The door opened and I felt a burst of cold air as Wesley walked in, pulling his knit wool cap off his head. His cheeks were pink from the frigid air outside, and snow had dusted the shoulders of his dark gray peacoat.
“Hey, weasel,” he said, as he gave me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. “It’s mad cold out there.” He took off his coat and draped it on the back of a chair. “I’m going to grab a hot chocolate. I can’t believe we’re going to have a wedding when it’s so cold out. We should have hopped on a plane to St. Barts or something. Hell, even Vegas would’ve beaten this.”
“Are you really going to start now? After everything?” I asked, gearing up for yet another battle about the wedding. Wesley had more or less been on my side as we’d brokered the details with our families. We’d chosen a date in early January so I would be between semesters in law school, and also because winter was the only time of year during which my Orthodox Jewish brother and sister-in-law would be able to attend. Noble and Shara didn’t drive on Shabbat, but once the sun set on Saturday evenings, they were free to use technology again. The early sunsets in January meant they would be able to attend a party that started at 7:00 p.m. In the warmer months of longer light, that would never have been a possibility.
Wesley’s parents had resisted the idea of a winter wedding, arguing about potential snowstorms and road closures. They ultimately revealed that their reluctance stemmed from a desire to host the affair in their backyard, which wouldn’t be possible during the winter. Of course, my parents couldn’t abide the idea of the groom’s parents’ hosting their daughter’s wedding, regardless of the season. They traded comments that only provoked both families further. Wesley’s parents had even threatened not to attend at one point. Somehow, Wesley had worn them down, and eventually, we had all agreed on a January date. Except now Wesley was bringing it up again.
“No, I’m not saying that,” he replied, as he took his wallet out of his messenger bag. “I’m just cold. Your parents have been through so much over the past few years, it’s understandable that they might still behave irrationally sometimes, almost like they have a little PTSD.” He shrugged, like he was talking about strangers.
“PTSD?” I blanched at his flip attitude. “Since when was this about my parents being irrational? I thought you agreed that the wedding should be in the winter.” I didn’t bother to hide my irritation as my mind starting spinning with logistical questions, running scenarios about new dates and other options, but then I thought of the scalding disputes we had all suffered through already, and I prepared to dig in my heels.
“No.” He shook his head, as though he had never taken a side. “I just agreed that the constant arguing was tiresome.”
I opened my mouth, ready to lay into him for this disavowal, but Wesley held up a finger to pause the conversation and walked off to place an order with the barista. I rolled my eyes, annoyed at him for hightailing it out of this discussion as soon as it became adversarial. Even so, when he returned to the table a couple of minutes later, a steaming mug of hot chocolate nestled between his hands, I decided to take a page out of his book and dodge the conflict. The wedding plans were already set, continuing to bicker wouldn’t achieve anything.
“Have you heard from your parents? Did they land yet?” I asked, changing the subject, as Wesley licked at the whipped cream topping his drink.
“Nah,” he answered, plunking down into the seat opposite me. “I guess the whole point was to get away from everything—de-stress from all the tension of the wedding planning, the arguing. I’m going to give them their space so they can get forget about the travesty of having to participate in a kosher wedding.”
And there was that. Wesley’s parents had insisted on splitting the cost of the wedding with my parents as a condition of relenting about the date. It was a lovely gesture—until the bills started coming in and everyone began fighting about how to allocate the wedding dollars. Serving kosher food cost too much, the Latners complained, but they seemed to think my mother was cheaping out by hiring a ten-piece band instead of sixteen. Sixteen! Weren’t we going to hire valet parking attendants, they wanted to know. What about a person to staff the coat room? My mother wanted orchids in the centerpieces; Wesley’s wanted tiered candles. Our parents did finally reach compromises on the myriad decisions, but apparently all the squabbling was just too much. Wesley’s parents had decided they needed to take an extravagant vacation in order to put the stress behind them and rest up for the big day.
