I Am Quinn

by McGarvey Black

  When the priest said, ‘You may kiss the bride,’ the church burst into applause and cheers. Making a grand show of it, Alec cradled Quinn in his arms, leaned her back and lowered her down inches above the floor while planting a long dramatic kiss on her lips.

  When he lifted his new wife up, she proudly held her flowers high over her head like a defiant Statue of Liberty holding her torch. The crowd in the church erupted. The music started and through their tears, Ed and Eileen watched their little girl, the same one who would cling to their legs, now hang on the arm of her new husband.

  Minutes later, the wedding guests stood in front of the church while the bridal party posed for pictures. Through the crowd, Eileen saw Alec’s mother, Linda, and their eyes met. She could see Linda had been crying too and walked over to her with a welcoming smile.

  ‘Well,’ Eileen said, giving Linda a hug, ‘they really did it. Our kids are married. Alec looked handsome in his tuxedo.’

  ‘I know,’ said Linda, smiling and wiping away another tear. ‘He polishes up nicely, doesn’t he? And Quinn, she has to be the most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen, and that includes the ones in the magazines.’

  ‘Believe it or not,’ said Eileen, ‘she’s been completely calm throughout all the wedding planning. There was no drama whatsoever. I was the wreck. Quinn has always been the most composed and cool-headed of all my girls.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Linda said. ‘I guess it helps her deal with my son’s temper. I never knew how to handle him when he got so mad. She must know the secret.’

  At that, Linda waved to a relative and moved away. Eileen felt a cold chill go down her spine and her stomach churn. What did Linda mean? Alec had a temper? She knew Alec could be opinionated, but Quinn never mentioned anything about a temper.

  Eileen decided to keep the comment to herself. If Ed heard about it, holy hell would break loose. Besides, she might have misunderstood what Linda had meant. Maybe she was saying Alec could be a hothead from time to time. Eileen knew all about that. She was married to one. Don’t borrow trouble, she told herself. Years later, after things got bad, she wondered if she should have told her husband about it.

  Chapter 22

  They were only eighteen months apart, but Erin Delaney was definitely the big sister, and as far as she was concerned, that made her the boss of them. It worked because Quinn liked being the second banana, it suited her personality. She enjoyed being looked after, and Erin loved being in charge. Their mother used to joke that they were the perfect bookends.

  Quinn was tiny; Erin was tall. Quinn was beautiful; Erin was cute. Quinn turned out to be fragile and Erin wasn’t able to protect her the way she was supposed to. That was Erin’s job.

  Their mother put baby Quinn into Erin’s arms when Erin was barely two, and that’s where Quinn stayed. Always safe and protected, until the awful day. The sisters were each other’s most prominent critics and fiercest protectors. Growing up, they shared clothes, jewelry, make-up, friends and sometimes even boyfriends, but never at the same time. They were, as the expression goes, ‘in each other’s pockets,’ and mostly, they liked it that way.

  When they were five or six, Erin favorite games were to play dress-up as Cinderella or Rapunzel, or coloring in her books. Quinn’s idea of fun usually involved her baby dolls and pretending they were real. Sometimes, just to get under her sister’s skin as sisters are known to do, Erin would refuse to play with the ‘stupid dolls’. Quinn would look at Erin with her big sad blue eyes, hold her breath and pout. Invariably, Erin would give in, never able to say no to that sad pouty face. Quinn had Erin wrapped around her finger.

  Until they were almost teens, their mother had dressed the two of them as if they were twins. Everything matched, clothes, shoes, hair clips, snowsuits. Same colors, different sizes.

  ‘I buy two of everything,’ Eileen would say to her friends. ‘Identical clothes and nobody fights.’

  When Erin turned seven and Quinn six, their parents gave them permission to go to the playground at the end of their street by themselves. They’d spend hours riding on the swings, slides, and seesaws. Quinn liked the swings the best, and two sisters would compete to see who could go higher, each encouraging the other to pump just a little harder.

  ‘Come on, Quinnie,’ Erin would shout, ‘move those skinny little legs of yours or you won’t catch up to me. Go higher, Quinn, higher.’

