Wrong sister, Right man

chapter 5

The dress was the first problem.

It arrived on a Tuesday in a garment bag about the length of a canoe, delivered by a woman from the bridal shop who looked honestly thrilled for me. "Your fitting's at four," she said. "We only need to take it in a little at the waist."

I stared at her. "Who was it made for?"

She checked the tag. Wedding shops are thorough that way. "Vanessa Carter. Ordered in June."

It was beautiful, which made it worse. Ivory silk, low back, a skirt that moved like water. My sister had picked it out, my father had paid for it, and somebody in my family had decided that since Vanessa and I were roughly the same size, it would be a shame to let it go to waste. I held it up to the light and thought about putting on a dress my sister had stood in front of a mirror in, imagining her own wedding. Then I handed the bag back.

"I'll buy my own," I said.

"The wedding is Saturday."

"Then I'll buy it fast."

I bought it on Thursday from a department store, with Dolly sitting in the fitting-room chair eating pretzels and giving notes. It was ivory, long-sleeved, high at the neck, with a skirt that stopped just below the knee. Dolly said I looked like a very elegant librarian. I said that was the idea. It cost two hundred and ten dollars and fit without a single pin, and when I looked in the mirror I saw somebody who had picked it herself. I hadn't known how badly I wanted that until I had it.

---

The wedding was held at the old cloth exchange down by the river, a long brick hall where merchants used to bargain over bolts of fabric two hundred years ago. Somebody had restored it and put in a good floor and soft lights, but they'd left the iron hooks in the beams where the samples used to hang. I kept looking up at them. It was easier than looking at the room.

There were forty guests, which Ms. Adler had described as "small" and my aunt Grace described as "a funeral with canapés." My side was easy to spot. Aunt Grace had brought her dog in a handbag. Dolly was waving at me with both arms. Mr. Hale was sucking on a peppermint in the second row. My father had invited two of the foremen from Eastgate, and Big Joe from the dye house was squeezed into a suit that clearly belonged to a smaller version of himself.

Damian's side was board members. I counted eleven of them, sitting in a row with the same straight backs and the same neutral expression, like a set of very expensive chairs. I'd asked Ms. Adler about his family the week before. "Mr. Blackwood's family is not available," she'd said, and the way she said it closed the subject so cleanly that I'd actually checked whether I'd been rude.

In the little room off the side of the hall, my father was fixing his tie for the third time.

"Dad. It's fine."

"It's crooked."

"It's the same as it was."

He let go of it. His hands didn't know where to go after that, so he put them in his pockets, then took them out. "I wasn't going to say anything," he said.

"Then don't."

"I'm going to say something." He looked at the floor, and then, with effort, at me. "I'm sorry I made you the price."

I'd have liked to say something wise. What came out was, "You didn't make me. I did that myself."

"That's worse," my father said, and it was the truest thing either of us had said all week, and neither of us knew what to do with it. So he offered me his arm, and I took it.

---

The cellist hit a wrong note at the exact moment the doors opened. I decided it was a sign and then decided not to decide anything.

It's a long walk down an aisle when forty people are looking at you and one of them is a dog. I kept my eyes on the far end of the hall, where Damian stood in front of a registrar with his hands clasped in front of him, in a black suit so sharp it looked like it could cut paper. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't scowling either. He looked at me coming toward him the way you'd look at a delivery you'd ordered and weren't sure had arrived in one piece.

My father let go of my arm at the end. He did it carefully, like handing over something that might spill.

"Dearly beloved," the registrar began, and then she must have remembered this was a civil ceremony, because she said, "Friends and family, and colleagues," and a few board members shifted in their seats.

We'd chosen the shortest vows the law allowed. I'd read them over so many times that morning that the words had gone slippery, the way a word does when you say it too often. Damian went first. "I, Damian Blackwood, take you, Mia Carter, to be my wife." He said it flat, perfectly, like someone reading out a bank statement. I looked at his mouth while he spoke and thought, he's a man who has never once stumbled over a sentence in his life.

Then the back door opened.

It wasn't a loud sound. A latch, and then the soft turn of a wheel. But every head in the hall went toward it, because that's what heads do, and I saw a nurse in a gray cardigan pushing a wheelchair into the last row. In the chair sat an old man with a blanket over his knees and white hair that had been combed by someone else.

Damian stopped.

He was in the middle of a sentence. He just stopped. His mouth stayed a little open on the last word, and he stood there, and the registrar waited, and the silence kept stretching. I counted three. I know it was three because I counted, and because by the end of the three I realized he was holding my hand so hard it hurt.

