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Where do we go from here? I started off this crazy weekend by trying to make sense of these moments—these moments that you know you’re going to remember—but like anything else, nothing exists without its opposite. So maybe it makes a certain kind of sense that I ended up thinking about the moments you know you’ll forget. Or, more accurately, try to remember incorrectly. How do we all learn how to do that? Relive something again and again in our heads until it takes on a slightly different light, a less truthful tone, until the memory can’t injure us as directly, until it joins the ranks of the more manageable?
When I look back to that moment when Josh finally spoke—silencing everything else—I think: Maybe this is what storytelling is made for. So someone can sit up front and raise their hand, showing off with an answer. Saying: This may have been uncomfortable, it may be uncomfortable for right now, but soon it will be over. Soon, I will explain the part to you where we all get to go home.
Let me tell you this. One of the strangest things to happen after the wedding that didn’t—after everyone started leaving the ballroom in droves, Josh and Meryl first, the back-rowers following—was that one guest told another how much she liked her dress. They were just standing in the aisle, and I didn’t recognize either of them. But this I remember most vividly, the holding on to the green fabric, the eye-to-eye contact of the exchange, their separation from each other. Like this was the most important thing that happened, or at least what they’d take away. The idea both stunned and comforted me.
As for me, I wasn’t sure which way to go. I had my tapes with me, in my hand. Walking up to the stained-glass window had been like approaching a locked apartment. You knew it was useless. You knew it. But you turned the knob anyway. A quick peek in the bag revealed the rest. For the most part, the tapes were gnarled and warm and ruined.
I looked around the still-panicked lobby and tried to find a place for myself. I wasn’t going back to the bridal suite for anything in the world. I could just picture the scene up there: Josh and Meryl taking the stairs to get there and then remembering halfway up that the elevator was working again. So maybe they’d get out of the staircase on floor seven or floor nine and ride the rest of the way. And once they were inside, they would do it again, exactly what they’d just done in front of everyone—tell each other it was over, end things—so they’d get to believe it.
Bess was on a courtesy phone in the lobby’s corner. I had no idea whom she was calling, but Michael was with her, the Moynihan-Richardses a few feet behind. In the corner was my father, saying good-bye to people, trying to talk them down from whatever it was they thought they’d just seen.
The whole hotel world was still moving in fast-forward: the bellhops and elevators, the now-useless towel piles. I decided to go outside and get some air. I wanted to give everything a little time to calm down. Or forever to calm down. But just as I was heading through the revolving door out onto the street, I heard someone knocking hard on the glass from the partition behind. It was my mother, motioning for me, frantically, to revolve the door right back in.
She looked down at the bag in my hand as we stepped back onto the lobby floor, but didn’t say anything. I don’t know if she hadn’t made the connection yet that the tapes were ruined, or if she just didn’t want to make it yet.
“I need you to take the Moynihan-Richardses back to the house,” she said. “You need to go there right now with them because they want to drive home tonight. All the way to Arkansas. As soon as possible.”
Her voice was all business, not that I would have argued anyway. I was glad for any excuse to get out. Even this one.
“And listen, Emmy, okay? I’m not
sure if anyone else is actually planning on staying with us at this point, but if I’m the one who tries to make them go, they’ll end up staying for three days. I’ll make them all dinner. I’ll invite them to stay on for the rest of the week.”
“I’ll take care of it, Mom,” I said. “I promise.”
“Because I need the house empty, Em. By the time I get back there tonight, I want everyone gone except for the four of us. We need to be there alone for a while, don’t you think?” She paused, looking up at the ceiling as far away from the bottom of me as she could get. “And please. Soak your foot for a good half hour when you can, okay?”
I looked down at the napkin, peeking out from beneath my heel, revealing my own little injury. In all of the chaos, I’d almost forgotten.
“Just sit there and soak it,” she continued. “Put about a half-tablespoon of salt in the water.”
“I’ll put lots of salt in it,” I said. “What else do you need me to do for you?”
She shook her head, her hand tugging gently on the bottom of my hair, flipping it under. “Nothing.”
“Then where are you going to be?” I said.
“I’m going to be with your father,” she said. “Wherever he decides to take me.”
It didn’t used to be that the time right after people got married was designated for the betrothed taking a major trip together. The whole trip-taking situation grew out of a much simpler tradition in Northern Europe of drinking a certain kind of mead and honey wine post-ceremony that was supposed to bring good luck. You were supposed to keep drinking it for a month—or a moon—which was where the term honeymoon came from. After this wedding, though, I was certain that the only wine drinking taking place was happening in the Volvo I was driving with the Moynihan-Richardses: the two of them sitting in the back together—chauffeur-style, on either side of the car seat, either side of a buckled-in Papa Smurf—both of them taking hefty swigs from the jug they’d lifted from somewhere inside the hotel.
Dr. Moynihan-Richards kept offering me some, in an attempt, I think, to let me know he didn’t blame me for what happened back in the ballroom. For the mess this weekend had become.
“We blame your brother, not you,” he came right out and said at one point. “And your parents. But them only a little bit.”
I smiled at him in the rearview. “Thank you,” I said.
It didn’t seem like the appropriate time to point out that he could have been justified in blaming me too. Especially because I had pretended to be their daughter’s friend when, clearly, being a true friend to her hadn’t turned out to be what mattered most to me. I thought about what was going on with her back at the hotel. With both of them. Who was where now? How was anyone trying to help each other? I had this image of the two of them sitting in opposite corners of the living room in that huge suite, talking to each other in starts and stops—both of them wanting to leave, but knowing they couldn’t. Knowing that when they did, that would be it.
I flipped on the radio, searching for an AM station not playing a commercial. “How about we listen to a traffic report? See what the highways are going to be like for your trip home?”
But Mrs. Moynihan-Richards leaned forward over the front seat, flipping the radio back off and wrapping her fingers around my seat’s edges.
“We’re going either way,” she said. “What’s the difference what they tell us about it?”
“I guess that’s one way to look at it,” I said, not excited about having Mrs. M-R right in my personal space. This was the first time I was even having anything approaching a real conversation with her. It was also, considering the extreme circumstances of today, probably going to be the last.
And still, I just wanted her to sit back, something she seemed determined not to do.
