Before I Do(79)
She noticed how stressed he looked, the worry lines that had appeared beside his eyes. She felt horribly selfish.
“I’m sorry.” She stood up and pulled him into a hug. “I know you’ve got a lot on your plate. Leave all the wedding stuff to me, I will sort it.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I’ll ask my mum for help, you know how she loves a wedding.”
“Thank you,” said Josh, kissing her on the forehead. “Right, I need to iron a shirt for tomorrow.”
As he left the room, Audrey reopened the online shopping order and filled in the rest of the food they would need for the week.
Josh called from the bedroom, “Audrey, have you been eating food in bed again?”
“No,” she yelled back.
“Why are there crumbs everywhere, then? We only changed these sheets two days ago.”
Audrey made a face at the door. How did he know? That man had laser crumb vision.
As she opened her wallet to find her card to pay, her fingers stopped on the strip of photographs buried in the inside pocket. The four pictures of Fred, saying “I will find you,” and the two of them kissing. She had almost forgotten they were there. She should throw them away. She was living with her fiancé; it wasn’t appropriate to carry around a photo of her kissing another man.
But something made her pause on these photos, the what-ifs dancing through her mind. Would she have been doing online shopping orders and spreadsheets with Fred? Or would they have been backpacking around darkest Peru, perhaps living out of a van in Mexico? Was marriage really the beginning of the adventure, or was it the end? She remembered what Fred had said to her that day: “Sometimes life feels like a hamster wheel . . . Sometimes you just need to jump off the wheel.” Audrey could hear Josh whistling a tune from Winnie the Pooh as he ironed in the next room. Sometimes she found his whistling habit endearing, other times she found it intensely annoying. Today, it was the latter. Her gaze lingered on the image of her twenty-two-year-old self. She looked so confident, so assured, so full of fire. What had happened to that girl? Where did she go?
Audrey didn’t need to throw the photos away. She would just take them out of her wallet and put them in a shoebox somewhere—a memento of another life, a reminder of the person she was before. As soon as Josh finished ironing in the bedroom, she would find somewhere more appropriate to put them. But then she started sorting out the next load of washing and forgot to do any such thing.
46
Four Hours After I Didn’t
“Time’s up, Fred. You’ve been monopolizing my wife-to-be long enough,” Josh said, leaning into their conversation.
“Sorry,” Fred said, a red flush rising up his neck.
“I’m joking, monopolize away.” Josh reached out around Audrey to slap Fred on the back again. “I’m going to say a few words. I know you hate being the center of attention, Auds, so I’ll keep it short.” He stood up and tapped his glass.
Audrey’s palms began to sweat, and her ears began to ring; she suddenly had a pounding, fierce headache. She looked down at the wedding menu in front of her and felt it was an exam paper she didn’t know the answers to. Time distorted, and phrases danced into her consciousness like a wind-whipped storm of words.
“I was planning to start my speech with the traditional ‘My wife and I . . . ,’ which usually gets a round of applause, but that might not be applicable just yet, so I’m going to start with, my Audrey and I . . .”
“You don’t have to go through with this just because you said yes.”
“. . . When we’re together, I feel like the windows of the world have been thrown open and all the stale air let out . . .”
“When you fall in love, you’ll understand.”
“Quod severis metes—‘As you sow, so shall you reap.’?”
“You fill my life with color, and I can’t wait to be married to you, however long it takes for us to say ‘I do.’?”
“Sometimes you just need to jump off the wheel.”
Audrey was drowning in the sea of words. As she looked around the room at jubilant faces, she felt as though she was in some surreal hall of mirrors; people’s features appeared stretched and distorted, and it made her feel woozy and off balance. She could feel the heat of Josh’s body on one side of her, smell the oaky aftershave Fred was wearing on the other. As soon as she sensed Josh’s speech was over, she leaned in to hug him, held steady through the applause, and then excused herself from the table, lurching out of her seat.
She walked up to the cake at the far side of the room, blocking people’s view with her body as she removed the bride figurine from the top and buried it in her palm. Out in the corridor, beyond the loos, she found a quiet space to inspect the figurine. She held it up to her face and asked the bride, “Did you jump, earlier, when you fell off the cake?” The bride refused to answer, her mouth painted stubbornly closed. “You jumped, didn’t you. Why? What is wrong with you?”
Still the bride refused to answer, and in anger, Audrey used a nail to pick off the paint on the figurine’s face, so now she had no expression at all. She then popped the faceless bride on top of a door frame, alone, punishment for being so uncooperative.
As she stood glaring at the faceless bride, she heard the band strike up a tune back in the Grand Suite. It was not the song they’d planned for their first dance; it was “Singin’ in the Rain,” the song she and Fred had danced to at the bandstand. “You’re kidding me,” Audrey said to the figurine. She could feel her sanity teetering on some edge. “No, I am not going to answer you, call of the void, not today.”