Chapter Thirty-Five #2
When they reach the end of the aisle and the music cuts, Josie reaches for her fiancée.
Genevieve’s waiting at the altar in a simple white gown—a silk slip perfect for this balmy October day.
Campbell brings his dad to the front row and sits beside him.
I watch them for the entire ceremony, how every couple minutes Campbell ducks toward him and says something.
The way his dad smiles at him. Reaches over to pat his arm.
Campbell’s mom sits on his opposite side, holding her husband’s hand.
When it’s sealed and we all rise to clap, Campbell looks at me over one shoulder. I’m just behind him and a few seats over. Our eyes catch under the setting sun and it swells in my chest, how much he means to me. How very much I want to reach forward and hold him.
I go to the bar for a glass of water when Campbell’s family leaves to take pictures across the street at the beach. There are nearly fifty people here, all strangers, and I’m dying to be alone. When I slip into the house, nobody stops me.
It’s a bit worn, all of it: the woven rugs scattered across the hardwood, the edges of the oversized couch, the wooden frames of family photos on the walls.
There’s a blue vase in the center of the dining room table with a chip at its lip.
It feels so lived-in and welcoming, a soft place to land after the disaster of the past few days.
It’s Campbell’s safe space, not mine. But with him across the street, and me all alone in here, I let myself pretend.
Finding his room is almost comically easy: there’s a tattered white-and-red baseball sticker on the door with his name on it.
The letters are lopsided and unsteady, like maybe he wrote them when he was twelve.
It’s unrecognizable from the Campbell I know now and his neat, methodical block print.
I push open the door and shut it quietly behind me.
The room is tiny but tidy, a twin bed in one corner with a window above it.
Campbell’s suitcase from our trip sits at the foot of it, unzipped but flipped shut.
I think of all his toiletries, that first night I slept in his room, lined up in a perfect row in the pristine Wicksteed bathroom.
How I think I knew even then that I was falling in love with him.
I sit on the edge of his bed. All four walls are papered in pale blue plaid, standard-issue little boy bedroom. There’s a framed photo on his nightstand and I reach for it, bring it closer to me.
It’s a boy and his father, standing on the bow of a boat.
Campbell’s maybe ten, barefoot in swim trunks, his tummy poking out as he beams into the camera.
He’s squinting against the sun and holding up a giant fish by its tail, nearly as tall as he is.
His dad has a hand on Campbell’s shoulder, leaned sideways to get their heads closer together.
Both of them look inextinguishably happy.
He was so funny, Campbell said. He knows me in all these ways no one else does.
I think of my own father, a mystery to me. Of all those people through the back door, clustered in the yard to celebrate Josie. Of all the people who will be at Ava’s wedding, next spring.
Of all the ways a person can be known, and the one person I want to know in every single one of them.
I’m still holding the photo when the door pushes open. Campbell pauses in the doorframe, relief settling over his face. He’s flushed from being outside in a tuxedo, and I want so badly to cross the room and kiss the pink burn of his cheek. Feel the heat of him with my lips.
“There you are,” he says, and it occurs to me that he thought I’d left.
“I’m sorry.” I stand, putting the photo back on the table. There’s so much love in this house that I feel like I’m drowning under the wave of it. “I just needed a minute alone.”
Campbell’s eyes linger on the photograph before moving back to my face. “It’s okay,” he says, quietly. Then he pushes the door open wide. “Come on, it’s dinnertime.”
I sit between Campbell and his mother, at a table with Vivian and her family. Evan, the aide from Plover House, appears before the appetizers do.
“Elaine?”
Campbell’s mom looks up, to where he’s hovering in the grass at the edge of the tables. “I’m about ready to get Cam back.”
Elaine stands, and squeezes Campbell’s shoulder when he makes to do the same. “You stay, sweetheart,” she tells him. “You’ll see him tomorrow.”
Campbell watches her go. We both do, music drifting slow and sweet from the speakers near the fence line.
Campbell’s dad is waiting near the gate where I came in, his hands folded in his lap. He smiles when his wife reaches him, and I watch them both in profile—Campbell’s mom tucking over him like an apostrophe.
Beside me, Campbell squeezes the back of his neck. He told me he’d never seen love last, but in that moment I’m looking straight at it: the way his mother smooths his father’s tie, then kisses his hair with her hand cupping the back of his head.
I’m about to say something, maybe even risk the bravery it’d take to point this out, when Vivian’s husband, Gabriel, laughs from across the table. Campbell and I both turn toward the sound of it.
