Five months later—after weeks and weeks of wedding preparations, dress buying, invitation writing, venue selecting, all of it mostly orchestrated by my mom and okayed by me via telephone and Skype—I sit in the little room off the side of my parents’ hometown church in Jacksonville, Florida, the room where in the normal universe the beautiful bride is to wait with her happy attendants, and I watch while everything in my life falls apart in slow motion.
Noah has not shown up for the wedding.
He is now forty-seven and a half minutes late, which, as I keep explaining to anyone who will listen, is still going to be okay. He will come strolling in. He will.
He could even send a text message that says something like Hey! I’m at the Episcopal church! Where is everyone? And then I’ll say, Ha ha ha! Wait! Not the Episcopal church! We’re getting married at the Methodist church a block away! And we’ll both type in a smiley emoji, then he’ll speed over, and it will all be fine.
But so far nothing like that has happened.
So far what is happening is that I am sweating my head off in this torture chamber with my sister, Natalie, and my two childhood friends, Ellen and Sophronia, and I am wearing a dress my mother picked out for me, a dress that I now see makes me look like a gigantic white upholstered chair, and my tongue has become this dried-out, fat piece of meat sitting in my mouth, and my hair is pulled so tightly back in a bun that it actually hurts my forehead, and my feet are swelling to twice their normal size, and it is approximately ninety-seven thousand degrees in this windowless room, and my sister and my two attendants will mercifully not look at me because they are so embarrassed for me that all they can think to do is stare into their phones until the world ends.
From the sanctuary, I hear the organist playing the same three chords over and over again. I wonder how many hours she would go on playing those chords, and how she’ll know when to stop. Whose job is it to call off the wedding anyway? Maybe it’s like a death, and the minister and my father—and probably me—will all look at our watches and one of us will say, “Well, this is it. I’m calling it. Four thirty-four. Wedding’s not going to happen, folks.”
Ohgodohgodohgodohgod. Noah is never late to anything unless an airline is involved, and so this means that he’s either dead, or else he and Whipple are now on their way to some fabulous adventure that girls can’t be part of. In which case I will have to hunt down my supposed-to-be husband and kill him.
What if he’s dead? What if any moment now a police officer shows up and leads me down to the hospital, and I have to stand there in my wedding dress, hysterically weeping, while I identify his body?
I unpin the veil and start clawing my pulled-back hair out of its restraints.
“No,” says Natalie. “Don’t do that.” She comes over and sits next to me, her eyes damp and luminous. She is six months pregnant, and maybe because she’s carrying the future in her body, she is lately a bit hyperconcerned that the world might not turn out to be a predictable, rational place. She always looks like she’s about to cry. Two days ago she picked me up from the airport when I came in from California for the wedding, and when a Prince song came on the radio, honest to God, she had to pull the car over because she was crying too hard to see. All because Prince shouldn’t have had to die, she said.
“There’s going to turn out to be a reasonable explanation for this,” she says now in a high, wavery voice. “Maybe the bridge is out. Or maybe the tux shop was closed. Text him again.”
I laugh. “Seriously, Nat? The bridge? The tux shop? Seriously?”
“Text him again.”
So I do.
Hi my luv monkey . . . how’s it going?
Nothing.
Can’t wait to see U! #marriedtoday!!!!!
Crickets. Five minutes later, I write: You up? LOL!
Unbeknownst to Natalie, I make a deal with the universe: if I put down my phone and don’t look at it while I count to one thousand, then when I pick it up again, he will be typing. The three little dots will be blinking at me, and he’ll say he was on his way, but he just had to save somebody’s life, or there was a hurt dog in the street and he had to find the owner, and he is so, so sorry, but who could leave a dog who was hurt?
I count to eight hundred and forty-eight, and then I say, “Forget this,” and I write in rapid succession:
WTF?? R U OK?
Noah Spinnaker, if you don’t get here soon, I am going to FREAK OUT AND PROBABLY DIE!!!!!!!!
Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.
Just please.
My father, all dolled up in his father-of-the-bride tuxedo, peeks in the door.
“How are you holding up, Ducky?” he asks. He hasn’t called me that since I was ten and begged him to stop, so I know he is losing it.
“She’s coping, okay?” says Natalie. “Maybe somebody needs to go and look for this son of a bitch and bring him here.”
We’re all stunned into silence.
I can see my dad thinking, Uh-oh, pregnancy hormones, and then he looks at me and says, “Um, Noah’s great-aunt is out here, and she wants to know if she can have a word with you.”
“Sure, send her in,” I say, swallowing.
And then there’s Blix, striding in, looking like she got dressed from the bargain bin at a 1970s clothing consignment shop, but in a good, fun way. She’s wearing a long pink tulle skirt and some kind of silvery, shimmery shirt with a bunch of lacy scarves all tied up in loopy knots, long turquoise earrings, and about a hundred beaded bracelets. Nothing goes together, and yet somehow she makes it look like an art project. Her crazy white Einstein hair is moussed up into little points, and she’s wearing bright red lipstick, and her eyes are extra beady and sharp today—X-ray eyes, Noah calls them, the better to see deep into your soul.
I have to admit I feel a little flicker of hope that maybe she really is a witch. Maybe she’s like the fairy godmother in Cinderella and she’ll say, Bibbity bobbity boo and conjure Noah up right in front of me—and then my life, which seems to have curled up into the fetal position, will somehow stand up and stretch and crank itself back up into normalcy.
Yes. I am precisely that far gone.
Ellen, Sophronia, and Natalie look shocked. I raise my hand in a listless wave.
“Well, what the actual hell?” Blix says, and we all laugh weakly. “The life force is running out of this room! I’ve been at funerals that had better vibrations than this.” She puts her hands on her hips and looks around at us, taking in our wedding finery, and for a moment I think she might be about to dispense some fashion advice. Perhaps we need more of something. That’s what’s gone wrong: not even one floaty scarf among the four of us.
But instead, she comes over and takes my damp hands in her cool, bony ones, and says, dryly, her eyes shining with trouble and mischief: “I’m not here to make you feel worse, but I just want to tell you that I hope we don’t have to kill him today. But if we do, we do. I want you to know I’m up for it. You girls with me?”
I see Natalie start to blink very rapidly.
“I don’t think we’ll have to kill him,” I say quietly, although I had, of course, been thinking the same thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if Blix knows that.
“Yeah, well, he’s pushing his luck,” she says and pulls up a chair like somebody who’s settling in for the duration. “But we’ve got to take care of you. The important thing is: Are you breathing consciously? You’re not, are you?”
I try to breathe, to make her happy.
“You know, what we need here is to raise the vibe. We need the Breath of Joy. It’s a yoga thing. I’ll show you how to do it.” And to my surprise, she stands up and throws her arms up over her head and then swings them down fast by her sides while she bends her knees and collapses her middle. When her head is almost down to her knees, she lets out a loud “ARRRRRRRGH!”