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.
*
That night, when I extend my arm under the thin-blanket, he’s there. How, I have no idea. After the brief hand-holding at lunch, Fat and Skinny didn’t leave us alone. Every time he looked at me, one of them was in my face, suggesting Scrabble (whatever that is). But tonight Blondie is on duty. She must have allowed him to take liberties.
He half sits, half lies on the sleeping bench and looks at me. “I w-wish this were the beginning,” he says. “Like for the c … c … couple who got … marr … married.”
In the moonlight, I see tears in his eyes. It’s the first time I’ve heard him talk in … I don’t know how long.