell.
Mrs. Pruitt—in yellow as well, like she wanted to be a bridesmaid—was sliding a bracelet onto Shay’s wrist. Shay flinched at her touch, but Mrs. Pruitt pretended not to notice.
“It’s been in our family for more than a century.
” Gold links broken by sapphires. “Your something old and blue.” Ever since Riverside, Shay had avoided physical contact, and now everyone in the room was caressing her elbow and forearm and shoulder except for her mother.
She knew how to irritate Shay like no one else alive on this earth, but she also knew when her daughter did not want to be touched.
There was a final offer of food, glistening slices of peach on a china plate, which Shay refused.
A sip of champagne she waved away, repulsed by Mrs. Pruitt’s look of girlish deviance, like this was the worst they could be: Veuve in the morning.
Shay’d had a night of vodka tonics alone at a bar the week after she left Riverside as an act of defiance, but it had only made the voices louder (it’s poison you know it’s poison you’re the poison).
Even a cup of coffee in the afternoon could pitch her sideways.
She used to drink a pot a day—a ritual with Joel, to get a cup in the evening at that diner on 42nd after a film, how she would sip from his cup when he got up to use the restroom. Her lips where his lips had been.
The parade was marching out the door. Katherine gave her a glass of water. “Ready?” she asked as Shay finished it in steady gulps. She knew that Katherine and Grace, if asked, would fashion an escape for her. They had seemed ready for the request ever since they arrived on the island.
“Yes,” she said.
Her mother slid beside her on the golf cart.
“I never thought I’d be riding in a golf cart to get to your wedding ceremony,” she said, and Shay chose not to respond.
There was nothing left to say about her mother or her father.
She’d said everything (you don’t even love them you’re not capable of love), but even so, it was impossible not to become her teenage self again when she was around her mother.
There had been one phone call she’d made from Riverside to Chicago when she’d felt an incredible peace, their conversation a gentle stream, but the next time they spoke, it was the same as it had always been.
Maybe nothing could change their dynamic, and they would fight until her mother died; she’d never fought with her father, so perhaps this was better.
She had learned that there is anger in love, though there is not always love in anger.
The drive to the church was short, the leaves all the same shade of jade.
She could overhear Mrs. Pruitt lecturing Katherine about the island and all the houses that ought to be torn down.
Shay had first come here the summer after she and Andrew graduated from college, and she’d hated it.
The Pruitts never wanted to leave their house.
They didn’t talk to anyone but each other.
But one morning, before anyone else was awake, Shay went to the gas station they’d passed after the ferry and had a breakfast of coffee and biscuits.
She talked to the owner, Red, about Feynman and quantum mechanics, her summer’s obsession as she avoided her law school books, and that became her routine.
Soon it felt like everyone on the island looked at her differently, like she was one of their own.
She had a life there separate from the Pruitts.
And so, when Andrew had asked to get married there, although everyone thought she was acquiescing to his wishes, she agreed because this place was hers too: the marsh their golf cart was passing, the children waving to her like she was a queen on the way to her coronation, the church they were approaching, a seagull perched on its gutter, hydrangeas frothing beneath simple glass windows.
Grace turned around from the cart in front of Shay and raised her eyebrows.
She was asking if she was all right just like Katherine had, and Shay smiled in response, letting her know there was nothing to worry about.
The groomsmen were waiting on the dry grass.
Ken, always protective and misguided, crushed a cigarette beneath his heel.
The engine turned off, and Shay’s mother looked at her, another set of eyes posing another question.
Once, Shay had been told by Mrs. Pruitt that it was polite to refuse an offer of food or drink twice, and only on the third offer could you accept and take what you had wanted in the first place.
And so here was her third offer (you don’t know what’s good for you you can’t even be trusted to wash your hair).
Shay straightened her spine and stood, taking the bouquet of pink roses from Grace’s hand.
Her mother walked through the door first, then the bridesmaids and groomsmen, pairing off like animals boarding the ark.
An organ groaned, but outside, the katydids were louder, and Shay thought she could even hear the white noise of the ocean.
She closed her eyes and imagined the boat Joel had found for Cleo.
A storm churning the water, waves swelling and crashing over the deck until the hull was flipped, its mast no longer pointing to the sky but to the ocean floor.
Cleo had promised she wouldn’t return to the building on Riverside, that she had not even wanted to come to the island, and Shay saw Cleo washing up as naked as an infant on a distant shore. Him, she would have to deal with later.
The organ changed its key, and she heard the church creak under the weight of everyone rising to stand.
Shay opened her eyes and took a step forward.
There were white silk ribbons knotted along the pews.
The occasional child, their face bored and unimpressed.
So many others. Her entire life in a crowd of people.
If someone locked the doors and lit a match, who else would even remember her?
Aunt Eleanor, who had apparently refused to leave Chicago.
Red at the gas station. Perhaps the Korean woman who had taken in her dry cleaning for years.
All the lost souls on Riverside. Andrew smiled at her from the altar, clearly awash with relief.
Her feet were quiet on the carpet, and now she understood why fathers walked brides down the aisle.
Someone had to keep you moving forward. Someone had to keep you from moving backward, from sitting on the floor in a heap of lace and tulle and asking everyone whether you had been found wanting.
And then she saw Joel standing in the back of the church in only his white shirt, his mouth open.
She should have said something to him on the docks, but she knew deep in her bones that he could have convinced her to leave.
He wanted to take care of her, just as she wanted to care for him, but she was not strong enough for that yet.
Ever since her father died, she could not be the person he loved.
Joel saw her too clearly, and he would begin to sense the weakness festering within her, the same weakness that had taken her father.
He would have been loyal and tried to help her, just like Shay would have done for him, but he would love her less, and she could not have borne that.
Her mother told her, that morning after the funeral, that Joel wouldn’t be good for her.
You’re the same side of the coin. She had hated her mother for this, for saying out loud what she’d felt like a sickness ever since she’d gotten the phone call about the train tracks.
She needed Andrew’s selfishness, his only-child-ness, the borders of his simple, steadfast love.
And she and Joel would find each other later, if he was still waiting.
Maybe they would both have children by then.
Maybe, at that point, the years they had left would be countable on their fingers, on one hand.
No one would understand this. No one trusted that she knew what she wanted or needed.
But when you are cracked open, you go within yourself.
You swim through a dark ocean and find golden beams filtering through the water, and you promise yourself that when you surface, if you surface, you will find the sources of light.