  Quinn would pump her scrawny limbs even harder and get all red in the face to stay even with her bigger, more athletic sister as they both soared recklessly through the air, wind in their hair. They pretended they were birds flying through the sky. A few times they went so high, they were afraid they would swing right over the top, but they never did.

  Erin was the comedian and Quinn her adoring audience.

  ‘Do that funny voice again, Erin,’ Quinn would beg. Without much encouragement, Erin would oblige and perfectly imitate a man they saw on the street that day or one of the teachers at school. Quinn would laugh so hard that tears would run down her face. Laughter was Quinn’s Achilles heel. Make her laugh, and you owned her. That’s how Erin got her sister to do almost anything.

  The matchy-matchy clothing their mother insisted on was tolerated for a while, but once the girls hit their pre-teens, they demanded their own fashion identities. Saturday afternoons were spent shopping and walking around the nearby college town. Upscale Princeton, New Jersey, had a bustling downtown, an Ivy League university and was loaded with cute college guys who could be found loitering on just about every corner. On one of those Saturdays, Erin realized her fourteen-year-old younger sister had mastered the art of boy-talk. Erin watched Quinn effortlessly navigate conversations with countless numbers of guys and wondered how her sister had learned to do this. Quinn was so confident and masterful while Erin felt awkward and clumsy. Quinn knew exactly what to say to make every boy smile and come back for more.

  In high school, the sisters snuck out for cigarettes between classes, got fake IDs to get into bars and were the popular party girls. The two of them had a blast and somehow managed to stay just to the right of any real trouble. They didn’t always get along. They loved each other, but they had fights, too. Big ones.

  ‘Why can’t I go with you and your friends to the movies?’ Quinn whined.

  ‘Damn, stop being so clingy, Quinn, you can’t go everywhere with me. Make your own friends for a change. You’re so annoying.’

  ‘I don’t want to be by myself all day. I have nothing to do.’

  ‘You’re such a whiny baby,’ said Erin.

  ‘And you’re such a bitch,’ said Quinn. That’s when Erin would pounce on Quinn, and the physical brawl would begin. Quinn was so small that Erin always won.

  Sometimes their mother had to intervene before someone got hurt. The fights were usually short-lived, and after a few hours of mutual seething, one of them would apologize. It was usually Quinn who couldn’t stand the idea of her big sister being mad at her. By the next morning, they were best friends again.

  In the summer before her senior year of high school, Erin began dating Mike Danzi. Mike was easy breezy, adored Erin’s sense of humor and playfulness and was also fiercely protective of her. No one hurt Erin on his watch and Erin knew back then that one day she would marry him.

  Quinn’s boyfriend, Mark, on the other hand, was cut from a different cloth. While he was cute and basically nice, he often wanted Quinn to ‘quiet down’ and sit next to him like an obedient dog. Quinn used to do it too, which never sat well with her sister.

  Years later, Erin wondered if she had encouraged her sister to stand up for herself with Mark in high school, she might not have ended up with Alec. She might have been more independent. She might be alive. Erin vividly remembered the first day her sister met Alec.

  ‘He put shrimp up his nose?’ Erin had said incredulously. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. It was funny,’ Quinn said, laughing. ‘He’s really cute, too,’ she said wit
h a sly smile. ‘You’ll see.’

  Erin met Alec the following weekend when she worked a wedding with her sister. He wasn’t what she was expecting, but there was something oddly appealing about him. He told silly jokes that made both Quinn and Erin laugh. It was evident to Erin and everyone else that Alec was crazy about her sister. He fawned over Quinn who could seemingly do no wrong in his eyes. Erin noticed that Quinn lapped up his adulation. It irked her that her sister basked so shamelessly in Alec’s admiration.

  ‘You’re being the Quinntessa, again,’ Erin reminded her sister one night after they had seen Alec.

  ‘I am not,’ Quinn yelled over her shoulder, running to pick up his phone call. ‘You’re just jealous that Mike doesn’t treat you that way.’

  ‘You’re just stuck up and blind,’ shouted Erin.

