I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(11)
“Worse,” said Zach. “He snapped off the music. And lectured, declaimed. About marriage.”
“But Ian’s never been married.”
“Yeah, as if not knowing shit about a subject ever stopped him. Like the clone of my father he is.”
“So what did he say?”
“No idea. I blocked him out completely. All I heard was blah, blah, blah, and whenever he pointed at me or banged his palm on the steering wheel, I nodded. Worked pretty well, actually. God, at least Uncle Lloyd and the bad seeds were in the car behind us. If they’d been there, I might have had to slit my wrists.”
“Or theirs,” I said, cheerfully. The bad seeds were Uncle Lloyd’s horrible twin sons, Jerome-called-Jeb and Ralph-called-Rally.
“Good idea, but I don’t think you can bleed to death when you’re bloodless.”
By now, his finger thrumming had reached such a crazy tempo that it was probably leaving bruises. I took one of his hands in mine.
“Just try to relax and forget about them,” I said, softly.
Zach’s gaze went blank then flared; he yanked his hand away as if he’d touched something rotten. “Don’t tell me to relax!” he almost shouted.
I took five or six quick, backward steps away from him. I may even have skittered, like a frightened mouse. The movement had to be entirely reflexive, some leftover, evolutionary fight-or-flight thing, since I knew—of course I knew—that Zach would never hurt me. And the bongo drumming of my heartbeat in my ears, that was reflexive, too. For a moment, we stood like statues, before Zach’s taut face slackened and paled and he shut his eyes.
“God, I’m sorry,” he said, and he opened his eyes and reached his arms out to me, and even though I knew he really was sorry, I didn’t walk into them. Instead—another reflex—I tossed him the flowers.
“Oh, stargazer lilies!” said a voice. “You know, I’ve always admired them. Their total refusal to be self-effacing or shy. I’ve always thought the stargazer was an audacious kind of flower.”
It struck me as such an unexpected and wondrous thing for someone to say that for a moment, I forgot to worry about whether or not she’d witnessed my and Zach’s argument. She stood on the path a few feet away, beaming at the bouquet and leaning on her cane, looking oddly glorious, with her green shoes and blue dress and silver hair, as if she’d been spun together out of the land and sky that surrounded her: the old lady from this morning. I saw that she wasn’t holding the book anymore, and, flustered, I wondered if she’d finished it. Her eyes met mine and held. She smiled. Nothing in the smile said she’d overheard our conversation, but, even though we all stood about the same distance from each other, right then, the points of our triangle seemed to shift—equilateral to isosceles—with the old woman next to me and Zach far away, alone.
“They’re Clare’s favorite,” he said, brightly.
I turned and saw him standing there, gripping the bouquet in both hands, his fingers crumpling the brown paper, exhaustion and tension sapping him of his usual glow and making his handsome face look old. And because I knew he loved me to the absolute best of his ability and, more important, because no one should ever look that way the day before his wedding, I walked over to him and took the flowers back.
“Yes, they are,” I said.
In a book I loved as a kid, a girl named Randy plays a game in which she wanders around the wide yard of her family’s big, quirky, wonderful house and pretends that she is a traveler, far from home and alone in the world. It’s nighttime, so, through the windows, she can see the family—brothers, sister, father, housekeeper, dogs—moving around in their warm, interior light, going about their evening rituals, while Randy, outside in the cooling air, can hear bathwater running, a dog’s bark, a radio, the father’s typewriter, all the blessed and ordinary music of a happy family, and she stands in the grass, getting sadder by the second, aching with longing and loneliness. And then—whoosh—she allows herself to suddenly remember that the house is hers, the family is hers, and flooded with the sweetest relief, she runs inside.
Maybe because from the time I was a baby until I turned eleven, in what I still think of as the BC (Before Cornelia) era, it was just me and my mom, a dyad that felt whole but fragile, I never played this game. But after that, once I had at least four different houses that felt like home, I played it a lot. A lot, a lot and for way longer than I’d admitted to anyone, except for Dev, and even he didn’t know that, occasionally, I still played it. It was a way to remind me of my own luck, I think, and I guess I got a little addicted to it all: how thoroughly my imagination could fool me, the stinging loneliness, the rush of joy.
But on the day before my wedding, as I walked out of a side door of the hotel in my rehearsal dinner dress to see most of my family—blood relatives and otherwise—coming toward me, instead of me playing the game, the game played me. They were moving in my direction in pairs or threes, rising like suns over a gentle green-furred slope, clear as day, but it was as if I saw them through a thick pane of glass. My mother and Gordon; Cornelia and Teo and Dev’s mother, Lake; Teo’s parents; Cornelia’s parents; Teo’s sister, Estrella-called-Star; Cornelia’s brother Toby and his son, Jasper; Cornelia’s other brother, Cam, and his husband, Niall; Hildy with Dev’s and my friend Aidan; and finally Dev with Cornelia and Teo’s children, Rose and Simon. All in summer dresses or pastel-colored shirts open at the neck, clean and gleaming and tidy haired, with seven-year-old Simon barefoot in the soft grass, Dev carrying his shoes.