The Night Mark(101)

“Tonight,” Dolly wrote. “If you’re in a hurry. But it won’t be perfect.”

“Want to get married tomorrow?” she asked Pat.

“No time like the present.”

“I always wanted a June wedding,” she said. “Now I get to have two of them. I should probably tell Carrick.”

“That we’re getting married?”

“Yes. And that Carrick and I are getting married.”





24


“By the powers vested in me by God and His Holy Church, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

“That sounds really familiar,” Faye said as Carrick took her face in his hands. “Where have I heard that before?”

“Your other wedding,” Carrick said. “This morning.”

“Oh, that’s right.” She glanced at Pat, who laughed and rolled his eyes at the absurdity of the situation. “I got married to that guy, too.”

“You did, but this is the one that counts,” Carrick said. “Now hush so I can kiss you.”

“I’m hushing. Start kissing.”

Carrick kissed her, or attempted to. She could hardly stop smiling long enough to make it a real kiss. But that was fine, as Dolly chose that moment to pelt them both with rice, which ruined the kiss even more than her semipermanent grin did.

Faye laughed as Carrick groaned, but he didn’t give up. He tilted her head back, pulled her body flush with his and kissed her like he meant it, like every other kiss between them had been an ellipsis and this was the full-stop period.

The end.

Lips to tongue, tongue to lips... Carrick didn’t seem to care they were being watched by both Pat and Dolly as he kissed her, and Faye couldn’t care less, either. Only when Dolly hit them with another cup of rice did they finally stop. Carrick pressed his lips to her ear and whispered one more vow to her. “I’ll will love you and take care of you for the rest of your life.”

“Don’t you mean your life?”

“I meant what I said.”

She smiled, but didn’t tell him Will would make the same vow decades from now. Why give the credit to Will when Carrick said it first? She tucked the vow in her heart, where she kept the vows Will had made to her. They glowed inside her like a beacon in the night, keeping watch over her.

Dolly took Faye and Carrick by the hands and dragged them to the porch, where she’d set up a wedding dinner. Marrying Pat had taken some doing. They’d had to register for a license and then had sit around for the two-day waiting period before they could get married. But Pat hadn’t minded sticking around in 1921. Being in a body that didn’t betray him with aches and pains and tremors was like being on vacation, he’d said. He slept in Carrick’s bed at night while Carrick worked in the lighthouse. Then he and Faye and Dolly had gone into town during the day to fill out the marriage license and be seen by the fine people of Beaufort.

It had scared Faye to see the town finally, the people in their period clothes that weren’t period clothes but simply their clothes. She’d passed a livery stable on the way to the justice of the peace. An actual livery stable. Carrick had pointed it out and said he’d kept a horse there for his once-a-month trips into town for supplies. A horse. Carrick owned a horse. For transportation. The way other people owned bikes in 2015. It amazed her, although it shouldn’t have. Rural South Carolina had one foot in the nineteenth century and barely a toe in the twentieth. But she understood the temptation to live in the past better than anyone. When people lost hope, they looked in the last place they remembered having it, and it was always in the past. Maybe someday they’d stop looking to the past to find their hope and start looking at one another, where hope really lived. Pat had traveled back ninety-four years to rescue her. Carrick had carried Dolly 110 steps to protect her from a storm. Dolly had stayed up all night to sew Faye a wedding dress, and it was as lovely as anything she’d ever worn—a sleeveless ivory sheath dress made from the same fabric Dolly had used to make her baby sister’s church dress. Hope was other people, no matter what the philosophers said.

And this was a time that needed hope. That morning in Beaufort, Faye had seen children sitting on house porches in the morning humidity looking unwashed and undernourished. She’d seen dogs roaming the streets snapping at one another and men kicking the dogs right in their skinny ribs. She’d smelled a fish plant on the water and gagged at the scent of rot and diesel. She’d seen an older white woman in a fine white dress being followed by a young black housemaid, who held a parasol over her head, a scene Faye found more noxious than the fish plant. These were ugly things, but she saw them with a photographer’s eye that needed to see all, to record all, to hold a mirror up to the world so it could see itself—see the stark ugliness, yes, but all the beauty, too.

After her quick and perfunctory wedding in town to Pat, they’d returned to the island by rowboat. Standing in the living room by the picture window, Pat became a priest again and performed a simple and lovely wedding ceremony with no one acting as witness but Dolly and God, which was more than good enough for Faye and Carrick.

By seven o’clock that evening, Faye had officially been married four times.

To which Faye could only say, “Give the lady a prize.”

Not long after dinner, Dolly’s father showed up in his little tin fishing boat. Dolly ran out to the dock to embrace her father. Faye followed and helped her into the boat.