  Some people look at life through rose-colored glasses. Quinn’s lens for Alec was deep red. Everything he did was funny, witty and original. Erin didn’t get it, but as long as her sister was happy, she decided Alec was probably alright. She figured Quinn would move on to someone new in no time, like she always did before.

  As Erin always knew, her boyfriend, Mike, eventually became her husband. Mike was not a fan of Alec.

  ‘I guess he can be funny sometimes,’ Mike said to Erin one afternoon when they were in their mid-twenties, ‘but he’s so arrogant, thinks he knows everything. He gets on my nerves.’

  ‘He makes me laugh once in a while,’ said Erin, defending her brother-in-law.

  ‘Come on, but he’s so full of himself,’ said Mike wearily.

  When Alec met Quinn’s parents, they were surprised at their daughter’s choice. Alec was ordinary and Quinn, most definitely was not. After spending half an hour with Alec, though he didn’t say it, Ed Delaney wasn’t impressed.

  ‘That’s Mr. Wonderful?’ said Quinn’s father to his wife.

  ‘He’s so thin. A summer breeze could blow him right over,’ his wife whispered after Quinn and Alec left to go into town. ‘He barely looks like he’s eighteen. Still, Quinnie seems to really like him. I just don’t get it.’

  Eileen Delaney told her husband not to worry. None of Quinn’s boyfriends lasted very long. Her daughter soon tired of them, needing a fresh injection of admiration from a new suitor. Her family fully expected she’d be on to her next conquest within a week.

  Months passed, and surprisingly Quinn didn’t tire of Alec, and he didn’t disappear. A year later, he was seated at their dining-room table on Christmas Day. Even though the family’s initial opinion of the loquacious Alec Roberts had been middling at best, he had grown on them, and they began to enjoy his offbeat sense of humor. Quinn was over the moon in love and one by one, Alec won each of them over, even Mike. Everyone, that is, except Big Ed.

  In spring of her senior year of college, Quinn announced that she and Alec were engaged to be married and proudly showed her family the tiny diamond solitaire ring Alec had given to her. Erin had gotten used to Alec and even occasionally enjoyed his jokes but the thought of him marrying Quinn just didn’t feel right. It occurred to Erin that from then on, until she died, Alec Roberts would be with them every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every Easter, ‘every-everything’ and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  Chapter 23

  The first time he saw Quinn Delaney wasn’t the day he stuck shrimp up his nose. She thought it was. Alec had seen her on the college campus plenty of times but never had the balls to say anything. Every guy at school had a crush on Quinn Delaney because she was so freaking beautiful and she didn’t act like she knew it – at least not most of the time. There were a lot of pretty girls there, but Quinn, she was in another league.

  Alec Roberts didn’t start to grow until the end of high school. Guys his own age treated him like an annoying little brother because of his size. The girls used to say he was ‘adorable’ but not in a good way, not in a boyfriend way. He took the jeers, he wasn’t a baby, but sometimes it was hard. He never had a girlfriend until the middle of college. He was never even kissed until then.

  The beginning of Alec’s sophomore year was the first time he laid eyes on Quinn. She was walking across campus, laughing and joking with a bunch of other kids, in the center of the crowd. Even from thirty yards away, her shiny black hair and almond-shaped blue eyes sucked him in. That first glance so mesmerized him that he nearly walked into a parking meter in front of the library. For him, it was love at first sight.

  After that, he was always on the lookout for his dream girl. He wasn’t the only one; half the guys on campus tripped over themselves to flirt with her. Alec would watch from a distance while the queen held court in the cafeteria or on a bench under the giant oak tree in front of Tully Hall. Dozens of his male classmates competed for her attention. She handled them effortlessly, knowing precisely what to say to make each one feel special. Every guy hoped he might be the one she’d choose. They laughed and smiled at her every word, and she basked in all their attention.

  For Alec, everything about Quinn Delaney was perfect. She was petite and small women made him feel big, strong and powerful. Her body was curvy, perfectly balanced in a tiny package like a fantasy Wonder Woman doll. Rumor had it that Quinn had been a model for a local newspaper when she was in high school. If you asked Alec and half the boys on campus, she could have been on the cover of Sports Illustrated or in a Victoria’s Secret catalog. For all of them, she was the embodiment of the perfect woman. While he thought she was a modern-day Aphrodite, she had no idea he existed or that his heart raced every time he saw her.

