She knows that her visions are easily explained by exhaustion. By hunger. By all the stresses of living like cattle. But they are also a necessary illusion, a gift.
Past a billowing white tent, the wedding party, some twenty people, is gathered down at the beach, where a regiment of folding chairs faces a rented arbor, and beyond that, the sheltered waters of Pillikut Bay.
“Hello!” A professionally cheerful woman accosts Helen and Dmitri as they cross the lawn. “I’m Sandy Holcomb, the wedding planner. And you are…?”
“Dmitri Buriakov and Helen Webb,” Helen says.
The wedding planner brightens and exclaims, “Wonderful. We’re just about to get started. Would you mind sitting here and letting us know if you can hear everyone?”
“A wedding planner?” Dmitri says to Helen. “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
While the wedding planner walks everyone through their paces, Helen and Dmitri sit in the back row, standing in for the guests who will assemble for the ceremony tomorrow. It is like watching a community theater rehearsal. As the groom’s brother and two friends escort the mothers across the lawn, they undermine each other’s weak attempts at solemnity with self-conscious grins. The young man escorting the mother of the bride whispers something in her ear. It’s possible, Helen thinks, that he might be flirting with her. Naureen is only a few years younger than Helen, but she is tanned and athletic, one of those lean Katharine Hepburn types who seem to age like hardwood.
Helen remembers how surprised they all were when Andrei, at age thirty-six, turned up with Naureen. He had seemed so destined to remain a bachelor. Helen can’t recall his ever bringing a girl home before or showing any interest in one. Though her own girlfriends were always turning coy and flirty when they first met him, he was hopelessly serious and woodenly indifferent to their charms, a nerd who seemed content to bury himself in his textbooks.
Later, his life had revolved around his practice, and a specialty in corneal transplants meant that his schedule was more or less dictated by the randomness of car accidents. He moved away from home only to purchase a condo within walking distance of the hospital. Helen went there once or twice, and all you needed to know about Andrei’s private life then could be read in those sparsely furnished rooms: takeout containers on the kitchen counter, a dead cactus on the windowsill, empty dry-cleaning bags draped over a bar stool. He’d brought his maple bedroom set from home, and the nightstand was piled with medical journals, the headboard stuck with threaded needles. When Helen asked, he explained that at night, he lay in bed and practiced threading needles in the dark, so he would be able to do it in surgery while wearing magnifying goggles. “The magnification is so high, everything blurs. It’s like being blind,” he had said, apparently without irony.
Helen guesses he probably never had a date in his life that wasn’t set up by someone else. So when her parents called her in Phoenix and said that Andrei had met a girl and it looked serious, Helen pegged her as an exceptionally determined husband-hunter with her cap set for a surgeon. When Naureen turned out to be pretty and ten years his junior to boot, that sealed it in Helen’s eyes. She wasn’t particularly close to her brother, but she didn’t like to see him get snookered, either.
That was twenty-five years ago, and Helen freely admits she misjudged. Naureen’s the best thing that could have happened to Andrei, giving him a home and a life that he never would have come up with on his own. Under her care, he has even developed a few outside interests and can hold up his end of a conversation about restaurants or politics or local sports. Last year, she bought him a titanium fly rod and lessons. “I’m working him up to hobbies,” she joked. “He’s going to have to retire at some point, and I can’t have him hanging around the house all day.” She seems to adore Andrei, and he, in turn, visibly softens in her presence, his careful self-possession melting in spaniel-like gratitude when she praises him or takes his arm. If it’s all for show, Helen has never been able to spot a crack in the facade. They really do seem to be in love, even all these years later.
Behind Naureen comes a girl who looks to be about five and is the niece of the groom. She processes with resolute concentration, determinedly flinging imaginary handfuls of petals from her wicker basket. Her younger brother stops stone-still just short of the chairs and eyes the assembled group with undisguised suspicion. The laughter that erupts humiliates him, and he veers unsteadily back toward his mother. It requires a good deal of coaching to lure him back down the aisle.
“Okay, group,” chirps the wedding organizer, “let’s just get through this and then we can all relax and have fun.” One look at her tells that spontaneous fun is not her forte.
“Bridesmaids, take your time. Wait five counts before the next girl. That’s right.” A redhead dressed in shorts and black satin shoes takes slow, halting steps across the lawn, gripping an imaginary bouquet and looking as though she may topple off her heels at every step.
“Now we’ll leave a little space for our absent bridesmaid. How is she feeling? Well, one way or the other, the musicians will just keep playing until everyone is down the aisle. And then the sister.” After a gap comes Jen, the groom’s sister.
“Now, wait ten counts. The music will change to the wedding march.”
“No,” Naureen says. “They’re playing Ode to Joy.”
“Okay, so wait for the change. And here it is.” She raises her hand. “Katie, Mr. Buriakov.”
As Katie and Andrei approach the beach at a measured pace, Dmitri rises and Helen follows suit, the stand-in guests. The bride-to-be glides across the uneven lawn, one hand holding a bouquet constructed of ribbons and tissue paper flowers glued to a doily-encrusted paper plate, the other hand resting lightly on her father’s arm. Even dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, she looks radiant. She has an expression that Helen has sometimes seen on brides and new mothers but didn’t experience herself: a calm, clear-eyed gaze that takes in the world just as it is and pronounces it good.
The rehearsal drones forward, and Helen lapses into memories of her own wedding. Anyone with the dullest intuition could have foretold the future in the dregs of that day. When she arrived at the church with her parents, Don had been standing outside the entrance, smoking a cigarette. Marina had tried to shoo him off, saying it was bad luck to see the bride before the ceremony, but Don had just said, “I think we’ve already had our bad luck.”
Dmitri keeps glancing back at the house, and finally he whispers, “I’m going to go find your mother.” He’s about to stand up, but Helen puts her hand over his.
“Is something wrong, Papa?”
“It’s nothing for you to worry about.” When he sees that this is exactly the response guaranteed to make her worry, he amends his answer. “Your mother, she doesn’t like to confess her limits, but she needs looking after a little. That’s all. Your brother makes too much of this,” he adds. “You know how he is.”
Of course she does. Helen squeezes her father’s hand. “You sit. I’ll get her.”
Inside the house, Helen calls her mother. She taps on the closed bathroom door. “Mama? Are you okay?”
After a moment, the toilet flushes and her mother emerges.
“You’re missing the show,” Helen says.
“Am I?”
“No, not really. They’re just walking through the ceremony. Actually, I just came up to see if you were okay.”
“Okay?”
Her mother looks a little puzzled, and Helen is conscious of how idiotic she must sound.
“I don’t know what it is about weddings. I’m always expecting disaster. You remember my wedding?”