“Oh, here.” Wesley seemed to have remembered something, as he started fishing through his pocket. “I saw it on my way to work this morning and thought you absolutely needed to have it.” He pulled out a brown paper bag, inside of which was a petite bundle of brown paper that looked to be folded around a very small, egg-shaped item. As he unwrapped the item, it materialized as a necklace with a tiny snow globe charm hanging from it.
“Wesley!” I gushed, feeling my cheeks flush with pleasure at his persistence in spoiling me. “You should not be spending your hard-earned money on me when you still have so much to save up,” I admonished him, even as I reached for the necklace.
It was cool against my hand, still chilled from the air outside. As I peered more closely at the charm, I saw mini plastic figures inside, a tiny bride and groom kissing in the middle of the snowy world.
“It’s kind of garbage,” Wesley hedged, “but with your collection and all . . .” He shrugged sheepishly, as if he was now embarrassed by the romantic gesture.
“I will always feel like I’m living inside my own personal snow globe with you—nothing but the two of us in the world, inside a bubble of perfection,” I told him.
I didn’t think much at the moment about how the coating of the bubble I envisioned was made of glass, so easily broken.
IT WAS ONLY three hours later when Wesley got a call from the airline. We were snuggling on the denim couch in my compact studio apartment, watching the 21 Jump Street movie, which we had already seen in the theater earlier that year. Wesley’s cell rang, and he didn’t even answer the first time.
“Don’t they know I’m hanging with my girl?” He wrapped his arm more tightly around me as he silenced his cell with his other hand.
When the phone started vibrating again a minute later, I paused the movie. “You should see who wants to talk to you so badly. It’s fine.”
He took the phone from his pocket and shrugged at it, like he didn’t recognize the number.
“This is Wesley,” he said into the phone as he lifted the bottle of wine that was on the coffee table and started refilling our glasses. I took the opportunity to prance to the kitchen for the box of red velvet cupcakes Wesley had made the week before, which I had stashed in my freezer. I was thinking that the cold temperature should have made those cupcakes easier to resist, muted their flavor, when I heard glass shatter.
I dashed back out of the kitchen and saw Wesley standing on the blond parquet floors in the center of a pool of red wine and broken glass, seemingly frozen, the phone to his ear and his face gone gray.
I stared at him, afraid.
“Okay,” he said into the phone, in a voice I hardly recognized. “Okay.”
He touched a button to end the call and then stared at the device in his hand while I waited and my dread mounted.
After a few seconds, he sank back onto the couch behind him, an expression of utter confusion taking hold of his features.
“What?” I finally asked in a near whisper. “What happened?”
“The plane crashed.” He spoke like he didn’t understand his own words. “Into the water. They’re dead.”
“What? Wait, what? Oh my God!”
He dropped his head into his hands and I stood there, mute, not knowing what to do.
When he finally raised his eyes to look back up at me, they were filled with hate.
Chapter Ten
December 2012
At the funeral three days later, we had still barely spoken, even tho
ugh I had been by his side the entire time. Wesley seemed to be channeling his grief into a take-charge approach. His first phone call had been to the family attorney, as he sought to determine how his mother and father wanted their affairs settled. Suddenly, the corporate executive inside him, the part of himself that he had always resisted, had emerged in full force. From funeral arrangements to the distribution of testamentary funds, he was fixated on discharging his obligations as the surviving son with flying colors, as though he was paying tribute to his parents by becoming the type of man they had always wanted him to be.
Wesley was an only child, and his two aunts and one uncle were much older, leaving him basically family-less as he dealt with this situation on his own. There was only me, and, for reasons I couldn’t understand, Wesley could barely look at me.