  Quinn was walking across campus carrying a brown Coronet Catering uniform over her shoulder when Alec spotted her from the second floor of the History Department building. He recognized the brown shirt because a kid on his baseball team had the same one and it gave him the idea. There had been a job posting for servers by Coronet Catering on the bulletin board outside the Uni Student Center. If he worked for them, maybe he’d finally get to talk to his dream girl. The next day he applied for a job and was hired.

  The first Saturday, Alec worked a bar mitzvah. His job was to unload the trucks and set up the food stations. He had heard from another waiter that Quinn Delaney was upstairs serving hors d’oeuvres. Their paths never crossed the entire day.

  The following weekend, luck was on his side. He and Quinn both worked the same wedding. Alec promised himself he would get her attention before the day was over.

  He was in the kitchen reloading food platters with fresh pigs in blankets, shrimp cocktail, and Swedish meatballs when he saw Quinn in the distance walking towards him carrying an empty tray. This was his chance. He turned his back to her and went on autopilot. Without a plan, he grabbed the nearest thing to him, which turned out to be four jumbo shrimp.

  ‘Hey,’ Quinn said, out of breath, tapping him on the back. ‘You new? I need a refill. I’m picked clean. You’d think those people had never had a meal before.’

  His fantasy girl was talking directly to him. She knew he existed. Slowly, he turned around with shrimp in his nose and ears and calmly proclaimed he was 007.

  She looked at him, stunned for a second and then burst out laughing. She laughed so hard she doubled over and almost dropped her tray as she bent over to catch her breath. Tears ran down her cheeks.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Alec said, without flinching or removing the fish from his face. His stoic composure made her laugh harder.

  ‘Stop, you’re killing me. Oh my God,’ she said, trying to right herself as she wiped her eyes. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Actually, my name is Alec,’ he said, removing the fish and extending his hand. She smiled at him with rows of sparkling white teeth and Alec’s heart nearly stopped.

  ‘Hi, Alec, I’m Quinn. Nice to meet you,’ she said as she reached out her hand. When her fingers touched his, an electric current traveled up his arm and shot all the way to his shoulder. It was all over for him. At that moment he promised himself that one day he was going to marry her.
A week later he asked her out.

  By the third date, things got pretty serious. Alec kept Quinn laughing while she continued to charm and beguile him. His fantasy had come true. How often does that happen, he wondered. Never.

  Within a month, they were in a committed relationship, and Alec made sure everyone on campus knew they were a couple. Being Quinn Delaney’s boyfriend completely changed Alec’s social status. He went from being a nobody to a somebody. To say the other guys were incredulous was an understatement. They used to treat Alec like a nothing. Now they all wanted to be him.

  ‘Hey, Roberts, how the hell did you score with Quinn Delaney?’ they’d shout out. Alec would smile and hold up his hands like it was a total mystery to him, too. In a way, it was.

  They were all jealous, he decided. The hottest girl at school was in love with him, and he was mad, crazy in love with her. After all the abuse, all the teasing, he was the big winner. If someone like her had picked him, he must be a rock star.

  It wasn’t only her looks that made Alec fall for her. He wasn’t completely shallow, he told himself. Quinn was also sweet and would do anything to help someone, even a total stranger. When it came to animals, if she could have, she would have adopted every stray dog and cat in the world. She couldn’t pass a dog on the street without stopping to pet them. Quinn was a total marshmallow inside, just like her father.

  Chapter 24

  QUINN

  Right after our wedding, we rented our first apartment near my parents’ house in New Jersey. Alec was going full time on his master’s degree while working at a photography equipment company to pay the bills. That’s where he learned so much about taking pictures, techniques of lighting and lenses. I waitressed four or five nights a week at a local pub called the Angry Turtle, and made great tips – especially if I flirted my ass off when groups of guys came in. Old guys were always good tippers, and I knew how to butter my own bread. Things were pretty perfect for Alec and me that first year. We didn’t have a pot to piss in, but we were young and had our whole lives ahead of us.