The Things We Keep(65)

32

Anna

Ten months ago …

You know what’s sadder than the fact that I haven’t laid a finger on Young Guy in forever? Soon I won’t know him. Yeah, that’d be true even if it wasn’t for Project Watch Us All the Time, but in light of Project Watch Us All the Time, well … not even a super-strength pink pill can make me feel better about that.

But time ticks on, slower than before. Every now and again, I think about that window in the upstairs room. About how I could go up there and end it, just like that. Then I see him in the big front room or out on the lawn, and I decide: Not today. I won’t do it today.

*

I’m flat on my sleeping-bench, where I’ve been all day. What I’d give for a drink of water! I threw up this morning and I can still taste sick in my mouth. I’m hungry, too, but every time I try to think what I’d like to eat, I think I might be sick all over again. So I just stay where I am, on my sleeping bench.

When Skinny walks in, I give her the barest glance, then look back at the wall. She’ll just be reminding me about fresh air again. Fuck fresh air.

“Coming?” she says. “It’s about to start.”

“What is?”

“The wedding.” Skinny’s voice is over-the-top patient, making clear the fact that she has told me this before, perhaps very recently. “Bert’s granddaughter’s wedding. In the garden.”

She looks at me, frowns. “Where are your clothes, Anna?”

“Where are yours?” I say, although it’s silly because her clothes, quite obviously, are on her body. Mine are not. I’m sitting here in a top-thing and a pair of sleeping-pants. “Anyway, I was just about to get dressed,” I say.

That part is true, at least. I was about to get dressed, a little while ago. But when I couldn’t find my clothes, I lost interest and started looking at the wall. “Someone has hidden my clothes,” I tell her, awash with new frustration. “Or stolen them. It was you, wasn’t it?”

Bitch.

“Your clothes are right here, Anna, in your closet. Why don’t I help you?”

She opens a door and, like magic, there they are! It pisses me off. I really hate it when Skinny is right.

She pulls out a long shirt with no sleeves. “How about this? This would be nice for the wedding.”

I look at the thing she’s handed me. “Is it warm out?”

She hands me another thing, this one with long sleeves and open at the front. “You’ll be fine with this cardigan on top.”

To her credit, Skinny is surprisingly efficient at getting me dressed. She even brushes my hair and pins it back and then smiles and tells me I look very pretty. It annoys me, her showing this nice side after hiding my clothes like that. But it’s also really handy not having to get dressed by myself, so I guess we’re Even Steven.

Outside my door, in the long thin room, I see him. Skinny must see him, too, because she takes my elbow and starts dragging me toward the back door. As I pass him, the backs of our hands touch for an instant and I close my eyes. When I open them again, he’s gone.

It looks like a fairy threw up outside. White flower-leaves are sprinkled over everything: the grass, the chairs, the green arched thingy out front. The chairs are divided in the center by a pink floor-rug that is also sprinkled with—you said it—white flower-leaves. From somewhere or other music plays. I recognize the song, I think.

I’m starting to wonder what all this is about when someone explains there is a wedding about to take place. Baldy’s granddaughter’s. All the people who live here are seated at the side of the garden; so are the staff. Latina Cook-Lady sits on one side of me. Her belly is big and round now, and she rests her hand on it. In her other hand is a sandwich that smells like pickle and cheese. It’s making me hungry.

Everyone oohs and ahhs, but I’m underwhelmed. For my wedding to Aiden, I wore a short black thingy and red pointy shoes, but this, I guess, is most women’s dream. Baldy walks the bride down the aisle on his pushy-wheeler, for which he earns a standing clap. I admit, judging from all the flower-leaves, I’d written the bride off as a superficial Barbie-princess-wedding kind of girl, but when I see her, edging down the aisle next to her elderly grandfather, she earns back a modicum of my respect.

It’s not until the couple are exchanging their vows that I realize Young Guy is beside me. His head hangs forward, blocking the sun from my face. And I definitely still know him. For now.

“Well, well,” I say, wondering why someone hadn’t whisked him away. “Skinny must have got laid.”

We both glance at her, at the end of the bench, dabbing her eyes. Her mind was clearly elsewhere.

His hand clasps mine.

We stay like that through the ceremony, as the music—Pachelbel’s Canon, according to the folded paper-thingamajig—plays around us. And before I know it, I’m picturing our wedding. What it could have been like. What it should have been like, if it wasn’t for the stupid brain-disease. Then again, if it wasn’t for the stupid brain-disease, we would never have met.

When the wedding guests move on to the party, Latina Cook-Lady brings out the bread with fillings and bubbly water and we eat and drink outside. Even Skinny and the other lady—Fat?—eat out here with us. No one talks—it’s as if we’ve been put under a spell. Maybe it’s witnessing someone at the beginning of their lives that has made us reflective of our own lives, at the end.