As we drove back from the cemetery to his parents’ house in Irvington, I wondered how he was going to get through the whole week of shiva. Friends and relatives were going to be visiting the family home for seven full days following the funeral in order to pay their respects. I had packed Wesley a bag of clothes from his apartment to use for the week at his parents’, and my mother had jumped in to help out with the food, ordering platters of bagels and lox, cookies, and mini egg rolls to serve during the endless rotation of company that was about to begin.
I wasn’t sure how long to wait to bring up the wedding. Obviously, we weren’t going to be having a three-hundred-person celebration in three weeks. I wondered if we should just do one of those justice-of-the-peace ceremonies and get it done or wait until Wesley wasn’t so consumed by his grief. As I looked over at him in the limo that was carrying us back to the house from the funeral, the wedding seemed like the furthest thing from his mind. In fact, it seemed he could barely stomach sitting in the same car as me.
“My mom is waiting back at the house,” I told him delicately, looking at the text she had just sent me. “Some of your dad’s business people are already there, she said.”
“Yup,” he answered, looking out the window, the muscles of his jaw working while he stared at the bare trees along the road, possibly seeing nothing at all.
Maybe I should have been more patient. Not maybe. I definitely should have been more patient. Still, as I picked at the plastic label of an unopened tissue box resting between us, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Is there something I should be doing that I’m not? I just feel like this is more than grief, like you’re angry at me . . .”
“Jesus, Meredith. Not everything is about you, okay?” he snapped.
“Wow, okay. Sorry.” I forced myself not to get defensive. Wesley should have a free pass for just about anything right now.
Suddenly, his eyes shot to mine. It was the first time since hearing the news about his parents that he seemed to actually be looking at me, seeing me.
“Fine,” he nearly shouted, his face abruptly flushed. “You want to know what it is? It was your mother who was supposed to die! Not mine! Your family that was supposed to fall apart! Not fucking mine!”
I jerked back as if he’d slapped me. Whoa. Maybe not a free pass for that, though.
“Hold on,” I said gently, like I was trying to calm a spooked horse. “None of this was supposed to happen—that’s true.”
“No shit, this wasn’t supposed to happen,” he spat back.
I tried to think how to respond, but he kept going.
“And maybe, just maybe, Meredith, if you and your perfect parents hadn’t been so high maintenance, so fucking stuck up about our stupid wedding, then my parents wouldn’t have gone on that trip, wouldn’t have needed to de-stress from the strain that you Altmans put on them with all your fucking demands. Did you think about that? Did you ever fucking think at all?”
I looked back at Wesley, stunned. I didn’t know this man. I didn’t know what to say or how to react. So I was silent.
The car was pulling up in front of his parents’ semicircular driveway before I had a chance to respond.
“Look,” he said, a little more gently, but not contrite, “I just can’t do this right now. I need some space. I can’t keep looking at you and thinking about all the things that should have been different. Can you just go? That’s what I need right now, for you to just give me some breathing room. Okay?”
Maybe I should have argued, refused to leave his side during that time, but I couldn’t fathom how he could possibly be blaming those deaths on me, or on my parents. I didn’t want to be around a man who would act out at me like that, not even when he had such extreme grief as an excuse. So, instead, I did what he asked. I left.
Chapter Eleven
February 2017
It’s a frosty gray morning as Aaron and I walk up Broadway toward Community Kitchen, and I find myself babbling, filling him in on all the minute details of my college life. I point out the little copy center where I used to buy printer paper on the cheap, then the place where Daphne and I ate lunch together nearly every day for the first month of freshman year, then the bodega where Bina and I shared hangover-curing tuna melts on Sunday mornings.
“Not mornings,” I correct myself. “It was probably well into the afternoon by the time we meandered out of our dorm.”
“Tuna melts for a hangover?” Aaron glances at me sideways as we cross 115th Street. “Kinda nasty, no?”
“Don’t knock it till you try it.” I laugh, trying too hard to keep everything casual and light. I don’t want him to know how nervous I am, how fixated I’ve been on the idea of running into Wesley.