His fingers were cold. They were damp, too, which I hadn't expected, since I'd have bet money that Damian Blackwood didn't sweat.

"...to be my wife," he finished, and his voice had dropped. It wasn't the bank-statement voice anymore. It sounded like a man who'd been touched on a bruise and was trying not to flinch.

My turn. I said mine too fast. "I, Mia Carter, take you, Damian Blackwood, to be my husband," and the whole thing came out as one long word, and Dolly, in the second row, made a tiny encouraging noise like a kettle.

The rings were held by Ms. Adler, who stepped forward with a small velvet box and the stiff dignity of a woman carrying a diplomatic pouch. Damian took the smaller one. He slid it onto my finger.

It was too big.

Not much. Maybe half a size. But enough that it slipped down against my knuckle and turned there, loose, a cold little hoop. I felt him feel it. His thumb was still on the band, and I felt the exact second he understood what he was looking at, which was that he'd ordered it in the size of a woman who wasn't standing here. It would have been in a file somewhere. Of course it would. Vanessa's size, written on a card, in a drawer in a building thirty-eight floors up.

Neither of us said anything. I closed my fingers into a fist to keep it on.

"By the power vested in me," said the registrar, "I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride."

We'd agreed on this one. In public, I'd said, I can pretend. He'd said, you'll have to. So he leaned down, and I turned my face up like a woman who'd practiced it, and he kissed me at the corner of my mouth, brief and dry, like stamping a form.

That should have been the end of it. It was nothing. A board member clapped, and then the others clapped, in a polite rolling way, like rain on a car roof.

But when he straightened, his hand was shaking. Just slightly. He saw me notice, and put it in his pocket.

---

The old man found me at the reception.

I was standing by a table of tiny sandwiches, holding a glass of champagne I didn't want, when the nurse wheeled him up and parked him next to me with the care of a woman landing a plane. He was very thin. His eyes were clear, though, and sharper than the rest of him.

"You're the sister," he said. His voice was a dry little thread.

"The other one," I said. "Yes."

"Good." He looked me over, slowly, as if I were something he'd been told about for years. "The other one is usually the better one."

I laughed, because I didn't know what else to do. "I'm sorry, I don't think we've met."

"Walter Reyes." He held out a hand, and I took it. It felt like paper. "I've known him since he was nineteen. He'll never tell you things, you know. He isn't built that way. Don't listen to what he says. Watch what he does."

"Sir," the nurse said quietly, "we should get you home. You've had a long day."

"I'm having a lovely day."

"Walter."

It was Damian. He'd come up behind me without a sound, and he wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the old man, and his face was different. I can't tell you how. There was just less of it, somehow, as though a few layers had been taken off.

"You look thin," Walter said.

"You look worse."

"I always did." Walter smiled, and the smile had a lifetime in it.

Damian bent down and tucked the blanket more tightly around the old man's knees, with a care I wouldn't have thought his hands could do. It took him maybe four seconds. Then he straightened and looked at me, and I watched the care go out of his face like someone shutting a lid.

"The car's waiting," he said.

I asked Ms. Adler about it later, in the corridor, while Dolly was trying to rescue her cake from the dog.

"Who is he?"

"A friend of the family," said Ms. Adler. She watched the nurse wheel the old man out to a car, and for the first time since I'd met her, she didn't seem to be choosing her words. "Mr. Blackwood's oldest friend, really. He wasn't on the guest list. He wasn't meant to come. He's very ill."

"Did Damian know he'd be here?"

"No," she said. "I don't believe he did."

---

We rode to the house in the back of a long black car, with a lot of silence between us and a divider to keep the driver out of it. It was dark. The river went by in pieces. I turned the ring around on my finger with my thumb, around and around, the way you worry a loose tooth.

"I'll have it resized," Damian said.

"It's fine."

"It isn't."

"It's a ring, Damian. It's not a heart valve."

He didn't answer. After a moment, he said, to the window, "It was sized for—"

"I know who it was sized for."

That ended it. We went up the hill in the dark, and the house appeared ahead of us with every light burning, huge and clean and silent, like a ship that nobody had ever sailed.

"Clause fifteen," I said, not unkindly.

His mouth moved. It wasn't a smile, but I think it was what a smile would look like if it had been out of use for a long time.

"Yes," he said. "Clause fifteen."

Somebody took forty photographs at my wedding. I've seen them since. In every one of them, I'm holding my left hand in a fist.