Gabriel has an enormous, spectacular laugh. Every time he’s wielded it at me today—even now, with Campbell’s eyes flickering again to his dad across the lawn—I feel something loosen in the clench of my chest.
“It’s the humidity,” Gabriel’s saying. “I’m not built for it. I feel like I’m in a sausage casing.” When he tugs at his shirt collar, Vivian smacks the back of his hand. Their daughter, Lola, is already asleep across their laps.
“You’re being dramatic,” Vivian says.
“You grew up here, mi vida! It’s in your DNA!”
Gabriel’s from Colorado, where the three of them live, now.
He’s a wildland firefighter and has the beefiest biceps I’ve seen on a human being with my own two eyes.
They already spent nearly ten minutes chastising Campbell for failing to visit while we were in Aspen, though they live four hours from the Wicksteed resort and he was—as he repeated emphatically—working there.
“Where are you from, Mattie?” Campbell’s mom asks, now. I jump a little at the sound of her voice, but she only smiles as she lowers back into the seat beside me. When I glance toward the gate, Evan and Cam are gone.
“Southern Illinois,” I tell her. I can tell that she’s holding me carefully, unsure exactly what I am to Campbell. Every time she glances at me, she glances at him, too. “Never strayed too far.”
“France, once,” Campbell says. He reaches for his beer and takes a sip. “Mattie was nominated for a Cannes Lion the same year I was.”
His mother’s eyebrows lift.
“Campbell won, though,” I say, quickly. “Of course.”
“A close call, I’m sure,” Elaine says. “We’re very proud of him.”
I can feel Campbell looking at me. You’ve proven everything you need to, he told me during that awful conversation in my hotel room. This is your place.
I meet his eyes in the string-lit dusk, and I wish it were true.
That this was my place, right here beside him.
We’ve barely finished dinner when Josie and Genevieve arrive at our table. Elaine’s just disappeared to check in with the caterer about cake.
“Porters!” Josie cries. “Porter-Riveras!” She looks at me. “Whatever your last name is, Mattie!”
“French,” I say, smiling as my gaze flicks to Campbell. The name belongs to him, somehow, too.
“How you doing, Mrs. Brides?” Vivian asks, reaching both arms up for a hug. “I’d stand, but Lola’s asleep.”
Josie squeezes her sister, then runs a hand over Lola’s hair. “Sweet girl,” she says. “We’re great.”
Genevieve kisses the side of Josie’s head, quiet and contented.
“Dad did so good,” Josie says to Vivian, then looks at Campbell. I think of what he told me, in California: He has good days, too. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Campbell says. But he’s picking at the label on his beer bottle, restless. “It was perfect, Jo.”
She beams at him. Then she turns to her sister. “Has Mom forgiven you yet for not staying at the house?”
Vivian cuts a look at Gabriel. “It’s a simple boundary,” she says. “The house has one bathroom. We have a three-year-old. And besides, Lou always says sometimes it’s better—”
“Who’s Lou?” Campbell asks.
Josie gapes at him. “How have you escaped the onslaught of new Vivian-isms inspired by Lou? She’s her therapist in Colorado.”
“She’s smart,” Vivian says, a bit huffily. “And Mom’s fine. She’s already getting over it. She’s too excited for y’all to remember to be mad at me.”
The music cuts, and the MC’s voice interrupts whatever Josie was about to say. “If everyone wants to gather round the dance floor,” he says, “it’s just about time for Josie and Gen’s first dance.”
Josie squeals, not even bothering to say goodbye as she pulls Gen away from us. Gen, smiling, lifts one hand over her shoulder. Campbell returns the wave, then reaches for his beer and knocks what’s left of it back.
“I’m up next,” he tells me, lowly. “You can stay.”
I watch him go, worrying my napkin under the table. When I look up, Vivian’s staring at me.
“You okay?” she asks. Next to her, Gabriel’s craned around in his seat to see the dance floor. Our table’s right beside it, giving us a clear view.
“Yeah,” I say. I don’t know Vivian; I don’t know what Campbell’s told her, or what she thinks of me.
But something softens in her voice when she glances after Campbell and says, “Is he okay?”
It bruises, that she thinks I’m someone to him—someone who would know the answer to that question better than she does.
“I don’t know,” I tell her, honestly, and then the music starts.
As Josie and Gen spiral under the dance floor’s webbed string lights, Campbell’s mom returns to her seat beside me.
“They’re so beautiful,” she says, and I smile at her. They are: two white dresses moving against the night, their bodies in such clear conversation. Every time Gen moves, there’s an answering motion from Josie. Invisible string, right there between them.