I made a supreme effort this morning to seem as blasé about this winter Sunday as I would be about any other. I forced myself to leave my hair alone, letting the blond strands fall haphazardly in waves around my shoulders instead of straightening them with a curling iron like I would for a night out. I threw on a solid navy long-sleeved shirt over a basic pair of skinny jeans. My makeup is subtle, only pale eye shadow and light pink gloss. It just so happens that the jeans are my favorite, best ass-hugging pair, and I know that Wesley always loved my hair wavy, but I’m not going to dwell on those facts right now.
“It’s right up there,” I say, pointing toward the church, where, again, a line of people is beginning to snake around the side of the building.
“You weren’t kidding about this being a hot ticket.” Aaron surveys the diverse crowd, people of all shapes and sizes waiting in puffer jackets and sweatshirts alongside the wrought-iron fence that encircles the old brick building. His eyes linger on a group of children dashing about, zigzagging around adults who stand restlessly, seemingly unaware of the obstacle course their impatient limbs provide. While the older people bide their time, various shades of boredom and expectation coloring their faces, the children bob and weave as though they are at a playground.
“We go this way.” I grab for Aaron’s hand, and his eyes slide away from the children. We walk in the opposite direction, toward a fireproof metal door that leads to the kitchen. When we step into the warm air, the scent of tomato sauce and beans immediately greets us, Katie Sue seems surprised to see me again, as though my visit last week had been a one-off that I was unlikely to repeat. I introduce Aaron, who seems suddenly to be all Katie Sue can see.
“Look at you”—she pokes at my ribs in a gesture of pride—“engaged to a handsome doctor,” though she pronounces it “doctah” and I’m unsure whether she’s making a joke or if Aaron has her so flustered that she’s forgotten to mind her Queens accent. She rests a hand on his arm, and I swear she wants to squeeze his bicep. “You sure know how to pick ’em.”
She says this lightly, but my eyes dart to Aaron’s, worried he will be offended by the reference, by the fact that Katie Sue has lumped him into some amorphous group with the other fiancé I once had.
Aaron’s focus is elsewhere, though, his eyes roving around the kitchen, moving from the two older women in back who are silently chopping vegetables to the heavy-set man stirring a vat of dark liquid on the stove.
“So, what’s m
y job, Katie Sue? Where am I most useful?” he asks just as a wiry Asian man walks into the kitchen from the gymnasium.
“Garth could use some help with setup,” she answers, gesturing toward the slender man who’s just appeared. I met Garth last week and learned only after serving soggy vegetables alongside him for two hours that he’s the new priest at this parish. “Garth, show this strapping young man what to do out there,” Katie Sue directs.
A flush creeps subtly onto Aaron’s cheeks as he seems to finally notice Katie Sue’s fawning. He sends me a look of helpless surprise before following Garth back out the door.
I pull a worn apron off the hook by the swinging door and slip it over my head, reaching behind myself to tie the straps.
“Women are going to try to steal that one from you.” Katie Sue motions with her head in the direction Aaron walked, smiling proudly, as she carries a covered aluminum tray toward the oven.
“Yeah, he’s a keeper.” I try to sound nonchalant even as I glance toward the door, wondering when Wesley might walk in, if he is even here this week.
“Wesley is teaching his class down the hall again today,” she tells me, as though I’ve spoken my thoughts aloud. She removes three bags of celery stalks from a cardboard box on the counter and pushes them in my direction. “You two have a chance to catch up last week?” She asks the question lightly, but there’s nothing light about the twisty, convoluted path Wesley and I have followed. Katie Sue always seemed to know what was going on in my head even before I met Wesley, when I was first dealing with my mom’s illness and all that detritus. She could see things that other people never detected.
“Nah,” I answer, moving over to the industrial sink to hose down the celery, pulling the stalks apart and letting the water rinse off lingering soil. “He took off pretty quickly last week. It’s fine, though. It’s been a while.”
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